The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad Vol. 1: Skint Idjit Read online

  THE RELUCTANT ADVENTURES

  OF

  FLETCHER CONNOLLY

  ON THE

  INTERSTELLAR RAILROAD

  VOLUME 1

  SKINT IDJIT

  BY

  FELIX R. SAVAGE

  Copyright © 2016 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

  First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Knights Hill Publishing.

  Cover art by Christian Bentulan

  Interior layout by Felix R. Savage

  THE INTERSTELLAR RAILROAD SERIES

  Rubbish With Names (prequel)

  Skint Idjit

  Intergalactic Bogtrotter

  Banjaxed Ceili

  Supermassive Blackguard

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  CHAPTER 1

  I know, I know. What can you expect from a ship named the Skint Idjit? People play to type and so do ships, if the number of Marauders and Hellraisers floating around is anything to go by, hole your shielding as soon as look at you, Jesus have mercy. The Milky Way is infested with pirates, and when I have my own planet I will invest in some decent planetary defenses.

  But there aren’t any pirates on the Beta Aurigae spur of the Interstellar Railroad. There is no one at all, except us. Our backers sent us out here because it is completely fecking unmapped. As in, we are the first human beings to ever set foot in this region of the galaxy. Here Be Dragons …

  I wish.

  Dragons, now that’d be something we could flog for cash in hand.

  So far, we have discovered:

  Seventeen planets scoured to the crust, presumably in all-out wars fought by their late owners

  Six planets abundant in alien lifeforms presenting varying degrees of convergent evolution—nothing bigger, smarter, or more valuable than a rabbit

  And three planets that aren’t there anymore. See ‘all-out wars of planetary reduction,’ advanced level.

  These wars all happened millions and millions of years ago. The aliens who prosecuted them are extinct. In the year 2066 of our feeble human reckoning, Homo sapiens is the only intelligent species in the galaxy, although I’m not so sure about the intelligent part.

  Exhibit A: our pilot, Woolly, a wookie. She’s not really a wookie, of course. If there were any living aliens, which there aren’t, I’m sure they would not resemble the fond imaginings of George Lucas. It’s A-tech-based cosmetic surgery. The DNA for the hair grafts comes from llamas, but the overall effect is convincing, as well as smelly. Woolly is asleep in the pilot’s couch beside me right now. She is snoring.

  “Woolly?”

  Snore, snore.

  “Woolly.” I nudge her. A louse crawls out of her arm hair. I pinch it between thumb and forefinger, and wipe my fingers on my jeans. “We’re coming up on the next planet. You might want to wake up now.”

  She surfaces, groaning, and pushes her fringe out of her eyes.

  On the console, the main optical feed screen shows the view from the nose camera. The Interstellar Railroad stretches away ahead of us, a glimmering double line of pure ghostly energy, joined by ties of the same spooky stuff. No stars are visible. We’re rushing through mysteriously folded space at two lightyears an hour, except it’s a lot less than that now, because we’ll be slowing down as we go around the next loop, to see if there’s anything there worth exploring.

  “Oh my freaking God,” Woolly says. “What’s that?”

  The words are scarcely out of her mouth when I see it, too. There’s some kind of obstruction at the junction in the distance, where we will veer off onto the next loop.

  The bridge of the Skint Idjit is always crowded, because a Boeing X-80 is simply not a very large ship. Harriet, Morgan, and some other odds and sods are playing blackjack for chocolate chips at the navigation table. They all rush up to peer over our shoulders. I am in the co-pilot’s seat, which I shouldn’t be because I am not a pilot. I’m just the chief A-tech scout. But I have worked on the Railroad more or less continuously since I was eighteen, and I say, “Relax. It’s only some gandy dancers.”

  The gandy dancers are the maintenance entities that came with the Interstellar Railroad. They look like small grey humanoids with overgrown heads. Yes, the same buggers that used to sneak around Earth in their flying saucers. It is thought they were trying to determine if we were sentient or not. These ones are standing on the Railroad, right at the junction, waving their tools and bouncing up and down.

  No one knows if the gandy dancers are robots, biologicals, automated at a high level, or governed by conditional logic; no one knows where they came from; no one knows if they created the Railroad, or were created along with it; and least of all does anyone know why they bother, after all these millennia. But it is clear to any sentient being that they are telling the Skint Idjit, “NOT THIS WAY!”

  “Woolly, they don’t want us to go down the loop,” I say. “Maybe we’d better not.”

  This should not be my decision, it should be the Captain’s. He’s standing behind me, breathing noisily through the grille of his exoskeleton. He has taken to clanking around in this exoskeleton all the time. He bought it on Arcadia a few months ago. It’s A-tech, very advanced, but it makes it hard to tell what he’s thinking, especially when he’s not saying anything.

  We rush closer to the junction, and now I see what’s got the gandy dancers in a tizzy. Just beyond the junction, on the local loop, there is a hole in the Railroad.

  A hole in the Interstellar Railroad.

  Some ties are missing on either side of it, too. The ends of the track look uneven. Chewed.

  “Woolly!” I say sharply. “We’ll keep going as we were!”

