He looked at me with pleading eyes, unable to say anything.
“Thank you for turning out to be an even bigger prick than I imagined you were. Very rewarding,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ve just knocked the wind out of you. But I’ll take this moment to say what’s been a long time coming. Denreiker, you asshole, you’re under arrest.”
He tapped his hand on the floor a couple times, but still couldn’t manage to catch his breath. His head twitched, then fell to the side, tongue hanging limply, froth dripping steadily.
Turned out I never needed a pair of vibroknuckles to get the job done. Just knuckles of the regular variety.
Rule #5 of being a private detective: Never forget that being a private detective means you are a badass.
∙ • ∙
My moment of self-congratulation didn’t last long.
As though a wrecking ball had swooped through our turf, a tower of metal Gyora-3 crates suddenly crashed to the ground twenty yards away. Dust from the crates kicked up into a low hanging cloud, but fortunately nothing looked punctured or bright. Apparently, Gyora-3 could take a fall. It just couldn’t take a bullet.
I heard quick flurry of cybernetic punches, like a jackhammer slamming on steel. Then complete silence.
“Gina?” I called. Nothing. I stood up and braced myself. I couldn’t see anything over the tumble of freight. “Gina, you okay?” Another moment passed—a timeless, anxious moment—before I heard a crunch. Followed by another crunch.
A pair of cybernetic shoulder spotlights came flying out of the wreckage, twirling like boomerangs, and skidded to a halt on the ground only a few feet from me.
Not good.
I looked over to where Gina had thrown the pipe that Denreiker was going to smash my skull with and lunged for it. I knew it wouldn’t be of any use against Ken the Super Soldier, but I had little in the way of options. And then I remembered Alice. I knew she could take down a slimy politician, but once Ken trounced me and made his way to her, she was pulp.
Some rubble shifted. Gina emerged. Her silhouette resolved into a fully realized warrior of death as the smoke cleared, her red dress shredded well beyond its job description. Each hand held a rapid-fire cannon that she must have torn clean off of her sparring partner’s shoulders. She casually connected them to her own, where her spotlight accessory used to be.
“So that asshole got these shrapnel slingers, and I got equipped with fucking spotlights? Spotlights, Alan!”
I let out a sigh, then smiled. “Those guns look good on you.”
“I know, right? Spotlights. I’m filing an official complaint at CyberOps when I get back.” She folded the cannons into her back as she approached me, picked up the rickety spotlight contraptions she’d flung to the ground, bent one of them around Denreiker’s wrists, the other around his feet. Two pairs of makeshift handcuffs. “Where’s Alice?”
I looked down the opposite aisle between the stacks and heard Alice waxing political. I couldn’t help but let out a laugh. “I think she’s releasing the frustration of the masses on one poor presidential hopeful.” I dropped the pipe. “Come on.”
When we reached them, we found Mannigan cowering in a corner with Alice pacing back and forth in front of him, wielding the vibroknuckles in her hand as she pontificated. Every time the knuckles came within six feet, Mannigan winced.
“And another thing!” Alice went on. “What the hell’s with the interest rate on school loans, huh? It’s supposed to be fixed! Well, Mr. Promises, mine keeps going up! Maybe fixed isn’t the right word. Maybe ‘rigged’ would be more appropriate, don’t ya think? I mean, they’re not even tax deductible, anymore! Who the hell can afford to go to interstellar college, now, huh? Certainly not the poor or the disenfranchised. No sir, only the lucky people who already live on the prime planets, that’s who. Privileged wealth, like the kind I was fortunate enough to have been born into. Heaven forbid we let some poor kid from a nonprime work her way up the ladder by giving her an affordable student loan.” She took a breath. Mannigan looked up hopefully. “And another thing!” Alice said. Mannigan flinched again. “What about the terraforming shortage on Desmonda? Don’t we even care about sending them aid? But no, it’s out of sight, out of mind, isn’t it? Let’s just all enjoy our holovids and crackdogs and call it a day. I swear, I—”
I walked up to Alice and put my hand on her shoulder. “Easy there, fighter. I think you can back off, now. You’ve got him on the ropes.”
