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

  “And this is where I grabbed the controls.”

  Our viewpoint pitches to the right. Then we go into a disorienting tumble. A G-type star flashes at us, occulted every few seconds by large objects that will turn out to be pieces of Planet No.27.

  “You’re a crap pilot, Fletch,” says Harriet, who has meandered over to watch.

  “OK, I think we’ve seen enough of that.” I rewind and freeze-frame at the instant before we derail, when we are as close as we’ll get to the damaged stretch of track. “This is what I’m interested in. Look at the track.”

  “Looks pretty chewed up,” Ruby says.

  “Give the lad a gold star. It does look fairly chewed up. And I’m wondering how a bit of rock could do that much damage.”

  “Well,” says Ruby, “I guess it was a big rock.”

  “Kinetic energy is proportionate to velocity. Those fragments aren’t moving very fast. They’re just floating around inside the local loop of the Railroad.”

  “Well, they holed us.”

  Apparently losing interest, Ruby wanders away.

  “Yeah,” I shout after him, “but that’s apples and oranges. The Skint Idjit is a spaceship. The Interstellar Railroad is an A-tech artifact of unknown provenance, which scientists believe to be constructed of pure energy, having the function of folding spacetime in its immediate vicinity, so it’s got to be a bit stronger than a Boeing X-80, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah man, I guess,” is Ruby’s response, as he vanishes into his tent.

  “I wonder how smart you have to be to act that stupid,” I say to Harriet, quite loudly. Ruby really does annoy the shite out of me.

  She yawns. “Let’s go see how they’re getting on with the repairs.”

  We squelch to the edge of the treeline. Standing in the shade of an awning-sized leaf, we gaze at the Skint Idjit. She is a blended-wing atmosphere-capable spaceship, 1000 feet long from nose to thrusters. Claws stick out from her undercarriage like a row of teats, between her landing gear. Those are her chain dogs, energy converters which hook onto the Railroad when we go interstellar. Most of the rest of the ship is the nuclear drive for in-system maneuvering. Hidden away in the middle, behind three-meter-thick shielding, is 6,000 cubic feet of pressurized cabin space … for 28 of us. It gets quite fetid in there after a few weeks or months, and I’m happy to see both airlocks are open, airing the ship out.

  The tiny figures of the Captain, Woolly, and one of Saul’s assistants dot the Idjit’s towering sides. The Captain is wearing his exoskeleton. The others are stripped to the waist like construction workers. They are patching the holes left by microscopic pieces of Planet No. 27. Saul, Penelope, and Saul’s other assistant are working on the reactor.

  Low in the mustard-colored sky, the dull red disk of Suckass’s star subtends an angle of 25 degrees—approximately 50 times the size of the sun as seen from Earth. A thin black line skims the top edge of the disk, bisecting the sky from horizon to horizon. This is the local loop of the Interstellar Railroad. Every connected planet has one.

  “I wonder where it came from,” Harriet muses.

  Of course, nobody knows the answer to that. The Railroad simply zoomed into our solar system one day in 2024, built loops around Earth and Mars, and zoomed onwards to connect the rest of the Orion Arm. Humanity’s initial reaction to the Railroad was to attempt to blow it up. This proves that Ruby has shite for brains. An artifact that couldn’t be damaged by nukes is not going to get holed by a few bits of rock. Anyway, when we got over our annoyance and terror, we realized there was a galaxy out there to explore.

  500 billion stars …

  400 billion planets …

  40 billion of those Earthalikes (very broadly speaking) in the habitable zone …

  And at least 30 billion of those already connected by the Railroad.

  We seem to have come along rather late in the day, on the galactic timescale.

  But it’s not so bad.

  Because everywhere we go, everyone is dead.

  All the countless other civilizations that once flourished in the Milky Way galaxy are history.

  And as they say, you can’t take it with you. Enough A-tech has already been recovered from once-inhabited worlds to fund Earth’s booming exploration industry several times over.

  It’s nice to be fashionably late.

  Earth is teeming with squintillionaires, we’ve planted colonies on dozens if not hundreds of worlds, the discoverers of new A-tech wonders are feted in the media every week, and all it would take for me to become one of those success stories is one little find.

