Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  I eventually found it at the foot of the “bed,” in the pile of cheap stuffed toys that Luny Land put in their skill-tester machines and which parents had a regular tendency to “accidentally” lose in my passenger cabin. I brought up my list of recent emails.

  The good news was that the subject line from last night wasn’t there. The bad news was that it had been crowded out of view by several new ones.

  RE: RE: ATTENTION: JACQUES MCKEOWN

  RE: RE: RE: ATTENTION: JACQUES MCKEOWN

  hey is this Jacques McKeown’s address

  HELLO JACK MCKEOWN

  love your books

  FAO: FAO: FAO: FAO: FAO: JACQUES MCKEOWN

  checking to see if this is Jacques McKeowns address . . .

  Paging Jacques McKeown

  PLEASE LET ME PREVIEW NEXT BOOK. MY GRANDMOTHER HAS CANCER

  I lowered the phone to my side and slapped the screen against my thigh. Someone had apparently been spreading around the old rumor that I was Jacques McKeown, renowned recluse and intergalactically famous author of star pilot fiction. This would be awkward, because an astonishing amount of people wanted Jacques McKeown dead. Half of them star pilots whose stories he had ripped off, the other half rabid fans who wanted to stuff and mount his corpse in their living rooms.

  So the distinct possibility arose that this was connected to my visitors this morning. Word got around fast in the star pilot community, and since this wasn’t the first time I’d been taken for McKeown, there were quite a few members of that community who would be quick to believe it. The men outside could have been assassins, here to strike me dead. And that wasn’t even the most pessimistic scenario.

  Unfortunately for them, they weren’t dealing with some frightened, wide-eyed newcomer to death threats. I lifted the loose plate in the floor of the cockpit and recovered the secret items beneath.

  Some years ago now, I had been walking past the security guards’ locker room on my way through the spaceport, and had noticed that the door had been carelessly left open. So like a good citizen I had closed it for them. And as compensation for my civic-mindedness, I had taken one of the security uniform shirts that had been lying on a bench just inside the door. It had come in handy enough times since then that it was probably overdue for a wash, but it would pass inspection for now if I stayed downwind.

  After I had doffed my flight jacket and put it on, I opened the hatch that had once led to the escape pod, back in a distant nostalgic age when the Neverdie could have passed a standard safety check. I lowered myself until I was hanging upside down from the emergency exit tube and could catch a glimpse of the men waiting outside my airlock door.

  To my surprise, they were spaceport security guards, both in the standard brown uniform. They were poised either side of the Neverdie’s exit door, tensed up and ready to ambush at the slightest sign of movement, but didn’t seem to be holding weapons.

  So maybe I was being thrown out after all, but the way they were being stealthy still didn’t sit right. Maybe some star pilots had paid them to assassinate me? An unlikely explanation, because it incorporated the words star pilot and paid. Maybe someone had made them an offer, and now they were coming to me to ask if I’d be prepared to make a higher bid.

  I lowered myself from the escape tube to the floor of the parking bay, wincing slightly as my shoes clapped against the cement, but my visitors didn’t seem to notice. I carefully kept the forward landing leg between me and them.

  My first instinct was to sneak all the way out of the spaceport and get on with my day, check out the university, take a long lunch, amuse myself with thoughts of these guys waiting here, half-crouched in anticipation the entire time with leg cramps only getting worse.

  But that wouldn’t tell me who they were or what they wanted. Which was information I probably needed before I had to come back and confront two potential hostiles with shortened tempers and very painful legs.

  I took a wide path around several other parked ships, slipping from cover to cover like a prowling tiger in a forest of landing gear, until I was behind the security men and could pretend that I had come from the spaceport entrance. I straightened my uniform shirt, gave both armpits a quick sniff, and effected a self-righteous air and an officious gait as I stomped forward.

  “How’s it going here?”

  Both of the men immediately jumped a foot in the air, and landed in what they were probably hoping looked like casual poses. The older, more rugged-looking one with silver hair put one hand behind his head and glanced around, puffing out his cheeks. The younger, scrawnier one leaned against the hull of my ship and pretended to take an interest in an oil stain.

  “Oh, hello,” said the younger one, flamboyantly turning around and pretending to notice me for the first time. “Yes, it’s going fine. Perfectly. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Do you need any help with this?”

  “No,” growled the older guard.

  “No, no, I’m sure we can manage it,” said the younger. “It’s, you know, it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do . . . it.”

  This wasn’t getting me any closer to figuring out what “it” was. “Don’t let me distract you from . . . it, then.” I clasped my hands behind my back like a true official. “Carry on like I’m not here.”

  The younger guard nervously put his own hands behind his back as he attempted to blandly smile his way through the awkward moment. Shortly, the other was doing the same. All three of us stood surveying each other like that for a while, rocking gently on our heels. It was like being stuck in a dull conversation at a straitjacket party.

  “Right, we’ll get on with . . . it,” said the younger, more verbose guard. His face was turning quite red, while his friend was directing a fixed scowl at me. “Um. Remind me, er . . . Johnson. What specific part of ‘it’ were we about to do?”

