Marlowe and the Spacewoman (17 page)

“You could just drop me off.  I have some stuff I’d like to collect, it should be waiting for me.  I hid it pretty well.”

“Tell you what, father.  Once I’ve wrapped up my investigations here, we can talk about it.”

“Fine,” Jebediah answered petulantly.  Marlowe could imagine him crossing his arms and slinking back into his seat, his face a picture of impatience.  Linking via House into the Studebaker’s CarCam, a small vid camera mounted in the overhead light, bore out his guess at his father’s response.

“I’m sorry House,” said Nina.  “Where were we?”

“You wanted me to search some sort of net.”

“Yeah, you know, the world wide web.  The Internet.”

“Hmm.  Sorry, never heard of it.”

“Never heard of it!?  But the Internet was completely woven into the fabric of our society.  It was everywhere.  It was supposed to be indestructible!  Last forever!”

“Well, it appears it wasn’t and didn’t.”

“But parts of it must still exist, somewhere.  It was decentralized.”

“It’s entirely possible this Internet does exist outside the City, but I’d be surprised.  We do have trading relationships and open communications with a number of other cities, and I’ve never come across the term before.”

“I’ve heard of it,” boasted Jebediah.

“Really?  What happened to it,” asked Nina.

“Verboten.  Verboten, verboten, verboten,” responded Jebediah, refusing to look her in the eye.  “No such thing as the Internet.  No such thing.”

“Oh.”  Nina couldn’t keep the disappointment out of her voice.  “I’m beginning to wonder why I bothered trying to get back.  No ticker tape parades, no hero’s welcome, all the world turned upside down.  Hell, I kinda half expected that we’d be a sort of legend, people half waiting for us to return, half not believing the story of our voyage.”

“Lost Martians,” hissed Jebediah.

“I am sorry,” said House.  “If it’s any consolation, you’ve handled the adjustment remarkably well thus far.”

“You don’t get sent into deep space for three years with only three other people if you don’t have a certain amount of mental fortitude.”  She stared out the window as the buildings thinned and whizzed by.  “Or political connections,” she added bitterly under her breath.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, what was that last bit?”

“Nothing.  Just talking to myself.  That mental fortitude cracking, you know.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” broke in Jebediah.

House ignored the outburst.  “I can recommend some very nice drugs that might help you adjust.”

“That’s OK, I’m doing just fine.”

“I’m with you,” said Jebediah. “I’d have turned down the drugs too, if they’d given me a choice.”  He turned to the window and started watching the scenery slip past them.  “The place has changed a lot since I was last here.”

“Tell me about it,” murmured Nina.

The car hummed along for a few minutes, dipping and bobbing with each pothole it flew over.  

“House?”

“Yes?”

“How hard is it to leave the City?”

“In your current circumstances?  Impossible.  You’d never be allowed past the first checkpoint.”

“In normal circumstances?”

“Virtually impossible.  You’d have to have municipal approval, which means trade or espionage.  And then, of course, getting into another city would prove equally difficult.  These are not the most trusting of times.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Don’t despair.  If things really deteriorate, you’d do well to remember that Marlowe often manages to do the impossible.  Maybe even for you.”

“Hmm.”  She sat silently for the rest of the trip, only nudging Marlowe as they approached the first security checkpoint around the collective farm.

“Mmwah?”  Marlowe stretched his arms, which creaked, and his legs, which cracked and popped.  “Here already?  OK.  Let me do the talking.”

But he didn’t need to talk.  The Civic Defense Guard soldier manning the checkpoint scanned the car’s ID tag, noted who Marlowe was, and upon seeing the authority vested in him by the Governor, waved the car through.  This happened at the second checkpoint, and by the time they reached the third one, Jebediah had quit cowering on the floor of the backseat.  At the fourth checkpoint, however, the armed guards forced them to stop and answer questions.  They were Ministry of Policing constables.  They glared at Marlowe, Nina, and Jebediah, they squinted suspiciously at the Studebaker, and they took a lot of time verifying Marlowe’s authorization and authority with headquarters.  All Obedere’s work, no doubt.  But eventually, they were allowed through and Marlowe finally saw firsthand the destruction wrought by Nina’s arrival.

