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

  By that time Donal had trudged through his spaceship engineering course and got all the licenses and cleared the regulatory hurdles they make you jump before you can get your own ship. So I had a way back into the business. Finian gave us a hand at times, as Donal’s father is a big man in the nuclear industry and that’s a connection you want to have, but he always made it clear he wasn’t doing it for me.

  He’s a legend in certain circles. Did you know there are pirate fan clubs? There are and all. These wee idiot boys on Earth subscribe to his updates and he sends them elephant pins and t-shirts and shite. They probably want to be just like him when they grow up.

  His ship is called the Marauding Elephant, of course, and when we arrive on board, after a long, bumpy flitter trip, I struggle not to laugh. He’s made a lot of improvements since I was last on board. The interior of his up-armored Airbus A990 is now tarted up like the Playboy mansion, with a jacuzzi and 100-inch tellies, oldies blasting from the sound system and solid gold elephants on every bloody thing.

  The crew’s combined ages run into the high four figures. They’re Finian’s mates from his surface rat days, which is to say they all come from West Clare. Now they’re living the life of kings. Nepotism’s a wonderful thing.

  But it only goes so far, and Finian makes it clear that blood’s not thicker than water when he marches me into the bogs and slams me against the wall. There are gold elephants embossed on the tiles. A sharp edge opens my scalp. “Ow feck!”

  “Where’s the fucking A-tech?” Finian growls.

  He’s got his lightsaber jammed under my jaw. One ounce of pressure from his thumb and it’ll stab through my brain.

  I try to speak without moving my jaw. “It’s on the nightside. Go and get it yourself if you’ve the bollocks for it.”

  “Fuck off, cunt. There was a beacon, as arranged, we go to retrieve the stuff, and there’s nothing but yourself and Liam O’Leary’s boy running a fever of a hundred and three. This is not satisfactory.”

  This is not satisfactory always was one of Finian’s favorite phrases, usually to be followed by a severe kicking for the unfortunate crewman who’d prompted it. But now it’s a different phrase that snags in my panicked brain: As arranged.

  As arranged by who?

  As arranged by Finian and Donal, of course, and if Donal wasn’t in the Elephant’s sickbay right now with an IV in his arm and the entire ship’s supply of antibiotics in his blood, I’d murder him.

  They must have planned it all out beforehand.

  There we were on Arcadia, outfitting the Skint Idjit for an expedition along an unexplored spur of the Railroad. Goldman Sachs has claimed this whole spur, and funded our trip. Anything we find, 50% of it is theirs.

  Unless we leave it where it is, and Finian comes along and picks it up later. Then him and Donal split the profit.

  That’s how they must have arranged it.

  And Finian thinks I know about this cunning little scheme, but this is the first I’ve heard of it, because Donal never said a word. He was planning to cut me and Morgan out, so he could keep his whole share to set up with Harriet in a love-nest on Treetop, or maybe buy a floating island on Seventh Heaven, or some other clichéd yuppie thing.

  No wonder he didn’t seem too happy when I carted those body bags full of A-tech into the Skint Idjit’s freezer.

  Blood tickles the back of my neck, running down from the cut on my scalp. I swallow. The muzzle of the lightsaber grinds against my adam’s apple. I grit out, “Put that away and I’ll tell you how to get the A-tech.”

  He lowers his lightsaber a few inches. “I remember you stole one of these from me,” he says broodingly. “They never were able to reverse-engineer the beam mechanism, did you know? There are only five or six in the universe, and they’re each worth millions.”

  Finian Connolly, ladies and gentlemen. Grudges give him something to wake up for in the morning.

  “I’ve still got mine,” I say. “It’s on the Skint Idjit.”

  “Yeah, and where’s that?”

  “Probably about five hundred lightyears away. Is the Elephant still as fast as she used to be? We might be able to catch them.”

  “And tell me why I’d want to do that, when the A-tech is here, according to you.”

  “Because there are also samples on the Idjit! And if they get back to Arcadia first, it all belongs to Goldman Sachs.” Or rather, to Lukas Sakashvili, after he murders Ruby as he ought.

