“Agh,” my uncle grunts, having failed to bait me. “I’ve got to use the jacks.”
“You can hold on.”
“I’m about to piss myself. You know at my age, my bladder control isn’t what it used to be.”
I scowl. “All right.”
I undo the bungee cords I used to strap him into the jumpseat. I’d also put some plastic handcuffs on him.
“I can’t undo my flies with these on,” he says, holding up his cuffed hands.
“You can, sure.”
“No, I can’t. Would you help me?” Grin, grin under his moustache. He’s enjoying this. He looms over me in the dimness of the back. I’m 6’1” in my sock feet but he’s a shade taller even than that. It is very difficult for me to stand my ground, even though I’ve got my lightsaber in my hand. He’s had the whip hand over me all my life—the role reversal is jarring.
“Fine,” I say, and release the plastic handcuffs with the little key.
He goes into the closet-sized loo at the back. The door locks.
I stand outside with my lightsaber in my hand.
Imogen stirs.
“Fletch?” Her voice is weak.
“How are you feeling, love?” I spare her a glance.
“Alive,” she says, testing out her limbs. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Maude tased you.”
“That, I got.”
She stands up shakily, holding onto the overhead webbing. I want to go to her, but I daren’t leave the bogs unguarded. “Finian’s in the toilet,” I say. “Could you go forward and have a look at the radar?”
“Are you kidding?”
“I am not. We’re nearly there. If we can land at the north pole, that’s what I want to do, but it depends on the traffic in orbit, the satellite coverage …”
“No, no, I mean Finian is here? On board? In the restroom at this moment?”
“He is.”
She gives me a searching look. “You’re either a better man than I thought you were, Fletcher Connolly,” she says, “or a much worse one.” With these enigmatic words she makes her way forward, stepping over the slumbering Sam and picking up a bottle of coconut water on the way.
I rattle the loo door. “Finian, have you had a heart attack in there?” My heart sinks; I may have guessed his strategy. He’ll stay locked in there so we can’t make him do the radio protocol for us. Then they’ll know we’re not really the police, and they’ll shoot us down.
“Oh crap,” Imogen says wearily.
“What?”
She’s in the driver’s seat. “The fucking Ghost Train’s still here.”
“How is that possible? We’ve been away …” It feels like a lifetime. But when I add it up, it comes out to— “A bit less than twenty-three hours.” And the Ghost Train halts for 27 hours, 3 minutes, and 40 seconds precisely, every time it visits Treetop or one of its other stops. “All right, so it’s still here. Is that a problem?”
“It’ll just make us more conspicuous. No one can use the Railroad until the Ghost Train’s gone, so we’ll be the only ship de-orbiting. And I’ll have to fly right over the Railroad to enter a polar orbit. We’ll be passing pretty close to the Ghost Train itself.”
“Well, hopefully everyone’s got bored and turned off their telescopes and cameras by now.”
While I am uttering these fatuously optimistic words, the door of the loo bursts open, catching me in the shoulder, and Finian bursts out, brandishing a knife in an overhand grip.
He’s better at hiding weapons than I am at finding them, obviously.
“You’re under arrest, all of youse!” he bellows, his eyes flaming, daring me to try and take the knife off him.
It’s only a measly little pocket-knife.
I daren’t use my lightsaber in this enclosed space. The risk of killing someone, or piercing the hull, is too great.
So the instant Imogen screams, pulling Finian’s gaze away, I charge him with my head down. I grab his wrist and head-butt him in the solar plexus.
We wrangle back and forth across the cabin, and step on Sam, who wakes up with a panicked shout.
I trip.
And somehow, I don’t know how, the knife goes flying out of Finian’s hand, passes an inch above Imogen’s head, and sticks in the windscreen.
It’s a metalforma knife.
Metalforma can cut through anything.
Even rad-hardened, impact-resistant, triple-layer spaceship window glass.
Having done its damage, the knife falls out of the windscreen, leaving a silver crack across the face of Treetop. I hear the thin shriek of escaping air.
There goes my last shred of optimism.
