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

  “You have to make a choice,” Penelope announces. “Her or me? Which is it to be, Donal?”

  “You can’t do this,” Donal husks weakly. “I mean, I order you to release her!”

  “Huh,” Penelope sneers. “You suck at dominance.” Her voice trembles with self-pity. “I really know how to pick ‘em.”

  Up in the corridor, Mama-zilla can smell all the lovely electricity coursing through the equipment in the control room. Her wingbeats throb like a jet engine. Dark wing-points shoot around the edges of the dolly. I whack at them with an anti-grav tea tray.

  My life has now officially reached peak embuggerment.

  Well, at least it isn’t raining.

  Two seconds later it starts to rain … flame-retardant foam.

  The fire in the kitchen must have triggered the sprinklers.

  The foam falls straight through Mama-Zilla’s wing-points, making them glow gray. If chronic depression had a color this would be it. These fluttering points of existential misery wrap around the edges of the anti-grav dolly and embrace Sakashvili.

  His biohazard suit doesn’t give him enough protection. He crumples. His falling body knocks me off the ladder.

  I land on the heap of EVA suits, slip in the foam, and catch myself—pure reflex, I promise—on Penelope’s legs.

  She staggers back into the control room, taking Harriet with her.

  Donal is still rooted to the spot. But clever Harriet seizes her chance. While Penelope’s off balance, Harriet bites her ear.

  Penelope yowls and drops her knife. Metalforma is wasted on amateurs.

  I charge into the control room, catch Penelope with my shoulder, and knock her to the floor.

  Harriet starts to run to Donal, then backpedals at the sight of Mama-zilla.

  The A-tech horror heaves through the door and into the control room with us, wings spreading to all four walls, quivering as if it can’t decide what to eat first, now that it’s surrounded by such bounty. It settles on the flight control computers.

  The lights dim. Various background hums fade to silence as the Skint Idjit suffers an unscheduled power-down.

  When it has finished with the ship it will eat us. By that time, I expect EVA suits will pose no obstacle to it.

  And then it will move on to eat another hole in the Interstellar Railroad … just like the ones off the Hellraiser did before.

  And maybe the gandy dancers’ll be able to stop it this time, or maybe they won’t, and maybe it’ll eat the entire Railroad from one end of the Milky Way to the other.

  And maybe that’d be a good thing.

  But on the whole, I think not.

  Penelope, on the floor, is crawling under her bed to get away from the monster.

  Her anti-grav bed, which I have seen her fly around the leafy suburbs of Treetop like a flitter, with Donal behind her holding onto her shoulders and the both of them screeching like kids on a rollercoaster, in the days when things were good.

  I close the visor of my helmet. Almost immediately I start to suffocate.

  I take a flying leap, through Mama-zilla’s miserable wings, and land on the bed. Where are the bloody controls?

  Ah, here.

  I power the bed up to the ceiling, yank it into position, and then force it down.

  Right on top of Mama-zilla.

  Unfortunately Penelope’s under there, too.

  CHAPTER 15

  The weaponized bed didn’t kill Mama-zilla, but it gave her pause for thought. That was long enough for Penelope to dive out of the way. She brushed Mama-zilla’s wings and hit the floor looking rather gray. The bright side is she’s no longer in any shape to threaten us. It’s all she can do to struggle into her own high-end EVA suit and flee the ship, helped along by Donal and Harriet, whose capacity for forgiveness astounds me.

  Final headcount of survivors: twelve. Six South Africans. One assistant propulsion tech (her name turns out to be Vanessa). Donal. Harriet. Penelope. And Ruby and me.

  The others have scattered over the surface of the planetary shard. I can’t see them anymore, and we’ve got no radio contact with them.

  Ruby’s hanging onto my belt. He’s totally dependent on me to guide him, as his visor is now a mass of duct tape.

  “I don’t see the Hellraiser,” I tell him.

  Our shard has tumbled around on its axis and we’re now facing away from Planet No.27’s sun. In the abyss of space ‘above’ us float angular bits of rubble lit up like the moon. The local loop, also lit up, encircles the horizon like a thin silver rainbow. This is how it looks from Earth at night, if you get out into the countryside. It’s a beautiful view, and strikingly empty of ships.

