The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 2: Intergalactic Bogtrotter Page 5

  The lights of the oncoming ship blaze into the bridge. “Oh my God oh MY GOD,” Imogen screams. She curls up in a ball, hiding her face. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her lose her cool.

  I sprawl loose-limbed in the gunner’s couch, feeling weirdly detached from everything.

  Thunderous impacts slam into the Bogtrotter with the force of a car crash. Everyone who was standing up falls down, and everyone who was seated falls out of their couch.

  I stumble upright amid screeching alarms and strobing emergency lights.

  Donal hurtles onto the bridge, doing up his belt, yelling, “What happened?!?”

  “They used kinetics,” I say. I can taste blood in my mouth.

  “We’re losing power to the chain dogs,” Imogen shrieks. She’s back on her feet, hauling on the yoke, which seems to have got stuck in the hard-a-port position. “Gordon where’s Gordon HE NEEDS TO GET HERE!”

  The alarms are telling us we’re losing pressurization. The emergency pressure doors all over the ship have sealed. Even if Gordon is still alive, he’s stuck in the crew quarters.

  Donal calmly reviews the alerts, and initiates an emergency shutdown of the reactor.

  “Somebody fucking help me,” Imogen screams.

  So we all haul on her as she hauls on the yoke. What a bunch of monkeys.

  Ten seconds later, the Bogtrotter swoons off the Railroad into uncharted interstellar space.

  CHAPTER 9

  Interstellar space in the Omega Centauri cluster is not what you think of when you think of the vastness of the universe.

  Starlight floods the bridge. Every screen shows stars as bright as Sirius, amidst a milky haze of more-distant stars. It’s bright enough to work by, like reading by the light of the telly in a dark room. Not that I’m doing any work. None of us are.

  Gordon has diverted every erg of stored power to the thrusters, so the inertial dampeners are off, and we’re all drifting around in freefall, saying sorry when we bump into each other.

  Have I mentioned I hate freefall? I’ve already puked once.

  “There’s a large gravitational attractor ahead,” Gordon says over the intercom.

  He survived the depressurization of the crew quarters by whipping on the spacesuit that he keeps under his bed at all times. He’s still in his cabin, working on his laptop, which is hooked up to the Bogtrotter’s control systems.

  “Imogen, can you see the object I’m describing?” he says.

  “Yes,” she whispers. “It looks like a planet.”

  I swim through the air, using other people as handles. The object on the viewscreen is round, dark, and about the size of my fist held at arm’s length. Starlight illuminates one curve.

  “What’s a planet doing all the way out here?” Kenneth voices the question that’s in my own mind.

  Gordon crackles, “I would theorize that it hasn’t been here long. A galactic cluster is a busy neighborhood. A passing star may have ripped this planet away from its sun, flinging it into space. The other possibility is that it’s a rogue planet, but those are generally gas giants. This one looks terrestrial, perhaps even habitable—which is a stroke of luck for us.”

  Gordon is a master of understatement.

  “We’ll set down there if we can,” Donal says.

  Support for this decision is unanimous, since the alternative is perishing in deep space when our air runs out.

  But it takes so long to get there! The Interstellar Railroad has spoiled us. We expect to skip from planet to planet in a few hours plus time-to-orbit. We’ve lost the knack of sitting, sorry, floating around patiently for weeks on end, in a tin can that would be a tight squeeze for four people, never mind nine, which is how many were on the bridge at the moment of the attack.

  The worst part of it is listening to the others die.

  Gordon stumps around the parts of the ship that are now in vacuum, delivering encouragement and EVA suits. He rescues the four South Africans who got stuck in the ammo locker, so now there are five people stumping around in spacesuits. But there is nothing any of them can do for the seven Australians, two Spaniards, and two more South Africans who were stranded in their cabins at the time of the attack. Those cabins are boxes with bunks in. They’re meant to hold pressurization for long enough for you to get into your EVA suit. If you don’t have an EVA suit, you’re toast.

  Three of them commit suicide before the end.

  As for the other stowaways, they were all killed instantly in the attack.

