Chapter One
I tossed back my drink. It burned my throat on its way down. I’d bought the bar’s cheapest whiskey and I don’t think it had ever seen an oak barrel. The bottle was now half empty, and I was looking like a man who had drunk a pint of cheap liquor.
‘Collum’s Genuine Irish Pub’ was dimly lit and every surface felt sticky. It wasn’t the sort of place you’d bring a date – especially not at eleven in the morning. Only a few tables were occupied, mostly by guys who’d come in off the nightshift at the spaceport.
“Are you Gaskoyne?” a voice asked.
It took me a moment to remember that I was. I looked up at the man with bleary eyes. Mine were bleary, not his.
“‘Sright,” I said, my head wobbling slightly on my neck.
“I heard you’ve got a problem,” the man said.
He was dressed in the kind of suit circus cowboys wear and looked like a big man who’d been scaled down to five foot six. He didn’t have much by way of a neck and his face had that shifty used-car salesman quality. I pretended not to recognise him.
“Who told you that?” I asked.
“I know people,” he said.
I had a good idea who he knew but I wasn’t about to admit it.
“Yeah?” I blinked to clear my eyes and tried to convince him it had worked.
“Big Dan Patterson,” he said, holding out his hand. I shook it. My palm was wet with whiskey and his smile faltered for a second.
Big Dan sat down opposite me. He stared at the logo on my wrinkled coveralls and then nodded as if something had been decided. “I may be able to help you,” he said.
“Don’t need any help. I’m going to drink it all myself.” I reached for the bottle. My fingertips missed by about an inch.
“Tell me about the robots,” he said.
“Robots?” I looked over my shoulder, confused.
“The ones in the freight yard,” he said. My expression told him I did not comprehend. “Behind the spaceport,” he insisted.
“My robots?” I said, realisation finally dawning.
“Your robots,” he agreed.
I shook my head. “They’re not mine. Belong to my boss. He’s going to kill me.”
Big Dan picked up the whiskey bottle and sniffed the open neck. He put it down quickly.
“I brought the wrong ones,” I said. “Shipped them halfway across the galaxy.”
Big Dan Patterson tried not to smile but his lips gave him away. He quickly wiped them with the back of his hand. “How did it happen?” he asked.
He’d already been told how it happened. But he needed to hear the whole sorry story from me before he could make his play.
I sighed heavily. “I just picked up the container and brought it here. From Caledonia. You know it?”
Big Dan nodded and smiled, encouraging me to go on.
“Drove the container up into a freightliner and brought them here. Halfway across the galaxy. ‘S long way.”
“And you went to deliver them,” he said, trying to move the tale on towards its tragic climax.
I nodded slowly and then shook my head. “They didn’t want them. I brought the wrong ones.”
“You brought a container load of the wrong robots?” The urge to smile made his lips twitch some more.
I nodded. “Halfway across the galaxy. My boss is going to kill me!”
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” he said, wanting me to know he was on my side.
“Damn right it wasn’t! My boss had them loaded into the container. But you know who’s going to get the blame?”
Big Dan leaned forward. “You?”
“Me! Poor Joe Gaskoyne. He’ll tell me I should have checked the load before I brought it. But I ask you, Mister Petersend…”
“Patterson.”
“Right, that. I ask you – if you looked in that container, could you tell an EX-450 from an EB-350?”
“Actually, Joe, yes I could,” he said.
“You’re kidding me!”
“Not at all. As a matter of fact, I sell robots for a living. Patterson’s Universal Robots.”
“You’re that Patterson?” I hoped my surprise looked genuine.
“The very same. I have a store down here in New Grimsby and another up on the station for duty-free trade.”
“Up?” I pointed and looked upwards as if I might see the space station through the grimy ceiling of the bar. Then I looked down and reached for the bottle, missed it again. Patterson picked it up and filled my glass. The man was obviously a sadist.
“If I have to take all those robots back,” I said, “we’ll lose a bundle on the shipping charges. ‘S long way.”
Big Dan nodded in agreement. “Halfway across the galaxy.”
“It’ll cost me my job,” I said, looking down at my nice blue coveralls and smoothing the logo with a damp palm. “Unless I can find another buyer for them here.”
Patterson’s lips twisted towards a smile and he had to wipe them with his hand again. You had to hope he didn’t play poker.
