Will Save the Galaxy for Food

  “Um,” said Jemima quietly, close to my ear. “Could you be honest? How likely is it that this will kill us all?”

  I kept my gaze fixed on the countdown. “Well,” I murmured, speaking as slowly as I dared. “I wouldn’t put it above one percent. And. Below three percent.”

  “You wouldn’t put it between one and three percent?” summarized Jemima.

  “No,” I replied, drawing the syllable out a good few seconds.

  “Would you put it at more than three percent?”

  A set of metal rings appeared around the ship and began to spin in opposite directions, knitting the warp bubble around us. My hair stood on end as every airborne particle in the ship’s atmosphere held perfectly still.

  “Tell you later!” I shouted over the growing roar of the activating trebuchet cannon, before smashing the Cancel button.

  For one confusing moment, the ship seemed to be several million light years in length and facing in twenty different directions. Then reality reasserted itself, and we crossed the Black.

  Chapter 15

  I went through the usual disorienting sensation that accompanies a trebuchet jump, and once I’d firmly established where my body ended and the rest of the universe began, I took stock.

  I’d had worse trebuchet jumps. I was still sitting in the chair, miraculously, although it had rolled a good six feet away from where it had been previously, and there was a large, painful bruise on my forehead that seemed to correspond in size to a patch of grease on a nearby bulkhead.

  Jemima and Warden were both picking themselves up from various sections of floor. Daniel’s chair had been heavy enough to stay where it was, so he was still in it, although it hadn’t fully stopped spinning. His face looked a little green.

  “Urgh,” he said, it being his catch phrase. “We could have gotten, like, hurt from that. That was against, like, health and safety or something.”

  “Where are we?” barked Warden.

  I moved my chair back to the console by the traditional method of repeatedly digging my heels into the carpet and hip thrusting madly. “Well, I can tell you it’s not a worst-case scenario, because we’re still alive,” I said, leafing through the navigation menus.

  “Answer the question,” said Warden testily, looming over me again.

  I looked at the tiny icon that represented our current location. Then I looked at the other icon indicating the asteroid belt near Cantrabargid, where I’d last seen Den and Mark. Then I looked at the yawning black gulf of barely charted space between the two and emitted a little sigh.

  “We’re here,” I said, pointing helpfully. “We want to be there.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Assuming we aren’t attacked on the way?” I said.

  “Well, that would just make things quicker, wouldn’t it?” asked Jemima, appearing at my other shoulder. “That’s what you, like, wanted to do, right? Join up with pirates? And once you do that, we can go home, right?”

  “Uh. Yeah,” I said, nodding slowly.

  What I did not mention was that while a lot of pirates in the Black were reasonable ex-pilot types just trying to get by, it was still a very large and completely unregulated region, and some parts of it were more unregulated than others. Solar System authorities had sent a couple of census workers around the Black to get at least some idea of who was out there and what they were doing, and several of them had never been heard from again. I’d heard that one of the census shuttles had been found drifting, with a load of severed limbs tied to the rear nacelles like grim wedding party ornaments.

  “But if that doesn’t happen, I’d say it’s a four-hour travel time,” I said.

  “BOOOOR-IIIING,” interjected Daniel informatively. “I don’t wanna go wherever Dad’s got set up. It’ll be boring.”

  “Dude, it’s not set up, it’s real,” said Jemima, desperately staring at the gun in Warden’s hand.

  “It is set up. My dad said it was. Ms. Warden isn’t even any good at pretending. She used the exact same voice when she was making me clean my room.”

  “Set the course,” said Warden to me through her teeth.

  “Right you are, Mary Poppins,” I replied, under my breath.

  “Four hours, then,” said Warden, addressing the room. “We should take the opportunity to get some sleep.”

  “I’ll just nap in the pilot’s chair,” I said, pulling the peak of my cap low.

