Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  The reception desk was flanked on both sides by illuminated displays of star piloting memorabilia that brought all kinds of memories flooding back as I ambled toward them. Front and center was a mannequin wearing a sequined jumpsuit and high-collared flight jacket somewhat reminiscent of what Captain Blanche used to wear, or possibly a more flamboyant Dick Dynamite. The plaque in front of it, however, declared it to be “Jacques McKeown’s outfit during his battle with the Pestilent Brotherhood.”

  That set the tone for the rest of the displays. They were all replicas of artifacts from a real-life star pilot or star pilot adventure, pushed through the filter of Jacques McKeown’s writing. And then, because a sinking feeling was making me look for something like this, I noticed a plastic replica blaster in one of the cabinets that was slightly reminiscent of my own. The power dial had been replaced by a row of red LEDs that no actual gun would ever possess, as its only conceivable purpose would be to give your position away. “Jacques McKeown’s blaster from Jacques McKeown and the Malmind Menace,” read the adjoining plaque. I felt suddenly embarrassed and nauseous, like I was listening to a gushing, inaccurate eulogy at my own funeral.

  I paused my slow advance to take another sweeping look around the room, confirming that there was nothing displayed here in the lobby but dodgy plastic replicas. Nothing along the lines of genuine star piloting memorabilia, like the cryonic cylinder that was the ultimate prize; I wasn’t fortunate enough that any of the really valuable stuff would be in easy reach.

  There was a rotating rack on the reception desk crammed with colorful Jacques McKeown paperbacks, as well as a few books from writers who’d tried to imitate his style after he got popular, colloquially known as Hack McKeowns. Which made me speculate for a moment on how traccy a writer must have to be, to be considered a poor man’s Jacques McKeown.

  “Sir?”

  I’d now drifted into the detection range of the receptionist who was standing patiently behind the rack with her spine ramrod stiff. She was young, pretty, and smiling, but there was a slight pleading look in her eyes that tended to be a hallmark of people who worked for Henderson. She was wearing a dark blue waistcoat with the glittery star pattern that was fast becoming a recurring theme.

  “Can I help you?” she asked predictably.

  I buried my hands in my jacket pockets and took a step closer. “Here to see Daniel Henderson. I’m Jacques McKeown.” I doubted that saying it would ever stop feeling weird.

  Her eyebrows went up. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” I made a show of glancing around. “Take it you’re pretty sick of hearing that name around here.”

  “No, not at all,” she lied. “You’re here to meet with Mr. Henderson?”

  “Yes, I’m here to see Daniel Henderson.”

  “Of course. I’ll inform Mr. Henderson right away.” She reached for the reception console and adjusted her earpiece.

  I coughed. “When you say Mr. Henderson, you are talking about Daniel Henderson, right? Not his father? I’m pretty sure Daniel Henderson is the contact.”

  She hadn’t heard me, as she was still concluding a brief muttered conversation with someone on the other end of the phone line. “Someone will be with you very soon,” she said to me when she was finished. Then the smile and welcoming posture disappeared in an instant to indicate that I was dealt with and she no longer cared whether I lived or died.

  I took another look around the room, at the replica ship and the replica memorabilia. This time, I noticed a framed poster on the wall near the foot of one of the grand staircases. It depicted a ship not unlike the one behind me flying through space, in the style of Jacques McKeown’s usual cover artist. The text at the bottom read JACQUES MCCON ’75!—’75 being the current year—and just underneath that, WITH SPECIAL GUEST FOR REAL THIS TIME!

  Something about all of this felt off. Nothing I was seeing gelled with my memories of Mr. Henderson as a person. I remembered him as a cheerful, upbeat embarrassing-dad type with a fondness for loud sweaters, who was also completely plying psychotic, ruthless, and sadistic. He wasn’t a McKeown fanboy. Daniel was, and by all accounts had only gotten more so, but it was the senior Henderson who had to be footing the bill for all this. And this kind of expense went far beyond fatherly overindulgence.

