The dumper truck rolls into the clearing, straight over Annika.
Sam Junior winces. “But,” he says, “I’m willing to overlook that. You found the force fields, right? I can’t believe how many of them are just lying around here. Those things are freaking currency, man. So here’s my plan. We grab as many of them as my ships will carry and light out for Arcadia. What do you say?”
“Whisht!”
“Yeah, I know they can’t be reverse-engineered. But imagine how much they’d go for per piece.”
This lad’s talking my language, I think for a fleeting instant, and then Donal yells, “Fletch, come on!”
The truck’s inside the airlock. Donal’s jammed this end with the same old branch wedged crosswise. The others are changing into the spacesuits left behind by Sam’s party. Sam watches this operation with mounting horror.
“Oh yeah,” I say to him, “and you can’t use your radio to communicate with anyone outside the dome. But I expect you’ve already found that out.”
I squeeze into one of their spacesuits. Gordon covers Sam with my lightsaber while I’m doing up the seals. Donal’s begging Harriet to leave the treecats.
“The whats?” Sam says, looking at the cat carriers that, I now observe, the girls are loading into the dumper truck.
Everyone doing what they’re told.
No messing about.
Oh sure, that’ll be no problem, says Donal, ever-optimistic.
“We are NOT taking the FECKING treecats!” I roar. I jump into the truck and hurl the cat carriers out.
And I’m not quite sure what happens next because it starts with Harriet punching me in the groin, and these spacesuits of Sam’s, being fancy A-tech ones, have nothing to cushion the blow.
Sprawled on the truck bed, blinking through tears of pain, I see blurry shapes leaping over me. There’s a melee in the entrance of the airlock, some trying to get out, others trying to pull them back.
I never see who kicks the branch away.
But I’m pretty sure that one of the South Africans—Adriaan, the quiet fella, who’s always showing you pics of his kids—did it on purpose.
The airlock slams shut.
“You asshole,” Imogen hisses in the dark, to me, I assume.
A quick roll call confirms that we’ve lost Harriet, Vanessa, Jasmine (one of the Australian women), and Donal.
CHAPTER 14
The dumper truck rolls out onto the plain. According to its ponderous habit of many millennia, it tilts up its skip and tips us out.
I’m still reeling from the shock of losing Donal and the three women. Not to mention the agonizing effects of Harriet’s right hook.
We can’t go on with the plan. But we are going on with the plan, whether I want to or not. There were dozens of people gathering up bubbles when we emerged, and now they’re all around us, wanting to know what we found inside the dome, “Did you waste ‘em, Sam?” and “Where are the others?” because if we were Sam’s raiding party there should be twice as many of us.
I know I’ll give the game away as soon as I open my mouth. It was supposed to be Donal who handled this part. He’s got the gift of the gab and he can do a wicked American accent.
Hopelessly, I say, “Well, guys, I’ll give you the good news first. There are millions of force field bubbles lying around here, as you’ve discovered, and those things are freaking currency, man …”
Oh Jesus, I sound like a jackeen trying to talk gangsta.
A hulking Samite picks me up and shakes me. “Say what, asshole? Who the fack is you, anyways?”
Kenneth pipes up. “Hey, is that Doug the Shiv?”
Consternation among the Samites.
“Who’s that? Where’s Sam?”
“In there,” says Kenneth, the traitor, the survivor off the Hellraiser who we kept around knowing full well that he used to be a pirate. Thinking, wrongly, that he’d been scared straight. Believing in his ramen-eating, crap-music-loving, double-digit-IQ persona. Feeling sorry for him.
This was only supposed to be an exploration trip.
And maybe it would have been, maybe we would’ve been halfway back to Arcadia by now, if Kenneth hadn’t betrayed us to Special Delivery Sam. I see it plainly, too late. These arseholes all talk to each other on their private subreddits.
“It’s Ken the Xenobiologist!”
“Dang, man, how’d you get here?”
I writhe, trying to break loose from the enormous Samite who rejoices in the name of Doug the Shiv.
“I ast you who the fack is you?” says D the S.