  So we’re more or less back to our original strength, which would help with rationing, except that there is NO FOOD on the bridge. All right, I exaggerate. There is a stash of MREs that are nine years past their best before dates. The Hellraiser’s original crew must have inherited them from the USAF.

  We drink the water from the toilet.

  And I think that gives you a good enough idea of what it’s like, so I’ll gloss over Day 5, when Armando and his sole surviving companero get into a fight with Kenneth about who took the last packet of Pork Chow Mein. Kenneth blames the treecats, and Vanessa backs him up, and Harriet defends the treecats, and Donal attempts to make peace, and I may have shoved Armando in the back at the very moment he was threatening to cut Kenneth’s balls off.

  The end result is both Spaniards wind up with their blood on the outside of their bodies.

  We do not eat them.

  The treecats do.

  So it’s a wretched crew, seething with hatred and self-pity, that guides the Bogtrotter down to the surface of the Lost Planet on Day 7.

  We land on an icy, starlit plain near one of the weird objects we saw from orbit, which have been consuming the 0.01% of our attention not devoted to food-related matters. These are shaped like halves of golf balls. They’re city-sized, mountain-high, and you can’t take anything for granted with aliens, but they look like domes to me.

  Sitting on the ice, we observe movement at the foot of the nearest dome. Something is coming out and going back in, twice a day—twice an Earth day, that is. The Lost Planet has no sun, hence no days at all.

  But we have to contain our curiosity for 40 more hours, while Gordon and the four South Africans work to free us from the bridge. They survived in their EVA suits all this time by taking turns to rest, eat, and sleep on the control deck, which has its own airlock. But their refuge is separated from ours by vacuum. And there’s a gaping hole in the hull right outside the bridge. That has to be sealed before this part of the ship can be repressurized. We don’t have enough carbonfoam, so they end up sealing the hole with ice, which is not as mad as it sounds, given that the temperature outside is down in the minus 100 range.

  At last we stumble forth into the arms of four South African desperadoes and one septuagenarian pirate, and I would weep for joy if it wasn’t so fecking cold. Our breath clouds the new-made air in the corridor.

  “The surface of a sunless planet should be much colder than this,” Gordon tuts. “A great deal of heat is being expelled from those domes. They’re probably using the same mass-energy conversion system that was found on Deneb 3b, among other planets. The construction of the domes certainly evokes the Denebite Empire …”

  The Denebite Empire is old hat. They had four arms and beaks for faces, and they colonized most of the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm.

  If Gordon’s right, and this is a 5-million-year-old Denebite outpost, there’s nothing new to be found here. But at the moment I don’t care. Our rescuers have brought some long-shelf-life pastries and Clonakilty black puddings up from the kitchen. The stuff is freeze-dried by a week in vacuum. We tear into it so eagerly that we’re at risk of losing teeth.

  When we start to get frostbite, we stop eating and scramble into our spacesuits. After the debacle on the Skint Idjit, Donal insisted on having enough spacesuits to go around this time. They’re third-hand, and smell like knickers, but that’s the sweetest perfume compared to the smell on the bridge these past days.

  Harriet and Imogen fuss o
ver the treecats. Ten of the little beasts survive. Gordon, who has also fallen for their cuteness, went to the bother of bringing their pressurized cat carriers up from the cargo hold, so they can survive a bit longer.

  Lugging the treecats, we tramp across the plain. Gordon explains that the layer of squeaky snow underfoot used to be the Lost Planet’s atmosphere. The stars are so big and close, it’s as bright as day.

  It’s very strange to look up at the sky and see no local loop of the Railroad. That thin glowing band is always there, on every habitable planet. Its absence is a crushing reminder that the Lost Planet is not habitable.

  We’ll just have to pray this dome has some resources to offer.

  Walking in a spacesuit is horrible at the best of times. I get hot and sweaty and the dome seems to come no nearer, until finally I look up from the pitted snow, and there it is.

  Too tired to speak, we stare up at the mysterious structure. It’s made of some silicate A-tech material. There is no visible door. If this is a dead end, we’re finished.