  “Inspection,” said Johnson, still glaring at me.

  “Yes! Inspection. We’re inspecting things.” He looked the nearest landing leg up and down and rapped his knuckles against it. “That’s a landing leg, all right. Metal, I see, which is a sturdy material, and therefore suitable for this purpose.” He coughed. “Full marks for this one. Let’s see if the other landing legs live up to this standard.”

  As he turned to look for more things to inspect, I noticed that the younger guard’s uniform shirt must have been very ill fitting, as a large percentage of it was scrunched up and tucked into the back of his trousers. And as my attention was drawn in that direction, I noticed that his trousers were black jeans, which the dress code wouldn’t usually allow.

  “You’re not spaceport security,” I realized aloud, before I could stop myself.

  The younger guard made a desperate scoffing noise and began to babble. “Of course we’re spaceport security! We’re wearing the shirts, aren’t we, Jefferson? Johnson? Whatever I said your name was?”

  Johnson eyeballed his partner with naked contempt, then produced a Taser pistol, with which he promptly shot me.

  It wasn’t my first time being tased, but it’s not the sort of thing you eventually take a liking to once you’re used to it. The barb hit me in the gut, instantly penetrating the flimsy shirt fabric, and I felt a sensation like being slapped in the midsection with a metal tea tray. Every muscle in my body made a spirited attempt to cringe hard enough to powderize my bones, and I stood tottering for a few moments before something slammed painfully into my side. Something which, after a moment’s reflection, I discovered to be the ground.

  “Oh, what the plying hell did you do that for?” hissed the younger guard, clutching his temples.

  “He saw through us,” replied Johnson, although I was starting to ­seriously doubt that that was his name. “He would either have tried to stop us or alerted the rest of security. Therefore, the best option was to disable him.”

  “I could still have talked us out of
it! You didn’t have to tase him!”

  “You tried to talk us out of it, and he saw through us anyway. There was no logical reason to assume that continuing to talk would have started to work. The only logical solution—”

  “Look, will you stop with your logic trac? It’s not helping.”

  “Maybe if you kept a level head, I wouldn’t always have to take charge.”

  “Don’t you do that. Don’t you start twisting this around to somehow make it my fault, you bracket. You always do this.”

  Meanwhile, from my position on the floor in a little private ball of pain and disorientation, my addled mind was trying to connect a few important facts. The phony guard’s use of Pilot Math had brought on a realization, and because being tased made it harder for me to learn from my recent mistakes, I voiced it aloud. “You’re star pilots?”

  The two men offered me matching affronted looks, then returned their attentions to each other. “And now he’s figured that out. What does logic tell us to do now, Mr. Roboto?”

  “It’s telling me he might not have figured that out if you hadn’t just confirmed it,” said the older pilot, with infuriating condescension. “We need to take him with us.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Scenario one: we leave him, he alerts the rest of security, they know we were here. Scenario two: we kill him, the other guards find the body, they check the security tapes and know we were here. Logically . . .”

  “Oh, for plying out loud, fine. Let’s go.”

  I slowly craned my neck to plaintively look my older tormentor in the eye. He met my gaze, displayed the merest flicker of sympathy, then shot me with the Taser again.

  Chapter 4

  I drifted in and out of consciousness like a shy wallflower passing in and out of their secret crush’s personal space. I had a strange dream about lying in a hammock being held between two easily distracted gorillas, which probably meant the two men were carrying me by all four limbs. I’m fairly certain we passed through a Quantunnel at some point, because I felt the slightly nauseating sensation of the temperature and air pressure abruptly changing as we passed through a magic doorway to a completely different part of the universe.

  When consciousness finally did tentatively return on what would hopefully be a semipermanent basis, I found myself in a sitting position with a black bag over my head. I twitched my aching limbs, and discovered to my utter lack of surprise that I was securely tied to the chair. My instincts told me that I was in a bare room with all the doors and windows closed, and the faint electronic hum on the edge of earshot sounded like an atmosphere cycler, which meant I was probably on a ship.

  Again, this was not a wholly unfamiliar experience. When you were an adventuring space hero with a tendency to foil galactic supervillains, you did have to expect to get knocked out and tied to things a lot. As a rule, you usually weren’t in danger until after the villain in question had had a chance to gloat at you and explain what they were up to. Until then, there wasn’t much to do besides try to avoid cramping and practice the usual lines.

  “You’ll never get away with this,” I muttered to myself, it being the best opener for general purposes. “Do you expect me to talk? You’re insane.” I exercised my cheek muscles and tried some different inflections. “You’re insane. You’re insane!”

  I felt rather than heard footfalls in an adjoining room, and then the ­hydraulic zuzzung of a sliding door opening, letting new voices spill into the room.

  I heard a woman’s voice. “. . . You kidnapped a security guard, and now you expect me to clean this mess up for you, is that it?”

  “You told us to make sure that no one saw us or knew we had been there,” said a familiar condescending voice. “You didn’t say anything about what to do if we failed. Logically, the course of action that made the most sense to us—”

  “Yes, I see,” snapped the woman.

