by Eric Flint
"Montessori, Nomlin, this is Captain Fu Tichi," said Col Shack, making brisk introductions. "And his partner, Cuspitui. They'll be taking us across the desert."
The rough fellow looked me up and down, taking special interest in my teeth. Nuts displayed hers in a friendly grin that seemed to take him briefly aback. Still, however pointy her Demmie dentition, she was clearly not a vampire, and that was apparently good enough. He answered with a wry, uneven grin of his own.
"Nice to meet you both. Any friends of Cat-ski and Cola Snack are acquaintances of mine."
"That's Coalshack," the policeman growled, stepping closer, as if daring the mercenary to make an issue of it. Holding his ground, the captain seemed willing.
"Let us be off, before the bookies come to enforce our debts!" commented his furry were-companion, in a voice that seemed surprisingly whiny, for one so large.
"Bookies? I ain't afraid of no bookies," snapped Fu Tichi. But he relented. "Are those your only bags? Then come quickly, while there's still daylight. To our ship!"
Ship? I thought, briefly allowing hope to spark. But no. He can't mean that kind of ship. Something much more primitive, no doubt.
Soon, in the cavernous casino parking garage, I discovered just how primitive.
"It's a lovercraft!" murmured my Demmie colleague, as she hurried forward, running her hand along the streaked and stained hull, stretching about ten meters in length, by six in width. Low-slung, with a single-story cabin, it seemed to levitate, just above the ground. "I've never seen one so big," she crooned. "They don't even work on most worlds! Captain Tichi, how fast does it go?"
The grizzled pilot tossed our bags up to his hirsute comrade while Katske and Coalshack ascended a narrow boarding ramp, the old man carefully cradling the finder, out of sight beneath his cape.
"How fast? Get aboard, sweetfeet, and let me show you."
Nuts sighed, suddenly happy, and hurried to comply. Though not before bumping the mercenary with a wide sway of her hip, accompanied by a coy smile.
Oh, boy, I thought. I hope we're not in for trouble. At least not that kind.
At the top of the ramp, I took one last look around the garage. Nearby, a row of oversized transports ranged all the way from grungy barges to highly-polished land yachts. Then came rows of smaller coupes, sedans and hearses, leading finally to the underground back entrance of the Golden Palace, where imp-like valets in burgundy uniforms hopped about, parking vehicles or retrieving them, greedily accepting gratuities in the form of red disks that they popped into their mouths. One more thing about this world that I found curious, but probably would rather not learn about up-close.
Then I spotted a more familiar figure, standing to one side of the doorway. Someone tall and wide and hairy.
Lorg?
The werewolf was looking at me, making some kind of gesture—reaching into his ragged vest, repeatedly, as if urging me to do the same.
I did so—
—and my hand encountered a folded piece of paper.
Oh. I realized. Then our encounter was no accident. No coincidence. He must have slipped this in while lifting me . . . and I was too distracted to notice.
Cursing my stupidity, I made my way aft, checking to make sure that none of the others were looking my way. The captain and his assistant were busy casting off and revving the engines. Katske and Coalshack were shaking thumbs with two other passengers—a young man armed with a shiny sword and a small creature who looked like a cross between a frog and some kind of lawn gnome.
I turned away from them in order to open the letter. Some flecks of skin-colored substance fell out of the unfolded page. But the handwriting was fluid and quite pretty to look at.
Sorry we had to run, leaving you in that alley.
CS was nosing about. He's dangerous!
Took a while to find you. Needed help.
We have news! Located some of your friends.
Also, Ping awaits! Anxious to discuss matters.
It finished in a sweeping signature—Sully and Moulder.
When I next looked up, the ship was already in motion, heading toward the broad exit, leading from the parking garage into fading daylight. Beyond lay a vast landscape of ravaged urban ruins, where a once-prospering city formerly extended—now a wasteland extending to the horizon. More evidence of how far from their peak these people had fallen.
