Rubbish With Names: An Interstellar Railroad Story

  THE RELUCTANT ADVENTURES

  OF

  FLETCHER CONNOLLY

  ON THE

  INTERSTELLAR RAILROAD

  THE PREQUEL

  RUBBISH WITH NAMES

  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

  CHAPTER 1

  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.”

  CHAPTER 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?!?”