Xenotech What Happens: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 3) Read online

  Cornell tried another tactic to lose me—pure speed. He headed southeast from the Stratosphere, flying down Las Vegas Boulevard. I revised my estimation of his craft’s maximum velocity. He wasn’t doing thirty miles per hour—he was pushing sixty. Sixty seems like nothing when you’re in a car zooming down an interstate, but when you’re being towed behind an aircraft it’s a different story. I held my head close to the banner to reduce wind resistance and lowered my eyes so the onrushing air wasn’t blowing right in my face. Even with all that I still slid backwards until I got to the far end and was able to wrap one of the banner’s trailing cords around my wrists to anchor me in place. I didn’t have any brain cycles available to search the sky for Poly, but could look at the scenes spooling by below me.

  We passed the Royal Dauushan on the right, across from the Convention Center where the old Circus Circus hotel had been. There were two acres of warm mud wallows in the back and I put all thoughts of circus elephant jokes out of my mind. I was too busy being a knot in a kite’s tail on a windy day. The paired, pyramidal towers of the Grand Pyridian, the hotel where Poly and I were staying, flashed by on the left. It was built on the site of the Fontainebleau Resort that had filed for bankruptcy before it opened, twenty years ago, when the real estate market in Vegas last crashed. Next came the SLN Capital hotel, with its monumental facade imitating the United States Capitol building. Then I managed to turn my head to the side.

  Spots of red, white and blue zoomed by along my aerial path and it took my brain a few seconds to identify them. More than a dozen dirigibles from Fly Roller Air Tours were painted in patriotic stripes. They were shuttling visitors up and down the Strip and out to nearby tourist destinations like the Valley of Fire, Hoover Dam, and Red Rock Canyon. Some were huge—big enough to airlift Tōdons and Dauushans—while others scaled for Musans and J’Vel weren’t much larger than the one I was hanging from.

  Now we were going faster. Cornell must be doing eighty. Instead of whipping back and forth, the extra speed helped the banner I was clinging to straighten out. I was thirty feet directly behind Cornell’s dirigible. If I were Indiana Jones I’d be making my way hand over hand along the banner, getting closer and closer to Cornell so I could surprise him and have a bare knuckled fight in his dirigible’s cockpit at six hundred feet while being strafed by a red Fokker triplane. Unfortunately, the only Professor Jones I knew was an expert in the Iliad and the Odyssey, not archaeological adventures. I opted for just hanging on.

  Cornell turned due south to follow the Strip. Tall, glass-covered skyscraper hotels went by to the right and left, then we zipped past a pirate ship, a replica of the Doge’s palace, and a pink, fifty-foot neon flamingo. The side of one hotel had a huge video billboard for The Siberia Experience—Can You Survive?

  I hoped that question wasn’t prophetic.

  Then our airspeed dropped and I went from being straight out at the end of the banner to hanging below Cornell’s dirigible like a worm on the end of a fishing line. There was a lake coming up on my right—could I let go and take my chances with a water landing? With my luck, it would only be four inches deep.

  Cornell had a different idea. Across the street from the Bellagio—I could read the hotels’ names now—was the Paris Las Vegas resort and its half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. He slowly circled the top of the tower and some of the banner’s cords dangling below me caught on architectural ornaments protruding from highest point of the spire. He continued to circle until the entire thirty-foot banner was wrapped around the tower’s apex. I was stuck inside the layers like a pink vinyl mummy, with only my head free. Then Cornell revved his dirigible’s engines and the grommets holding the cords to the near end of the banner finally ripped out. His shark had lost its tether.

  It was too much to hope that Cornell would just fly away, leaving me to contemplate the shame of my ignominious situation in peace. Instead, he circled around the tower and floated just a few feet in front of me. He raised his pistol. If he’d started with a full clip he still had plenty of rounds left to wreak significant havoc on my person. My pupa silk shirt might protect me if he aimed for my torso, but if he went for a head shot, it was adieu, lights out, the party’s over, been nice knowin’ ya.

