The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 3: Banjaxed Ceili Page 6

  The gull-wing driver’s side door flies up, and Sam steps out.

  “Whoops,” he says ruefully. “Sorry about that, man.”

  I stand there, thumb hovering over the press button of my lightsaber. I don’t know what to do. Did he intend to run me down? Or was it really an accident?

  He walks around the Lamborghini and makes a face at the damage. “I always wanted a car like this, and I have to wreck it.”

  Behind me, Imogen screams, “WATCH OUT!”

  I then have to spend the next eternity, which actually lasts about ten seconds, dealing with the last two robot dogs.

  Meanwhile, Sam jogs back towards the gate, shirttails flapping. To my shame, I had completely forgotten about the two people he mowed down. Maybe he’s gone to see if they are all right …

  … or not. When he comes back, he is wearing an unfamiliar pair of trousers and a matching pair of sneakers.

  “High five!” he grins through a mask of dust.

  I leave his hand hanging in the air. As if robbing the dead wasn’t enough, he may have attempted to kill me, too. I just don’t know.

  His face falls into a sulky pout. “Did you find the Gizmo?”

  “Yeah. Who were those fellas? The security guards?”

  “I assume, man, I assume.” He shrugs. “I didn’t check their ID. I walked into the kiosk and asked them if any of these cars run.”

  “That was risky. Did they raise the alarm?”

  “No, man. Wimps. They told me the Lamborghini hasn’t been stripped yet. Then they gave me the keys. I made them start the engine, just in case it would have blown up or something. Then I told them to run.” Sam chuckles.

  “You didn’t even need a weapon.”

  A shadow passes across his expression. “Anything can be a weapon. That’s what my mom always used to say.”

  Imogen’s gone to examine the dead security guards. I jog over to her.

  Squatting by Sam’s second victim, she looks up at me speechlessly.

  The security guard is an alien.

  All right, all right. He / she is human. There are no aliens. They’re all dead and we’ve inherited the galaxy.

  But Jesus, this is a good copy of a Krell, if Krells were thin and tailless. The frog-mouthed face, the bald head with the frilly ears, the brown warty skin, same as the natterjack toads you find in Irish ponds… all the exposed skin, including hands and neck, matches. Dust films orange Krell eyes.

  The other one’s much the same.

  I remember I was properly impressed by the so-called Chinese national champion of biomodding, Krell division. Silly me. He was just the product sample.

  This one’s much more realistic. And he (or maybe she) was working as a security guard at a scrap yard? That doesn’t sound right.

  Imogen stretches out a finger to touch a warty, dead cheek, and draws back swiftly. “Did I tell you what I found on the driver’s phone? The New You Reform Clinic?”

  “Do you think it’s all connected?” I say sarcastically.

  “God, you’re such an idiot, Fletch! Of course it’s all connected. It’s a biomodding clinic. It has to be. And that character I couldn’t read … I bet that’s Chinese for Krell.”

  A few minutes later we are in the Lamborghini, rolling towards the gate in the chainlink fence. Krells working for minimum wage, stolen cars, fraudulent recycling rackets, biomodification clinics–it’s all connected, I’m sure, in a tangled web that we don’t want to get stuck in at any price.

  We’ll head for the spaceport, where hopefully Kenneth, Vanessa, and Ruby are still waiting for us.

  I get out to deal with the gate. My lightsaber fades and dies as I hack through the hasp of the padlock. That’s it for my A-tech superweapon, unless I find a fresh powerpack lying around somewhere.

  Wheeeee ….

  Every hair on my body stands on end. I squint upwards. I gave the sunglasses to Imogen earlier, so all I can see is the purple sky and the water in my own eyes. Then I make out a bright spot that isn’t the sun.

  The XS rocket boys are on the job again.

  And this time we’re in their crosshairs.

  CHAPTER 7

  The rocket tumbles and swerves through the sky, seeking its target.

  Us.

  Every second feels like a lifetime. I wrestle with the padlock on the scrap yard’s gate. I managed to cut the hasp almost all the way through before my lightsaber died. Finally the last thread of metal snaps. I fling the padlock to the ground, kick the gate open, and fly back to the Lamborghini. “Go!” I shout, jumping into the passenger seat.