  I uncap my thermos and take a swig of Pepsi, ice-cold despite the eighty-degree heat. Some lucky bastard discovered an alien corpse that was still cold to the touch, despite reposing on a planet whose sun had expanded into a red giant. The body bag on that corpse proved to be reverse-engineerable, and said lucky bastard now has his own planet.

  That’s all it would take.

  One little tiny find that isn’t shite.

  Harriet says, “Do you think Ruby guesses about the treecats?”

  The treecats are shite. We picked them up on Planet No.14, Lisdoonvarna XV (named by the Captain). They’re now in a pressurized inflatable animal habitat in the cargo hold. They’re not going to fetch much, so there is no need to let our backers know about them. One-fortieth of not much is better than one-fortieth of fifty percent of not much. But even if they catch on as pets, it’s not going to buy me a planet, is it?

  “Bugger the treecats,” I say.

  “Oh come on, you like them,” Harriet says, without conviction. She starts walking into the sunlight. “I’m going to make sure they’ve been fed. The Captain said he would do it while he’s up there, but I bet he’ll forget.”

  I watch her walk towards the ship, scuffing up charred geranium leaves like a little girl at the beach. Harriet has shapely hips, and it’s a nice view. I muse that this is probably the best view obtainable on Suckass. We are 2.3 kiloparsecs from home.

  The wind drops for a minute, as it sometimes does, and the world goes so quiet that I can hear Harriet’s footsteps crunching in the ashes. I also hear the Captain’s groan of despair when he drops his carbon-foam applicator. It thuds to the ground 60 feet below. He always was bad with his hands. Cut off the top of his own pinky finger in fabrication class when we were first-years.

  My radio squelches. I jump, startled.

  “Fletch here.”

  “Help!” yells the person on the other end. I hold the radio away from my face and frown at it.

  “What did you say?”

  “HELP!”

  “Who is this?” It’s one of the scouts but he hasn’t identified himself.

  “This is Morgan. Get off your arse, you dosser, we need HELP! It’s eaten Eamon and Aisling!”

  “What?”

  A wordless wail from Morgan, and the radio goes dead.

  Well.

  That doesn’t sound good.

  Ruby’s face floats pale in the shade under the geraniums. “Everything OK, Fletch?”

  “They’ve got a problem,” I say, bringing up the GPS screen on my radio. We dropped a handful of sats in orbit on our way down. Each explorer has a beacon that pinpoints his or her location.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “At a guess, a complex metazoan problem.”

  Holy feck. Morgan is on the nightside. In fact, the whole of Scout Group B is on the nightside, about a mile past the terminator.

  Before my eyes, their little red location bubbles vanish.

  “Now they’ve turned off their beacons.” I record their last known coordinates and trudge towards the tents to pick up some stuff.

  A ghastly scream spins me around.

  The Captain has come off the ship, exoskeleton and all. I am just in time to see him hit the ground.

  Harriet breaks into a run.

  That wasn’t the Captain screaming. It was her.

  “He’s fallen!” Ruby shouts.
“Is he hurt?”

  I’m starting to believe this one really is as stupid as he acts. “He’ll be fine. That’s what the fecking exoskeleton is for. Impact protection, rad protection, you-name-it protection.”

  Harriet reaches the Captain. She screams again.

  Ruby charges past me, arms windmilling. I pick up my pace a bit.

  Lying on the ground, covered with ash, the Captain in his exoskeleton looks like an actual skeleton of some long-dead alien. I shove everyone else aside and rattle my knuckles on the exoskeleton’s fishbowl helmet. Inside, his face is as red as a tomato. There must be a way to open this piece of shite from the outside.

  There isn’t.

  Saul fetches a power saw.

  I move away and radio Scout Group A. “How are you doing, Lukas? Listen, Morgan and his crew are in a spot of trouble … yeah, I know.” Scout Group A are 1,238 miles from Scout Group B’s last known location. But Scout Group C are even further away. “Well, the sooner you get airborne, the sooner you’ll be there, won’t you?”