  A permanent Quantunnel archway set into the nearby wall slid open to reveal a hallway on the top floor of the building, this being an increasingly common arrangement in tall buildings, as the power expense was usually less than the cost of maintaining an elevator. A heavyset man in a black suit and dark glasses stepped through and gestured for me to follow. He must have been part of Henderson’s inner circle, as he had the telltale orange skin tone of one who has spent too much time under the artificial sun reserved for Terran high society.

  “You McKeown?” he asked brusquely after I had passed through the Quantunnel and shaken off the usual disorientation.

  “That’s me.” This was the third time I’d told the big lie in as many minutes, and it wasn’t getting easier. The sheer weight of it was heavier with every telling. If I was asked the question a fourth time today, I felt certain something would break inside me and I’d hurl myself through the nearest window.

  “Mr. Henderson’s waiting,” growled my escort.

  “Yeah, which Mr. Henderson are we going to see, again? No one’s given me a straight answer on that yet.”

  “As I say, Mr. Henderson’s waiting,” he replied, not turning around.

  “Right.” I sighed and followed him down the hallway.

  It would have been a very bad idea to throw myself through these windows. We were on the highest level of the building, and a wall of glass to my right looked out over Ritsuko City, sprawling out beneath its Perspex bubble like a reflection of a Christmas tree in a fishbowl. Above it, the motherly mass of the universe, gazing fondly down at us through its billions of burning eyes. I thought of my future life with Oniris, deep in the furthest darkness, and tried to feel encouraged.

  The suited bodyguard stopped outside a plain, well-varnished door to what I assumed was one of the penthouse apartments. I had already pegged him for the kind of bracket who never gave much away, emotionally, but I could have sworn that he took a deep breath and steeled himself before he rapped upon the door with his large simian knuckles.

  There was a conspicuous lack of noise on the other side of the door, until an amount of time had passed that would be roughly the amount needed for an excited fanboy to calm himself down to a socially acceptable level. Then there was a rush of incoming footsteps and the door flew open.

  Daniel Henderson had had a growth spurt since I’d seen him last. He was taller and less dumpy, and his limbs dangled off him like loose cables from a detached air cycler, as if puberty had simply grabbed him by both ends and pulled until he was fit to ride all the roller coasters. Also, his complexion looked like he had imbibed a large quantity of ball bearings and they had attempted to burst out of his body through his face. He was wearing an imitation flight jacket of the type that I happened to know were sold predistressed from the expensive fashion boutiques near the spaceport, and an extremely weathered “I Found Elation on Salvation Station” T-shirt.

  “Jacques!” he said, leaning on the door frame in a poor imitation of casualness and struggling to tone down his idiot grin. “Cool to see you again! Come in. We can talk about the con.”

  He stood aside, gesturing into the apartment with a little bow, and I slipped past him, feeling like a lamb being announced at the abattoir ball. He noticed the bodyguard who had escorted me here. “Oh, Mr. Heller. Now you can, er . . . you can clean the toilet again? I was just in there.”

  “Yes, Mr. Henderson,” muttered Heller, stomping away toward the bathroom.

  “Dad’s people,” whispered Daniel apologetically. “They keep asking me for things to do.”

  I was only half listening, as I was preoccupied wit
h taking in the apartment. And there was a lot to take in. First of all, the inevitable ridiculous level of expensive luxury. The apartment was on two levels, with a gold-trimmed spiral staircase leading to the upper rooms. A set of windows taller than those of any cathedral you’d care to name watched over a set of bone-white leather sofas and an imitation fireplace.

  The second thing I noticed was the small army of gangsters dotted around the place. Some were wearing the black suit and sunglasses of the Henderson inner circle, but most were bikers. All of them seemed to be engaged in a menial household task. Some were dusting, a few were polishing the windows, two had pulled rubber gloves over their jacket sleeves and were working away at a pile of washing-up in the fully outfitted kitchen. Every single one of them was wearing an expression somewhere on the spectrum between boredom and abject disgust.

