The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 6

  “You’ll remember this.”

  He sets his fiddle under his chin and bows a melody, and Jesus, I do remember it. When the first part comes back around, I join in, singing:

  Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,

  Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;

  Love lives again, that with the dead has been:

  Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

  It’s an Easter hymn, but that feels appropriate. Ireland became an irreligious country around the turn of the century. But lately the Church has been making a comeback. Not coincidentally, the revival dates to the years of panic and confusion after the arrival of the Railroad. When you’re suddenly given a galaxy to explore, what do you do? You beat a path to the nearest church, that’s what. And if you think that doesn’t make sense, just wait until you’ve explored a few hundred planets in the mold of Suckass, and dirtied your hands picking through the rubble of a dozen alien civilizations, all of them dead. Wait until you’ve buried an old friend on an alien planet.

  Donal’s fiddle skirls plaintively through the geraniums and it’s almost like we’ve made a church of the twilit halls beneath the leaves. I’ve seldom felt so far from home. Tears are dripping down Donal’s face, and I’m on the point of choking up myself, until Ruby says, “Hey, I never knew you had such a good singing voice, Fletch.”

  Me and Donal spin around. I nearly stumble into the grave. Ruby walks closer.

  “What’re you doing?” he says in that me-so-clueless way of his.

  We might still be able to bluff this out. “We’re burying our friend,” I say coldly.

  “In secret. Half an hour before launch?”

  “As you do,” I say, and lunge for my entrenching tool.

  Donal’s shout stops me. “He’s got a gun!”

  He does. It is a Glock, nice and small and concealable, and he’s aiming it at Donal’s heart.

  No more Mr. Nice Guy, I guess.

  And I left my lightsaber on board.

  Donal’s hands automatically go up. His fiddle falls to the ground. He winces—that fiddle is an old companion—and Ruby chuckles coldly. “Don’t worry, I’ll bury it with you.” He motions with the Glock. He’s twenty feet from us. Too far to rush him. Close enough that he won’t miss. “Get into that hole.”

  “It’s not big enough for the three of us,” Donal says.

  “Yeah, Fletch is obviously better at singing than digging. Whatever. I just thought you’d prefer to be buried rather than left to rot on the ground.”

  I start to edge away from Donal, moonwalking half an inch at a time. We might have a chance if I can reach my entrenching tool. Come on, Donal, keep him talking!

  “It’s awfully dark,” Donal says, looking up at the chinks of sky we can see through the geranium canopy.

  He’s right actually, it is dark, and I realize what that means half a second before the sky opens.

  It’s like God is emptying his bathtub up there.

  Thank you, Suckass!

  Ruby twitches as the first splatters hit his face. His aim drifts.

  I fling myself on the entrenching tool.

  The Glock barks.

  Donal staggers, blood fountaining.

  I scream and charge at Ruby. The recoil has knocked him off balance, and I’m on him before he can recover. I whirl the entrenching tool at his head. I don’t connect. Not because he’s quick but because he’s slipped in the leaf muck. He goes down on one knee, and the Glock flies out of his hands.

  Berserk with rage, I swing the entrenching tool at him like an axe. Maybe it’s in the genes, as my dad said.

  But Ruby’s rolling sideways, slipping and sliding, on his feet and darting away. His ancestors must’ve been rabbits.

  I snatch up the Glock. We used to carry these on the Draco Spur, in addition to our laser rifles and sawn-off shotguns and every goddamn tool for slaughter we could get hold of.

  BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  He’s vanished among the geraniums. I can’t tell if I’ve hit him or not. The rain is sheeting down—it’s at that stage now where the water dripping off the leaves is a downpour in its own right.

  The Glock is empty, the barrel so hot the rain sizzles on it. I throw it down and turn to Donal, dreading what I’ll see.

  “Help me up, you gobshite!”

  “Jesus, you’re alive!”

  He looks old with pain. He’s clutching his right arm. Blood wells between his fingers and runs down his arm, turning pink as it mixes with the rain. “I need to get a tourniquet on this.”

