BY FELIX R. SAVAGE
You must have heard the story of how the Vikings discovered Iceland. “Oooh,” they said. “This place is nice. We don’t want the scum of the fjords overrunning it,” so they named it Iceland. Then they sailed on for a bit and found Greenland. “Ugh, this place is horrible. By Odin, I’ve got a great idea!”
That is the story of Arcadia. For the Atlantic substitute the Interstellar Railroad. For ice and snow substitute rocky wastes drenched with acid rain, thanks to some long-ago war of planetary reduction that bollixed the atmosphere. You have to wear a breathing mask on the surface, and if you get rainwater on you it’s sore. No doubt the early explorers who named this miserable place Arcadia thought they were being very humorous.
But the joke was on them because it turns out that Arcadia is absolutely riddled with subterranean bunkers. Alien remains have been found down there, and oodles of A-tech. Jesus, I wish I’d been around thirty years ago. You could literally get rich by falling down the stairs.
Nowadays hundreds of thousands of people live in the bunkers, most of them in the services and tech sectors. Arcadia is a hub for the exploration industry, since it’s only two stops from Earth. Branches of the Railroad shoot off in all directions from the local junction.
Which is why we are here, picking up cargo for a run out to the Perseus Arm.
Oh, it’s a life for heroes, exploring the galaxy on the Interstellar Railroad, boldly going where no man has gone before …
Except for the bits where you’re waiting for your funding to come through and so you have to moonlight as a cargo ship, or the crew’s salaries don’t get paid.
I am scowling at my iPad as we stroll along Kladbishche Road, trying to decipher my own memos. Bastard autocorrect. On top of which, the iPad can’t wrap its software around my Irish accent, so it’s got ‘dead body’ as dead buddy.
“Right, we’ve only got one more item to collect, anyway,” I say to Woolly and Morgan, my companions. “A dead body.”
“Oh, that’s why we’re at the cemetery,” says Woolly, light dawning at last. She can be quite obtuse.
“No, Woolly, we’ve come to buy plots for when you get us all killed with your shite piloting,” Morgan says.
You know a colony has arrived when it’s got a cemetery.
All along one side of Kladbishche Road runs a high iron railing and beyond that lie lawns dotted with gravestones, trees, and shrubbery.
Some of the subterranean bunkers on Arcadia are very large indeed.
Far above our heads glow biological lamps planted in the roof by the same long-dead aliens who built the bunkers. The spectrum’s not quite right for human eyes, and the lights aren’t bright enough, so it always looks like it’s about to thunder. Plants thrive on it, though.
We reach the gate and fork over $15 apiece to the babushka collecting tickets. Arcadia is mostly owned by the Russians and it shows. They’d charge for breathing if they could figure out how, although now that I think of it, the spaceport fee comes out to the same thing.
It’s calculated by the hour, so our fees are mounting higher every minute we waste down here.
Galvanized by that thought, I say, “Come on, let’s find this fella.” I’ve just about figured out what I dictated to my iPad a week ago. “His name’s Tom Jones and he’s resting in plot number 955, unless that nine is a four. It should be this way.”
We set off along tidy paved paths, Morgan pushing the anti-grav dolly, Woolly roving over the grass and gazing into the graves.
I’m a little disturbed myself, actually, by the glimpses of rosy, placid faces beneath glass viewing panels set into the ground.
You see, Brouchkov Cemetery is not your typical final resting place.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust? That’s so 20th-century.
These punters all went to their rest in the firm belief that they’d be coming back soon.
The Insterstellar Railroad connects most of the habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy, as far as we’re aware. The Railroad zoomed into our solar system one day in 2024, built loops of itself around Earth and Mars, and zoomed off again to connect the rest of the Orion Arm. Cue global panic, shortly followed by global realization that the royal road to the stars lay open. In the forty-three years since then it’s been one mad scramble for alien riches. And amazing treasures have indeed been found—I’m wearing a monocle reverse-engineered from A-tech that gives me X-ray vision if I feel like it! How fecking cool is that?—but the secret of eternal life? Sorry, not yet.
If there were any such secret, in my own humble opinion, all the other civilizations that used to flourish in our galaxy wouldn’t be dead.
Such logical objections do not deter our brave cryonauts. Here they lie in their hundreds and thousands, cryogenically preserved until the elixir of life is found, or their insurance company goes under, whichever happens first, and I know which way I’m betting.
But our lad, Mr. Tom Jones of Boulder, Colorado, is not here because he hoped for a glorious chemical resurrection. He croaked unexpectedly while waiting for his connecting flight, so they froze him until a ship could be found to take him on to his final destination. That’s where we come in.
Or where we will come in, anyway, if I can ever find him. We’ve reach the end of the 900s. “We’ll go back this way and then try the four hundreds,” I sigh. The jacaranda trees are in flower, and their scent hangs heavy in the air. Distant sprinklers hiss. I zigzag across the grass, scanning mostly Cyrillic names. “Tom Jones, Tom Jones, what do you think, Morgan, is that at all likely to be an alias?”
“No way,” Morgan says. “It’s too obvious.”
“Ah, that’s the clever part. They picked an obvious alias to make you think it’s too obvious.”
“Why do you think it’s not his real name?”
“Why are they paying us a packet to ship him onwards?” I respond, rhetorically. None of us knows—it wasn’t the sort of deal where you pipe up with questions.
The headstones aren’t in any real order. They’re all scattered around artistically. I hate the feckers who designed this place. A worker sweeps jacaranda petals off the graves, the dead smile up smugly into the purple shadows, and where the feck is Woolly? She’s always wandering off.
“WOOLLY!” I shout.
A faint yell comes back.
“That didn’t sound like her.”
CRASH!