And then, like being hit with the sudden crash of an ocean wave, the ship lurched. We all fell over, except for Mannigan, who was already on his ass. Alice sat upright first and looked at us. “Did that mean what I think it meant?”
“We’ve been netted.” Gina said as she stood back up. “Dammit Stenson, where are you?”
“How long have we been in subspace?” I asked. “Exactly.”
“Exactly?” Gina checked something up and to the right. Probably an internal clock image overlay. “Six hours, ten minutes, thirty-seven seconds.”
“And what would that convert to in real space travel at a standard ejection pod velocity?”
She looked to the upper right, again. Probably a calculator app. “Twenty-three months, four days, seven hours. Terran Standard.”
“About two years.” I looked at Alice. “This is where your parents disappeared.”
“Wait, what?” Alice gasped. “Oh my god. I need to sit down.” She walked over to a small box nearby. Gina went over to her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
I glared at Mannigan. “It’s time you tell us what the hell’s going on here.” He was curled up on the ground in front of a stack of crates. In the dim light, he looked like a giant piece of excrement. Of course, that may have been due more to my mood than the lighting. “What is it you wanted to come back here, for?”
Mannigan shifted into a more comfortable position. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter what you know, at this point. Your impending capture is inevitable.”
“You mean our impending capture, don’t you?” Alice asked. “Why wouldn’t the space pirates nab you, as well?”
“Because I’m the one who’s paying them!” Mannigan said. “Well, not directly, anyway. Finance reform, and all that. I don’t have much goola to run this campaign on. You know how it goes. I really did intentionally involve finance reform in my platform...” He looked at Alice for approval, but she merely snorted and rolled her eyes. He looked back at me. “Denreiker’s paying them, to be exact. In the form of this ship’s cargo, as well as the ship before it. He’d acquired their manifests, knew that between the two of them, they had what it took to create a subgate. He’d also managed to gather up the only two net amplifiers in existence. It gave him a lot of bargaining power.” He shrugged. “As a politician running for office? It made sense to hitch my wagon to his star.”
Alice just looked at him, dumbfounded. “I knew you were an asshole, but I didn’t know you were that big of an asshole.”
He looked back at her. “But it’s all for a good cause! Don’t you see what we’re doing, here?” We collectively shook our heads. “We’re expanding Parsec 17! No longer will the Edgeworld Cluster cater to the likes of Orion or Quartermast, treated as an burdensome child. Mannigan will become its crown jewel!”
Gina looked at me. “Is any of this making sense to either of you?” We shook our heads again. “What do you mean you’ll be its foundation? Why are you referring to yourself in the third person, aside from being insane?”
Mannigan laughed. “No, no, not me Mannigan. Planet Mannigan. The one that will be named after me. The secret that Parsec 17 harbors. The very place we just emerged. It’s a planet! A naturally Earth-like planet, closer in proximity to Fillion than it is to any colonized world in the Orion Cluster. It only makes sense to incorporate it into the Edgeworlds.”
Alice’s eyes got wider. Apparently, sh
e was aware of something we weren’t. “And according to Intercluster Agreement 53-B, any Parsec Representative with sudden jurisdiction over a newly discovered, naturally Earth-like planet—a prime—becomes President De-facto of that entire cluster. That is, assuming the cluster in question doesn’t have a prime already.”
Mannigan looked up at her and smiled. “Ah, I see you learned something useful in poli sci, after all. Yes, according to the precedent set forth by Core upon the incorporation of Planet Lyon into the Quartermast Cluster, Planet Mannigan would become the Edgeworld Cluster’s prime.”
“Because it doesn’t have one of its own,” I added. Of course, it made sense. The Edgeworlds were all terraformed. It was ripe for incorporation.