The Brussels sprouts field stretched out for several kilometers.  It was black.  Smoke still hung in the air.  Emergency vehicles were still loitering, chatting amongst themselves as their occupants walked around outside, mopping up any small fires they came across.  A long blackened rut ran through the field, perpendicular to the cultivated rows of genetically improved vegetables.  Marlowe traced it to the end, where it just tapered into nothing.

“There’s nothing there.”

Nina put her hand on Marlowe’s chin and swung his head to the other end of the rut.  Then he saw the spaceship.

It wasn’t all that impressive, actually.  Small, slightly larger than a municipal school flitter.     Only with wings.  Well, a wing.  The second wing, or the twisted, smoldering remains of it, lay about a hundred meters behind the main section of the craft.  The ship was completely black, maybe by design, maybe due to scorching, ten meters long and three and a half meters across.  A  tail fin, cracked and bent at an odd angle, jutted out from the rear of the ship just above three large thruster nozzles.   One of the nozzles was crushed into an elliptical shape, the edges curling inward like the torn lips of a toothless gray mouth.

The front was badly mashed in, but Marlowe could make out a cockpit window above a now very flat nose cone.  In the rear, just past the thruster nozzles, cables ran out, frayed snakes leading to a flaccid, very charred parachute.  Marlowe kicked up the mag and noticed that the ship was covered in non-uniformly sized tiles.  Some had fallen off, revealing they were actually thick rectangles and cubes.  Where one was gone, several were often missing, forming long jagged lines.

No question about it, Nina’s arrival had devastated the entire crop of Brussels sprouts.  Apparently no amount of genetic engineering could protect the vegetables from a crashing spacecraft.  Marlowe couldn’t work himself into tears over it, though.  He didn’t like Brussels sprouts.  They reminded him of tiny little cabbages, and he’d had a bad run-in with a pack of genetically modified cabbages a few years ago.  Of course, Brussels sprouts didn’t have arms and legs, and the fool who’d thought she could create a self-harvesting cabbage patch had paid for her hubris with her life.  It was possible, though, that being subsequently resurrected might have taken the edge off that lesson.

“I never did hear an explanation for why you crashed, Nina.  Did some crucial system fail?”

“I’m not sure.  A shudder shortly after reentry, followed by a catastrophic failure of the hydraulics system, and then the control surfaces no longer responded properly and I was out of control.  If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say I was hit by a missile or something.  I’m sure a detailed crash investigation would reveal that, but I suspect the people who shot me down are in charge of that investigation and less than eager to shift the blame for my crash onto themselves, given the consequences I’m facing.”

Marlowe silently agreed.  Especially if it turned out to be Ministry of Policing personnel who shot her down.

“But that’s all water under the bridge.  Here is where I am, and no amount of complaining will change that.  Come on, let me show you the inside!”  Excitement resonated in Nina’s voice, highlighting her pleasure to be back on familiar territory.  

“Can I come with you?” asked Jebediah.  He had, of course, abandoned any pretense of remembering his promise to be quiet as a mouse.

“No, you need to wait here.”  Marlowe activated the childproof locks on the doors as he climbed out of the car.

Jebediah pouted while muttering to himself.  “Fine.  I’ll bide my time.  Oh yes, I’ll have my reward soon enough.  Patience.  I must be patient.”  As soon as Nina and Marlowe’s doors closed, he tried the handle on his.  It rattled, but wouldn’t open.  Jebediah howled in frustration and pounded against the blast-resistant windows.

The interior of the Studebaker was soundproofed, so Marlowe didn’t even notice Jebediah’s tantrum.  The guards didn’t give them any trouble approaching the ship, probably because there weren’t any guards.  The soldiers stood huddled around a fruit stand just off the road.  Marlowe leaned his left ear towards them, the one with the parabolic implant, and tried to listen in on their furtive conversation.  He could only make out bits and pieces, snatches about radiation, sterility, and Martians.

