I managed to snap out of my gawp and fumbled at the phone that was still in my hand, trying to call Daniel back. No answer came. Going by the ship’s bucking motion, he was probably having to use both hands to do something to his thrust controls that would probably violate the warranty.
The Biskotti swarm was spreading across the port side of the ship’s hull. They were just feet away from the seam of the exterior airlock door, and that distance was closing one Biskotti hand span at a time.
I let instinct take over and darted forwards, shoulder charging a wall of struggling yellow bodies. Instantly, tiny wrists shot out of the churning mass and fastened around my arms and legs.
For a brief moment, I saw Terrorgorn through a gap between someone’s armpit and the crook of someone’s knee. He was sitting calmly in a hollow space in the middle of the Biskotti swarm like it was a sedan chair made of bodies. He met my gaze, and gave the sort of tightlipped apologetic smile you give when you notice someone you vaguely know in the street but hope they don’t want to stop and talk because you really can’t be bothered.
Then the hands that held me in place tensed, and I was hurled back onto my arse. Looking up, I saw that the barely visible seam around the Hemingway’s airlock door had become a thick black line that six or seven Biskotti hands had worked fingers into. A moment later, it flew open with a chunk.
The next few things happened so fast, I had to take time later to piece them together in my head. First, the Biskottis, along with Terrorgorn, boarded the ship. Their entire mass seemed to be sucked into the airlock like a plate of ramen into the mouth of a Ritsuko salaryman with only two minutes left in his lunch break.
After the airlock slammed shut again, the ship froze, then quivered madly in midair like an insect fighting a takeover by some kind of brain-eating fungus, then stopped. It bobbed daintily, then shot upwards through the station’s force field. Within seconds, they had slalomed clumsily around the nearest debris field and disappeared from sight.
I aborted my attempt to stand up and fell back again on my arse, defeated, staring straight upward at nothing. I was alone on the landing pad with Davisham Derby, Malcolm Sturb, and the upturned Neverdie.
It was Derby who spoke first. “Well, that’s one way to distract them,” he said, with insincere optimism. “On to phase two?”
Chapter 23
We suddenly had the run of the now-deserted Biskot Central, cold comfort as that was, so I wordlessly picked up the portable Quantunnel gate from the Neverdie’s passenger cabin—pretending not to notice Henderson’s body, now arched over the ceiling light—and carried it down to the recharge station in the concourse, laying it reverently like a funeral wreath. Sturb, who had been following me like a lost puppy throughout, took the hint and stepped forward, digging out his phone to set up a connection.
He gave a little cough to break the mournful silence. “Jimi, do you think you can reestablish the tunnel to the other gate?”
“Assessing,” reported Jimi. “Checking for secondary gate. Found. Secondary gate is intact. Approximate location: Ritsuko City, Luna, Sol system.”
“All right, well,” began Sturb, self-consciously keeping his voice low in the station’s deafening quiet. “At least things could be worse.”
“Do we have a plan?” asked Derby skeptically. He had also followed me like a lost puppy, but from a greater distance, taking every opportunity to fold his arms and lean on whatever items of furniture were convenient.
“A plan,” I repeated flatly. “Yes. The plan is, we get back to Ritsuko City, and then we find a nice flat rock to hide under until we’re sure nothing is coming back to us.”
“An elegant scheme,” he said, spitting his words. “Dare I admit I’m fully behind it.”
“But there has to be something we can . . .” began Sturb.
“Do?” I said witheringly. “Do what? Save the Hendersons?”
“We should tell Penelope. I must say I’m still not one hundred percent convinced that she sent those killers after us.”
I stared at him with tired eyes. “How about we have a big, long, fruitful debate about that while we’re lying low.”
He grimaced. “But . . . what am I supposed to do? My whole life is at Salvation Station now. Where else can I go?”
Until that moment, I hadn’t had an answer to that question, but looking into his anxious eyes caused an idea to hit me that, like the idea to use the portable Quantunnel, was mind-meltingly obvious in retrospect. “Cybernetics,” I said to myself. “That’s kind of like being a scientist, isn’t it?”