“Exactly,” Mannigan answered. “Listen, I know it’s all rather complicated, but the whole thing amounts to making me the cluster’s president. A great burden, but I would take on the responsibility for the good of the galaxy.” He cleared his throat. “And the goola won’t be too shabby, either.”
An alert rang throughout the ship.
“Attention all passengers! This is the Captain of the Orion Express. I’m afraid I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is, we have been netted by space pirates. I repeat, we have been netted. Breach vessels are closing on our position. It turns out that insisting on this flight through pirate infested space wasn’t such a good idea, after all.”
“Well, thank you, Captain Obvious,” Alice grumbled.
The captain cleared his throat, and went on. “The good news is that a Terran planet has been picked up on our scanners. Each lifepod has had the course for that planet downloaded into its destination matrix. Follow the emergency lights to a lifepod and eject it, immediately. There should be enough lifepods for everyone. This is not a drill. Thank you for flying Orion Express.” The captain took a short breath.
I shook my head. “Something still doesn’t add up, Mannigan. There’s no way in hell you’re going to win this election. You’re not a member of either of the two major parties. What difference would it make to you? Either Fragart or Bass is sure to win the office, and then this entire scenario would fall into their lap. One of them would make the leap from Parsec Representative to President, not you.”
“Unless...” Gina shook her head, then looked at Mannigan. “Unless that planet was supposedly discovered by you. Today. A few weeks before the election. You’d win by a landslide. Everyone in the Five Clusters would know your name.”
Mannigan smiled even bigger. “To the victor, goeth the spoils of war.” He looked beyond us to Denreiker’s listless form on the ground. “He’ll be okay, right? I plan on paying him back by giving him a position in my cabinet.” We didn’t respond. “Anyway, the pirates get to keep the majority of this cargo. But first, the engineers they’ve captured over the years will be forced to create a subgate with the primary components. Once the gate goes up, the pirates will use it to travel somewhere else, entirely—they don’t like people knowing where they are, so they’ll just set a course for somewhere ‘that-a-way’ and emerge in a different patch of deadspace.”
“Are you done yet?” Gina asked.
“I mean, they’ve had this entire planet down there,” Mannigan continued, “a perfectly good planet, just waiting to live on, to colonize, and yet they insist on remaining ship-bound and stealing things from passersby!” He took a deep breath to calm himself down. “But I digress. The point is, you’ll all be enslaved, soon. The pirates know to only leave me and Denreiker alone. They will allow us to escape back to Fillion—through the newly created subgate this time, of course. There’s no way I’m taking two years to get back, again.” He shivered at the memory and mumbled something about nutrition bars.
“So let me get this straight,” Alice said. “You actually survived the Titanic IV—the ship that my parents were killed on—and rather than tell the authorities where a band of space pirates were, you used it as a power grab?”
“It was an opportunity! Listen, I didn’t destroy the Titanic. I merely survived. This is my destiny. I’m not a bad guy. I’m just playing this out.”
“You’re delusional,” Gina said. “You teamed up with a syndicate boss who made sure this ship would get netted and ransacked by space pirates. The passengers on board... They’re all going to be killed or enslaved. And you say you’re not a bad guy?”
“A small price to pay for the greater good,” Mannigan replied. The self-assurance in his voice was palpable. There was no point in arguing with a crazy person. “I have big plans for this cluster,” he said. “My leadership will prove prosperous. Humankind will flourish. You’ll see.”
A loud thumping could be heard from beyond the megacrate, filtering through its hatch above. It sounded as distant as the hull of the cruise ship itself. Mannigan shifted his stance and brushed off his pants.
“Actually, you won’t see,” he corrected. “I forgot, you’re about to be enslaved. Denreiker and I are getting paid by the head. Pretty much the only reason we kept you alive, this long. Well, that and he insisted on killing you himself, Alan. I really saw no reason to.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
“I really do apologize. I kind of like you folks. But this is all part of the political process. It’s how the crackdogs are made.”
