A stone bounces off the sled, exactly where I was standing, with the crack! of a ricocheting bullet.
I’m safe now, for the stairs are protected by the same invisible and intangible force field that stopped the flying saucer burning to a crisp in the atmosphere. It’s much more advanced than the biotech force fields we discovered on the Lost Planet. Everything the gandy dancers have is better.
I moodily thumb my lightsaber off. It’s got a limited range of about thirty meters. “Jesus Christ, I wish I had a gun!”
“And what would you do with it if you had?” Finian says dryly.
I’m about to reply, ‘Shoot the feckers, of course,’ when I feel Imogen’s eyes on me. She was much more upset than I was when Sam killed those security guards on Treetop’s moon. She’s a vegan and all. It’s the purest hypocrisy, for didn’t she used to work for the Russian mob on Arcadia, and they murder people for fun and profit, but that’s different, or something. Jesus, I don’t know. What I do know is it’s out of sight, out of mind for her, and I know something else, too. If we stay on Merrielande, the Hippo-Arses will never be out of sight, out of mind, or out of our business.
“There are too many of them to shoot,” I mutter.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Finian says. “Apparently they evolved here, same as we evolved on Earth. They’ve exterminated all the megafauna on this continent and now they’re migrating towards the straits, looking for new sources of game. There are about three million of them. That’s according to Dizzy and Pew Pew.”
“I am going to murder those little twats,” I say, grinding my teeth.
Speak of the devil. Dizzy and Pew Pew come down the steps behind Finian.
“You said there was nothing dangerous here!” I shout at them.
Dizzy stops, holding the railing of the steps, lightly balanced on her short legs. “WE SAID NO DANGEROUS ANIMALS. THESE NOT ANIMALS, IN INFORMAL HUMAN TAXONOMY.”
“And what about ‘uninhabited’?!?”
“WE SAID UNCOLONIZED. NOT UNINHABITED.”
While we were talking, the Hippo-Arses have returned for more plunder, the brazen gobshites. There are about thirty of them this time. The others must have been hiding in the brushwood. While the slingshot hunters keep a wary eye on the flying saucer, the rest pick up as much of our stuff as they can carry.
We brought everything on the enterprising colonist’s shopping list:
Tents
Seeds
Tools
Grain grinders
Insect-proof food storage bins
Water purification filters
Ovens
A lifetime’s supply of drugs and medical kit, including immune booster shots
Radios
Crossbows and bolts
Everything’s solar-powered, of course.
A million batteries for when the sun doesn’t shine
… and the list goes on and on. I really came into my own when we were deciding what to request from the Wonder Wall. I’ve survived more camping trips on alien planets than the rest of this crew combined.
The Hippo-Arses, of course, have no idea what any of our stuff is. One of them sinks his chompers into the soft pillow Imogen specially requested, and spits out polyfoam filling. Another is trying to wear a string of solar panels as armor.
One of the hunters yells at them to hurry up.
I don’t know what he said, but I know what he said, if you know what I mean.
I scowl at Dizzy and Pew Pew, with a sinking feeling in my stomach. “Are they … intelligent?”
“UNKNOWN,” says Pew Pew. “WE WILL FIND OUT.”
Both gandy dancers raise their right arms and hum softly.
Without warning, the smaller slingshot hunter rises into the air and floats, screeching and flailing, towards the flying saucer. He vanishes around the far side of the craft and is heard no more.
The rest have watched in gobsmacked amazement, but when the bigger slingshot hunter rises into the air in his turn, they turn tail and run.
It does them no good. One by one, the flying saucer’s invisible tractor beam—the same kind of beam, I am certain, as the one that trapped our police cruiser—catches them and lifts them into the air. One by one, they vanish inside the flying saucer.
When their jabbering is silenced, peace falls once more upon the prairie.
But it’s a shite kind of peace, with our kit scattered everywhere, and some of the Hippo-Arses’ tree-bark waistcoats and plumed headdresses mixed in with it.
Dizzy turns to me. “DO YOU STILL WANT TO STAY HERE?”
I draw a deep breath. “You mean we still can?”
“YES, IF YOU LIKE.”
