Marlowe and the Spacewoman (28 page)

“This was on my watch,” said Jebediah.  “We could never prove it was Mirth City, but that didn’t stop me from sending rabid sheep over there.”  He chuckled softly.  “Took their wool industry years to recover.”

“Anyway,” continued Marlowe, “we got the frat population under control with the development of spring-loaded, flying rat traps.  I can still remember summer evenings catching fireflies and dodging those frat traps.  They kept flying, even after the trap had sprung, so they could be pretty ripe.”  Marlowe smiled.  “And then there was frat baseball, a summer favorite, where you’d hit a trap towards players on the other team-”

“OK, OK, I get the picture,” said Nina.  “Obviously the traps didn’t get all of the frats.”

“Nope,” said Jebediah.  “They’re cunning bastards and started hiding down here.  We could have sent frat traps down after them, but the things are damned expensive and a maintenance nightmare to boot.  We figured, as long as the frats stay out of sight, well, live and let live.”  He started rummaging around in his pockets.  “Anyone hungry?  I’m hungry.  Ah, here they are!  Marie Antoinette, anyone?”

“What’s that,” asked Nina.

Jebediah produced a small foil-wrapped package.  “Snack cake.  Chocolate with cognac liqueur center and a delicate gold leaf frosting on top.”

“They’re terrible,” said Marlowe.

“Maybe,” said Jebediah, “but the ads were great.  Remember the ads?”

“No,” said Marlowe in a tone indicating he did but didn’t want to be reminded.

“Imagine,” said Jebediah, hands drawing a square in the air, “it’s night, and a mob is forming outside a castle.  Zoom into the castle, just behind a courtier who is walking in a panic, down richly apportioned halls, the sound of music growing as he moves.  Suddenly we’re in a huge ballroom, with hundreds of well-dressed aristocrats dancing in concentric circles.  At the center of these rings, draped in jewels and naked from the waist up  is-”

“She wasn’t topless!” barked Marlowe.

“You remember it your way, I’ll remember it mine, thank you very much.  Now where was I?  Ah yes,” continued Jebediah, his voice growing wistful, “her honey brown hair flowing over bare shoulders, like milk chocolate on ivory.  The courtier exclaims, ‘Your highness, the peasants, they’re revolting!’  ’Yes,’ she replies in a posh accent, ‘ they are disgusting little trolls, aren’t they.’  ’No, no,’ says the courier urgently, ‘they are revolting.  Up in arms and about to storm the castle!’  ’Oh how droll,’ she replies.  ’Let them eat cake.’  Cut to the peasants.  Each, in one hand, holds a weapon, a torch, a pitchfork, a sword.  And in the other, a Marie Antoinette cake.  As they eat the cakes, their mood lightens, they break out in smiles, and they drop their weapons.  ’Let them eat cake,’ says the voice over.  ’Snacks for the riff-raff.’  I made efforts to find that actress, you know, but the ad was filmed in another city.  I could never touch her.”  He sighed.

“Yes,” said Marlowe.  “Mirth City, as I recall.  Which is how the whole frat thing started.”

“I just wanted to talk to her,” said Jebediah petulantly.

“A stupid campaign,” said Marlowe, “and even worse snacks, if you ask me.”

Nina shook her head.  “I’ll pass.  But I could sure go for a coffee about now.”

“Coffee,” asked Jebediah incredulously.  “How can you think of coffee at a time like this?”

“I don’t know,” shrugged Nina.  “I just feel an urge for a coffee.”

“There used to be a Bucky Brew down here,” said Marlowe.  “Next to the underground water park.  Not sure exactly where, and it may not be open any more.  Most of their business came from the park, and they had to shut that down last year due to pH balance problems.”

“Enough!” shouted Jebediah.  “I thought we were trying to break into the Ministry of Policing!”

It felt like hours, hours crouched over the wrinkled vellum with a light bead, hours groping in the dark, before finally reaching their final destination.  They’d noticed the tunnels sloping slightly upwards for the last twenty minutes, so when they finally reached OSD203-J6, affectionately known as Outskirts Storm Drain 203, Junction 6, the standing water had receded and the bottom of the tunnel consisted of crunchy, dark powder.  Marlowe groaned as he saw the next leg of their journey – yet another rusty ladder rising up out of brown muck.

