Rocketship Patrol (10 page)

“Feh! Vei!” Dag shouted towards the back of the hold. “I think we’ve got a new partner!”

Five minutes after being stunned into unconsciousness, Loy still lay sprawled out on the deck in front of
8724
’s airlock where she had collapsed.

“Junior Officer Loy?”

8724’s voice broke through her sleep. “What happened?” she asked, lifting her head and looking around. No surprise, Hackenthrush and Rikki were nowhere to be seen.

“We were boarded by a short robot, who attacked you with a stun device.”

Beside her, the airlock hatch started to close. “Wait, what are you doing?”

“The scavenger ship is undocking. I must close the hatch to avoid decompression.”

Loy forced herself to her hands and knees. “Tube still connected?”

“At the moment.”

“Keep it that way as long as you can,” Loy said. Fighting a strong desire to go back to sleep, she threw herself through the hatchway into the airlock just as the hatch closed.

EIGHT

In
8724
’s mess, Igon was a whirlwind of limbs up on the kitchenette counter, ransacking the storage lockers, tossing out plates, cups, boxes and cans of food. “What does a toaster even look like?” he asked himself.

“Excuse me...” Lieutenant Detective Hackenthrush said from the mess’ hatchway.

Igon grabbed a plastic box of cereal and hopped down off the counter. He marched up to Hackenthrush and shoved the box up at him. “Is this the toaster?”

“Umm…” Rikki peeked over Hackenthrush’s shoulder down at the robot. “No… it’s Fruit Crunchies.”

Igon let out a shrill electronic growl of frustration and threw the box of cereal up at Hackenthrush, hitting him good and square in the chin. Hackenthrush instantly went out like a light, collapsing to the deck.

Igon leaped up onto the unconscious Hackenthrush’s chest and held the sparking stunstick an inch from Rikki’s shaking knees. “Where’s the toaster, furry?”

Rikki jabbed a finger towards the shiny metal toaster-oven on the counter. “There. It’s there.”

Snorting, Igon jumped off Hackenthrush and hopped back up onto the kitchenette counter. He took the toaster in his claws and spun it around to look at it from every angle. “You see a data port? I don’t see a port.”

“Ummm,” Rikki said, “it’s a toaster. Toasters... don’t have ports.”

On the floor, Hackenthrush shook himself awake, rubbing his chin. “Well, not the kind the DUPES can afford.”

Igon let out a low-pitch white-noise scream and angrily chucked the toaster away. It hit Hackenthrush in the head just as he was sitting up, knocking his toupee off and Hackenthrush himself back into unconsciousness.

“That bitch lied,” Igon said. “Again! What are the odds?” From somewhere above them came a sharp
clank
. Igon spun around to point his big yellow glowing  eye at Rikki. “What’s that?”

“Ummmm,” Rikki said, “sounds like a ship undocking, maybe?”

“Blerg!” Igon said, and hopped down off the kitchenette counter.

Rikki stepped in front of the robot as he skittered for the hatchway. He held up his hands. “Not so fast–”

Without stopping, Igon jammed the sparking stunstick into Rikki’s ankle – sending Rikki, yelping like a baby, to the floor in spasms – and marched out of the mess, muttering obscenities to himself.

As the
Exalted Refuse
slowly pulled away from
Patrol Rocketship 8724
, Junior Officer Loy stood in the scavenger ship’s airlock her ears popping from the difference in pressure as it finished cycling. The air around her cold and dry, she swallowed, squared her shoulders and raised her service raygun in front of her.

The airlock hatch opened on its own.

“All right,” Loy announced, stepping out of the airlock, “everybody on this ship is under arrest!”

Feh, standing unseen in the shadows on the side of the airlock, extended a webbed foot into her path.

Loy tripped and started to fall, but recovered by turning the fall into a somewhat gracefully executed tuck and roll tumble, ending up in an alert combat crouch.

