Rubbish With Names: An Interstellar Railroad Story Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER 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-two. Forty. Two. 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, won
dering 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 f
or 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.