The COMPLETE Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad by Felix R. Savage

Author:Felix R. Savage [Savage, Felix R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humorous science fiction
Publisher: Knights Hill Publishing
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

“Fucking move already!” Maude yells. “It’s too hot to stand around out here!”

I straighten up, heart thudding. She’s not about to shoot us, after all. She’s trying to herd us away somewhere. I don’t like that much, either.

Nor do I want to move away from the taxi, because it’s got the Gizmo in it.

But Maude points her gun at me, and I decide obedience is the better part of valor. I give Imogen what I hope is an encouraging smile. “Cheer up, it’s going to be fine,” I whisper, and we follow the Krells.

Blondie walks ahead, talking on his phone. We all bounce awkwardly in the low gravity, except for Maude, who brings up the rear. She’s got the loping micro-gravity gait dialed in, and her gun stays in her hand.

Heat ripples off the ground. It’s as dry as a bone. The dust makes me cough. I lace my fingers over my eyes and squint through them. The rectangular outline of a building shimmers in the distance.

A flatbed lorry purrs past us, going in the other direction. Walking sideways, I watch it shrink into a tarry blob and converge on the other blob which is Imogen’s taxi. The whine of hydraulics cuts through the silence. They’re loading the taxi onto the flatbed, taking it away.

“My taxi!” Imogen says.

My Gizmo! I think, stricken.

There it goes, gliding away into the haze. We have no option but to stumble on, into the shadow of the building. It’s an industrial facility about a mile long. This side is lined with loading docks. Here and there, semi-trailers nuzzle their rear ends against the wall. They all have Chinese writing on their sides.

Maude herds us up a flight of concrete stairs and in through the side door of an unused loading dock.

Air-conditioning comes as a huge relief. It does not compensate for the smell, which is horrendous. So is the noise—clanking, whining, thudding, crunching.

We climb onto a tongue of rusty steel that sticks out over a conveyor belt as wide as a highway. The conveyor belt runs the entire length of the building, carrying rubbish towards a crusher apparatus at the far end.

It’s a recycling center.

The rubbish inching past below includes kitchen waste, broken furniture, debris from Krell buildings (they’re still demolishing shite to make room for more human facilities), and huge chunks of cactus, oozing goo from their fibrous ends.

“Hey, isn’t this a recycling center?” Sam says, his voice too high.

“Yes,” snaps Maude.

“But what about separating the trash? They’re fanatical about that on Treetop! Kitchen waste, cardboard, plastics, metal, it’s all supposed to be recycled separately!”

Blondie looks up from his phone and speaks for the first time. His English is as fluent as Maude’s. “Oh, that’s just PR bullshit. It makes them feel good. But it all goes into the same incinerator. Now we’ve got a whole galaxy to pollute, who cares?”

“And the incinerator runs hot,” Maude says with a dark chuckle. “No one can tell from the ashes what went in there, whether it’s plastics … or cactuses … or human remains.

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