  But she doesn’t move. She’s frozen up completely. Her hairy hands grip the armrests of her couch.

  Behind me, everyone’s yelling in terror. The Skint Idjit zooms into the junction. The gandy dancers spring out of our way. I lean across Woolly, grab the yoke, and throw it over hard—

  —too late.

  We hurtle onto the local loop.

  So all I’ve accomplished is to steer us against the curvature of the loop, which is a big no-no, and we fly off the Railroad, just short of the hole in the tracks, into the orbital space of Planet No. 27.

  The whine of the chain dogs cuts out. The nuclear thermal drive we use for in-system maneuvering kicks in with its own whooshing hum.

  Woolly screams, “What is that?”

  “There’s nothing there,” I shout, which is not exactly true. Planet No. 27 is there. It’s just not in one piece. It’s in about a million pieces. A new twist on the old ‘wars of planetary reduction’ theme. The bright bluish-tinged light of a G-type main-sequence star flashes upon continent-sized shards, some of them drifting horribly close to the Skint Idjit. I keep my grip on the yoke and steer us back towards the Railroad, praying I won’t smash us into anything.

  “Attitude control thrusters,” yells the Captain, reacting at last, and not before time. His armored torso crushes me sideways as
he leans between our seats to reach the controls.

  “It’s eating the Railroad!” Woolly squeals.

  She’s pointing at the infrared display, and it does look like there’s something there. Fields of heat, like fluttering wings, embrace the ragged ends of the gap in the Railroad.

  On the optical display, gandy dancers scramble over the same area, laying new ties, so maybe the infrared’s just picking them up, although I’ve never seen it do that before.

  No time to think about it. I grab Woolly’s hands and place them on the yoke, snarling at her to do her job, and then I roll onto the floor so the Captain can take my seat. He can’t sit down very easily in that exoskeleton, so he stays on his feet, leaning over the thruster controls.

  A thunderous boom resounds through the ship. Everyone screams. Penelope speaks over the intercom from the control deck, as calm as always. “We just sustained damage to the heat rejection system. I’m shutting down the main turbines.”

  “We’re hit we’re fecking hit!” shout several people, diving for the door out of the bridge. I don’t bother to move off the floor. If we’re hit, we’re finished. That’s all.

  “I’d like Saul to visually confirm shutdown of turbines two through eight,” Penelope says. “I can keep the reactor running for a few minutes without blowing us all up. Can we get back on the Railroad quickly, though?”

  This concentrates Woolly’s mind. She pilots us back to the local loop on the far side of the gap, avoiding the nearest pieces of Planet No. 27. Once we’re back on the Railroad, we shut down the reactor completely and switch the secondary systems over to battery power. Saul, our main propulsion guy, and his assistants toil on the engineering deck, while I direct some of the scouts to spacewalk and find out how bad the hull damage is. It can’t be that bad, as we’re still breathing.

  I sit at the navigation table amidst the detritus of the blackjack school and drink a coffee with a good-sized dram of whiskey in it.

  Morgan sits opposite me and fiddles with the gunnery computer he bought second-hand on Arcadia.

  “Morgan?” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  That should be yes, sir, as Morgan is the leader of Scout Group B, which makes me his boss, but he’s the cousin of a friend from Ennis, so we don’t stand on ceremony. Actually, on the Skint Idjit, basic manners are in short supply, never mind formality. Morgan is in his boxers and undershirt, and I’m not wearing much more myself.

  “You don’t need to do that,” I tell him.

  “I just need to get the optical feed to synchronize with the targeting software.”

  “And if you did, that piece-of-shite antimatter cannon you bought from the mob would probably explode the first time you fired it. We don’t need it out here, Morgan. We’re the only human beings within two kiloparsecs.”

  “Something hit us, if you noticed,” he says.

  “That wasn’t a slug, it was a piece of Planet Number Twenty-fecking-Seven. And if it had been a larger piece, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “I’d still rather be safe than sorry,” he says obstinately.

  I know the feeling. I eat some chocolate chips left on the table. What Morgan doesn’t understand is that if there were any bad guys out here, which there aren’t, thank God, his pathetic second-hand antimatter cannon would just give them a laugh at our expense, before they blew us away with their twenty-gun high-energy laser broadside.

  My uncle Finian used to have terawatt-class laser batteries on his ship, when I worked for him on the Draco spur. That was twenty years ago, but I can still see the explosions vividly in my memory. It was actually less horrible that way, when there weren’t any bodies to bury ... or not bury, as the case might be, because it was more important to make a quick getaway with the A-tech.

  There was loads of A-tech on the Draco spur in those days. But now it’s all been found and the pirates have to search further afield, running ahead of the tsunami of big money that’s sweeping through the exploration industry. So there is a silver lining to Wall Street taking over the industry, bringing in rules and regulations and lawsuits that’ll bleed you out as surely as a bullet wound. I may complain about our backers but I’d rather deal with them than with pirates like my uncle. That’s another way of saying I’d rather be alive than dead.