  Warden eyed me suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Because if we do get ambushed by something, then I don’t want to have to run up however many plying flights of steps dodging beanbags and popcorn machines to get back to the controls,” I spat.

  “Very well,” she said, after mulling it over at length. “Daniel. Jemima. Come on. I’m going to lock you in one of the cabins.”

  “Erm,” I interjected as I noticed Daniel immediately perk up. “Maybe . . . put them in separate cabins,” I suggested. “So they don’t conspire with each other.”

  “Thank you,” mouthed Jemima.

  Warden mulled this one over, too. “Perfectly sound reason twice in one minute?” she said suspiciously. “Don’t strain yourself, McKeown.” She must have been in a good mood, or at least drifting over to the manic side of bipolar.

  “I’m not going to bed!” protested Daniel as Warden waggled the gun toward the door. “I’m not tired! This is stupid.”

  “Daniel, do as you are told,” said Warden, holding the gun uncomfortably. I didn’t think she’d actually shoot him with it, but I wondered if she’d go as far as a pistol-whip.

  “Yeah, come on, Dan, please,” said Jemima fearfully, touching his arm in a way that made Daniel’s eyes bulge out like a pair of sweaty cue balls. “I want to see, you know, what your Dad set up. Maybe it’ll be . . . fun?”

  “Okay,” said Daniel meekly, reddening.

  Warden was shepherding the pair of them out of the room with little sweeps of the gun but stopped at the door. “McKeown, give me your phone. We need to get rid of it before it’s traced.”

  “I know! Stop fussing, all right?” I snapped. “Just concentrate on locking the kids up. I can get rid of my own phone. I’m not stupid.”

  She opened her mouth to attempt some devastatingly witty response to that, but then aborted and went for a tired sigh instead. “Fine. Don’t forget.”

  Soon I was alone on the bridge, with no company except the background chorus of stock electronic bleeps and hums that were piped through the PA system apparently for atmospheric purposes alone.

  I leaned back, interlaced my hands behind my head, and watched the passing stars until they started to lull me into a doze, and my thoughts returned to Jacques McKeown. The traitor to pilotkind believed by a growing list of people to be me, including his plying employers now.

  But the greatest of all sellouts hadn’t reaped any of the traditional reward of selling out—I had. And I didn’t want to think about whether or not this meant I had also stolen the title of traitor along with everything else. I’d just have to let that hang over me until the opportunity arose to donate it to charity or sprinkle it all away from the top of a tall building.

  I just couldn’t get my head around why he’d never taken it. Was he just dense? He was smart enough to write the plying things and steal other people’s life stories. Didn’t add up. Had he been screwed by his agent or the publisher? No, the publisher had been trying to find him. And they said he didn’t have an agent.

  Maybe, and this was getting really speculative, he just felt bad. He was just some star pilot doing some amateur writing on the side to make ends meet, and the success snowballed on him. It seemed likelier, but then again, according to the publishers he’d never collected any money. Not even from his earliest books, before he was popular as both author and hate figure.

  No star pilot would turn away cash. That was just a fact. We’d all gone long past the point that pride had to be sacrificed for survival. So . . .

  . . . So there was always t
he possibility that the real Jacques McKeown wasn’t a pilot.

  I had almost put myself to sleep with the nice, calming background noise of constant dread when my phone burst into life, sending me into a brief seizure that almost toppled the chair.

  I worried my phone free of my pocket. No caller ID, again. The words don’t forget, in Warden’s strict tones, echoed in my ears for a moment. But what the hell, I thought. She wasn’t the boss of me, and there’s always room to dig yourself a little deeper. I answered.

  “Take it you got there alive, Jacques?”

  Still bleary from partial sleep, I needed a moment to recognize that voice that I’d heard before, but never from this phone. When I did, it sparked off a new round of seizures that sent me straight off the chair and onto the floor. “Henderson?” I said, propping myself up on an elbow.