Nina climbed down the ridge into the crater, slipping and sliding until she came to rest near the front of the ship.  Marlowe followed cautiously, managing to fall only a couple of times.  The hatch was on the side, a meter and a half diameter circle rimmed in orange.  Four hand-holds were evenly spaced around the hatch.  ’Odyssey I’ was stenciled across the top in neat black letters, ‘FSEP’ along the bottom.  Marlowe wiped away some of the soot in the center to reveal a dark blue circle with a star field it in.  The hatch, which was open, swung slightly under the pressure of Marlowe’s cleaning.

“I closed it behind me when I exited.  But it wouldn’t be that hard to figure out how to open.  I just hope they didn’t damage anything when they searched it.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, Obedere hasn’t been inside.  He wouldn’t fit through the hatch.”

Nina laughed.  “He wouldn’t fit inside either.  It’s…cramped.”

Nina grabbed two hand holds above the hatch and propelled herself in, feet first.  Marlowe followed suit more slowly and more awkwardly.  Much to his chagrin, he found that he had a hard time fitting too.

Inside was like a studio flat.  A one room, spartan midget doll house studio flat.  It had a low ceiling with wall-to-wall lighting built in, with two bunks, one over the other, lining each side, a screened off area with a toilet in the back, and a small oven next to the toilet.  The opposite wall had racks lining it, with gaping holes revealing the wall behind it and an occasional piece of electronics, and one high-backed chair in front with empty mountings for three more chairs on the floor next to it.  The chair overlooked the cracked cockpit windows.

Nina gestured to the wall and chair.  “I had to remove anything not absolutely necessary to reduce my mass.  That included a lot of the electronics and the other three flight seats.”

The interior made Nina’s cell at the Ministry of Policing look like a country club.

Marlowe wrinkled his nose at the lingering smell, a funky, sweaty odor that suggested someone had spent a great deal of time here without access to a shower.  Nina walked over to one of the bunks and lifted the mattress up.  That’s when Marlowe noticed that the other bunks were actually just empty frames devoid of mattresses or bedding.  More mass reduction, evidently.

“Do you have a knife?” she asked, one hand outstretched towards Marlowe.

“No, but will a screwdriver work?”

“Phillips or flathead?”

“What’s Phillips?”

“You mean you don’t have Phillips screws and screwdrivers in the future?”

“I’m afraid not, unless this is a Phillips.”

“Amazing.  Gimme the screwdriver.”  She took the offered tool from Marlowe.  “It’s a flathead.”  Nina used it to poke through the fabric of the mattress.  She jabbed and pulled until she’d made a long gash, then reached in and started pulling out foam stuffing.

“It’s in here somewhere.”  She pushed her arm up to the shoulder into the mattress.

“What are you looking for?”

“A disk.”

“You hid it in the mattress?”

“We were told to be cautious on our return, in case things had changed dramatically.  Like we returned to a police state, for example.  Ah, here it is!”

Nina pulled her arm, now covered in tufts of clingy foam, out of the mattress, her fist closed tight around something.  She brushed her arm off, sending up a cloud of the particles.  Marlowe sneezed once, triggering the histamine filters in his nostrils, which folded back over his nasal passages and blocked the entry of any more irritants.

“Here,” she said gleefully.  “Proof of who I am and where I’ve been.”  She dropped a small plastic rectangle into Marlowe’s hand.  It was the size and thickness of an after-dinner mint.  On the underside of one edge were some gold contact points.

Marlowe turned the tiny disk over and over in his hands.  “OK, and what do I do with this?”

“You slot it into a disk dri…oh.”  Nina looked nonplussed.  “Right, that state of the art disk is one hundred year old technology for you.  No matter.  I’ve got a computer and disk drive over here.”

Nina plucked the disk out of Marlowe’s hand, moved past him, and sat down in one of the crash seats.

“Do the computers still work?”

“It all still works.  Nuclear battery, under the floor.  Actually, we need to be careful with that.  Could cause problems, be used for mischief.  I’m not sure how we’ll transfer the data over to your PDI, but I can at least show you on the monitor.”