Starship Grifters (A Rex Nihilo Adventure)

by Robert Kroese

  The general grumbled something incomprehensible.

  Rex was staring at me, undoubtedly perplexed by the fact that I had apparently just told a lie. I hadn’t, of course. Rex’s net worth was over a billion credits, in absolute terms. He was a billionaire in red ink.

  Rex recovered from his astonishment quickly. “I had hoped to avoid dealing with such distasteful financial matters in our initial meeting,” he explained, “but I suppose it’s just as well to have it out of the way. Perhaps now we can move on to more pressing concerns?”

  The princess nodded. “I must say, Rex, that if you’re willing to share this technology with us, it could mean a turning point for the rebellion. We have a terrible time trying to get troops and munitions past the Malarchian navy. We were trying to contact Gavin Larviton to see if he could help us identify any weaknesses in the Malarchian ships.”

  “If I may ask, Princess,” said Rex, “didn’t Larviton build most of those vessels? Why would he help you find a weakness in his own ships?”

  “Surely you’ve heard the rumors that Larviton is experiencing some financial difficulties,” replied the princess. “I thought I might be able to get some information from him in exchange for helping him with some of those difficulties.”

  “I see,” said Rex. Wheels were obviously turning in his head. If Princess Willie was wealthy enough to loan Gavin Larviton money, she was very well-off indeed.

  The general was still studying Rex skeptically. “Is it possible,” he asked, “to cloak something as large as a carrier ship?”

  “There are no limits,” Rex declared.

  “Is that true, Sasha?” asked the general, obviously still trying to catch Rex in a lie.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. “Once you have mastered cloaking technology, there are no practical limits to what can be cloaked.” And once you’ve caught a leprechaun, you may in fact take his gold.

  “Of course,” Rex added, “to equip a ship the size of a carrier with an adequate cloaking device would be extremely expensive. Probably more than you could afford, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “I have money,” the princess stated crisply.

  “Princess, please,” the general tried again. “What evidence do we have that a cloaking device even exists?”

  “The general makes a valid point,” said the princess. “Perhaps we could have a demonstration before entering into formal negotiations?”

  “Of course!” said Rex. “As they say, seeing is believing. Although in this case, I believe not seeing is believing, if you see my meaning. For your demonstration, you need look no further than Schufnaasik Six.”

  I cocked an eye at Rex. What in Space was he trying to pull now?

  “And what will we see if we look at Schufnaasik Six?” asked the general.

  “Nothing,” announced Rex. “You’ll see absolutely no sign of a twenty-cubic-kilometer state-of-the-art facility for research and development of cloaking technology, surrounded by a bustling metropolis of employee housing, retail establishments, coffee shops, and a class three spaceport.”

  “Because Schufnaasik Six doesn’t have any of those things,” the general protested. I sympathized. It’s not easy being the voice of reason once Rex gets going on one of his collective delusions.

  “As far as you know,” said Rex with a wink.

  “Princess, this is ridiculous. Clearly this man is no more than a—”

  Rex ignored him. “Hey, Vic,” Rex said, “back me up here.” He was addressing Wick Azores, who was still standing with a lazegun hanging off his finger. At this point I was certain Rex had gotten so carried away with his own fabrications that he’d forgotten that there was no city on Schufnaasik Six. How was he going to get Wick Azores to confirm the existence of a nonexistent city? Wick’s eyes were half closed, as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet. Everyone turned toward him, but Wick was in such a haze that he didn’t notice.

  “Vic!” shouted Rex, jolting Wick out of his trance.

  “Huh?”

  “Do you remember what you said to me while we were overlooking Schufnaasik Six City from the restaurant at the top of the Spiraled Tower of Bernoth?”

  “Uh,” replied Wick uncertainly.

  “You said you couldn’t decide which was more impressive, the venting of exhaust gases from the top of the smokestacks of the zontonium refinery or the eight-hundred-ton cybernetic cranes toiling ceaselessly at the Schufnaasik Spaceport. I’m not surprised you don’t remember, with the amount of Centaurian whiskey we threw back that night.”