  “Right you are.” I take off my t-shirt and knot it around his arm above the horrible gouge where the bullet tore through flesh and muscle. This slows the rate of blood loss, but he’s fading on me, going into shock in front of my eyes. I get on the radio. “Harriet, Harriet, come in.”

  All I hear is my own ears ringing from the gunshots. I try the other channels. “Harriet, Saul, Woolly, where are you guys? Captain’s down!”

  Saul proclaims faintly, “T minus fourteen minutes and holding. Verify all systems ready for crew deck closeout.”

  Feck!

  I pick the Captain up. I carried a dead friend out here and now I’m carrying a half-dead friend back. Sorry, Morgan, I don’t have time to fill in your grave. I hope you understand.

  At the end of my strength, I stagger out from the treeline into the sheeting rain.

  The Skint Idjit glows like a sideways Christmas tree through the downpour. These clusters of pretty lights indicate that she is ready to launch. All the flitters have been stowed on the flight deck except the last one, which is presently rising in the cargo winch, and below it, on the ground, squats Ruby, waiting for the winch to come back down.

  I am going to murder Sakashvili. He was supposed to keep an eye on this freak.

  I drag Donal across bare earth speckled with geranium shoots. Ruby doesn’t look around until we’re nearly on top of him. He’s wounded. I did hit him. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be very serious. He staggers upright, favoring his left leg.

  I lay Donal carefully on the grass and take a swing at Ruby. He reels out of range. It’s comical, actually. I’m so exhausted I can’t even land a punch on a man with a bullet in his leg.

  “Why,” I gasp, “are you,” gasp, “trying to kill us?”

  “Got no beef with you, Fletch.” He glances up hopefully. The winch is descending.

  I take this opportunity to punch him in the gob. It hardly even qualifies as a punch, more of a tap, but he lets out a squawk that turns into a scream as he inadvertently puts his weight on his bad leg.

  “What’s your fecking problem?” I pant. “Donal says you’ve been trying to kill him ever since Arcadia.”

  Ruby yelps, “Goldman Sachs dispatched me to make sure Ms. Saltzman was OK. They were not happy with the situation on board, and I believe their concerns are valid!”

  So Donal was right. This is about Penelope. “What are the backers concerned about, specifically?”

  “Based on her reports, they think she could be suicidal.”

  “Jesus Christ, she’s not suicidal, she’s submissive. You know what that means?”

  “Yes, I know what that means, and the two things are not mutually exclusive.”

  “She’s a donor. Goldman Sachs doesn’t understand donors,” I sneer. Although most of the shiteheads who work at GS are stackers themselves, they do not understand the donor mindset. They can’t conceive of why a person, especially a stacker, would do anything without being paid for it. Actually I can’t either, but I’m not the one with fifty million dollars tied up in the Skint Idjit.

  “They understand donors fine,” Ruby snaps.”They understand that if a donor dies in the field, his or her ship is stuck until help arrives! Which could be years, way out here.”

  “We’ve got self-propelled message capsules. More like a week.”

  “All the same, time is money. They didn’t want to take that ris
k, which is why I’m here. And I’ve determined that the primary risk to Penelope’s mental health is him.”

  A jerk of his chin at Donal.

  Following his gaze, I see that the cargo winch is about to touch down on top of Donal. I yank his unresponsive body out of the way just in time.

  The bucket hits the mud, splashing us.

  Over the side of the bucket rises the grinning face of Sakashvili.

  He is pointing a laser carbine at me.

  I don’t even curse him out. I am just too tired. It’s myself I should be cursing, anyway, for trusting this pimply Georgian mafioso.

  “Gimme a hand,” Ruby says. Sakashvili ignores him. He is intent on covering me. Ruby hauls himself into the bucket with a grunt of pain. I wonder why Sakashvili is letting Ruby on board, instead of shooting him as would be more sensible. He probably thinks the backers would be more upset to lose Ruby than to lose Donal and me, and he is probably right.

  I start to move towards the winch, and Sakashvili lays an energy pulse at my feet.

  “Aw c’mon, let’s take Fletch,” says Ruby.

