Will Save the Galaxy for Food

  “Really?” Jemima bit her lip. “Are you sure you want to use it up? I mean, you might need it later.”

  “I’m talking about killing Malcolm Sturb!” I hissed. “Ending the Malmind! The galactic scourge gone once and for all! I can finish the fight that I and every other star pilot have only ever chipped away at for decades. What better use are you imagining for half a charge of blaster cell?”

  By the end of my question I was already turning the blaster up to Solve All Immediate Problems and taking aim for the slumped figure silhouetted against the multiple screens. But Warden clamped a hand around my straightened elbow. “McKeown, if you fire that gun, every single hostile entity in this chamber will immediately know our position.”

  “Warden,” I said, adopting her tone of voice. “It won’t matter because all the hostile entities in the room can’t do trac unless the central control hub is functioning, and the central control hub in question will be spread across the floor like jam on toast.”

  Her eyes flicked around as the cogwheels turned, then she released my arm. “Very well. Proceed.”

  I was about to, but I noticed a commotion in the cyborg mob. Sturb suddenly spun around in his office chair as his minions parted neatly. Alice was being brought forward by a pair of the humanoid cyborgs, each holding an arm. She was making up for that by getting as much motion as she could out of her legs, but they weren’t touching the ground.

  “Ah yes, the native girl,” said Malcolm Sturb. I hadn’t heard that he had a voice like one of those early twentieth century horror movie villains. “You are proving an annoyance again and again. Converting you first has now become a necessity.”

  “You can’t make me keep still for it,” said Alice through defiantly clenched teeth.

  “I only need one minion to hold each limb,” said Sturb matter-of-factly. “Unless you are hiding several thousand vestigial ones, I do not see this as an issue.”

  As if to illustrate his point, two cyborgified Ruggels ran up with perfect synchronicity and latched onto her shins. Even from a distance I could see the fear rising in Alice’s eyes as Sturb took a step forward, toying with his fingers menacingly.

  “We will . . . be avenged,” quavered Alice.

  Sturb folded his arms. “Girl, you are the only thing that even comes close to intelligent or physically threatening among that entire teddy bear collection you call a tribe. Honestly, who or what do you expect to be avenging you?”

  And that sounded like as good a cue as any. I stood at the edge of the platform, spread my legs to optimal heroic-pose width, took a moment to make sure I was dynamically silhouetted against the glow from the force field behind me, and yelled, “STURRRB!”

  Every face in the room turned in my direction. I must have made for quite an impressive sight, elevated above the Malmind horde with gun drawn and legs akimbo. It was the sort of situation that called for a one-liner.

  “SUCK IT!” I roared, and pulled the trigger.

  It had been a while since I’d had a chance to fire my blaster at full power, and I’d forgotten how much of a kick it had. A roaring ball of swirling energy burst from the barrel and smashed into a mob of Malmind cyborgs like a bowling ball into pins. I saw Sturb flinch with the impact, but it had missed him by several feet.

  Once the moment passed, I realized that the reason I had missed so hugely was less about the recoil and more about Jemima, suddenly standing next to me and pushing on my wrist with all her strength.

  “Jemima?!” I said.

  “It’s a real gun!” she called, apparently not addressing me.

  “Real gun?” said Sturb, suddenly very pale and dropping his villainous accent. “You let him get this far carrying a real gun?” He directed this question at Alice, who had been freed by the cyborgs but was making no effort to escape or fight.

  “You’re the one who’s supposed to take their weapons away. You’re the villain,” said Alice.

  “Excuse me!” said Sturb petulantly. “It says quite clearly in the guide, if the participants are not disarmed in the first encounter, any available person should take the opportunity to do so when possible.”

  “I didn’t know he had a gun!” Alice protested. She, too, had dropped the slightly alien lilt from her voice.

  My legs were starting to get stiff from my heroic pose, and I still hadn’t gotten my head around the situation, until Warden piped up. “McKeown. Look.”

