The Sheriff of Yrnameer (9 page)

But the vacuum was pulling inexorably at the clog, and suddenly,
whoosh
, the wad on one side gave out and
fwoomp
was immediately replaced by more Payper, and then the same happened on the other side,
whoosh fwoomp!
initiating an uneven rhythm of
whoosh fwoomp! whoosh fwoomp fwoomp!
as physics began winning its battle of attrition with bureaucracy.

Cole pushed off the window and flew back to the cockpit door. Behind him he could hear the
whoosh fwoomp
and the suddenly muffled voices of sheets of Payper sucked away in midsentence: “If you have questions regarding the
mphmmm mmm mmmm …
” He could also hear a creaking, cracking noise—the helmet wasn’t going to last much longer.

He held on with both hands as he kicked at the door, then spotted the button for the video peephole. He touched it and it fitzed to life. Nora’s face filled the screen, knitted with concentration, then jerked back as she tried to pull the door open.

“Nora!” Cole shouted. “The pressure! You have to equalize the pressure!” She looked up, startled, then nodded, understanding. He watched her search for something, then adjust a dial out of the camera’s line of sight. Air jetted and hissed through vents in the door, and suddenly it gave.

Cole shouldered his way through the portal and turned to reseal the door just as the helmet caved in and was fired into the void. The sudden vacuum slammed the door shut.

The ship shuddered. Cole looked through the video peephole. He caught a glimpse of the ruined, twisted cockpit, and then the video feed went to gray static, and then to nothing.

Had there been any gravity, the three of them would have collapsed, gasping for breath. Instead they did their gasping suspended in the corridor.

“Well,” said Cole after a longish panting break, “at least things can’t get much worse.”

Then Bacchi stuck his head out of a heretofore hidden storage compartment and said, “What the
hell
was
that
?”

It took Cole’s ears several minutes to stop ringing after Nora fired. The high-velocity bullet missed Bacchi and pinged a rapid staccato as it ricocheted along the corridor and all around them, striking sparks, whining as it zipped past one side of Cole’s head and then the other. With no gravity to pull it to the ground it kept going, gradually
converting its kinetic energy into pockmarks on every possible surface, somehow missing them as they cowered in little fetal balls.

The pinging finally slowed, then stopped. The lights in the corridor were flickering, a control panel
zzip
ing and
zzap
ing as it shorted out. The bullet, beaten into a grotesque splat, floated at a stately pace down the corridor and came to rest gently between Bacchi’s eyes.

Everyone took a very deep breath and let it out again.

Then Nora brought the gun up once more. “Don’t shoot!” said Bacchi. “Cole, tell her not to shoot!”

Nora kept her gaze focused on Bacchi. “You know him?” she asked Cole.

“He does!” said Bacchi. “We’re friends. Cole, tell her not to shoot!”

Cole thought about the request. On the one hand …

Nora cocked the gun.

“Cole?” said Bacchi.

“Don’t shoot,” said Cole. “I know him.”

Nora lowered the gun. Bacchi exhaled.

“Cole, what are you doing here?” said Bacchi. “Where’s Teg?”

“That’s what /keep asking,” said Philip.

“Is Cole piloting this thing?” said Bacchi. “Oh, great. We’re
farged
. I don’t farging believe this. Cole? Fargin’ farg farg! I can’t farging—”

“Shoot him,” said Cole.

Nora raised the gun.

“Wait! I’m kidding!” said Bacchi. “Cole, please!”

“Who is this?” Nora said to Cole.

“This is Bacchi. Remember how I said it couldn’t get worse?
Now
it can’t get worse.”

One of the shorted wires on the control panel spat out a few more sparks, igniting a small fire. The main lights
kechunked
off, replaced by cold, flat emergency illumination.

The sprinkler system kicked in. A cold mist sprayed into the corridor from countless nozzles.

Nora looked at Philip. “The cargo!” she said.