“According to House, this will open up into a large drain in a custodial closet adjoining detention block thirty eight.  This is where the heavy torture supposedly occurs.”

Nina looked up, using her glowing wine glass as a pointer.  “Will the drain be large enough for us to fit?”

“According to the blueprints House downloaded, yes.  I suppose we’d better find out.  Nina, we’re counting on you to get the drain grating off.”

Nina climbed the ladder and surveyed the grating above them.  She also cocked her head, listening for noises above them.

“Quiet as a ghost on the other side,” she reported.  “The grating should be large enough for our purposes.”

Nina pushed with all her might against the grating.  The rung of the ladder she had been using to brace herself gave way and with a sharp scream she fell backwards onto Marlowe and Jebediah.

 Marlowe grunted at the impact.  Jebediah bristled with rage.  “I thought we were supposed to be stealthy!  Screaming and making a racket isn’t exactly the sort of subtlety one normally exercises when breaking and entering!”

“You OK, Nina?” asked Marlowe.

“Yeah, thanks for breaking my fall.  We’ve got a problem here.  I can lift the grating with no problem, but this old ladder isn’t strong enough to bear the weight.  Any suggestions?”

Marlowe drew a blank, and kept on drawing one.  He was utterly flummoxed.  Jebediah came up with the solution, a smug grin spreading across his face.  “If you’d get off of my chest so I can breathe properly, I think I can propose a solution.”  Nina rolled off Marlowe, who rolled off Jebediah.

“Thank you,” said Jebediah as he took a deep breath.  “Now, my suggestion is that Nina climbs back up the ladder.  I will follow, with Marlowe staying at the bottom.  I will climb onto Marlowe’s shoulders, and Nina will climb onto mine.  We should hold up better than a rusty ladder.”

Marlowe muttered about being at the bottom, but it made sense.  Nina needed to be at the top to open the grate, and Jebediah wouldn’t be able to hold her weight and Marlowe’s.  

Amazingly, the plan worked and Marlowe soon found himself following the other two up and into the Ministry of Policing headquarters.

Unfiltered musty, dank air seeped into Marlowe’s lungs with his first breath inside the complex.  They had ascended into what looked like a large locker room style shower stall, with discolored white tiles covering the floor, walls, and ceiling.  The grout between the tiles was grimy and dark, and the floor felt gritty to the touch.  A faint sourness lingered in the dankness, punctuated by the slow, steady drip drop of a leaky shower head.  The grating lay on the floor just to the side of the hole they’d entered through, and the air blowing in from the sewer tunnel felt warm.

“I thought you said this would be a custodial closet,” grumbled Jebediah.

“Well, House had to build his map of this building by extrapolating from several sources – blueprints filed in the City Hall of Records available to the public, which are generally assumed to be highly inaccurate, blueprints filed in the Hall of Records that aren’t publicly accessible, but for which House has some inside connections, and some overhead satellite images.”

“Obviously his sources don’t amount to a hill of beans,” snapped Jebediah.  “We’re doomed if we continue this endeavor.”

“It’s not perfect, but should be close enough.”

Jebediah snorted.  “I’ll bet we’re not even close to, what detention block is this supposed to be?”

“Thirty eight, I believe,” said Nina, pointing to the “DB38” stenciled on the wall of the shower stall.

“Lucky guess,” Jebediah spit out.

“Regardless of where we are,” said Marlowe, “the sooner we change, the better.”  He opened the waterproof chestpack and pulled out three Ministry of Policing administrative uniforms.  They’d reprogrammed the clothes nozzles to spray them out before leaving, using a black market program House kept carefully tucked away on an otherwise innocent looking network drive that handled the day to day operations of the septic system.  The nozzles had no memory of making the uniforms.

The name patches were blank, a fact Nina had found alarming when she first inspected them back at home, but House had assured them that the lack of a name tag implied secrecy and high rank, meaning few people would dare molest them in the halls of the Ministry of Policing.  As a defense against anyone else who might ask questions, House had provided all three of them with clipboards, which Marlowe now pulled out of the chestpack and handed out.

