The ship landed rather inelegantly—as if Peter and Pippa were distracted by something—but once the floor had stopped vibrating and our chairs had stopped moving around the room like a slow barn dance, the ship was at rest on the floor of the docking bay. After a second, the background hum of the engine ceased, the kind of white noise that’s only noticeable after it stops.
“Right,” I said, leaning forward. “Here’s the plan. Before they come back—”
The cockpit door swished open and our captors returned, Pippa holding her blaster and Peter holding mine. They were each covering us with one hand while warming their other hand in each other’s back pocket.
“Okay, never mind,” I muttered, leaning back again.
The four of us were escorted from the ship and across the docking bay by the happy couple, who it seems also understood the importance of staying out of grabbing range. From what I could gather, this appeared to be a fairly standard take-them-to-our-leader scenario, but the process was slowed down considerably by Peter and Pippa greeting every single person we passed, on infuriatingly cheerful first-name terms.
Warden walked just ahead of me. She was looking all around, scrutinizing the details and no doubt finding ways to work them together into some scheme to completely ply me over.
I glanced back at the kids. Jemima walked head bowed, seemingly embarrassed with a dash of good old-fashioned fear, but Daniel, still gagged, seemed to have nothing but fascination for our surroundings.
We moved straight from the docking bay to an enormous area with ceilings as high as a cathedral, and it took me a moment to shake off my preconceptions of pirate stations and realize that it was intended to look very much like a spaceport concourse.
There were troughs with plastic plants. Benches. Clear signage indicating directions to the toilets and exits. The walls were lined with several levels of shops, although most of them were still under development. Darkened shop windows half obscured various arrangements of stepladders and protective plastic coverings. Most of them had a prominent sign out front, bearing the words Your Business Here in garish red lettering.
So that was one way it differed from Ritsuko spaceport, and the other was that it wasn’t lined with endless rows of out-of-work charter pilots trying to solicit work. The pilots were there, but they were happy. They swarmed about the place with purpose, chatting, laughing, working together to build this place as one, big, single-minded family. It was the kind of camaraderie I hadn’t seen since the pre-Quantunneling days. Somewhere beneath the endless buzzing fear that I was about to be crucified, I felt the stirrings of intrigue.
It seemed like we were being led toward a small cluster of people in one of the larger nexuses of the concourse, in the middle of a wide clearing that the pirate workers were steering clear of. I soon saw why: some filming was taking place. A young woman in a technician’s overalls similar to Pippa’s was carefully holding out a phone horizontally, framing a shot of the older man in front of her.
He looked familiar, but then, there was a sort of universal quality to his appearance. He wasn’t in overalls or flight gear, like pretty much everyone else, but a fatherly red-and-black checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A middle-aged paunch bloomed out from blue jeans, cinched unreasonably with a belt.
Either his full beard had turned prematurely white, or he had mastered that ruddy, twinkly eyed look that allows older men to inexhaustibly project a younger bearing. Up close, I realized that the area around him had not been vacated because of the filming. It was because he projected the kind of presence that filled a room.
“Rolling,” said the camera holder.
The man being filmed, who had been standing with tightly pressed lips and neutral posture, was suddenly wearing a huge, winning smile and arranging himself to look like he was about to chummily bear hug the air in front of him. “Investors, business owners, visitors, boys and girls,” he said, in a voice like honey dripping off a Cuban cigar, performing various sweeping gestures to generally indicate the scenery. “Welcome to Salvation Station. An island of peace, safety, and entertainment, right here in the middle of the Black. Enjoy the mysteries of unknown space the traditional way, with real star pilots, and assured of total—”
“Plying hairy trac-holes!” someone shouted, ruining the take. Then I caught a lot of reproachful looks, and realized that it had been me. I must have reflexively blurted it out after I realized who the man was. I’d been holding the image of his face in my mind’s eye and de-aging it until the beard was dark again and the laughter lines faded.