  “How did there get to be samples on the Idjit? You were supposed to leave them in situ for us to pick up.”

  I don’t want to tell him Donal neglected to inform me about that part. I don’t want him to think I’m gullible, even though I obviously am. So let him think I’m holding out on him. Let him think I might have more to give. “We’ve got a corporate spy on board,” I say, which is after all true.

  Finian scowls and runs his thumb over the pushbutton of his lightsaber. The music from the lounge hits a sludgy crescendo. I’m trembling, trying to hide it. One of the auld fellas walks in and unzips at a urinal without so much as a double-take. They’ve seen Finian kill in cold blood before, and will not be surprised if they see it again. It makes no difference at all that I’m his own brother’s son.

  “You were nothing but trouble when you worked for me,” he says at last. “Always looking for the easy score. Dragging the other lads into your crap wee schemes. Disobeying orders. Thinking you could get away with murder because you were my nephew.”

  He slots the lightsaber smartly into the holster on his belt, which of course has a gold elephant on it.

  “We’ll see if you’ve learned your lesson.”

  I nod humbly.

  It’s true I learned a lot of things working for Finian. And one of them is that honesty doesn’t pay.

  CHAPTER 12

  So I get a temporary extension of my lease on life, which is my definition of a successful negotiation at this point.

  And the Marauding Elephant charges out along the Interstellar Railroad.

  The Elephant does not have a donor, per se. Finian is way beyond such conventionalities. He’s instead procured himself a stacker of a very rare type: a rebel. This individual is called Milton Khan and he bends my ear about the moral turpitude (his words) of The Establishment. What does he think of Finian then? I dare not ask in case it induces cognitive dissonance.

  “You want to keep an eye on that one,” I tell my uncle. “One day he’ll wake up and realize that he could be working for Wall Street, and you won’t see him for dust.”

  “Were you having trouble with your donor on the Idjit?”

  “A bit, yeah.”

  “You need to have a backup.” He nods at one of the auld fellas, who raises his pint to us. “He’s our backup. He worked in the City for forty years, then he decided to do something else with his life.”

  It’s queer to see an old stacker. They usually hide away in think tanks and executive boardrooms. It’s even queerer to see a stacker who doesn’t look like one, and Milton Khan makes two. He wears purple spandex bike shorts. The ex-City geezer dresses like the rest of Finian’s crew—leather jeans, rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts, pointy boots. It’s as if they think they’re living in Mad Max, the remake.

  “Have you been back to Lisdoonvarna recently?” Finian asks me, boots on the bar, sipping Laphroaig.

  “Not for a couple of years. Have you?”

  I know he hasn’t. My dad wouldn’t let him into the house if he dared to show his nose. There are some in town who might even call the guards. It’s a respectable community.

  My thoughts probably show on my face. Finian scowls. “What are they saying about me these days?”

  “Oh, the usual. But that’s nothing to what they’ll say if we lose the Skint Idjit.”

  “Don’t you worry. The Elephant’s capable of twice that old tub’s top speed. We’ll catch up to her … and the A-tech.”

  An hour or so later we sweep into the star system of Planet No. 27,
the one we didn’t bother to name because it is in pieces. The gandy dancers have not yet finished repairing the hole in the Railroad, but they have put up a detour that goes around it, closing the local loop.

  As we race around the loop, Milton Khan lets out a cry.

  I forgot to mention that Khan does not lurk in his own messy computer-filled lair like most of the donors I’ve known. On the Elephant, the control room is the bridge is the lounge, and Khan does his stuff on two laptops with a pair of noise-canceling headphones.

  In one corner the auld fellas are watching Ireland v. Russia in the 2066 World Cup, and in this corner Khan is pointing at another of the big screens, which now shows the rubble of Planet No. 27.

  “That’s a ship!” he screeches.

  “Slow down,” I shout.

  We are whipping around the local loop at a few percent of the speed of light. You can’t feel it on account of the Railroad’s gravity field, but Padraig, my uncle’s pilot, is leaning into the curve like a motorcycle racer, the yoke slewed all the way over. “The feck I’m slowing down,” he grunts.