Something rips through the top of a nearby tree. Leaves and petals hit the ground. So do I. Morgan is slower but only by a nanosecond. We crawl behind the nearest headstone. That was a bullet. We have seen enough of this sort of thing on remote planets but we never expected to see it in Brouchkov Cemetery, which is why neither of us is armed, not that I’d have the slightest interest in returning fire even if I could. The trick in these situations is to keep your head down until you can safely run for it.
The worker who was sweeping the graves runs … towards the gunfire, carrying his broom like a pikeman.
“Bleeding maniac,” says Morgan.
Bullets ricochet off headstones—crack, crack! Chips of marble and granite fly. More workers run past our hiding-place, bawling what sound to my non-Russian-speaking ears like Cossack war cries. One of them spots the anti-grav dolly which Morgan abandoned. He stops for half a second to figure out the controls, hops on, and rides away, swerving between the trees.
“Hey!” roars Morgan. “That’s ours!”
The blessed idjit leaps up and races after it. Jesus have mercy. Now I’ve got to follow him if I don’t want to look like a total skiver. Of course everyone who knows me knows I am a total skiver, unrivalled in my commitment to dodging things, people, and situations I do not fancy, but it occurs to me that Woolly might somehow have started the whole thing. She’s been known to do that. I run after Morgan, spluttering curses.
We follow the shouts, screams, and gunfire back towards the entrance of the cemetery. There’s a café next to the gate. The parking lot in front of the café is now the scene of a pitched battle. Morgan and I lurk behind a screen of trees, next to a big glossy shed.
To my astonishment the cemetery workers are winning. They’ve got a couple of gunmen on the ground. Another throws up his hands in surrender as we watch. This does not save him from a brutal kicking. It’s easy to tell the gunmen as they are wearing sunglasses and Lokomotiv Moscow shellsuits. These lads never think they need to take reasonable precautions—such as not looking like mafiosi.
The workers advance on the café, carrying the outdoor tables for shields.
A volley of bullets shatters the café’s last remaining window.
The workers roar and rush in, leaping through the shattered windows, brandishing shovels and hedge scissors.
In the wake of this stirring charge, our anti-grav dolly rocks, abandoned, in mid-air.
Morgan dashes out, leaps athletically, and catches it with his fingertips. He scrambles on and rides the dolly back through the trees. I climb on. The dolly descends to just above the ground.
“We’ve got to find Woolly,” I groan, over the noise of battle issuing from the café.
Suddenly, a man bursts out of the big glossy shed next to us. Shaved head, sunglasses—he’s obviously with the gunmen even if he is wearing a rather nice suit. Yelling in Russian, he dashes past the dolly without seeming to see us. My foot automatically goes out. Your man trips and falls flat on his face. A pistol I didn’t spot flies out of his fist, into the shrubbery.
“Go, go, fecking go!”
Morgan opens the throttle. With the two of us on board, the dolly moves at a fast walking pace. I hop off and run. At the fence, Morgan takes the dolly up and over, pretends to sail away without me, then comes back, pissing himself laughing.
I am stuck at the top of the fence, trying to get over with my manhood intact.
“Give us a hand, you gobshite!”
A couple of police bikes dawdle past. In the bunkers of Arcadia it is all bikes, no cars. These have got their sirens on maximum volume, to make up for approaching the scene of the crime with blatant diffidence.
“Where the feck is Woolly?”
“Right here,” trills her voice. The bushes on the other side of the fence quiver.
Relieved, I brush myself off and inspect a rip in my new jeans. “We didn’t even get the deader,” I groan.
“Oh,” says Woolly, peeking through the fence. “You mean this one?”
Another face peeps between the railings. Pink-cheeked, clean-shaven, twentyish. If not for the platinum ID tag grafted to his forehead, I’d believe he was asleep on his feet, not dead.
“Tom Jones?” I check the tag. It is indeed the one and only, pseudonymic in my opinion, Tom Jones of Boulder, Colorado.
Woolly, holding him by the scruff of the neck, jounces him up and down to make him nod. “That’s me,” she squeaks, doing his voice, and giggles. One eye comes partly open, showing white.
He looks familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen him before somewhere but I’m fecked if I can place him. I’m rubbish with names.
Morgan hoists the stiff-as-a-board body over the fence, then helps Woolly over. We retreat up the road at a jog.
“How did you find him?” I say.
“I asked someone,” Woolly says, as if this were the most obvious course of action in the world.
I’m a man, all right?
“Well, where was he in the end?” I say, ignoring Morgan’s snorts of laughter at my expense.
“Oh, he was in that big shed. I think that’s where they do the stuff?”
“The cryogenic preservation stuff.”
“Yeah, I think so. I think since he only just died, he was still in processing?”
Oh.
I reach out to the dolly and twitch aside Morgan’s jacket, which we’ve laid over Tom Jones to make him look less dead, although it’s not really working. I prod his cheek. It is hard, like a frozen steak. But moisture comes away on my fingers.
I was wondering what happened to the coffin that was supposed to come with him.
“Feck. He’s not been cryogenically frozen at all. He’s just been normally frozen, and now …”
It is warm in the bunkers of Arcadia. California weather, the local boosters call it.
“Better get him back to the ship, quick.”
2
Our ship is called the Skint Idjit. If you’re wondering how she got a name like that, you’d better ask the Captain, who owns the 60% of her that isn’t in hock to Goldman Sachs. The Captain is not on board when we arrive. We shove the body of ‘Tom Jones’ (the quotation marks are now firmly established in my mind) into the walk-in freezer.
“Where’s the Captain?” I say.
“Gone shopping,” says Trigger, our cook.
“Bollocks.” I shoulder him aside to wash my hands at the kitchen sink. “And of course he’s not answering his phone.”
