Xenotech What Happens: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 3)

by Dave Schroeder

  “You might say that,” I said.

  “An’ I did,” said Roger Joe-Bob. “Now let’s git a move on, pardners. Follow me.”

  We trailed behind the Pyr as he led us along a brightly painted, well-lit hall. The floor looked like some sort of marble and an excellently executed pair of morphic murals showing Orishens in their butterfly-like adult forms flitting about graced the walls. Private aviation was a lot more elegant than flying commercial airlines. When we walked down the ramp and boarded Roger Joe-Bob’s private jet, the elegance level went up another notch.

  The first thing I noticed was that the passenger compartment of the plane wasn’t a typical claustrophobic narrow tube. It was smaller version of the wide body style that allowed commercial airlines to cram in nine seats across, but here there were just four in each row. There were also Pyr support cradles and a set of morphic chairs that I expect would be able to conform to Pâkk, Tigrammath and Nicósn forms. Dauushans and Tōdons used modified cargo planes with rear loading ramps.

  The plane’s interior was paneled in polished Nicósn bogwood—it’s more beautiful than it sounds. Trees buried in Nicósn bogs for a few human generations have some of their internal structure replaced by minerals that sparkle like gemstones when they’re turned into veneers. The walls glinted with sparks of light like stars twinkling in a dark sky. I was still taking in the polished gold trim on the full bar along a back wall when my attention was drawn to movement at the front of the plane.

  A female Pyr wearing a white aviator’s scarf wrapped around her pyramidal form, just below her eyes, came bustling down the middle of the cabin. Unlike most Pyrs, she didn’t glide along on her mobility cilia, she moved in a sort of vertical wave that made her seem to bounce with energy and excitement.

  “Mimi!” said Roger Joe-Bob. “Meet Jack ’n’ Poly!”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, giving half a bow.

  “Me, too,” said Poly, repeating my motion.

  “Amelia ‘Mimi’ Earhart, aviatrix, at your service,” said Mimi.

  She didn’t bow—Pyrs don’t bend that way—but she did wave a friendly tentacle at each of us. Mimi was an inch or so shorter than Roger Joe-Bob but seemed more substantial, somehow. It must be because female Pyrs have four sides, while males have only three.

  “There’s plenty of room for you here,” said Mimi, indicating the passenger cabin with a sweep of another tentacle, “but y’all are welcome to join us in the cockpit if you’d prefer.”

  “I sure would,” said Poly.

  “That sounds great,” I said. “I’d love to watch you fly this sweet thing.”

  “It’s almost as sweet as my Mimi,” said Roger Joe-Bob.

  “He says that to all his pilots,” said Mimi. The top third of her body was starting to look a little red.

  “How many pilots do you have?” I asked Roger Joe-Bob.

  “Just Mimi,” he said. The two of his mouths I could see were smiling.

  I stowed our bags in a locker across from the bar in the back of the passenger compartment and thought about my little friend who usually lived in my backpack.

  This morning, I’d asked Chit if she wanted to come with us to Las Vegas, but she’d said she preferred to stay in Atlanta and binge-watch all four seasons of legislative Monkey Trials from Kansas on SLN. I didn’t tell her that they’d been stuck for most of season three trying to figure out if Bishop Ussher had been wrong and the world was actually created in 4005, not 4004 B.C. She hated spoilers. I hoped she’d enjoy her downtime.

  I walked forward to join Poly, Roger Joe-Bob and Mimi in the cockpit.

  The nose of the plane was wide enough to have room for side-by-side Pyr support cradles. Two Orishen morphic chairs were behind them and a little closer to the walls, so there was still good forward visibility. The Pyrs slid onto their cradles and triggered the mechanism that gripped their broad bases so they wouldn’t bounce around if we ran into turbulence. Poly sat behind Mimi and I sat behind Roger Joe-Bob. Our morphic chairs sensed that we were humans and adapted their shapes to fit our forms. Instead of seat belts it felt like I was getting a hug from a carpenter ant’s mandibles.

