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.
“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 towards 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 lights of the oncoming ship blaze into the bridge. “Oh my God oh MY GOD,” Imogen screams. She curls up in a ball, hiding her face. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her lose her cool.
I sprawl loose-limbed in the gunner’s couch, feeling weirdly detached from everything.
Thunderous impacts slam into the Bogtrotter with the force of a car crash. Everyone who was standing up falls down, and everyone who was seated falls out of their couch.
I stumble upright amid screeching alarms and strobing emergency lights.
Donal hurtles onto the bridge, doing up his belt, yelling, “What happened?!?”
“They used kinetics,” I say. I can taste blood in my mouth.
“We’re losing power to the chain dogs,” Imogen shrieks. She’s back on her feet, hauling on the yoke, which seems to have got stuck in the hard-a-port position. “Gordon where’s Gordon HE NEEDS TO GET HERE!”
The alarms are telling us we’re losing pressurization. The emergency pressure doors all over the ship have sealed. Even if Gordon is still alive, he’s stuck in the crew quarters.
Donal calmly reviews the alerts, and initiates an emergency shutdown of the reactor.
“Somebody fucking help me,” Imogen screams.
So we all haul on her as she hauls on the yoke. What a bunch of monkeys.
Ten seconds later, the Bogtrotter swoons off the Railroad into uncharted interstellar space.
CHAPTER 9
Interstellar space in the Omega Centauri cluster is not what you think of when you think of the vastness of the universe.
Starlight floods the bridge. Every screen shows stars as bright as Sirius, amidst a milky haze of more-distant stars. It’s bright enough to work by, like reading by the light of the telly in a dark room. Not that I’m doing any work. None of us are.
Gordon has diverted every erg of stored power to the thrusters, so the inertial dampeners are off, and we’re all drifting around in freefall, saying sorry when we bump into each other.
Have I mentioned I hate freefall? I’ve already puked once.
“There’s a large gravitational attractor ahead,” Gordon says over the intercom.
He survived the depressurization of the crew quarters by whipping on the spacesuit that he keeps under his bed at all times. He’s still in his cabin, working on his laptop, which is hooked up to the Bogtrotter’s control systems.
“Imogen, can you see the object I’m describing?” he says.
“Yes,” she whispers. “It looks like a planet.”
I swim through the air, using other people as handles. The object on the viewscreen is round, dark, and about the size of my fist held at arm’s length. Starlight illuminates one curve.
“What’s a planet doing all the way out here?” Kenneth voices the question that’s in my own mind.
Gordon crackles, “I would theorize that it hasn’t been here long. A galactic cluster is a busy neighborhood. A passing star may have ripped this planet away from its sun, flinging it into space. The other possibility is that it’s a rogue planet, but those are generally gas giants. This one looks terrestrial, perhaps even habitable—which is a stroke of luck for us.”
Gordon is a master of understatement.
“We’ll set down there if we can,” Donal says.
Support for this decision is unanimous, since the alternative is perishing in deep space when our air runs out.
But it takes so long to get there! The Interstellar Railroad has spoiled us. We expect to skip from planet to planet in a few hours plus time-to-orbit. We’ve lost the knack of sitting, sorry, floating around patiently for weeks on end, in a tin can that would be a tight squeeze for four people, never mind nine, which is how many were on the bridge at the moment of the attack.
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 13