“He’s under a lot of stress,” Trigger says severely. “He needs to decompress. Excuse me, that brush is for vegetables. I don’t want dead body … stuff … on it.”
I toss the vegetable brush into the sink and head for the door.
Trigger yells after me, “If you go to GUM, could you pick up some asparagus?”
The man is delusional. He cooks for a crew of 28 explorers, most of whom prefer Big Macs to fine cuisine, and it’s always frozen stuff anyway. But now we’re on Arcadia, with access to fresh vegetables, he is determined to maximize our nutritional profiles.
“Asparagus,” I say into my iPad, and roll it up and stick it back in my jeans.
I suit up—breathing mask, waterproof poncho just in case—and clatter down the stairs from the Skint Idjit’s airlock.
Acres of gray rock stretch away forever. Around me, numerous spaceships crouch beneath the overcast sky. They are mostly Boeings—X-80s like our own Idjit, the bigger X-90s, and the jumbo X-700s—plus a sprinkling of Airbuses. I also spy a few Antonovs and Sukhois. Those are not military ships. If the militaries of Earth ever come out this way, which they don’t because their job is defending Earth (from each other), they park in their own bases on the other side of the planet. The Sukhois etc., with their forward sensor blisters bulging like eyes and their bucktoothed railgun barrels grinning at all the universe, are military surplus, and they give the game away. Who runs Arcadia? The hard men do.
You could call them the Russian mafia, or just the mafia, but you’d be risking a cup of polonium tea. Most of those lads work as enforcers for the big tech companies—Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, yeah, that lot. They can and will wave their contracts in your face, while jamming a Glock into your groin.
I hurry between the spaceships. My eyes water and my nose runs, despite the updated World War II gasmask I’ve got on. The air on Arcadia is a standard oxygen / nitrogen mix, it’s just that it’s got lots of particulate matter in it. I hustle into the terminal and drop my mask’s filter in the bin, musing that the dark gray gunk on it is probably the ashes of long-dead aliens, as well as all their topsoil and everything else that subsisted here.
They built to last, though.
Down, down from the terminal—a shoddy human building—go the stairs to the underground. They’re the wrong size for human legs, as their original users averaged eight feet tall. I run down them two at a time, which is actually easier, zigzagging between various anti-grav conveyances.
If the Captain’s gone shopping he’ll be in Tretyakovsky.
They named it after the exclusive Moscow shopping area, but this isn’t another Greenland-ism: Tretyakovsky really is a bunker full of luxury boutiques. It’s the best place in the universe to buy A-tech consumer goods, reverse-engineered right here on Arcadia. Reverse-engineering is mostly programming, all the best programmers are Russian, and mysteriously enough, they prefer to live and work out of reach of the long arm of the taxman. So everything’s cheaper here. People come out from Earth for the weekend just to shop.
Gunning my bike through herds of identical rentals, I steadfastly ignore the gadgets beckoning to me from the shop windows. There’s the Captain, lusting over something in the window of a wearables emporium. I leave the rent-a-bike at the curb.
“Donal!”
The Captain and myself go back to the High Infants in Lisdoonvarna. And you were wondering how a dosser like me ever got to be XO on an exploration ship. Heh.
He whips around guiltily. Covers up with a toothy, “Ah Fletch, what’s the craic?”
“The craic is lacking, big lad. It is distinctly lacking.”
The Captain is squiring Penelope, the Skint Idjit’s stacker, who is also his girlfriend. If looks could kill I would be writhing on the pavement. Penelope has never copped to me.
I lower my voice. “Do you know anything about that dead body on the cargo manifest?”
“Dead body on the cargo manifest?!?”
“The cryonaut, idjit. Do you have any more information on him?”
“Erm … you were going to collect him from the cemetery this morning, right? Did that go off OK?”
Clearly the Captain does not know the first thing about ‘Tom Jones’ apart from the fact that someone has paid his shipping fees. He’s wrinkling his handsome forehead, trying to remember what he doesn’t know. Trigger was right: he is under a lot of stress.
And I am looking at the cause, giraffe-legged in her hooker footwear. Three master’s degrees, an IQ of 193, and a leather fetish, fact o’ God. “What are you shopping for?” I say, betting it’ll be an A-tech sex toy with a four-figure price tag.
The Captain’s gaze strays back to the window. “I was thinking of buying an exoskeleton …”
“But you’ve got one!”
“Not like that,” he says, pointing at an eight-foot full-coverage carapace. “It’s made of LiquidMetal.”
“Rad-proof, weatherproof, shockproof, with built-in massage functionality,” Penelope intones.
Cripes almighty, they’re as bad as each other. “How much …” I break off. A sexy Russian traffic warden is ticketing my bike. “Don’t be too late getting back to the ship,” I say to the Captain, and dash away. “No need for that, I’m just leaving.”
“No parking here,” says the policewoman, ignoring the luxury bikes parked on either side of mine.
“They’re doing it,” I say, on principle.
Duly ticketed, I pull into traffic and use my monocle (it’s multifunctional!) to place a call. “Lukas? Where are you just now?”
Lukas Sakashvili, one of my underlings, is in a titty bar. He invites me to join him.
“Those places are clip joints. Lukas, I’m a little concerned about … yeah, how’d you guess?”
He has heard about the rumble in the cemetery. This is where having a Russian-speaker on the crew comes in handy. Sakashvili says he immediately connected the news with ‘Tom Jones.’ The shellsuit-and-sunglasses brigade were after a specific corpse, and given our luck, says Sakashvili, it’s got to be our one.
“Good thing you always running late, Fletch, huh?” Cackle cackle. “Imagine if you walk away with corpse belonging to Bratva.” This is what the hard men call themelves in Russian. The Brotherhood. “Ouch!”
I nearly rear-end the bike in front of me. “It’s on board the Idjit right now!”