  “The Hellraiser’s gotta be there, man! They told me they’d wait for me to bring Penelope! Anyway, where would they go?”

  Ruby and I are talking to each other by radio. I made sure to get a spare powerpack off him as soon as the others were out of sight.

  “Oh, I dunno,” I say. “But like I said, we don’t really need Penelope, do we?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a stacker yourself, aren’t you, Ruby?”

  “I, uh, no. Nope. Well … kinda. Yeah, I guess.”

  He admits it. I smirk to myself. The truth dawned on me after I met Finian’s stackers. They don’t have to look like it. And anyway, Ruby works for Goldman Sachs. The possibility was there all along.

  “But that doesn’t mean I can operate a ship! There is training involved.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be able to pick it up as you go along. You’re a smart guy.”

  He laughs weakly. “Damn, I was so hoping to get out of this. I’m just sick of it, you know? Do as you’re told, go where you’re sent, make your quota or lose your bonus …Being a stacker means you’re never free. You people don’t know how good you have it.”

  “Nobody forced you at gunpoint to work for Goldman Sachs,” I point out.

  “No, but if you graduate from Harvard, what else are you gonna do? And then you wind up fetching the boss’s goddamn coffee, and then they send me all the way out here to spy on some kooky exploration activist’s sex life, like I’m a fucking PI or something. I can’t take it anymore.”

  Jesus, the self-pity. I recognize it because it could have been me a few weeks ago, only with different complaints. Self-pity isn’t a stacker monopoly.

  “So, OK.” He heaves a sigh. “I guess donating my brainpower to a bunch of pirates … it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” I say.

  The beep-beep-beep of my suit’s radar homing guidance has sped up. Hauling Ruby with me, I fly over a jagged cliff and there’s the Marauding Elephant.

  A space toboggan zips towards us, a rotund black-clad figure atop it.

  “Meet my uncle Finian,” I say to Ruby. “I’m sure the two of you will get along great.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “We captured her in fifteen minutes flat,” my uncle tells me, showing us around the ship formerly known as the Hellraiser. “It was a cakewalk.” He seems a bit aggrieved about that. “There were only two people on board.”

  “Two!” marvels Harriet.

  “Yes, the captain and the pilot, may their souls rest in peace, or not as the case may be. They’d locked themselves in the bridge.”

  “To escape the Butterfly-zillas?”

  “No, this would have been later. It looks as if they jettisoned all the A-tech right after they came off the Railroad. But it had already cut a swathe through them. Their stacker was dead. Which is why you should always have a back-up … but they didn’t. So they were stuck.” Of course, I’ve already heard this from Ruby, who was plotting to un-stick the Hellraiser with my help. “That was five months ago, according to the pilot,” my uncle goes on. “Five months! So you can imagine.”

  “I’m surprised even two of them managed to live that long,” Harriet says innocently.

  “We’ve tidied the place up for you,” F
inian says, seemingly changing the subject. He waves at the large, barren mess. I know what he’s talking about because I helped with the tidying up before the others came on board. There were … bones.

  “What happened to the captain?” Donal says.

  “He ate his gun,” Finian says curtly.

  The former Hellraiser is indeed an F-99. Those military boys love their grey paint, ugly strip lighting, and touch screens on every blessed thing (all broken now). Subsequent owners have tweaked the ambiance with classic rap posters and rude graffiti.

  Vanessa and Harriet gaze around disconsolately. “I wish I’d gone on the Elephant,” Vanessa sighs.

  She is alluding to Penelope, who’s currently in the Elephant’s sick-bay. It was the only place for her after her encounter with Mama-zilla. If she wasn’t a stacker, she’d probably have died, like Morgan did, but those drugs they take enhance their powers of recuperation into the bargain. They’re going to have a lively old time of it on the Elephant, I reckon. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of Finian’s crew turned out to be into BDSM.

  “I don’t wish I’d gone on the Elephant,” Harriet says, smiling at Donal. He takes her hand, pulls her close, and kisses her.

  Vanessa scoops up a treecat and kisses that. “Well, at least we’ve got the kitties.”