˙  ˙  ˙

Nora and Philip raced through the ship to the cargo hold, as much as one could race in zero G without cracking one’s skull open after miscalculating a turn. Cole and Bacchi followed, not quite as fast, pulling themselves along with handholds and kicking off walls to change direction.

Cole had reached to switch off the sprinkler system, but Nora stopped him, knocking his hand away. “No! Let it go. Better one hundred percent than halfway. Believe me.”

Cole, not having the slightest idea what she was talking about, wasn’t sure if he did believe her, but she seemed slightly deranged and had a gun and that sufficed.

Now the corridors were filling with wobbling, shimmering globules of water as the mist from the sprinkler system coalesced into spheres, spheres that burst as the four glided through the passageways.

“Cole,” said Bacchi from behind him. “Cole, wait up.”

Cole grabbed a handrail and slowed himself to a stop.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Bacchi.

“It’s a long story.”

“As in, you stole Teg’s ship?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not such a long story.”

“There are details,” said Cole, turning to go.

“I bet. Where are Tangy and Samantha?”

He drew back as Cole spun to face him.

“Aha,” said Bacchi. “Those kinds of details.”

Cole turned and started off again. Bacchi followed.

“Where’s your ship, Cole? In a jar?”

“Where’s yours?”

“In a jar. I was double-parked,” said Bacchi. His tone turned reproachful. “You were going to let her shoot me,” he said.

“Not a chance. You saw her aim—she’d have hit someone else instead.”

“Cole, hold on!”

Cole stopped.

“Listen,” said Bacchi, “I owed you money. You robbed me. I figure we’re about even. Truce?” He extended a hand.

“Bacchi, the last time I shook your hand …”

“I know. But they let you out after, what, a month?”

“Two.”

“Big deal. What about the time on BordCo?”

Cole indicated Bacchi’s tail. “You seem to have recovered.”

“It grew back crooked, Cole.”

“I’m supposed to feel bad about that? Maybe you’re forgetting about Mazgoprom.”

“I didn’t know it was armed. How about Foron B?”

“I honestly thought he was a she.”

They regarded each other for a moment. Bacchi pointed to Cole’s bruised face. “Kenneth?”

“Kenneth, Teg, a Very Large Alien …”

Bacchi nodded. “You stole
Teg’s ship,”
he said with grudging admiration.

Cole felt himself smiling despite himself.

“Truce?” repeated Bacchi, sticking his hand out again.

“Fine,” said Cole, shaking it. “Truce.” At least until I can get you near an air lock, he thought.

“And no nonsense with the air locks or anything,” said Bacchi.

A cry from down the corridor interrupted them.

“Come on!” said Cole, and accelerated toward the source of the sound.

“What’s the cargo, Cole?” asked Bacchi from behind him.

“None of your business.”

“You don’t know, either.”

“Not the slightest.”

“Where are we going?”

“Yrnameer.”

“Cole, quit farging around!”

They caught up to Philip and Nora in the cargo bay, the blinking emergency lights strobing their movement, turning the humans’ skin dead green and Bacchi’s a mottled gray. At some level Cole registered the fact that the sprinklers were on in the cargo bay, but the air was mostly devoid of water. That thought, however, was quickly shouldered aside by the observation that the crates were making ominous creaking and straining noises.

“Oh, no,” said Philip. “Oh, no. Oh no oh no oh no.”

“Nora, what’s happening?” asked Cole. “What’s in there? Nora?”

“Remember you saying it couldn’t get any worse?” she said.

The crates looked to Cole to be trembling and bulging. From inside them came strange thudding noises, and then an eerie keening was added to the mix.

“Quick!” said Nora. “We have to—”

An explosive
pop!
cut her off, as the hinges on one of the crates gave way and the lid burst open.

Like a spider springing out of its hole to seize its prey, a taloned hand shot up and grabbed the edge of the crate.

Cole heard himself screaming a dissonant chord with the others.