  But it was the third layer of discovery that finally made my jaw get around to the business of dropping. Every inch of space that wasn’t taken up by expensive furniture or servants was crammed with a broad selection of artifacts related to the history of star piloting. A section of hull from the Starplyer was sitting on the coffee table, made unmistakable by visible traces of the thermoduric weed that had claimed it. The vaguely human shape carved from asteroidal rock propped up in the corner looked to me like Captain Blackbottom’s figurehead. Tiffany Lurid’s famous Zoobskin cloak was draped across the sideboard.

  I was so occupied with taking all this in that it took thirty seconds of awkward silence for me to parse Daniel’s previous statement. “Um, yeah, actually, where is your father?” I did another scan of my surroundings and didn’t catch a single glimpse of colorful sweater.

  “Oh, he’s around,” said Daniel, wobbling a hand. “Can I get you anything? A drink? Anything you want. I could tell someone to go out and get it if we don’t have it here. They’d totally do it, too. It’s so cool.”

  I caught the eye of the bodyguard who was doing the washing-up, and his completely frozen face was very telling. “I’m fine,” I said.

  Daniel shrugged, then words seemed to fail him for a moment. He merely stared at me ecstatically, jiggling up and down as if riding an invisible exercise bike, until words began to tumble out like cement from an unsecured mixer. “Sooo cool that you can do the con. Nobody believed me when I said I knew you. I tried to get you for our first one, last year, actually. But I never heard back, and everyone was really disappointed.” He rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “Really disappointed, actually. Mr. Heller had to get onstage and apologize but everyone was still really, really disappointed. Some people died.”

  I boggled at him. “This was around this time last year, was it?”

  “Yeah!”

  I’d assumed that last year’s citywide student riots had been about tuition fees, like they usually were. I took another in a long series of deep, steadying breaths. “I see.”

  “But we’ve got you this year. So cool.” For a few more moments he continued staring at me the way a dog stares at a fist that it has been led to believe contains a biscuit, then he snapped out of it and turned to an open laptop on the kitchen counter. “Okay. So it’s, like, a three-day convention, we’ll have an exhibition floor for my Jacques McKeown collection, meeting rooms for people to talk about Jacques McKeown in, the competition for dressing up the most like Jacques McKeown, and . . . we’ll have you!”

  “And this is the collection?” I said, referring to the priceless antiques that were scattered around the floor like piles of used gift wrap after an overindulgent birthday party.

  “Yeah!” Daniel beamed at me before returning to the database in front of him. “So the first day you’ll probably want to take it easy a bit, so we’ll just do a Q and A at nine a.m. And ten a.m. And eleven a.m. And twelve. And there’ll be more people free at lunchtime, so we could do one at twelve thirty and one at one . . .” He pressed a few keys. “Oh, I forgot book signings. Do you think you could eat lunch and dinner at the same time?”

  The phone in my pocket made a subtle clicking noise to signal another photo being taken, and I was reminded of my actual objective. “Is this your whole collection?”

  “Not all of it,” said Daniel cheerily, moving boxes around in his database. “Some of it’s in my bedroom. Some of it’s in the bath.”

  “What about a . . . cryonic cylinder?”

  He looked up. “How did you know about that?”

  There wasn’t an ounce of suspicion in his voice. He was just thrilled that I seemed to have taken an interest. But I wasn’t about to let anything slip. I flipped the imaginary switch in my head that I used when I needed to ­seriously commit to a role, and shifted my weight into what I thought would be an impressive stance. “I’m Jacques McKeown,” I said, lowering my voice by half an octave. “If it’s to do with star piloting, I know about it.”

  I heard a nearby biker give a brief grunt of undisguised contempt, but Daniel looked so impressed, I thought he might wet himself. “Oh, sure! Cool! Well, the tube can’t just be lying around like the other stuff, it needs special care. I keep it in the fridge.”

  He pointed. The “fridge” was, in fact, a walk-in freezer, accessed by a steel door at the back of the kitchen preparation area. It was a heavy door, but I didn’t see a lock. I angled the phone in my pocket toward it for the next snapshot, pretending to be scratching under my nipple.