Glancing back at Lorg, I saw that he had been joined by two svelte figures, dressed in bellboy uniforms, and even at a distance I could tell who they were. The closest things to friends that I had made on this world. But, as I made ready to leap over the rail—a risky drop, at this height and speed—I felt a familiar, unwelcome poke in my spine.
"You're not thinkin' of leaving us, are you Doc?"
I whirled to face Coalshack. "You don't need me anymore. You have Nuts and her finder. Let me go and good luck with your quest."
The cop answered with a headshake. And then a curt motion with his weapon, motioning for me to rejoin the other passengers. I could only glance backward to give Sully and Moulder a resigned shrug, as the lovercraft cruised ahead, exiting between wide gates.
There was a moment of tension, as a pair of ogre-like security guards gave us a once-over. Cuspitui muttered something about how Fu Tichi "should have let the bookies win . . ."
But the guards were too busy to give any vessel a close inspection. Most of their attention was devoted to a nearby picket line, where the casino's regular zombie service staff was marching—or shambling—back and forth, waving signs and pelting vehicles with garbage. And, while I could not understand their moaning chants, I could read their signs and placards, waved by weathered, crumbling hands.
CORPAMBULISTS DEMAND BETTER CONDITIONS!
FULL EMBALMING & DENTAL!
RESIDUALS ON RE-RUNS!
MORE BRAINS!
Jeers, taunts, debris, scabs and small body parts rained upon the land barge while it rumbled by the demonstrators. We all had to duck—
—till the captain finally reached street-level and turned his ship onto a once-grand boulevard, now dusty and wind-blown. The noisy, shimmering pyramid of the Golden Palace fell behind us as we sped away from the still-lively parts of Cal'mari, into long-abandoned precincts, passing between broken and eyeless towers left over from better days. Soon we were racing toward the margins of the old metropolis, as quickly as the straining engines could manage. Hurrying to make the safety of open desert, before it was fully night.
* * *
To be continued
Comments? Complaints? Wretched-awful ideas?
Send them to [email protected].
Fish Story, Episode Eleven,
The End of Mankind
Written by Dave Freer, Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis
Illustrated by Barb Jernigan
It was a good pub to be back in, even if I was being talked to.
"Are you listening to me?" The woman—she'd introduced herself as Melonie Brown, was just at that stage of consumption when the inner schoolmarm dominates.
I smiled in what I hoped was a suitably offensive manner. I'd made a bad choice of women to sit next to at the bar. I should have guessed by the wide berth around her, despite her physical charms. I'd taken the stool anyway, as there weren't many other choices, and I'm really good at unfounded optimism. "I'm sorry . . . I was thinking about fish."
Melonie sniffed. "We're discussing the end of man."
I made a moue. "My favorite subject, darling." To my irritation she didn't back off or even seem to notice. It's hard to get pissed as a newt in peace these days.
"Did you know that there is the equivalent forty tons of TNT for every human on earth, stored in the thermo-nuclear stockpiles of the world's major powers?" she said in the "we will have a questions and answers session after this lecture" fashion. (I will ask the questions. If you don't know the answers, I will start the lecture again.)
"Oh good!" I said cheerfully. "Where do I collect mine? No more complaints of s
exual inadequacy. You'll say I was the best bang since the big one," I said, cheerfully stealing from Douglas Adams. He's dead, and wasn't, I was fairly sure, in the bar at the time. They've passed no smoking laws. That means you can't hide Granddad's remains in the ashtrays anymore. (I know someone who did this at his local. Some people have the weirdest last wishes.)
Finally, I penetrated the armor of her righteous indignation about the wicked (and evil) nuclear powers. Ms. Brown sniffed. "You don't take anything seriously, do you?"
"Au contraire!" I protested. "I take fish seriously. And beer. Especially the absence of it. Anyway, who works out these figures? It's totally improbable that it is exactly 40 tons. And it must change by the day. At last, a good reason for increasing the world population. It reduces the per person risk, to say nothing of the weight of TNT our knees bend under. Now fish . . . ."