“Oh,” Kenneth says, “ignore him. He’s a douche.”
Ignore, it turns out, is pirate for kick the daylights out of.
Waking, groaning, in solid darkness, the first thing I notice is I’m spacesuit-less again. The second thing is that Doug the Shiv must have practised his goal kicks on me extensively while I was out.
It hurts to move my toes.
I can hear a familiar combination of background noises—humming, rumbling, banging. I’m on board a ship.
Moaning in pain, I explore the darkness by touch. I’m in a two-bunker cabin. There’s one person in the top bunk, me in the bottom bunk, and three on the floor.
It’s like being back on the Skint Idjit, without the party atmosphere.
With some difficulty I wake the others up. They turn out to be Shaka, Adriaan, Gail (another of the Australian women) and Gordon.
Not having much to lose at this point, we shout and kick the door—actually, Shaka and Gail kick it. I hurt too much. But nothing happens, and nothing happens, and even Shaka is at the giving-up stage when the door finally opens.
Kenneth’s scrawny form blocks out the light.
Shaka growls and seizes him by the neck.
“Lemme go! Ow! OW!”
“Out of my way,” I say, trying to squeeze past them.
“Mmmph-uggh!” Kenneth pushes something at me.
My lightsaber.
“Let him go, Shaka!”
It’s amazing how one little piece of A-tech can improve your day.
I glance up and down the dimly lit corridor, getting my bearings. Now I know where we are. There’s not much room on a converted DC-100. The crew all have to sleep in titchy cabins off this corridor at the back of the ship, above the engineering deck.
“I’m goddamn freeing you, if you noticed,” Kenneth croaks.
“Yeah, thanks, Kenneth.”
“I know Sam from way back. I could have just switched sides and left you to rot. But I actually got to like you guys.”
“I said thank you, Kenneth.”
“I don’t want to work for Special Delivery. She’s the worst employer in the business. I probably would have ended up digging potatoes on Omega Centauri 49. It’s like Wales, only the weather is worse.”
I move down the corridor towards the back of the ship, rapping my knuckles on the doors. I can’t hear if anyone’s in there because Kenneth’s still telling us what a hero he is.
“And Vanessa’s stuck in the dome! They were saying we should just leave them! So I’m like, no, man. This is not going to happen. But I have zero pull around here. So I thought, OK, if anyone can handle this, Fletch can …”
This is what comes of murdering innocent pirates. Now I’ve got a reputation to live down to. I use my lightsaber to burn through the keypad locks on the cabin doors.
Out come Hendrik, Adriaan, Florence (the third Australian), Jackal, and Imogen—who shrugs me off when I try to hug her.
Out come several people I recall from our muster on the Burren.
Out comes Ruby, his make-up smeared all over his face.
And out come Padraig and Milton and Big Colm off the Marauding Elephant …
… and Finian himself.
He’s been badly used. He’s got a black eye, and he’s shirtless, his once-white chest hair matted with blood. I hope it’s someone else’s. He stares at me expressionlessly.
“I’m freeing you,” I
point out. Now I know how Kenneth felt.
“Aye, thanks, lad.”
And then he’s hurtling towards the other end of the corridor, roaring, “Old Elephants! With me! Men! Women! We can TAKE this fecking ship! Show the pirates no more mercy than they showed us on the Burren!”
Nearly all the freed prisoners surge after him, howling.
Stop them? I might as well try to stop a wave at a football stadium.
And if you thought what happened on the bridge of the Intergalactic Bogtrotter was stomach-turning, I will spare you the details of what happens when Finian storms the bridge of the Bagged & Tagged. It’s inhuman, man—as Hendrik might say, and if he ever has the nerve to say that again, I will remind him how he cut the head off Doug the Shiv and drop-kicked it across the mess. He was a well-brought-up Afrikaaner boy, private school and everything, and then he went on the Railroad. It’s desperate what this life can do to you.
It’s begun doing it to me, too. I killed those two kids in the dome. I still can’t quite believe I did that, and I refuse to kill any more, especially when others are so enthusiastically doing it for me.