“You’re an asshole,” Gina said.
“Yes, so all of you keep telling me.” Mannigan straightened his tie. “Oh! Whatever you do, I wouldn’t make any jokes about eye patches or peg legs. I hear they don’t take very kindly to those kinds of things.”
Gina looked over at me. “What’s our next move?”
“Aside from shitting bricks,” Alice added.
I thought. We needed to get the fuck off this ship. Think, Alan, think! “We grab a freighter floating in the zero-g hold. Fly out of here as quickly as possible. Toward this mythical planet, if it’s close enough.”
“What good will that do?” Alice asked. “Won’t the pirates catch us before we make it there?”
“I’m open to any better ideas.”
Gina thought for a moment. “He’s right,” she conceded. “It’s worth a shot.”
I looked behind us to the pile of abandoned jetpacks just past Denreiker. “Grab a pack, everyone.”
We ran toward them, ditching Mannigan. As usual, I used the opportunity from Point A to Point B to assess the facts of our situation. Something still bothered me... There had been six jetpack mounts on the wall in the main hold. I used the sixth one, but the other five had been removed prior to mine. Five. I’d left mine over by the ladder, and there were four others accounted for here—one each for Silo, Mannigan, Denreiker, and Ken. That left one still unaccounted for. Again, we were back to bad math.
We reached the pile of packs. Alice had just buckled into hers and I was fastening my own when I saw a figure emerge on a stack of boxes fifty feet away.
The rumor of someone’s death had been greatly exaggerated.
16
Final Countdown
“Stenson!” I yelled to Gina, pointing up ahead of us. “On the stack of Gyora-3!”
Gina looked straight at him, probably zooming in with her cyberoptics. “I’ll get him. I’ll meet you at the hatch.”
“Bullshit, we’ll all get him. No more splitting up. We get out of here as a team.”
Gina and Alice nodded.
We jetted there in a matter of seconds, hovering above him on the way down to a soft landing. The final missing jetpack lay next to him. Even though Silo had cut off one of his hands, he’d managed to hold onto the briefcase. He had opened it, and was using the hand he still possessed to frantically operate a control panel inside.
The pounding from beyond the hull was becoming more frequent and intense.
Gina landed first and ran up to him. “Stenson, thank god you’re okay. You still have the distress beacon...”
“Wait, distress beacon?” I asked. “Did you say distress beacon? That’s what the briefcase is? Like Loche’s coffee maker?”
“Loche’s coffee maker was a beacon?” She thought about it for a second. Closed her eyes. “Of course, that makes sense, now.”
“Didn’t want to tell you. Thought at the time we’d accidentally destroyed our ticket out of this mess.”
“No matter. This is another one. The Plan B I’d mentioned. It’s CyberOps tech, ready to transmit our real space location directly to SpaceFleet. They’ll find us.”
Probably not soon enough, I thought. It could take days for them to receive the signal, even more to close the distance.
She looked back at Stenson and smiled. “I knew you’d come through for us, Stens.” He didn’t look up. The suitcase suddenly latched onto the top of the metal crate full of Gyora-3 with some kind of electromagnetic seal. He hit a final button, and the mechanism lit up.
“There,” he said. “It’s activated. Now all we need to do is hold out, baby.” It was the first time I’d heard the blond agent with the perfect jawline actually say anything. The guy spoke with the gravitas of Charlton Heston. He could probably read you the manual for a terraformer machine and it would sound seductive. Alice swooned. I rolled my eyes. “What’s your next gameplay?” he asked with a surplus of testosterone.
“We’re heading for a freighter in the main hold. Booking to a nearby planet.”
“Count me in.” His eye glinted with the supreme confidence of an alpha male as he stood, broad shouldered and proud. This was probably the first time he’d heard of the planet that Mannigan just spilled the beans on, but he was willing to go with it, his trust in Gina implicit and complete.
Murder on the Orion Express Page 16