  Mimi and Roger Joe-Bob were focused on pre-flight checklists, so I leaned over and whispered to Poly.

  “Do you fly?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It beats walking.”

  “No, do you have a pilot’s license?”

  “Oh,” she said, her eyes twinkling like the fancy paneling. “Why didn’t you say so? I have a private pilot’s certificate and an instrument rating from the FAA, plus a lighter-than-air certificate from the Helium Institute.”

  “You were at the Helium Institute?” I said. “When?”

  “Back in 2022,” she said. “It was my first certificate. Mom wanted me to be her chauffeur on Fthtipthi.”

  “The planet with the gas bag aliens?”

  “Uh huh. I met some of the nicest beings there. The Fthtipth are really lovely and great to be around when they’re not feeding on float plants high in sulfur compounds.”

  I wrinkled my nose. I could just imagine what happened when aliens whose bodies were largely bags of hydrogen gas added sulfur to the mix.

  “How about you?” asked Poly.

  “I was at the Helium Institute a few years after you were there,” I said. “It was my second certificate, not my first. My step-dad taught me to fly in the Alaskan bush and I fell in love with it.”

  “To think we could have met among the topless towers of Helium…” said Poly wistfully.

  “It’s time to launch a thousand ships,” I said.

  “Or at least this one,” said Mimi from the seat in front of Poly. “Make sure your seat belts are fastened, y’all. It’s time to hoedown.”

  I glanced at Poly. She was being hugged by her own morphic seat’s mandibles.

  “We’re both secure,” I said to Mimi. “What runway are we using?”

  “Runway?” said Mimi. Her voice had a humorous overtone from blending the word using two of her four mouths.

  “We don’t need no stinkin’ runway,” said Roger Joe-Bob.

  Mimi waved a tentacle at him and Roger Joe-Bob pushed four throttles between their support cradles halfway forward. The plane vibrated a little and gently lifted vertically off the stretch of concrete where it had been parked. A screen to Roger Joe-Bob’s right showed line-art versions of four congruency-powered engines rotated into their down position. We kept rising until we were five hundred feet up, then the two engines on either side of the plane’s tail rotated ninety degrees and started pushing us. A few seconds later, the engines under the wings did the same and we began making good time heading west toward Las Vegas.

  “Sweet,” said Poly. “What is this plane? I thought I knew all the models Gulfstream makes and this isn’t one of them.”

  “It’s a custom job,” said Mimi. “He calls it the Horus One, after the hawk-headed Egyptian god.”

  “No, my dear, that’s what you call it,” said Roger Joe-Bob. “I call it the Screaming Mimi.”

  He put the plane through a series of acrobatic maneuvers, starting with a barrel roll, then moving into a pair of Immelmann turns that increased their altitude by two thousand feet. Mimi kept a placid expression and didn’t acknowledge the plane’s gyrations. Poly and I held our hands above our heads like we were on a roller coaster and shouted, “Wheeeee!”

  “Someday I’m going to get a scream out of you, darlin’,” said Roger Joe-Bob.

  “Dream on,” said Mimi, smiling. She took the controls. “My turn.”

  Roger Joe-Bob retracted the tentacles he’d been using to steer the plane and left the driving to the aptly named Amelia Earhart. He flicked a switch on the console to his left and the fasten seat belt indicator went off above our seats.

 
“Now that the copilot has turned off the fasten seat belt sign please feel free to move around the cabin,” said Roger Joe-Bob in a affected pilot-announcer’s voice. “Our flight time this afternoon is two hours and forty-five minutes and the weather at our destination is a balmy eighty-five degrees under sunny skies with winds out of the northwest at four miles per hour. It should be a perfect day.”

  Poly and I clapped to show our appreciation for his performance. Roger Joe-Bob raised two tentacles above his head as if he was signaling a touchdown.

  “Let’s head back and get ourselves a sarsaparilla,” said Roger Joe-Bob, disengaging his seat restraints.

  Poly and I followed Roger Joe-Bob to the bar at the back of the corporate jet and popped four bottles of craft-brewed root beer. Roger Joe-Bob took one of them up to the cockpit for Mimi.