“Didn’t Bran Baycott offer to buy them at a reduced price?” he asked.
I hadn’t told him that Baycott had been the intended buyer, but he didn’t need to be a genius to figure it out. Baycott was Big Dan’s biggest rival in the local tin-man market. In fact, Baycott was his only rival in this sector of inhabited space.
“No, sir, he did not,” I said. “The man hasn’t a sympathetic bone in his head. He was downright rude.”
“There was no call for that.” Big Dan licked his lips. He was trying to look sympathetic, but he wanted to grin at me, I could tell.
“Tell me, Mister Gaskoyne,” he said, “what price would you take for those robots.”
Now it was me who had to try not to smile. I told him the wholesale price for twenty EB-350s. He sucked his teeth and pretended to think about this. Then he made his offer. Fifty thousand dollars. It was less than half what I’d quoted. A lot less. Then he decided to twist the knife, as I knew he would.
“That would be local currency,” he said.
The Saphiran dollar was currently worth about seventy-four Alliance cents. Big Dan Patterson was a crooked bastard, which you’ve got to admire, but he was a bastard nonetheless.
“I couldn’t possibly let them go for that,” I said.
Big Dan looked into my eyes, and I tried to focus on his. “I’d be willing to pay you a thousand as a handling fee,” he said. “Off the books.”
“I just couldn’t,” I said. “Unless…”
I paused and he stared at me without blinking. “Unless what, Joe?”
“I’d have to report them stolen!” I whispered it loudly and waved a drunken finger up to my lips.
“I could accept that.”
Big Dan obviously had no problem filing off serial numbers and faking paperwork. These wouldn’t be his first black-market robots.
“I’d have to have the money in cash,” I said. “All of it. I want to change it down here – the bureau up on the station rips you off.”
He thought about this, then nodded. “I’ll need to see the robots,” he said.
I looked across the bar to where a shiny purple robot with a yellow head was leaning against the wall. Floyd had been listening to our conversation. He nodded.
“Come on then,” I said, getting to my feet and swaying only slightly. “Do you have a car, or shall I drive?”
“We’ll take a cab,” Big Dan said.
*
I swung open the door of the shipping container and the smell of new robots wafted out.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“They’re unwrapped,” Big Dan said, with a hint of suspicion.
“That’s how we found out they weren’t 450s,” I said.
He nodded as if this made sense. He walked down the gap between the two rows of inactive robots. Either he was counting them, or he was looking for signs of damage.
“All right,” he said, coming back towards me, squinting at the daylight.
“Gotta be cash,” I reminded him.
“Fine, fine, I’ll get it,” he said, flapping a hand at me like a flipper.
“Have you got a truck?” I asked. “If these things walk out of here in a long line, it might attract unwanted attention.”
“I’ll bring a truck,” he said.
“Drive it up to the side gate,” I said. “You hand me the money and I’ll open up the gate. You can drive right up and load these in the back. And good riddance to them!”
“I’ll be here at three this afternoon,” Big Dan said.
With any luck, I’d be sober by then. I didn’t like being drunk. When you live by your wits, you can’t afford to let booze dull them. But there are devices out there that can tell if you’re faking it, and I didn’t want to be caught in that trap. Big Dan Patterson had to believe that he’d outwitted a drunken nobody.
*
At just after three o’clock, an unmarked white box truck pulled up at the gate to the freight yard. I looked up into the cab. The driver sitting next to Big Dan was about eighty and didn’t look like he was going to cause any trouble. Floyd was standing by, hidden behind the container, just in case.
My computer, Trixie, had the two drones up in the air. Mozzie and Gnat would alert us if Big Dan Patterson had brought any friends with him or tipped off the police.
Big Dan didn’t even climb down out of the truck. He rolled down the window and dropped an old carpet bag into my arms. Staying in the shadow of the truck, I knelt and examined the cash. Trixie ran her scanners over the banknotes and pronounced the bills genuine and the total correct, including my thousand ‘bonus.’ I closed the bag and stood up.
“You’re not expecting a receipt, are you?” I asked.
Big Dan scowled down at me. I gave him a thumbs-up and rolled the gate open.
The truck pulled into the yard. I closed the gate behind them and locked it. It wouldn’t hold them, but it would slow them down.
I ran to where my Trekker was waiting, motor humming and ready to go. Floyd climbed into the passenger seat, tossing his cannon into the back. We left four smoking spots of black rubber as we pulled away.