Having already ruined the take, I figured I might as well voice my conclusion. “You’re . . . Robert Blaze.”
His expression shifted from mild annoyance to faintly embarrassed pride. Warden glanced at me questioningly, one eyebrow raised.
Robert Blaze was the person who the average nonpilot thought Jacques McKeown was. The archetype. Not some media-constructed, lantern-jawed action hero, but an ordinary, regular guy who just happened to be the greatest star pilot who ever lived. The original. The first star pilot to resign from the big transport corporations and go it alone as a freelance bounty hunter, charter pilot, and mercenary. Savior of a hundred worlds, veteran of a thousand planetary wars. But the word on the space lane was that he’d mysteriously disappeared shortly after Quantunneling put us all out of work.
My first instinct was to shake his hand, but as my arm shot out, I noticed just in time that the hand I was proposing to shake was missing, replaced by a hook. I was able to change the gesture midway into a respectful tilting of my cap, and out of nowhere, I remembered that Robert Blaze had been one of the first pilots to adopt a pet Zoob.
“And your reputation precedes you as well, Mr. McKeown,” said Blaze. The way he said the last two words was like a glimpse of a concealed blaster inside someone’s jacket. I remembered with a jolt that McKeown’s books had stolen more stories from the life of Robert Blaze than any other pilot, by a very wide margin. “Assuming you are Jacques McKeown, that is; I’ve been hearing conflicting reports.”
This wasn’t the ideal way to meet your hero, and my stammering failure to reply gave Warden her opportunity. “He is Jacques McKeown,” she said, stepping forward. “You can do whatever you like with him. In return, I request sanctuary. My name is Penelope Warden. I am highly skilled in the areas of IT and business management, and can be a great asset.”
“Oh, that was the plan, was it?” I hissed bitterly. “Nice. Great start for your new life of not being a backstabbing henchman to a crime lord.”
Blaze waited until I was finished, then addressed Warden. “On the run, then, Ms. Warden? You’d be surprised how often we get this. Half the funding for this place came from fugitives. First time we’ve ever been paid in hostages, I should add.” He noticed that Daniel still had tape over his mouth and smartly pulled it off with a single sweep of the hand. “Is he Jacques McKeown?”
“Yeah,” said Daniel, as if it were a stupid question. “My dad says he is and my dad’s really really important and he paid for all this so if you don’t—”
The tape went smartly back onto his mouth. “All right then,” said Blaze. “And are the kids with you, or are they pack-in bonuses?”
“Uh . . .” began Jemima.
“I’d like them given safe passage,” said Warden. “As part of the reward for McKeown.”
“Well, I’m sure that can be arranged,” said Blaze, speaking as if he were merely taking everyone’s lunch order. He turned to Jemima. “Assuming he is McKeown. Is he McKeown?”
Jemima still hadn’t closed her mouth from back when she’d said “uh.” I saw her glance at me, then Warden, then back to Blaze. She chewed her lip, calculating, but her eyes were apologetic. “I . . . um. Yes.”
“Jemima!” I cried. Plying perfect—as if I didn’t have enough to deal with, suddenly the Terrans were ganging up.
“Three against one,” said Blaze, smiling at me.
“I’m not plying Jacques McKeown!�
�� I yelled.
Blaze’s smile shifted into a more sympathetic one. “All right then. If you’re not Jacques McKeown, who are you?”
I launched into a summary of events, jabbing an angry finger at each of my companions in turn. “She works for his dad who’s this megarich supervillain and she thought she’d hired Jacques McKeown for his birthday but she plied up and hired me to pretend to be Jacques McKeown, then the moment we were in space she decided she didn’t want to work for his dad anymore so she made me help her kidnap them and fly us out here.” I took a deep breath, getting pretty heated, and jabbed a finger at Jemima. “And she’s a friend of his who’s waiting for the chance to have some kind of role in this narrative.”
“Hey!” protested Jemima.
