“Oh, trac. We are beyond calculus,” I moaned, sitting up. “We are somewhere in the region of differential geometry right now.”
“Perfect,” said Derby. “So now we’ve got a day to figure out how to explain this to the Henderson clan in such a way that they don’t murder us all. And if we survive that, then we get to explain to the rest of the universe that we set Terrorgorn loose. Wonderful. Marvelous. What a textbook operation this has been.” By then, he was ranting, pacing irritably back and forth across Henderson’s corpse.
“Mr. Derby, I really don’t think that was a helpful thing to say,” said Sturb hotly, sitting with his knees drawn up. “Now. What does everyone think we should do?”
“You’re asking me?!” Derby stopped dead in front of him. “None of this was Davisham Derby’s idea. None of it is my fault.” He scowled at me, then yanked at the wristlet on his arm stump until the straps came loose and flung it into the corner. “Davisham Derby’s going to have a nice private little midlife crisis somewhere.” He stalked off in the direction of the head, slamming doors behind him.
“Okay,” said Sturb, with moist frustration in his eyes. “We tell Daniel Henderson the truth. We apologize. He was the one who bought Terrorgorn’s body in the first place. He has to realize that everyone has to share some of the blame for this situation.”
By now I was on my feet, checking Henderson over. I nudged his rapidly graying face with my foot. His head flopped over to the side like the page of a very difficult and unpleasant book.
“It might work on Daniel,” I said through a sigh. “Maybe. I’ve no idea where he’ll go, mentally, over this. But then there’s the rest of Henderson’s people.” I thought of Heller, with his body like an upright refrigerator and fists like flesh-covered toasters. “This is gonna leave a power vacuum like a plying black hole. Half of them will want to go to war on the spot.”
“So what do you think we should do?!”
I had been squatting on my haunches, examining the body, but as I fully considered Sturb’s question, I rocked back and let my posterior thump to the floor. I exhaled through pursed lips and let them flutter musically for a good few seconds before finally looking up. “Die?”
“Come on, seriously, now.”
“I might be serious.” Henderson’s face was starting to bother me, so I positioned my knee between it and mine so I wouldn’t have to look. “And we might not even live that long. Terrorgorn’s probably mowing through the Biskottis as we speak, and then he’ll realize this ship’s the only way off the station.”
“Listen, we mustn’t stop believing in ourselves!” said Sturb, raising the pitch of his voice by an octave as he tried to be inspiring. “We’re not completely helpless, are we? You’re a star pilot . . .”
“Ex–star pilot.”
“And Davisham Derby’s the greatest thief in the galaxy . . .”
I looked up at him. “And you’re a supervillain.”
“Ex-supervillain,” said Sturb, with remarkable speed, every muscle in his body visibly tensing before he forced himself to relax. “Come on, we’re Penelope Warden’s handpicked heist crew! There’s got to be something we can do about all this!” His words penetrated my fog of despair, and my neck slowly rolled around as I took in the contents of the room, feeling the little tentative roots of plans forming in my mind. I mentally cataloged the suite of skills we had available to us. I stared at Henderson’s body, my eyes narrowing in thought, then looked to Sturb again.
“You’re a . . . cyber . . . cyborginator?”
“Cyberneticist, I’d say,” said Sturb, with a hint of reproach.
“Could you turn Henderson into one of your cyborgs?” I felt hope returning, like a cleansing rain through my limbs, as the sheer obviousness of the scheme hit me.
He was taken aback, the corners of his mouth twisting into a grimace like I was suggesting he use his fingernails to scrape the hardened brown bits off the side of a toilet bowl. “Uh. No. He’s dead.”
“That’s a problem?” I was thinking back to my encounters with Malmind drones in the past, and they’d always been pale and vacant looking enough to be dead.
“Yes, because my tech was designed to redirect higher brain functions.” He dug his hands into his pockets uncomfortably. “It wouldn’t do anything if they were dead. Because they wouldn’t have brain functions to redirect. That’s what dead means.”
