The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 3: Banjaxed Ceili Page 8

  It’s amazing the effect that titles have on people, even when they’re obviously self-service ones. The manager instantly digests the information that these people own planets. He gains two inches in height. “It is a pleasure to host you at Flower Lake, your lordships, and …?” He smiles at Imogen.

  “My fiancée,” I purr. Sometimes the devil gets into me. I can’t help it.

  “A pleasure, my lady. If you’d like to come this way to our reception area …”

  Before we set out on our ill-fated trip up the Beta Aurigae spur, we took the Skint Idjit on a cargo run out to Hell’s Armpit—another misnamed planet. It’s gorgeous there. We stayed one night in a mansion owned by the CFO of Google. You could hardly tell if you were inside or outside. Everything was open to nature, with birds flying around and plants growing through the floors.

  The foyer of the Flower Lake resort reminds me of that, except all the plants are spikier. We recline in huge wicker chairs and sip cold drinks. Mine’s a Pepsi.

  Guests wander through the foyer in swimsuits. They stare curiously at us. I can’t blame them—we’re a sight: Sam in a tuxedo shirt and security guard’s trousers; Imogen in her taxi driver’s uniform, minus the blazer; and me still dressed as a waiter. But so what? Aristocrats can wear whatever they like.

  “When I have my own planet, I think I’ll call myself Taoiseach,” I muse. “King is too common, and I’m bored of Baron.”

  “What does Teeshuck mean?” Imogen says. She’s got a frappuccino-style drink in her hand. It seems to have cheered her up.

  “It’s Irish for President.”

  Imogen chokes on her coffee. “I’m trying to imagine you going into politics.”

  “What do you mean? We had a Taoiseach at one stage who was a convicted arms dealer and was involved in serious real estate fraud. He was a moustache away from being a Bond villain. And people still say he was the best Taoiseach we ever had.”

  Imogen giggles. It feels good that I can still make her laugh.

  My grin fades. “But it doesn’t matter anyway, because there won’t be any other people on my planet.”

  The manager comes back, tablet in hand. “Thank you very much, your lordships, you ladyship. Now regarding payment, would you like to make a deposit of ten percent or twenty-five percent? We accept cash only, I’m afraid.”

  A while back there was a movement to do away with cash altogether, on the basis that ne’er-do-wells use cash, whereas decent people use credit. The privacy advocates won that one. Right now, I wish they hadn’t. As Baron Short, I’ve got a five-figure credit line (which has to be repaid to the Russians). But I’ve only $102 in my pocket.

  Aristocrats always carry cash. If I reveal how broke I am, it’ll blow our cover.

  “Look, to be honest, all we want is a club sandwich and half an hour on the computer.”

  “And a swim,” Imogen pipes up.

  “Can we not do this a la carte, as it were?”

  Hark to Fletch the planet-owner.

  I never find out if we would have got away with it or not, because at that moment I spot Ruby, wearing a loose white uniform, coming out of the elevator with a stack of towels.

  CHAPTER 10

  I wouldn’t have known it was Ruby if I wasn’t expecting to see him here. He really looks like a woman! The five o’clock shadow is gone, the face is narrower—almost triangular—and the swaying walk emphasizes wider hips.

  But it is him. I’m out of my chair like a shot, leaving Imogen to deal with the manager. I accost Ruby before he can vanish through the swinging doors to the pier.

  He jumps three feet in the air and drops his stack of towels.

  “Was that you in the Lamborghini?”

  “I am a baron, you know.”

  Credit where it's due, Ruby can think on his feet. He’s a stacker. Maybe I should say he used to be a stacker. It’s the nootropic drugs they take that really give them their edge, and he had to go off those. They cost a bundle and every penny we were making on Arcadia was going to the Russian fake-ID vendors. But he's still got his genetically boosted IQ, and he spins the manager a whole fable about how he personally invited us to experience Flower Lake for the afternoon before we return to our planets in the Perseus arm. He seems to have a fair amount of credibility with the manager. We squeak through on promises that we’ll talk the place up to our planet-owning friends.