“Okay, that one was on me,” Loy said, warily keeping her raygun trained on Feh and slowly coming out of her crouch. “Now, I repeat, you’re under–”

The butt of an autorifle came down hard against the back of her head. Loy’s eyes rolled to white and she collapsed forward, unconscious.

Behind Loy, Dag lowered the rifle. He prodded at Loy’s side with a fleshy toe. “Yep, she’s out.”

“We have incapacitated the cop!” Dag yelled from the back of the hold. “Should we space her?”

“No,” Cortez called back. “She’s just doing her job. Badly, but still… Make her comfortable!” Cortez was leaned back against the
Exalted Refuse
’s command nest-station, her legs crossed, the rent-a-speedship’s recovered data core on the floor in front of her. A patch cord connected the core to
Exalted Refuse’s
radio. Her palm holoflat blinked:

DATA TRANSFER COMPLETE.
BOOTY ONE
DATA PACKAGE MOVED FROM PATROL ROCKETSHIP 8724 SHIP’S BRAIN SECONDARY MEMORY TO DATA CORE MEMORY MATRIX.

Cortez yanked the data cable from the data core, then twisted around to look up at Vei, crouched in her nest-station. “This thing ready to go superluminal yet? I’ve got a schedule to get back on.”

“We’re ready. You sure about this?” Vei asked. “We haven’t used the superluminal engine in a while – too expensive. There’s a good chance it will blow up, take us with it.”

“I’m feeling lucky,” Cortez said, patting the top of the data core.

Vei’s shell heaved with a shrug and she reached for the controls.

Igon banged his claws against
Patrol Rocketship 8724
’s inner airlock hatch. “Open! Open!”

“Would you please stop that?” 8724 asked. “Your ship has already undocked.”

“Well, don’t just sit there,” Igon said. “Chase after it!”

“I don’t take orders from you. Anyway... you destroyed my rockets, remember?”

Igon gave the hatch a frustrated head-butt. “It can’t end this way! I really really really want to be stinking rich. And to propose... Propose?” He banged his head against the hatch again and started pacing. “Enough with the crazy love talk. She dies. That beautiful, wonderful piece of meat dies. And I get stinking rich. Has to be that way... Unless, dare I think it, she says ‘Yes’. We’ll honeymoon on the third moon of Varienk 3. It’s so romantic there, the way the methane rivers sparkle in the–” He stopped pacing. “Has it gone superluminal yet?”

“No, but it appears to be powering up.”

“Good… All right, listen, ship.  You are going to shoot me out this airlock.”

“Technically,” 8724 said, “I’m not allowed to do that. Safety protocols.”

“Damn the protocols! Shoot me! For love! And money!”

“Oh, didn’t say I wasn’t gonna do it,” 8724 said, and popped the inner airlock hatch open.

Igon jumped into the airlock. The inner hatch closed and locked behind him as he skittered up to the outer hatch and went up on claw-tips to peer out its portal. The
Exalted Refuse
was getting smaller and smaller, slowly thrusting away, its rusty hull beginning to glow green. “Hurry!” Igon pleaded. “They’re going superluminal.”

“If you insist.”

The outer hatch snapped open, ejecting Igon in the rush of escaping air.

Limbs flailing, Igon shot out in a straight-line vector away from
Patrol Rocketship 8724
towards...

Empty space.

Panicked, Igon swiveled his bulb eyes around. The
Exalted Refuse
was way over there to his left, the green glow of her superluminal envelope growing stronger.

Igon let out a curse, lost to the soundless void.

Thruster pods popped out of his cylinder near his ass end. The pods oriented themselves and ignited, sending a twisting Igon around in a graceful arc aimed at the
Exalted Refuse
. He pulled his limbs into his cylinder and thrust faster and faster, closer and closer.

Just as the glow around
Exalted Refuse
reached a peak of intensity, Igon reached the trawler. No time to slow down, all he could do was whip his limbs out wide and belly flop hard against the ship’s hull. He grabbed hold, claw tips biting into the hull to stop himself from bouncing off.