“All right,” I said, feeling stupid but not quite ready to be completely deflated. “But couldn’t you rig something up? It wouldn’t have to pass for long. Prop him up, make his head move around . . .” I patted my pockets. “I could find, like, a text-to-speech app and make it say something psychotic . . .”
“No,” said Sturb firmly, drawing himself to his full height. His love handles were quivering and his face was turning very pink. “I can’t do that.”
“Serious?” I looked over the body again. “I’m pretty sure I could rig him up with some hydraulics from the cargo bay, worst comes to it.”
“All right, well, let me be clearer.” Sturb puffed his chest out even further. “I won’t do that. I’m not going to do it because I don’t want to.”
I tapped my fingers rhythmically upon the metal floor while I waited for the punch line, but it didn’t come. “You’re an evil cyberneticist and you don’t want to do it.”
“Evil cybernetics was something that I did,” he said insistently. “It is not something that I am.”
That sounded suspiciously like a recitation. “Where did that come from?”
He lowered himself from tiptoe sheepishly. “I go to a support group.”
“You go to a support group for former supervillains.”
“Supervillains, career pirates, star pilots who can’t let go.” His eyes glazed over in memory. “Penelope organized it on Salvation Station. She said we could all help each other turn a page in our lives.”
Warden had gone straight from the Henderson organization to Robert Blaze’s employ at Salvation, of course, but if she’d intended to move on from her life as a manipulative criminal psycho-div, I would have thought that the first step would have been to stop being a manipulative criminal psycho-div. If she’d turned a page, she’d left a few bookmarks.
I kept these thoughts to myself, because talking about her had made Sturb stare reverently into the middle distance. “Look,” I said. “I’m not asking you to set up a new cybergulag and start rounding up tourists again. We’re just going to temporarily make use of a body that the previous owner doesn’t need anymore.”
He seemed to be considering it, but then he smacked his hands around his ears. “No. No, no, no, no. That’s the little voice.”
“What?”
“It always starts with the little voice; we’ve talked about it at the group.” I could see tears glinting in his eyes. “The little voice that says it can’t hurt to do just a tiny bit of evil cybernetics when it’s convenient. But you do it and that sets a precedent, and the little voice gets louder every time, and the next thing you know . . .”
“Sturb, this is, like, one million percent less evil than the kind of stuff you used to do with the Malmind.”
“That’s the other thing the little voice says!” He pointed a shaking finger at me like he’d just figured out who the last real human on a planet full of evil alien clones was. “Always forward, never back! Clean slate! A supervillain without villainy is just a super person!” He backed toward the door. “Stop trying to bring me down to your level!”
Then he ran off. I heard his heavy footfalls rapidly ascend the steps, and then the cockpit hatchway slammed shut like the bedroom door of a teenager whose parents persistently fail to understand them. So that left me, having successfully alienated everyone in the plying universe, sitting alone on the floor of an unswept passenger cabin with a highly inconvenient corpse. The thought occurred at that moment that I could
always put my gun to Sturb’s head and make him raise Henderson to a nightmarish state of animatronic undeath.
I rubbed my eyes. No, I couldn’t. It was a stupid idea. What was I proposing, dangle Henderson’s body from the ceiling with tow cables and make his legs do a little happy Irish jig when Daniel walked in? It was insane. Monstrous. The sane solution was obviously to remove Henderson’s skin and wear it.
I rubbed my eyes again. No, no, no. There was definitely something wrong with my thought processes. It was probably related to my recent identity crisis. In which case, it was about time I started reining that in.
So I looked at Henderson’s corpse, at the unnatural stillness of his face, and tried not to think about all the ways it was going to make my life difficult. I didn’t think about what clever lie I was going to spin to his grieving child, or even that I could at least take comfort that he could no longer force us to knife fight each other. I pushed these thoughts out of my head until I saw the body as what it was: the remains of a fellow human being who had wanted to live as much as I did, and who, whatever he might have done or been, hadn’t deserved this.