  “This is good stuff,” said Poly, moving the bottle back and forth under her nose and inhaling the root beer’s spicy bouquet.

  I took a swig from my bottle and nodded my agreement. I still preferred Diet Starbuzz, but this stuff was pretty good. I wondered if it came in diet?

  “Have you ever been to Vegas?” I asked Poly.

  “No, have you?” she replied. “Mom was always too busy visiting other planets to take me to terrestrial tourist spots.”

  “You mean you haven’t been to Disney World, either?”

  “No.”

  There was a lot of emotion packed into that single syllable. Poly may have recently reconciled with her mother, but she was still holding plenty of pain inside.

  “Las Vegas is sort of like Disney World, but for adults.”

  “I know,” said Poly enthusiastically.

  The dark cloud on her face had lifted quickly. Now her expression was sunny again.

  “I can’t wait to hit the Strip.”

  “What do you want to see?” I asked.

  “Everything!” said Poly.

  “We’ve only got half a day before GALTEX starts.”

  “Then we’ll have to hit the ground running.”

  * * * * *

  Our suite at the Grand Pyridian exceeded the luxury of Roger Joe-Bob’s private jet by a factor of ten. I’d never seen so much Italian marble in my life. Our hotel had two tall pyramidal towers—one with three sides and one with four, representing male and female Pyrs. We were one floor down from the very top, right below the Observation Lounge at the apex of the three-sided pyramid. It stood sixty-three stories, more than twice as tall as the Luxor, the original pyramid in town.

  We had the whole suite to ourselves, since Roger Joe-Bob and Mimi were sharing the larger suite on the penultimate floor of the four-sided pyramid. A few minutes of on-line research told me that Roger Joe-Bob Bacon’s company, Khufu, Limited, was a major investor in the Grand Pyridian complex. That explained a lot.

  Our suite had a large central living room with three separate bedrooms at the points of the triangular floor plan. Poly and I explored one of the bedrooms by walking through a short hall between an en suite bathroom and a walk-in closet. A king-sized bed with an opulent gold coverlet sat in a room with an amazing view of the Las Vegas Strip through two tinted and sharply angled floor-to-ceiling windows. I put my roller bag on a padded bench at the foot of the bed and gently placed my backpack tool bag in the space under the nightstand on my side. Poly put her Follow-Me carry-all next to mine on the padded bench and kept her leather messenger bag on her shoulder. She was tugging my arm.

  “Let’s go, let’s go!” she said. “I want a gondola ride at the Venetian.”

  “You don’t want to see if the bed’s comfy first?”

  “Plenty of time for that after we explore.”

  Poly pulled me up and down the Strip, from the Stratosphere to Mandalay Bay, with stops at every tourist attraction in between. She got her gondola ride and we walked through more high-end luxury brand shops than I could count. Barbara Keen, Poly’s mother, may have patronized such places, but my tastes ran more to REI, L. L. Bean, and Pyr One Sports than Gucci, Prada, and Versace.

  We had lunch at the Bellagio’s buffet and dinner at Ubercow, the exclusive Pâkk churrascaria restaurant that delivered meat to our plates until we almost needed wheelbarrows to move. Then we caught a midnight show of the Blue Man Group at the Luxor, now in its fortieth year. Since my body was still on Eastern Time, it was physiologically five in the morning by the time we got back to our suite. I hadn’t had too much trouble talking Poly into taking an autocab back to the Grand Pyridian and the two of us supported each other in the elevator heading up to the penthouse.

  We staggered into the bedroom we’d selected and Poly fell on top of the coverlet with a plop. I took off her shoes and flipped my side of the coverlet over her. Then I took off my own shoes and crawled into bed. The Galactic Technology Expo would start in six hours. With my last few conscious brain cells I asked my phone to wake me up at eight-thirty.

  Maybe Poly would scrub my back in the shower in the morning.

  Chapter 7

  “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle

  to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.”