  “No,” Sakashvili says. “This fucker always make others do the hard work. Lazy fuck Irish. He wipe ass with safety regulations, and others suffer!” He is bawling at me now. “Morgan, Aisling, Daphne, Shane, Fergal, Eamon, ALL DEAD because of him! No, no, Ruby. Shooting is too good for this piece of shit.”

  And I can’t say anything, because he’s right. It was my job to keep them out of trouble. I failed.

  The scoop begins to rise, and it might be the rain getting in Sakashvili’s eyes, but I’m 99% certain he winks at me.

  Meaning: I will be thinking of you when I’m counting my billions on Arcadia.

  There is only one way I might possibly spoil his triumph. I start shouting as loudly as I can.

  “Look in the freezer! Ruby! LOOK! IN THE! FREEZER! LOOK IN THE FREEZER RUBY IN THE FREEZER IN THE …”

  The wind knocks the scoop against the Skint Idjit’s side. It reaches the airlock, with no sign that Ruby has heard me.

  The crane arm retracts into the airlock, taking the scoop with it.

  The airlock closes.

  Saul’s imperturbable voice says on the radio, “Countdown resuming. T minus three minutes.”

  I look up at the humungous bulk of the Idjit. Then I look around the LZ, which we scorched to the raw earth with our engines when we landed. And then—I’ll never know afterwards how I managed it—I hoist Donal onto my back and I start to run.

  CHAPTER 10

  Well, Fletch, you wanted a planet, you’ve got a planet.

  And you even get to share it with your best friend.

  It’s a shame Donal is too poorly to appreciate our luck, but nothing’s perfect.

  “Just call me King Fletcher,” I tell him, cracking a water purification capsule into a thermos full of rainwater.

  If you’re easily disgusted, you can skip this next bit. I went back to Morgan’s body and fetched all the kit that was on him. Of course the battery-powered shite was dead, but that still yielded a haul of:

  24 water purification tablets

  5 ration bars

  1 balisong knife

  1 A-tech thermos

  1 solar-powered emergency beacon

  and 1 portable solar still (this last item is GOLD, we’d be dead already without it).

  I did not encourage my people to ignore safety regulations. There’s a middle ground between being reckless and being an ‘elf ‘n’ safety nerd like Sakashvillain, and Morgan had it dialed in, at least until that final risk he took, which killed him.

  Well, we’re likely enough to join him before long.

  We’ve exactly one third of one ration bar left, and I have had no luck hunting with my entrenchment tool.

  There are animals on Suckass. The ones we know about look like large rats. They’re extremely shy but I have spotted a few of them about since the Skint Idjit left. It’s as if they know that very soon they’ll have the planet to themselves again.

  I support Donal’s shoulders with one arm and tip the thermos to his lips, as if I’m feeding a baby. “Just imagine it’s whiskey,” I tell him.

  “Very funny,” he croaks. Some of the water goes into his mouth. More trickles into his stubble. “Sorry, sorry, man.”

  “Not to worry, there’s more where that came from.”

  There are not a lot more water purification tablets, but we shouldn’t need them anyway, having had A-tech immune shots. I’d just rather be safe than sorry. After all, something has caused Donal’s arm to puff up like a football. The wound is red and inflamed. Pus weeps from the raw mouth of it. And the redness is spreading along his arm in both directions. I’ve never seen anything like this in real life, but some kind of ancestral memory tells me it is an infection. If it goes untreated much longer he will die.

  It feels like a year since the Skint Idjit launched; in fact it’s been five rains. That’s about 70 hours. I resist the temptation to check the actual time. My radio’s all I’ve got for a clock and I’ve turned it off to save the battery. I had a solar charger for it, but I fed that to the Butterfly-zillas last week.

  On the day the Skint Idjit launched, I managed to haul Donal far enough away that we didn’t get crisped, although I felt the heat of her lift-off burn on my back. We’ve now reoccupied our bivouac at the treeline. Some careless sod left a hammock behind, and I also found a torn groundsheet which I’ve rigged up in the lowest branches to keep the rain off us.

