Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  Inspired, I waited for another break in the fire, then hauled myself back up on top of the block and started kicking away at the crumbling concrete, which by now was looking like a scale model of a highly accident-prone asteroid. Another big fragment came away and smashed gratifyingly into the chest of the nearest biker, sending them and their mount spinning catastrophically away.

  This effectively reduced the bikers’ pursuing numbers from tracloads to still tracloads. I was forced to duck behind the block again as a fresh volley of blaster fire peppered the air above me.

  My endeavors, combined with the continued impacts with the ground, caused another few lumps of concrete to break off, skittering away into the darkened street behind us. “Sturb! Try pulling up!” I called. “We might’ve lost enough weight!”

  He replied only with an excited gasp and a grunt of effort, and then the ruined block made a particularly high leap as the Neverdie began to gain altitude. I hung on for dear life as the block swung forward on the end of its tether, and this time, we were already high enough that the block didn’t touch the ground at all. I couldn’t help letting out an invigorated whoop as the pursuing bikers grew smaller and smaller and we swung back and forth like a theme-park pirate-ship ride.

  And then, the tether snapped.

  It was probably my fault for getting optimistic, but I made sure to portion out plenty of blame for Sturb, Derby, the local steel industry, and God, too. The block plunged back toward the road, still traveling forwards with alarming speed, and I was almost jarred right off it the first time it bounced off the ground.

  Instinctively I was clinging to the six feet of tether that was still attached to the top, and the six feet of Derby still harnessed to it, so it and the pair of us trailed after the jagged chunk of concrete like the ponytail on the head of an angry teenage boy with a bad complexion. It was only sheer dumb luck that we weren’t smashed against the ground as the block rolled end over end with each impact.

  The block finally came to rest, thanks to the road curving suddenly and a row of parked bicycles that was swiftly pulped into a single jingling mass between the block and the nearby wall. With an enormous amount of conscious effort, I managed to persuade my white-knuckled hands to separate from the tether.

  “Urgh.” Derby groaned as our sudden lack of movement signaled to his danger senses that it was safe to regain consciousness. He looked around blearily. “Never fear. The uncanny skills of Davisham Derby will . . . do whatever it is we’re doing.”

  I looked up. We had stopped mere feet away from utterly destroying the ground floor lobby of the nearest building, but more importantly, Sturb had flown out of view in my plying ship. It was entirely possible that he would notice our absence and come back for us, but that would be the sort of thing one would expect of a human being, rather than a criminal tech-genius monster superficially resembling one.

  I looked back. The boost of speed provided by our temporary ascent had put some distance between us and the biker horde, but they were closing in fast. They had spread out across the entire road to cut off our escape and, possibly, to indicate how little trac they gave about traffic laws at this ­moment. I could see their handheld chains whirling around their heads with the painful clarity of a near-death experience.

  “Sturb has abandoned us, I take it,” said Derby, slightly muffled from the concrete his face was resting on.

  “Yeah, what a shame.” I carefully moved behind the pile of concrete and gripped my blaster, in the hope that taking a combat position might persuade the gun’s power cell to be slightly less depleted. “Would be nice if someone could mind slave these brackets and get them to pedal somewhere else.”

  “Oh, I’m given to understand the process is more complicated than that,” he said groggily as he rose to his feet and brushed concrete dust from his sleeves, very nearly disemboweling himself with the unpowered saw on his wrist. “I suppose it falls now to Davisham Derby to save the day?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, eyes wide, the act of talking using up most of what little energy I had left. “Get out there and save the day. As visibly as possible.”

  “Naturally.” He stepped in front of the wrecked anchor block, facing down the front row of the incoming biker kill squad, and shook his arms free of his sleeves.

  I was still trying to figure out precisely how he signaled for his assistant to shove new tools into his arm Quantunnel. He didn’t seem to do anything with his hand, and we would have heard any spoken commands through his tooth mic. Whatever it was, he was apparently doing it now.