  Khan zooms in on the image he’s captured. It is a blended-wing Boeing X-80. It is wedged into a crevice on a smallish fragment of Planet No. 27, near the center of the 100,000-mile-wide rubble cloud.

  Honestly, the obituaries write themselves with our lot.

  “That’s the Idjit,” I howl.

  “Is it now?” Finian purrs. “Go around for another pass, Paddy.”

  Around the loop we go again. This time Khan gets a better angle for the cameras. The Skint Idjit is unmistakably, indubitably stuck.

  “The luck of the Irish strikes again,” my uncle says happily.

  “We have to go and get the A-tech off them,” I say. But of course I am not thinking about the bleeding Butterfly-zillas. I am thinking about Harriet and Woolly and Saul and Saul’s scruffy assistants and Trigger the cook and his assistants, and the South Africans and yes, even the Georgians. Not even a bastard like Sakashvili deserves to die of hunger and thirst. I should know. I’ve tried it.

  Finian is indifferent. “We’ll go back to Planet Geranium and get it there. If you’ve got the balls for it, Fletcher.”

  “Take us into the system, Khan,” I say, chancing my arm.

  “Boss?” says Khan.

  “I’m not taking my baby into that shambles,” Finian says. “Not on your fecking life.”

  “Harriet,” moos a voice from the other end of the lounge. Jesus, it’s Donal. On his feet, looking like a zombie fresh out of the grave. He’s transfixed by the giant image of the Skint Idjit on the big screen. “Harriet!” he lows again.

  “Away with you to bed,” Finian says curtly.

  I pivot back to the screens. We are coming up on the detour again. It just looks like a little bulge in the loop, and Finian’s crew probably don’t know why it’s like that, because they never mentioned a hole in the Railroad, so it must have happened after they passed through …

  “Oh, look,” I say. “The track’s dodgy up here,” and I throw myself on Padraig, knocking him off the pilot’s couch. Roars of fear and fury arise. Finian leaps at me.

  I elbow him in the gut, grab the yoke, and steer the Marauding Elephant past the detour.

  We sail straight off the broken end of the track and decelerate into the orbital space of Planet No.27.

  Everyone sits down suddenly as we experience a split second of crushing gee-force before the inertial dampeners kick in. These are the same anti-grav A-tech that’s in the flitters, amped up to compensate for the extreme deceleration you experience when coming off the Railroad.

  Khan, moaning, engages the nuclear thermal drive. We backthrust into the rubble cloud.

  When ten septillion tons of ex-planet are floating around in an area 100,000 miles across, the pieces are actually quite close together. It’s like that bit in Star Wars where they fly through the asteroid belt, except real.

  Last time I did this, I was trying to stay out of the rubble cloud. Now I’m flying into it. I jink and swerve, dodging potential impactors in three dimensions. The auld fellas hide under the furniture. Khan throws up. But he manages not to puke on his computers, and like a good stacker he holds it together, finessing our deceleration so that we land neatly on the shard where the Skint Idjit is wedged.

  My heart is going like the clappers. My armpits are soaked with sweat. I can’t believe I pulled that off.

  Limp, I roll off the couch and confront my uncle. He’s the only person still on his feet. Arms folded, he scowls for a second and then cracks a grudging smile. “At least you didn’t kill us.” The smile vanishes. “Now go and get a spacesuit.”

  I’ve only spacewalked a few times in my life. By the time I came along it was all shirtsleeves, and if the ship needs repairs in deep space, leave it to the propulsion guys. Finian lends me an EVA suit that must date back to his surface rat days. It’s hot, constricting, and makes me look like a marshmallow with vestigial limbs.

  We line up in the hall on this side of the airlock, armed to the teeth.

  It’s me, Finian, and a dozen of the auld fellas.

  They aren’t wearing marshmallows. They have custom spacesuits in the Elephant’s colors of black and fiery red, with tusks on their helmets, honest to God, and bandoliers hanging off them and metalforma blades strapped to their thighs, and a blunderbuss for each one the size of a frigging saxophone.

  Aren’t the bloodyminded old feckers ever going to pack it in?