  Where was Poly when I needed her?

  Cornell, in standard villain style, couldn’t resist gloating.

  “How does it feel to have the tables turned, Jack?”

  I tried to shrug, but couldn’t because my shoulders were wrapped in pink vinyl.

  “Not so good,” I said.

  Cornell laughed an evil laugh straight out of Villain Clichés 101.

  “How did you know I’d be in Las Vegas, for that matter?” he said.

  “We know more than you think.”

  I wasn’t going to tell him that it was only a coincidence we were in Vegas. If I kept him talking that meant more time for me to be rescued. Cornell gave me a hard look.

  “We know about the flash drive, too,” I said. “Boba Fett.”

  Cornell wasn’t happy to hear that.

  “Keep talking,” he said.

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at me and felt like a mouse facing down a rattlesnake. Okay, non-venomous rat snake. Cornell was just a henchman, not a major league baddie, or at least he gave that impression.

  I thought fast.

  “If you’re passing along the specs for the compliant plague, they’re wrong,” I said. “The version you’ve got just makes people complacent and sleepy.”

  Cornell smiled. That hadn’t been the right answer.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  He shook his head back and forth like he was disgusted he’d let me blather on this long. Air currents pushed his dirigible ten yards farther away from the tower, so he made a minor adjustment to return to his original position, and aimed his pistol at my head. We were both distracted by the sound of trumpets, joined by other instruments in a military band. They were playing the opening bars of La Marseillaise.

  Then I heard gunshots. Lots of gunshots. Twenty-one gunshots, to be exact. The French Legionnaires, part of the entertainment at the Paris Las Vegas, were showing their colors and giving their eleven o’clock twenty-one gun salute—with blanks, unfortunately.

  There was shouting below us. Spectators and hotel employees must have noticed the top of their replica Eiffel Tower was wrapped in pink vinyl and having a close encounter with a shark. With my luck, they’d probably consider it performance art, like the guy who’d encircled Guam with a twelve-foot high fence made of purple bubble wrap back in 2023. Still, the shots and shouts did distract Cornell, if only for a few seconds.

  My nemesis had been keeping a close watch on the skies around him. Cornell knew Poly was still out there somewhere in her dirigible, but he couldn’t see her. When the shouting began he looked down as well as around and confirmed there wasn’t a hostile dirigible in sight. I could see what Cornell couldn’t however. Personal dirigibles have blind spots. There’s no easy way for their pilots to see what’s above them. Poly had been hovering directly above Cornell for several minutes and it had taken all my acting ability, such as it was, to stop myself from smiling, which would have surely given her away.

  While the legionnaires had been firing, Poly had rotated her engines until her jets were aimed at the sky. As the last echoes of gunshots bouncing off nearby hotels faded, she powered her airship into the top of Cornell’s shark, pushing it toward the palm tree shaded courtyard at the base of the tower. Cornell fired his pistol, but instead of hitting me, I heard metallic pings as the bullets ricocheted around the structural steel girders of the imitation French landmark.

  Thank you, Poly!

  I couldn’t bend my head far enough to see what happened next but did hear spectators’ shouts from below change to cheers. Poly must be putting on quite a show. Then I heard wh
at had to be the crunch of the bottom of Cornell’s cockpit gondola hitting concrete at a speed much higher than its designers had contemplated. Some of the cheers turned to screams. Two more shots rang out—they didn’t sound like blanks this time. There was a lot more screaming. I hoped that Poly was okay. It didn’t sound like her screaming, anyway.

  I figured she had things well in hand. Cornell would be stunned from hitting the ground. Poly would capture him, hand him over to Las Vegas law enforcement, and be up to cut me free from my elevated vinyl Bastille in a few minutes. I didn’t have anything to worry about.