“It what? Fuck! Get it off the ship!”
“Do you think they’d come looking for it?” I remember trotting across the spaceport with ‘Tom Jones’ on the dolly, in full view of those Sukhois.
Whomp of a door on the other end of the phone. Sakashvili gibbers, “The guys on Bratva subreddit say he drug mule! Still got the stuff inside him!”
Oh, Reddit. All the same, I’m U-turning across traffic, cold sweat prickling my back, picturing a repeat of the cemetery invasion—on board the Skint Idjit. “Did they say what it is? Skank, bliss, fudge?”
“Don’t think so. Something much more valuable, or they don’t trash the cemetery looking for! I go now. Where you?”
“Tretyakovsky.”
“Meet at ship.” Sakashvili hangs up.
I race back towards the underground exit of the terminal, thinking hard.
Sakashvili is a gutless coward. This doesn’t mean the rumors he’s heard are wrong, unfortunately.
It does mean he’s now in a state of panic.
He’ll rush back to the ship like his arse is on fire, drag ‘Tom Jones’ out of the freezer, and dump him on the surface, as far away from the Idjit as he dares. Let the lads in the Sukhois pick him up at their leisure.
And what a wicked waste that would be.
By the time I reach the terminal I am not, strictly, thinking any longer, but rather weltering in an an emotional soup of avarice, fear, and frustration. Why am I always drawing the short end of the stick? The frustation, Jesus, the frustration gets so bad sometimes it overwhelms rational thought, and this is one of those times. I pant up the stairs and totter once more across a mile of barren rock to the Skint Idjit.
“Has Lukas been around?”
“He’s at a house of ill repute.”
“Thank Christ for that.”
“Did you get my asparagus?”
“No.”
“What are you doing? Ew. Are you putting him somewhere else? Please do. I feel like he’s looking at me every time I open the door.”
A few minutes later:
“What are you doing with the Captain’s exoskeleton?”
“I’m borrowing it for a bit.”
“He’s not going to be very happy about that.”
“He’s buying a new one,” I snarl, “which costs seventeen thousand dollars, so I don’t think he’ll mind.”
As I’m heading back out, Trigger makes one final comment: “You are stark raving mad, aren’t you, Fletch? I’m just checking.”
“No,” I tell him, “I’m the only sane one round here. Hang on. Can I borrow your hat? Thanks, a mhac.”
And so I perambulate back across the surface of Arcadia, accompanied by ‘Tom Jones’ in the Captain’s old exoskeleton, which has anti-grav functionality. It also has a remote control, which I am swiftly getting the hang of.
Trigger’s hat suits Jonesy nicely. It also hides the cryonaut tag on his forehead.
If Jonesy was a drug mule … and if the loot frozen in his insides is valuable enough to justify the burgling of a high-end cryogenic facility…
… I’m fecked if I’ll let the Bratva have it.
As we reach the terminal, Sakashvili staggers out, recognizable by his full-body gas mask (he’s a health ’n’ safety nut). He stares hard at me. And at the unmoving shape draped in a spare poncho, with a bit of hat poking out the front.
“You’ll thank me later,” I tell him.
3
All I have to do is keep Jonesy safe until 10 PM, which is when we’re scheduled to close out the crew deck for launch. I’ll head back to the ship on the dot of. I’ve notified Morgan to meet me at the terminal. Until then, me and Jonesy are better off on our own.
I consider various options:
Sit in a public park
Rent a bike with a sidecar and ride around for five hours
Check into a capsule hotel
Go to church and pray for forgiveness
Option #4 calls to me, but there isn’t a Catholic church in this bunker complex, it’s all Russian Orthodox and I suspect their priests are in league with the Bratva. Option #3 probably makes the most sense, but I can’t stand the thought of being shut up with Jonesy in a confined space for five hours. He’s thawing rapidly.
So I end up in the Pravda, a seedy bar in the old bunker of Tagansky. Of course all the bunkers are the same age, about 800 million years old, but this one still has a lot of the original alien buildings. It’s a tourist destination. The Pravda has ceilings so high I almost feel like I am in church, and maybe that’s why I end up confessing my frustration to Jonesy, sat at the end of the mile-long bar.
“I’m just bloody sick of it. Anything we make, the Captain spends it on pointless shite, or else on Penelope, but I repeat myself. There I go, y’see, breaking the ninth commandment again. And we won’t even mention the tenth commandment.”
Of course I covet Penelope. She’s fit as hell. It helps to remind myself that she is also a demanding, emotionally unstable cow, but it doesn’t help as much as it should.
“How old were you, about twenty? You probably thought you’d live forever. Me, I’m forty-three. Forty. Three. And there’s feck all in my retirement fund.”
I lean in closer.
“What was it they made you swallow, Jonesy? Not skank, not bliss, not fudge. Something worth sending the Bratva to pick up.”
A-tech. That’s the conclusion I jumped to hours ago, and I’m sticking to it. Something new, unclaimed, and small enough to fit in a condom.
I frown at Jonesy’s damp torso, wondering just how hard it is to perform a forensic dissection.
“If this is the find I’ve been waiting for,” I murmur, “I’ll find out who you really were, and send a half-share to your family, I promise.”
Jonesy offers no comment, of course. He just stares through his sunglasses—mine, actually, I’ll have to throw them away after this—at the pint I thoughtfully purchased for him.
My own pint is empty. I slide it over to him and take his. Then I check to make sure no one noticed.
Someone did notice.
The woman sitting two barstools down.
If Penelope is a 9, this bird is at least … erm … a 5.
I prop an elbow on the bar and grin. “I’ve got X-ray vision,” I tell her, tapping my monocle, “and it tells me you’ve got a hollow leg. Can I help you fill it up?” Waggle waggle the auld eyebrows.
