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

“But I’m still waiting for my drink,” she says.

  I know it’s going to take a few moments for it to sink in. A person cannot react immediately to news this crushingly bad. Unfortunately, we don’t have a few moments. I fasten my hand around her arm. Her eyes darken.

  Sam stiffens. “Oh shit.” I follow his gaze to the entrance.

  Finian’s shoving his way into the shop, flanked by his men. Raising his flashing baton to attract attention, he booms, “Near Earth Police Department! Remain calm and nobody will get hurt!”

  The three of us edge behind the freestanding shelves of souvenir mugs and doodads. These are high enough to conceal us from the NEPD for at least a moment. My eyes dart, plotting an escape route: through the seating area, nip behind their backs, and away ... he might not even notice us, he’s so busy intimidating the populace—

  “Imogen!” A barista slams a plastic cup on the counter. “Imogen, your venti mocha frappuccino with extra mocha and caramel is READY!”

  Why does she have to have such a rare name?

  Finian lets out a roar and charges.

  His men follow, batons whirling.

  They get entangled with a flock of pensioners towing suitcases bigger than they are.

  I drag Imogen behind the Starbucks counter. She snags her drink on the way.

  “Sorry, sorry, excuse me—”

  Back into the storage area. Baristas on their break are eating enormous muffins, surrounded by boxes of coffee.

  “Which way out?”

  A barista gestures mutely with a muffin.

  We crash through a steel door into a service corridor. Sam, on our heels, is laughing wildly. I will later learn that he tipped over a coffee machine on his way behind the counter, complicating Finian’s passage and probably giving several baristas third-degree burns.

  We sprint along the corridor, dodging service workers. Imogen is still holding onto her frappuccino, one hand over the lid so it won’t spill.

  “Back to the Lamborghini,” I yell.

  “But what about the Bogtrotter?” Imogen gasps.

  Oh Christ, I haven’t told her that part yet. “Kenneth and Vanessa stole her. She’s probably in a hundred pieces on Flea Market by now.”

  Imogen wails in despair, inasmuch as one can when running flat out.

  “Cheer up,” I pant. “She was at the end of her days, anyway. The insurance payments were more than she was worth.”

  At the end of the corridor, an emergency exit door beckons. I crash the push-bar down. A klaxon erupts. We stumble out into the sunlight, which seems brighter than ever. The heat feels hotter than ever. At least we’re in shadow.

  We’ve come out on a different side of the terminal from where we went in. This appears to be a service parking area. Beyond the parked vans and lorries, a mountain of demolition debris rises to the sky.

  An explosion shakes the still air. We flinch back against the terminal building.

  “Was that a ship taking off?” Imogen says.

  “It didn’t sound like that,” I say.

  People are clambering down the rubble mountain. They’re wearing business suits, slipping and sliding on the chunks of pulverized Krell buildings.

  “Those are stackers,” Imogen says unexpectedly.

  “You can tell?” I say.

  “Uccchh. I used to work with those people, remember? Bet you anything they’re Big Tech guys.”

  “In that case, I certainly don’t want to meet them.”

  We scuttle along the side of the terminal, staying in the building’s narrow strip of shadow.

  Up on top of the debris mound, a radio crackles loudly.

  I glance back. More figures are descending the rubble. Feck! They’re NEPD officers, helmeted and jackbooted. They overtake the suits and knock one of them over. The suits shout at them and they shout back.

  “Run,” I say.

  We sprint to the corner of the terminal building. I break stride for another glance back.

  The NEPD officers have almost reached the bottom of the rubble mountain, slithering as fast as they can. But that’s not the worst thing I see.

  From this vantage, I can see the sloping summit of the rubble mountain. And up there in the sunlight stands a skeletal jeep, painted in the NEPD colors. There’s a frame over the back of the jeep that supports a contraption like a very large milk bottle, angled towards the sky.

  I’ve seen one of those before, on the Draco spur.

  It’s a rocket launcher.

  We break into the sunlight. I’m out of breath, pouring with sweat. Families and tour groups meander across the visitor parking lot, shaded by parasols, portable fans whirring.

