No Small Bills Read online

  I waited, but he’d trailed off. “But what? Come on, tell me!” I demanded. “What’s so bad if it’s that one?”

  Ned sighed. “That planet’s under Galactic Interdict.”

  “Okay, and that means what, exactly? No pay channels on late-night cable?”

  “No visitors.” Ned shook his head. “Not ever.”

  “A planet is placed under Galactic Interdict,” Mary explained, “when its population is considered either too primitive for contact with the spacefaring population—or too dangerous.”

  Too dangerous. Great. “So which one is this? Are they too scared of us creepy spacemen, or do they like to nosh on a few spacemen for breakfast?”

  “I don’t know,” Ned admitted. “I’ve got a galactic database programmed into this scanner but only with the most basic details—I’ve got the planet listed as under interdict but not how long ago or why.”

  “Well, if it is for being too dangerous, maybe that’s somewhere else,” I mentioned. “I mean, look around. What exactly would we be worried about here? The coconut trees?”

  “Maybe,” Tall answered. He glanced up at the tree he’d climbed a minute before and shuddered slightly. “Imagine if that tree was alive? I basically just cut off its nuts so we could have a light snack.”

  I put up a hand to stop him from talking any further. “Boy, that was an image I didn’t need, thanks very much.” It was a good thing coconut meat wasn’t heavy or I’d be heaving it back up right now. “So how do we find out which it is? And does it really matter?”

  “It might.” Ned sighed. “At least it’d tell us whether we should be worrying for our lives.”

  Which is, of course, when something erupted out of the water and came charging straight toward us.

  It was a shark. A massive one, just like the one from Jaws. Except that it was a deep purple, and kind of pebbly all over, like that rubber covering you get on flashlights and such.

  Oh, and it had legs. Big, strong, muscular legs. I realized that when it burst from the ocean and ran, not flew, across the sand.

  Swell, I thought as we all threw ourselves to the sides in the hope of avoiding its mad rush. An honest-to-god land shark. No wonder this place is under Edict or whatever.

  I’d thrown my hands over my head and held my breath, waiting for the thing to gobble us up. I remember reading once that great white sharks can eat pretty much forever, and I figured this rough-skinned purple version would have a similar appetite. The four of us probably wouldn’t be much more than an appetizer before it went on to consume an ocean liner or something. Sure enough, it skidded to a stop in our midst, opened that gigantic mouth wide, revealing row upon row of razor-sharp teeth—

  —and sobbed, “Don’t let it get me!”

  Then it dove behind the coconut trees and cowered there, whimpering.

  Oh, great.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Who ordered the shrimp Fra Diablo?

  It took a few seconds before what’d just happened sank in. Then I pushed myself back to my feet and dusted myself off. The others did the same.

  “What the hell?” I finally asked.

  “I have no idea,” Ned admitted. “Maybe the sharks of this world are cowardly vegetarians?”

  “Oh, come on,” Tall told him. “Did you see those teeth? I’ve hunted great whites off the Barrier Reef, and that thing could be their bigger, uglier cousin! There’s no way it’s not an omnivore like they are!”

  “A talking one, with legs,” I pointed out. “But yeah, I agree.” Of course the closest I’d gotten to hunting great white sharks was watching one of those treasure-hunt adventure movies where the heroes went up against sharks, but I figured it was much the same thing.

  “The great white shark is one of Earth’s dominant aquatic lifeforms,” Mary mentioned. “If this creature holds a similar prowess, what could scare it enough to force it to take cover on this tiny island?”

  I heard a weird hissing sound, and turned back toward the water to see bubbles of steam rising from a small patch—a patch that was growing steadily closer to our little refuge. “I have a feeling we’re about to find out.”

  We all watched the bubbles approach. All except Sharky, who was still sobbing behind the trees.

  “Anything we can do to defend ourselves?” I asked Ned over my shoulder.

  “I might be able to rig a temporary forcefield,” he answered, extracting two of his technowands and rubbing them together. “It’d only last a few seconds, though. At best.” He checked the wands. “And it’d only be a foot across.”