CHAPTER 17
Air whistles out through the hairline crack in the windscreen. Imogen’s hair flies out horizontally. An empty tub of hummus hits me in the face, and that gives me an idea. I struggle out of Finian’s slack grasp and scramble into the passenger seat. I left the blanket I was using to keep warm stuffed down the side of the seat. I slap it over the windscreen.
Mercifully, the shriek of escaping air falls silent.
The blanket covers half the windscreen, gradually getting sucked into the crack
“I can’t see,” Imogen screams.
She doesn’t need to see out of the windscreen. She’s got the instruments. I slide onto the floor and dig around in the litter, searching for Finian’s knife. I heard it fall. Christ, it’s a mess down here. Cops are almost as bad as taxi drivers.
“You’re under arrest, Ms. Kincaid,” Finian snarls. “Surrender control of this cruiser immediately, by order of the NEPD.”
He’s leaning between the seats, waving his badge in Imogen’s face. I wonder if the NEPD really know what they’ve got here? Giving a sheriff’s badge to a man like this is asking for wrongful death lawsuits.
He’s cold-cocked Sam and all.
My hand closes on the hilt of his knife. Not the blade, thankfully. I hold it up, keeping it out of his reach. “Is this NEPD issue, Finian?”
I know it’s not. Metalforma is illegal on Earth, for good reason. I shove it into an unneeded part of the dashboard.
“We’ll drop you off along the way,” I tell him. Maybe in deep space. The NEPD can thank me later.
Never one to back down when threatened, my uncle sneers, “All that effort, just for a shite wee Krell artefact that you broke to pieces, anyway.”
I’m sick of his patronizing attitude. Recklessly, I pull the Gizmo out of my Speedos. It’s a relief not to have it digging into me anymore. I unwrap it from my underpants and hold it up. “Nope, Uncle. All that effort was for this.”
“Jesus fuck, is that what I think it is?” Finian exclaims.
Sam stirs. Blood glistens at the corner of his mouth. “Lemme see,” he croaks.
Leaning back against the dashboard, I hold the Gizmo out of reach of grabby hands. I glance out the window on my side, which is oriented towards Treetop. The surface of the planet looks like a round ceiling. Tree canopies are dark green rosettes, as if the whole planet were done in plaster and painted green. There are several vehicles rising into orbit. They’re probably responding to our arrival. And we’ve got to fly all the way to the north pole, and land without being noticed.
“We’re screwed,” Imogen weeps.
It is looking a bit that way.
I hold up the Gizmo. If we’re about to be captured, I may as well get a good gloat in first. “You never found anything this valuable, did you, Finian? I’ll tell you why. You weren’t looking in the right places. Alien planets! The far reaches of the Railroad!” I make a rude noise. “The exploration industry’s a game for losers, Finian. It’s rigged against the little guy. We made two of the best finds of the last decade and we ended up as skint as ever. So I finally figured out the right place to look: in the reverse-R&D lab of a trillionaire’s holiday house.”
Finian stares at me, jaw sagging.
Did I say anything that shocking?
Imogen’s sobb
ing, stamping on the pedals, swinging the yoke all over the place.
Actually, it is possible that Finian is not staring at me, but at something behind me.
I turn around to look out the windshield.
Well, that is quite a view.
We’re about to deorbit past the local loop of the Railroad. Every habitable planet has a loop around it at an altitude of 9,000 miles, give or take, and we’re coming up on that now. Since we’ve got no chain dogs on this cruiser, nothing to clamp on with, the Railroad will literally be immaterial to us; we’ll just sail past it. But it looks like a rope across the universe, one of those A-tech ones they hang at the entrance of nightclubs, that give you a shock if you touch them. This far and no further, dirtwad.
And on that glimmering double arc, directly ahead of us, sits the Ghost Train.
We call our Railroad-capable vehicles ships, because that’s what they are. Spaceships, equipped with nuclear thermal drives, for getting into orbit and down again.