“That’s disgusting,” she responds
That line never works.
“Is he OK?”
I whip around and see what she means. Jonesy’s nose is running like a tap. The pink tinge of the effluent suggests it’s some kind of special cryogenic fluid they injected into his brain in preparation for the preservation process. It’s dripping into his empty pint glass.
“He’s extremely allergic to the PM 2.5,” I improvise, meaning the particulate matter that makes everyone’s noses run outside. “Wipe your nose, Jonesy!” I’m frantically working the remote control in my jacket pocket. I manage to make one of his arms rise and swipe at his face. The semblance of life established, I help settle him against the wall, making sure his hat is pulled well down. “You’re completely blootered, Jonesy.”
“Is he also paraplegic?”
The bottom half of the exoskeleton, with the anti-grav engine in it, is hard to miss. It looks like Jonesy’s sitting in a stripped-down mobility chair, despite the poncho slung casually across the back of it.
“That’s it, you’re right,” I say to her gratefully. “Lost the use of his legs on Barsoom. A horrible tragedy. That’s why he drinks so much.”
“And what’s your excuse?”
I count the pint glasses in front of me—the bartender’s not bothered to take them away; it’s that kind of bar—and realize some excuse is needed. “I’m Irish,” I offer.
“Oh, wow. I’ve always wanted to visit Ireland.”
When you think about it, a woman who’s no better than a 5, sitting in the Pravda by herself, is probably not not trying to find companionship.
So I pour on the Oirish charm, and she insists on buying the next round. She’s Canadian. Came out to Arcadia to work in the tech industry, lost her job, and now she’s a taxi driver. A taxi driver? “Yeah. I like the freedom.” She’s got big brown eyes that peep out through a geek-girl fringe, and an endearing habit of brushing the fringe away with the back of her hand. Actually she’s 6.5, maybe a 7, it depends what’s under that unisex smock she’s got on…
The X-ray vision monocle doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. It’s more for inspecting the contents of parcels.
And before you ask, yes, of course I X-rayed Jonesy’s tum, but whatever’s in there it’s made from atoms too light to show up. Which means nothing.
“Ah feck. I’ve got to go,” I exclaim. My monocle has just flashed up an alarm: 9:45. “Time flies when you’re having fun.” I smile at—what’s her bloody name? Starts with an I, I’m sure of it.
What can I say? I have all my best ideas when I’m drunk. I pull on her little plump hands. She hops off her barstool, stands between my legs. I cup the back of her head and pull her down for a kiss. “Just my luck, meeting you on my last day here,” I murmur.
She kisses me back so enthusiastically, I nearly fall off my barstool. Jesus, she’s bullin’ for it, as we say in County Clare.
I’ve got to go, but…
I am hazily trying to think if we’ve got time for a quick visit to the bogs when I hear a faint whining noise. It is the sound of the exoskeleton’s clapped-out servomotors.
The girl (Imelda? Isabel? Imogen?) is grinding against my crotch, which is great, but the remote control, still in the pocket of my jacket, is trapped under her hip.
I dip her back, still kissing her, and jerk my jacket free.
The whining doesn’t stop. I also hear a bumping noise.
I reach into my pocket with my free hand, and nibble on her lower lip while . frantically manipulating the remote control. She’s stopped reacting. I peek to make sure her eyes are still closed.
They’re not.
She’s staring over my shoulder at Jonesy, who is banging his head on the bartop.
“What’s his problem?” she says, pulling away from me.
“When you’re very frustrated with life, haven’t you ever felt like banging your head on the bar?” I can’t see what I’m doing with the remote. I’m making it worse. At last Jonesy’s headdesking ceases.
“Is he really OK?”
“I’m sure, yeah, he’s feeling better now.”
There is a pause. She straightens her smock. I adjust Jonesy’s hat and toss a tip on the bar.
Finally, she says, “Your life is a bit too complicated for me.”
“I feel the same way myself, love.” I make the exoskeleton back away from the bar. I want to flee the scene of this fiasco as rapidly as possible.
“Well, it was nice meeting you, anyway,” she says, a bit mournfully. She pulls out a business card and hands it to me. I glance at it long enough to get her name.
“Imogen, it was more than nice meeting you, and I hope you’re still at this number next time I’m on Arcadia. I’ll buy you a drink somewhere better than this,” because by then I will be in funds. If I can get Jonesy back to the Skint Idjit without being set upon by the Bratva. If I can get him safely off this horrible planet.
I maneuver him out to the street and accelerate the exoskeleton to its top speed, which is about 10 miles an hour. I ride along beside it on my rent-a-bike, between spiky alien buildings with their bottom floors slathered in neon. The roof lamps have dimmed to eyestrain wattage. They’re synchronized with Arcadia’s 25.5 hour day.
I have the devil of a time maneuvering Jonesy through the traffic on the sidewalks, while maneuvering my bike through the traffic on the streets. By the time we reach the spaceport terminal, it’s 10:15. I dump the bike and guide Jonesy up the stairs. I’m just about to call Morgan when he calls me.
“Where are you, you dosser?”
“On my way. Is everything all right?”
“We’ve got visitors. They say they’re from the customs.”
“And the Captain let them on board?!?”
“He didn’t have much choice.” Morgan’s voice vibrates with nerves. “There’s three of them going through the hold right now.”
“Well that’s all right, they’ll find nothing except legit cargo.” I reach the top of the stairs, out of breath. The concourse is full of backpackers bedding down on the benches. I’ll have to wait here until the ‘customs’ gang have fecked off. I head for the toilets. “Just get rid of them.”
“Woolly said she’d get rid of them.”
“What?” I guide Jonesy into the handicapped stall and squeeze in after him.
“I don’t know what she’s got in mind, but she is a seven-foot wookie. Heh heh.”
