Marlowe and the Spacewoman (24 page)

The car rolled forward until it was fifty meters from the epicenter of the explosion and flatly refused to go any further on automatic.  Marlowe didn’t have the heart to engage the manual overdrive; that was almost as shameful to the car as being executed was to the good citizens of the City.

“Come on, Nina.  Up for another walk?  Father?”

Jebediah shook his head, refusing to look directly at Marlowe.  Nina popped open her door and jumped out.

There was a warm, acrid smell in the air as they trudged to the lip of the trench and looked down.  There wasn’t much to see.  A blackened hole where the entrance had once been, filled with smoking dirt and bent, smoldering pieces of rusty metal, and a metallic ball about a meter in diameter wobbling back and forth at the bottom of the crater.

“Oh my, I think they used an EMC.”

“An EMC?”  

“Electro-magnetic crusher.  Sort of like a bomb, but exactly the opposite.  They create a localized electro-magnetic field that crushes inward anything metal or magnetic within its range.  Fortunately, they aren’t used very often.”

“Why not?”

“Very expensive, very limited range, and very brief implosion period, about a tenth of a second.  They’re also pretty large, and incredibly energy inefficient.  The energy required to crush that truck would have flattened several City blocks if it had been a conventional bomb.  It was probably in the truck’s tank, otherwise we would have seen it.”

Marlowe’s head sagged as the efforts and exertions of the day suddenly overwhelmed him.  His hands hurt, his elbows burned, his face and arms stung with the scratches and cuts of the long climb out of the sewers.  He closed his eyes and listened, for a moment, to the total silence in his head.  He missed his PDI.  Tired as he was, and as reasonable as a short exile of peace and tranquility sounded, he missed being tapped into the pulse of the City, and painfully felt the dull aching absence of the data stream House constantly fed to him.  It struck him as akin to being afloat in the center of a huge bottomless pool; his feet couldn’t find the bottom and his hands couldn’t reach out and touch the sides.  And somewhere, down there, a powerful drain was waiting to suck him into oblivion.

Nina breached the alien stillness in which he was in danger of drowning.

“Shouldn’t we look for Huggy Bear?”

“Yeah, I suppose so.  I just hope he’s too tired to talk on the way back.”

They found him a kilometer from the entrance, crawling on his hands and knees up the incline of the newly formed valley and sliding back down.  He was covered with dirt and leaves and grass stains, and bawling like a baby.  It took some effort to coax him into the Studebaker, but once settled in and resigned to his fate, he sat morosely staring out the window.  He didn’t say a word, and needed no prompting to get out when they stopped in front of his store.  No wave, no goodbye, just a broken man hanging his head low as he shuffled back into his shop.

Marlowe had just enough energy to utter one more short phrase.

“Home, car, home.”

The Studebaker, having decided it too had had just about enough excitement for one day and was really looked forward to a quiet evening at the curb, happily and speedily complied.

CHAPTER 13

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE

The flag was up on the mailbox.  This surprised Marlowe, because the City Municipal Postal Service usually took the month-long Halloween recess off along with the City Legislature, and they had a very powerful, well connected union that didn’t like having a recess interrupted.  So either he had an important piece of mail, or someone had booby-trapped the box.

The City Municipal Postal Service was a monument to inefficiency.  Originally a private enterprise, the union employees eventually bought it out, and then formed their own lobby group that made sure laws protecting their jobs were passed.  So every citizen had to send at least two pieces of mail a week, if to no one else then to themselves.  In addition, they also had their paid holidays - the Halloween recess, the Xmas shutdown, and the Hygiene Day Hiatus, to name but a few.  And, of course, they also had junk mail.  Spam filters had gotten so good that it was now cheaper to sent junk mail physically rather than by email.  And since it was illegal not to accept junk mail, well, the CMPS was around for the long haul.

“Ooh, mail!  I almost never got mail at…the old place.  And the mail I did get was junk.  Catalogs, mostly, and election fliers.  I hate election fliers!”  Jebediah moved towards the mailbox, his face awash in pure, unmitigated joy, and Marlowe almost took pleasure in extinguishing that joy by clamping a hand firmly on his father’s shoulder and stopping him.  Almost.  Maybe if he hadn’t had such a harrowing day.

“Not so fast, father, it may be a trap.”

Jebediah nodded solemnly.  “Quite right, Spares.  I’ve forgotten myself.  Been out of the thick of things too long, wasting away in that padded cell all these years.  Losing my edge.”

The moment of lucidity lasted almost thirty seconds, and Marlowe suspected House, if he had witnessed it, would have been pleased at the progress.  He’d shown some moments of mental acuity back at the sewage treatment plant too.  In a week or so, the man might be fully sane again.

All three of them gave the mailbox a wide berth.  Marlowe practically crashed through the door in his haste to revive the PDI.  His sudden burst into the hallway startled Gomer, who squawked and half flew, half careened down the hallway back into the living room.  

