No Small Bills Read online

“There isn’t an access door?” I shook my head. “An escape hatch? A trash chute? Something?”

  “There’s a secure hatch between it and the first passenger car,” Ned admitted, “but we’d have to backtrack and cut in through that car to reach it. And even then I’d have to bypass the security to get us through.”

  “Can we shoot our way in?” Tall asked. He had his gun out and pointed down.

  “NO!!!” This time I was the one in chorus with Ned and Mary. “You could kill us all!” I shouted at him. “That bullet would probably just bounce back up and take out one or more of us before it cut through the shield—and who’s to say we wouldn’t all be sucked out with it before the shield could repair itself?”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t seen Tall look embarrassed before. It made him look almost human. “Right. Sorry.” He holstered his gun.

  “There’s gotta be a way in, right?” I glanced at Ned and Mary again. “Did anybody bring an electric can opener?”

  Ned stared at me for a second. Then he grinned. “DuckBob, you’re a genius!” That was the second time he’d called me a genius—I was really starting to doubt his intelligence. “That just might work!”

  “What might?” Yeah, I’d confused myself. Trust me, it happens a lot.

  “If I reconfigure the shields on this car,” Ned explained, “I might be able to dip them below the hull’s surface for just a second. That’d let the train’s own velocity punch a hole right through it.” He had three different doodads out and was messing with all of them at once. I had no idea eyebrows could be prehensile. “The trick,” he muttered, “is to keep the displacement extremely focused, so it only effects a single spot and not the entire car.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Because cutting the shields all along the car would be bad.” I nodded. I think I’d moved beyond fear and into shock, which at least meant I was calm about the chances of our violent and messy death. Hey, if it happened it’d be kind of like having yourself cremated and your ashes scattered, only it’d be over several galaxies and there wouldn’t be any burning or, y’know, peaceful sleep beforehand.

  “I think I’ve got it,” Ned announced after a minute. “Hold on!” He kept saying that, but there still wasn’t anything to hold onto, so I grabbed Mary’s hand. She glanced down at my hand on hers but didn’t say anything and didn’t pull away. Hey, that was further than I got on most first dates. Then again, we’d gone a lot further for this date, too.

  The first of Ned’s little devices made a high-pitched squeal, like a pig spotting an especially nice mudhole. Then the second one beeped and the third one chirruped. It was like his own little orchestra there, comprised of electronics and barnyard animals. But it worked. I felt a mild tingle across my back and over my head as the shield shifted, and ducked down to be safe, and then watched as an area a few feet to our right buckled and vanished, torn clean off in an instant. The tingle faded, and Ned beamed.

  “We’re in! And I’ve reset the shield so we can approach it safely. Once we’re in I’ll pull the shields in tight on this car, so the DAE won’t be able to follow us.”

  “You rock, Ned.” I meant it, too, as we followed him over to the hole. It was maybe three feet across and roughly circular, so all of us fit through without too much trouble, though I did have to tilt my head way back for my bill and Tall did have to suck in his shoulders a bit. Then we were all inside and looking around.

  What a dump!

  The walls and ceilings and floors were the same as the train cars we’d seen already, smooth and metallic but brushed instead of shiny, with some kind of faint light coming off them so the whole space had a nice even glow. But there was crap all over.

  Okay, not literally crap. Just wires and circuit boards and monitors and other random electronics. It was like an IT department had gone completely Exorcist and just started spewing gadgetry across every available surface.

  Ned, of course, was in hog heaven. “This is amazing!” he gasped as he stumbled through the forest of circuitry, running his fingers along this or that bit. “The tech they’re using is unbelievable!”

  “I’m glad you’re happy with it,” I told him. “Now can you find this emergency call button we actually risked our lives to reach?”

  “Oh, sure.” Ned glanced around. “There it is.”

  The rest of us all made a beeline for the thing he’d gestured toward. It was a small box affixed to the wall just inside the door from the next car, actually, and it had a big red button on it.