Blaze had been standing with his little smile, holding his hook behind his back, displaying the patience of a saint as my words washed over him, along with the occasional droplet of saliva. He turned to address Pippa and the camera technician, who seemed to be what passed for the jury. “Is it me, or does that story ring just a little bit truer than Jacques McKeown suddenly coming out into the open and taking private gigs?”
“Yes!” I said, nodding very quickly.
“Yeah,” said Pippa. “You’d think he’d have enough money, wouldn’t you.”
“Ye-es,” I said, nodding slightly slower this time.
“Scan his ID chip,” said Warden, scrambling for a foothold. “You’ll see.”
“Ah, that was the original plan, wasn’t it,” said Blaze. He nodded to Peter, who had mysteriously disappeared early in the conversation, and had now returned with a handheld chip scanner attached to a tablet device. Craftily he was able to scan the back of my hand while I was still holding them both out in an explanatory gesture.
“Jacques McKeown,” read Peter from the tablet.
The atmosphere around this little discourse was feeling more and more claustrophobic. The background noise of construction work was beginning to sound like a flock of crows circling me in anticipation. “Okay, look . . .” I began.
“Well, that clinches it,” said Blaze, looking at the proffered tablet screen with amusement. “You cannot possibly be Jacques McKeown.”
“No, but listen,” I added, before fully parsing his sentence. “What?”
Blaze turned his back on us and walked a few idle steps away, taking in the sight of what was fairly safe to assume was his creation. “Jacques McKeown isn’t the novelist’s real name. I happen to know that for a fact. If we’d scanned your ID chip and seen any name other than Jacques McKeown, that wouldn’t have told us anything. But from this result we can deduce one thing: that Jacques McKeown is the one person you cannot possibly be.”
He turned, and gave a little twinkly eyed laugh at the looks on our faces. “I’m sorry. Forgive an old retired star pilot who has to amuse himself where he can. The truth is, I knew you weren’t Jacques McKeown from the moment you walked in. I just wanted to see who would lie to me.”
Warden’s face remained emotionless, but sweat appeared on her forehead with an almost audible phut. “Captain Blaze . . .” she said. I wondered if she was going to switch tacks immediately or continue trying to persuade him to have me killed.
“Oh, I’m not going to make an issue of it,” said Blaze, laughingly waving his hook in a way that could probably have seriously injured someone standing nearby. “You don’t have to buy your way in. Out here we take every pair of hands we can get. I’ll get someone to take the kids home; we’re not monsters. And of course there’s always a space here for another pilot.”
Having been led into what had felt like a lion’s den, I stood blinking as the lion served the tea and started talking me through his record collection. “Really?”
He squinted at me, touching the point of his hook lightly to the side of his mouth. “I try to keep track. Forgive me, I forget the name, but . . . you were Cantrabargid, yes? The Malmind War.”
“Yes!” I said, thrilled, but that didn’t seem like enough. “Did you . . . like that one?”
“Textbook planet saving, I’d say. What’ve you been up to since then?”
“I, er, was living in Ritsuko City,” I admitted. “Charter piloting. Day trips.”
He winced. “Well, that’s actually good. You’re exactly the kind of person I need to reach. The kind who needs to know about this little enterprise we’ve got going on here.” He turned and took a few steps away again, gazing up at the cathedral-sized partially constructed concourse.
I took the hint and started walking with him, and we commenced a slow tour of the station, Warden and the kids following awkwardly behind. “So what is this enterprise?” I said. “If I may ask.” I mentally added the words please may I ask oh trac I just want this conversation to go on for the rest of my plying life.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like a spaceport.”
“Yes, a spaceport. But what about it would you say makes it different from the spaceport back in Ritsuko City, or New Dubai, or anywhere else in the policed zones?”
I cast a look around, frowning. “There aren’t any Sushi Stations?”
Charitably, he considered this, head tilted to one side. “Not yet, no. But I meant more about the people.” He was leading my gaze toward a small group of three pilots, amiably chatting and leaning on a tool chest set up outside an unfinished cafeteria.