  She was kneeling by the edge of our perch, and I saw what she was indicating. The cyborgs I had fired upon were reduced to scattered, fizzling pieces on the ground, surrounded by their completely unperturbed brethren. I saw a lot of scorched servos still whirring by themselves, and a lot of mechanical body parts with scraps of waxy fake skin hanging off them. What I wasn’t seeing was much in the way of organic tissue.

  “I don’t believe these to be cyborgs at all,” said Warden. “I think they are entirely robotic.”

  I thought back to the first one I had killed when we’d arrived on the planet. Its insides had been far too red hot and melted to properly inspect, but now that I thought back to it, the rubbery, dead look on its face could probably be explained by it being both made of rubber and not alive.

  I hopped down into my newly created smoking patch of destruction, crunching motors and gears beneath my shoes. “Could someone please explain to me what is going on? Are you telling me that none of this has been real?”

  The person I had assumed was Malcolm Sturb blustered indignantly. “Of course it’s real! This is a genuine planet-saving experience straight from the Golden Age of star piloting. I mean, you can forget about VR. This is realer than real.”

  I let him finish, counted to three, then made my point. “I meant, not real in the sense that no one’s actually being turned into cyborgs or in any danger at all.”

  He adjusted his crown. “Well. No. Not until you showed up swinging a real gun around, anyway.”

  I turned to Alice. “And presumably you weren’t raised by sloths, either.”

  She picked awkwardly at her fur bikini and reddened. “No. But I am classically trained.”

  My scowling gaze then moved to a row of cyborg Ruggels, who were still standing nearby with frozen shocked expressions and their little arms held out. After a few seconds of concentrated glare, one of them caved, relaxed their arms, and morosely unclipped their fake cranial implant. That spurred the rest of them to do the same.

  “Well, I feel like a plying chump now, don’t I,” I spat. “Ruggels. You even made the name cute. What are they really called?”

  “We are Spercubulans,” said the nearest ex-Ruggel, making me flinch. It spoke with a rather alarming voice that sounded like a death metal singer had given up his career to spend the rest of his life chain-smoking in a public bathroom.

  “Deep space nomadic mercenaries,” explained Alice, staring at the floor. “They do any work for pay. It’s part of their honor system.”

  “Yeah,” growled another Spercubulan, producing a switchblade from some kind of pouch like a marsupial’s. “So you better not ruin this gig for us, or we’ll cut yer.”

  “So what happened to the Zuvirons?” I asked, turning back to Sturb.

  “Ugh. Suppose there’s no reason to hide anything at this point, is there.” He turned back to his cluster of keyboards and entered a lengthy password into one of the many competing screens.

  There was a whining of hydraulics, and then a large Zuviron wall painting (depicting warfare, predictably) began to rumble, before sliding upward into a hidden recess and revealing a doorway marked with black-and-yellow stripes.

  And beyond that was an elongated corridor, partly lit by wall-mounted torches and partly by numerous screens and hardware bedecked with glowing LEDs. I saw row after row of workstations like scaled-down versions of the one Sturb used, and at every single one, there sat a Zuviron. Each stared fixedly at a screen, with all four arms occupied with a controller of some kind. At least one of them that I could see was wearing a helmet wit
h two cans of energy drink attached.

  “Four arms, very good for working the controls,” said the Sturb actor, as if that was the only thing that needed explaining. “Each of them can control two robots at once.”

  I recognized a couple of Zuviron warriors I’d fought alongside in the war. None of them looked physically unhealthier, I had to admit, but none of them were on their feet or engaged in a life-or-death grapple for their future, which, for them, was pretty unhealthy in a sense.

  “Zovok,” I said, addressing someone I had last seen tying the spinal columns of two cyberserkers into a knot, somehow without killing either. “What are you all doing here?”

  He didn’t even look at me. “We do what we have alwaysh done,” he said through his tusks. “We fight for honor. We fight for glory.”

  I grabbed his naked thigh urgently. It was like slapping a beached whale, and he didn’t even react. “But it’s not real!”

