Marlowe and the Spacewoman (7 page)

He didn’t remember much of the rest.  Subsequent therapy had succeeded in blocking his ability to remember those last horrible moments before the call came in, the order to stop, the exposure of the true culprit.  He knew Madeline had been responsible for that.  Madeline, Obedere’s personal assistant who had always had a soft spot, for some reason, for Marlowe.  Madeline, who had disappeared during Marlowe’s recovery.  He wanted to believe she’d escaped the City, had found freedom and peace in another place, but knew better.

The soothing warmth of AnxietyAway began its characteristic flow through Marlowe’s limbs.  The intensity of the memories had triggered their release, and while Marlowe didn’t like the thought of having a crutch like that, he had to admit it allowed him to step back and view the world around him more calmly and with greater focus.  He forced himself back into the present.

Marlowe noted, as he always did when he saw Obedere, that the uniform itself was a marvel of engineering, considering the great girth it endeavored to encase.  All constables wore a plasma-resistant, reactive armor fabric uniform, and according to a City tailor Marlowe had struck up a conversation with at a bar, it was a very difficult material to work with.  Considering the great swathes involved, it must have required a superhuman effort to make Obedere’s.  But then, Obedere inspired superhuman effort once he made clear the consequence of failure.

There was something new this time.  It took Marlowe a moment to pick out just what it was, but when he did he had to choke back a laugh.  The happy drugs were working a little too well now.  He could just make out an exo-skeleton, matte black and very discreet, wrapped snugly around Obedere’s bulk.  Marlowe guessed the Chief Constable’s body could no longer battle gravity unassisted.  It was only a matter of time before he ended up in levitation boots.

Obedere stepped mechanically out of the shadows.  “Ah, Marlowe, my old friend.  It’s so nice to see you again.  I’ve missed having you as my…guest.”

His voice was shrill and warbled at first, but then dropped into a deep baritone.  Marlowe fought back a chuckle.  Obedere was using vocal chord enhancers, and they obviously weren’t fully warmed up.

“Hello, CMP Obedere.”  Marlowe gagged as the faint odor of formaldehyde wafted over him.  Obviously Obedere had been dabbling in his rumored favorite hobby before this business began.  “I understand you have a prisoner for me to pick up.”

“Pick up?  I’m afraid I don’t have any orders to transfer the prisoner to you.”

“If you’re reluctant, we can always call my brother for clarification.”

Obedere frowned with distaste.  “Oh, the less we involve him the better.  You can have her, for now.  But until her case is…resolved, well, she’ll be your responsibility.  If anything should happen that prevents justice from being served in her case, such as escape, you will be held accountable.”

“Of course.  I expect nothing less of you.”

Obedere eyed Marlowe, suspicious he’d just been somehow slighted.  “Will you be heading out to the crash site, old friend?”

“In due course.  You’ve been there?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“Lots of fire.  A big hole in the ground.  Smoke.  Civic Defense Stormtroopers scrambling across the landscape, weapons drawn, death in their eyes.  Like a tasty appetizer from Hell, a delicious sample of things to come.”  A smile crept onto Obedere’s face.  It scared Marlowe.  “Come, my old friend.  Let’s introduce you to the…hehehe…spacewoman.”

Marlowe followed the corpulent Chief constable into the darkness.  Only his low light filter prevented him from tripping over the stone knobs set into the ground at random intervals.  Set there, no doubt, to slow down anyone trying to storm the building, should such an unlikely event ever occur.  The dark passage ran about ten meters, the hard marble floor clicking with each step of Obedere’s exo-skeleton.  Marlowe almost felt sorry for the man as he struggled in obvious pain with each step.  But then he remembered the torture he’d endured at Obedere’s hands during his last visit.  The fat bastard couldn’t suffer enough.

They reached a dead end, a solid slab of marble that suddenly recessed into the wall and slid back.  Beyond was a blindingly bright hallway.  Marlowe stifled a cry of pain as his low light filter overloaded and burned a white rectangle of light onto his retina.

“Oh, sorry, old friend.  I should have warned you to turn off the low light filter.  My apologies.”

“That’s alright.  It auto compensated,” lied Marlowe.