  “So, what, we just push it?” I stared at the thing suspiciously. It seemed too easy. And too easy usually translated to “completely wrong.”

  “Yep.” Ned was disassembling something that looked like a futuristic neon coffeemaker gone rogue and didn’t even glance up.

  “You’re sure this is it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Ned!”

  That made him look up, finally. “What?”

  “You’re sure this is it?” I pointed at the button.

  “I’m sure,” he confirmed. “What else could it be?” I heard him mutter as he turned back to the space-age Mr. Coffee.

  I looked at Mary and Tall but they both shrugged. “Ned is the expert,” Mary pointed out. “If he says this is the call button, I must assume he is correct.”

  “What’ve we got to lose?” Tall added.

  “Okay, fine. Just remember, if something goes wrong, we all agreed to this,” I warned them.

  Then I pushed the button.

  Squeak!

  There was a tremendous scraping noise, like a giant with titanium claws attacking an equally large chalkboard. It set my bill on edge and sent spikes of pain through my head. Then the whole car shuddered and shook, hurling us against the door. The grinding continued—I wanted to tell Tall to knock it off but this time I knew it wasn’t him—and the shuddering grew worse.

  And then it all stopped.

  All the sound. All the noise. All the shaking.

  The car was completely quiet.

  Oh, and dark. No lights. And no soft “whoosh” of air, either.

  I picked myself back up and helped Mary back to her feet as best I could. Hey, I couldn’t see—is it my fault my hands may have strayed a bit? A few times? Tall I let get himself up.

  “What the hell just happened?” I demanded.

  “Um.” We heard a cough from the direction Ned had been in before. “Well.” Then we saw a faint glow—he had one of his doohickeys up, and it was putting out a soft light. “I may have been a little hasty in my assessment,” he admitted, not looking at us.

  “Meaning what? What the hell was that?” I shouted. The words were really loud without any other noise.

  “It wasn’t an emergency call button, that’s for sure,” Tall commented.

  “No, apparently not,” Ned agreed. “I think—I think it was actually an emergency brake.”

  “I thought you said this thing didn’t have an emergency brake!”

  “Actually, no, I never said that. Though I would have if you’d asked.”

  “I said it,” Mary reminded me. “And I believed it to be true. The train is fully automated and does not make unscheduled stops for any reason.”

  “Yet here’s an emergency brake.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you explain that, then?”

  Mary shrugged. “I was wrong.” That one was impossible to argue so I turned back toward Ned.

  “So we’ve stopped?”

  “Yep.”

  “Completely?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why aren’t there any lights? Or any air?”

  “The train’s motion powered everything else,” Ned explained. “With it stopped the other systems all shut down.”

  “The shields?”

  “Still active for now, but those’ll fade too after a while.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we freeze to death. If we don’t suffocate first.”

  “I thought we couldn’t suffocate,” I
asked. I glared at Mary. “Isn’t that why you jabbed me with that great big horse needle before we left?”

  “It is, and under normal conditions it would provide sufficient oxygen,” she agreed.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  In answer, she gestured around her. “This room,” she said. “It is a vacuum.”

  “It is?”

  Ned looked embarrassed. “Helps keep the equipment running more smoothly,” he told me. “Sorry.”

  “Great.” I turned back to the door behind us. “Get this thing open.”

  “Why? It’s just as bad in the other cars.”

  “Yeah, but the dinos are out there. If they see me they’ll shoot me. And at least that way I won’t have to sit around and wait for it.”

  “You’re a pessimist,” Ned told me. “Look on the bright side.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I found the emergency call button.” He held up another little silvery box with a big button, but this one was blue.

  “Great. Hit it and get us some help.”

  “I can’t.” He tossed it aside. “No power.”

  “Oh. Right.” I sank down to the floor and put my head in my hands. “So what now?”

  Ned reached into his coveralls and pulled out a small green flask. “Do you know any good drinking songs?”