  Gordon—easily identifiable in his Old Elephant spacesuit—steps forward and picks something up. A transparent ball. It’s a bit smaller than a football. He throws it into the air. It floats slowly back to the ground.

  “Damn it all to bloody hell!” he shouts, and lashes out with a kick.

  Dozens more of the bubbles rise around him.

  There are hundreds, millions of these bubbles piled around the base of the dome. We plunge into them like kids into a ball pool. They’re squashy and fun to land on. They look like the bubbles you used to blow with washing-up liquid when you were little, but they don’t break. I throw an armful at Imogen, and she throws more back. For a few moments the radio crackles with our laughter. I almost forget we’re 3.5 kiloparsecs from home and about to die of hunger and cold.

  Then a house-sized section of the dome slides up.

  A robot dumper truck drives out and upends its skip.

  Thousands more squashy bubbles cascade onto the plain.

  Indifferent to us, the truck drives away a few hundred yards. It deploys two scoop arms and fills its now-empty skip with snow. We all watch, drop-jawed. What it’s doing is boring and beside the point. It moves, that’s the point. A-tech that’s still working after all these years always sends shivers up your spine.

  “Yes, almost certainly Denebite,” Gordon says. “The curvilinear wheelbase is a giveaway.”

  Full of snow, the dumper truck drives back to the hole in the dome. It’s halfway inside when—

  “Wait!”

  I hurl myself at the truck.

  The sides of the skip are too high to climb. I get my elbows over the top. Struggling, I feel like I’m thirteen again, back in Lisdoonvarna, climbing the wall of the outdoor toilets to peek at the girls.

  Donal leaps up beside me and gets a handhold.

  The truck doesn’t even notice us. It drives the rest of the way into a dark, confined chamber. The others crowd in around it.

  The hatch closes.

  We’re trapped inside the dome.

  Before we have time to panic, air jets into the chamber—it’s an airlock—and the other end slides open.

  I drop down to the ground and stumble into green-tinged light.

  A spear bounces off my helmet.

  CHAPTER 10

  A spear? No, just a sharpened stick.

  I pick it up. More sticks continue to hail down on myself and the others, bouncing harmlessly off our spacesuits. I look around for whoever’s throwing them, and spot movement in the trees.

  Yes, trees. Big, jungly ones, reaching up to a distant roof that glows a uniform soft white.

  “Hey, you!” I shout—pointlessly, as I’m still in my spacesuit. “Come out of there!”

  I’ve got my lightsaber on me, but it’s inside my spacesuit. Lacking ready access to it, or any other weapon, I hurl the stick back in the direction it came from.

  Boughs dance, leaves fall, and several small stout forms drop to the ground and flee through the undergrowth. Shaggy golden fur, pink naked bottoms. Some kind of monkeys.

  “Welcome to the jungle,” Donal says. “Well, you do hear of chimpanzees attacking people.”

  “They must have been waiting for the truck,” Harriet says. “We frightened them, poor things.”

  Meanwhile the dumper truck is rolling away down a road that runs around the inside of the dome. The road is paved with what looks like diamonds.

  “I want to know where that’s going.” I shuffle after the truck as fast as you can in a spacesuit. My mind dances with visions of real live aliens, the last survivors of the Denebite Empire; they’ve been hiding out here for millennia and will be delighted to see some new faces … I’ll be able to tell them that their great enemies, the Silicon People from the galactic core who invented anti-grav, are no more, and they’ll be so happy they shower me with presents … Admittedly this is farfetched. When the dumper truck turns into a small compound in the jungle, just a couple of hundred yards down the road, I halt and take off my spacesuit. I dig my lightsaber out of my Carhartts.

  It’s a relief to get out of that horrible articulated balloon, anyway.

  The air is fine, as proved by the spear-hurling monkeys, and it feels deliciously cool on my sweaty skin. The smell reminds me of the Fern House at the botanic gardens in Dublin.

  “Hurry up, lads,” I say to those who’ve come with me—Donal, Hendrik, the black South African who calls himself Jackal, and Gordon.