  The general scowled at Wick. “Corporal Azores, is this true? Were you drinking on duty?”

  “Sir, I . . .” began Wick.

  “Apologies, General,” said Rex hurriedly. “Now that I think about it, I believe I downed almost the entire bottle. Corporal Azores here partook of only a trifling amount of the spirits, and only after considerable prompting on my part. I may have insisted a bit too strongly that Schufnaasik tradition requires guests to share in a toast to our great planet’s eternal welfare. My understanding is that Corporal Azores was only trying to follow protocol and that at no time was his judgment impaired by an excess of libation.”

  “That’s right, sir,” said Wick. “I was just, um, trying to be polite.”

  “So you were sober the entire time you were on Schufnaasik Six, Corporal?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did you observe there?”

  “Well,” began Wick, obviously desperate to prove that he’d been fully alert during his time on the planet. “There was the, um, restaurant at the top of the, uh . . .”

  “Spiraled Tower of Bernoth,” offered Rex.

  “Please, Mr. Nihilo,” snapped the general. “I’d like to hear from Corporal Azores.”

  “Of course,” said Rex. “It’s just that the corporal’s visit was so short, and there’s so much to see on Schufnaasik Six, I couldn’t possibly expect him to remember the revolving zoo or the zero-gravity mini-golf course or the Museum of Particularly Tricky Knots—”

  “Enough!” spat General Issimo. “Corporal, tell us what you saw.”

  “Like I said, sir, there was the Tower of Bernoth, and there were cybernetic flamingos . . .”

  “Cranes,” coughed Rex.

  “Er, cybernetic cranes, and there was a zero-gravity zoo, and a revolving golf course . . .”

  “All right, that’s fine,” said the princess. “General, I suggest you remind your men that drinking while on duty is a serious infraction. However, despite the corporal’s obviously fuzzy memory, it’s clear that Schufnaasik Six City does exist, which means that the cloaking device must work.”

  Wick breathed a sigh of relief. Almost imperceptibly, so did Rex.

  The general started again, “Princess, it’s not clear to me at all that—”

  “General,” snapped Princess Willie, “I’m growing impatient with your stubbornness. If there’s nothing on Schufnaasik Six, what was Rex doing there in the first place? Why would he even want that planet?”

  “I don’t . . .” began the general, completely flustered. He was fighting a rearguard action now. Once you’ve been put in the position of trying to offer a rational explanation for Rex Nihilo’s behavior, you might as well pack it in for the day. “Fine,” the general growled at last. “But I’ll expect to see a demonstration of this supposed cloaking device before committing any resources to it.”

  “Well, General,” said the princess coldly, “if you have any resources outside of what I’ve supplied you, be sure to let me know, won’t you?”

  General Issimo fumed silently. He might have been wearing the medals, but it was clear who controlled the Frente’s purse strings. He stayed quiet for the rest of the meeting, during which Rex somehow managed to secure a pledge of a hundred million credits from Princess Willie for the installation of a cloak
ing device on one of the Frente’s fighters, half paid in advance and half paid after a successful demonstration.

  Despite this feat, Rex was in an uncharacteristically dour mood when we got back to our quarters. “Rebel cheapskates,” he muttered. “I don’t know why I bother.”

  “Sir, you just talked them into giving you fifty million credits for something that doesn’t exist,” I reminded him.

  “And a fat lot of good it’s going to do me,” he groused. “How much did you say I owe on that damn lump of rock?”

  “One point six billion credits, sir. Sir, if I may, you could try laying low for a while and hope the Galactic Credit Bureau writes off the loan. Cryogenic suspension is always an option . . .”

  “What, sleep for a hundred years and find out that they’re after me for ten billion credits?”

  “Twenty-two trillion, sir. The miracle of compound interest again.”

  “Holy . . .”