  The electric saw rattled awkwardly back into its housing. There were a few moments of faint clattering noises and adolescent swearing, then a new tool came out, locking into place with a clunk.

  It was tubular, like a cannon, with two attachments along its length that could have been triggers. Derby pointed it far to the left, entirely away from any of the targets, and pulled the trigger closest to the barrel’s mouth.

  His elbow jerked with recoil, and a fist-sized object vaguely resembling a beetle with its legs splayed out fired from the cannon, trailing a black wire that was so thin it was barely visible. It embedded itself in the side of a bus shelter, creating a spider web of cracks in the plexiglass protecting a poster for Jacques McCon.

  Without skipping a beat, Derby swiveled on his heel, pointed his cannon at the other side of the road, and pulled the other trigger. A second grabbing device fired, trailing the other end of the wire, and lodged in the building opposite.

  There was a subtle whirring noise as the two grappling hooks pulled the wire taut between them, followed by a considerably more catastrophic noise when the first bikers hit it. The bikes stopped instantly and tilted up onto their front tires, bucking the riders off like angry mules. The bikers coming in just behind tightened their brakes far too late and skidded into the new pile of abandoned bicycles, getting each other’s limbs caught in the chains they had been swinging around.

  “Lesson one,” said Derby grandly as he surveyed the carnage. “A vehicle can be a useful thing, but in battle it does little more than make your movements predictable.”

  “Does lesson two cover what to do about angry bikers you’ve just made slightly angrier?” I asked, still behind cover.

  He put one hand on his hip to consider my point. While a lot of the bikers were struggling to get out of the pile of metal and limbs just behind the tripwire, the ones that had been unseated first and thrown forward had only been brought closer to us faster. The closest one, a bald man with enough chains dangling from his piercings to imprison a rhinoceros, was already up on his elbows, showing skinned flesh through the holes in his outfit and looking at Derby the way a sumo wrestler looks at a new opponent provocatively waving a sandwich.

  A barely perceptible increase of tension in Derby’s muscles indicated his sudden drop in confidence. “We may have . . . lost the element of surprise.”

  Two, three, four more bikers were getting to their feet, all looking upset and two already holding guns. The nearest one steadied his aim, drawing a bead on Derby’s center mass.

  There was an earsplitting bang, and a streak of energy arced across the street, showering sparks and sending the nearest bikers diving reflexively for cover. I clutched the sides of my head in despair. “Plying hell!”

  Derby, unharmed, uncoiled himself from his defensive flinch. “What was that?”

  “That was my last plying countermeasure!” I looked up. The Neverdie was hovering just above us, the port missile tube still emitting heat haze from the launch. “Sturb, you bracket! I was gonna pawn that to pay for Christmas dinner!”

  “Sorry,” came Sturb’s voice. “Did you know the labels have worn off most of your buttons?” The ship descended further. The other half of the anchor cable was still attached to the landing leg, and the frayed end of it was already low enough to grab.

  I wound my arm around it an
d scowled. “Don’t touch anything else, you doint, I’ve got those set up exactly how I like them.” I jumped and began to climb with just my arms, the effort driving all the air from my lungs until I had climbed high enough to bring my legs into the equation.

  Derby, meanwhile, had ditched his double grappling hook launcher for a smaller, more conventional one with a standard winch, which he used to draw himself into the open airlock. I made a brief hand gesture as he flew past in an attempt to let him know that I would be checking very carefully for any marks the grappler left in the hull.

  By the time I had clambered off the landing leg into the airlock, the Neverdie was ascending again. I stood in the external door, surveying the carnage below me, and the damage our actions had caused to the streets of Ritsuko. I winced, mentally cataloging the new set of bills I was going to have to avoid paying.

  Chapter 13

  By the time I reached the Neverdie’s cockpit, the ship was already above the buildings and heading for the upper airlock in Ritsuko’s bubble. It sounded like Sturb was talking to the air traffic control lads.