  Tall pulled out his pistol and checked the clip. “I’ve still got about six shots,” he offered.

  “I have neither offensive nor defensive capabilities,” Mary said.

  “Yeah, well, all I’ve got is the head of a duck, so we’re even,” I assured her. “Okay, here it comes, so let’s look alive. And hope that shark’s just got some kind of weird phobia for harmless little fish.”

  The bubbles had reached the shore. They stopped there, hissing and steaming. And then they grew larger, bursting angrily and filling the air with a curtain of steam. And something rose within that wave of heat.

  Rose and stepped onto the beach, only a few feet from us.

  It was hard to make out more than a menacing shadow, all tentacles and waving limbs. The four of us shrank back together for protection, retreating until the trees were at our backs. Behind us Sharky was making little horrified squeaking noises.

  Then the steam dispersed and the air cleared, and we could finally see the owner of that shadow—

  It was a shrimp.

  No, not a really short man. A shrimp. An actual shrimp. The kind you get stuck around a big cup filled with cocktail sauce, or skewered and buttered and grilled. A shrimp.

  It was maybe six inches tall. Which, when you think about it, is actually huge for a shrimp. Like it was a giant shrimp.

  And it was red. Candy-apple red. Fire-engine red. I thought shrimp were a blue-gray before they were cooked, but then again sharks were usually white so what did I know? This one was definitely red. And hot. I could still see steam rising off it. Where it stood on its little tiny feet, the sand was turning to glass from the heat.

  Oh, and its eyes were glowing black.

  “Okay, what exactly are you, then?” I asked it, crouching so I could see it better. “The killer shrimp from hell?”

  The shrimp bristled—literally, as little spines sprang out all across its back and sides—and its antennae waved. “Mock me at your own peril,” it replied darkly. Its voice was surprisingly deep for such a tiny thing, and had a weird echo to it like someone was sampling the words and running them back on a sub-bass line. Yeah, I worked for a band one summer. Nellie and the Hackeysacks. Death-metal group, big in Weehawken and in Osaka.

  “What’re you gonna do?” I replied. “Jump down my throat and choke me?” I know, bad idea, but I couldn’t help it. I’d been all freaked out because here we were on this island on this waterworld and then this giant shark shows up and then it’s terrified and it turns out the thing terrifying it is Wally the Wonder Shrimp! I just couldn’t bring myself to be scared of the thing.

  I never did know what was good for me.

  “You insult the honor of the Herenga,” the shrimp intoned. “For that you must pay with your lives, your consciousnesses, and your very souls.”

  “Uh huh. Do you take checks?” But it didn’t reply again. Not in words, anyway. Instead it pulled out a gun.

  Okay, that’s not fair. Calling this thing a gun would be like calling the Sting Ray I’d seen earlier a car, or the amazing meal at the truck stop a snack. This wasn’t a gun. It was a death machine with a handle. It was an Armageddon device with a pistol grip. It was the fury of the universe, packaged in chrome and equipped with a laser sight and a trigger.

  It was massive. Easily as big as I am, if not bigger. Barrels and sights and flanges and cables growing out of each other, all heaped and mounded together like
a mass of eels devouring one another—and it was all pointed at my head.

  “Ned!” I shouted as the devil-shrimp glared at me and the gun began to pulse and whine like an attack dog begging to be let off its leash.

  “On it!” he shouted back. Then the shrimp fired. I saw a blue fireball emerge from the gun’s main barrel, merge with lightning bolts from several sides, pick up steam and laser fire from above and below, and become one massive smoking, snarling, writhing, crackling, steaming sphere of doom. All leaping right toward me. It zoomed straight for the spot between my eyes, closing the gap before I could blink—

  —and then it rebounded.

  And engulfed the crazy killer shrimp instead.

  “NO!!!” It screamed, then its voice vanished as that fireball consumed it. The gun clattered to the ground, parts of it charred and smoking. All that was left of the shrimp was the miniature glass plain where it had stood.

