The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 3: Banjaxed Ceili Page 5

  “It’s all in Chinese,” I say. “That’s very helpful.”

  “It is,” she says, not picking up on my sarcasm. She never does.

  “Can you read that?”

  “Yeah, I took Chinese in college.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me that by the way, you also play the ukulele.”

  “I do.”

  “Ah, come on.”

  She laughs out loud. “Just kidding. All I can play is the kazoo.” She investigates the glove compartment. “Oh look, Fletch, green tea. Hydrate.”

  “Thanks.” I swig the revolting stuff while wrestling with the steering. Keeping a twenty-tonner straight in the air is no joke. I should have let Imogen drive, but then I’d be stuck trying to decipher the GPS in Chinese.

  “Left up here,” she says.

  “At the cactus?”

  “Yep.”

  We swerve around the base of a cactus the size of Mullaghmore. It’s shaped like a knobbly, bulgy, blue-green pincushion. Scabby brown sabres, up to thirty feet long, stick out of it at all angles. Imagine pricking your finger on one of those. There are rags caught on them, which lift off in black flurries as we approach. Birds. They whirl away from the lorry, shrieking so loudly we can hear them even with the windows closed and the A/C on.

  “It’s about thirty kilometers,” Imogen says.

  “What’s that in miles?”

  She smiles and aims a mock swat at my head.

  Mission accomplished: I’ve cheered her up. She isn’t going to fall apart on me. What’s next? Right.

  “We need to get in touch with Kenneth, Vanessa, and Ruby. Ring them and tell them we’re on our way, but we’ll be slightly delayed.”

  “OK. I’ll try calling Van.” She gets out her own phone—which doesn’t work here, of course, as we both use Arcadia-based carriers—and copies the number onto the lorry driver’s phone.

  “Don’t mention that we’ve temporarily mislaid the Gizmo,” I say uneasily. “No need to worry them.”

  “All right.”

  Ring, ring.

  “She’s not picking up.”

  “It’s an unknown number; she’s being careful. Try leaving a message.”

  “Hey, Van, this is Imogen. Call me.”

  She repeats the process twice more. Kenneth and Ruby aren’t picking up, either.

  “Okayyyy,” Imogen whispers. She’s got her knuckles in her mouth. “Let’s act like this is not a very bad sign. Let’s just pretend they all went out for pizza and forgot their phones.”

  As calmly as I can manage, I say, “They’ll probably call back in a minute. Which way up here?”

  We’re zooming between two mountainous cacti, along a dry valley lined with thorns. The sun’s in our faces now, so the windscreen has tinted itself dark, turning everything sepia.

  “Turn right after this cactus,” Imogen mutters, pinching and swiping the phone’s screen.

  The valley opens out. I slew the lorry to the right. Now, instead of bare desert below, we’re skimming over Krell architecture. The Krell were aliens with exceedingly strange mindsets. We call them Krell because they had tails, and may have been amphibious, but beyond that we know nothing about them. Their terraformed planets only add to the mystery. They liked grossly oversized vegetation but they also liked cramped, labyrinthine cities. The built-up area below resembles one of those mazes you get in children’s coloring books, and it goes on forever. Nothing moves down there.

  The sun throws the shadow of the lorry onto the cactus slope on our right. We have an entourage of smaller, raggedy shadows. They’re flocking around the back.

  “It’s those birds!”

  “I hope Sam is OK back there,” Imogen says.

  I have already come to the conclusion that he may not be OK, and am looking for somewhere to land. The streets of the Krell maze are too narrow for the lorry. There is nowhere except the slope of the cactus. Right. Down we go. Our right wing clips a spike, the lorry spins, and I get her wheels down with her nose pointing uphill.

  “Next time, let me drive,” Imogen says.

  “With pleasure.” I jump out. Birds rise up like scraps of burnt paper from the lorry, and I run around the back, dreading what I may find.

  A roll of carpet tumbles out and unrolls itself on the slope at my feet. Sam sits up, eyes on top of his head. “Are they gone?”

  “The birds? Up there. What happened to your trousers?”

