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 sobbing, 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.
Fletch’s (mostly unwanted) adventures continue in the next volume of the Interstellar Railroad series, Supermassive Blackguard.
DISCOVER THE ADVENTUROUS WORLD
S
OF FELIX R. SAVAGE
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THE RELUCTANT ADVENTURES
OF
FLETCHER CONNOLLY
ON THE
INTERSTELLAR RAILROAD
Near-Future Non-Hard Science Fiction
An Irishman in space. Untold hoards of alien technological relics waiting to be discovered. What could possibly go wrong?
Skint Idjit
Intergalactic Bogtrotter
Banjaxed Ceili
Supermassive Blackguard
THE SOL SYSTEM RENEGADES SERIES
Near-Future Hard Science Fiction
A genocidal AI is devouring our solar system. Can a few brave men and women save humanity?
In the year 2288, humanity stands at a crossroads between space colonization and extinction. Packed with excitement, heartbreak, and unforgettable characters, the Sol System Renegades series tells a sweeping tale of struggle and deliverance.
Crapkiller
The Galapagos Incident
The Vesta Conspiracy
The Mercury Rebellion
The Luna Deception
The Phobos Maneuver
The Mars Shock
The Callisto Gambit
Keep Off The Grass (short story)
A Very Merry Zero-Gravity Christmas (short story)
FIRST CONTACT, INC.
Not A User’s Manual
The alien rulers of the galaxy are pyramid marketers, and humanity’s role in the grand scam is to play the sucker at the bottom.
Unless we can find suckers of our own to prey on …
Against The Rules
Payback
The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 3: Banjaxed Ceili Page 12