  “Well, that went well,” I muttered. Then I fainted.

  When I came to, I found Mary looking down at me. She was right above me, and I was laying on something soft. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to realize I had my head in her lap. I wanted to close my eyes and pretend to still be unconscious—for the next fifty years—but she noticed me staring at her.

  “You are awake,” she stated. ‘Have you recovered sufficiently?”

  “I’m okay, yeah.” I sat up, slowly so I didn’t flatten her with my bill in the process, and rubbed the back of my head. “What happened?”

  “You fainted.”

  “I did?”

  “You sure did,” Tall said from where he was sitting a few feet away. “Dropped like a little girl.”

  “What little girls do you know?” I countered. “Cause the ones I’ve met’d tear you apart without breaking a sweat.” I blinked. “Besides, I just narrowly escaped being vaporized by the Scampi of Satan. Excuse me of I was overwhelmed by my near-death experience.”

  Tall started to snap back at me, then shut his mouth and nodded. “Smart move,” he said instead after a second. “Getting that thing to aim its gun at you so Ned could focus the forcefield there and bounce the shot straight back on the shooter instead.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” I hadn’t actually planned it like that. I’d been stupidly taunting the seafood from hell, and called for help when it pulled the cosmos’ largest handgun on me. But it had worked out, so I wasn’t going to complain about it. Or admit to my own stupidity. Hey, that’s how I’ve kept my day job so long.

  “How long was I out?” I asked instead, shifting over to give Mary more room. Not too much room, though.

  “One hour,” she told me. “Ned has been disassembling the weapon of the Herenga.” She glanced past me and I turned to see Ned with what looked like an entire garage worth of parts spread out before him. “He hopes to find something there which might aid us.”

  “Cool.” I staggered to my feet and lurched the couple of steps over to him before dropping back down again. “Hey, Ned, how’s it going? Didja find a lifepod stashed in that thing?”

  “I wish,” he replied without looking up. “No, this entire thing is designed for one thing and one thing only—to destroy its target utterly. You’re lucky my forcefield held.”

  “Yep, that’s me. Lucky. So it’s just made for killing and vaporizing. What good does that do us?”

  “More than you’d think.” He grinned at me before returning to his work. “I think I may be able to cobble something together out of the parts, something that could get us off-planet.”

  “Really? Wow. So there really was an emergency lifepod in there!” I scratched at my bill. “But what happens once we get off-planet?”

  “We can worry about that then,” Ned pointed out. “Being off-planet is at least back in outer space, which is better than being stuck here.”

  “Fair enough.” I suddenly realized that it was quiet. No blubbering. “Hey, what happened to the Great Purple Whiney-tail?”

  That actually got a laugh out of him. “Once he saw the shrimp-thing was dead, he jumped up, started thanking us frantically, and ran back into the water.” He gestured up ahead and to the left. “He tossed those up here a few minutes later, I’m guessing as a thank-you. He hasn’t been back since.”

  I looked where Ned had pointed. A large pile of fish, clams, mussels, eels, and seabirds lay mounded together near the water’s edge. It was more than the four of us could eat in a week, assuming we weren’t too picky. A part of me wondered whether Sharky had caught these for us or simply coughed up whatever he’d eaten lately, but the rest of me ambushed that part, knocked him out, bound and gagged him, and stuffed him in a trunk somewhere. Pesky rational thoughts.

  “Okay.” I stood up again, a little less shakily than before. “So we’ve got food. But it’s raw. Have we got any way to cook it?”

  In answer Ned picked up a gun component and held it out for me. “Be careful,” he warned as I took it.

  It looked like a super-soaker, a long tube inside another long tube with a handle and a trigger mounted on the outer one. I wasn’t sure how that was going to help—we could already drown our food, and it’s not like it wasn’t all dead already—but I took it anyway and trudged over to the mound.

  “Right.” I looked at the tube-thing again, then at the mound. “Well, let’s give it a whirl.” I started to aim it at the pile, but then my common sense pulled loose its gag and levered the trunk open long enough to shout at me “hey stupid, try it on one piece first!” Fine, whatever. I grabbed a random fish, tossed it a few feet away, and aimed the tube at that. Then I pulled the trigger.