  I seize Imogen’s hand and drag her straight through a tour group. They exclaim in shock at our rudeness.

  “Sam!” Imogen cries.

  I look back. Sam’s sprawled full length on the tarmac. He must have tripped in those over-large sneakers he borrowed from the dead Krell security guard.

  The NEPD officers are closing in.

  I hesitate.

  Imogen doesn’t.

  She dashes back, screams at the closest officer, and throws her frappuccino into his face.

  By that time I’ve dragged Sam to his feet. We run for the Lamborghini, Sam limping—it turns out he lost one sneaker in Starbucks and the bottom of his bare foot is torn to ribbons. That doesn’t stop him laughing. “That was awesome, Imogen! A frappuccino bomb! I fucking love it!”

  The NEPD officers have stopped to help their colleague, who is screaming his head off, maybe thinking he’s been doused with acid or something. We zigzag behind the cars and buses to the Lamborghini.

  It’s been sitting in the sun so the inside is like an oven. While they’re opening all the doors, I get into the driver’s seat.

  Sam is still laughing and Imogen’s smiling primly. “I really wanted that frappuccino,” she says.

  “I’ll buy you another when we get off-planet,” Sam says. “I’ll buy you a whole fucking Starbucks franchise.”

  “Buy yourself a pair of shoes first.”

  I’m in no mood to join in their laughter. The situation is still extremely hairy. I gun the engine, roll out of our parking place, and take off.

  The NEPD officers below glance up at us and then go on searching the parking lot. It does not occur to them that we may be in possession of a pricey sports car. And from down there they can’t see the crumpled bonnet.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” Imogen says. She goes on without waiting for me to reply. “The way I see it, we’ve got to lie low for a while. The NEPD are doofuses. They’ll go away. But what about Maude’s gang? Shit shit shit.”

  “That just about sums it up,” I say. “But we’ll worry about all that after we pick Ruby up.”

  I expect protests from them both and I get them aplenty. Neither Sam nor Imogen is friends with Ruby. Imogen only met him on the Lost Planet, when Ruby was whining and moaning every waking minute about how he didn’t quit his job at Goldman Sachs for this. Then when we got back to Arcadia she was working as a taxi driver and he was waiting tables at a nightclub, so they hardly ever saw each other. Sam used to go to Ruby’s nightclub occasionally and laugh at his pretensions. Ruby is transitioning to female. He had to stop taking his meds after the Lost Planet debacle, as we had no money, so he’s been stuck in an awful in-between stage for a while—a transvestite with stubble. Some people find that laughable or perverse. I have been among them at times. Well, quite often. But that doesn’t justify abandoning him, after Kenneth and Vanessa have abandoned him already.

  Basically, I have to start doing the right thing at some stage, or there won’t be anything left of me.

  I can’t say that out loud, of course. It would ruin my image. I just point out, “Ruby would turn us in in a heartbeat if Finian catches him.”

  “Oh, dammit,” Sam sighs. “In that case, I suppose we have to bump him off.”

  “Sam!” Imogen says.

  “Just kidding, just kidding.
” Sam gives us one of his lazy smiles. “I meant to say rescue him from whatever hole he’s hiding in. Did he say?”

  I lean forward and speak into the sat-nav. “Flower Lake.”

  It’s not that far, thank feck.

  “Flower Lake,” Sam says. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Nor have I. It’s some kind of resort.”

  We fly over the built-up area outside the spaceport. I keep the speed to the legal limit, and watch other cars hurtle gaily past at twice that.

  “Aren’t you going to turn the GPS off?” Sam says.

  “The sat-nav? I’m using it.”

  “I thought you said they could use it to track us.”

  “That was when I thought it was the XS Group shooting rockets at us.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “No, you idjit. It was Finian. Did you not see that set-up in the service parking area?”

  “Oh.”

  “The NEPD’s jurisdiction ends at the perimeter of the spaceport. The tech lobby squeezed that concession out of the pols, to make sure there’d be no interference with the various profit-making activities out here. So what does the auld bastard do but he brings along his truck-mounted rocket launcher to extend his range?”