I slam the door and lock it. “Morgan, are you out of your wits? Get her away from them!”
The best thing about the exploration business is the talent it attracts. Just to be clear, Woolly is not actually an alien. All the aliens are dead and have been for millions of years, and none of them looked like the fevered imaginings of George Lucas, anyway. Woolly is as human as you or me, at least I assume so, although all the hair makes it a bit hard to tell. It’s an A-tech thing; interspecies skin grafting. The DNA comes from llamas.
Unsurprisingly, those who choose to go through life as wookies tend to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Woolly is no exception. But she’d be mostly harmless if it wasn’t for idjits like Morgan egging her on.
He is pissing himself laughing right now at something he can see and I can only imagine.
“Just don’t let her murder any of them,” I plead.
“Ulp,” Morgan says suddenly, and hangs up.
Feck! I call him back. I call the Captain. I call Sakashvili. None of them answers, and I am stuck in a very confined space with Jonesy, exactly what I didn’t want, and for the first time in my life I’m glad the standards of hygiene at the spaceport are so low, because dirty-toilet is a better smell than rotting-corpse.
Someone rattles the door. I ignore them until they start hammering on it. Then I have to loudly flush the toilet and emerge, past a woman with a little boy. “Mummy, that man doesn’t look very well,” he says, staring.
I drape Jonesy’s poncho over his head as we bear down on the babushka guarding the exit.
“Twenty dollars for launch zone pass.”
I’ve got a pass already and I show it to her.
“What about he? Where he pass?”
Aw feck. Like an idjit, I argue, “Our ship’s out there. We’re launching at half past ten.”
“He need pass. Thirty dollars.”
“You said it was twenty.”
“Thirty for same-day purchase.”
“You’re just making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”
“Thirty dollars.”
Snarling wordlessly, I dig out my last $10 coins. In the early heady days after the Railroad transformed the economy, there was a government conspiracy to outlaw cash. The privacy advocates won, so we got to keep our bills and coins, even if they’re all made of plastic now. It’s a pain in the bloody arse. One day I will qualify for a credit card.
Gasmasked, I guide Jonesy out into a heavy drizzle. Good thing I’m wearing my poncho. The rocks are slippery, and I don’t look up until I see a flash of light in my peripheral vision.
That is a nuclear thermal drive.
It’s about half a mile away.
In fact it belongs to the Skint Idjit.
“Wait! Lads! Come back!”
I’m screaming my throat raw but I can’t hear myself. When a spaceship launches, it feels like the air isn’t big enough for the sound. My gas mask’s got built-in ear protectors but a fat lot of good that does, because this is a noise that hits you in the chest and knocks you over. I’m literally face down on the rock, like a lizard trying to crawl into a crack, as the Skint Idjit shoots into the sky on a stalk of flame.
Billows of smoke and steam lick away, engulfing the other spaceships nearby.
“All personnel and visitors exit the launch zone immediately,” quacks an automated announcement from my iPad.”T minus ten to the scheduled launch of the … Skint Idjit. Exit the launch zone immediately.”
A sonic boom echoes down from the clouds.
4
IMOGEN KINCAID
FRIENDLY, RELIABLE, PUNCTUAL
Lying on my back on the wet rock, I hold Imogen’s business card up to the backlight of my iPad.
CALL 24/7
ORBITAL PICK-UPS BY REQUEST
She really is a taxi driver.
The rain’s running in around the edges of my gas mask, stinging my temples. I roll over onto my stomach and call her freedial number.
“Imogen?” Cough, cough. “Erm, this is Fletch …” cough … “we met earlier at the Pravda, if you recall …” I just manage to tell her where I am before I end the call and lie face down, wheezing.
There’s a bit of litter stuck to the rock. Green litter. No, it isn’t, either. It’s grass.
Would you believe that? Some little seed, exported from Earth to brighten up the subterranean bunkers of Arcadia, has found its way out here and managed to grow, despite the acid rain, the wind, and the regular spaceship launches.
I find this so inspiring that I show it to Imogen when she arrives to pick me up. “Look at that! It’s alive!”
“Wow,” she says politely, through her mask.
“It gives you hope, doesn’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
Her taxi is a Honda the size of a sixteen-wheeler. These little space shuttles are used for ground-to-orbit transfer. If a captain doesn’t want to land, which I understand perfectly, it’s nothing but trouble down here, he’ll just arrange for a taxi to rendezvous with his ship. They can do it for cheaper, anyway, The Isp of antigrav engines starts to make sense once you whittle your mass down under a few tons. We bundle Jonesy into the boot, strap him down, and strap ourselves into the cab for take-off.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Imogen says. “But you’re carting a corpse into orbit, chasing a spaceship that took off without you, for unexplained reasons…”
“I can explain—”
She holds up one of those cute pudgy little hands. “I don’t want you to explain. It’s more fun this way.” Unexpectedly, she’s choking with laughter. “Do you have to be nuts to work in the exploration industry, or is it just you?”
“I’m the soul of rationality next to most people I know,” I say, bitterly.
“Was that guy really a drug mule?”
“How did you know?”
“It’s all over Reddit.”
Gee-force presses us back against our seats. Rain streaks the windows, and then abruptly stops as we rise through Arcadia’s cloud blanket.
The light of Arcadia’s moon paints the clouds as white as cotton wool. It also illuminates the silver hoop of the Interstellar Railroad, encircling the planet.
Rationality is a crock; our Enlightenment philosophers suckered us. One look at the Railroad is enough to prove that we’ll never, ever understand how reality is put together. This monumental A-tech artifact, stretching from one end of the galaxy to the other, is apparently made of pure energy, with the ability to fold spacetime. On the Railroad you can travel up to ten lightyears in a single hour, and nary a sniff of relativistic time-dilation has ever been detected. Suck it up, Einstein.