  “Jacques, Jacques. We’re both men of the world. Well, you’re not—you live on the moon—but we understand each other, don’t we? It hit me while I was saying to Penny that thing about how any scumbag in the Black would sell her out. I thought to myself, wait a minute, I know just the guy.”

  “What?”

  “Geez, does living in low gravity make your brain float away? I mean you, Jacques! You’re the right guy in just the right place to ease a concerned father’s mind.”

  “Didn’t you have a vendetta against me not too long ago?”

  Henderson was doing that thing where he appeared completely deaf to any voice other than his own. “Now, I did a little bit of thinking after our earlier conversation, and I want to float some guesswork past you. Tell me, this whole idea to kidnap my son, was that really something you and Penny agreed on, equal partnership style?”

  Henderson was sharp. Dangerously so, like a knife hanging off a kitchen worktop in a household with young children. I looked all around before answering, to make sure Warden wasn’t still hovering behind me like one of the brides of Dracula. “No. I swear.”

  There was a pause. “Okay, so either you’re telling the truth, or you’re lying and you’ve decided you want out. That’s cool. Either suits me. What was it that killed the romance? Is she frigid? I’m pretty sure she’s frigid.”

  I winced. “I—”

  “I’m just messing with you, Jacques. That was the other thing that didn’t add up. You and her, running away together? You just didn’t seem like her type. I always pictured her settling down with some kind of filing cabinet with a dildo strapped to the top. But anyway, now we all know where we are, I have a proposal.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Wow, you are just turning on her like a revolving door, aren’t you. It’s a simple deal—turn on the Quantunnel booth in your ship, set it to the one in my spaceport on Ritsuko, let me and my boys come in and take everyone home. You do that, I wipe the slate clean and forget all about you. Seriously. Next time I see a poster for your books I’ll say, ‘Who’s that? Why have I never heard of such a popular and obviously extremely sensible writer?’”

  I finally got a word in edgeways. “Warden blew up the Quantunnel booth,” I said quickly, uncomfortably aware that I was, as I spoke, proving that she had been extremely smart to do so. “With a gun.”

  “How on earth did she get hold of a gun?”

  “I have no idea,” I said immediately.

  “Actually perhaps I should have said ‘how off earth’?” He made a little muttering laugh at his own joke. “Hm. This complicates things. All right, new deal. I’m sorting out some scum on my end. I’ll let you know where they’re going to be, you just tell Penny whatever lie you need, let the scum onboard, they take everyone away, you try not to look too much like a target, and then you can go wherever you want. Sound good?”

  I only half heard his words, because all my instincts were fighting each other inside my conscious mind. The scrappy survival instincts were all completely in favor of the proposal, but they were being fought on all fronts by the much older instincts of a star pilot. All of which were saying that, leaving aside Henderson being as trustworthy as a thirdhand EVA suit, betraying a woman to the archvillain that she was attempting to escape from was simply Not What Star Pilots Did. In response, a convincing case was made that this was a pretty sexist thought to have in a modern universe, and besides, Warden was a woman only on a completely technical level.

  Henderson broke my silence. He made the effort to sound reasonable. “Look. I’m offering a clean break out of this, Jacques. I know it’s what you want. And as long as Penny and Danny end up back with me, I could give two fetid shits for where you go after that.”

  I bit my lip. “What about Jemima?” I probed.

  “Jemima? Danny brought Jemima along?” He made a chuckle I didn’t like the sound of. “He’s coming of age fast, that boy. Now I know why her mother’s been on the news so much today. Actually, that might work out really well. Hold the scum!” His last three words had been muffled, apparently directed at someone else in the room with him. “I’ll let her know. She’s got some clout with the UR government. Well. I say clout. She runs it.”

  My eyes widened like balloons attached to air tanks as I translated this in my head. “Jemima’s mother is the president of the United Republic,” I said, tonelessly.