  “Honor demandsh that we fight and prove who ish the mightiesht,” muttered Zovok reasonably. “Honor shaysh nothing about having to actually be in danger ash well. Thish way we have honor and don’t loshe good breeding shtock.”

  I flung a hand back at the actors and depowered robots behind me, who had gathered to watch the whole scene passively from the doorway. “They’re desecrating the tombs of your dead!”

  “What need have the dead for honor?” asked Zovok. “Shuch shentiment ish ushelesh when Zovok ish jusht four hundred pointsh from the achievement.”

  I gave up and stomped back to the Malmind chamber, not stopping until I was close enough to address Jemima, who was still crouched guiltily on the upper path. “And you knew about this?”

  “Well, I figured it out after they brought me here,” she admitted. “When I noticed there wasn’t really a force field. It was just fluorescent tubes and a buzzing noise. They came clean, and I said I’d play along.”

  “Why?” asked Warden, standing near her on the ledge and just as nonplused as I.

  Jemima shrugged. “It was fun.”

  I clutched my temples for a moment. “We are trying to get you back to Robert Blaze before the UR stomps all over his station!”

  Jemima scowled. “I keep telling you . . .”

  “Robert Blaze?” said Alice, her attitude changing instantly from embarrassed guilt to urgent concern. “Is he in danger?”

  “Do you know him?” asked Warden.

  “He’s the one who set all this up!” said Alice. “Gave us all these jobs.”

  Warden looked to me. “Is that right.”

  “Blaze did this?” I reiterated. I felt a growing sickness in my stomach, and I returned Warden’s gaze. “We need to get off this planet right now. Me and Robert Blaze are going to have to have words.”

  The Malcolm Sturb impersonator touched his index fingertips together nervously. “You’re not going to get him to shut all this down, are you?”

  I gave him a withering look. “Do you know, I rather thought I might.”

  He looked hurt. “But . . . why?”

  I splayed out my arms. “This is obscene! You’ve turned star piloting into a plying theme park! It’s like prostitution on a planetary scale! I actually thought I was making a difference. I actually thought you were Malcolm Sturb!”

  “I am Malcolm Sturb,” said Malcolm Sturb.

  “No, I meant the real Malcolm Sturb.”

  “I am the real Malcolm Sturb.”

  I scrutinized his face. I had never met the real Malcolm Sturb in person, but I’d seen plenty of photographs, usually just above or just below words like “The Enemy” and large sums being offered for reward. And the likeness between those and the man in front of me was, on reflection, uncanny. A great deal of complicated feelings started wrestling for space like baby birds in a nest, cheeping obnoxiously.

  “Oh, trac, you are, aren’t you,” I said.

  “Yeah, I just said.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He seemed offended. “Trying to earn a living! Do you know how much it costs to keep a galaxy-spanning hive mind going? I had to uncyborg most of them just to get by. There isn’t as much traffic around here as there used to be. You know what I blame? Quantum tunneling.”

  Chapter 22

  When I was a kid, my dad cheated on my mum. Just the once. As he said at the time, it could hardly have been avoided: he was French. The solution they hit upon to patch the whole mess up was a family holiday in Luny Land, which basically did the trick and ended up being one of the happier times in my childhood.

  But I have a very clear memory of the journey there on the tube train. One of the most excruciating trips I’ve ever taken, right up there with that short-lived nuclear waste dumping contract. Sitting in absolute silence for hours, with both my parents opposite each other, maintaining fixed, tight-lipped eye contact. I didn’t dare to so much as ask for my coloring crayons in case the argument started again.

  I bring this up because I was distinctly reminded of it by the atmosphere in Alice’s borrowed shuttle as I flew Warden and Jemima back in the direction of Salvation Station. Except that Jemima had taken my role, while Warden and I were both sitting with arms folded, staring straight ahead, in perfect imitation of my mum.

  Several hours in, I decided I was going to have to start talking about it, because otherwise I was going to grind all my teeth down to slivers. I unfolded my arms and took the joysticks, not to correct the steering, but because I suspected I would need something to grip. “Well?”