I clung to that notion like it was my carry-on baggage and I was the world’s most paranoid bracket in a crowded departure lounge. Then I slowly rose to my knees, found an old hoodie that Terrorgorn had elected not to wear, and covered Henderson’s face with it.
“Rest in peace, you poor mad bracket,” I muttered.
Right, I thought. That was a start. Now I could work on dealienating the universe.
I was heading for the door when I picked up a rhythmic tapping sound. The sound of knuckles tapping on a solid surface, the kind made by someone who is in two minds about whether they want to draw attention to themselves. I followed my ears, and found Derby’s discarded wristlet lying in the debris in the corner.
“Uncle Dav?” came Nelly’s nervous voice as I cracked the wristlet’s lid open. “It’s just me. I promise I’m not going to bring up the fish shop. Please don’t slam the lid shut again.”
I held it up to my face. “Hi.”
“Oh.” Nelly appeared to have propped her end of the tube up in front of her, and was sitting forward in a “let’s have a serious conversation about this” kind of way—familiar to anyone who has had to attend an intervention, or inform a coworker that their body odor is affecting morale. “Did Uncle Dav get captured again?”
“No, he did it himself, this time.”
She bit her lip and winced. “You didn’t . . . tell him off, did you?”
In keeping with being in a walking-back kind of mood, I opted to be honest. “I might have said something about him living an insane midlife crisis.”
She tutted. “Great. So he’s probably going to blame me for telling you too much.”
“Look, why do you . . . enable him?” I asked, only faintly aware that standing over Henderson’s corpse with death closing in from multiple directions wasn’t the best time to have this conversation.
Nelly dropped her gaze. “You wouldn’t understand. We, me and the family, we kinda felt bad for him after he lost his job at the research facility.”
A few small flags suddenly raised in my memory. “He’s a scientist?”
“Chemical engineer,” said Nelly. “He devoted, like, twenty years of his life trying to create a, a . . . more efficient kind of hydrogen fuel, and he was so close to having a commercial product, and Speedstar had seen the work and were really interested, and then . . .”
“And then Quantunneling happened,” I said flatly.
“Um. Yeah. That’s partly why he came up with the wristlet idea. He said it was, like, taking back what quantum tunnels took from him.”
I had to admit, that was a much cleverer response than the one star pilots had come up with, which had been to sit around Ritsuko City Spaceport complaining and to start using mathematical terms as swear words. But more importantly, the revelation had stirred something up from the back of my memory, something that cut through all my confused thinking like a rigid anchor cable.
“If he’s a scientist,” I heard myself say, “do you think he’d have any interest in a new job opportunity?”
Again, I heard the sound of knuckles rapping against a solid surface. And this time I knew it wasn’t coming from Nelly, because I could see that all of her knuckles were gathered worriedly beneath her chin. It was coming from behind me. Someone was knocking on the airlock.
Derby’s wristlet still in hand, I went to answer. I wasn’t exactly expecting a kissogram, but I knew that the situation had to develop in some hideous manner and I didn’t see much point in putting it off. I arranged my face into a suitably deadpan expression and hit the Open controls.
It was Ic, the daughter of the Biskotti high priest. The lower half of her face was wreathed in the usual enraptured smiles, but her eyes were rather urgently wide, and her brow was furrowed enough to be about ready for a season’s worth of potato seeds. “Um, all hail the Ancients, the Speed-star Cor-po-ra-tion wel-comes you,” she chanted at lightning speed. “I beseech that you forgive my unworthy form trespassing upon your celestial vessel, but we were wondering if you wouldn’t mind descending from on high one more time to, to, um . . .” She tapped her index fingertips together a few times. “Resolve an argument?”
She politely moved aside to let me see what was going on at the far side of the landing pad. A small throng of Biskottis was rising into view at the top of the stairs, headed by Ath, the argumentative one we had encountered just before leaving. He was marching with the kind of confidence in his step that sets out to make everyone else feel discouraged. It was certainly working on me.