  He’s only wearing his boxer shorts and the shirt from his tuxedo. The tails flap around his skinny legs. “That cactus shit was not coming off. Jeez, we’re on a cactus!”

  It’s springy underfoot. In combination with the micro-gravity it feels like walking on a trampoline.

  “Were the birds attacking you or what were they doing?”

  They’re starting to come back. A bold one flaps straight into the back of the lorry.

  “Oh man,” Sam says. “You know what’s in there? Bodies.”

  “What?!?” Imogen and I say at nearly the same time.

  “Yup. Corpses. When the carpets, like, fell out the back, it uncovered a whole pile of them. I guess those assholes make a practice of recycling human remains. As they demonstrated when they whacked the Krell.”

  I start towards the back of the lorry.

  “No, Fletch, you do not want to see them …”

  But I have to. I vault into the back of the lorry. It’s now empty but for a couple of birds standing on …

  I suppose they were bodies, before a flock of alien vulture-analogs dined on them.

  Now, they’ve got no faces. Entrails spill from ragged cavities. There were two of them.

  I just saw four people murdered in front of my face half an hour ago, but this is worse, somehow.

  I gag, and jump back down, ducking to avoid another half-dozen birds which are flapping in to rejoin their lunch companions at the buffet.

  “Where do you figure they came from?” Sam says. If he’s queasy, it doesn’t show. His eyes are bright.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care.” I start to walk away from the lorry. Then I go back for the useful stuff out of the cab: the half-gallon bottle of green tea, mostly full, and the driver’s sunglasses. Then I start walking again. The sunglasses help. They hide my eyes, and the tears that are threatening to fall. Jesus but that was a horrible sight.

  After a minute, Imogen and Sam catch up with me.

  “Where are you going?” Sam says.

  “I’m not driving a lorry with that in the back.”

  Imogen does not argue, from which I gather she had a peek for herself. She says, “Well, we can walk to the tow lot. It’s only a couple more kilometers.”

  Then we have to fill Sam in about the reason we are going to the tow lot in the first place.

  There are some expostulations, I am sorry to say, and not all of them come from Sam. It’s hot, we’re all tired, the thin air is making our heads ache, and the silence of Arnold is somehow horrible. Even our own arguing voices are a better sound.

  After the futile discussion dies down, Imogen rekindles conversation with, “I know where they came from, anyway.”

  She means the bodies.

  “Does it say on there?” I ask.

  She’s holding the lorry driver’s phone, tilting it and squinting to see the screen in the sunlight.

  “Kind of, yeah. See this? OK, it’s in Chinese, sorry. This is a map of where the driver went today. So this was his only stop before the recycling center. And this says, I don’t actually know this character, but the others say something like ‘New You Reform Clinic.”

  “Organ harvesting?” Sam says. “My mom dabbled in that for a while …”

  “They can print replacement organs now,” I tell him, suppressing my disgust. He comes from Omega Centauri, so you can never be quite sure what he knows. I’d like to think that explains his lack of morals, too.

  “Well, yeah, I was about to say, she dabbled in it for a while, and then printable organs got big and knocke
d the bottom out of the market.”

  “Was that when you lived in the Omega Centauri cluster?”

  “Nope, before that, when we lived on Cygnus 2c. There were always explorers coming through, so supply wasn’t a problem.”

  And you wonder why I do not trust Sam? He grew up thousands of lightyears from Earth—he’s never even been to Earth—with a mother who’s got more blood on her hands than Genghis Khan. Slight exaggeration.

  “So as I was saying,” Imogen begins, and the lorry blows up.

  I hear the whistling screech, and by the time the boom comes, I’m flat on my face with Imogen underneath me.

  I twist my upper body, keeping her pinned— “That was a fecking rocket!”

  The lorry is a blackened, windowless hulk. Flames boil from the engine compartment. That’s the big drawback of hydrogen fuel cells. Smoke rises towards the wispy contrail the rocket left in the sky

  Imogen pushes at my chest. “Let me up,” she says, and I do.

  Sam’s dancing and yelling, thinking he saw where the rocket came from. Somewhere over that way—meaning the maze city that stretches to the horizon. That narrows it down all right.