“There are pilots,” I hazarded. “And they actually look like they belong here. And don’t seem to be contemplating suicide.”
He punched me playfully in the arm, thankfully with the non-hook hand. “Ex-actly! That’s exactly what we’re creating here. A place where pilots belong. What are you achieving back there, in the Solar System? What are any of the star pilots achieving?”
“Not a whole lot,” I admitted.
“No. Everyone made the same mistake when Quantunneling started. They tried to hold on to how it used to be. Hung around the colonies on Luna and Mars because they were the hub of our glory days. But we have to face the fact that back there just isn’t where star pilots are needed anymore.”
He was right, of course. Star pilots had been essential for space colonization, back in the day; the big transport corporations weren’t well suited for navigating the perilous Black. Star pilots were small, fast operators who knew the territory best, so eventually we were couriering everything and everyone that needed to get to the outlying colonies. But then there was Quantunneling, and after that, seeing star pilots sitting on every available surface in the Ritsuko City Spaceport concourse was like seeing a magnificent new building still surrounded by rusty scaffolding.
“The answer was staring us in the face the whole time,” continued Blaze. “The Black. This vast region of space, untamed, unmapped. This is where star pilots are supposed to be now.”
“But . . . we’ve always done things in the Black,” I said. “Everyone’s saved at least one planet out here, right?”
“Yes, and nothing changes. No offense meant. We sort out a squabble, kick the Malmind off another world, but then what? Squabbles remain. The Malmind find another planet to pick on. I’m not talking about being directionless mercenaries with vigilante leanings. Or treating the Black like most people see it, like some dark patch that we just have to work around. I’m talking about making something out of it. Shaping it into our own image. A place built by star pilots, for star pilots. No disrespect, no begging for clients, and no Quantunneling.”
“Isn’t that a Quantunnel over there?” said Jemima, pointing.
My attention had mostly been directed at Blaze, with everything else disappearing into a barely registered pink fog from about a six-foot radius around him, but now Jemima had stepped into that radius and I followed her finger.
At the far end of the concourse—there technically wasn’t one, since it was ring shaped, but there was a large, circular area that seemed to be a focal point, like the diamond on an engagement ring—was what was undeniably an incomplete, spaceport-sized
Quantunnel gate. Two workers in a cradle suspended next to the unfinished horizontal beam were laying new tiles in between laborious measurements.
“Well, all right, so there’s one Quantunnel,” said Blaze jokingly. “Putting it together’s a nightmare. Did you know, it has to be exactly the same size as the gateways in all the other spaceports, accurate to at least one-third of a millimeter? Otherwise it just doesn’t work.”
He caught the look on my face, which must have been similar to the look a child wears when they come downstairs unexpectedly on Christmas Eve and find their parents eating the cookies meant for Santa. He gave me an awkward attempt at a reassuring smile.
“Look,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking. But we have to be serious. We want to be officially recognized as a government of the region, and we need trade, tourism, and immigration. We can’t do that if we don’t have some kind of connection to the policed regions.”
“Right . . .” I said, unconvinced.
“I promise you it’ll be the only one. This isn’t the only place to visit around these parts; there’re other stations. Colonies. Racing centers. Quite a few native planets. All accessible only by the traditional means.” He patted me on the shoulder and winced slightly when he caught the whiff coming off my long-unlaundered set of clothes. “Join me for dinner tonight. I’ll give you the full picture. Until then, make use of the facilities. Have a wash, find a change of clothes, make yourselves at home. I’ll see if we can get some fresh tape for the boy’s mouth.”
Chapter 17
A suddenly much friendlier Peter led me to what was apparently going to be the hotel section of the station, showing absolute indifference to any topic of conversation other than his marriage. Outside the door of one of the mostly finished staterooms he saluted chummily and gave me my gun back. I was momentarily startled by the way it came so abruptly back into my possession but swiftly transferred it to my shoulder holster before the universe noticed.
Will Save the Galaxy for Food Page 17