  The power saw sings. I stick my finger in my free ear. Lukas Sakashvili, the leader of Scout Group A, quacks at me about having to finish recharging their batteries before they can go anywhere. He’s so committed to health and safety, it warms my heart.

  “He’s not responding,” shouts Harriet, who doubles as the ship’s medic.

  “Just go,” I yell at Sakashvili, and turn off the radio.

  The Captain is dying from heatstroke.

  He overheated in that fecking exoskeleton.

  Harriet and Saul ride up with him in the bucket of the Skint Idjit’s cargo winch. The stairs are broken, so we’re reduced to using the cargo winch to get in and out of the ship. Rapid cooling is the Captain’s only chance of avoiding organ failure and death. We have A-tech coming out of our ears, and yet all we can do for him is pop him in the freezer. I feel like I’m stuck in the 18th century.

  We all stand around watching the cargo winch rise into the air until it docks with the airlock. The streamlined nose of the Skint Idjit cuts a black wedge out of the grotesquely oversized sun.

  “Right. I’ve got to be off,” I say to no one in particular. “I’m sure you can handle this.”

  Woolly gawps at me. “Where are you going?”

  “A minor issue with one of the scout groups,” I say, aware of Ruby watching me with narrowed eyes. He overheard Morgan shouting for help. The hell with him. “I’m taking my flitter. I should be back by this time tomorrow.”

  We are much closer to Morgan’s location than Scout Group A are. They will dawdle, anyway. Haste would not comport with their keen commitment to ‘elf ‘n’ safety (theirs, not anyone else’s).

  “You don’t need me here, do you?” I say, already turning away.

  Donal O’Leary, the Captain and owner of the Skint Idjit, is my oldest friend. We grew up together in County Clare. Shoplifting from Lidl, drinking lager down the marina, breaking into the trade school to print out model spaceships of our own design … we had good craic. But it’s a long long way from Clare to here, as the man sang. And there is no denying the Captain has been slipping recently. The exoskeleton; his refusal to come out of it—he’s been sleeping in the fecking thing; Jesus, he even complimented Woolly on her flying the other day, and that’s when I knew he’d lost it.

  The right stuff is like anything else, you see. It trickles away over time.

  One day you wake up and you just can’t do it anymore.

  I’ll be dead before that happens to me.

  So I collect my stuff and wedge it into the pod of the last remaining flitter, and I take off into the wind, and I waggle my wings at the people below. Then I zoom away to the west. Cheeky auld Fletch.

  CHAPTER 3

  The flitters are great little vehicles. A-tech, of course, from the same find that gave us flying cars, at bloody last, and turned every morbidly obese person and decrepit pensioner on Earth into a levitating menace to society. It’s a complete crapshoot, isn’t it? You can’t control what people find and no more can you control what people do with it.

  But you can cash in, and as I fly west that is what I am planning to do.

  Whatever Morgan’s group has found, it must be fairly impressive. Our scouts carry energy weapons that could stop a tank.

  Am I not in the least worried about getting eaten, mauled, or otherwise embuggered myself?

  Nah.

  I am 99% sure that Morgan was taking the piss. If he was really in trouble, he’d have triggered his emergency beacon, instead of switching off his locator beacon to boot. “It’s eaten Eamon and Aisling”—not sure what he was on about there, but if it’s serious, I’ve got my lightsaber, anyway.

  My mind fills with visions of caverns packed with A-tech, hidden away on the nightside of Suckass. The secret of eternal life. Toothbrushes that never get bits of food stuck in them. Dog hair repellent. A non-broken version of that duplicator found five years ago on Seventh Heaven—that’s what all the backers are after right now. Dragons.

  I zoom over endless ridges and valleys covered with geraniums. Their black coloration makes the shadow of my flitter invisible, except when I pass above a patch of green flowers. The flitter is about the size of a Cessna 120, except with twice the wingspan. The wings are solar panels, which recharge the battery of the flitter’s anti-grav engine as I fly.

  Presently I see something queer: a pale patch in the geraniums.