The clipboards were entirely electronic, little more than rectangular screens with a stylus clipped to the top.  They were made by City Clipboards, were notoriously unreliable, and not even remotely waterproof, hence their journey through the sewers in the hermetically sealed chestpack.

“Remember, anyone gives you grief, give ‘em a sharp stare, ask their name and write it in the clipboard.”

“And how likely is that to work,” asked Jebediah skeptically.

“House gives it a 93.7% chance of working, with the odds dropped by 5% for each additional use of the tactic.”

“And if we run into Obedere, or the Deputy Chief Minister of Policing?”

“Won’t work at all with them.  If that happens, we hope the powers the Governor gave me work well enough to get us out of the building.  Might work, but I doubt it.  We should be able to avoid the Upper Administrative levels, so such an encounter isn’t likely.”

“The best laid plans of mice and men,” mumbled Jebediah.

Marlowe took one last look at the vellum map before folding it up and putting it in his pocket.  “OK, we need to head up twenty six floors.”

“And just where are we going?”  Jebediah had crossed his arms.  “You and House were somewhat circumspect on this aspect of the operation.”

“House has a backdoor into the megaframe here.  He used it a couple of years ago to create a high access account in the system, so future incursions could use the fake account rather than the backdoor.  Simple precaution – if the intrusion is detected, the fake account is blocked rather than the backdoor itself.  Well, to add legitimacy to the account, he arranged for an office for the ‘user’ – a private office with a phone and computer access.  We’re going to that office so we can contact House and initiate phase two.”

Jebediah smiled approvingly.  “Capital!  If Obedere knew, he’d turn himself inside out with rage.  Pure genius!  House’s idea, I assume.  You know, with his help, you could make a passable governor yourself.”

“We came up with it together,” replied Marlowe flatly, “and I have no political aspirations.”

Despite the initial inaccuracy about the storage closet, which they found right next to the bathroom, House’s map proved to be fairly close.  They walked down a dimly lit corridor, cell doors on either side lining the length of it.  Each cell they passed, with a cot, stainless steel sink and toilet, and moldy straw sprinkled on the floor, was utterly devoid of an inhabitant.  Jebediah commented on it first.

“Odd, the old M of P seems to be losing its touch.  Either that, or they’ve mellowed in the time I was…on vacation.”

“No, if anything, they’ve gotten worse since Obedere replaced my brother as Chief Minister of Policing.”  The cells should have been five to a unit, and their emptiness bothered Marlowe.  “This doesn’t make sense.  The place should be brimming with detainees.”

“Where do you think they went?” asked Nina.

Marlowe shrugged.  “I think we have quite enough going on right now as it is to start worrying about missing prisoners.  Just be glad we don’t have to deal with questions from them, not that they would have been likely to talk to us.”

The eeriness of the dark, empty detention block compelled Nina and Jebediah to agree.

The building had SpringStep stairs, in place more as an emergency exit in case of a fire or earthquake, but as with other buildings so equipped, no one used the stairs if an elevator was available.  So they had an uneventful ascent once they reached the stairs, save Nina’s trouble with the SpringSteps.

“What the hell!” she exclaimed as she fell into Jebediah after her first step.

“Ah, you’re not familiar with SpringSteps, are you?”  Marlowe helped her up, pushing his hand past the one already proffered by Jebediah.  “The steps lift up as you alight on them, to reduce the amount of energy required to climb to the next one.  There’s a sort of rhythm required to successfully use them.  Like this.”  Marlowe popped up to the next landing, doing a little one-two, one-two dance.

Nina contemplated the movement she’d just witnessed.  “You know, I never was one for dancing.”  She started up, muttering “one-two, one-two” under her breath, but only climbed three steps before falling over.  She broke the fall with her arms, coming to rest looking very much like she was doing push ups in the stairwell.  “Interesting.  Out of curiosity, how do these things work if you’ve got two people walking side-by-side, or someone coming down while you’re going up?”

“Timing is everything.  You’ll need to get the hang of this quickly, in case we run into someone.  Not knowing how to climb these will tag you immediately as an outsider.”