He gave the kind of obnoxious wince that overly educated people use when talking down to anyone normal. “Um. I suppose you could say that. It’s all STEM.”
I wasn’t sure what he was driveling about, but I pressed on. “I have an in with the Oniris Venture Company. I happen to know they’re desperate for scientists to fill out their new crew rosters. Probably desperate enough to skip a few stages on the background check.”
“Deep space recon?” said Sturb distastefully, but then his expression changed and his gaze traced a complicated path as he gave the matter serious thought. “That’s not a bad idea, actually.”
I leaned in, encouraged. “You said something about a supervillain support group. Do you think any of them would be interested? Are any of them scientists?”
“Yes, actually, quite a lot of them.”
I nodded, completely unsurprised. My lifelong distrust of university education was justified yet again. I looked back at Davisham Derby. “What about you?”
He thrust his shoulders back. “What about me?”
“Are you gonna sign up as well?”
He jerked his nose upwards and to the side dramatically. “Davisham Derby is no—”
“Yes, we’re all fully aware of what Davisham Derby is and is not,” I interjected wearily. “The question is, what are you?”
There was a truly pathetic look on his face for all of half a second before he erased it and looked away, tightening his folded arms even further as if manually reinflating his chest. “I suppose . . . it will suffice as a hideout. Until adventure calls for Davisham Derby once again.”
Something told me he’d finally made a breakthrough. I turned back to Sturb, who was adjusting the contours of the Quantunnel in accordance with Jimi’s instructions. “Is it ready?”
“Deviation: point two nine millimeters,” reported Jimi.
“Yes,” translated Sturb. He jabbed the screen of his phone a few times. “It’s about ready to open. Um. I should mention that this will light up on Ritsuko City’s Quantunnel monitoring system, so as soon as we confirm it’s safe, we’ll need to run before the police arrive.”
“That is an issue for there,” said Derby. “For now, the primary concern is no longer being here.”
“What if the police redirect the tunnel?” I asked Sturb.
“I’m still not entirely convinced that that technology exists. But I’ll have Jimi monitor the connection and confirm we’re heading to the same exit tunnel we used before. Also, if we look through it and see a prison cell, we could just, er, not go in.”
“Right,” I muttered.
Sturb pressed another button on his phone. “Could you both look away, please?”
I promptly covered my eyes and turned away, after which the Quantunnel gate made the telltale clicks and clangs of the metal frame aligning itself metaphysically with a different point in the spacetime continuum. I had to admit, having very recently hit my lowest emotional point, I was feeling more and more buoyed. We may have liberated Terrorgorn and left him free to enslave half the universe, but that still left a good fifty-fifty chance that our Oniris job placement would be in the other half.
“Huh,” said Sturb uncertainly, which I took as the signal that I could look again. The Quantunnel had connected, but the metal frame now contained a r
ectangle of complete darkness. The illuminated signs that looked down upon the concourse did very little to shine light on the situation.
“Is that the meat freezer?” I peered in. “Did they really not move it?”
“Well, there would have been no reason to think it was important, after it was turned off,” hazarded Sturb.
I activated the flashlight on my phone and poked it into the black rectangle. It wasn’t the freezer. It wasn’t a prison cell, either. The room was blandly decorated in beige walls and uncarpeted concrete, more like a storage room, which I supposed made sense. Although storage rooms, in my experience, were usually used to store something, and this one was empty.
Keeping myself tensed for action, I fed one leg into the room, then the other. There were no windows and only one door in the far wall, painted a sensible, industrial gray. This didn’t feel like Henderson Tower. It did create the same uncanny sensation that I was walking into the open mouth of a Fylerean worm, but the surroundings weren’t nearly ostentatious enough.