  “Well what?” said Warden, in the passenger seat beside me.

  “Haven’t you got anything to say?” I said, it being the only thing I could think of to say. “Something along the lines of ‘I told you so?’”

  “Since you bring it up, then yes, I did say that something seemed wrong,” she said, archly taking an interest in her armrest as she did so. “I admit I didn’t think we had stumbled into an amusement arcade.”

  “I don’t get why you had such a, you know, problem with it,” said Jemima, in the tiny living space behind us. To my annoyance, she had insisted on leaving the Malmind lair through the gift shop and was now wearing a bright pink T-shirt bearing the words “I Was a Cantrabargid Captive!!”

  I half turned in my seat and rested an elbow on the headrest to give her the full force of my glare. “Are you serious? Did you even see what was going on down there?”

  Jemima gave one of those nervous quasi-smiles that weren’t sure if they were going to break out or not. “I saw a lot of things, yeah. I saw a lot of people who seemed to be, you know, perfectly happy with it all.”

  I turned around and got my eyes back on the metaphorical road. “Well. I’m not happy. What you saw was exploitation. It’s offensive to me and the entire calling of star piloting.”

  “Oh, what, so you want to try to shut down something that helps people just because it offends you?” said Jemima hotly. “Like what my mum does with all those newspaper companies?”

  I kept my eyes on the view screen, but held up a single waggling finger. “It is not. The same thing.”

  “Why?” she insisted, in that infuriating teenage way.

  I let the finger continue waggling for a few moments as I sought the words. “Warden. Tell her.”

  “Tell her what?” said Warden sniffily. “I agree with her that the arrangement seems to work perfectly well for all concerned. I’d rather discuss what plan we have for getting her back to her mother before the navy arrives.”

  “She’s not going to send the navy, I keep telling you,” insisted Jemima, after a tut and a sigh.

  “You don’t know that,” said Warden dismissively.

  Jemima stood up straight so quickly that her head sank an inch into the ceiling padding with a thunk. “Why does everyone think they know my mum better than I do?!” she raged, before stomping off toward the toilet door at the stern. “She’s only been president for two years! I’ve had her for, like, sixteen!”

  She slammed the toilet door shu
t behind her. I heard a clank as she sat huffily down on the toilet lid.

  We flew in silence for another ten minutes, me glowering at the small cluster of stars we were making absolutely no significant progress toward, and Warden pretending to be taking an academic interest in the specks of cosmic dust that drifted past.

  “Someone should talk to her,” I said, hinting spitefully.

  “People only ever say someone when they mean you,” said Warden.

  “All right, you should talk to her!” I snapped. “You know how to talk to kids. You were Daniel’s tutor.”

  “Personal assistant,” she said tightly, firing the syllables as if from a staple gun. “I can instruct children, yes, but I think this requires a different level of communication.”

  “I can’t go back there. I’m the pilot.”

  “I didn’t mean you. If the aim is to talk her out of her arrested development, I’d rather the blind not attempt to lead the blind.”

  “Listen here, you div—”

  The debate ended suddenly when the control console blared an alert in my face to the effect that a ship nearby had locked its weapons onto our shuttle.

  The view through the windshield was just the usual endless black with twinkly bits, so I flicked on the augmented-reality flight aid. The view became filled with bright green lines, wrapping themselves around the contours of a fleet of ugly black attack ships arranged in a grid that filled the view screen. More and more of the ships were locking weapons onto our shuttle, but no one was firing yet. The sleeping dragon had merely opened an eye and seen what appeared to be a fly buzzing around a turd.

  “What the trac?” I said, reflexively.

  “I think it might be the United Republic navy,” said Warden. “It appears that Robert Blaze and his colleagues are in something of a strawberry jam situation.”

  “Never understood that phrase,” I muttered, before addressing the toilet door. “Hey! Jemima! Wanna come see how much your mum doesn’t care?”

  She didn’t reply. I heard the faint sound of tinny music. She must have had her ear-buds in.