  — Damon Runyon

  The next morning found Poly and me walking to the Convention Center for GALTEX and the resulting dirigible chase and my rescue from the top of the Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas. We hadn’t had time for Poly to scrub my back in the shower—or for me to scrub hers. I felt like I needed a vacation from my vacation and it wasn’t even noon yet on Monday.

  * * * * *

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” said my phone by way of Poly’s phone.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Hanging on to Cornell’s belt,” answered my phone. “He’s waiting for the northbound Las Vegas monorail at the station at Bally’s.”

  “He’s probably headed back to GALTEX,” said Poly.

  “Can we beat him there?”

  “Probably,” said Poly. “My dirigible is still in working order.”

  She’d moored her light blue airship bearing the IBM-EMC logo with a cable wrapped around a French Empire-style lamppost near the half-scale Eiffel Tower. EMC was growing a lot faster under IBM’s ownership than it had when Dell owned it, but right now I was only concerned with how fast we could get back to the Convention Center.

  “Go,” said Tomáso in his deep basso voice. “Get moving. Terrhi and Spike and I will meet you there.”

  Tomáso would not be coming with us, of course. An elephant-sized adult Dauushan would need a much larger dirigible to get off the ground. Fly Roller Air Tours ran a service offering heavy-lift airships to help Dauushans, and Tōdons, who were even larger, get from one end of the Strip to another without blocking traffic or putting human tourists at risk of being stepped on, but they only ran on the half hour. Queen Sherrhi had a humongous pink dirigible, The Matriarch of the Skies, to transport her locally. I’d seen it floating north of town when I was near the top of The Stratosphere, but it wasn’t close enough to be helpful.

  Tomáso was right. We needed to get it in gear if we wanted to be waiting at the Convention Center when Cornell’s monorail train arrived.

  Poly pulled down her dirigible by its mooring cable and took the controls. I climbed in and stood behind her with my feet on the lightweight tubular rails that formed the gondola’s frame. My hands had a tight grip on the back of her seat. I was sure that my van would be horrified that I didn’t have a seat belt. Once I told Poly I was secure, she lifted off.

  “We’re at the Grand Pyridian,” I shouted down to Tomáso and Terrhi as we floated up. “Three sided tower penthouse.”

  “I know,” said Tomáso in his booming voice.

  Did everybody know what was happening in my life?

  Terrhi waved her red Fokker triplane like a handkerchief, speeding us on our way, while
Poly directed us northeast along South Las Vegas Boulevard, the main artery of the Strip.

  The little airship was sluggish initially, because it carried two people instead of one, but Poly used the craft’s congruency-powered engines to good effect and got us up to speed after a few seconds. Cornell had managed to get Carcharodon System’s floating shark zooming along over eighty miles an hour earlier, even with dragging me and a banner behind, so I was pleased to see Poly was able to coax similar speed out of her dirigible’s engines.

  She made a sharp right turn and guided us through a narrow space between The Flamingo and the LINQ Hotel, then turned left to follow the route of the monorail. The wind nearly blew me off my precarious perch, but I hung on. Below me, a train was pulling out from the station at Harrah’s. Its next stop would be the Convention Center.

  “Step on it,” I shouted to Poly over the noise of the wind.

  “I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captain, an’ I canna give her no more,” she answered in a Scottish brogue.

  I laughed, but was impressed as Poly found a bit more speed by diving and catching the monorail’s slipstream. I looked ahead and saw the station was covered, not open. There wasn’t any room for a dirigible and Poly would have to pull up soon.

  “Get closer,” I shouted.

  Poly didn’t answer. She kept gunning the engines and our little airship shot forward until we were over the last car on the train. She maneuvered carefully and held us a few feet above it. I jumped, landing on the roof of the car, scrambling for a handhold. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one—streamlining and all that. I had to drape myself over the arch of the car’s roof, perpendicular to the train’s motion, and was glad there weren’t any sharp turns ahead. The monorail decelerated rapidly as it came into the station. I was glad the change in motion was computer-controlled. It was smooth enough that I wasn’t dislodged.