I turned around and shone my light over the wall behind me. As well as the metal frame that I had just emerged from, through which I could still see the cocked heads of Sturb and Derby silhouetted against electric signs, there were a number of other metal frames stuck to the wall of varying size and shape. All of them were empty, like I’d stumbled into an unfinished display room in an art gallery.
And finally, I realized where I was. “Oh, trac on a tracksuit,” I commented, before diving toward the open Quantunnel.
A shutter slammed down from above just before I reached it, covering the wall of Quantunnel frames with impenetrable sheet metal and very nearly shearing off my face. At the same time, the ceiling light snapped on, drilling my tired eyes with a whiteness so bright that I fell to my knees as if taking a blow to the head.
A beat later, with perfect coordination, the door flew open and the room was very swiftly filled with men in gray shirts and black ties, the uniform of the Ritsuko City Police Department. A truncheon swept at my legs, which was apparently a part of the procedure that didn’t account for me already being on my knees, so all it did was bruise my thighs a bit. Several pairs of hands firmly pushed my face to the floor, and I felt handcuffs snap onto my wrists.
The man in front of me was familiar, and only became more so as my gaze tracked up his black trousers to his substantial waistband, rumpled dress shirt, and dense black mustache.
“So which would you prefer?” asked Inspector Honda, bored. “ ‘Jacques McKeown, you’re under arrest’ or ‘Dashford Pierce, you’re under arrest’?”
Chapter 24
What with Ritsuko City being the modern, progressive shining jewel in the crown of humanity’s development, the holding cells in the city’s main police precinct were actually relatively nice. I had a room to myself with a plumbed-in toilet and washbasin, and the bed even had a pillow. I’d been on some planets where the prisons were considered liberal and wishy-washy if only one of the walls was covered in rotating saw blades.
My cell was, nevertheless, inescapable. There wasn’t so much a door as a six-inch-thick sheet of plexiglass making up the entirety of one of the walls, which slid up into the ceiling to let things in or out and must have weighed about as much as Frobisher’s mum.
The cell was part of a ring of cells going around the perimeter of a large circular chamber, with a round guard station in the middle that was always manned by at least two officers, ensuring that the entire room could be kept under constant surveillance. Nothing was getting out of this jail without a supremely skilled lawyer or a medium-sized tactical nuke.
Still, considering the number of different groups and individuals that I had been and was currently being hunted by, there was something very anticlimactic about the local police finally being the ones to succeed. It was like a veteran wild-animal trainer coming home after a long day and getting nibbled to death by the cat.
I had been in the cell for a night and about half a day, and had spent most of the time staring at the floor, thinking. Some kind of jammer was blocking the signal from my tooth mic and ear speaker, but all I had to do was get out of here, and I could talk to Sturb again. Presumably he’d been smart enough not to try to follow me, and to shut the tunnel down on his end before the cops could bring the shutter back up, because I hadn’t seen him or Derby being brought in to furnish the other cells. He’d probably know how to get hold of another portable Quantunnel so I could get back to Biskot and recover the Neverdie. And as long as I was fantasizing, maybe there’d be a beautiful woman waiting for me with armfuls of money and cake.
I was stirred from my contemplation by an irritating grinding sound, and looked up to see Inspector Honda casually walking toward my cell, dragging a metal folding chair that was leaving a thin trail in the cement floor behind him. He stopped about ten feet from my cell door and slowly opened the chair, getting momentarily confused by how the folding action worked. Then, after testing the seat with his hands, he settled into it, releasing a sigh like the cloud that flies up when a dying horse collapses onto dusty ground.
He rested there for some time, mouth still hanging open from the sigh, staring at me as if trying to place me in his memory. Then he sat forward and turned his attention to the paper bag he had been carrying in his other hand. He examined the contents the way a sleepy bear investigates a hastily abandoned picnic basket.
It was only after he’d taken a bite of his sushi sandwich and chewed it slowly for half a minute, keeping his eyes fixed on me, that he finally spoke. “Did you like our trap room?”
His voice was quiet and low, without a hint of expression. His eyelids drooped heavily, and he permanently looked like he was about to fall asleep. I answered him with a frown.
