“But why would he need a whole fleet?” she says.
I grind my teeth. “Because he thinks they’re still there, and he wants to blow them to shite, of course. And now he’s dragged us into it!”
I almost said dragged YOU into it. She wouldn’t like that. She’s not the sort of woman to want protecting. But the fact remains, if she gets hurt because I convinced, nay, begged her to take this job, I’ll feel extremely bad.
“There’s only one thing for it,” I say. “We’ll have to grab his A-tech discovery out from under his nose, while he’s busy piling into the competition.”
“You really think you can beat him at his own game,” she says skeptically.
“Darlin’, I’m a great believer in try, try, try again,” I say, smiling. She doesn’t smile. She stares into my eyes, and I stare back at her. The sunset is a golden explosion.
Donal comes up beside us. The man’s got an incomparable sense of timing. He’s too upset to notice. “So who do you think they are?”
“Who?” Imogen says.
I know what he means. Who drove Finian off A Certain Planet, nine years ago? Finian gave out he never identified them, but he was talking shite. Wankers like that plaster their names all over their second-hand Fed-Ex cargo jets.
“It’s got to be Special Delivery Sam,” I say.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Donal says.
“Who?” Imogen says, a trifle irritated.
“Special Delivery Sam,” I repeat. “That was the fella who handed Finian’s arse to him on the Draco spur. He used to be a pilot for Fed-Ex. That’s how he got the name. But don’t make the mistake of underestimating him.”
“Jeez, I wouldn’t,” Imogen says with a shudder. “I used to be a taxi driver. The delivery service guys were the worst.”
The sun completes its plunge into the sea. The sky gets brighter. It’s not dark. It is stars from horizon to horizon. It’s like looking up into the heart of the galaxy.
Of course, Planet Burren is on the edge of Omega Centauri.
What a fantastic view!
On the spur of the moment, I slide an arm around Imogen’s waist.
She’s trembling.
It’s not that cold.
Pointing upwards, she squeaks, “Are those stars meant to be moving?”
The last words are swallowed in a string of sonic booms.
CHAPTER 6
“To the ships!” Finian howls. “To the ships!”
You don’t have to tell me twice, big fella.
This must be excruciating for him. Special Delivery Sam caught him flatfooted on the ground once before, and now he’s done it again, if I don’t miss my guess, and I seldom do when it’s a matter of assuming the worst.
The enemy ships scream over and away, trailing thunderclaps as they break the sound barrier. One of them banks over the sea and I see the logo on its fuselage, painted with the same A-tech paint Donal used for the Bogtrotter’s name, so it glows in the dark. It’s the Fed-Ex logo, same colors, except it says Sam-I-Am.
Two fiery fountains gout up from the Burren into the star-filled sky. A double-barrelled boom crashes over us, sound following light.
Mother of God, their aim is horrible.
We scatter in blind panic. It looks like the ships hit were the two parked furthest from our campsite, the Bond Girl and the Terremoto. The Bogtrotter’s silhouette towers intact against the night, thank God. I sprint towards her, mindful of the cracks in the glacial-era pavement. Donal and I did a lot of running away during our adolescent years, which you might argue have not ended, heh heh. We may not be that fleet of foot anymore but we know a few tricks. I trip the fella behind me, knocking him sprawling, and five more fall over him. We reach the steps of the Bogtrotter before anyone else does.
Then hell reigns around us, ash blowing from the fireballs a mile off, the smell of carbonizing chemicals on the wind, people rushing the steps of the Bogtrotter. Donal zooms upstairs to initiate our emergency accelerated launch countdown. I hold the bottom of the steps, shoving our crew upstairs one after the other, and kicking anyone else who tries it. A couple of Spaniards are arguing violently with my admittance policy when the South Africans turn up and take over from me. No one’s getting past them.
At the top of the stairs I glance back at the beach. Finian’s still standing by the campfire, a shaggy-headed silhouette, literally shaking his fists at the luminescent sky. Bleeding idjit.
