Starship Grifters (A Rex Nihilo Adventure)

by Robert Kroese

  The men erupted into cheers, which were probably prompted by boredom as much as any hope that I might do any serious damage to the TRTL. Still, I have to admit their support made me feel a little better about having to run into the path of an unstoppable metal machine while wearing a vest full of explosives.

  “Off you go, Sasha,” said Rex.

  I sighed and took off running toward the armored juggernaut. The TRTL had two small lazecannons mounted on its head, but it hadn’t fired them yet. Presumably the marines piloting the TRTL were saving their ammo for close-range combat, where they could actually do some damage—unlike our own troops, half of whom had used up their battery packs etching vulgar graffiti into the enemy vehicles. I could only hope that the drivers didn’t think me enough of a threat to fire at me.

  As I approached the massive vehicle crawling slowly forward on its awkward metal feet, I realized that I was probably in a safer position than the men back at the repulsion barrier propagator: the little lazecannons on the TRTL’s head had a range of motion of only about twenty degrees. Anyone not directly in front of the vehicle was in no danger—unless they stopped dead in front of it and waited for it to crush them, which I had no intention of doing. I removed the vest (which I had triple-checked to make sure it really held explosives), set it gently on the ground, and then ran back to the propagator, taking a wide berth to stay out of range of the TRTL’s guns.

  “Nice work!” cried Rex. Several other men cheered and clapped me on the back, and for a moment I actually thought I might have done something worthwhile. Rex and I climbed on top of the propagator to watch the TRTL advance toward the vest. The plan was to wait until it was directly on top of the explosives and then trigger the detonator. If the explosives blasted through the TRTL’s armor, the men would charge the vehicle, climbing inside and finishing off anyone still alive. And if that worked, we’d do the same thing to the other three TRTLs, which were slightly farther away.

  Unfortunately, in my haste to get out of the TRTL’s way, I hadn’t placed the vest close enough to it. I saw that its right legs were now working faster than its left (or, more accurately, the left legs were now moving even more slowly than before), the result being that the TRTL was ever so slightly changing its course.

  “It’s going to miss the vest,” somebody said.

  “Maybe not,” said Rex. “I’ve seen glaciers make sharper turns.”

  We watched breathlessly as the huge reptilian vehicle took its excruciatingly slow evasive action. The vest was just in front of its front right foot. It looked like the TRTL was going to just miss it.

  “You’re going to have to move the vest,” Sergeant Ricketts said to me.

  “Why me?” I protested. “I did it the first time. Why don’t you do it?”

  “If you’d have done it right the first time, it wouldn’t have to be moved.”

  I wanted to argue, but he was right. “Fine,” I said. “But this is the last time. After this—”

  I was cut off by the TRTL’s lazecannons blasting holes in the antenna structure above us. “Get down!” Rex cried, and we dove for cover behind the building. The lazecannons continued to blast away at the structure and we cowered behind it.

  “Are you going to move the vest or not?” demanded Ricketts.

  “Now?” I croaked. I wouldn’t get more than ten meters from the propagator.

  “There’s no time,” said Rex. “The antenna thingy can’t take much more of this. If we don’t take that TRTL out now, we’re all screwed.”

  “We can’t even see if it’s on top of the vest,” I said. We didn’t dare peek around the wall for fear of the relentless barrage of lazecannon fire.

  “Nothing we can do now but hope the Chaotic whatever-it-is is with us,” said Rex. “Here goes nothing.” He pressed the trigger and a split second later an explosion shook the ground around us. As the dust cleared, we realized the lazecannon barrage had stopped. “Go see what happened!” Rex yelled. I nodded and crept out from behind the structure.

  “Um, Rex,” I said, standing up and cocking my head to observe the situation. “I think you should see this.”

  Rex came up next to me. “Why, what . . . oh.”