  We get loaner swimsuits so we'll be in compliance with the dress code. Imogen finishes her coffee and goes in swimming. I manage with great difficulty to persuade Sam to do the same. He stays bobbing around nearby, sprawled on one of their lilos with the attached parasols. But the lapping of the water against the pier and the droning of the insects, which drifts across the lake from the nearest pistil stalks, reassures me that he can’t overhear our conversation.

  “Ruby, I’m concerned about him.” It’s a huge relief to spill it out. “He tried to run me and Imogen over in the Lamborghini.”

  Ruby’s eyes open wide. We have filled him in about our adventures on the way here, but of course I didn’t mention our near-fatal car accident while Sam was listening. “Are you sure?” he says.

  “Of course I’m not sure. But if I wait to be sure, I’ll be dead. He wants the Gizmo.”

  “Color me unsurprised,” Ruby says. “It’s worth billions.”

  Billions of dollars currently folded up, in a hidden dimension as it were, in my trousers, which I’m sitting on. I had to change into this horrible Speedo on account of the dress code, but I’m not letting the trousers out of my sight. The Gizmo is a lump under my left buttock.

  “Well, what do you want to do about him?” Ruby says.

  We both look at Sam. He’s dabbling his feet in the water and drinking beer.

  “I don’t know,” I say, suddenly feeling like a coward and a fool. “I was hoping you’d have some ideas.”

  Ruby used to kill people. He tried to kill me once, and he very nearly did kill Donal. But that was when he worked for Goldman Sachs. Now he doesn’t even look like the same person anymore. He doesn’t sound like the same person. He’s done something to his voicebox.

  He shakes his head. “I want no part of this, Fletch.” He brushes his hair out of his eyes, a very feminine gesture.

  “Your Adam’s apple’s gone,” I say, noticing.

  “Yeah, and did you see my jawline?” He turns his head and touches the corner of his jaw just below his ear. It’s less pronounced than it used to be. The whole shape of his face looks different. “They’ve got some great surgeons here. First-class professionals.”

  Ruby has explained to us all that he started working here after Kenneth and Vanessa stole the Bogtrotter, leaving him flat. “I’d already come out here a couple of times to buy drugs, and I’d developed a rapport with the manager, so he was happy to offer me a position—” this is how Ruby talks. For him, Jacob Ruby is the center of the universe and we’re all just shadows on the wall. It’s extraordinary how stackers can maintain their egocentric confidence even when life repeatedly kicks them in the goolies.

  I glance at Ruby’s groin, concealed by the loose white folds of his uniform. He catches me looking and proffers a close-lipped smile. Has he still got all his bits, or did the surgeons of Flower Lake rid him of those, too? I can’t guess and you couldn’t pay me enough to ask.

  “So why have they got surgeons here, anyway, Ruby? Is that one of the packages? Go on holiday and come back as the opposite sex?”

  “Yeah, and they also do facelifts, liposuction, etcetera,” Ruby says. He nods at the clients sitting at the other tables on the pier, sipping drinks beneath big parasols. Many of them wear bandages, ranging from single eyepatches to the full Egyptian mummy look.

  “And you’re happy working here?”

  Ruby nods. “To be totally honest with you, Fletch? This is the first time I’ve felt at peace with myself in God, I don’t even know how long.”

  It’s completely ridiculous but my eyes suddenly prickle with tears. I tak
e a big bite of my club sandwich to hide it.

  “I’ve put up with being demeaned and insulted for years. Like my whole adult life, actually, going back to when I worked for GS. But here? Everyone’s cool. It’s a community of outsiders. For the first time in my life, I fit in. You probably can’t even imagine how that feels.”

  I’m about to say no, I can’t, but then I suddenly remember that I do know how it feels. I took it for granted when I lived at home in Lisdoonvarna. Ruby may never have had that experience in his over-privileged, rackety life.

  “So yeah. There’s no easy way to say this, but Fletch … I’m out. Sorry. You’ll just have to go on to Pervée without me.”

  He looks uncomfortable. In his egocentric way, he assumes this will be a devastating blow.

  “Of course, I’ll relinquish my share of the proceeds,” he adds.