He shouldn’t be dying here. It’s not right. I want to go back for him and drag him aboard the Bogtrotter. But it’s too far to the beach. I wouldn’t make it there and back, and then I remember how he cheated me out of $280 million, and I duck into the airlock.
Gordon and Imogen are in. A few minutes later, the slam of the airlock resounds through the ship. The South Africans tumble on to the bridge. “That’s everyone,” says Hendrik, his face war-painted with ash.
“OK,” Imogen says, her voice shrill with tension. “Now I am going to show you some real flying.”
Hardly are the words out of her mouth when the enemy ships thunder back for another go at us. We all freeze, waiting to turn into clouds of radioactive atoms. Except Imogen. By the time I realize I’m still alive, I am sprawling on the floor.
“Excelsior!” Imogen cries. “Hold onto your hats!”
The Intergalactic Bogtrotter lofts into the air. I scramble to the navigation station and peer at the screens. Three fiery torches now burn upon the Burren. When a nuclear-powered spaceship blows up, it’s not the reactor that makes the fireworks. That just melts. It’s all the liquid hydrogen propellant.
The enemy ships wink at us, zooming back over the ocean. Each wink is a laser beam scoring our shielding.
“Bite me, douchebags!” Imogen screams. She yanks back on the yoke, and the Bogtrotter goes into a near-vertical climb.
Have you ever seen a third-hand Lockheed-Martin F-99 go head to head with six second-hand Fed-Ex cargo planes?
No, neither have I, for Imogen leaves them gulping our rocket exhaust. The Bogtrotter may be old, but she’s got a 2.3 GW reactor under the hood, and thanks to Gordon’s fine-tuning, the reactor can now deliver all 23,000,000,000 of those watts to the thrusters. We scream away from the Burren at escape velocity.
Halfway into orbit, Shaka remembers that we have guns. “We should give them a goodbye present!”
“Sit down, you fecking nutter,” Donal says coldly.
Two minutes later, I hear the beautiful, beautiful sound of our chain dogs clamping onto the local loop.
“Which way, Captain?” Imogen says, not taking her eyes off her screens. “Junction coming up in eighteen … seventeen ...”
Donal glances at me.
There are certain things the captain of an exploration ship can’t say. So I say it for him. “Back the way we came!”
Back to safety, back to civilization. Back to a $50 million debt, and everyone blaming us for leaving Finian to die. I should have bailed on this business when I had the chance.
“There’s a ship in the junction!” Imogen shouts.
Headlights blaze from the screens, so bright they white out the Railroad ahead. The other ship is racing towards the junction, too.
It’s on the track we wanted to take, the one that leads back to Arcadia.
“Which way?” Imogen shouts. “Captain?”
Donal gapes feebly at the screens. There’s no question of which way anymore. The only open track is the Omega Centauri spur. But which ship will reach the junction first?
“Put the pedal to the floor, Gordon,” begs a desperate chorus, me included.
Closer, closer, we’re all going to die—
Chain dogs screaming, the Bogtrotter shoots through the junction under the other ship’s nose. The screens go dark.
We bowl at top speed onto the Omega Centauri spur.
Into the unknown.
I peer at the rearview screen. “Oh, look. They’re coming after us. Isn’t that grand.”
; Donal throws me an angry look. Then he pukes all over the floor.
CHAPTER 7
We thought it was radiation poisoning, from those exploding ships, and Harriet made us all take rad pills. But Donal was the only one who developed any symptoms. A day later he’s still alternately puking and running to the loo.
“It must have been the shrimp,” he says weakly.
Meanwhile, I’ve made the shattering discovery that our crew has tripled in number.
We now have eight Spaniards on board, including Armando, the captain of the Terremoto, and three-quarters of the crew of the Bond Girl.
So much for my belief that no one could get past the South Africans.
“This big girl’s blouse,” I say, pushing Hendrik at Donal, “let them on board after I went upstairs.”
“You didn’t say not to,” Hendrik grumbles.
“It was implied, you twat!”