  The TRTL was lying on its back, helplessly moving its giant feet back and forth in the air, its lazecannons buried in the muck. Men were pounding on a hatch in the TRTL’s head, but it was jammed against the ground and wouldn’t open more than a few centimeters. Overhead, another battleship exploded. There were now only six left. If we could overturn the other three TRTLs before they blasted the propagators, we only needed to wait for the rest of the ships to explode.

  “We need three more vests,” ordered Rex.

  “I’m on it,” I said.

  We used gunnysacks instead of vests, the key element being the zontonium charges and not the vests themselves. We ended up using five of them; the next couple of TRTLs didn’t turn quite as we expected and the charges detonated harmlessly underneath their armor. (Our original plan to aim for the supposed soft underbelly of the vehicles was apparently completely misguided.) The final TRTL managed to do some pretty severe damage to the southeastern tower, but we upended it before it could take the propagator offline. The four TRTLs now lay on their backs flailing helplessly, their crews trapped within, while the remaining starships exploded overhead. The Malarchy looked to be pretty well finished. Too bad for Wick and the others, but at least they died quickly and painlessly.

  “Well, that’s that,” said Rex. “Let’s get out of here before the Malarchy sends reinforcements.”

  We headed to the roof of the parking structure and began herding the men into ships. The princess met us as we were about to board the Flagrante Delicto.

  “You did it!” she cried, throwing her arms around Rex. “You saved the Frente! Your name is going to be known across the galaxy!”

  “Yeah, I did,” gasped Rex, who was in danger of being smothered by the princess’s bosom. “Maybe we could keep this whole business on the DL, though. I’ve already got half the repo bots in the galaxy looking for me.”

  “Do you need money?” asked the princess. “I suppose we don’t really need the cloaking device anymore, but I’ll still pay you for it.”

  “Hey, that’s super generous,” said Rex, disentangling himself from the princess. “I save your ass and you give me a few million credits. That’s fair.”

  “Well,” said the princess uncertainly, “we did have a deal. I’m sure I could come up with an additional reward in light of your service. Say, an additional twenty million credits?”

  “Twenty million credits!” exclaimed Rex. “Do you know how much I owe?” He turned to me. “How much do I owe?”

  “One point six billion credits, give or take,” I said.

  “How in Space did you come to owe that much money?” gasped the princess. “I’d gladly loan you whatever I can spare, but . . .”

  “I know, it’s out of your league,” said Rex. “The only person I know who had that kind of money was Gavin Larviton, and he just exploded somewhere overhead. Not that he was inclined to help me anyway; that bastard is the reason I owe the money in the first place.”

  “You mean because of your deal with him for the cloaking technology?” said the princess. “But surely the technology is worth that much. If the device works as well as you say, then you shouldn’t have any trouble finding buyers who would be willing to pay . . .”

  “There is no cloaking device!” snapped Rex. “I made it up, understand? It was all a big ruse to bilk you out of a little money. But what’s the point? Sure, I could string you along, convince you to invest in my cloaking device company, set up a standard pyramid scheme, get you to talk your friends into investing . . . actually, this is some pretty good stuff I’m coming up with here. I probably should have thought this through before admitting the cloaking device was a hoax. I suppose it’s too late to
ask you to invest now?”

  “A hoax?” said the princess softly, taking in Rex’s words. “But . . . but what about the hidden city on Schufnaasik Six? The cybernetic cranes? The Spiraled Tower of Bernoth? The Museum of Particularly Tricky Knots?”

  “All made up,” said Rex. “You can’t see them because they don’t exist. There’s nothing on that worthless planet but rocks. This whole time all I’ve been doing is trying to get Heinous Vlaak to blow it up.”

  “But you helped us defeat the Malarchy,” said the princess. “And you blew up the Peace Fortress. You did blow up the Peace Fortress, right?”

  “More or less,” said Rex. “It’s definitely blown up, although like I said that wasn’t our primary objective.”

  “Well,” said the princess. “Out of respect for what you’ve done for the Frente, I won’t seek damages against you for perpetrating this fraud against us. You can even keep the fifty million I’ve already given you.”