  Then I heard a whine above me and off to the southeast. It sounded like an angry lawn mower with bad engine knock, out for my blood. I had to look twice because I couldn’t believe what my retinas were recording. A bright red Fokker triplane with black crosses on its wings was coming at me out of the sun, machine guns blazing.

  Okay, who had a pipeline to my subconscious?

  A week on one of the Pyr pleasure planets with Poly instead of visiting GALTEX was looking better and better.

  At least I’d die in the pink.

  Chapter 3

  “Things are seldom what they seem.”

  — W. S. Gilbert, H. M. S. Pinafore

  The red triplane—and the bullets—got closer and closer. I could feel the shots hitting the vinyl to my left and right. But something was wrong—okay, something more than being attacked by the Red Baron while wrapped up at the top of a replica Eiffel Tower was wrong. The sound of the triplane hadn’t changed from an angry lawn mower to the Tyrannosaurus Rex roar of a real Fokker triplane’s engine. For that matter, the plane was close now, but it wasn’t any bigger. It wasn’t a restored World War One-era aircraft; it was a drone, no larger than a bald eagle. I’d seen plenty of them in Alaska with my step-dad. Eagles, not triplane drones.

  I looked to my left where the latest rounds from the drone’s machine guns were striking. The bullets, or rather rubber bullets smaller than pencil erasers, were hitting the banner that held me, loosening its hold on my body. I could already see some of it hanging down instead of keeping me captive. I hoped whoever was operating the drone wasn’t too zealous about unwrapping the banner. I could die just as easily from a fall as I could from one of Cornell’s gunshots.

  Moments later, the banner was sufficiently loose for me to crawl out above it and find a relatively secure perch at the very top of the tower’s crowning spire. Part of me wanted to beat on my chest and play King Kong, but I was more interested in figuring out how to get down from here without breaking my neck. Then the triplane buzzed me and circled around the top of the tower. A speaker on its lower fuselage crackled.

  “Hi, Uncle Jack! I’m glad you’re safe!”

  “Terrhi?”

  What was my favorite juvenile Dauushan doing in Las Vegas? And how did she end up operating a Fokker triplane drone?

  “Uh huh!” said the speaker in Terrhi’s high-pitched voice. “Mom’s in town to support Dauushan tech companies at GALTEX and Daddy got me this drone at the FAO Schwarz in the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace. Do you like it?”

  “I like it a lot, Terrhi.”

  She’d managed to answer both my questions. I was temporarily at a loss for words, but Terrhi’s voice from the triplane’s speaker filled in the gap.

  “I wanted to get a full scale triplane, but Daddy wouldn’t let me. He said I had to be happy with this one until I was older.”

  I kept all thoughts about little Fokkers to myself, but did grin like the idiot that I was.

  “Thanks for the rescue.”

  “Avec plaisir,” said the triplane’s speaker.

  Terrhi was learning French. How cool.

  “Merci beaucoup, ma petite mademoiselle,” I replied.

  “You need to come down to the courtyard,” said Terrhi’s voice. “Poly wants to talk to you.”

  “What’s the fastest way to get there?” I said.

  “You don’t want to use the fastest way,” teased Terrhi. “It would get messy.”

  She was right, now that I thought about it. The fastest way down would be letting go of the spire.

  “True enough,” I said, still grinning. “What’s the fastest way down that leaves me alive when I get there?”

  “Poly says there’s an elevator from the wide part at the top of the tower down to ground level,” said Terrhi. “You just have to get there.”

  “Right.”

  I made my way down the spire and helped finish unwrapping the banner so that I’d have exposed girders to hang on to. The long, pink ribbon of vinyl fluttered down. I continued more slowly and carefully in the same direction until I reached the catwalk around the observation deck. It was good to be standing on two feet instead of clinging to cold metal with both arms. I found a maintenance door leading from the catwalk to the observation deck and reached for my phone so it could use its mutakey function to unlock the door. But it wasn’t there.

  Where was my phone? And how was I going to get down off this tower without it?