  “All right, yes, to be perfectly honest, this is his ship. Very observant of you, quite impressive actually. But I assure you he is onboard. I realize how it must look, but I’m sure he’ll be up here in a . . .”

  He looked around and saw me enter. There was something gratifying about the way he snatched the headset off and leapt to his feet like the pilot’s chair had acquired a nest of Koberian rattlers, but I maintained my scowl as I grabbed the headset from his hand.

  “Now I see why you came back for us,” I growled before sitting down and donning the gear. “Who’s on shift tonight? Shinji? Adelaide?”

  “There you are,” said the voice of Shinji the air traffic controller. “Who was that doint? Tried to make us think we don’t recognize your ship when we see it . . .”

  The star pilot community had always been close to Ritsuko’s air and ground control personnel, and it’d only gotten chummier after Quantunneling, when we started constantly running into each other in bars and soup kitchens. “It’s a long story. We’re heading out.”

  “No prob.” I heard the tapping of the heavy, outdated switches in Shinji’s booth, and the airlock in the plexiglass directly above us began the typical cycle. “This long story got anything to do with that big fuss going on downtown at the moment?”

  “Frobisher’s sex life,” I said.

  “Gotcha. Tower out.”

  Sturb was still standing awkwardly to my left, toying apologetically with his fingers. “Frobisher’s what?”

  I glared at him for a second, then returned my focus to controlling the ship. “It’s star pilot code. It means, you’re better off knowing as little about this as possible.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said, smiling desperately.

  The airlock completed its cycle, and the Neverdie popped out of Ritsuko City’s bubble like a champagne cork, heading for open space and putting more and more distance between us and the mess we had left behind. I plotted a course for the solar system’s trebuchet gate. It was a fairly obvious escape route, but hopefully the ISS—the peacekeepers of the protected territory around the solar system—wouldn’t have time to mobilize anything to intercept us. A lot of their fleet had gone into mothballs since their last budget cut.

  I pointed the Neverdie’s nose cone directly at the tiny pinprick of light that represented the trebuchet gate’s guiding beacon and set the autopilot. Hopefully, moving forwards along a perfectly straight path wouldn’t tax the old thing, but I made sure the cooling vents were uncovered anyway.

  That left me with nothing to do but bask in the company of Malcolm Sturb. “Can I just say, I thought you did a very impressive job down there. I think we can all be proud of this heist, but you in particular demonstrated some very keen problem-solving skills under pressure.”

  “Thanks,” I said, talking out of the sides of my mouth.

  “Sorry Jimi had to take control of the autopilot. Actually, we may have done you a favor. Did you know how much spyware your mainframe had running in the background? Jimi had to create a sort of direct backdoor—”

  I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said, because I had slipped my headset back on and tuned into Ritsuko City’s newscasting station, which for the moment was still in range.

  “. . . watched his ship head up to the city airlock and off into space,” came the voice of Steve the traffic reporter. “Certainly couldn’t blame him for wanting to get away. Looks like it’s still quite a mess down there. Police have closed off the damaged streets, so traffic’s rock solid all the way to the Hips. Must be a terrible time to be down on ground level, right now.” There was more than a hint of satisfaction in his tone.

  “Ye-es, quite,” said Linda in the studio. “If you’re just joining us, the breaking news is that the already historic occasion of Jacques McKeown’s appearance at Jacques McCon this weekend has suddenly become even more so. We are getting reports that Jacques McKeown himself appears to have masterminded a daring heist and kidnapping, targeting the Henderson company, which was hosting the convention. Moments ago, he fled the scene in his ship, pursued by police and convention security in a spectacular high-speed chase, and appears to have successfully escaped from Ritsuko City’s jurisdiction.”

  “Already, this seems to have only added to the legend of Jacques McKeown,” said the other presenter. “Sales of his books have tripled and the day’s trading hasn’t officially begun. We called the office of Blasé Books for a statement, but when they picked up the phone all we could hear was the sound of people singing and champagne corks popping.”