“Apparently, the robots aren’t in the container,” Floyd said.
“Imagine that. Where did you get them?”
“We borrowed them from Peterson’s own warehouse,” he said.
By ‘we’ he meant him and Harmony. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the two of them working together. It wasn’t a matter of trust – I’d never trusted either of them. It was more the fact that separately they were each smarter than I was. If both of them worked together, I stood no chance. With this thought bouncing around in my head, I turned on the radio for some music to cheer me up. There was the tail end of a song about acts the singer wouldn’t perform in the name of love and then the news jingle.
“It’s three-fifteen, you’re listening to Kay-Bee-Oh-Tee, I’m Bobby-Ray Bitrot with your news headlines.”
Bobby-Ray is a robot disc jockey who broadcasts twenty-four hours a day from an orbiting satellite. I like the fact that he doesn’t take life too seriously.
“A search for missing ninety-eight-year-old grandfather Humphrey Hefner was called off today after it was discovered he had reported himself missing and then joined the group searching for him. Humph told reporters that he was just getting his own back on the police after he’d called them to report the theft of an ‘antique’ lawnmower and an officer had told him to ‘get lost’.”
It’s hard to know which of these news stories are true and which ones Bobby-Ray makes up. For the most part, it doesn’t really matter. He’s reported on a few of my recent exploits and it’s always good to have that element of doubt in listeners’ minds.
“There was pandemonium in downtown New Grimsby this afternoon when a lime green hot rod was driven through the front window of the Busey Street Cluck ‘n’ Dunk and out through the back wall into a swimming pool. When someone goes to those lengths to wash their car, you just know it’s Rubber Ball season. Don’t forget, racers, there’s automatic disqualification if bystanders get hurt – you’re only allowed to crack your own heads open.”
Mention of the Rubber Ball Rally made me look out at the hood of the Trekker. “I still don’t like that she painted my truck red,” I said.
Floyd looked at me and then down at himself. Harmony had talked him into a metallic purple paint job. I could understand his pain. I personally have nothing against purple shiny things, but I wouldn’t want to be one.
Chapter Two
We’d just conned an unscrupulous businessman out of fifty thousand dollars. I should have been celebrating. But I didn’t feel like it. I sat nursing a drink I didn’t want in the hotel bar. Floyd sat opposite. I knew he was watching me.
“What’s wrong?” Floyd asked.
“Nothing.”
Floyd tilted his head to one side. “If your frown gets any deeper, your forehead will fold in two.”
“Foreheads don’t do that.”
He just stared at me, head tilted. If he had eyebrows, he’d have raised one of them.
I sighed. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Sometimes it helps to just talk about things.” Floyd occasionally dipped into a textbook on human psychology. I think he was mentally skimming the pages as his head straightened. He adopted a listening pose.
“It’s nothing,” I said, trying to dismiss it.
“You’re still frowning.”
I raised a hand and rubbed my forehead, trying to smooth it. “It’ll sound stupid.”
Floyd didn’t turn that into an insult, he was definitely in psyche evaluation mode. I wondered what he’d do if he decided I was going nuts.
“I thought I would have achieved more,” I said.
“More success?” he asked, his voice as calm as always.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think success looks like?”
“Not like this,” I said, looking around me. I was on a dead-end planet at the end of occupied space. I was thirty-three-and-a-bit years old, and I had achieved nothing that I could point to with pride.
“What is it you want?” Floyd asked.
This was a good question. “I’m not sure.”
That was a bad answer. And not an entirely truthful one. It’s not often that I look at someone else’s life and wish it was mine. When I see what most people do every day, I know that’s not what I want. I’m an outlaw because I need excitement in my life. I need to live outside the rules. Of course, I’m not the only outlaw in the universe. And some of them are much better at it than me. They don’t end up hiding out on planets like Saphira. I’m not sure where, but at some point, I took a wrong turn. How do the other guys manage to get it right?
Allenson Pryce is a name that’s being mentioned a lot recently. He’s the blonde-haired, blue-eyed poster boy of the criminal world. He’s not just mentioned in news reports. People make documentaries about his exploits. And a comic book. There’s even talk of a movie. If you want some idea of the gap between his status and mine, the bounty on my head is thirty-thousand dollars. The reward for his capture is five hundred thousand dollars. What does success look like? It looks like Allenson Pryce. But I’m not going to tell Floyd that. He might head off and join team Pryce.