  “Throw away the phone,” I tell Imogen.

  “Why?” Pale, she cuddles it obstinately to her chest.

  “Throw away the fecking phone!”

  There is a short tussle, which ends with me holding the phone and Imogen crying. I hurl it as far as I can. With a micro-gravity assist, it ends up in the nearest street of the maze city.

  Five seconds later, another rocket hurtles out of the sky and blows the street up.

  CHAPTER 6

  Debris from the explosion in the maze city patters down around us. The largest pieces tear divots out of the cactus.

  We run. It’s more of a panicked sprint than a rational retreat. After all, we have no more working electronics on us that could be targeted. But when you don’t know who’s shooting at you, or from where, every passing second comes loaded with fear, and the sky itself turns into an enemy.

  But you can’t run away from the sky. When we get out of breath we straggle to a halt.

  We’ve been running around the cactus hill, parallel to its knobbly crown. We stand on one of the knolls that the spikes sprout out of, gazing down at a sea of destruction.

  This part of the maze city has been razed. This is what we humans call colonizing the galaxy. It’s done with bulldozers.

  A few months or years from now, there will be factories, feedlots, fuel depots, and God knows, probably an outlet mall here.

  At the moment there’s only an expanse of rubble. Down at the base of the cactus, a wire box fence surrounds an impound lot.

  Or rather, a scrap yard. On one side of the long, rectangular lot, vehicles are stacked on top of each other, two and three deep. On the other side, shinier vehicles stand at random angles—soon to be scrap, as well, when they’ve been stripped of resalable components. Well, that’s one way to get rid of an inconvenient taxi.

  From here, I can see several winged blobs that might be it. Or might not. We’ll just have to go and see.

  Sam points. “There’s a kiosk at the gate. See? There will be guards. I want some kind of a weapon.”

  “I’ve got my lightsaber.”

  “But I haven’t got a weapon. They took my .22 and my pocket taser.”

  I think to myself that this is a good thing. “Imogen?”

  She’s sitting on the knoll. Our desperate sprint has worn her out. Her head hangs. I pass her the green tea, and she finishes it. Neither Sam nor I say a word.

  At last she pushes herself to her feet. “OK, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  We walk downhill.

  The kiosk, at the far end of the lot, is a trailer with small tinted windows. No one comes out to stop me from cutting a hole in the chainlink fence with my lightsaber. Maybe the place is unmanned, after all. Maybe the security guards are sat in the trailer watching the Ghost Train on television.

  We walk among the undamaged vehicles on the right-hand side of the lot. It’s so quiet I can hear the blood rushing through my ears. The wire roof overhead divides the sky into hexagons. There’s a foul smell like rubbish decaying. These new arrivals are mostly cars, and they’re mostly expensive sport and luxury models, and I’ll bet their owners don’t know where they are.

  A few small spaceships loom over them. That one’s not our taxi. Nor is that one, or that one …

  “Oh my God,” Imogen says. “There it is!”

  She breaks into a run.

  A lithe four-legged shape squirts out from under the stacked vehicles on the other side of the lot. It bounds after her.

  Yelling, I run in pursuit. The blue lance of my lightsaber bites the ground at the creature’s heels. It looks like a dog but it isn’t.

  Imogen looks back, sees the danger, screams. She leaps at the side of our taxi and fumbles with the passenger door.

  The creature launches itself towards her—

  —and my lightsaber gores it through the body. It collides harmlessly with the door of the taxi as Imogen dives in.

  I catch up, and stab it again for good measure. It’s a robot dog.

  They used to use these in the exploration industry before immune boosters were discovered. In those days, every alien bacteria and organism could potentially kill you. So the early explorers EVA’d in spacesuits, and they used these robot dogs to investigate the planets where they landed.

  Nowadays we all get A-tech immune shots, which are fecking miraculous. So I’m breathing in alien germs without ill effect, and there’s no more call for robot dogs in the exploration industry—human labor is cheaper, when you take production costs into account. So this one’s apparently been redeployed as a junkyard dog, because you do want security for your illegal auto stripping operation. It just isn’t the kind of security I was expecting.