  More and more often, I catch myself thinking about that abandoned campsite I found on my journey to the terminator. It seems more sinister to me now. I imagine some guy stuck on Suckass, abandoned by his shipmates like us, surviving for a little while … and then quietly creeping into the trees to die.

  For it’s a dead certainty, if you’ll excuse the pun, that we can’t survive on Suckass.

  At least, not in this region of Suckass.

  After Donal dies I will start walking east, towards the nearest river. There may be fish. The fish may be easier to catch than the rats, if I get there. It’s almost a hundred miles, as I recall. I’m hungry already and you can’t eat geranium leaves (tried; puked). When I’m in a real mood, I wish Donal would hurry up and die so I can be away.

  Jesus have mercy.

  Jesus have mercy.

  The local loop of the Railroad taunts me. It says: I’ve got more ways to kill you than you ever imagined. You were worried about pirates, claim-jumpers, complex metazoans? I can kill you just by leaving you alone.

  Such thoughts as these are running darkly through my mind when a star peels off the railroad and blazes out, brighter than Suckass’s cool little sun.

  That’s a spaceship.

  It has just disengaged from the Railroad on a deorbit trajectory.

  I’m a heartbeat from running out into the clearing to shout and wave, like a loony.

  “Donal! It’s a ship! We’re saved!”

  He breathes stertorously, which is all he’s done for the last twelve hours or so.

  The star shoots across the sky and vanishes behind the curve of the planet. Feck, feck! They’re going to land thousands of miles from us!

  I turn on my radio. It’s got one bar of battery power left but it’s not got a very great range. Turn it off again.

  And then I remember about the other thing I found on Morgan’s body.

  His solar-powered emergency beacon.

  I carry it into the sunlight, set it up, and turn it on to broadcast at maximum power.

  I’m so excited, I forget my hunger.

  I remember it again fairly soon, as the leaves rustle in the wind and Donal moans in his fevered sleep and nothing else happens.

  Maybe I imagined that ship.

  Maybe I was hallucinating.

  Clouds roll out of the west and it starts to rain.

  The rain has just about cleared up when three flitters soar over the geraniums and glide into the clearing.

  These flitters ar
e black, with charging elephants haloed in flames painted on their pods. This is bad news. It’s unbelievably bad news. But I’m so relieved to see them that I run out heedlessly to meet them as they bounce to a stop in the sticky mud. “Hello! Hello there! We need help!”

  The pilot of the lead flitter hops out. He responds in the universal jargon of the exploration industry, by pointing a weapon at me.

  This weapon is a lightsaber, the twin of my own.

  “Stay right where you are,” he growls.

  It’s my uncle Finian.

  He’s well over seventy, clad in black from head to toe, with a belt buckle in the shape of an elephant. An Old Testament beard cascades over his substantial belly.

  Has he come all this way to kill me? I wouldn’t put it past him.

  “Are you going to shoot me, Uncle Finian? Make up your mind,” I say.

  CHAPTER 11

  My uncle Finian, my dad’s big brother, was a surface rat in the days when there were surface rats, before we found the A-tech immune booster stuff. Him and his mates would EVA in spacesuits on alien planets with perfectly good atmospheres, looking like 20th-century astronauts, searching for A-tech with robot sniffer dogs. It was easy to get a job on the Railroad in those days. You just had to be insane, suicidal, or willing to risk your life to play the A-tech lottery.

  Finian was all three, according to my parents. That only encouraged me to worship him and wish with all my childish heart that I could be just like him one day.

  I joined Finian’s crew the day I turned eighteen. He had his own ship by then. We operated on the Draco Spur, picking up pennies ahead of the lumbering corporate fleets. This was before Wall Street got clever with their outsourcing strategies. There were planets out there for the claiming and in retrospect, I should have claimed one for myself, but I was having too much fun and what I ended up claiming for myself was that lightsaber.

  I stuffed it into my suitcase and took it back with me to Lisdoonvarna.

  I was showing off with it in the beer garden behind O’Donoghue’s pub when in walks Finian and decks me. It turns out he was planning to register the beam mechanism as a new discovery, and by taking the thing back to Earth and waving it around in public, I’d established prior art. So there went millions of dollars for Finian, and there went my job.