Donal looks up, pale, sweat standing on his forehead. He’s sat on the loo with his kecks around his ankles. “That was really fecking stupid, Henny,” he grits.
“They lost their ships,” Hendrik says, getting self-righteous. “You want to leave them to die? That’s inhuman, man.”
The smell is appalling. I close the door of the loo, shutting Donal in with his pain. “You may have forgotten,” I say quietly to Hendrik, “we offloaded eighty percent of the supplies on the Burren. We’ve got enough food and water for a month, for us. Not for thirty-seven.”
And Special Delivery Sam’s thugs are breathing down our bumper.
They’ve kept up the pursuit for a solid thirty hours and they show no sign of slackening their pace. Their headlights shine into the bridge from the rearview screen, fraying everyone’s nerves.
Shaka argues for coming off the Railroad at the next planet, luring them into pursuit, and shooting them to bits.
Armando the Bucanero backs him up. The nosey bleeder has been poking about belowdecks and has discovered that the Bogtrotter’s railguns are in working order, to say nothing of her laser batteries. We should have decommissioned all this stuff on Arcadia, in compliance with commercial shipping law, but you know how it is, you’ve got a thousand things to do and some of them never get done.
So theoretically, the Bogtrotter is as deadly as ever the Hellraiser was, and the South Africans are clamoring at me to have a go.
I decline, for the following reasons:
Who’s to say there is only one ship pursuing us? Just because we can only see one does not mean there aren’t six more piled up behind it. The Railroad is straight, straight, straight.
Special Delivery Sam clearly thinks of the Omega Centauri cluster as his private empire. That means he’ll have a ship or three stationed on every planet along this spur. Wherever we come off, we might end up trapped between them and the pursuit.
I don’t want to die.
Reason #3 should go without saying. But the terrifying truth is it doesn’t with this crowd. Be they Spaniards, Australians, or nice middle-class South African boys, there are far too many men (they are usually men) who take to the Railroad to play the game with maximum panache, not to win at the end of it. I’d have hoped Finian would have winnowed these dangerous bleeders out during the hiring process. But if he was fishing in the piratical end of the talent pool, I’d imagine it was near-impossible to find crews motivated exclusively by honest greed. Even we didn’t manage it, and Donal made it clear from the start, back when we were hiring Hendrik and his lads, that there’d be no death-defying escapades.
Funny how these things work out.
I drag Gordon down to the crew quarters— “You’ve got to get some sleep.” By an evil stroke of luck, none of our Spanish and Australian stowaways were their ship’s stacker. So it’s all on Gordon’s shoulders.
“I’ve got to stay on watch,” he says.
“No, you don’t. All we’re doing is running in a straight line.”
Back at the back of the ship where the cabins are, you can hear the roar of the turbines, a noise that always bothers me when I’m trying to get to sleep, although I’ve not had much chance to do that lately.
“How far are we going to run, Fletcher?” Gordon says quietly. “Through the Omega Centauri cluster and out the other side?”
“How big is this cluster, anyway?” It seems a good time to ask.
“It contains an estimated ten million stars.”
“And it’s how wide?”
“A hundred and fifty lightyears, give or take.”
“And what’s on the other side?”
“No one knows,” Gordon says, and he gets a dreamy look on his face. “Whirlpools? Dragons? Elephants riding on the backs of giant turtles? The Total Perspective Vortex? I suppose we’ll find out.”
Not if I’ve got anything to do with it, we won’t. I guide Gordon into his cabin. He’s got one to himself, as befits his age and indispensability. He sits down on his bed and I sit down at his computer desk.
“I want to find this planet of Finian’s,” I say.
“This isn’t a lark anymore, Fletcher.”
“It never was!” I shout at him. “My uncle’s dead! Shot down in cold blood by a fecking postman! If you think I’m going to run away with my tail between my legs, you don’t know the Connollys.”
It was a lark to Gordon, I know. Retired from his high-flying job in finance, touring the galaxy with Finian’s disreputable crew, he was having a high old time. Maybe now he’s started to see this game for what it is—teeth and nails and devil take the hindmost.