  “So you can stay in the other penthouse apartment during the show. Dad owns the whole building,” continued Daniel. “It’s exactly the same as this one and the balconies nearly touch, so if you need anything you can just stand outside and shout.”

  “That sounds . . . very useful, actually,” I said. “I’ll want to take a look at that before I go. And the whole collection is going to be exhibited downstairs, is it?”

  “Oh, sure. We’ll bring it all down every morning and take it all back up each night. Safer that way.”

  This was getting harder and harder to believe. “You don’t have a safe? Or a panic room? Does the bathroom at least have a lock on the door?”

  He frowned with his eyebrows, but his excited grin didn’t change. “No. But it’s safe here. I’ve got people looking at them the whole time.”

  I glanced over at the bodyguard who was cleaning the window near Captain Blackbottom’s figurehead. Sure enough, while his hands were busy rubbing cleaning fluid across the glass, his eyes were fixed upon the figurehead. By the looks of it, he had been maintaining his vigilance for long enough that his neck was in severe need of massage therapy.

  “Except in the freezer,” added Daniel. “Can’t have someone in the freezer watching the cylinder, that’d be stupid. We’ll just have to particularly hope that no one wants to steal it.”

  “Fingers crossed,” I said distantly, staring at the freezer door. “Can I take a look at those balconies now?”

  “Sure! Cool.” He got onto his feet and led me along a weaving path through the scattered furniture and antiques. The laboring bodyguards all promptly slid out of his way with the grace of a choreographed dance routine. Every single one of them made sure to give me a very serious face as I passed by.

  I followed Daniel up a hardwood staircase—whose varnish looked like it had seen a lot of careless foot traffic—to the upper level, where a secondary lounge area looked down upon the one below and a couple of plain doors led, presumably, to bedrooms.

  “So . . . where did you get the cylinder from?” I asked, in the spirit of intelligence gathering.

  “Oh, that was the first thing in my collection, actually. Dad got it for me. Just before he went into his . . .” He suddenly stopped, then spun with a haste that made me jump. “Do you want to say hi to Dad?”

  Meeting Daniel Henderson’s father was pretty high on the list of things I doubted I would ever want to do again, just above Scandinavian cuisine and getting exposed to hard vacuum without an EVA suit. But I couldn’t help noticing a tang
ible change in the air the instant Henderson Sr. was invoked. One of the black-suited bodyguards paused in the act of polishing the doorknobs to watch my reaction.

  “I . . . wouldn’t want to bother him,” I said, looking at the door Daniel was indicating the way an ant regards the burrow of a trapdoor spider.

  “It’s cool. Not much bothers him these days.” I flinched as he hammered a fist on the door loud enough to rattle the wineglasses downstairs. “Daaad! We’re coming in!”

  The room beyond was straight out of a Christmas card for mental health professionals. The only source of light was a stone hearth with an open fire—a severe faux pas in a bubble city, but I doubted anyone had had the doints to say so—which cast flickering orange highlights across a grand four-poster bed and an array of moth-eaten hunting trophies from animals that had been extinct for generations. In front of the fire was an elaborately curving armchair whose backrest constituted about 70 percent of its total height.

  Sitting in it was none other than Mr. Henderson himself, his elbows and knees at perfect right angles as he clutched the armrests and dug his single remaining foot into the bearskin rug. He was wearing a knitted cardigan with a picture of a yellow frowny face on the front. I stared at it for some time, as I was putting off having to look at his actual face.

  I became aware of a rhythmic thudding noise, and saw that the fingers of his right hand were drumming against the armrest. It was a calm motion, with about a second’s pause between each drum, but I also noticed that the upholstery under his fingertips had been almost completely worn away, exposing the wood.

  “Dad?” said Daniel, standing between his father and the fire. “Dad, I need more money for the convention. The band wants to be paid upfront.”

  No response came, but Daniel didn’t seem to be expecting one. He produced a tablet that was displaying some kind of banking application, and with careful timing, slid it under Mr. Henderson’s hand as his fingers were upraised in the act of drumming. The fingerprint lock made a cheerful chime, and a ridiculous amount of money was transferred.