  Chapter Ten

  Hello, are you my nine o’clock hallucination?

  Don’t ask me what Ned had in that flask. I couldn’t tell you. Not because I didn’t ask him, or he didn’t answer, but because every time he did tell me it was apparently really, really funny—not just to him but to me, to Tall, to Mary, and after a while even to the walls and floors and all those cables and things. So funny we couldn’t do anything but laugh and laugh about it. Which meant we couldn’t remember his answer. Which meant—after handing the flask around again—one of us asked him all over again. Repeat as necessary.

  Wow, that little-bitty flask sure held a lot of . . . liquid. Though when I try to remember the exact color or flavor or consistency of its contents I’m utterly stumped. So it’s possible it was gas. Or tiny tiny chewable beachballs. Or concentrated solar-whale snot. I’m really not sure.

  For a while there I wasn’t sure of anything. Including my name, my address, and the general contours of my head. My shoe size I remembered all the way through, though. Some things just stick with you.

  So there we were, sprawled out on the floor of the space-train’s lead car, sipping or snorting or swallowing or smearing what Ned had in that flask, laughing our butts off. It was cold without the lights and with the shields starting to go, and getting harder to breathe, but drink enough and you don’t worry about those little details so much anymore. You’re too busy concentrating on grander issues, like why peanut butter only comes in crunchy and smooth. Is it because peanuts are crunchy and butter is smooth? What if you were to add a third ingredient, like chocolate peanut butter? Would you then have additional options, like “sweet” or “sticky”?

  So we were bouncing around heavy thoughts like this when the hallucinations started.

  First the room turned a cheery light blue. It was very restful, actually, though my eyes hurt a little from the sudden illumination. So I shut them. Ah, better!

  Then there were sounds. And not Mary and Ned and Tall, either. These were weird noises, clumps and clanks and thunks and cranks. We’d heard a little bit of thumping from the dinos initially, as they pounded on the door, but after a while that had faded. This car was the last one to lose air and shields, Ned had explained (this was after only one pass of the flask, so coherent thought was still more or less possible for all of us), so the DAE agents had probably collapsed already.

  But now there were sounds again. And these were closer than the door, and louder, and more prolonged. It was more like a giant robot had climbed into the cabin with us and was pounding on everything and whirring and ratcheting about between our feet.

  I could have opened my eyes to look, I suppose. And I tried, I really did. But they didn’t want to cooperate. I think they were scared. My eyelids have always had a very keen sense of reality.

  After the sounds—which lessened and then stopped completely—there were the voices. I had no idea what they were saying but they weren’t familiar and that made my eyes open despite themselves—curiosity overcomes fear every time. That’s why I stare whenever I’m on a rollercoaster. The fact that the safety bars can’t fit over my head doesn’t help.

  I was looking at . . . cotton candy. Fluffy pink and purple cotton candy. With eyes. And a little mouth. And hands, like little gloved cartoon hands, but without any arms. And little tiny cartoon booted feet without legs.

  And it was staring at me.

  “Hi,” I said. “You look tasty.”

  “Thank you,” it replied. “You don’t look half-bad yourself.” And sadly no, that’s not the first time I’ve gotten that, and in exactly that way.

  “Are you a hallucination?” I asked it.

  “I don’t know, are you hallucinating?”

  “I’m not sure—a lot will depend on your answer.”

  “So if I say yes you’re hallucinating and if I say no you’re not?”

  I thought about that one for a second. “Well, if you say yes I’m almost certainly hallucinating,” I decided. “If you say no I might still be hallucinating and you could be lying.”

  “Odds are, then, that you’re hallucinating,” the cotton-candy creature pointed out.

  “Odds are, yes. But I’ve never been one to stick to the odds. I’m a longshot kinda guy.”

  “Fair enough.” It beamed at me, which made its . . . body turn more pink than purple, like it was blushing. “In that case, no, I am not a hallucination. You win!”

  “Awesome!” I blinked. “What did I win?”