“Every time we find a new portable Quantunnel going around, we add it to the wall,” he continued. “Me and some of the boys built the shutter over a couple of weekends. Works pretty well, doesn’t it?”
Honda was playing a game that I didn’t have the rules for, so I decided to start laying some cards of my own. “What am I being charged with?”
He gave a slightly baffled smile. “Well. The use of illegal Quantunnels, for a start. That’s the easy one. That’s the gimme.” He produced some crumpled papers from his lunch bag, brushed off the crumbs, and peered at the writing. “Beyond that, it’s a lucky dip, really. Assault. Conspiracy to assault. Armed robbery. Conspiracy to commit armed robbery. Kidnapping. Conspiracy to—just assume all of these have conspiracy as well. Damage to civic property. Oh yes, and fraud. That’s the big one. Got a big asterisk next to that.” He brushed the paper again, as if making sure the asterisk wasn’t a crumb of nori. “A lot of that one hinges on you not really being Jacques McKeown, though.” He looked up. “Speaking of which, are you really Jacques McKeown?”
I kept quiet and expressionless. I wasn’t falling for this one. My dad had exhaustively drummed into me his three most important rules for modern living: don’t tell the police more than you have to, always assume the back of your ship is ten feet longer than you think it is, and never underestimate how much trouble can be avoided by complimenting your wife’s appearance.
“ ’Cos if you aren’t,” continued Honda, “and you’ve accepted money for being Jacques McKeown, then I have to add another asterisk.”
I said nothing, staring at the ceiling, feeling his soft eyes bore into me.
“I don’t think you are him,” he said, dropping a small bath bomb of dead seriousness into the otherwise calm pond of his voice. “Any more than you’re Dashford Pierce, or Claude Hart, or . . . any of these other names.” He was consulting his paper again. “Word of advice. If you’re going to keep changing your identity, consider changing your ship, as well.”
“Maybe I bought the ship,” I tried, since my silence didn’t seem to be helping. “From Dashford Pierce.”
Honda nodded. “That’s what I said. I said, ma
ybe he just bought it from someone who happens to look exactly like him. In one of those special ways that leave no sign of any money changing hands. But the chief inspector shot me down on that. You know how people are. In any case, we know that you were on the ship when the ship in question was used to carry out a heist on Henderson Tower.”
Considering the various parties that had been involved in that heist on both sides that far more richly deserved to be arrested than me, this treatment didn’t feel fair. “Why are you picking on me? There was—”
He put up his hands. “I know! I know! That’s the other thing I said to the chief inspector. There were much bigger fish involved in that, I said. Plus, he’s a star pilot. He fights for justice in the galaxy. Sure, he bends the rules now and then, but if we had to arrest every star pilot who’s done that, we’d never see the end of the bastards. You hungry?”
“Y-yes,” I said, caught off guard, as my empty stomach jumped up from its despairing doze and started wagging its tail.
Honda addressed one of the desk officers. “Mitch? Could you go out and get us a couple of currywursts from Gunther’s cart?”
Mitch glanced around, waiting for the punch line. “Er. No.”
“Oh?” said Honda, disappointed. “Why not?”
“Because . . . his cart got flipped over by a flying concrete block on a tether? When that ship was flying down the street?”
Honda snapped his fingers. “That’s right. I forgot. Poor Gunther. Will he get it back on insurance?”
Mitch sat up, realizing the role he had been assigned in this delightful little performance. “No. The company rejected his claim. They said it was ‘ridiculous.’ ”
“Oh dear,” said Honda, clicking his tongue. “He’ll have to shut his business down. And him with three kids to feed. Tragic.”
“Tragic,” emphasized Mitch, nodding.
The pair of them turned their heads slowly to look at me, nodding in unison, both wearing exaggerated pouts. I stood up, tired of the game. “Do you know who was in that plying cryopod?” I said. Maybe the same appeal that had worked on Daniel Henderson would work here.
Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash Page 24