  Imogen has taken Sam’s place at the wheel. “Not yet,” she says with zombie-like calm. Still as a snake, sensible taxi driver’s shoes poised on the pedals, she stares fixedly through the windscreen at the blazing meteor that’s coming for us.

  “Maybe it’ll detonate when it hits the fence,” I mutter, not trusting Imogen’s reflexes.

  “And maybe it won’t,” Sam snarls. He didn’t want to let Imogen drive ‘his’ Lamborghini. I had to speak quite sharply to get him to move over.

  “Wait … wait … wait,” Imogen mutters. Tension building, she hunches over the wheel. The idling engine rumbles.

  The rocket gets brighter and bigger and closer, painting a smoky contrail in the sky.

  I’m afraid Sam may be right about the fence. The roof part is only meant to stop anti-grav-enabled vehicles, not rockets. The hexagonal gaps in it are feet wide. There’s easily room for a high-explosive warhead to pass through.

  Wheeee ….

  Panic seizes me. I grab the door handle.

  “Wait,” Imogen chants. “Wait, wait, wait!”

  WHEEEE screams the rocket, blazing straight down out of the sky.

  At the very last possible instant, Imogen throws the Lamborghini into gear and accelerates so hard we’re thrown back violently against the seats.

  We smash through the gate, knocking it wide open, and soar into the air.

  Behind us, the scrap yard blows up.

  “OK,” Imogen says in a shaky voice. “That worked. Oh my God. It actually worked.” She takes off her sunglasses and tosses them into the back. She pumps both fists in the air. “We’re alive!”

  I grab her hands and replace them on the steering wheel. Then I plant a big kiss on her cheek. “That was flawless, Ms. Kincaid.” Now that the danger is past, I’m more than willing to give her her due. That was an amazing display of nerve under pressure. All she had to do was wait until it was too late for the rocket to change course. But if you think that’s easy, try it at home sometime.

  Sam sags across the back seat. “Balls of steel,” he says. “And reflexes like a mongoose on amphetamines.”

  “Um, that’s not very flattering, Sam.” Imogen laughs, but I’m proud of him for saying that. It almost eases my mind about our near-fatal car accident. Almost.

  The scrap yard shrinks below. The fireball is already sputtering out. The rocket hit the ground, gouged out a crater, and did little damage otherwise, apart from taking a year or two off my life.

  Imogen banks through the smoke rising from the scrap yard and flies over the maze city, low and fast. She hugs the landscape, jinking over the occasional fragment of wall left standing.

  I pull myself together. “Sam, there should be a McDonald’s bag in the back. And a couple of cans of Red Bull.”

  We polish off these scanty provisions—the leftovers of the last McDonald’s meal Imogen bought on Arcadia, 500 lightyears away—in approximately two minutes.

  The Red Bull gives me a second wind. I tap the Lamborghini’s sat-nav screen. “Imogen, look at this. It’s a major traffic artery. Shortest route between the spaceport and that cactus over there. Loads of cars in the air. If we merge into that, they’ll have to lay off with the rockets.”

  “Wanna bet?” Imogen says, but she angles the Lamborghini in the direction of the artery route. I turn off the sat-nav. No sense helping them to target us again.

  I don’t ev
en know if it is the electronics they’ve been targeting. But if they’re watching us from orbit, we’re screwed anyway.

  The artery route glistens from afar, a line of traffic flowing through the air about 200 meters up. We join the inbound stream of vehicles making for the spaceport. They’re all makes and models, from earthmovers to family cars and school buses. Arnold is turning into a real colony. People have been coming out here on holiday for ages, and now the emigrants are starting to come. I suppose it takes all sorts. Personally I’d be annoyed by the XS Group lobbing rockets around the place, but maybe they think it’s all part of the freewheeling frontier culture.

  The Lamborghini doesn’t stick out as badly as I was afraid of, and we complete our journey to the spaceport in record time. It’s brilliant to see human buildings below, as opposed to Krell ruins. We’re singing “Amazing Grace” (one of the few songs Sam knows) as Imogen sets the Lamborghini down in the corner of the spaceport parking lot.