  “Well, the thought of driving home tonight isn’t something that I’m in the mood to celebrate, I can tell you that,” said Linda.

  “Mm, I imagine,” said Steve in the observation tower. “I’d make room for you all up here but, you know, you’d probably find it a bit chilly. Which is a problem I’m sure the people in the business district are wishing they had right now. Looks like the rioters have lit another fire.”

  I flicked the radio off and pulled my headset down around my neck with a sigh. This hadn’t exactly been the ideal outcome. McKeown was getting free publicity and the collateral damage was going to take some serious blowing over. I’d probably have to dig into my box of fake mustaches when it came time to bring my scientists to Oniris. But something was nagging at me. “Kidnapping?”

  “Mm?” said Sturb, who had been idly examining a nearby readout with a hand to his chin.

  “The news said this was a heist and kidnapping.” My thoughtful stare focused into an accusing one when I remembered who I was talking to. “What did you plying do down there, Sturb?”

  “Nothing! Captain, I swear I didn’t do anything. I just got some things signed and bought some collectibles.” He grabbed a white plastic bag from the corner by the door and held out a pathetic little action figure. It was a scantily clad female warrior bearing a slight resemblance to Mrs. Frobisher.

  Without taking my eyes off him, I leaned over and locked the controls. I had no doubt that an amoral tech genius like Sturb could do whatever he plying wanted with my ship, but the gesture was more about letting him see the blaster I was still wearing under my jacket. “I’m gonna check over the ship.” I backed toward the door. “Stay here. Don’t touch anything. If I find anyone in slave crowns, we’re going to have a long, enlightening conversation about boundaries.”

  He kept his hands up, hanging his head defeatedly, until I was far enough through the door to lose sight of him. I descended the steps backwards, keeping one hand under my jacket, ready to draw at the first sign of hostile nerd.

  When I had retreated as far as the cabin door, I stopped when I heard voices. Not from the cabin—from the sturdy hatch opposite that led to the head. It was slightly ajar, and I could hear Derby arguing with someone. Probably his assistant, assuming he didn’t have an ong
oing beef with something he’d eaten today.

  “. . . could hardly cut through that cable,” said Derby. “It really did come close to ruining everything.”

  I moved my ear a little closer to the door. It was undoubtedly Derby’s voice, but there was something different about it. It was still condescending, but in a whiny, petulant way, with a hint of disappointment. He sounded like a weak-willed father trying to tactfully confront his teenage son about the magazines he’d found under his bed.

  “Sorry, Uncle Dav,” said his young assistant. I tried to peer through the crack in the door, and saw Derby’s shadow upon the wall. He was sitting on the toilet, leaning over his knees and talking into his arm stump.

  “And I don’t want you to feel like this was your fault, but if you’d just been a little more alert and provided me with the G32 like I signaled for, then . . .” He left his sentence hanging.

  His assistant made the kind of quiet little sigh one makes when about to launch into a statement you’ve been mentally preparing for the last couple of hours. “Uncle Dav, you signaled for a G16. That’s why I gave you the G16.”

  Derby hesitated for just a moment. “Now, come on, Nelly, we have been doing this for quite a while now, I don’t think I would have signaled for a G16 when I needed a G32, would I.”

  “I know we’ve been doing this for a while, but I’m telling you, you made the G16 signal.”

  Derby sighed tolerantly. “Nelly, I am one hundred percent certain I did not. I did left wink, look up, blink.”

  “Yes, and that’s for the G16,” Nelly insisted. “The G32 is two blinks.”

  A pause. “Is it?”

  “I’ve got the cheat sheet right here. Hang on.” I heard a very faint rustle of paper. “Here, look. Definitely. One blink for the G16, two blinks for the G32, and three blinks for the G32 pushed out already running and at maximum speed because you’re trying to impress someone. Look.”