The bits that loop around planets are less weird. You can go at regular orbital velocities.
Blips of light glide along the loop over our heads. Each one is a spaceship on its way to or from the local junction.
“That’s her,” I shout.
I can tell the Skint Idjit by the fact that she’s causing a traffic jam on the loop, everything else stacking up behind her like cars stuck behind a tractor.
The taxi rises towards the Railroad’s altitude of 9,000 miles, gradually converging with the Skint Idjit. Higher orbits are slower orbits, so we’ve got a chance of catching up. Imogen turns out to be great at this. Hunched over her controls, she chats to her AI assistant and occasionally sings snatches of Broadway musicals. I’m so excited I hardly notice we’re in freefall, which I hate.
The Railroad fills the sky, its twin shimmering arcs joined by ghostly ties.
The Idjit zooms towards us, and Imogen finesses the taxi onto a collision course.
“Bullseye!” she yells. “Am I good or what, baby?”
With a tooth-rattling jolt, the taxi’s grapples lock onto the Idjit’s hull. They are made of LiquidMetal. They stiffen into flexible legs. The Honda walks like a huge lobster to the crew airlock and squats on it.
“You’re amazing, love.” I give her a kiss. She’s shaking with exhilaration.
My phone doesn’t work up here, so I borrow the taxi’s radio. “Hello, hello Idjit. I hope you didn’t think you could get rid of me that easily!”
A chime signals that the airlocks have mated.
The taxi’s airlock is on the driver’s side, so when it opens, the first person they see is Imogen.
And the first person I see is the sharp-suited fella from the cemetery.
He’s still wearing his sunglasses and all.
Aiming a Glock at my face.
“Put your hands up,” he says, grinning.
I’m fecked if I will…
I’m fecked.
“No need for that.” I force a smile. “I’m just undoing my harness … hands in full view … I’m getting out…”
I slide across Imogen and stand up in the Idjit’s airlock, a short corridor that leads to the crew deck. The other end is closed. With the artificial gravity on, I weigh about half as much as I did on Arcadia, and so does Sharp Suit. A bandage around his left hand testifies to the bravery of the cemetery workers.
Behind him stands one of his confederates, with the Captain. The Captain is wearing his new exoskeleton. The goon is pointing a gun at his helmet, which might be bulletproof, but probably isn’t, given our luck.
“I didn’t mean to trip you in the cemetery,” I say apologetically to Sharp Suit. “These things just happen.”
He frowns. He’s got no idea what I’m talking about. “Your wookie hurt one of my friends.”
Bloody, bloody Woolly. I knew it.
“Sorry, Fletch,” the Captain says miserably. “I shouldn’t have launched. It was reflex.”
I nod. I’ve got the same reflex myself, after all. Trouble? Run away.
But I do not see how we’re going to run away from this one.
“Where is the body?” Sharp Suit suddenly shouts, so loudly that I flinch.
“It’s right here, Grigor,” sings out Imogen.
She’s crawling between the front seats of the taxi and snapping the pressure lock of the boot. Sharp Suit barks something in Russian at his confederate, who crawls into the boot after Imogen. The two of them haul Jonesy out between the seats. Jonesy is still in the exoskeleton so it’s like fitting a fridge up the stairs.
“A bit smelly, but undamaged,” Imogen chirps.
She doesn’t met my eyes, which is something.
Of course she wasn’t smitten by my forty-three-year-old body and my sexy accent. They set her on me, and if I hadn’t called her from the spaceport she’d have turned up anyway.
I should have taken my own advice and gone to church.
“Nice work, Imogen,” says Grigor. “The bill of lading,” he barks at me.
“Oh, right here. I’m just going to move my hand to the pocket of my jeans,” I narrate. “I’m getting out my iPad…”
There is something else in my pocket. I palm it. Then I carefully give Grigor my iPad.
He scowls at the screen. “Asparagus?!?”
“Click through to the documents folder.”
He swipes, clicks, and growls happily, “OK. This is the right body.”
The Captain’s voice emerges from the grille beneath his new exoskeleton’s faceplate. “So who is he?”
“You don’t recognize him?” Grigor laughs.
“Should we?”
“His daddy is a very important man. You will be in a lot of trouble for transporting him improperly.” Grigor disdainfully flicks Jonesy’s exoskeleton with a fingernail. “This is not coffin.”
Jonesy sits up and punches him in the face.
I palmed the remote control when I took my iPad out of my pocket, and now I’m working the little joystick for all I’m worth. Grigor yowls and falls over backwards, blood spraying from his nose.
I drop to the floor of the airlock. Jonesy stands up and kicks Grigor while he’s down. That’s my idea of a fair fight.
A gunshot deafens me. The ricochet dents the floor in front of my nose.
“Feck—away—off—my—ship!” the Captain roars.
He hurls the second Bratva thug over my head, a superhuman feat. That new exoskeleton was worth the price, after all.
Grigor is on his knees, reaching for his Glock, but I grab it before he does.
“Your taxi is waiting, I believe,” I gloat.
“Do you know who I work for?!?”
“I’m guessing Samsung,” I say. His eyes pop.
“It’s all true,” Imogen says defiantly. Her eyes glisten with tears of pure frustation. I know how she feels. “They hired me as a developer. Then they fired me over some petty shit, and if I want my job back, I’ve got to prove myself.”
“So go on,” I say softly to her. “Do it.”
She gasps angrily, and does.
She scrambles back into her taxi and mashes the airlock-close button.
The mated A-tech valves squelch shut. I smile. The taxi detaches with a clank and falls away.
“Well now,” I say to Grigor and his accomplice. “What are we going to do with you?”
The Captain clanks back to the inner end of the airlock and opens it. Still facing the two Samsung contractors, I toss the remote over my shoulder.