"If some mindless jerk pushes the button the fish'll all be radioactive slag too, along with all you useless males."
"Well," I said cheerfully raising my glass. "We might as well drink ourselves paralytic and say 'screw the bag limits' then."
"Don't you care about anything but drink and fishing? The end of man . . ."
"Look, Ms. Melonie Brown, it's not that I don't care. It's just you are so unutterably wrong and on the cosmic scale of things a few nukes are so trivial, compared to the way it is really going to happen."
She shook her head. "Oh, yeah. Like how?"
"I told you. Fish and liquor."
She rolled her eyes. "You really are a waste of space."
"Look, I have been there. I've seen it happen. And, predictably, it was caused by the output of female fish, Van der Decken and gin. Nothing to do with thermonuclear devices."
"And you were there. Ha ha ha."
"Well, I was, but I didn't want to be. I got out just in time you might say. Or just before time. To microseconds before, on a geological scale."
"Hmph. Geological scale. And how many million years is that?"
"Hard to tell. I bounced around like a yo-yo, dodging Gods, mythological creatures, Paleozoic monsters and the offspring of Cthulhu."
"Bless you."
"More like final absolution, with Cthulhu. Anyway, the end is coming soon, so we might as well enjoy it while we can." I patted her thigh.
She removed my hand, not quite severing the tendons. "The end would have to be real microseconds away. And I'd need to be blind drunk."
I took the hint—I'm quite good at getting those, if you apply them with a sledge hammer—and ordered another round.
Out of politeness and in gin she was foolish enough to ask, "So what do you claim will cause the end of mankind?"
"I didn't say mankind. I just said man. Women may go on. I didn't stick around to find out."
"Aha. So women survived Armageddon."
"It's possible. So do cockroaches. Or at least they have in the past."
Her eyes narrowed. "One minute you're making a pass at me, the next we're cockroaches."
"No. You have too few legs. And I have it on good authority that female cockroaches never turn males down. Besides I don't know if women did survive. I don't think they'd have liked it much if they did. Hendrik Van der Decken saw to that."
"Hendrik Van der Decken?"
"The Flying Dutchman. You know, cursed God and got doomed to try and beat round the Cape of Storms until the Day of Judgment. As usual, Wagner got it wrong. It's not every seven years. It's every hundred that he's allowed ashore. I met him here, in this very pub."
"It's been sold. I hear they're planning on a trendy wine-bar in its place," said Melonie.
"That's enough to start me crying into my beer," I said, looking at the well polished teak. "And it'd have suited Van der Decken better. He was supposed to be picking a true love."
"Trust me, a trendy wine bar is the wrong spot for that," she said sourly.
"Well, I don't think it would have made any difference. He's not very talented at picking up women. So we ended up drinking together."
"Two of a kind, eh?"
"You might say that. But I bathe a little more often, and I'm not a crusty old Dutchman with salt patches on my cap. Anyway, he spoke English of sort and we got talking about fish."
"How odd. Not about world peace or global warming," she said, dryly.
"The subject of global warming did come up. He thought it was a good idea," I said, cheerfully.
She was suitably outraged. I should get tired of playing these games, but they do rise so well to the bait. "What!? Was he crazy? It's the worst . . ."
"Ah, come on. Old Hendrik only gets to see other shipping during storms, when the other ship is in distress. And he only gets free at Armageddon. Global warming is supposed to increase the frequency and severity of storms and was supposed to destroy mankind. It gets pretty boring after a few centuries. There's sometimes the opportunity for picking up some new crew and a bit of entertainment. They got a hand-held game of Yahtzee with one of them. Hendrik said it nearly did what three centuries of storms and doing business with the treefort hadn't been able to do: sank the ship."
"You're crazy," she said, shaking her head.
"Yes, but I am buying the next round. And something to eat. So long as it is not caviar."
She pulled yet another disapproving face. "Caviar is one of those stupid affectations. And poaching is going to cause extinction!"
"You're telling me. Last time I nearly got potted by a gamekeeper. I'm a retired poacher."