  “Yeah. She’s an uppity little bitch. Haven’t quite been able to get her under the thumb, yet. But she’ll be all over this. She’ll send the Navy SPEALs. Yeah, you know what? Forget everything I just said. I don’t need to make a deal with you. You can make all the deals you like when the navy burst in and shoot you in the knees and pin you to the floor. Catch you later, then.”

  After he hung up, I stared at my deactivated phone for close to a full minute. Then an actual reasoned thought penetrated the din of chattering voices in my head, and I embarked upon a short walk down to the airlock to finally get rid of the phone.

  On the way, I tried to focus my mind. I wasn’t going to even try storing away the new knowledge that Jemima was the president’s daughter. I was very firmly ordering that to the back of the queue of things my brain needed to process. The only concrete fact that mattered was that we were now on the run from the entire plying UR Navy as well as Henderson. If either of those parties tracked down the ship and boarded it, I gave myself even odds that I wouldn’t immediately be shot in the face for being too visible.

  That was when a plan started unfolding. Henderson wanted Warden dead but didn’t seem to care as much about me. Suddenly we weren’t as “in this together” as I’d assumed. So if I wasn’t onboard to be captured when the cavalry arrived, Henderson probably wouldn’t give me another thought.

  I reached the airlock, and opened the inner door just an inch to toss my phone through, receiving a vicious blast of ice-cold suction before I could slam it shut. Then I opened the external door remotely, and my only means of communication disappeared into space, along with all my prepaid minutes.

  That was the solution. I was already in the Black; I was where I wanted to be. I just had to get off this plying ship. Leave it to drift in the middle of nowhere and let Henderson and the UR Navy scoop it up like dog dirt. Sure, it was a betrayal, but getting two minors back to their parents practically made it heroic.

  If the Platinum God of Whale Sharks had had escape pods, I would have been in one already, waving goodbye to this whole tangled mess. But that was just another safety measure the manufacturers apparently felt would have spoiled the party. I’d have to flag down a pirate vessel. I was honestly surprised they weren’t already circling us like hyenas, but one would show up sooner or later. Where things would get complicated would be persuading the crew to attach an umbilical but do basically the exact opposite of a boarding. They’d probably want to do the more conventional kind of boarding and clear the place out, if not hijack the entire ship, which would definitely get in the way of my plan to quietly slip away into the night.

  Once I was back in the pilot’s seat, I devoted all my thought to the matter, there being little else to do besides watch the stars fly past, an
d eventually remembered that I was, as of recently, a multimillionaire. Money was the ultimate persuader. What I wasn’t sure about was what kind of value Solar System currency would have out here in the Black, where transactions were mainly done through either bartering or theft. Still, I’d heard of arms dealers who went into the Black soliciting custom from pirates, so euroyen must have at least some value. And regardless, a million of any kind of currency turns heads.

  I performed a wide sensor sweep. Not a single blip. My concern for the absence of life around here was growing. But then, the Black was a big place. And we were currently deep in a large section of it I’d never set foot in. I usually flew tourists to Cantrabargid because it was near the rim of an outlying policed zone and conveniently close to a trebuchet gate. I hadn’t been this deep in the Black for a very long time.

  I started casting an even wider sensor sweep. I picked up a handful of populated planets within a few hours’ flying range, but most of them were still around the hitting-each-other-with-swords stage of civilization, last I’d heard. Humanity was still the most advanced spacefaring race, representing most of the traffic on what few spaceways had been established. Spaceways being probably an overgenerous term for “someone drew a line from one policed zone to another and did a quick one-time check for black holes.”

  Finally, I found a blip. Right on the edge of the Jemima’s communication range. A small vessel, but I was sure they could fit me in somewhere.

  I leaned close to the mike, to ensure no one else onboard would hear me, and sent out a standard directed signal on a hailing frequency. “Hello? This is civilian vessel . . . Jemima calling unidentified craft,” I said enticingly. I dispensed with the sign-offs and official-sounding voice; the Black tended to be less formal.