“Speaking of sorry,” continued Obedere as he led Marlowe down the hall, “I feel I should apologize again for the misunderstanding of your last visit.  A most unfortunate turn of events.  We’re still looking for the individual responsible for framing you.”

Yeah, thought Marlowe.  I’m still looking, too.  I’m looking right at him.  “I understand.  You had no choice, given the circumstances.”

“Yes, but I want you to know,” and at this point Obedere stopped, spun around with a groan, and gripped Marlowe by the shoulders, “when I learned the truth, I felt absolutely terrible.”  He tried to look sincere, but the mirth in his eyes ruined the effect.

“Yeah, well the whole experience left me feeling awful too.”

“Everything has grown back?”

“Mostly.”

“Thank goodness for modern medical science.  There were times when the loss of a digit or limb was permanent.”

“Yeah, lucky me.”  Marlowe had spent a month in black market surgery shops removing all the bugs and implants embedded into the bits and pieces the Ministry of Policing had ‘generously’ reattached after their little misunderstanding.

“Come, come, old friend, we’re going to a very special elevator.  It’s one of the few I’m sure you haven’t been in.  It’s for our VIP guests.”

A door slid open in the wall next to them, revealing a cargo elevator with polished steel walls.  A hover chair was floating inside.

“Ah!” cried Obedere gleefully.  “That’s where it got to!”  He plopped into the chair, which crashed into the floor before the mag field compensated.  “I swear, the thing has a mind of its own.  Always wandering off, which can be particularly dangerous around here, as you know.  If I didn’t know better, I might think it was hiding from me.”  The chair rose back up, a chair-shaped groove in the floor of the elevator.  

Obedere always reminded Marlowe that medical science still had room to advance.  Obesity, for one, had yet to be abolished.  Nano probes had no problem breaking down fatty deposits, but they did have a problem disposing of the broken down byproducts.  Hydrogen was one of them, and if one wasn’t careful and that hydrogen was released as a gas, a person could become a very large, very flammable dirigible.  Not an insurmountable problem, but in the case of very obese individuals, it was like trying to empty the contents of a lake with a tea cup.  It could be done, if you had enough tea cups, but the cost and effort would be enormous.

High cost and allergic reactions were two other obstacles that medical science needed to overcome.  Installing and maintaining a set of nano probes tended to be very expensive.  Even Marlowe could barely afford it, though in his line of work, he couldn’t afford not to have them.  And some people had an immune response when the nano probes were introduced into their system – their immune system attacked the nano probes.  This kept the nano probes so busy fighting off white blood cells that they didn’t have time to deal with other issues.  The only known solution to this issue was to wipe out the patient’s immune system and replace it with the nano probes.  Even Marlowe, an early adopter who embraced most new technologies, was reluctant to go that far.  It involved targeted radiation treatment to destroy bone marrow.  The process was apparently very painful, yet another deterrent if you didn’t already have the nano probes in place to block the pain.

Marlowe had managed to learn, after a great deal of trouble and expense, that Obedere didn’t have any nano probes.  While he’d never managed to get a peek at Obedere’s medical records, he couldn’t imagine Obedere forgoing the nano probes except if he was allergic to them.  This meant Obedere needed to be taken to a medical facility if he ever died and wanted to be resurrected.  And not being a man to take chances, Obedere made sure a medical facility was always nearby.  In addition to a state-of-the-art mobile facility that always traveled with him (at a discrete distance), Obedere had covert emergency medical centers dotted throughout the City.

Marlowe’s stomach lurched into his throat, but this time it wasn’t fear.  It was the elevator descending.

“There was some wreckage in the center of the crater.  Actually, wreckage might not be the right word.  The vessel from which our young lady emerged was actually fairly intact.  We’re planning on moving it soon, but for now we’re leaving it to preserve any evidence.”

The elevator stopped and they exited into a dimly lit hallway of concrete and brick walls.  At the far end a round, bright orange DuraPlast blast resistant door waited.  Obedere took the lead in his chair, speeding down the hallway.  The chair wobbled dangerously to the left and right, struggling with his mass.  Marlowe idly noted that the chair’s ability to function down here meant that somewhere in the floor was magnetic conduit.  Obedere skidded to a stop just outside the door, nearly hitting it, and then waited for Marlowe to catch up.  