But maybe if Floyd did go off and join Pryce, he could send me a message and tell me how the superhero supercrook does it. I’d love to know his secret.
“I can hear the gears grinding in your brain,” Floyd said. He’d obviously reached the page that said humour might lighten my mood.
“That’s not the sound of gears, it’s my teeth.”
“Is the life you lead not fulfilling?” he asked.
“I like what I do,” I said. “Most of the time. But I just feel…” I slid my hands into my pockets and shrugged.
“Does being with Harmony make you happy?” he asked.
“Yes.” I didn’t even need to think about that. She was brilliant and unpredictable and sexy as hell. She was also a better thief than I was. Maybe that was part of the problem.
“Would you like to be with her on a permanent basis?” Floyd asked.
“I don’t think our relationship has much of a future.” I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because…” I shrugged again.
“You don’t think you’re worthy of her?”
Ouch. That was a little too close to the truth.
“For what it’s worth, I know that she’s attracted to you,” Floyd said. “There are physiological signs which cannot be faked.”
“She likes me?”
“Very much.”
“Can you tell what she’s thinking?”
“Development of artificial sentience never progressed as far as telepathic abilities.” Was that a hint of disappointment in his voice?
There would be no more advances in artificial sentience – the technology has been outlawed. Floyd was one of the few surviving examples. I was glad he couldn’t read my thoughts.
“I know something that will cheer you up,” he said.
“Let me have it.”
“It requires anatomy I do not possess.”
That made me laugh. I don’t think he got it from a textbook.
*
Harmony looked down at the bag full of Big Dan Patterson’s money. She grinned. “We could throw it on the bed and make love on it,” she said.
“They’re used bank notes,” I said. “You don’t know where they’ve been.”
“I don’t know where you’ve been, but I throw you down on the bed.”
This was true. She seemed to have rediscovered her lust for life while I’d been away spending time with the galaxy’s baddest bounty hunter. I wanted to believe it was because she’d missed me. Or that Floyd had convinced her that I was the right guy for her. But I was under no illusions.
Harmony wrapped her arms around me and gave me one of those kisses that make you forget all your worries. “Your hair’s grown back,” she said, rubbing a warm palm over my skull.
“My beard still looks like a startled hedgehog,” I said.
“It’s getting there.” She slid her hand down my stomach and into the waistband of my jeans.
“I didn’t shave down there,” I said.
“Stop talking.” She pushed me back onto the bed.
*
We sat propped up against the pillows looking down at the pile of cash. Harmony had emptied it out after… well, after.
“What are we going to do with it?” I asked.
“I have a plan,” she said.
This didn’t surprise me. “What do you plan to do with your half?”
“I have a plan for all of it,” she said.
Again, not a surprise.
“Will I like this plan?” I asked.
Instead of answering, Harmony kissed me. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.
*
Our hotel was in the Old Quarter of the city, the part that had been home to the original settlers when the first spaceship landed on Saphira. The city is on the east coast of the planet’s only major continent – which is also called Saphira. There is only one city here and they were probably going to call that Saphira as well until someone put their foot down and said, ‘We’re calling it New Grimsby.’
New Grimsby looks pretty much like any medium-sized city on any backwater planet. There is a lot of grey concrete divided up into blocks by black asphalt. The Old Quarter looks more like one of the dusty desert towns I’d been living in for the past few years. If I was being unkind, I’d say it looks like a theme park version of an old frontier town. Lots of souvenirs with dragons on but not many tourists to buy them. Most of the tourists stay up on the space station. That’s where the casino is, in the Starlight Hotel. I had a suite up there when I first arrived at the end of the civilised universe. Then I had a run of bad luck. It has lasted for three years so far.
I left Harmony soaking in the hotel room’s big old bathtub and went out to explore. I hadn’t missed civilisation as much as I might have expected. Except for the food. Out in the boonies, the cuisine tended to be limited. I wandered down narrow streets away from the tourist shops and franchise restaurants, hoping to catch the spicy scent of street food or to glimpse a tiny backstreet eatery that promised dishes cooked with exotic ingredients and a healthy amount of passion. The kinds of places they don’t show on the tourist maps. I must have been looking in the wrong area. All I found was the sickly smell of old donut fat and a boutique selling ‘pre-loved’ fetish wear. I hurried past, fearing a hand might reach through the beaded curtain and drag me inside.