"Poaching of sturgeon," she said with exaggerated patience.
"In champagne is best, I believe. But they're hard to come by in England. Royal game, officially. Or belong to Red Ken Livingstone, if they're caught above London bridge."
"I think I'll have a double," she said, holding her head with one hand and her glass out with the other.
I nodded. I still had a fair amount of the Dutchman's gold, after all, and a limited time to spend it. "And a Cornish pasty. They have carrots and peas and, if you're going bark at the great white telephone later, it's always wise to have some recent carrots and peas. You go on throwing up until there is at least one carrot and three peas in the bowl. It is one of those immutable laws of physics. And besides the carrots and peas, a Cornish pasty may have almost anything in it, except caviar."
"Okay, so why the obsession with caviar?" She seemed more willing than most to stick with the subject.
"It's more of a violent dislike than an obsession. It's the way the world is going to end. In Beluga caviar. It's a horrible way to go."
She raised an eyebrow. "Better than thermonuclear fire?"
"That would be quicker, so long as they do a proper job. Drowning in caviar has the side effect of certain death with the smell of fish-oil."
"Okay. I grant you fish oil. Death by fish oil should be reserved for specially deserving cases. Anyway, I thought Beluga were whales."
"Nope. Totally unrelated. Beluga sturgeon are supposed to be the biggest bony fish known to be alive. Eighteen or nineteen feet long, and about two and a half tons. You get them in the rivers that run into Caspian and Black Sea. And the Adriatic, I believe. Van der Decken claimed his encounter was in the Black Sea. He sailed the seven seas. Or somewhere close to them. I'm not sure that they're our seven seas. Anyway, I've seen bigger fish since. "
"With bigger teeth."
"Not hard. Sturgeon don't have teeth. They swallow their prey whole."
"The dangerous, toothless prey of man, the conqueror!"
"Yep. And if it happens to be a female toothless victim at the right time of year . . . more than a million dollars worth of victim. Top quality and retail, of course. It'd only be worth about 60 thousand dollars in Kazakhstan. I went fishing with Van der Decken for money, not trophies. And if I'd been sober, not even for a million dollars. But somehow I got talked into drinking Kopstoot. You know, iced Dutch gin and . . ."
"Lager. You poor sick man!" Melonie Brown, for the first time, looked almost approachable. She'd obviously ex
perienced this. It was amazing what shared experience of horror could do.
"Yeah, I was broke and he was buying . . . and talking about fish that could solve all my financial problems see. I am surprised I could stand upright, let alone think. It did leave me capable of wandering off the sea at two in the morning, following a villainous old Dutchman. And that's how I ended up like this."
I paused. "You see, Van der Decken's ship doesn't sail the seven seas as we know 'em. He's in a parallel continuum, and the walls between that place and this only break down during storms. It's the massive electrical activity. Time and space don't work like here, over there. It's all mixed up, see. He even drops into the Cretaceous sometimes."
"I see. Well, I don't, but let's pretend I do. And the every hundred years bit?"
"Ah, that's actually a deal Hendrik cut with a bunch of fishy creatures lurking somewhere outside the space time continuum themselves. The bunch back in the Cretaceous. They needed wood for the treefort and he needed more Genever and a night out every now and again. They're pretty good at the space-time stuff. For a price of course. They want timbers for their treefort in the Cretaceous Yggdrasil. Biggest damned tree you ever saw, and most of it is underwater."
"The World Tree."
"Yeah. Source of a lot of coal-measures I gather. At least that's what this bloke I met on the ship told me. Geologist. Shipwreck survivor. A guy called Paul Bean. Van der Decken was always recruiting. It seems he was damned but his crew . . . can escape. If they can get off."
"Suddenly you interest me extremely," said my companion-of-the-bar. "What happened to him?"
I scratched my head. "He's still on the ship, I think. Van der Decken isn't any keener on losing crew than he is on losing business. I got out by good luck and bad judgment."
"Why don't you tell me about it?" She summoned the barman with an imperious gesture.