“Got it,” Morgan calls.
I duck as Jonesy sails into the ship. Then I back away after him. Woolly catches me and drags me out of the airlock.
Grigor and his accomplice, finally understanding what lies in store for them, rush towards me—too late. I slam the airlock, cycle the chamber, and laugh maniacally as the pair of them are swept into space by the force of the escaping air.
They’ll be fine. They’ve got re-entry parachutes.
We watch them fall from the bridge. They plummet into the cloud cover just before the curvature of the planet hides them from us.
“Do you think they’ll inform on us?” the Captain says worriedly.
“How can they?” I say, and turn to the dead body in the exoskeleton. “Come on, Jonesy, let’s get you in the freezer.” I’m still calling him Jonesy although I’ve finally remembered where I know him from. Television. It was Grigor who tipped me off. “We’re only doing the job we were hired to do: taking the vice-president of Google’s son home to his grieving family.”
5
Deep in the Perseus Arm of the galaxy lies a planet called Hell’s Armpit.
If you remember how Arcadia got its name, you can probably guess the next bit.
Hell’s Armpit teems with adorable alien wildlife, ranging from the size of a mouse to a woolly mammoth. All of them are herbivores. These gentle creatures frolic over several small continents fringed by warm seas, which are covered with woodlands abounding in delicious fruit and gorgeous flowers.
There’s suspicion that the whole planet was engineered by the aliens we call the Pinheads—it’s just too perfect—but that wouldn’t have kept the hoi polloi out.
Nor would the clever-clogs name of Hell’s Armpit. It’s a wee bit obvious, you’ll agree.
No, the reason Hell’s Armpit has not been overrun by refugees from Earth’s boring suburbs is because of its existing population, who number in the low hundreds. They include:
Six Fortune 500 trillionaires
Their families
And their servants.
One of said trillionaires is the vice-president of Google, and that is how the crew of the Skint Idjit ends up spending the weekend in the spaceport hotel in Brin Land. After five months on the Railroad, it feels like we’ve died and gone to heaven. ‘Spaceport hotel’ conjures up visions of cockroaches, leaks, and overpriced minibars, but this is a luxury beach resort with a spaceport attached. I woke up this morning to the crashing of surf, the smell of alien flowers, and the even better smell of hot coffee delivered to the door of my personal villa by unseen hands.
“One day,” I tell the Captain, “I’m going to live like this.”
He laughs mordantly. Then sees I am dead serious. I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror—it’s red and clenched.
“Want to live like this? It’s easy!” Morgan says. “Just inherit a software empire.”
I force myself to laugh. “I think I’ll make the A-tech discovery of the decade instead.” I spike my coffee with brandy from the overpriced minibar (nothing’s perfect) and stand on my verandah, watching the rest of the crew play with the furry sea slugs on the beach.
“The big man wants to meet with us at nine,” the Captain says nervously.
“I know, I know. Coming.”
We delivered our parcel of grief yesterday. The VP took it like a man, jaw set, very polite. After all, he’s had months to get used to the news—the Interstellar Postal Service may be limited to 20x the speed of light but it’s faster than any cargo ship can go. When we arrive at the VP’s treetop mansion, he welcomes us into an airy room with a tree growing through the floor. Clumps of flowers nod over little waterfalls. You can’t tell if you’re inside or outside, and I love it. There’s probably a retractable roof for when it rains.
My enthusiasm cools a bit when I see Kensington Page—as Jonesy is really called—laid out in a glass coffin like Cinderella.
There’s a hole in the middle of the coffin and from Jonesy’s tastefully white-draped midsection springs a green shoot.
I stare, the Captain stares, Morgan stares.
“Aha,” says the VP. “I thought you’d like to see how poor Kensington will live on as a part of Hell’s Armpit.”
He pulls out a Gpad—of course you wouldn’t catch him using the competitor’s products—and calls up a picture of a white flower with star-like petals. “The Kadupul orchid,” he says reverentially. “I’m an collector, as you can see…”
Oh, so that’s what all these flowers are. I thought they were local.
“The climate of Hell’s Armpit is perfect for breeding rare orchids. Kensington was my partner in our little enterprise, and he looked forward to completing our collection.” The VP passes the picture of the Kadupul orchid around. “Worth a hundred million dollars, give or take,” he says, and I nearly drop the Gpad.
Jesus Christ. We had a hundred million bucks in the freezer and I never knew?
The Captain coughs—as shocked as I am, for different reasons. He’s a decent man. Before he can make some unwise comment about how the VP seems to care more about his orchids than his son, I jump in with, “Isn’t that what they call gilding the lily?”
I’m a wee bit upset myself. This isn’t how the mega-rich should behave.
“What do you mean?” says the VP.
“Well, I mean Hell’s Armpit’s got its own plant life. The flowers are out of this world; I was smelling them this morning. It seems a bit pointless to bring orchids from Earth all the way out here.”
“Aha, I get you,” the VP says. “But after all, the galaxy is interconnected now. The Milky Way is a human lake!”
That’s not exactly what I meant, and he must notice my skeptical expression. Before we leave, he takes me aside. He’s holding an aerosol can. “You mentioned gilding the lily,” he says confidingly. “This is gilding the lily.”
He selects a lovely white flower and sprays it gold.
“Twenty-four carats,” he says, and grins, with tears in his eyes.
The rich are different from you and me. When they suffer a terrible loss they can plunge into orchid-collecting or gadget-developing, instead of into a pint of Guinness.
And I will join their number one day—after our visit to Hell’s Armpit, I’m more motivated than ever. But still, as we return to the Skint Idjit, I remember that little shoot of grass pushing through the rock of Arcadia’s spaceport. For my money that was prettier than any $100 million flower.