Gomer started to let loose a volley of profanity, but spied Nina and Jebediah and caught himself mid-curse.  He covered with a loud barrage of squawks and screams, deafening Marlowe and actually causing Jebediah to howl and bounce off the walls.  Nina did her best to subdue the wizened old man, meeting with more than adequate success.  The old man was on the floor and in a headlock in ten seconds, and the wailing had stopped after twenty.  When he calmed down enough, Nina released him.

“You’re much gentler than the orderlies at…the old place.  Thank you.  Kindness in people is such a rarity these days.”

“You’re welcome.”

Jebediah leaned close to Marlowe.  “She’s a real gem, Spares.  Smart, strong, and firm.  You could goes places with her at your side.”

“Please, how many times must I say it?  Don’t call me Spares.”

“What’s happened?”  House’s voice was in near panic.  “Are you all OK?  Right after you linked up from that abandoned sewage treatment plant, I lost contact.  Even the emergency beacon failed.”

“PDI’s dead, House.  Hit by some sort of virus.  I need you to reflash it.  I’m hoping that will do the trick.  I think I’ll go crazy if I’m cut off for much longer.”

Jebediah cleared his throat.

House chided Marlowe.  “I think that last statement was ill-worded.”

Nina tapped Marlowe on the shoulder.  “I hate to interrupt, but Gomer escaped from his cage.”

“Oh, he’s allowed out.  He likes to exercise.”

“Take my constitutional,” piped in Gomer.

Nina gasped, Marlowe glared, Gomer realized his mistake.

“SQUAWK!  Cookie cookie cookie!  SQUAWK!”

“I swear, Marlowe, he said something about taking a constitutional.”

“You’d be amazed at the verbal cues parrots pick up on.  You’d think you were having an honest-to-goodness conversation with them.”

“I like traffic lights.  SQUAWK!”

“And sometimes,” continued Marlowe, “you don’t think that for a second.”

Nina’s brow furled and her nose wrinkled.  “Hmm.”

“House, can you reflash the PDI while I’m in the shower?  I need to clean up.”

“Yes, that shouldn’t be a problem.  And I took the liberty of having liquid soap delivered while you were gone.”

“Did you check it for microbes and the like?”

“Yes.  The soap is safe.”

Marlowe turned to Nina and his father.  “Both of the guest rooms have showers if you’d like to take one.”

Nina nodded her assent, but Jebediah snorted.  “Need a shower?  Why?  I managed to stay out of the mud and,” he said, sniffing loudly for emphasis, “raw sewage.”

“Good for you, father.”  Marlowe stomped off to his bedroom.  He kicked off his shoes, twisted his way out of his trench coat, and threw it across the bed.  The rustling sounds from the pockets reminded him of his little collection.  He started pulling the folded plastic tabs from various pockets, tossing them into a pile in the center of the bedspread.

“House, I have some debris samples from Nina’s ship.  There should be skin cells in those samples.  I’d like you to send them out for age analysis.”

“Any preferred vendor for the analysis?”

“I’d love the results by tomorrow morning, but 24 Hour DNA copies the Ministry of Policing on all the results they generate.  And, I suspect, alters some of those results if the M of P requests it.  We’ll need to use some place discreet, but still accurate.”  There was a company that had a sterling reputation, but it was on the tip of his tongue.  Marlowe racked his brain, trying to come up with the name.  “Got it!  Paslin Biological.”

“City Consumer Magazine does rate them as one of the top three commercial analytical labs.  Third, to be exact.  They’d be higher except they cost a lot more.”

“Yeah, well, when it isn’t my money, I’m willing to pay the higher price.  This goes on the governor’s tab, as part of my investigation.  Tell them we’ll pay to have it overnight expedited.  I’d like the results as soon as possible.”

“Very well.  Let’s hope your brother doesn’t balk at the cost when he gets the bill.”

“Either he’ll still be around to get the bill, in which case he won’t mind paying, or both he and I will be out of circulation, if you catch my drift.”

“Indeed I do.  Any expected results?”

“They should range from a couple of days to about four months, if Nina’s story about being in the crashed spaceship is true.  But don’t tell them that.  I want to avoid any appearance that we influenced the results.  Just tell them to find out how long the cells have been dead.”

“Of course.  Presumably you want a mitochondrial decay analysis, since the samples aren’t more than a year old.”

“They shouldn’t be that old.”  Mitochondrial decay analysis, if Marlowe remembered correctly without his PDI as a reference, would examine genetic material in the cells and determine how old it was based on the level of molecular breakdown.  This would give a good idea of when the skin cells were shed.  The test was supposed to be accurate to within 48 hours, if the samples weren’t too old.

“Very well.  I’ll instruct a messenger bot to take them over tonight.”