  “So how were they targeting us?” Sam says.

  “Fecked if I know.” I touch the outline of the Gizmo once more. “I thought there might be a transmitter dot on the Gizmo, but I had a good look at it. There isn’t.”

  “Oh,” Imogen says.

  “What?” Sam and I say at once, because there’s that note of consternation in her voice that you might hear when terrible news has been received.

  “Um, I …” In the mirror, she’s pink, and I don’t think it’s just the sunburn. “I might know how they’re tracking us.”

  She works one hand into the pocket of her tight taxi driver’s trousers, and opens her fist to reveal a tangle of wires and cloudy crystals.

  The Krell artefact.

  CHAPTER 9

  Look on the bright side, I tell myself. At least she came clean about it.

  “Nice job, Ms. Kincaid,” I say. “How did you pull it off?”

  Defensively, she says, “The Krells were dead. It was just lying there.” She shrugs. “I took it.”

  This puts a new color on the way she left the recycling center and ran off across the desert. With this in her pocket, she must have thought she didn’t need us anymore. I don’t know whether to be glad or angry that she changed her mind.

  Sam grabs the artefact. Imogen doesn’t try to stop him. He holds it up to the window. “Aha. GPS dot.”

  So I had the right idea. Wrong artefact.

  And we might have found that GPS dot much earlier if Imogen had told us she had the artefact, or if she’d even looked at it properly.

  “Are you going to throw it away?” Imogen says.

  “Oh, maybe,” I say. “It always gives me a kick to toss millions of dollars out of the window. No, of course we’re not throwing it away.”

  “I can get this off,” Sam says, scraping at the GPS dot with his thumbnail. “There.”

  He peels the remains of his left sock off, wraps the GPS dot in the bloodstained terrycloth, and rolls down the window. The car fills with the throb of air. Sam hurls the sock and the GPS dot out, and rolls the window up again..

  “Look for a missile to land in that area soon,” he says.

  “It’s an hour’s drive,” I say. “You two might as well get some sleep.”

  Imogen curls up on the back seat. I’m sure she’s not really asleep. She’s mourning.

  Sam takes his other shoe off and props his bare feet on the dashboard. He turns the mess of flimsy wires and crystals in his hands. “How hard you think it’d be to reverse-engineer this?”

  “No idea. Sam, there’s just too much A-tech in the galaxy. If you try to figure out how it all works you’ll go mad.”

  “But this thing might be a goldmine. That dude said the Krells used it to swim underwater. We could make a fortune selling cheap copies on the Beach.”

  The Beach is another misleadingly named planet which is all water. A few people live there in seasteads.

  “We don’t even know that he was right,” I say, remembering the thief with pity. “The poor fella was unbalanced. He was probably just guessing.”

  “Maybe there was a label on the display case.”

  “There were no labels on any of the exhibits.” I shake my head. “It could be an aqualung, an extension cord, or the key to the seventh seal of the fecking apocalypse. We don’t know how the Krells thought.”

  “We don’t know how any of them thought,” Sam acknowledges.

  Imogen speaks up from the back seat. I knew she wasn’t asleep. “Reverse-engineering A-tech is basically a process of working out how dead aliens thought. You have to get into their heads to understand their technology.”

  “My mom spent nine years trying to work out how the Denebites thought,” Sam says. “She failed.”

  His mother, Special Delivery Sam, ended up getting arrested for her crimes on the Omega Centauri spur. They sent the military after her. It was the first-ever military operation outside our own solar system, which gives you an idea of just how heinous her crimes were. Finian got caught in the same net. He was trying to kill Special Delivery Sam at the time, which probably told in his favor. He ended up in the NEPD. She ended up in a maximum-security prison on Earth. Sam’s never given any indication of being upset about that. He’d already cut his own ties with her, after all. But now something in his voice makes me wonder how he really feels about it all.

  “Here.” He passes the Krell artefact back to Imogen. “It’s probably just jewelry or something.”