  I lean against the side of our taxi, panting. The robot dog lies motionless at my feet. It’s got a cluster of sensors instead of a head. Horrible-looking.

  “Is it dead?” Imogen screams from inside the taxi.

  “It was never alive,” I say quietly, looking around for Sam. He’s always wandering off.

  Another robot dog pokes its sensor-blistered snout around the nearest car. I hold my lightsaber at the ready, watching the dog mince closer.

  “Where did you leave the Gizmo, Fletch?”

  “I don’t know. Try looking under the seats.”

  “I can’t see it!”

  The second dog springs. I stab it in mid-air, feeling like a hunter of yore dispatching a wolf with my spear. I hope there aren’t any more of them. Unlike a spear, my lightsaber does run out of charge, and I haven’t got a spare … “Imogen, could you see if there’s a spare powerpack in there?”

  “I’m looking for the goddamn Gizmo!”

  “It’s in a resealable bag.”

  “I’m not seeing it!” Sounds of her scrabbling through the rubbish on the floor.

  “It would help if your taxi wasn’t a complete tip,” I mutter.

  Her feet vanish and her head pops out of the door. “Listen, asshole. While you were taking it easy on Arcadia, I was working twelve-hour shifts, ferrying rich stacker douchebags, oh so sorry, I’m repeating myself, all over the planet. I had to eat in the taxi, sleep in the taxi …”

  “Taking it easy? Do you think working construction is easy?”

  Even as I defend myself, I remember that working construction does have one side benefit: I’m fitter and stronger than I’ve ever been in my life. My hands are solid calluses and my upper body is solid muscle. Breaking up alien ruins all day builds up your stamina as well as your strength. So I’m probably much less tired than Imogen is, and I shouldn’t be giving out to her.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  After a few more minutes, she says in a small voice, “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  “Is this really it? It looks like a nail.”

  “That’s it.” I
’m elated to have the Gizmo back. Honestly, I am. But Sam’s still missing and another pair of robot dogs are watching me from behind the Porsche across the way. They’d be slavering if they had mouths.

  Imogen kneels on the driver’s seat of the taxi. “I found this, too.” She holds up a McDonald’s bag and two cans of Red Bull. “Bet you’re glad now my taxi is such a tip …”

  The Mickey D’s logo makes my mouth water. But instead of reaching for the bag, I take the Gizmo. This time it goes securely in the hip pocket of my jeans. I do all this one-handed, while watching the robot dogs.

  “Now we just need to find Sam and get out of here,” I say with false heartiness.

  “Well, we’re not going anywhere in this,” Imogen says, slapping the taxi’s steering-wheel. “The reactor’s gone. So’s the anti-grav engine.”

  “Bloody hell, that was fast.”

  “Bet you nothing else on this lot runs, either.”

  “And you didn’t happen to find a spare powerpack in the glove compartment, I suppose?”

  “No.”

  “Feck.”

  A terrified shout peels me off the side of the taxi. An engine roars. I glance towards the gate, while keeping one eye on the robot dogs.

  Gritty dust blows towards me. Two human figures run between the parked cars, arms pumping frantically. A bright red sports car looms out of the dust.

  So something on this lot runs.

  The red car accelerates, swerves at one of the runners, and catches him/her on its snarling grille. The person flies into the air like a broken doll. I take this all in before my heart’s got time to skip a beat. The car mows down the other runner.

  And then it accelerates straight at me.

  I react without thinking. I grab Imogen around the waist and throw her onto the roof of the taxi like bloody Nijinsky. Thank you, micro-gravity! Then I step on the driver’s seat and scramble up onto the roof.

  The red car crunches into the driver’s side of the taxi.

  It wasn’t actually going very fast at the moment of impact. All the same, the jolt knocks me and Imogen off the other side of the taxi.

  I run back around, lightsaber in hand, mentally steeling myself to murder someone. I will if I have to. I will.

  The red car backs a few feet away from the taxi. Its bumper is crumpled, its bonnet dented. It’s a Lamborghini, if I know my hood ornaments. I can’t see through the tinted windscreen.