“The Ancients are false deities!” he declared, waving a burning rolled-up magazine. “Throw off the shackles of outdated superstition! Embrace the true power of he who would stand against the lies of the Ancients!”
More Biskottis were surging up onto the landing pad, their eyes wide with bewilderment but nevertheless holding up their fists and making vaguely bellicose noises. As the last few stragglers arrived, I saw that Terrorgorn was, inevitably, among them. He was sitting in a plastic chair from the food court that four of the burlier Biskottis were holding aloft.
“The Ancients have abandoned us!” clarified Ath at full volume to be heard over the background grumbling. “Assemble beneath the banner of Tarragon!”
“Uh, hmmm,” coughed Terrorgorn, somehow loud enough to be audible. Instantly, every single one of the assembled Biskottis flinched and fell into terrified silence.
“Not Tarragon?” asked Ath, looking back and sweating profusely. “What was it? Terragon?”
“Hmmmmm.” Terrorgorn tilted his head slightly, pointing his eyes sideways.
“Terrorgorn,” I suggested.
“Terror-gorn?”
“Mm,” went Terrorgorn, nodding his head one fraction of a centimeter.
“Terrorgorn.” Ath shook himself back into full enthusiasm and waved his fiery magazine. “Burn the pretenders!”
“Yes, so, um,” said Ic, still fiddling with her fingers. “If you could just quickly explain to them why the Ancients are the true lords of the heavens, that would be super.”
I watched the situation develop, the crowd of Biskottis spreading themselves across the landing pad toward us like a giant serving of hostile custard. Then I casually leaned back until I was fully inside the airlock again and smashed the Close button violently enough that the external door very nearly claimed the tip of my nose as it slammed shut. Then I pulled the mechanical locks into place.
After retreating through the internal door and locking that as well, I pressed my back against it and silently cursed myself. It would have been so easy to play up the god thing. There was no end of ways I could have faked up a miracle to enforce the position a bit. My gun, my phone, the graviton generator, trac, I was pretty sure I had a mechanical pencil lying around somewhere that
would probably have turned heads. Not to mention Sturb’s portable quantu—
The realization hit me at the exact same moment that a number of angry fists crashed upon the side of the Neverdie’s hull, enhancing the effect somewhat. Of course. The portable Quantunnel gate, still leaning against the wall of the passenger cabin, was our ticket out of here. With any luck, the other side was still intact in Henderson’s meat freezer, and with Henderson’s corpse and son both confirmed to be here in the Black, it was probably the safest place to be, short of burying ourselves alive under thick concrete.
Trac. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? This was exactly why star pilots had been left behind by the Quantunnel revolution: we just didn’t have the creativity to consider the applications.
I stumbled back into the cabin, tripping on the base of the door frame as another blow shook the entire ship. The Biskottis must have been coordinating their blows remarkably well, as a single Biskotti fist against the Neverdie’s hull would have been like hitting a leather shoe with a matchstick.
The portable Quantunnel frame was still leaning against the far wall, with Henderson’s body sprawled between it and me as if he had only just hurled himself through it. I was midway through stepping carefully around his outspread limbs when I realized that the Quantunnel couldn’t be activated without power, which the Neverdie was presently lacking. But there was plenty of perfectly good electricity in the station; I wondered if Terrorgorn and his new angry mob would be willing to let me borrow a cup.
As if in response to my thoughts, the entire ship shook and tilted slightly, sending an avalanche of crumbs and discarded Biros cascading across the floor like a herd of gazelle spotting an indiscreet cheetah. Henderson’s broken neck lolled sickeningly again as his body rolled into the corner.
I could hear the moans and complaints of the Biskottis, recently abandoned by God, right through the hull. They made a collective huff sound and the ship tilted again, further this time, before rocking back and tilting even more the other way.
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