But the Ghost Train never leaves the Railroad, so I suppose it doesn’t need a conventional drive, although what do I know? What does anyone know about it? Only that it looks like an old-fashioned steam locomotive, pulling a string of capsule-style carriages joined by concertina locks, as if convergent evolution applied to machines as well as carbon-based species, which it does in the broad sense, for didn’t every alien empire go through a sticks-and-stones age, then an industrial age, then an information age, and finally a space age, before smearing itself across the windscreen of the galaxy?
So maybe it’s no great wonder that one of these civilizations built a train which can not only make a circuit of the galaxy every two years for umpty million years, but possesses an ability our ships do not, which is the power, once on the Railroad, to stop.
“I wish the bloody thing would hurry up and leave,” I say uneasily.
“It’s waiting for us!” Imogen sobs. “It thinks we’re getting on board!”
“Well, it’s wrong, isn’t it? Go that way, we’re going to pass too close to it.”
Imogen jiggles the cruiser’s controls in a panic.
“Everything’s dead! It’s not responding!”
“It’s sucking us in,” Sam says brokenly. “My mom knew a guy this happened to.” He’s crying. “I don’t want to die!”
The Railroad fills the sky. The Ghost Train looms overhead, the size of several oil tankers joined end to end. We’re drifting towards the boxcar, well, the bit on the end, anyway. I stare at the fractal steel tangle of its undercarriage. Sparks of unholy coloration and lurid intensity wriggle in there. It’s like a metal coral reef in deep space.
Finian lunges between the seats and seizes the yoke from Imogen. He pushes it hard over, trying to slew us around. This has zero effect.
We rise up alongside the boxcar. Its side melts away like mist, and as we float inside. I see that the floor is littered with vehicles ranging from Silicon People gravsleds to bicycles, fact o’ God, and several classical Area 51-style flying saucers.
I turn to stare desperately out of my window.
All that’s out there is blackness.
Treetop has already vanished.
The police cruiser floats in. The wall opaques behind us. There is no sensation of motion, but we all know how the Ghost Train behaves, anyway.
SUPERMASSIVE BLACKGUARD
CHAPTER 1
Everyone says you should stay well away from the Ghost Train. I thought a couple of hundred miles would be far enough. But the bloody thing’s got some kind of monstrous invisible effector field. Our ship is trapped, and we’re being sucked inexorably towards the train.
It’s the size of several oil tankers joined end to end, clamped onto the Interstellar Railroad with a thousand chain dogs, like a silver caterpillar on an infinitely long twig. I stare at the fractal steel tangle of its undercarriage. Sparks of unholy coloration and lurid intensity wriggle in there.
Well. We would probably have been shot dead the moment we set foot on Treetop, anyway. We’re in a stolen police cruiser, and I’ve got a stolen A-tech artefact worth billions stuck down my swimming togs.
I stuffed it in there to have my hands free for my lightsaber. As if there’s any way I could possibly fight this.
The wall of the Ghost Train fades like mist, and we drift helplessly inside.
This is the end carriage of the Ghost Train, the caboose I suppose, and it’s huge, as long as two football fields. It looks like a vast parking lot. We’re still under the control of the mysterious force that sucked us in here. Imogen, my partner in crime, is sitting in the driver’s seat, but she’s obviously not piloting the cruiser. She’s got her hands clamped over her face and she’s crying quietly.
I pat her shoulder. She shakes my hand off.
I gaze out of the window. The floor is packed solid with vehicles ranging from Silicon People gravsleds to bicycles, fact o’ God, and several classical-style flying saucers.
We land as lightly as a feather in a parking space exactly the right size for the police cruiser.
For a moment we all sit in silence.
Breathe, Fletch. Breathe.
We’re not the first people to board the Ghost Train in the forty-odd years since humanity began to explore the Interstellar Railroad. The Ghost Train makes a circuit of the galaxy every two years, you see. No one knows where it comes from, or who built it. There are these automated maintenance entities that came with the Railroad—we call them gandy dancers, and maybe they know something about the Ghost Train, but they aren’t talking. It is thought they can’t talk.
What we do know is that not one of the poor souls who’ve boarded the Ghost Train in the past has ever returned.
I try to recall if we’re the first ever to board the Ghost Train by accident.