  There was a soft splat sound, and a rush of hot air knocked me off my feet. I landed right beside the mound of dead things. And the fish? Nothing but a smoking cinder.

  Okay, I’d have to dial it down a bit. No problem. I looked at the tube, then looked again, more closely. Big problem. No dial. No lever, no buttons, no scale, no thing except the trigger.

  And the tube within a tube.

  Hm.

  I thought about that for a second. Then I tugged the inner tube until it was almost completely out of the outer one. And I tried again, this time with a clam I set up beyond the remains of the first fish.

  There was only a warm breeze this time, and the clam wasn’t even hot to the touch.

  Bingo!

  I experimented with the tubes, sliding them in and out like a pro trombone player until I got just the right amount of heat to cook the food without burning it. Then I spread the mound’s contents out in a long row and walked up and down it, grilling each piece as I went.

  “Lunch!” I called out when I was done. “Come and get it while it’s hot!” Though I doubted that would be a problem.

  We feasted on seafood, drank warm clear water using the empty clamshells, and sat back to enjoy having a full belly and a nice sunny sky overhead.

  “I think I’ve got this thing worked out,” Ned said after a while. “It’ll take me a few more hours to build it, but then we should be able to get off-planet.”

  “Awesome.” I’d have patted him on the back but I had my hands behind my head. “Anything we can do to help?”

  “I’ll let you know, but not right now.”

  “Okay.” I yawned. “Well, if there isn’t anything else we can or should do I suggest the rest of us get some shut-eye while we can.”

  “That is a wise suggestion,” Mary agreed. She stretched out on the sand not far from me. “We do not know what will happen once we leave this place, and we should all be alert and rested so we may adapt to any situation that arises.”

  “Right.” Her face was maybe a foot from mine. “That’s what I said.” She gave me a lazy half-smile, sweet and totally unalien, and then closed her eyes and was asleep. Just like that.

  “Works for me,” Tall agreed, and I heard him shifting and then a few seconds later he was snoring. Damn! Aliens and feds had it easy!

  I thought I’d be awake forever, what with everything that’d happened that da
y, but amazingly I closed my eyes and the next thing I knew it was night and Ned was nudging my shoulder.

  “It’s done,” he said. “Get everybody up.”

  “How long did we sleep?” I asked as I rolled over and got to my knees, still yawning.

  “Six hours.”

  “Six hours! You said it’d be three!”

  He shrugged. “I ran into a few complications. Got ’em all sorted now, though.”

  “Oh.” I shook my head to clear it, then reached out and laid a hand on Mary’s shoulder. She was sleeping so peacefully, and you’d never know she wasn’t your average gorgeous full-figured supermodel asleep on a desert island somewhere.

  “Mary?” I whispered. “Time to get up. Ned’s finished and we’re outta here.”

  Her eyes snapped open and fixed on me. There wasn’t any confusion in there, none of the bleariness most people have when they first wake up. “I am glad to hear it.” She sat up, then rose gracefully to her feet. “Wake Agent Thomas and we will prepare for our imminent departure.”

  I watched her walk over to Ned, then turned to Tall. He got a slightly rougher shoulder-shake, but he also snapped awake in an instant. Must be the training. Or the mind-control chip. I was still a little woozy myself, and Tall wound up having to give me a hand to get me standing again, but finally we joined Ned and Mary over by the trees.

  And saw Ned’s latest creation for the first time.

  It looked like an oven rack. That was my first thought. It was basically a grid of thin metal beams I recognized as gun barrels, all criss-crossing each other here there and everywhere. Along the front there were several more little devices, and in back were what looked like silvery space-age rockets.

  “What exactly is this thing?” I asked once I’d glanced around to make sure there weren’t more pieces—or a small spaceship—hidden somewhere nearby.

  “This,” Ned answered proudly, “is our ticket out of here.”

  “It’s an oven rack. With rockets on the back.”