A Fistful of Trouble (Outlaws of the Galaxy Book 2) Paul Tomlinson (reading strategies book .TXT) 📖

in the Trekker? Or had she just taken that as a getaway vehicle? I didn’t know the answer to that.

“Quin? Are you all right?” Danny asked.

“I’ve had better days,” I said.

“We’ve only got about an hour,” he said.

“What?”

“The robot sale in the marketplace...”

In all the excitement, I had forgotten that. I looked over to where Floyd was sitting. Headless. “Have you got a head that will fit him?”

Danny was already prepared for this question. “I have a choice of two.”

The first head he showed me was from a security robot. Older than the ones we’d fought last night but of similar design. I shook my head. Even before yesterday, I’d had an aversion to security robots. The second head was much more battered than the first, but it was closer in design to the head Floyd had lost. I pointed to it.

“Can you get that wired up and working again?”

Danny nodded. “I thought you’d choose this one. I already started on it. I need another ten minutes or so. There’s a pot of coffee on the hotplate over there – and aspirin in the desk drawer if you need them.”

“Why would you think I need aspirin?” I asked.

Danny looked at my battered face, shook his head and grinned. If I’d shown more interest in his work when I first met him, things might have turned out very differently. I found a big mug that didn’t have a chip in the rim and filled it with hot black coffee.

“How does it look?” Danny asked.

Floyd was sitting with a head on his shoulders. It was a definite improvement. But I missed the old head. Though not for sentimental reasons.

“Floyd?” I said. “You okay?”

“A dragon took my head,” he said through his new mouth. “Again.”

“You and me both lost our heads to the same woman,” I said.

“It’s worse than that,” he said. “I let her get away with half of our money.”

“Me too.”

Floyd turned and looked at me. “She took everything?”

I nodded. “Including the Trekker.”

“She came into the cave,” Floyd said. “She said you’d asked her to hide there for her own safety. I didn’t suspect her. She’s a much better liar than you.”

“Yeah, she is.”

“She had your zap gun. I think she used full power. By the time I recovered, she was gone. And so was my head.”

“He received a major blast of electricity,” Danny confirmed. Then he said some technical stuff that I didn’t really understand. It boiled down to something about some of Floyd’s circuits having been fried, but he – Danny – had now fixed them.

“How much money do we have left?” Floyd asked.

“We’ll have whatever you fetch at auction today,” I said.

“Do you have the remote?” Floyd asked.

I nodded. I had it in my pocket. That and my gun were pretty much all that Harmony had left me.

“We need to move,” Danny said. He went over to his motley collection of repaired robots and began turning them on. “I was hoping to have a few more of these things ready. But Happy never turned up with the parts. I guess he got held up in Cootersville.”

We’d passed the turn-off to Cootersville on the way here – it was a single-lane dirt track and the sign pointing the way was pocked with bullet holes. That’s why we’d kept going and headed for Cicada City. The sign had less rust and fewer holes.

“I’ll go with the others,” Floyd said. “You can turn off the connection.”

“Are you sure?” I didn’t usually sever the link between Floyd, the artificial sentience, and his robot suit until the sale was made and money was about to change hands. That was usually the point someone plugged him into a computer and ran some basic diagnostics to check that his specifications were as advertised.

Danny’s chorus line of old clunkers all turned and began marching out of the shop. Floyd got up and joined the end of the line. I think he felt the need to punish himself. Or perhaps I was just projecting my own feelings. I joined the line behind him. I looked down at the little remote control in my hand. I pressed the ‘off’ button. The little light flickered and turned red. There was no visible change in the robot in front of me, but I knew that Floyd was now sitting alone in the dark and had no contact with the outside world. I followed the robot out of the shop.

As Danny locked the door behind us, I was giving serious thought to letting Floyd turn me in for the bounty on my head. Danny could act as his human agent.

Chapter Thirteen

The market place was an open area of dust at the end of the main street. It was surrounded on two sides by stores and on the third by the council house. The shade from the buildings kept the temperature bearable – at least until the late afternoon when the sun shone directly down the street. There was little to distinguish the council house from the other buildings except for the clock-face high up on its façade. It looked like it had been made for a much bigger building. It was so big that you could actually see the minute hand moving. Civic pride is demonstrated in different ways in different towns. Most marketplaces have a fountain or a well in the middle. Or a statue of a famous former resident. Cicada City just had dirt. The town’s only celebrity was Madam Fifi. Maybe they’d erect a statue from her when she died.

On market day, the stores that surrounded the square put displays of goods out in front of their windows. Trestle tables held leather goods, boots and shoes, and bolts of cloth. The grocer put out fruit and vegetables and a selection of dry goods. The butcher had only a papier mâché pig and something that was probably meant to be a cow. Nobody wanted to see meat out in the open with flies crawling over it.

Other traders displayed