I loiter in the rear, flourishing my lightsaber from time to time in case anyone’s watching. When the chaos dies down, I scrounge around for a spacesuit that hasn’t got a dead body inside it.
Finian’s on the bridge. He’s swivelled the gun turrets to cover Sam’s other two ships. Bellowing abuse over the radio, he waves an AR-15 at the terrified survivors of the Bagged & Tagged. “Where are you going?” he says when he sees me all suited up.
“Back into the dome. Donal’s in there. Give me twelve hours, a bit more.”
“What dome?”
“That one.”
He zooms the viewscreen, only now noticing that the Lost Planet has features other than the two remaining Samite ships. “That’s alien shite.”
“It is.”
“Bugger the domes. This planet’s covered in gold. The hold of this ship’s half filled with force fields already. Do you know what force fields are? They’re fecking brilliant. Best A-tech material ever.” He holds up his lightsaber, and winks. “You’ve just got to have one of these to make the most of them.”
“We did actually figure that out, Finian,” Gordon says, behind me. “We were patching the Bogtrotter with them when you came along.”
Finian laughs. “You’re not a stacker for nothing.”
“It was Fletch’s idea, actually.”
I look around, surprised to get credit from this source. Gordon’s in his Old Elephant suit, tusked helmet in his hand.
“Right, right,” Finian says, focusing on his enemies once more. “Come out of there with your hands up, or I’ll blow you to feck! Now what were you saying, Fletch?”
I have had enough. “See you later,” I say, and stomp off the bridge as fast as my aching ribs will allow. Kenneth joins me in the airlock. He’s the only other one coming. The rest of our lot are either wounded, or not interested in anything except getting off the Lost Planet as fast as possible.
It’s an evil feeling walking across the snow under the guns of the DC-100s. All three are locked down, their railgun turrets trained on one another. Finian’s already won this thing, but the lads in the other ships don’t know it yet.
I refuse to look back to see if they’re targeting me. I trudge past the poor old Intergalactic Bogtrotter. Kenneth’s far ahead of me, running to catch the truck.
I nearly jump out of my skin when two of the Old Elephants catch up with me.
Gordon.
And Finian.
“You should have told me Donal’s trapped in there,” my uncle says.
“I did. You weren’t listening.”
“I’ve known him since he was wee. He’s a solid lad.”
Whereas I’m a douche who is crap in a fight, I suppose. But I’ve only Sam’s word for it Finian said that. In reality it was probably ‘useless gowl’ or something like that.
.”He takes after his father,” Finian goes on, the unspoken point being that Donal’s father is a big man in County Clare, a managing director at the nuclear plant in Moneypoint. I’m actually surprised to know that Finian still cares about the good opinion of people back home. I’d thought he forgot about that when he cashed a cheque for $700 million.
“Do you think he’s aware of where these force fields come from, at all?”
I turn my head in surprise, and suck in an involuntary gasp of pain. I’m still stiff from the beating Sam’s thugs gave me.
“They’re made by the wee aliens in there, according to Gordon.”
I don’t recall mentioning that to Gordon.
“They shit them out! Isn’t that right, Gordon?” Finian chuckles. “The media’ll go bananas. We’ve barely wrapped our heads around the idea of growing petrol in the fields.” He’s referring to biofuel, which still carries the stigma of the pre-Railroad days when they used corn, not oilflowers from Sirius Beta.
“One’s always had the view that the Denebites drew no lines between genetic engineering and other branches of biotechnology,” Gordon says deprecatingly.
He figured it out by himself, of course, damn him.
“They drew no bloody lines anywhere,” Finian grunts.
“Quite. We still consider genetic engineering to be somewhat immoral—a view I subscribe to myself—but the Denebites had no such qualms. I believe these domes to be …force field factories.”
Finian tilts his helmet at the massive dome rearing ahead of us. “Is that smoke coming out of there?”
CHAPTER 15
The dumper truck swerves past us on its return journey to the airlock. Kenneth’s jumping up and down in the skip on top of a load of snow. He, too, has seen the smoke emerging from vents high in the dome’s sides.