I turned into one of the wider thoroughfares. There were more people here. I looked around, trying to spot someone who looked like a local. I planned to seize them by the lapels and make them tell me where to find their favourite restaurant.
At the far end of the street, I glimpsed something that made me duck behind a wooden column in front of a shoe store. I wasn’t even sure what I’d seen. Faded blue fabric swaying as someone walked. An unfashionably long coat. A primitive part of my brain recognised it as a threat. Outlaw reflexes. The wearer of the blue coat had been swallowed up by the crowd. They were walking away from me. I decided to follow.
Despite having outwitted the bounty hunter O’Keefe – after a fashion – I was not a free man. There was still a price on my head – put there by a gangster named Bastian Durant. I’d once stolen something from him, and he was the sort to hold a grudge. Every bounty hunter in the universe wanted to deliver my head to him and claim the $30,000 prize. I would rather that none of them succeeded. When my father left with a robot disguised as me, he’d promised to muddy the trail a bit. Perhaps he hadn’t succeeded.
I dodged around strolling shoppers, trying to keep the faded blue coat in sight. If I lost it, I might suddenly find them behind me, holding a knife to my throat and then it was goodbye head. As I got closer, I saw that there were two of them. The shorter, thinner one was in the blue coat and a distinctive hat. The bigger man had a shaved head and was wearing greasy black denim jeans and an old military jacket. He looked like hired muscle. There was something familiar about the pair of them, but I would need to see their faces to know for certain.
Following them was risky, but I was sure I stood a better chance of outwitting them if I knew who they were. Well, fairly sure. I edged over to the left, intending to draw level and get a better look at them in profile.
The blue coat had faded, ragged braid on the front. A pirate’s coat. The man wearing it had an eyepatch and scars down his cheek. I didn’t know anyone with an eyepatch, but I did know someone who’d lost an eye. I might have been partially responsible for its loss. And for the scars. His name was ‘Captain’ Jack Sterling. I’d once shared a cell with him.
The big man with the shaved head had a pink foam prosthetic where his nose was supposed to be. I wasn’t responsible for the missing nose, he’d shot it off himself. His name was Dante, and he was one of Old Jack’s crew. He had a thick black moustache that hadn’t been there when I saw him last. Maybe it was to compensate for the false nose. Or maybe it was attached to it.
The two men were striding purposefully, expecting people to move out of their way. Mostly, people did. They didn’t seem to be looking for me and were heading in the opposite direction to our hotel. Could it just be a coincidence that they were here? If they spotted me, I was sure they would try and kill me. I’d left them stranded in the jungle after Floyd blew up their ship and their treasure. I would have felt happier if my gun wasn’t back at the hotel.
“This is it,” I heard Dante say.
They had stopped in front of a bar. It didn’t look like the sort of place you’d find pirates. But Old Jack’s crew weren’t proper pirates. They were more of a pirate crew tribute band. As they opened the door and went inside, I wasn’t sure whether to follow them or turn and run. Running away would be the smart option.
I went up to the door and peered through the glass. It was dark inside and it took my eyes a moment to adjust. Old Jack and Dante were sitting down at a table with a man whose back was to the door. There was an open window close to their table. If I went into the alley at the side of the building, I might be able to listen in to their conversation. I walked casually into the shadows at the side of the bar and slipped into the alley. If anyone saw me, they’d think it was someone caught short and needing to take a swazz. I crept towards the window. It was too high for me to be able to see inside. I listened and could make out voices.
“You don’t spell it like that,” Dante said.
“What?”
“It’s supposed to be ‘Swashbucklers,’ you’ve put ‘wash buckets’,” Dante said.
“I have not,” Old Jack said. “Look at that, does that look like ‘wash buckets’ to you?”
I heard the sound of paper being moved – obviously he was showing it to the other man.
“It says ‘wash buckets’,” the other man said.
“It’s a stupid name, anyway,” Old Jack said. There was the sound of him crossing it out angrily. “There, that’s better.”
“The Dangling Privates?” the other man said.
“It says Daring Pirates!”
“If you say so. The fee is a thousand dollars. Cash.”
Something was slapped on the table. Presumably, it was a thousand dollars. I needed to see what was going on. If the other man was someone I recognised, he might just have sold the pirates information about my whereabouts. There was a pile of empty plastic beer crates further along the alley next to a side door. I moved towards them and bent to pick one up.