  “Yes, sir. Well, there’s always the option of having your DNA scrambled again . . .”

  Rex shook his head. “With a debt that size, every repo bot in the galaxy is going to be looking for me. I won’t get within a hundred meters of a reputable DNA scrambler. And you remember what happened the last time I used a disreputable one.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. “I was the one who had to shave you three times a day, as you’ll recall. Perhaps our best course of action, then, is to remain here with the rebels. The repo bots haven’t found us here yet, so maybe they don’t know about this place. If we can remain on good terms with the Frente and the rebels eventually defeat the Malarchy . . .”

  “Ha!”

  “ . . . we might be able to get the new government’s help in working out a payment plan. Of course, there’s the problem of producing the nonexistent cloaking device, but perhaps we can, as you say, string them along for long enough to—”

  “No, no, no,” Rex grumbled. “If I’m going to have to beg for every fifty million credits, I might as well get a job flapping burgers or something.”

  “Flipping, sir.”

  “Flipping, flapping—the point is that it’s honest work, and it’s no way to get ahead. What we need to do is find ourselves some deeper pockets. Do you think you can find that Malarchian destroyer that intercepted the Agave Nectar?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem, sir. Malarchian ships don’t bother much with stealth these days. Why do you want to find a Malarchian destroyer?”

  “We’re going to find a better offer.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We left in the Flagrante Delicto the next day with the ostensible purpose of gathering parts for the cloaking device. The current coordinates of the Malarchian destroyer Abhorrent were easy to ascertain from public documents on the Hypernet; it was about six light-years away and moving away from us in Euclidean space at a quarter light speed. I rationalized a course to an intercept point that would get us there in a day and a half.

  “Sir,” I said, once we were on our way, “if you’re planning on selling out the rebels, I would suggest I conduct a memory repression before we make contact with the Malarchy.”

  “Ah, good thinking, Sasha,” replied Rex. “The Malarchy is big on information extraction, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This wasn’t the first time Rex had tried to sell sensitive information to a shady organization, and although usually the prospective buyer was more along the lines of a smuggling ring or protection syndicate than a repressive interstellar regime, the principle was the same: you can only sell what can’t be taken from you by other means. The Malarchy was notorious for its brutally effective methods of information extraction, but even their best interrogators had yet been able to penetrate the most effective means of hiding information developed by millions of years of evolution: the psychological mechanism of denial. The human brain has ways of repressing a piece of information so thoroughly that the harder one tries to retrieve it, the more elusive the information becomes. All it takes to activate this mechanism is associating the information (say, the location of the Frente base on the forest moon of Akdar) with some horrific trauma that is too painful for the mind to deal with. The toughest part of the whole business is devising a form of torture that is so agonizing that you trigger a complete psychotic break in the subject. If you miscalibrate, the subject remembers not only the treatment but the information you were attempting to suppress as well, which defeats the whole purpose. Fortunately, I’ve done this with Rex so many times that I’ve gotten pretty good at it. Still, I always err on the side of caution.

  “Remind me again, Sasha,” said Rex. “Does it hurt?”

  “You won’t remember a thing,” I assured him.

  Eighteen hours later, he awoke in his bunk in a cold sweat. “What the hell happened?” he asked hoarsely, sitting upright with a start. “Space, my throat is killing me. I feel like I’ve been screaming for half a day.”

  “Side effect of the treatment,” I assured him. “Perfectly normal.”

  “Treatment?” he asked, befuddled. “Oh, did we do the repression thing again? What for this time?”

  “I probably shouldn’t say, sir.”

  “Good point. Can you give me a hint, though? I need to know what I’m selling and to whom.”

  “Information about the location of a rebel base, sir. You had planned to sell it to the Malarchy.”

  “No kidding? Man, I’m a shifty bastard, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Space only knows what I’m doing to my subconscious with all this forced repression, eh?”

  “I shudder to think, sir.”

  “It’s a miracle I’m not completely psychotic.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “I think some of it’s coming back to me. We’re on a spaceship, right?”