I think about what that would mean. Fighting with the Hippo-Arses every bleeding day, I’ve no doubt. Maybe we could teach them that we’re to be feared and avoided, but there are millions of them to five of us, and they have already demonstrated a fearless bent for thievery.
I dicker. “If we stay, will you give us guns, then?”
“NO.”
“Why the feck not?”
“YOU HAVE CROSSBOWS.”
“I only asked for those because you wouldn’t give us rifles. I’ve never shot a crossbow in my life.”
“YOU ARE SAPIENT. YOU CAN LEARN.”
A laugh, quickly smothered, comes from the top of the steps. Imogen. What does she think is so funny? The gandy dancers’ blatantly low opinion of our intelligence?
I grind my teeth, resisting the impulse to glance at Finian and see what he’s thinking. I will make this decision myself.
“No,” says Imogen, and the laughter’s gone from her voice. “We’re not staying. This is their planet, not ours.”
With that, she turns and goes back into the flying saucer.
“Right,” I mutter. “It looks like we’re not staying.”
“UNDERSTOOD, FLETCH.”
Dizzy and Pew Pew hum in unison and wave their arms. As if sucked up by an invisible hoover, our kit rises into the air and arcs back into the flying saucer. Finian and I have to duck or get hit in the head by the larger pieces of equipment. Within a few moments, the prairie is pristine once more, leaving no sign we were ever here.
But on the way back up to the local loop, I remember something.
I whisper to Sam. I’m sitting next to him this time, as I’m thoroughly pissed off with Imogen. This is because, or maybe in spite of, her being right. “Guess what.”
He turns a drawn face to me. The slingshot hunter’s stone left a pigeon’s egg on his forehead. The gandy dancers have put a white compress on it. “What?”
“I left some rubbish in that cave. A Pepsi can and an empty package of Taytos. Imagine the distant descendants of the Hippo-Arses finding that in a million years’ time.”
We crack up, shaking in our seats.
I leave unspoken the biggest implication of this oversight: the gandy dancers are not omniscient and omnipotent, after all.
CHAPTER 6
Back aboard the Ghost Train, Caleb greets us with obnoxious glee. It turns out he suspected the trick that Dizzy and Pew Pew played on us, but didn’t say anything. “So you decided not to stay, huh? Some of ‘em do stay! An’ next time we visit, coupla years later, they’re always daid as a goldurn doornail.”
He says the gandy dancers are currently ‘examining’ half a dozen species, widely scattered throughout the galaxy, which have the potential to be classified as sapient.
“They brought back a bunch of those fatsos, huh? They’re probably examining them right now. Wanna watch? It’s freaky as all heck.”
“Jesus,” I say, in a very bad mood at this point, “I can’t think of anything I’d less rather see than a probe being shoved up a Hippo-Arse’s rear end.”
But everyone else wants to see, and I trail along after them. Caleb leads the way to the lounge.
We have spent very little time here, except when getting stuff from the Wonder Wall. I thought it was queer at first that Caleb lives in h
is pickup truck, when the whole Ghost Train is his oyster, but we have been doing the exact same thing. The lounge is just not welcoming somehow. So myself, Sam, and Finian have been sleeping in the Sagittarian long-distance monowheel, while Imogen reposes in relative comfort in the back of the police cruiser. Somehow, this seems preferable to sleeping in the lounge.
And now I know why. Each of the clinical white sofas has risen up to table height (for a gandy dancer), and on each of them lies a Hippo-Arse, unconscious beneath hospital lights. I shudder. Something in me suspected that this was the true purpose of the lounge all along.
There are a dozen gandy dancers here. I’ve never seen any of them before, not that you can tell them apart. These ones are wearing white coats like doctors. They move between the tables, poking and prodding the Hippo-Arses, murmuring in fridge-like voices.
It is now clear that Dizzy and Pew Pew, in their overalls, are mere janitors, delivery-truck drivers, or what have you. This is the crew that runs things.
Mercifully, we seem to have come too late to see the physical examinations. The Hippo-Arses snore and fart in their sleep. The gandy dancers step back, and a sarcophagus descends over each table.
Before the sarcophagi hide the Hippo-Arses from sight, I glimpse the inside of the nearest one.
It is lined with five-inch nails.
“It’s an Iron Maiden!” I blurt.
“Oh no, it ain’t,” Caleb says. “It’s a Tomb of Youth.”