Someone slapped me on the butt – hard enough to make my cheek sting.
“Yow!”
I whirled around, expecting to see Harmony. It wasn’t her. Unless there’d been something in her bathwater that made her shrink and age fifty years. I squinted down at the little old woman.
“I thought I knew that face!” she said brightly.
“Hilda May?”
She beamed up at me. “Admit it, you didn’t recognise me at first. It’s the jumpsuit, isn’t it?”
Hilda May Crouton was wearing a bubble gum pink jumpsuit that looked at least a couple of sizes too big – the sleeves and the legs were both rolled to shorten them. This was turning into one of those dreams where people you know turn up in unexpected places. The last time I’d seen Hilda May, we’d teamed up to drive off a gang of bikers that had been terrorising a little desert town a hundred miles from here. She did a twirl to let me see her outfit in full. Embroidered across the back it said Buzzard Creek Belles. Maybe she’d joined a bowling team.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Came to sign up,” she said.
“Sign up for what?” I thought for a moment that she was joining the army. Hilda May liked guns. She used to be a gunslinger, back in the day.
“For the rally,” she said. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
Ah, yes, The Rubber Ball Rally. Harmony had signed me up for it. And she’d painted my Trekker red and stuck a big number four on the side. She hadn’t consulted me about either of these things. “Yes, I’m taking part,” I admitted.
“Great!” she said. “We need some worthy competitors.”
I glanced up towards the open window, worried that someone would have heard me yelp.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Who are you hiding from?” Hilda May asked.
“Some… er… old friends.”
“Not those scracking bikers from Buzzard Creek?” she asked. “I thought I saw a couple of them earlier.”
“No, not them. Mother and I made a truce.”
“I hope you busted his nose first,” she said.
“I may have caused him a little damage.”
There was no need to tell her that I had received some damage in return.
“He’s still walking with a limp!” Hilda May said proudly. She shot Mother in the foot. I think he lost a toe. And she blew up his motorcycle.
We walked back out onto the street, blinking in the sunlight. Hilda May slid her arm through mine – I had to lean over a little so she could reach. I cast a glance back towards the bar. I would really have liked to know what the pirates were up to. But at least I knew they were in town and could watch out for them. I tried to convince myself that they didn’t even know I was in New Grimsby. Their presence here was just a coincidence and all I needed to do was avoid bumping into them accidentally. It was a nice thought, but I don’t believe in coincidences.
“Come on, I want you to meet Gloria,” Hilda May said. “I’ve told her all about you.”
Chapter Three
Hilda May led me down a side street to a rented garage. The door was rolled up and a car had been pulled forward so that the front half of it was in the sunlight. The hood was up and someone in a bubble gum pink jumpsuit was bent over, rummaging inside.
“She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” Hilda May asked. “She’s old but she’s well-preserved.”
I thought it best to assume she meant the car and not her co-driver. It was a curvy sportscar that had been built before my mother was born and was now painted seashell pink. The paintwork gleamed and the chrome accents were so bright they left green spots in your eyes when the sun caught them. Maybe one of the ladies had it from new or maybe it had been a barn find, either way, it was a stunning car. The round number ten sticker on the door was a recent addition.
“Had to replace the wheel motors and batteries, but other than that she’s original,” Hilda May said. “Gloria, come and meet Quincy!”
Gloria straightened up and walked towards me, hand extended. It was covered in black brake dust, but I shook it anyway. My momma taught me to be polite.
“Gloria Glitterburg, Quincy Randall.” Hilda May beamed at both of us. “Quincy’s in the Rubber Ball Rally too.”
“Good to meet you, Quincy.” Her voice was deep and mellow; maybe she was a whiskey drinker.
Gloria’s wavy hair was a dark chestnut colour. Her face was powdered and pale, and her red lipstick was immaculate. I’d say that she had always been a little on the heavy side and that she’d looked all the better for it. She even made the jumpsuit look good. If I had to guess her age, I’d say she was older than the pink car, but I couldn’t say how much older.
“You show him the car, Hildy. I’ll get us some lemonade.”
“What do you think?” Hilda May asked.
“Stunning,” I said, watching Gloria walk away.
“I meant the car.”
“So did I,” I said, grinning.