  “Good,” said Rex. “Because I’ve already spent it.”

  “Of course you have,” said the princess. She turned to leave.

  “Where are you going to go?” asked Rex.

  “The Malarchy is in disarray, but they are far from destroyed,” said the princess. “I will find another forgotten planet where the Frente can continue the work of liberating the galaxy.”

  “OK,” said Rex. “Good luck with that.”

  “Good-bye, Rex Nihilo,” said the princess, and left to board her own ship. It and the Flagrante Delicto were the only two ships left on the roof of the base.

  “I probably could have handled that better,” Rex remarked.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. “I’d say you burned our bridges with the Frente, which means we’re on our own against every repo bot in the galaxy.”

  “Shut up and get me out of here, Sasha,” Rex snapped. “And make me a martini.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After a day and a half of traveling in Euclidean space, the forest moon had shrunk to a bright point in the distance. Rex hadn’t given me a destination, having disappeared into his cabin. My attempts to rouse him were unsuccessful. I was about to pick a Fringe planet at random when he finally stumbled into the cockpit, unshaven and holding a Bloody Mary.

  “Destination, sir?” I prompted.

  “I want you to plot a course,” Rex slurred, “right up Gavin Larviton’s fat ass.”

  “Sir, perhaps you’ve had enough to drink.”

  “What difference does it make?” Rex snapped. “Damn repo bots will find me wherever I go. Who’d have thought it would be so gorkin’ hard to get a planet blowed up? Blowed. Up. Exploded.”

  “It was a good plan,” I said. “Sometimes things don’t work out.”

  “Things never work out,” corrected Rex. “Not ever. Never.”

  “Shall I set a course for one of the Fringe worlds, sir? Repo bots are sparser out there, and maybe we can make a little money smuggling for one of the local—”

  “Make a little money?” Rex cried. “I owe 1.6 billion credits. I’ll never pay that off, Sasha. I’m doomed. You might as well drive this ship right into the heart of that star.”

  “Star, sir?”

  “Right in front of us,” said Rex. “Are you blind?”

  “There’s no . . . uh-oh. Sir, that’s a ship. Coming directly at us, fast.”

  “Ram ’em!”

  “Sir, are you sure that you . . .”

  “Ram ’em!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It’s just about impossible for one spaceship to ram another, unless at least one of them is fantastically large or barely moving. Even then, it’s harder than you would think. The problem is that space, as you may have heard, is huge, and spaceships travel ridiculously fast. If you’ve ever tried to hit a bullet with another bullet, you have an idea of how hard it is to ram a spaceship with another spaceship. Even if one ship is traveling head-on at the other, the slightest course variation by either ship could cause them to miss each other by hundreds of meters.

  All of this raises the question of why someone would pilot their ship straight at us in the first place. Since the most likely outcome would be a near miss followed by the two ships quickly being thousands of kilometers away from each other, the reasonable assumption would be that the other ship was about to attack us. That assumption was borne out when the ship began to shower us with lazecannon blasts. The Flagrante Delicto shuddered with the blasts, and our shields were rapidly reduced to twenty percent. In retrospect, Rex’s order to ram the ship started to seem like a pretty good idea: by heading straight toward it at full speed, we minimized our profile and gave the other ship only a few seconds to fire at us before we passed it. Rex was a tactical genius.

  At least that’s what I was thinking until we hit the other ship.

  It wasn’t a direct hit, thank Space. The bottom of the Flagrante Delicto just grazed the top of the other ship, which looked to be just slightly bigger than ours. Still, the jolt was enough to drastically reduce our speed; even with the grav-dampers at full bore, Rex and I were thrown violently against our restraints. The stabilizers fired as the Flagrante Delicto spun wildly out of control. Red warning lights flashed and a klaxon blared. When the spinning had subsided to a tolerable level, I appraised the damage: our shields were at zero, several subsystems were offline, the landing gear was damaged, and we were losing air pressure.