“I think you’d sell your own granny for a big A-tech discovery,” he says to me now.
Damn him and his 200+ IQ.
“That’s not what it’s about, Fletch.”
“Do tell me what it’s about, in your opinion,” I say between my teeth.
“Exploration, you dunce! Like it says on the tin! Expanding the boundaries of human knowledge. Building up redundancy for our species. Transitioning to a true galactic civilization, before we stumble on the wrong planet and push the wrong button and destroy ourselves, like every last gang of sentient idiots before us!”
It’s his turn to shout at me. I blink at him for a second, impressed by his passion. Then I lean forward. “You think maybe this planet of Finian’s is the wrong one, eh? And Special Delivery Sam’s out here searching for the big red button? Or maybe he’s already found it?”
Gordon shakes his head wearily.
“Good,” I say, standing up. “Because I wouldn’t want to destroy the galaxy on top of everything.” I lean down to him. “C’mon, where’s this planet, Gordon? You were here with Finian in ’56. You must know.”
Returning to the bridge, I glad-hand the odds and sods. “Forty-ninth exit from the Burren. We’re coming off.” Oh Jesus, am I mad? Probably. But somewhere Finian’s ghost is smiling.
Anyway, the alternative is running straight through the Omega Centauri cluster and out the other side, and Gordon may think that’s a fine idea, but I beg to differ. I’d rather take my chances on Omega Centauri 49.
I turn to Shaka. “Well, hotshot? Now’s your chance to show what you can do. Go see about those guns.”
Shaka and the other South Africans fly downstairs with cries of joy.
Ignoring questions from Imogen, I check the exit counter Gordon set up at the navigation station. The stars, and hence the habitable planets, are so close together in the Omega Centauri cluster that they’re flying by at a rate of one every twenty minutes. We’ve just passed the forty-third exit since the Burren. Perfect. I’ll let Gordon sleep for an hour or two, and then …
Armando the Bucanero, hovering behind Imogen, lets out a screech. “Me cago en Dios!”
“What? What?”
He points over Imogen’s shoulder at the screen showing the Railroad.
Twin stars twinkle, far ahead.
No. You can’t see any stars on the Railroad. Those are the lights of an approaching ship.
CHAPTER 8
The ship races to
wards us, and my scalp freezes with terror.
The Interstellar Railroad is, of course, two-way. It looks like an old Earth railroad, with the parallel rails and the crossties between them. But your chain dogs only clamp onto one rail, so there’s room for another ship to pass you on the other rail, going the other way.
It doesn’t look like there’s room, but there always is, no matter how wide your ship might be. They’ve experimented with mile-long container ships turned sideways.
Oh, and it doesn’t matter which rail you were on to start with. If some idjit is rushing headlong at you on the same rail, you’ll still squeeze past each other at many times the speed of light.
Yes, those long-dead aliens who built the Railroad were clever … but they were not clever enough to anticipate human viciousness. Or maybe they were, who knows, maybe us killing each other was all part of their master plan.
For the Railroad folds spacetime, but it exists in real space, so it follows that when you’re passing another ship, there is a picosecond of time when you’re infinitely close to it, and you can unload a broadside of laser pulses or even kinetics, if your gunnery computer’s precise enough, at point blank range.
This is why every tactically capable ship in the universe has its laser batteries on its sides.
The Intergalactic Bogtrotter does too.
But Shaka, who’d be our gunner, has just gone downstairs to prep the railguns for a completely different type of contact, and there’s no time to summon him back.
Armando dashes for the empty gunner’s couch, gibbering in Spanish.
I kick him in the hamstrings. He goes down with a crack, hitting his chin on the deck.
I drop into the gunner’s couch, enter Donal’s password, and command the computer to rake the approaching ship with laser fire at the instant of closest approach. No human being can get the timing right at these speeds, although I know Armando would have tried. He’s spitting blood, calling me a hijo de puta.
The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 2: Intergalactic Bogtrotter Page 4