  Snapping out of my dreams of riches beyond the wildest, etc., I fly down for a closer look. The patch is roughly circular and measures half a mile across. It is a bald patch. Well, almost bald. It is covered with baby geraniums.

  It looks an awful lot like our LZ.

  Or rather, like our LZ will look some weeks or months after we leave.

  Dark suspicions clouding my mind, I set the flitter down near the edge of the bald patch. The wheels crush the new growth, releasing a pungent scent. The baby geraniums are knee high. How fast do they grow? Feck knows, but let’s say an inch a week.

  It has been about five months since someone else’s spaceship landed here, charring out an LZ for itself, just like we did.

  I turn my face up to the sullen, bloated sun and curse our backers, 2.3 kiloparsecs away.

  Never before visited, they said. Completely unmapped, they said. You’ll be the first, they said. You’ve every chance of finding something new.

  “ A little bit of oppo research would have helped!”

  Unless—darker suspicions—they’ve covertly backed another ship and pointed it in the same direction, to double their chances of finding whatever there is here to find.

  Viciously, I hope there’s nothing on this spur to find. Misery loves company.

  I kick through the baby geraniums for a while, to punish the stubborn part of my brain that still doesn’t want to believe the bad news. It only takes a few minutes before I find a crisp packet, its colors still vivid. Filthy litterers. Then, investigating the treeline, I find some forgotten washing hanging from a stem. Several pairs of boxer shorts, some A-tech socks (they never get stinky!), and a pair of Carhartt bib overalls. I am tempted to take the overalls for myself, but principle supervenes.

  This is not really much of a clue, as everyone in the exploration industry wears Carhartt, Wranglers, Dickies, etc.

  But I’ll definitely be having a word with Ruby when I get back.

  I go back to the flitter to use the radio. “Morgan? Come in, Morgan.” He needs to know about this.

  He doesn’t answer.

  Feck. What if he really is in trouble?

  What if the owners of this washing are still on Suckass—and they’ve found him?

  A gauzy shadow falls across the flitter. Clouds blot out the sun. It’s time for Suckass to do its one and only party trick: pouring down with rain.

  Now slightly more concerned about the fate of Morgan’s group, I decide to fly straight through it. Neither our instruments nor our own eyes have picked up any signs of electrical storms o
n Suckass, so I’m not at risk of getting hit by lightning. What’s a little water?

  Actually, a metric fucktonne of water.

  Eh, screw it. I’m Irish.

  I make it through the storm without problems, but by the time the sun comes out again, my battery is redlining. That’s the trouble with the flitters. Anti-grav gobbles juice. As I fly onwards, the solar panels on the wings feed electricity straight to the engine, with none left over to top up the battery. The situation is so marginal that I daren’t use the heater, and I’m now so close to the terminator that it is bloody cold up here. I switch on the radio.

  The flitter promptly sinks lower in the sky.

  “Morgan? Morgan, come in.”

  No joy.

  “Idjit, this is Fletch, any change?”

  “He hasn’t woken up yet,” Woolly says. Her voice breaks. “I don’t think he’s going to.”

  My flitter is practically brushing the tops of the geraniums. “Got you, Woolly. Well, tell Harriet to do her best.”

  I have to switch off the radio then or crash. The flitter labors back into the sky, and I see the terminator.

  Everything ahead just sort of fades into twilight.

  I’d like to take the flitter across the terminator and check out Morgan’s last known coordinates from a safe height, but that is not happening with no battery power.

  The scouts have figured out how to land the flitters safely on Suckass. I implement their procedure. It goes like this:

  Turn off engine

  Gradually damp anti-grav effector

  Pray

  It works! The flitter’s wings come to rest on top of the geraniums, supported by the crowns of three separate plants. The stems creak and bow, but do not give way.

  I scramble out onto the port wing, hung about with stuff like a donkey, and walk along it to the nearest geranium. Conscious that I’m 80 feet up, and mindful of what happened to the Captain, I rope on and descend to the forest floor.

  The geraniums are widely enough spaced that I can look up and see the flitter resting like a giant insect on the flowers. I’ll let it sit there and recharge until I come back. There’s definitely something to be said for a planet where it is always day.