  “Men!” says Finian, swinging his elephant helmet in one hand. “We are about to acquire a truly fecking stupendous prize, if my nephew is telling the truth! If he is not, I’ll personally take responsibilty for gutting him. But be that as it may. That ship is defended only by a handful of explorers, who may well be dead by now anyway.”

  I raise my hand. “If you come across a pimply Georgian mafioso named Sakashvili, he’s mine. Same goes for a Yank called Ruby.”

  “Very good,” says Finian. “Apart from that, keep the carnage to a minimum, bearing in mind these are Donal O’Leary’s guys. Old Elephants … let’s MARAUD!”

  The auld fellas cheer, and we crowd into the airlock.

  Spacewalking is not a game for the faint of heart.

  I’m tumbling here and there over the rocky plain of sheared-off crust, feeling spacesick, because I’m not used to freefall. The inertial dampeners on our ships provide about half of Earth’s gravity, even when you’re not on the Railroad, and believe me, the difference between 0.5 gees and zero-gee is the difference between feeling fine and being sick in your mouth because you don’t know which way is up and which way is down anymore.

  I frantically pump my cold gas thrusters. The Old Elephants buzz ahead of me, belching fire from the much more powerful thrusters of these little space toboggans they’ve got. It is obvious that they will reach the Skint Idjit before I do, and I’m afraid they’ll blow every living soul to pieces, regardless of Finian’s mild suggestion to keep the carnage to a minimum. Carnage is what the Old Elephants do.

  ‘Up’ in the abyss of space, ginormous bergs of rock glint in the light of Planet No. 27’s sun. That one looks like it’s going to come ‘down’ and crush us. It’s an illusion. It’s thousands of miles away. I am spinning. I glimpse the Skint Idjit’s nose, poking out of the crevice where she’s wedged, and then the Marauding Elephant behind me, and then …

  What the feck is that?

  “Ship!” I screech, praying my radio’s working. “Finian! There’s some fecker coming!”

  “What?!?”

  I can only gibber “ship, ship, ship.” Ship is actually too kind a word for this monstrosity. It is the size of the Skint Idjit and the Marauding Elephant put together, a gigantic iron arrowhead with six thrusters. And it’s got bloody huge broadside batteries and these have just laid down a stream of laser pulses on the Marauding Elephant’s nose, ablating a few tons of the Airbus’s shielding. This is what we in the business call a ‘warning shot.’

  The twelve-
year-old trainspotter in me says “Lockheed-Martin F-99.” But it can’t be the USAF, because they wisely never leave our solar system. So it’s military surplus, which means …

  “Pirates!” bellows Finian. “It’s a trap! Back to the Elephant, boys!”

  “This is the Hellraiser,” says a voice.

  See? What did I tell you? What did I tell you? Everyone and his cousin thinks this is an acceptable way to make a living.

  “Surrender immediately and you will not be harmed. Otherwise we will blow you to crap.”

  But the Hellraisers of the galaxy have never met my uncle.

  “The feck you will,” Finian booms.

  And the Elephant is already lifting into space, corkscrewing like a spinning top, using her superior agility to dart out of the Hellraiser’s field of fire, and now she comes out of her controlled tumble right on top of the larger ship. Feck, that Padraig is good. The Elephant’s chain dogs glom onto the Hellraiser in a shower of electrical shorts. Trust them to find a violent use for the most innocuous technology. They’re grappled!

  The auld fellas scream past me, howling war cries and hurling supersonic missiles at the Hellraiser from their toboggans, which turn out to have integrated railguns.

  I do not have a toboggan, a railgun, or a death wish. I putter on as fast as my weak little thrusters will go, and dive into the Idjit’s crevasse while the Old Elephants engage the Hellraiser from every point of the compass. I drift down between the sheared silicate cliff and the ironclad side of the Idjit. It’s nice and dark down here. From a survivability point of view, this is definitely the best place to be right now.

  A black butterfly flutters up to me, bobbing in the light of my helmet lamp.

  Or, maybe not.

  If that’s one of our Butterfly-zillas, it’s shrunk. It’s only the size of my head.

  “Feck off, you bastard!”

  How did it get out of the ship?