  Well, I should hope so.

  Unfortunately, leaving that aside, this is a devastating blow. I was counting on Ruby to figure out how we’re going to get off this bloody moon. And to help me decide what to do about Sam.

  I force a smile. “As long as you’re happy.”

  “I am. I am.” His gaze flits past me. “Well, nothing’s perfect,” he says wryly.

  I’m on a hair trigger at this point and as soon as I realize he’s looking at something or someone behind me, I twist around.

  A new group of clients has sat down at the table nearest ours. They poke at the menu tablet, chattering in Chinese.

  They are Krells.

  My jaw hits the floor. “Jesus! What are they doing here?”

  “House specialty,” Ruby says. “Transgender is so old hat.” He sounds a bit annoyed not to be on the cutting edge. “Transspecies is the next big thing.”

  I shake my head. “Transspecies has been the next big thing for the last twenty years. Don’t you remember Woolly?”

  Woolly was our pilot on the Skint Idjit. She’d had the surgery to turn herself into a facsimile of a wookie.

  “Yeah, sure, but wookies never actually existed. Krells did.”

  “So?”

  “So the technology’s finally getting to the point where they can do these more extreme transitions.”

  I stiffen, suddenly remembering dead bodies in the back of a recycling truck. The vulture-analogs had eaten so much of their faces that I couldn’t tell if they were baseline humans or not. “Ruby? How good are these surgeons really?”

  “Like I said, they’re really good.”

  “But are they good enough to get it right every time? This technology is still in its infancy, correct? And it’s based on A-tech. That’s always somewhat experimental. Are they good enough that no one ever dies on the operating table?”

  Ruby looks unhappy. “I don’t know, Fletch. That’s way above my pay grade.”

  I think he does know, and just doesn’t want to admit it, because that would mean admitting that his cool community of outsiders has a dark side. In fact, a lethal side. So I say it for him. “I think they do die, Ruby. I think a fair number of them die, and the bodies are put into a recycling incinerator, and the risks don’t even make it into the fine print of the brochures that the salespeople hand out at fancy parties.”

  Ruby throws up his hands. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  I shake my head. “Nothing.” I’m tenser than ever, scanning the whole pier. Just because I can’t see any danger doesn’t mean it’s not there. “Just tell me this. Does Flower Lake ever use salespeople from the XS Group?”

  CHAPTER 11

  “There are a dozen health resorts like this on Arnold,” Ruby says. “If your hijackers really were XS Group salespeople, they came from someplace else.”

  “Except this resort’s quite close to where that demented cow put us down.”

  “Fletch, you have to be careful with that kind of language around here. This isn’t the Beta Aurigae spur.”

  I stand up to survey the pier. I can see only the one group of Krells. The others are probably hidden away in their rooms, recuperating from surgery. Or in bags, waiting to be picked up for recycling. What drives people to take these kinds of risks, only to end up looking like bipedal natterjack toads?

  I suddenly recall something. “Ruby, the security guards at the scrap yard were Krells.”

  “Oh yes,” he says. “Flower Lake offers an installment plan for clients with limited means. That’s actually how I’m paying for my surgeries. They let you work off the costs over a period of time.”

  “That proves it, then. The resort’s affiliated with that scrap yard. That’s where the XS Group had our taxi towed. And it’s only on the other side of this cactus.”

  “Proves what? Tell me, Fletch, exactly what that proves.” Ruby’s getting cross now.

  “It proves that we have to leg it this very fecking second,” I mutter. “The manager probably rang Maude the second he saw the Lamborghini.”

  I squint out into the lake, trying to identify Imogen among the scattered swimmers. Sam paddles his lilo back towards the pier. “What’s up, Fletch?”

  With difficulty, I hide my panic. “Ah, I was just trying to see where Imogen went. Can you see her at all?”

  “I think that’s her over there,” he says, gesturing vaguely. “You gonna go in?”

  “Sure, why don’t you come with me? We should look for her. She’s been in a while.”

  Sam caws a laugh. “Dude. I can’t swim.”

  “I thought Omega Centauri 49 was a wet planet.”