“A what?”
Caleb beckons us away from the entrance to the lounge, back into the stairwell. He draws us close with his skinny arms around Sam’s shoulders and my own. Maybe it’s the lighting, but I seem to see livid sparks dancing in his eyes, like the worms of hellfire that wriggle along the undercarriage of the Ghost Train. He says in a hoarse whisper: “How you figger I stay so young?”
Finian is the first to speak up. “You’re having us on,” he says, and his voice sounds old and uncertain in comparison to Caleb’s sprightly hiss.
“It’s the Lord’s truth. I’ll show you as soon as they’re gone.”
In another few minutes the lounge is empty of gandy dancers. Only the tables remain, lidded by sarcophagi, like sinister soup tureens.
“They’ll leave ‘em in the Tombs for a few hours,” Caleb says. “Fix whatever’s wrong with ‘em. Worms, parasites, teeth problems, that’s mostly what these primitives got. Then they’ll let ‘em out.”
“You mean, they’ll take them back to their planet?” Imogen says.
Caleb shows his teeth. I notice again how straight and white these are. I thought it was just American dentistry. “They’ll ask ‘em if they want to go back. If they do, off they go. If they want to stay here …” He mimes drawing his 1911, flipping off the safety. “I’m a get me some target practice.”
Finian snorts approvingly, and Imogen smiles. I am sure neither of them believes him. They think he’s taking the piss.
I meet Sam’s eyes. We know he is not joking. If any Hippo-Arses are foolish enough to stay on the Ghost Train, Caleb will hunt them down like animals, while singing along to Johnny Cash.
He is the apex predator of this tiny ecosystem—the one human who, when abducted, happened to be carrying a gun.
“Fair play to you,” I say, smiling, and thinking that I will kill him at some point. It would be safer for all of us.
The gandy dancers are out of the way but the lounge is still dim. Caleb leads us to a table with no Hippo-Arse or tureen on it. “This one musta died.” He climbs onto the table and lies down, arms crossed over his chest. “That’s all you gotta do.”
With the faintest of hums, a sarcophagus descends from the ceiling.
Caleb rolls off the table. “I ain’t goin’ in just now. Don’t wanna be greedy.”
The Tomb of Youth stops, a few feet above the table.
“Seems like some of y’all need it more than me.”
Caleb looks at Finian.
We all look at Finian—seventy-six, beer-bellied, not as quick on his feet as he used to be. He’s lost none of his swagger but it has seemed to me as if he lost something when he exchanged the pirate lifestyle for an NEPD badge.
“It don’t hurt, buddy,” Caleb says gently.
For the first time I can remember, Finian seems to be lost for words.
He grunts, turns on his heel and walks away.
This is so unusual, I’m tempted to go after him. But something else has occurred to me. I lean over the table, peering up at the nail-like protrusions on the Tomb’s underside.
“Careful,” Caleb says.
“Sam? Do those look like what I think they are?”
He’s at my side, holding the compress onto his forehead with one hand. “Oh fuuuuck.”
I unzip my cargo pocket and bring out the Gizmo of Rejuvenation. I hold it up, comparing it to the nail-like protrusions on the Tomb’s underside.
Imogen pushes between us. “Is that the Gizmo? Let me see.”
She forgot about the Gizmo amidst the excitement of the last few days. It’s understandable.
“Wow,” she says, hushed. “It’s the same.”
“It is,” I say.
Sam and I exchange an uneasy glance. When he got shot on Treetop’s moon, he used the Gizmo to heal himself. It worked like a fecking charm. Bullet wounds that should have killed him vanished like marks on an erasable whiteboard. There were no side effects, except that he looked thinner afterwards. I assume the Gizmo used up his bodily reserves to repair the damage. He’s back to his normal weight now, anyway, as he should be, given how much he’s been eating since we got on the Ghost Train.
“So now we know where it came from,” Imogen says. She stares into the Tomb of Youth, as if counting its spikes to see is there one missing. But there are about thirty Tombs. It could have come from any of them. Or it could have been part of another rejuvenation machine, made by the same aliens who built the Ghost Train, whoever they were. I think I heard that the King’s explorers found it in the Scutum-Centauri arm.