  I agree, it is a bit silly to have a parking lot on a moon that is, or will soon be, one giant parking lot. But we do not want to get stopped at this point for parking on the imaginary double yellow lines.

  Sam kisses the steering wheel as he scrambles out across the driver’s seat. “Goodbye, baby. Wish I could take you with me.” He’s cheered up again, seemingly having forgotten the aggro I gave him over the dead security guards—and the guards themselves, for that matter. That’s the thing about Sam. He can literally forget that he killed two innocent people on the spur of the moment. And that’s why I have to seriously consider the possibility that he tried to kill myself and Imogen, too.

  It’s splat in the middle of Arnold’s 29-hour day now, hotter than ever. We scurry into the terminal building. The sprawling air-conditioned concourse would not be out of place on Earth. Imogen stares longingly at the restaurants and cafés. “Do we have time to grab something?”

  I deliberate for all of two seconds. We left Treetop nine hours ago and it feels like nine days. The smell of fast food is making my stomach growl. “All right. You two go pick something up.” I hand Imogen a plastic $100 bill, the dog-end of my final paycheck from Arcadia. “I’ll see if I can find a phone shop. Meet you back here in fifteen minutes.”

  I spend my next-to-last $100 on a prepaid phone. Mooching out of the phone shop, I angle across the concourse and climb the low flight of stairs to the mezzanine level. A curving wall of tinted glass overlooks the landing zone. Of course, you couldn’t have spaceships landing and taking off too close to the terminal, so the closest ones are mere dots in the distance. The tarmac shimmers like liquid in the sun. I dial Kenneth’s number.

  Ring … ring …

  One of the dots in the distance ignites into a pinpoint blaze. It shoots straight up into the sky. Tourists point it out to their children.

  Ring … ring …

  Sunburnt kiddies dash across my path as I saunter along, waiting for Kenneth to pick up. I never wanted children of my own, but something plucks at my heart now. Their little faces are happy and bright. In their world, no one steals A-tech artefacts or gets hijacked by extreme salespersons. For them, the Arnold spaceport is a wonderland where they can jump three times as high as on Earth. For me, it’s the belly of the beast. I wish I lived in their world.

  “You know what to do,” says Kenneth’s irritating nasal voice. I hang up on his voicemail and try Vanessa.

  No answer from her, either. I’m trying Ruby when I come upon an interesting display. It’s a slanted table with a holographic diorama of the whole spaceport on it. Each little spaceship has a callout tag glowing above it. Tourists cluster around the display, cooing in admiration as a wee ship appears ten feet in the air and drops down to land in the diorama. At the same time, a star drops out of the sky outside.

  I shove through the tourists and crane over the display. Every ship at the spaceport is displayed here, and that includes the ones in long-term parking. I start at the top left corner and read every single tag.

  Ruby’s phone rings and rings.

  No Intergalactic Bogtrotter.

  No Lockheed-Martin F-99s at all.

  They might have parked her under a false name, but they couldn’t have lied about her specs. It’s pretty hard to disguise a decommissioned, extensively repaired USAF fighter-bomber.

  “If you’ve got something to say, say it,” Ruby’s voicemail kicks in.

  “Yeah, Ruby. The Bogtrotter’s gone. It is not here. What the fecking hell is going on?”

  My voice rises on the last words. Children stare at me. A mother wraps her hands around her offspring’s shoulders, as if to protect them from the big man using bad words.

  “Call me back,” I say, and push through the crowd, my cheeks hot.

  Back down on the concourse, I spot Sam standing outside the Subway franchise, his cheeks bulging, one foot-long sandwich in his hands, another one tucked under his arm.

  I’m striding towards him when a fragment of conversation freezes me.

  “I’m telling you it is in this very spaceport right now!”

  I never expected to hear an Irish accent on Arnold.

  Homesickness stabs me like a lightsaber.

  Which is fairly stupid, because I recognize the voice. It is Finian’s.