“Her name, if no one’s told you yet, is Nina Minari.  She claims to be some sort of ‘astronut’ or something from the past.  A very colorful story.  And fun to watch her tell.  She gets so, what is the word…agitated, yes, agitated, when you ask her to tell it again.”  Obedere cracked a crafty smile and his eyes twinkled, almost certainly his iris implants.

“Now what is that access code,” Obedere asked himself as he surveyed the console next to the door.  “I can never remember what it is.”  He rotated the chair so he was facing away from Marlowe, but because the hover chair continued to wobble a bit, Marlowe managed to see Obedere sneak a surreptitious peek at the palm of his right hand, which had something scribbled across it.  Obedere clenched his hand into a fist and rotated back.  “Ah yes, now I remember.”  

He never did have a very sharp memory, thought Marlowe.  At least not for numbers.  Slights, on the other hand, he never forgot.

“We had some problems when we initially detained her.”  Obedere raised the chair up until his eye was level with the retinal scanner, which briefly flashed red over his left eye.  “She’s,” and he paused again to lower the chair so he could rest his hammy palm on the hand scanner, “hehehe…a feisty one.”  He licked his lips and smiled like the cat that caught the parrot.

The door hummed, shifted in color from orange to gray blue, and sank diagonally into the floor.  The cell was bright, clean, and small.  Inside Marlowe noted a bunk, attached flush to the wall with an olive green blanket stretched over it, a toilet with one of those awful cushiony seats, and a Virtu-window.  It displayed the same green pastures as the screen in the Governor’s private office, but this view had prison bars in the foreground.

By far the most arresting feature of the cell was its occupant.  She was sitting cross-legged on the bunk, hands resting on her knees, palms up.  Her eyes were closed, and she looked calm, almost blissful.  She had wavy black hair, cut short and with veins of gray running through it.  Marlowe could not help but admire her strong jawline and sharply defined cheekbones.  A slight dimple on her chin and a perfectly proportioned nose rounded out an altogether pleasing face.  She had a raw, natural beauty Marlowe rarely saw anymore, a beauty that stood out in the sea of cookie-cutter good looks everyone else got from the the plastic surgery shops.

She wore a simple unisex jumpsuit, maroon in color, and covered with zippered pockets.  A circular patch on the left shoulder of the jumpsuit depicted two stars with a gas giant in the foreground, and the words ‘Odyssey I’ across the top and ‘55 Cancri’ across the bottom.  Over her left breast was a name tag.  It read ‘MINARI’.  Clasped around both feet were some seriously heavy-duty, made for stomping boots.  They put the standard issue constables’ boots to shame; Marlowe decided he’d hate to meet up with the business end of them.

The possibility that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen crossed his mind, and when she opened her eyes, that possibility became certainty.  He momentarily misplaced himself in her deep, penetrating eyes, warm gold like a well browned pie crust.  What had his brother gotten him into?  This was, without a doubt, going to lead to nothing but trouble.

“Your Most Blessed Highness, Queen of the Solar System, you have a guest.  It is to my everlasting shame that I must present this humble peasant of little worth.”

The woman sighed, blinked her eyes a few times, and stood up.  She glared at Obedere first, then her eyes stopped on Marlowe.

“OK, I’ve died and gone to Hell, I’m dreaming, or you guys have put something in my food.  What is Humphrey Bogart doing here?”

Obedere looked genuinely confused, Marlowe pleasantly surprised; she was the first person who actually recognized the man he’d modeled his most recent face after.

“The name is Marlowe, sweetheart,” Marlowe said in his best imitation Bogie voice.  “I’ve been put in charge of figuring out who you are, where you come from, and how you got into the City.”  Marlowe liked that.  ’Put in charge’ made him sound more important, like he was the head of a task force or something.

Nina laughed, but not a comfortable, friendly laugh.  More an on-the-edge-of-hysteria laugh.  “Phillip Marlowe is in charge of investigating me.  This can’t get any more absurd.  Is John Wayne going to lead the cavalry in at the last moment to save me?  Oh Christ, I’m going to have to go through my story again, aren’t I?  I’m so tired of telling it.  And what’s the point?  This floating freak here has recorded every telling of it.  Can’t you watch the tape and then come back?”