We walked around the car. It was one of those classic designs that looks good from every angle. What few straight lines and angles there were only served to emphasise the curves. You couldn’t help running your fingers over it. The maker’s name on the badge was Chanler – a company I’d never heard of – and written in chrome script on the trunk lid it said ‘Aveline.’
“Where are the cannons hidden?” I asked.
Hilda May pulled a face. “Gloria wouldn’t let me bring them – said we couldn’t afford the extra weight.” She placed a finger on her lips and beckoned me to come around to the trunk. She opened it and then lifted a false floor. Under it, she had a well-stocked arsenal. “I left my make-up bag at home to free up some space.”
“That’s… er… impressive.” What else could I say? I’d been joking when I mentioned the cannons.
“If we need more ammo, we’ll have to buy it on route.”
I began to wonder what sort of race this Rubber Ball Rally was going to be. Hilda May hastily closed the trunk as Gloria returned with a tray of frosted glasses filled with lemonade and ice.
“She thinks I don’t know what’s in there,” Gloria whispered as she handed me a glass.
“Have you girls entered the rally before?” I asked.
Gloria nodded. “Two years ago. That’s when we burned out the motors. Last year we were just spectators.”
I sipped my lemonade. And coughed. It was about fifty percent tequila. Gloria raised her glass and smiled. Maybe she was trying to nobble the competition before the race even started.
“This year we got us a sponsor so we could get the new motors,” Hilda May said. “Drake Dyce-Wight of Drake’s Pig Feed and Shiatsu Parlour, you heard of it?”
“I can’t say I have.”
“Drake and I used to step out together,” Gloria said, “before he remarried.”
“He remarried the same woman,” Hilda May said. “What sort of man gets himself a divorce and then marries his old wife?”
“Oh, hush, Hildy. Movie stars do it all the time.”
“Yes, but they aren’t like real people.”
Gloria rolled her eyes. “Tell us what car you’ll be driving in the race, Quincy.”
I told them about the Trekker – including the part about its recent respray.
“And Harmony will be your co-driver, will she?” Gloria asked. I think she had a lot of questions about Harmony. She wasn’t the only one.
“I think that’s the plan,” I said.
I’d been on Saphira over three years at this point and I’d never heard of the Rubber Ball Rally. I could have asked Trixie to pull up the facts for me but hearing about it from a couple of local participants might give me a better idea of what was to come. Assuming I did actually compete, which I hadn’t fully decided.
Most places have illegal street races of some kind. Either there are laps of an illegal circuit mapped out on public roads or there’s a longer cross-country race completed in stages. On Acadia, they have the Gumbo Rally where everyone heads for an out-of-the-way spot carrying ingredients that all end up in a big pot for a celebration feast. I’d accidentally taken part in a section of it when I was being pursued by the Highway Patrol there.
Wherever they take place, the races have one thing in common – all the entrants pay a fee to take part and whoever completes the course in the shortest time drives away with all the cash. And in the longer rallies, not every car makes it across the finish line. The entry fee for the Gumbo Rally was ten thousand dollars, and with upwards of twenty drivers, the prize was worth winning. If the prize money for the Rubber Ball Rally was the same, I could see why Harmony was attracted by it.
When Gloria said that the rally started in New Grimsby and ended in Saphira’s second city, I was confused. The planet had one continent, and, on that continent, there was just the one city. Apparently, there had been plans for a second city on the west coast and it was going to be called Esmeralda – the emerald city. I guess they were done with the whole sapphire thing by that point. You can look at the proposed street plan and some architectural paintings if you want to. Trixie projected them onto a wall for me. But that is all you can see. After the initial enthusiasm that saw the founding of New Grimsby and the building of an orbiting space station, people began to realise that Saphira didn’t have that much to offer. It may have been the location for one of the final battles in the human-Gator war, but there isn’t anything to show for it. Apart from some poisoned badlands that no one wants to visit. Perhaps if they’d known about the wreck of the battleship Celestia, they could have put together a better sales pitch. But the investment necessary to turn twenty square miles of desolate wasteland into an emerald city never materialised. Saphira remains a barely colonised planet at the edge of the human Alliance and Esmeralda exists only as a ghost of what might have been – a mythical city on the other side of the continent. And as the destination for the planet’s biggest illegal street race. The Rubber Ball Rally was billed, somewhat ironically I assume, as a race from shining city to shining city. And, like many such things, it began with a bet. I suspect there was drink involved.