  They emerge out of their spacesuits into the sound of leaves rustling and water falling nearby. Their expressions of relief and joy give me an idea of what my own face must have looked like when I took my spacesuit off.

  Something clanks inside the compound. We sidle through the gateway and see the dumper truck tipping its load of snow into a hopper. That done, it hooks itself up to a charging station.

  Otherwise, the compound contains two sheds, empty but for a few dead leaves, and one of those advanced printers the Denebites made, which probably spits out spare parts for the dumper truck when it needs them.

  Examining the printer, I get that feeling very strongly, and I can see from Donal’s face he’s got it, too. What feeling? Why, the feeling you get when an initially promising discovery turns out to be shite. Nothing new here, nothing new.

  Gordon says, “It’s a wholly automated system. The tipper lorries replenish the water and air supplies, and take out the rubbish. I expect there are other robots around, managing the flora and fauna. It’s a Mary Celeste.”

  Minus the mystery, I think to myself. There’s no mystery about the fate of the Denebites. Just like all the other aliens, they’re dead, dead, dead.

  “I might be able to print out some spare parts for the Bogtrotter,” Gordon goes on, poking at the printer’s Denebite keypad. They counted in base four.

  “I thought it was impossible to reprogram those?” Donal says.

  “Well, no one’s managed it yet,” Gordon admits.

  “Come on,” Donal says, taking him by the elbow. “There’s one other thing we didn’t find here, apart from aliens, and that’s food. Maybe the others have had better luck.”

  They have.

  After stumbling through the forest and calling their names, we find them encamped on the bank of a lake at the bottom of a waterfall. They are picking and eating fruit from the trees around the lake. These fruits include:

  Knobbly pears that taste like dates

  Leaves that taste like sweet ‘n’ spicy beef jerky

  Nuts that remind me of pecans

  Strawberries the size of your fist

  And the water’s got an Evian-like flavor.

  “This,” I say to Imogen, “could be worse.”

  She grins lazily. “That’s Irish for ‘I can’t believe we got this lucky,’ right?”

  “Close,” I say. “There’s got to be a catch.”

  We’re lying on the velvety grass, basking in the light of the roof. It’s not so cold that you
need your layers, and Imogen has stripped down to a fetching little camisole. The rest of us have lost a shocking amount of weight but she’s managed to hang onto her curves. Scratches from fruit-picking stripe her cheeks. Date-pear juice stains her lips brown. I could eat her up.

  “Oh, I can think of a few catches,” she says. “Such as, we’re stuck three and a half kiloparsecs from home, on a planet without a sun, our spaceship’s bust, and we’ll probably die here ...” She giggles.

  “Optimism’s easier with a full stomach,” I agree. I’m playing with a piece of her hair, and she’s not stopping me.

  “No, but seriously.” She props herself on one elbow—removing her hair from my fingers—and gazes at me earnestly. “There’s something good about being on an alien planet. I feel different. It was the same on the Burren. I felt like I could finally relax. No pressure to perform. No one watching me.”

  “Arcadia’s an alien planet.”

  “Oh come on, no it’s not. OK, technically. But it’s really just Silicon Valley’s outsourcing center. This is an alien planet.”

  I hesitate. “I was going to buy my own planet.” It feels risky telling her this. But she seems to feel the same way I do, which is unexpected and amazing. “I’d have named it Fletchworld, or something. It would be all mine.”

  She doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t even raise a condescending eyebrow at my common-as-shite dream, shared by many other thousands of men (yes, mostly men). Instead, confusingly, she looks sad. “I get that. I wouldn’t have before, but now? I totally get that.”

  “But recently I’ve been thinking, a whole planet to myself? It might get a bit lonely.”

  “No risk of that here,” she mutters.

  I glance around. Actually, the only people in sight are the three surviving Australians and Gordon, who are sunbathing at a distance. The South Africans have gone hunting, claiming that a vegan diet is not for them, nee dankie. Donal and Harriet have gone with them, to prevent them from shooting the monkeys. Kenneth and Vanessa are having it off in the undergrowth. The treecats are chasing birds.