  We fly over the demolished region of the maze city, and then a non-demolished region, and then a human industrial cluster, and finally a cactus town. This would be where the school buses and SUVs in the air are coming from. There are caves in the sides of the cactus. People have dug holes in the giant plant and trained it to grow back around nanowire frames, forming smooth cavities. It’s a bit like a pueblo of old, with strips of cultivated sunflowers and roses outside. They tap the cactus itself for water.

  I fly up over the side of the cactus. The sat-nav says Flower Lake is on the top of here, which seems like a queer place to build a holiday resort. I hug the knolls and valleys of the gargantuan plant, flying low—because I’m still feeling paranoid—and slow—because I’m not the driver Imogen is.

  The lumps and bumps become steeper. The shadow of the Lamborghini glides over crevices Swiss-cheesed with burrows. I wonder what kind of creatures come out of there at night? My imagination suggests scorpion-analogs and rattlesnake-analogs. I’m starting to hate this moon, and the Krells who designed it.

  “Look,” I say. “No more spikes.”

  We are now flying over waves of thin, frilly ridges gradated from pale green to white. “Weird,” Sam says without interest.

  Suddenly the cactus drops away. Ahead glitters a plain of … water!

  Tall, slender poles poke out of the water, attracting swarms of insects so dense they look like black clouds. Rainbow-colored birds flock on the surface. The entire depression in the cactus is rimmed with knife-edged ridges like the ones we just flew over, so thin at the tops that the sun shines through them. Around the shores of the lake, fan-like growths crowd in splashes of orange and pink, shading the shallows.

  Imogen sits up. “Oh, cool!” she says. “Flower Lake! Duh! I’ve heard of these! Guys, we are inside a cactus flower. That’s nectar, and oh my God, there are people swimming in it!”

  There are indeed. Watching them splash and float on lilos with attached parasols, my whole body thirsts for the embrace of water. Nectar? Water? I don’t care as long as it’s wet. I’m hot and sticky and tired and a dip would be the best thing in the world just now.

  The swimmers are diving off a pier, clearly manmade, that juts out into the lake. Beyond it, a collection of rustic buildings sprawls
along the shore. The swimmers are not paying any attention to the Lamborghini buzzing over their heads, because there is a parking lot attached to the complex, and it is half full of cars already.

  “I’m putting down in the carpark over there,” I say.

  Sam frowns. “Fletch, we don’t know what this place is. I don’t like going in with no information.”

  I exhale through my nose. If he was going to quibble, could he not have done it earlier? All right, he did do it earlier, and I overruled him. I’ll just have to do it again. As tactfully as possible.

  “It is a holiday resort,” I say. “You’re from Omega Centauri, Sam, so you’re not always au fait with trends on Earth. But people from Earth like taking holidays on other planets. Arnold is cheap and you can make day trips to Treetop for the shopping. I always thought it was only suckers who plunked down for Arnold tours, but now I admit that I may have been mistaken, because this looks very nice indeed. Anyway, this is where Ruby is. Call him.” I flip Sam my prepaid.

  He dials and waits while I set the Lamborghini down in the parking lot.

  “No answer,” he says as we get out.

  I don’t reply immediately, testing the springy cactus-stuff underfoot. It’s cooler up here. The air, however, seems richer. Maybe the tall petals swaying around the parking lot somehow emit oxygen. They cast sharp shadows. There’s an elusive, tangy scent in the air that reminds me of juniper.

  A valet hurries up, wearing a loose white uniform with a sunhat tied under her chin. “Hi! Do you have a reservation?”

  I step in front of the other two and give her my widest, most charming smile. “We do not, but I was hoping you’d take walk-ins.”

  “Well, it depends on which package you’re thinking of. But we would definitely hope to accommodate you, so if I could just have your names?” She gets out a tablet.

  “Certainly, and as to the package, what do you recommend?” I am winging this. Hope I don’t end up committing us to aromatherapy massages or anything of that sort.

  A plump, pink-faced body with ‘manager’ practically written on his forehead is hurrying across the parking-lot. I wait for him to reach us before continuing.

  “My name is Dick Short—Lord Short of Pervée—and this is my good friend Baron Hofacker of Zabordelo.”