Caleb goggles at the Gizmo in my hand. “Ooo-wee. You better not let the Grays know you took that.” ‘The Grays’ is what he calls the gandy dancers, for some reason. “They would not be happy.”
“We didn’t take it,” I say irritably.
“Yes, we did,” Imogen says. “We stole it from the King, and that’s how this whole disaster started.”
“They got kings these days?” Caleb is occasionally curious about how the world has changed since the 20th century.
“Yes,” I snap. “Dozens of them, and hundreds of barons and lords and that sort of thing. You can buy yourself a title if you’ve got your own planet. That’s what I was going to do.”
“Then maybe you should have stayed on Merrielande,” Imogen says, her voice high and shaky. “King Fletch.”
She whirls around and stomps out of the lounge.
I go after her. I don’t know what I could say to cheer her up. I never get to say it, anyway, because Imogen passes Dizzy in the doorway. The little gandy dancer comes into the lounge.
I whip the Gizmo behind my back.
It’s no good. Dizzy toddles towards me and holds out one three-fingered hand.
“What?” I say, looking down at her.
“GIVE ME THE ARTEFACT YOU ARE HIDING BEHIND YOUR BACK.”
Sam sniggers. Then he says quietly, “Do it, Fletch. We just got a glimpse of what these guys are capable of. Pissing them off: not recommended.”
I know he’s right, but it still stings. What right have the gandy dancers got to confiscate our stuff?
Exactly as much right as they had to abduct us in the first place. Which is none at all. But they did it anyway.
I slap the Gizmo into Dizzy’s hand.
“THANK YOU,” she says. Then she points at the Tomb of Youth that’s halfway down from the ceiling. “DO ANY OF YOU WISH TO USE THIS FACILITY?”
“No,” Sam says. “One five-inch nail—OK, I can convince myself it’s just a big needle
. Hundreds of them? Sorry. Too creepy.” He touches the bump on his head. “I’ll let Dr. Time take care of this.”
Dizzy leaves the lounge. Soon, Sam and Caleb are requesting dinner from the Wonder Wall, squabbling about the merits of curly french fries versus steak fries. It’s as if we never went down to the surface of Merrielande, never abandoned hope of getting off the Ghost Train.
Back on the road again.
CHAPTER 7
Sam and Caleb get dinner from the Wonder Wall, and Imogen comes back from the parking lot, a bit tearstained, to join them. Strangely, I’m not hungry at the moment.
I leave them to it and catch up with Finian on the observation deck.
He’s sat on one of the benches facing the front of the train, staring out. “Here you go.” I set down a couple of glasses and pour from my new bottle of Bushmills.
“That’s the core of the galaxy,” he says, nodding at the windows.
The glow ahead of us looks like a crack in the darkness of the universe. It’s so bright we don’t need any other light to see by. It’s been like this for the last couple of days. That keen astronomer Caleb tells us it is the Galactic Bar. And we are rushing towards it.
“Boldly going where, blah blah blah,” I sigh. I plonk down beside Finian and sip my whisky. “Maybe we should have stayed on Merrielande, after all.”
I’m inviting him to blame our hasty decision on me. I want him to show some bloody leadership. Yes, I know I’ve complained about his tyrannical ways in the past, but it turns out that worse than a tyrant is a tyrant who’s stepped down from his pedestal.
“Do you know why I joined the NEPD?” He opens one huge, age-spotted fist. There’s his NEPD sheriff’s star, laminated with unbreakable A-tech glass.
“Was it something that happened on the Omega Centauri spur? I heard it was a bit of a shambles.”
“Heh. It was a fecking omnishambles. There were the lads and myself in three of Special Delivery Sam’s own ships, her expecting them back, not expecting us at all. We gave her a beating to start with. You can’t really go wrong with a surprise attack on a planet. But she had thousands of people out there. They retreated into the hills, and it turned into a ground war, and they knew the ground better than we did. Omega Centauri 49 is like Wales with more mountains, if you can picture such a thing. It rains all the bleeding time. My lads were getting picked off, and we were living on potatoes … sure it’s a thrilling life being a pirate. And I dropped my lightsaber into a river. If I was superstitious, I’d say I lost my luck at that point.”
The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: A Comedic Sci-Fi Adventure Page 33