  “Wet as in it rains a lot. Do you go in swimming when it’s raining?”

  “Yes. I’m Irish.”

  “Well, I’m not, and anyway, I’m starving.” Sam loops the tether of his lilo onto the post attached to the steps. “Ruby, do we get free food? Or were the free drinks the extent of it?”

  I glance at my folded trousers.

  Sam comes up the steps and starts flicking through the menu, while Ruby irritably tells him not to order the most expensive thing.

  I place my shoes and socks on top of my trousers. I’ll just have to chance it.

  “Going to look for Imogen,” I say, and dive off the pier.

  Whew! The water embraces my body with a glorious shock. It’s cold, sure. But when you come from the west coast of Ireland, it’s fine to go in as long as there’s not actually ice on the surface.

  I get a little water in my mouth, and remember it’s not actually water, it’s cactus nectar. It is ever so slightly sweet.

  I don’t feel buoyant, either. It’s more like swimming in a pond than in the sea. That makes sense.

  I break into a crawl, heading for the clump of swimmers I saw from the pier.

  But it turns out that none of them are Imogen. They’re Australians, here to have everything lifted and tucked. They tell me that they thought at first I was one of the Krells. “That lot are always swimming underwater. Bloody creepy!” They’re nice ladies but they haven’t seen Imogen, and I strike off again into the lake.

  Could something have happened to her? I can’t see her anywhere, although it’s not a perfect view with the lilos floating around, and the pistil stalks protruding from the water, each one veiled in its own cloud of buzzing insects.

  I glance back at the pier. A waiter is delivering a whole tray full of food to Sam. That should keep him busy for a while.

  I decide to swim in a big circle around the pier. This time I try swimming with my head underwater and my eyes open.

  Holy feck! I can see all the way to the bottom. This is amazing!

  The water’s perfectly clear. Purple and pink pond weed covers the bottom, and little fish-analogs dart around in it.

  Those Krells certainly did a righteous job of terraforming this place. How could biomodified humans ever measure up? If you looked like a Krell but weren’t a Krell, wouldn’t it just give you an even worse inferiority complex?

  Brushing these fruitless speculations away, I swim in a breaststroke so as to splash less, coming up for air every couple of str
okes. I’m looking for Imogen’s drowned body on the bottom. I’m looking for an excuse to stop running. I’m looking for a way out of my life.

  Without warning, someone grabs my legs and pulls me under.

  I kick wildly, and break free. Spinning in a cloud of bubbles, I find myself looking into Imogen’s smiling face. Her eyes and her mouth are open. She shouts: “How fucking cool is this?” and I can hear her. Underwater, I can hear her.

  Her hair’s held back with an arrangement of wires that loops over her face like a dog’s muzzle, and there are two small gray things stuck in her nostrils, and more of the wires vanish into her mouth.

  I latch my hand into her swimsuit and kick for the surface. It’s hard to pull her up into the air. She doesn’t want to come. When I finally get her to break the surface, she bucks violently and spews water from her mouth. She retches several times, expelling the water that filled her lungs.

  Normally, a person whose lungs were filled with water is drowned.

  “It’s the Krell artefact, isn’t it?”

  She’s sneezed out the crystals that were in her nose. Now she spits out another one from her mouth. She floats on her back with the artefact tangled in her hair. “Yes, and thanks for spoiling my swim, asshole.”

  “It really works,” I say stupidly.

  “Apparently so. The Krells weren’t amphibian, after all. They just had very advanced scuba diving equipment.”

  “Now we know why that biomodder risked going to jail for it,” I say, thinking aloud. “We can sell that for an easy five figures. It’s just a toy, really. But it’s all about the supply and demand …”

  Imogen wrenches the artefact off her head, throws it at me. I catch it just before it sinks into the depths. “I knew you guys were going to screw me over,” she says bitterly. “That’s why I took it.”

  “Imogen—”

  “You don’t trust me, and that’s fine. I know I haven’t earned your trust.”

  I want to listen to her, but my attention’s divided. Back on the pier, the waiter clears away Sam’s plate. Ruby’s gone. He must have had to go back to work. I’m treading water, getting tired.