The sun was rising over planet Sanitek, which the Greys still insisted on calling X’x”x-x.

Who could pronounce that? thought Charlie Perkins. Four glottal stops, three of them while inhaling and the final one with a big breathy exhale, plus the simultaneous clicky noises indicated by the
x
‘s, and the
boing
sound the dash represented, a sound humans weren’t really physically capable of producing anyway. And don’t let them catch you calling them Greys—they were very touchy about that sort of thing. But try to say to them, I’d very much
like
to refer to you and your people by your real name, but it’s just not anatomically possible for me to pronounce Qx”-x-’–’, and they’d still get peevish. Best to rely on the auto-translators, no matter how error prone they were.

He sipped his coffee and took a bite of his breakfast. Looking out the window he could see about half the planet, the glass automatically darkening as the sun rose above the horizon. In another few minutes his window would be facing the other direction, out into space, as Success!Sat One continued its endless axial rotations to create the artificial gravity. As corporate seminar satellites went, it was one of the biggest: four rings connected by a central pillar, with living quarters for more than five thousand, two gyms, a recreation area, seven large auditoriums, four banquet halls, and a number of smaller classrooms.

A big spindle orbiting in space around the most boring planet in the galaxy, thought Charlie. Which was why orbital rents were still so cheap—who’d want to set up there? Vericom, that’s who.

Cheap, and unregulated. An important point when you were introducing a product that had unfairly acquired a bad reputation.

He’d been up here about six weeks now, conducting training seminars for three thousand members of the Vericom sales force, as well as a contingent of about five hundred officers from the Unified Forces who were interested in military applications of the V2.

As he slurped at his coffee he flipped idly through the latest brochure that the marketing staff had sent him, a glossy folding thing with moving images on a constant loop: people running through fields or playing energetically with their laughing kids or just absolutely kicking ass at business meetings, all demonstrating how much the V2 could enhance your life.

Right now Charlie was looking at the business meeting ass-kicking example: some cocky young hotshot pausing in midsentence to say, “Hold on, let me check on that,” then glancing off into the middle distance for a brief moment. Then he says, “That’d be an increase of seventy-two percent over the past three quarters, sir,” to admiring looks from his colleagues and an approving nod from his tough-to-please, crusty boss—well done, son, you’ll go far.

Charlie flipped to the last page of the brochure. “Learn how Vericom’s V2 can improve
your
life,” said an attractive woman. “The V2 interfaces with extremely well-researched and understood neural pathways. The V2 has been thoroughly tested and approved, with a perfect safety record.”

Even so, you had people protesting it. Charlie couldn’t stand those sorts, their knee-jerk resistance to any technological innovation. Remember Qualtek 3, they’d say. As if anyone would forget.

There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” said Charlie.

The door opened. It was Fred. At least that’s what Charlie called him, and Fred didn’t seem to mind.

Fred said something in Grey, and Charlie’s auto-translator kicked in: “Good morning, Charles. I hope you had a lot of singing chipmunks mustard root-plant last night.”

Charlie had gotten used to this. The Grey language was very evocative and full of idiomatic expressions that were beyond the scope of the auto-translator to competently render in New English. He’d hear things like “rotating hoar-frost bean request marshland,” and he’d later find out that it was a common expression meaning “okay, sounds good.”

“I slept very well, thanks,” said Charlie.

He generally liked Fred—he was polite and serious and hardworking, unlike the other Greys on board the Success!Sat, a bunch of shiftless bastards. There were a few dozen of them, lazing around and collecting fat paychecks from Vericom, there through some make-work program as a sop to the local government. They supposedly had administrative duties on the satellite, but as far as Charlie could tell those duties consisted of gambling, chewing qhag, and muttering behind your back about you in Grey.

“What can I do you for, Fred?”

There was a pause while Fred listened to his AT before answering.

“I nothing more want want fresh buds new rain confirm yes,” said Charlie’s AT.