  “He’s always doing this,” said the slightly ingratiating voice of my younger kidnapper.

  The woman sighed. “Your directive was to recover a man. Perhaps you needed me to be clearer. I meant a specific man.”

  “Well, I don’t think the guy you wanted saw us or anything,” said the younger man. “We can go right back and try again as soon as we’ve sorted this out.”

  “You mean, as soon as I’ve sorted this out.”

  I felt a hand fumbling with the bag on my head. I had decided I was going to go with “You’ll never get away with this.” Tired, sure, but a classic for a reason. It gave them a cue to start laying out the exposition and would allow me to retain my dignity at the same time. I cleared my throat.

  The bag came off. “You . . . plying fat tracbag in a bracket case!”

  Of course it was Warden. I hadn’t recognized her voice at first, because she actually sounded relaxed, and while I had known her, she had been permanently wound tighter than a nervous sidewinder in an elastic band factory. But there was no mistaking that unhealthy Terran complexion, or that hair tied tightly back like a spool of high-tensile garrote wire. She was wearing a pale blue pantsuit that matched well with the cold metal bulkheads that surrounded us.

  Her padded shoulders visibly dropped in relaxation when she took in my face. “Gentlemen, you can stand down. This is the specific man.”

  “Seriously?”

  “But he’s a security guard,” said the logical one.

  Warden examined my uniform shirt. “No, he’s just wearing a security guard’s clothing. Let me guess, you happen to have it on hand in case you need to con someone?”

  I stayed quiet, but kept my scowl going.

  “Guess he passed the audition,” said the younger one, rubbing the back of his head.

  “What audition?” I did a little hop in my chair to punctuate the question. “What the trac is this? Are we on Salvation Station?”

  Salvation was the star pilot haven deep in the uncharted regions of space, one that I deliberately avoided largely because of its general administrator, who at that moment was standing in front of me, sighing and folding her arms. “On a cargo transporter a few light minutes from Salvation. For deniability.”

  “Well, that’s lucky, because now you can use it to transport me right back to Ritsuko, plying sharpish.”

  “And the ‘audition’ was for a specialist,” she continued, ignoring my statement. “A situation has transpired that calls for someone who can pass as someone he isn’t.”

  “Okay, you seem to have gotten the wrong idea about me in a couple of areas. Firstly, that I’m some kind of first-rate con man just because I put on a security guard’s uniform and tricked two complete plying morons who are stupid enough to work for you, and secondly, that I would ever consider working with you again before I’d drunk the contents of my cleaning-supply cabinet.”

  Warden arched an eyebrow. “Believe me, the second-rateness of your abilities is perfectly clear. But this situation calls for a person with the highly specialized quality of being able to pass as Jacques McKeown to some very specific people who already think he’s Jacques McKeown.”

  I let a few seconds of pregnant silence pass as I considered the response that would best summarize my feelings. “Kiss my doints.”

  She chewed on her bottom lip, letting her jaw bob left and right like the head of a dancing cobra. Then she turned to her two lackeys, who had been seething together in the background ever since the “morons” comment. “Let me talk to him alone.”

  They left obediently, the older and crabbier of the two making sure to give me a threatening face just as the door slid shut. Then I was alone in a room with Penelope Warden. I’d often longed for a situation like this, although in my fantasies I hadn’t been tied to a chair, and was usually holding a blunt object.

  “This won’t change anything,” I said. “All you’ve done is increase the average amount of hatred I feel for all the people in this room.�
��

  She had produced her tablet computer from some dark recess of her outfit that no other human being would ever explore without mining equipment, and began tapping at the screen as she spoke, not looking at me. “Can we dispense with the melodrama? We should start from a clean slate. You could profit from this, if you’d be willing to look at it pragmatically.”

  “Dispense with the melodrama? Who’s the one kidnapping people and tying them to chairs?” I attempted to turn my back on her, but the effort only made my neck hurt. “And as for pragmatism, the last time I pretended to be Jacques McKeown for you, I almost got killed, like, a hundred times.” The memories came flooding back, and they washed up a compelling theory with them. “Oh, trac. It was you, wasn’t it.”

  She glanced up from her work. “Hm?”

  “You’re the reason I got all those emails addressed to Jacques McKeown this morning. You changed my name on the population database again.”

  Her fingers paused in the act of tapping for a moment. “No. I’m sure you take a lot of comfort from your persecution complex, but I’ll have to disappoint you. I only sent for you after I saw the post.”

  “What post?”

  She switched her tablet to Project mode and a beam of light burst from the lens in the back. It drilled painfully into my retinas for a second before she aimed it at the bare wall in front of me, taking her position at my side. Once I had blinked the afterimages away, I saw what looked like a page from an online discussion forum.

  “Hey, can someone confirm that this is Jacques McKeown’s personal email? Trying to invite him to Jacques McCon,” read the post at the top of the thread, apparently authored by an individual going by “DanDanMcKeownFan.” Under that was an email address that looked heartbreakingly like mine.

  “Who posted that?” I asked in a pained voice, suspecting that I could guess the answer.