  “We need to land,” I said.

  “We just took off!” Rex replied.

  “OK, let me rephrase that,” I said. “You need to land. I can live indefinitely without oxygen. The lack of air will actually be a big plus when your corpse starts to rot. Sir.”

  “Fine,” snapped Rex. “Get us back to the forest moon.”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  I used the gravitational field of the moon’s parent planet, Akdar, to slingshot the Flagrante Delicto, sending us back toward the moon.

  “Who the hell was that anyway?” Rex asked as we entered the atmosphere. “Some overzealous Malarchian captain who didn’t get the word the battle is over?”

  I shook my head. “That wasn’t a military ship. It was too small, and it looked like a luxury craft.”

  “A luxury craft equipped with lazecannons?” said Rex. “That sounds like . . .”

  “So!” a voice shrieked over the comm system. “We meet again!”

  “Heinous Vlaak,” Rex spat. “I was hoping you’d been killed in the battle. I guess you didn’t outfit your own ship with one of those fancy new reactors. One might get the idea you think they aren’t safe.”

  “It’s true that the plasmatic entropy technology is proving a bit of a disappointment,” replied Vlaak. “Which is why it is now even more vital that you reveal to me the location of Schufnaasik Six City. I must possess the cloaking device!”

  Rex sighed. “Vlaak, use your head. If I actually possessed a cloaking device, why wouldn’t I be using it on my own ship?”

  “Another clever ruse, no doubt!” Vlaak shrieked.

  “Right,” said Rex. “I cleverly decided to get shot down rather than use my own cloaking device to escape. That makes sense.”

  “Tell me the location of Schufnaasik Six City or be destroyed!”

  “Suck plasma, Vlaak.” Rex shut off the comm unit and turned to me. “Do you have him on your sensors?”

  “Sensors are offline, sir. We’re flying blind.”

  “All right, well, set us down as fast as you can. Let’s try not to give him another chance to fire on us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I managed to find a relatively solid expanse of ground on which to set the Flagrante Delicto. It was probably just as well that we had no functioning landing gear; the struts would have just sunk into the muck.

  “Now what, sir?”

  “We find somewhere to hide.”

>   We exited the ship and surveyed our surroundings. The landscape was a featureless swamp in every direction as far as we could see. Not a single tree was visible.

  “Hiding may not be an option, sir,” I said.

  A silvery speck appeared in the sky and grew steadily larger until it became a sleek luxury ship, albeit with a badly damaged upper deck. Along the side was written in flowery script:

  Our Moment of Victory

  The ship set down near the Flagrante Delicto and two marines with lazeguns exited. Behind them came Vlaak’s lieutenant, Gavin Larviton, and Vlaak himself.

  “Drop your weapon!” shrieked Heinous Vlaak.

  Rex set his lazegun down in the muck.

  “There is no escape, Rex Nihilo!” Vlaak screeched. “Tell me the coordinates of Schufnaasik Six City or die!”

  “You might as well just kill me,” said Rex. “Schufnaasik Six City isn’t real. There’s no cloaking device. I made it all up. Tell him, Larviton.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Larviton with a smile. “Of course Schufnaasik Six City is real.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Rex. “He’s the one who sold you those faulty reactors.”

  “Oh, I’m well aware of that,” said Vlaak. “The only reason he’s still alive is that I suspect he might know the location of Schufnaasik Six City.”

  “What?” Larviton said, apparently shocked. “That was an honest mistake. I told you we’d fix it with the next batch of ships.”

  “There isn’t going to be any next batch of ships, you fool!” screeched Vlaak. “Half of the Malarchy’s fleet is equipped with plasmatic entropy reactors. Do you have any idea how much those ships are going to cost to replace? Of course you do, because you were expecting to sell us the replacements too, weren’t you? No, Gavin Larviton, your days of swindling the Malarchy are over. Go stand over there with Nihilo.”

  The marines prodded the stunned Gavin Larviton next to Rex.