  I paced around the catwalk a few times, looking for alternate entrances. I even contemplated trying to make my way down the structure of the outside of the tower, but thought better of it. I didn’t want anything else from my subconscious appearing to break my concentration when I was in a vulnerable position, hanging on to crossbeams.

  Then the maintenance door opened and Poly beckoned. Thank goodness! Unfortunately, she wasn’t smiling.

  Poly gave me a hug and tugged me over to the elevator. She’d bought me a ticket so I had a right to be on the observation deck, but I’d had my fill of seeing Vegas from high vantage points for a day or a lifetime. The two of us were alone in the elevator as it made its slow descent.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  I moved to give her another hug, but she was in serious mode and took a step back. Her face held a mixture of concern, frustration and anger.

  “Cornell got away,” she said.

  That explained all three emotions.

  Crap, I thought. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Poly. “I couldn’t see what was happening below me.”

  Just like Cornell couldn’t see above him earlier. The shark dirigible’s helium compartments were in the way.

  “That sucks,” I said.

  “It does,” said Poly. “Terrhi and Tomáso and Spike were walking up the Strip. They saw the commotion and stopped to watch.”

  “Tomáso’s in the courtyard?”

  “Yes,” said Poly. “He didn’t realize we were in Vegas, too.”

  Things had happened rather quickly after we’d rescued Tomáso’s mate and Terrhi’s mom, Queen Sherrhiliandarianne the Second, Matriarch of All Dauush, from kidnappers last Saturday.

  “Terrhi said she thought she saw someone jump out of the shark dirigible just before it hit the ground,” continued Poly. “He ran into the hotel.”

  “So we’ve lost him,” I said.

  “Seems like it,” said Poly.

  Then Poly’s phone rang. She answered.

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” said the voice at the other end of the line.

  It was my phone.

  Finally, things were going our way.

  Chapter 4

  “Begin at the beginning and go on

  till you come to the end: then stop.”

  — Lewis Carroll

  So much had happened in the past hour that everything seemed surreal. A week ago, my friend and now my new employee, Mike Goodman, had called to ask for help with eight-legged construction bots building an ominous looking two hundred and fifty foot combat robot. Now, a week later, after defeating twelve giant combat robots, Poly and I were chasing Cornell through the skies of t
he Gambling Capital of the World. Like a bad penny, the unscrupulous Earth First Militant henchman kept turning up. My mind flashed back to consider what had happened to get us from Poly’s graduation at Emory University in Atlanta on Saturday to the courtyard of the Paris Las Vegas resort today.

  * * * * *

  Two Days Earlier

  Poly and I were sitting on the edge of the stage that had been set up for Emory’s graduation, holding hands. We were enjoying the warm glow of a job well done, having saved the galaxy again, sort of. The villains were on their way to jail and the forces of good were triumphant.

  For more than a month, I had been planning a romantic week away so the two of us could go somewhere with no distractions. It would be wonderful to focus on each other, not Poly’s academic commitments or my tech support clients. I’d shared the idea with Poly a few days ago and she’d enthusiastically agreed—she was more than ready for a break. We’d each made lists of places we wanted to go and were pleasantly surprised when we’d both picked attending GALTEX, the Galactic Technology Exposition, ahead of going to Maui, Guam, or one of the Pyr pleasure planets.

  “Las Vegas, here we come,” I said.

  “We just have to find a way to get there,” said Poly, “and a place to stay.”

  I looked a little sheepish. GALTEX was the largest convention of the year in a town that’s used to hosting large conventions. Hotels would be sold out as far away as Hoover Dam. Damn. And all the flights from Atlanta to Las Vegas would have been full for months.

  “Do you think your mother could pull some strings for us?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to ask her,” said Poly. “Are you?”

  “What’s the big deal?” I said. “You’re a grown woman.”

  “I’m also my mother’s little girl and we’ve just now gotten back on speaking terms.”