It turns out that Denebite automation has forest fires covered.
The smoke from the burning trees streams upwards. There’s a roaring noise of suction. An artificial gale blows, whipping the trees around, as fresh air is pumped into the dome at many times the normal rate.
I suppose this must have happened more than a few times in the dome’s long history.
But I’m sure it’s never before resulted from human interference.
Who knows how it happened? An accident, arson, an attempt to drive Donal and the others out of cover, a Care Bear cookfire carelessly scattered? Who cares?
It must have started near here. Some trees are black spars, others are untouched. The wind’s pushing the flames away from us at a fast walking pace. A lurid red furnace glows through the trunks. I mooch along in my spacesuit, saying over the radio, “Donal! Harriet!”
Off to the left of me, Kenneth’s shouting, “Vanessa! Honey! Baby! Please be alive!”
Finian and Gordon have gone in a different direction. They’re probably searching for any surviving Care Bears of the Lost Planet.
That is what Finian was up to all along, of course, with his blather about how Donal is a ‘good solid lad,’ ‘takes after his father’—he was trying to sound out my own loyalties, to see if I’d be open to cutting Donal out of the proceeds.
After all, that worked out so brilliantly for me the last time.
More generally, he’ll have been trying to play me and Donal off against each other. That’s been his game for ages.
Well, he’ll be disappointed this time. I told him that I wasn’t up for it, and anyway, Donal already knows about the Care Bears’ hidden talents. He was with me at the historical moment when we became the first humans to witness A-tech biofactories pooping.
Force field bubbles bounce across the forest floor, carried on the wind. I kick listlessly at them, and change direction. I was heading for the lake, for want of any better ideas. But it’s an inferno up that way. If Donal and the others hid there, they’re already dead.
I am just wondering what happened to Sam Junior and his lads when chips fly out of a tree trunk in front of my face.
Oh Jesus! As if a forest fire wasn’t enough to be dea
ling with!
I throw myself flat and crawl away from the flames. I have my helmet on, to avoid the smoke, but now I can’t stand being deaf, unable to hear which way the bullets are coming from. I pop my visor and inhale smoke-tinged air.
Wheeeee-BANG!
The bullets whistle as they tumble through the trees. Time to be elsewhere.
CRACK!
CRACK!
That’s a different gun, firing supersonic rounds. I pop my head up—
—and one of those bloody maintenance robots nearly takes it off, striding over me.
The robot is dragging a hose.
I roll out of the way as several more maintenance robots pass by, carrying their sections of the hose.
Denebite Automation For Stopping Forest Fires, Part 2.
At close range, the robots launch a spray of water into the flames. I stumble the other way, thanking Jesus and Mary and all the saints.
My relief is shortlived.
I tumble down into a hollow I recognize; it was formerly full of mushberry vines. The Care Bears showed us how to harvest the berries by slicing through their stems with a sharp bit of bark.
Now it’s full of charred debris, the fire already having passed through here, and force field bubbles, which are completely immune to fire of course. They fill the hollow, and thigh deep in them stands Finian, pointing his AR-15 at me.
That was the faster gun I heard.
“I thought you were Sam,” he says, lowering his gun. Then he reconsiders. “Well, you’re in it with him, anyway.” The AR comes back up.
He thinks I betrayed the expedition to Special Delivery Sam?!?
He’s partly right, for it was someone on our crew, whose background we really should have checked out more thoroughly. But blaming Kenneth would not get me anywhere now. Finian has already made up his mind to shoot me, his own brother’s son, for this imagined treachery.
I’m almost too gobsmacked to move.
Then I do, diving into the bubbles.
At the same time I hear the wheeee-CRACK! of the slower gun. That must be Sam, sniping at us from cover.
Finian yells a curse and drops the AR-15.
I scramble for it, burrowing through the bubbles, and my glove closes on the hot barrel just as Finian body-slams me. I rear back—my ribs screaming—and hurl the AR out of the hollow.
The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 2: Intergalactic Bogtrotter Page 8