  Harriet and Vanessa actually went back to the Skint Idjit to rescue the treecats. That’s what I call courage, otherwise known as rank idiocy. There’s really not much difference. The treecats now have the run of the Hellraiser’s crew deck. They’ve been piddling everywhere. It’s a good thing they’re so damn cute.

  For all the mass of the ship, the interior is pretty cramped, but we’re used to that. And anyway there are only eleven of us now.

  Our tour ends on the bridge, where the last survivor of the Hellraiser is cringing on the pilot’s couch, guarded by Adriaan and Shaka, two of our South Africans. The pilot may have a pirate’s hedgehog haircut and metallic tattoos, but he’s been the most cooperative of captives, as you would be in his position. Anyway, his name is Kenneth. I can’t imagine someone named Kenneth killing us all in a suicidal act of revenge. And if he should try it, I’ll just grab the controls.

  “Well, I’ve got to get on,” says my uncle, picking up his elephant-tusked helmet. “Oh, by the way, Fletcher, I think this is yours?”

  He reaches into his spacesuit’s thigh pocket and holds out my lightsaber.

  I goggle, too surprised to move. I thought that was lost forever, back on the Skint Idjit.

  Finian checks that no one else is close enough to overhear, and murmurs, “Your man had it with him in his rucksack.” No one else knows that Ruby is safe and sound on board the Marauding Elephant, and we would both like it to stay that way.

  “That little prick,” I mutter through clenched teeth.

  “Well, do you want it?”

  I hesitate.

  Finian reads my hesitation accurately. I stole it off him twenty years ago, according to him; why is he giving it back to me now?

  “Oh,” he says, “I figure you’ve earned it. You got the job done back there.” He winks.

  “Ta,” is all I can think of to say, sliding the lightsaber into my pocket.

  Hoping to hell I never have to use it again.

  Everyone says goodbye and thank you to Finian. “I’ll look forward to buying you a drink at O’Donoghue’s in the not too distant future,” Donal says. Finian makes noncommittal noises, and flies back to his ship.

  Both ships are now standing off—well off—from the shard where the Skint Idjit is lodged.

  We can’t actually see the Idjit anymore. But infrared scans reveal a patch of warmth at her location. It flutters.

  I think we have solved the mystery of what destroyed Planet No. 27, incidentally. There’s a lot of heat energy in a planet.

  A normally rotating planet, that is.

  Not so much on the nightside of a tidally locked planet. Which is why unnamed aliens, billions of years ago, must have thought it would make a good cold storage locker.

  Well, I’m not so sure about that. But I do know that these shards are not a safe place for Mama-zilla and her family. They move.

  So, after the Marauding Elephant has zoomed off up the Railroad, Donal gives a command: “Acquire target.”

  “Target acquired,” says Shaka, who has been pining for years to get his hands on some guns like the former Hellraiser’s.

  “Ready missiles.”

  “Missiles ready.”

  “Fire!”

  With a boom that catches us all by surprise, the F-99 unloads her twin dorsal railguns. Kinetic projectiles, not energy beams, streak through space and smash into the shard where Mama-zilla is digesting its meal. Megatons of shrapnel spurt into space.

  This was my idea, based on swatting the Baby-zillas. You can smash their energy receptors or something. I hope to God I’m right about how it works. I’m just guessing.

  At any rate, when the dust drifts away, we run another infrared scan, and it does seem a bit cooler down there now.

  “Poor old Skint Idjit,” Donal says mournfully. “I never dreamed it would end this way.”

  “Oh, shut up,” says the unsentimental Harriet. “This ship’s much better.”

  There is no question the F-99 is a faster, bigger, more heavily armed ship than the Skint Idjit was. Better is a matter of taste, but more valuable is not.

  “We can sell her on Arcadia and then go home,” Harriet says.

  I laugh out loud, knowing Donal better than that. Harriet scowls at me. “Well, what are you planning to do, Fletch?”

  Our new stacker, Gordon, saves me from having to answer. “Might we be planning to hit the tracks any time soon?” he yawns.