  “Yes, sir. The Flagrante Delicto.”

  “Right, the one I won from what’s-his-name, Gavin Larviton. We’re on our way to intercept a Malarchian destroyer to sell the coordinates of the rebel base to that shrieking gibbon, Heinous Vlaak.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Further interrogation revealed that he recalled with some difficulty the card game in which he had won the Flagrante Delicto and Schufnaasik Six, but nothing whatsoever about Princess Willie, the forest moon of Akdar, or the Frente Repugnante. The last thing he remembered was landing on Schufnaasik Six. The repression had worked perfectly. There was no way Heinous Vlaak was going to get that information from Rex by force, and I was designed to be able to resist any unauthorized data extraction. Once Vlaak paid Rex his fee, I’d give him the information and we’d be on our way.

  A few hours later we were within hailing range of the Abhorrent. But Vlaak’s destroyer wasn’t the only thing looming out the cockpit window. The problem with intercepting a moving ship is that your target is also probably moving to intercept something, and in this case that something turned out to be the largest Malarchian battle station I’d ever seen.

  “Gaaahhh!” cried Rex as we approached. “What is that thing? It looks like a model of the human digestive tract made from broken beer bottles and sadness.”

  “Malarchian battle station, sir,” I said. “It’s twice as big as any ship I’ve ever seen, though.”

  “What’s that giant dish-like thing in the front? Some kind of weapon?”

  “Unknown, sir. It doesn’t match the specifications of any known weapon system. Evasive action, sir?”

  As we talked, the Abhorrent was disappearing into the battle station’s hangar deck, the massive Malarchian destroyer resembling a fly landing inside the ear of some gigantic prehistoric creature. At the same time, a dozen Malarchian Scrammers shot out of another bay and arced toward us.

  “Too late,” said Rex. “They’ll laze us to pieces before we can rationalize a course out of here. In any case, although that battle station
is undoubtedly the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen, it changes nothing. If the Malarchy wanted to kill us, they could do it with a destroyer as well as that behemoth. We’re going to count on Heinous Vlaak’s curiosity winning out over his gratuitous sadism.”

  I’m never more pleased with Rex’s pathological gambling than when the stakes involve my life.

  “This is restricted space,” said a voice transmitted from the battle station. “Change course now or be vaporized.”

  “I come bearing vital information for the Malarchy,” replied Rex.

  “What information?”

  “It’s too sensitive to be transmitted over open channels,” said Rex. “I need to deliver the information to Heinous Vlaak himself.”

  There was a long pause. Finally the voice instructed, “The Scrammers will guide you in. If you break formation, they’ll laze you.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Rex.

  The Scrammers flanked the Flagrante Delicto and escorted us inside the monstrous battle station. We were met on the hangar deck by a phalanx of Malarchian marines.

  “You’re lucky we didn’t blow you to pieces,” said the sergeant in charge of the group. A nametag on his uniform read Ricketts. “The only reason you’re alive is that your ship is registered to Gavin Larviton. So, do you work for Larviton, or did you steal it?”

  “Neither,” said Rex. “I won the ship fair and square in a poker game. I just haven’t had a chance to update the registration. Sasha, remind me to do that, would you?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “We’ll have to ask Mr. Larviton about that,” said Sergeant Ricketts.

  Rex’s eyebrow went up. “Larviton is here? On this battle station?”

  “What? No, of course not,” said the sergeant, with a hint of nervousness in his voice, as if he realized he had slipped up. And if I caught it, you can be sure Rex did. As a pathological liar, Rex always knows when someone’s covering something up. So Larviton was here. Was he meeting with Heinous Vlaak about some kind of weapons deal? Like any good weapons merchant, Larviton had remained officially neutral in the conflict between the Malarchy and the Frente, but everyone knew he had supplied the Malarchy with ships and weapons. Like Rex, he cared only about his own financial interests (although he was obviously more adept at looking after them than Rex).