“It was inspired by a movie that became a videogame,” Hilda May said. “Or was it the other way around?”
Gloria shrugged. “It started as an argument between two young men – Keiichi and Vittorio…”
“They were members of rival gangs and in love with the same woman,” Hilda May said.
“That was the movie,” Gloria said. “Keiichi was the delivery driver for a ramen shop…”
“I heard it was tofu… sorry.” Hilda May looked down, withering under Gloria’s glare.
“Takumi’s ramen shop promised to deliver your food, piping hot, anywhere in the city within half-an-hour or you’d get your food for free. Vittorio kept trying to get a free meal, ordering food to be delivered to the most awkward locations that he could find, but Keiichi always got there with a few minutes to spare. One day, Keiichi bragged that he could deliver food anywhere on Saphira – even to Esmeralda. Vittorio bet him he wouldn’t make it. The challenge then became a race to see who could get there first.”
“The first race was just Keiichi and Vittorio,” Hilda May said. “Vittorio tried every trick he could to get there first, but when he arrived, Keiichi was sitting cross-legged on the bonnet of his car eating a bowl of noodles. Or tofu.”
“That’s more or less how it happened,” Gloria said. She’d downed a couple of glasses of ‘lemonade’ by this point and didn’t care about the details.
“Have you registered yet?” Hilda May asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “My… er… co-driver is taking care of it. We only just got the cash together for the entry fee.”
Hilda May nodded. “Gloria and me been pooling the money we usually spend on Friday night cocktails. It soon mounts up. And you get a lot more fun for your thousand dollars.”
“The entry fee is one thousand dollars?” I thought I’d misheard.
“Yep. But if you win, you might get thirty – depending on how many cars sign up.”
“Thirty thousand,” I said.
Hilda May smiled and nodded like it was all the money in the world. On Saphira, it might be – there isn’t a whole lot you can buy. But if Harmony, Floyd and me wanted to get away from this planet, we were going to need much more. Thirty thousand dollars would get us up to the space station and a nice hotel room to stay in, but it wouldn’t get us tickets on the next flight out of the star system.
I couldn’t make sense of it. We’d taken fifty thousand off Big Dan Patterson for the stolen robots. And now Harmony was ‘investing’ that in a race where we might win thirty thousand. If we won. Something didn’t add up.
“There’s more drivers coming in today,” Hilda May said. “We’re meeting at the DeLoise Inn for drinks. You should join us.”
“I might do that,” I said. I had no intention of being there. And I had made up my mind that I wouldn’t be having anything to do with the Rubber Ball Rally.
*
I leaned against a wall a couple of blocks away from the garage where Hilda May and Gloria kept their car. I wanted to head back to the hotel and have a serious talk with Harmony about her plans, but first I needed to think through what I was going to say.
Whenever you read a report about a confidence trick, the writer will always say, ‘If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.’ This is a cliché, but it’s also true. I’m not stupid – honest, I’m not – I knew that this ‘honeymoon’ with Harmony was too good to be true. She was plotting something, and she was trying to distract me with sex. It was working. It was working really well. But I still didn’t trust her. Not when we were out of bed. Or the shower. Or the elevator. I didn’t know what she was up to, but there was a good chance that something bad was coming. And I needed to be ready for it. What made things trickier was that I didn’t know if Floyd was on Harmony’s side or mine. Or his own. Whatever happened, I had to look out for myself. Always have a Plan B.
This is one of the downsides of my line of work. It makes you cynical. You never trust anyone or anything, because you know other folks can’t trust you.
I pulled Mozzie and Gnat out of my jacket pocket and had Trixie launch them in a standard search pattern outwards from my location. If Old Jack and his crew were anywhere near, I wanted to know. Trixie managed to pull some biometrics from old arrest records; she’d be able to identify them on any images that the two drones sent back.
What was I going to do about the pirates? My first instinct was to go and fill some balloons with green slime and ambush them, but while that would have made me feel better, it probably wasn’t in my best interests. Never take a slime balloon to a gunfight. I’d deal with the Dangling Privates when they revealed themselves. And hopefully, I’d have Floyd to back me up.
In the meantime, I needed to confront Harmony.
* * *
Wicked Racers — Available from Amazon UK – Amazon USA and on other Amazon stores
PAUL TOMLINSON 