  Uncle Finian has lent us his back-up stacker. Gordon F. Poole is seventy-eight and sports a mustache like those old pictures of Chinese sages. He was quite happy to be lent, on the condition that he gets to work on the bridge and play his music, which helps him concentrate. So we are all listening to Avenged Sevenfold, and before that it was Queens of the Stone Age and something called Eagles of Death Metal, God help us.

  “Oh, ah, yes,” says Donal, who’s a bit in awe of Gordon. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  So we sail onto the Interstellar Railroad and accelerate painlessly to thousands of times the speed of light. Donal cracks a bottle of champagne, we drink to the memory of our dead colleagues, everyone gets emotional, Vanessa gets off with Kenneth the pirate, and Harriet completely forgets her question.

  I bet you have forgotten it, too.

  The question was: What am I planning to do when we reach Arcadia?

  The answer is I’m not sure yet.

  But I did recover one of the body bags full of Baby-zillas that Ruby threw out of the airlock.

  And I did give it to Finian after I handed Ruby over to him.

  And Finian left Planet No. 27 before we did, which will put him on Arcadia several days ahead of us, since we’ll have to make at least one water stop en route.

  As soon as he gets there, he’ll announce the A-tech discovery and claim his 50%.

  Only 50%? Yes. This find is too big to be auctioned off under the table. We agreed he’d better turn the Butterfly-zillas over to their rightful owners, Goldman Sachs. They might try to stiff him, since he hasn’t got an exploration contract with them. But he has got a Goldman Sachs employee on board: Jacob Ruby, who will lie his arse off to prove Finian’s claim, if he values his wretched life. And everyone can agree that 50% of untold billions is a lot better than 50% of nothing.

  I’m getting 40% of Finian’s 50%, which is still so much money it makes me giddy.

  I might share it with Donal and the others, just to make Donal feel really bad.

  Or I might buy a planet.

  Or, I suppose, Finian might try to stiff me. But I don’t think it’s likely. He knows that if he did that, he’d never be able to hold up his head in Lisdoonvarna again.

  Fletcher�
�s (mostly unwanted) adventures continue in the next Interstellar Railroad book, Intergalactic Bogtrotter.

  See Intergalactic Bogtrotter at your favorite ebook retailer

  INTERGALACTIC BOGTROTTER

  CHAPTER 1

  Going by the looks of her you’d assume the Hellraiser deserves her name. She’s a decommissioned Lockheed-Martin F-99, a quarter of a mile long, shaped like a manta ray, barnacled with railguns and energy weapons. But she handles like a swine, and I should know—I’ve piloted her most of the way back to Arcadia, while Kenneth, who’s supposed to be doing it, humps Vanessa in the ammo locker. Vanessa is our sole surviving propulsion technician. The Captain’s asked her to do something about the gurgling noise you can hear on the engineering deck, but she says it’s just the plumbing.

  I am slumped in the pilot’s couch when the Captain charges onto the bridge, his brow furrowed. “Have you seen my iPhone?”

  “No, I haven’t. What do you need it for?”

  It’s not as if we can get a signal on the Interstellar Railroad.

  The Captain rummages in the lockers and drawers where the Hellraiser’s former owners kept their stuff. “Iphone, iPhone!” he says. It’s the 2063 model he’s got. It’s supposed to sing out when you shout for it. Out of various crannies drift obscene greetings from phones belonging to dead pirates. The Captain chucks them into the e-waste bin.

  “Why do you need your phone?” says Harriet, our life-support officer. She’s huddled at the navigation table, nursing a treecat and a cup of tea.

  “It’s got the bloody insurance documents on it!” the Captain says. “The pictures and everything.”

  He is referring to the final pictures he took of our doomed ship, the Skint Idjit. She was eaten three weeks ago by A-tech artefacts that looked like giant butterflies. Half our crew were eaten, too.

  We had to blow up the poor old Idjit, with the dead inside her, and decamp to the Hellraiser, whose entire crew had already been eaten, except for Kenneth and his boss, whose death no one regrets. We are now eleven, down from 28. It may seem heartless for the Captain to be obsessing over the insurance documents, but he’s coping better than Harriet, who is too traumatized to do anything except cry into her tea. She thinks we will be going home soon. Poor Harriet.