There are four of us. Myself and Imogen, and then there’s Sam, who helped us rob the King of Treetop. He’s the son of a notorious female pirate who’s currently in jail on Earth. The fourth member of our unwilling crew is my uncle Finian Connolly. He used to be a pirate, too. Now he’s a sheriff in the Near Earth Police Department. The police cruiser is his. We took it without his permission, needless to say. He’s a bloodthirsty old bastard.
Now he’s crouched behind the cockpit, looking haggard and afraid, pulling on one end of his white moustache.
Imogen breaks the silence, mumbling, “Our Father who art in heaven …” I never knew she was a believer. I’m a Catholic myself. Save us from the fires of hell, and the trains of long-dead aliens.
I take a deep breath, lean across Imogen, and peer at the exterior sensor readout. It says the parking lot is pressurized at exactly one Earth atmosphere.
Here goes nothing. I release the pressure seals.
My ears pop.
A grin spreads across my face.
“Right, we’re not dead yet. That’s something.”
I open my door. It crunches into the side of the vehicle next to us. Squeezing out, I see that this vehicle is a Denebite star shuttle. Its shovel-nose juts over the aisle in front of the police cruiser. Jesus, no one’s ever found an undamaged one!
And on the other side of the cruiser is a Sagittarian monowheel, like a paddlewheel steamer glued on top of a giant gray duvet. Its decorative horns claw towards the bright white lights in the ceiling. The Sagittarians were great ones for putting horns on everything.
My grin gets wider. The old excitement is tickling at my brain. The thrill of the A-tech hunt. The elation of discovery. It’s like adrenaline, you know, what the ancient Celts called the berserker madness. It can keep you going when any rational man would be curled up weeping in a corner.
There’s music playing.
Patsy Cline, actually. I Fall to Pieces.
My grin gets a bit strained, but I urge Imogen out of the cruiser. “Come on love, on your feet.”
Finian squeezes out of the rear passenger-side door—it’s the only one that will open all the way. He stares around, mentally valuing everything we
see, if I know him. He may have put on an NEPD uniform, and shaved off the Old Testament beard he used to sport, but he hasn’t changed that much.
Sam is ahead of us all. He’s already halfway up the side of the star shuttle. It’s not quite undamaged. Holes in the hull, which appear to have been punched out by large slugs, make handy footholds. Sam balances twenty feet up, peering into the portholes.
“There are skeletons in there,” he says, pop-eyed.
Well, that’s grand news. I force a confident tone. “There could be other stuff around the place. It’s huge. Let’s explore properly.”
Imogen sinks down on her heels with a sigh, propping her back against the cruiser’s hubcap and wrapping her arms around her knees.
“Well, I am an A-tech scout,” I say, spreading my arms. I used to be, anyway, before I turned to crime.
“Talking of A-tech,” Finian says, showing his yellow snaggleteeth. “Did youse see those flying saucers? I’m going to have a look at those.”
I grit my teeth, watching him stroll off. Nothing about the wisdom, or unwisdom, of splitting up in a place like this. Not even a see you later.
“Ah well.” I turn to Sam. “Let’s go this way.”
“No, let’s go towards the back of the train.”
“This is towards the back of the train, idjit.”
We argue pointlessly about this for a few minutes and then set off in the arbitrary direction I chose, as opposed to the arbitrary direction Sam chose. At least it made Imogen laugh, although her laughter dies very quickly behind us. She said she would lock herself in the police cruiser until we return.
My steps echo on the deck, which seems to be made of corrugated iron, except it can’t be or it’d have rusted. Sam’s footsteps angle off to my right.
I walk between spaceships from every galactic civilization known to man, and some I cannot place at all. All the aliens are dead, and have been for millions or billions of years. Each species in its turn flourished, expanded, colonized, and then ran into another species that finished it off, or else obliterated itself through some combination of stupidity and planet-busting weapons. Humanity is now the only sapient species in the galaxy. We have found plenty of A-tech in our explorations, and thousands of people have got rich reverse-engineering it, but everything we find is old, old, old.
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 30