Marlowe scooped up the clear slips and waited until a small metallic tube walked into the room.  Thirty centimeters long and half as tall, the messenger bot stood on six legs, but had another six folded and raised up against its body.  Those six legs had small grappling hooks, which allowed it to scale the walls of buildings and rooms as necessary.  Marlowe knew of an instance when a messenger bot traversed a ceiling so as to sneak up on the recipient and serve a court summons.  Unfortunately, that recipient had been Marlowe.

The messenger bot turned to Marlowe and by completely bending its front legs and partially bending the middle pair, managed to bow.  A small slot in the back slid down with the bow, and Marlowe dropped the tabs into the slot and gave the messenger bot a little salute.

“Thank you sir, for the opportunity to make this delivery,” said the bot with a tinny voice.

“Happy to oblige you,” said Marlowe.  “Oh and House, tell them to treat this as criminal evidence and document everything, maintain the chain of evidence, and so on.  The PDI failure doesn’t help on that front, since there is now officially a missing link in that chain, but we can always get more samples from the ship if need be.  Oh, and ask Nina about the big ship, the Odyssey I.  She said something earlier about it being visible.  Presumably in the night sky.  Maybe we can hire an amateur astronomer to look for it.”

That duty done, Marlowe jumped into the shower and set the nozzle to NoFab.  The warm jets of solvent dissolved the soiled clothing and then automatically switched over to hot water.  Marlowe watched the soupy slush of dissolved clothing swirl down the drain.  Without his PDI working, his nasal filters couldn’t block out the smell of the solvent.  Marlowe hadn’t realized how pungent the odor was, and while his nose and eyes burned, he idly wondered what the chemicals were doing to his skin and body without the ever-vigilant nano probes standing by to undo the damage.  He shrugged the thought off, and then, with some trepidation, poured out a handful of liquid soap and began to scrub away the dirt and stink of the day.  His hands and arms stung with the hundreds of cuts and nicks he’d accrued during his near-fatal efforts to access the Internet.  

The joy of the steaming hot shower and the irritation of his minor injuries distracted him from the flashing process, leaving him totally unaware that House was rebuilding the OS on his PDI until he was suddenly back online.  It was wonderful.  He was a little annoyed to discover that his bookmarks had been lost in the reinstall, but that was easily fixed.  He surfed the CityNet for awhile, catching up on the minutiae he’d missed out on during the downtime.

“Say, House, any ideas on how the PDI crashed?”

House spoke to him via the now-working receiver in his ear, the volume raised just enough to cut through the sound of the shower.  “I didn’t look too closely, for fear of being infected by a virus I can’t detect.”

“It’s got Obedere’s fingerprints all over it, the son of a parrot.  I thought you had a backdoor into the Ministry of Policing megaframe.”

“I do.  Although now I’ll have to wonder if it’s real.  Maybe they detected my intrusions and have sandboxed me into a virtual megaframe where I see only what they want me to see.  I had previously calculated those odds at one billion forty eight million and sixty six to one against, given that I’m familiar with the business practices of the contractor they hired to install their servers.”

“And the odds now?”

“Something in the range of three to one against.”

“Three to one!”

“Until I have more information, I have to assume the worst.  If my backdoor is genuine, there should have been no way for Obedere to infect your PDI.  I read his email before he does, I peruse his Ministry memos and directives before any of the intended recipients.  I’ve seen nothing about a new type of virus in their arsenal.  If they do indeed have some sort of new super virus, then my backdoor is almost certainly bogus.”

“How do we find out?”

“Either we discover the virus came from another source, or we need to physically break into the Ministry of Policing.”

“Ah nuts.  I hate getting them to arrest me on false pretenses.  I always get roughed up.”  Marlowe slouched as the hot water hit his head and rolled down his back and neck.  He wasn’t sure how much longer he could stay awake.  He could have his nano probes inject a dose of CafFiend into his system to stay awake, but decided the insanity of an unauthorized, covert physical intrusion into the Ministry of Policing did not merit any contemplation until after catching up on his much needed and much deserved sleep.

It wasn’t until after the shower, when he emerged fresh, clean, and lightly scented, that he noticed all the bird down wafting around on the air currents in his room.  He shut the window, which was half open, and glared through the wall in Gomer’s direction.

“Gomer!  How many times have I told you my room is private!”

“SQUAWK!  Hello!  Cracker cracker cracker!”

Damn that bird.  He seemed more hindrance than help, especially of late.  But he owed the avian his life, a debt not easily repaid.

“House, is there really mail in the mail box, or is that another trap?”

“An excellent question, given recent events.  However, I witnessed the delivery, and it was made by an accredited City Municipal Postal Server.  Earning overtime, no doubt, working on a holiday.”

“Then I better see what it is.”

“I’d recommend getting dressed first.”

“Think it’s urgent?”

“Well, it wasn’t marked as urgent, but it was delivered on a postal holiday.”

“I’m too tired to wring an answer out of that response.  Yes or no?”

“I’m sorry, I just don’t have enough information to give you an answer with a high probability of accuracy.”

“You’re a lot of help, House.  Bring up the mail cam.”