  CHAPTER 8

  It’s agony not looking. But I keep my back turned to Finian’s voice. He’s less likely to recognize the back of my head. My hair is longer now than when he last saw me, and I dyed it brown to impersonate Baron Short.

  “If you want to recover the artefact, you’ll let me do my bleeding job,” he says—snarls, rather, in the tone that once made bold pirates shake in their boots.

  My brain’s writhing in panic, but my legs keep moving and they carry me towards the Pizza Hut two shops down from the Subway franchise, where I pretend to be standing in line. With a hundred or so punters in between me and Finian, I finally allow myself to look in his direction.

  He’s standing with a half-dozen of his officers, all of them resplendent in their NEPD uniforms, chatting to a little besuited fella whom I take to be something to do with the spaceport.

  I’m now too far away to hear what they’re saying, but I recognize the way Finian is looming over the poor wee man and I estimate he’ll seize him by the throat any minute. I pray the little fella can stand up to him. It’s pretty clear that Finian wants to use the powers vested in him—meaning shouting and hitting people with batons—to search the spaceport, and the wee fella is objecting on the grounds of basic decency and tourism revenues.

  I sidle urgently towards Sam. I’ve just caught his eye when my prepaid phone rings.

  I gape at it for a moment and then pick up. “Hello?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Ruby?”

  “Yeah. Is that Fletch?”

  “Where are you? We’re at the spaceport, and the fecking ship isn’t here.”

  Sam’s at my shoulder now, listening in. At the ship isn’t here he yells out, “Shit!” and I desperately shush him, jerking my thumb in Finian’s direction.

  “No,” says Ruby. His voice is flat. “No, it isn’t there.”

  “What the feck happened? Where are you?”

  “What happened is Kenneth and his girlfriend took off with the ship.”

  The words send me into a mental tailspin. I feel like I’ve been tossed into space without an EVA suit.

  I knew Kenneth was a former pirate and I knew Vanessa was more loyal to him than to us, but I thought the promise of a share in the Gizmo would keep them on-side.

  Evidently I was wrong. After all, if greed is all that motivates your friends, they’re not really your friends, are they?

  “They took off last week,” Ruby goes on. “I left the ship to do some last-minute shopping, and they launched before I even reached the terminal. I wrote you, but I guess you didn’t get my letter.”

  The interstellar mail packets are slow. “No.”

  “They’re probably planning to sell the ship on Flea Market
. They won’t get that much for it. But something’s better than nothing, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So did the operation pan out?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Dude, it’s either yes or no, it did or it didn’t. The Gizmo of Rejuvenation is not freaking Schrodinger’s cat. You either have it or you don’t.”

  “Yes, we have it, but—”

  “Awesome,” Ruby says, perking up. “Take that, oh ye of little faith.”

  “But we’ve actually got a problem at the moment.” I don’t give him time to ask what it is. “I’ll call you back. Where are you, anyway?”

  “Flower Lake. It’s this resort.”

  I hang up without bothering to ask Ruby what he is doing at a holiday resort.

  Sam is staring drop-jawed across the concourse. The confrontation between Finian and the spaceport officials seems to be escalating.

  “Sam, where’s Imogen?”

  “She went to Starbucks.”

  Thank God. Starbucks is in the other direction from Finian and his men. “Come on.”

  “How’d he get here?” Sam walks sideways, unable to tear his eyes off the horrible sight of the NEPD squadron.

  “In a ship, I suppose.”

  “Figure he’s after us?”

  “Yes, that would be my assumption,” I snarl.

  “But what about the Krells? It was them who set off the burglar alarm at King Zuck’s. We don’t even know that anyone knows the Gizmo is missing.”

  For the hundredth time, I brush my fingers over the outline of the Gizmo, making sure it’s still in my pocket. “You could be right. But if he gets his hands on us, he’ll know the Gizmo is missing then, won’t he?”

  We plunge into Starbucks. It’s crowded. Imogen has an unaccountable passion for frappuccino. There she is, waiting at the counter where the drinks are delivered.

  “Imogen.” She twitches as Sam and I suddenly appear on either side of her. “Bad news: Finian’s here. We’ve got to leg it.”