  Saul calls up from the engineering deck. “Good news,” he says. “We can fix the heat rejection system. Bad news, it’s going to take a while. I hope the next planet is nice.”

  “At this point,” I tell him, “I’d settle for it being there.”

  It is there. Eighteen hours after our hasty departure from Planet No. 27, another junction comes in view and we zoom smoothly onto the local loop that encircles Planet No. 28.

  From orbit, it’s half black and half striped.

  The stripe is a band of green around the terminator. The middle of the dayside, facing Planet No. 28’s sun, is dry-roasted rock.

  “Tidally locked,” sighs the Captain. “But where there’s green stuff, there’s air and water. We’ll put down in the twilight zone.” He touches the intercom with a metal-gloved finger. “Penny, is it safe to bring the reactor online for a de-orbit burn?”

  Even if Penelope said no, we’d have to try it anyway. We need air and water. My fingers close around the old plastic rosary in my pocket.

  “Harriet,” says the Captain through the grille at the bottom of his faceplate, turning to our life-support officer, “it is your turn to name this newly discovered planet.”

  “Oh no it’s not,” says Hendrik, one of my scout group leaders. He’s South African, and always suspects us of not giving him a fair shake. “It’s my turn. Hers was last planet.”

  “It was,” the Captain acknowledges, “but that was not strictly speaking a planet. So she gets to name this one.”

  “He can have it,” Harriet says. “I hate tidally locked planets.” Harriet is supposed to be one of our most stalwart crew members, but I have suspected for some time that she has had enough and would like to go home.

  “Ah, go on, Harry,” the Captain wheedles.

  “Fine.” Harriet sighs noisily. “I name this planet Suckass.”

  CHAPTER 2

  As tidally locked planets go, Suckass turns out to be not so bad. It’s a little massier than Earth, a little smaller. Its star is a cool dwarf only a bit bigger than Jupiter. The twilight zone, a thousand kilometers wide, goes all the way around the planet. Its ecosystem runs to complex metazoans, what we in the industry call ‘animals.’ There is no sign that sentient life ever evolved here. The terrain around our LZ is mountainous and covered with photosynthetic organisms (‘plants’) that look like hundred-foot geraniums with black leaves and green flowers. It’s a bit windy.

  Despite the superficially unpromising nature of a planet covered (well, at least partly covered) with gargantuan geraniums, I’ve deployed the scouts to have a look around. They’ve been gone two days now, and have been in intermittent radio contact. We toasted a kilometer-wide patch of jungle when the Idjit landed, leaving the ground knee-deep in charred biomass, which is still blowing away in dusty flurries. Not my idea of a pleasant campsite, so I hauled our stuff to the treeline—doing Harriet’s job for her—and set up a nice little bivouac in the shade of the geraniums. As long as you aren’t in direct sunlight, the heat is nice.

  In fact, for those of us not working on the damaged ship, it feels almost like a holiday. We were certainly due one.

  I am kicking back in my hammock on Day 3 when Ruby comes to pester me.

  “Any word from the scouts?”

  I look up reluctantly from my iPad. Jacob Ruby is six foot three with a hipster beard and pencil biceps. His official title is Deputy A-Tech Scout, which would make him my assistant, but in reality he’s a spy foisted upon the Skint Idjit by Goldman Sachs, our primary backers. They suspect us of squirrelling away the good stuff and selling it on Arcadia or Flea Market. It has not been easy to convince them that we just have bad luck, but maybe this time out will do
it.

  “The scouts have found nothing except geraniums,” I say. “Oh, I was forgetting. One of them was attacked by a butterfly the size of an eagle.”

  “Whoa!” says Ruby in his puppyish way, which fools no one. “Got pics?”

  “If you want to look in the surface comms archives, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of pics in there.”

  Instead of going away, as I hoped, Ruby drags over a camp stool and sits down beside my hammock. “Whatcha looking at?”

  I swiftly close the tab. He already thinks I am up to something. Let him think it has something to do with this footage. Red Herrings ‘R’ Us. “Nothing,” I say with a big smile.

  “Aw, c’mon, Fletch.”

  When I have my own planet, it will be Mister Connolly to annoying hipsters like this one. Or maybe King Fletcher. Yes, I like the sound of that.

  “Porn? I’m not gonna judge you.”

  There will be no hipsters on my planet, though. There will not be another living soul. Just me and my planetary defenses.

  “It’s probably Full Metal Jacket,” shouts Harriet from behind the tents. “Fletch is a romantic.”

  I am a romantic. My favorite film ever is Everest V, that docudrama about the fella who claimed a snow-covered planet and survived there alone for fifteen years. Pure art, although I could do without the snow.

  “All right, Ruby, see what you make of this.”

  He scoots closer. The legs of his camp stool sink into the leaf mulch, a deep layer the consistency of clay, undisturbed by any sentient being for the last trillion years or so.

  “This is where we derailed,” I say. “Nose cam footage.”

  You can see the junction, where the local loop of Planet No. 27 curls off from the main spur, and the gandy dancers jumping around on it. I slow the replay. The gandy dancers spring out of the way in slow motion. We glide onto the local loop. In reality, it was sickeningly fast.