  “A last-minute rescue,” it told me. “And—“ it slapped something into my hand. It felt like a pamphlet or a brochure, but it was silvery and the paper, if it was paper, was pebbly and sucked all the moisture from my skin. “—a citation.”

  “A what?” I stared at the brochure. It had symbols and markings I didn’t recognize, though they were an attractive shade of fuchsia. “You mean like a commendation?” Hey, we had stopped those dinos! Sort of.

  But it sighed. “No, not that kind of citation. More like an official censure, a warning, a summons.”

  “Oh.” Yeah, that figured. Even my hallucinations gave me bad reviews. “What for?”

  “For all this.” Its unattached little hands waved around it, and I gaped at all the destruction. It looked like someone had blown up a Radio Shack with us inside.

  “Wow! What happened here?”

  “You did,” it answered. “You and your friends. You activated the emergency brake.”

  “Oh, right. That. We had to! Those little dino-guys were chasing us!”

  “The dinotropic aesthetic elite? Yes. And they killed several passengers and caused a significant amount of damage.”

  “See!”

  “So the four of you broke into this control car and hit the emergency brake, stopping the train dead—and, as a result, killing hundreds of passengers and causing catastrophic damage.”

  “Oh.” I tried to smile at it—not easy when my bill felt like its two halves were simultaneously stapled to my skin and clamped shut by bands of razor-barbed iron. “We thought we were hitting the emergency call button.”

  “Why would you think a button colored bright red—the universal color for “stop”—was a call button, rather than the one labeled calm, communicative blue?” It shook its . . . well, it shook its whole body, really. So basically saying no meant doing a jig. That probably made fights hysterical to watch. “It doesn’t matter,” it told me. “You and your friends hit the brakes and caused the damage, so you’ve been cited. The courts will settle the rest.”

  “The courts?” I tried to sit up and discovered I was already standing. Who knew? Of course that meant the cotton-candy guy was fl
oating five feet off the floor, but I found that easier to believe than the fact that I was already—or still—on my feet.

  “Yes, the traffic courts. They will arbitrate the matter.”

  “Oh. Where’s the court? And when are we supposed to see them?”

  “The court is located in ultraspace,” it told me like I was stupid—and at that moment it wasn’t far wrong, “and the time is—now.”

  Everything blurred around me, turning a lovely but disquieting green paisley pattern. Then the green dimmed to almost black and I was standing with Mary, Ned, and Tall in a huge curtained room. The little cotton-candy creature gone, which made it almost certain he wasn’t one of my hallucinations—they tended to linger unpleasantly for days on end.

  The paisleys, it turned out, were real. They were stitched into the curtains.

  “Where are we?” Tall slurred. He was swaying on his feet. I was steady on mine, actually—the advantage of feet like mine. I was either steady or falling but never in between.

  “Ultraspace,” Mary answered. Her words were a little indistinct too, and her hair was mussed. She looked amazing. I can’t believe I got drunk with a chick that hot and all we did was laugh and fall about.

  Actually, that was pretty cool.

  “Whatthehellisultraspace?” Tall must have been worried about using up his word allotment for the day, so he jammed them all into one. Impressive.

  “It’s a layer of reality atop our own,” Ned replied. If the flask’s contents had affected him at all I couldn’t see it. “Time is extended here—an hour in our reality can be days here. They tried using it for travel—you know, fly for three days here, pop back out and it’s only been an hour back home—but for some reason you always show up exactly where you started, no matter how far you went.” He shrugged. “Lousy for space travel. Great for meetings, though. Everyone can step through, go to the appointed meeting place, talk for as long as necessary, and when they leave ultraspace they’re right back where they started and almost no time has passed.”

  I could see where that would be handy. I could also see where it would be a nightmare. “Hey, let’s have a series of meetings for no real reason on things that don’t matter in the least. Each meeting can take days and days—it doesn’t matter, because we’re not losing any time in the real world.”