Marlowe and the Spacewoman (11 page)

Marlowe broke out in a cold sweat.  He didn’t like the drift of this conversation.  “What kind of bomb,” he bubbled.

Tray went on, ignoring the question.  “They made a big mistake.  Didn’t realize I was still conscious while they reworked me.   Didn’t think of me as a real person.  So I knew what they were doing.  That’s why I’m resisting the itch.  But, oh God, I really want to scratch it!”

Marlowe watched as a tiny prosthetic arm extending from Tray’s structural frame wobbled back and forth.  “Tray, listen to me.  The itch isn’t real.  It’s a computer-generated sensation.  Don’t succumb to it.”

“It’s only a matter of time, Marlowe.  It keeps getting worse and worse.  I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out.  Knowing about the bomb helps though.  It’s big.”

“How big?”

“Anti-matter.  Enough to remove the entire floor of this building from current reality and convert it into a sizable chunk of energy.  Nothing left.  But it gets even worse.”

“Worse?”

“Now that you’re here, a secondary trigger has armed.  If you move out of sight, the bomb detonates automatically.  They didn’t want to leave anything to chance.”

“Who didn’t?”

“That’s the worst part, Marlowe.  I don’t know who.  I can’t remember that part.  They made sure of that.  No impressions or anything.  A total blank.”

“Why did you kill me this morning?”

“Kill you this morning?  What are you talking about?  Haven’t you been listening?  I’ve been in this tank for the last week!”

Nina had been standing quietly over Marlowe, a testament to her patience, but was clearly growing agitated.  Marlowe leaned back and filled her in.  “He’s a bomb.  A big bomb.  The whole building will collapse.  A lot of people will die with us when he goes off.”

“Can we defuse the bomb?  I’m pretty good with electronics.”

“No, that’s the last thing you want.  Anti-matter bombs detonate upon being defused.  You want to keep them running so the magnetic field isolating the anti-matter from matter stays up.  Defuse the bomb, lose the magnetic field, the anti-matter falls and comes into contact with matter, and then poof.  We both achieve enlightenment.  Literally.”

Nina leaned into Marlowe and whispered.  “Can we ditch him?”

“No, if he loses sight of me, he blows up.”

“You are clearly the primary target,” said House, “but perhaps the high levels of collateral damage are deliberate.  Illustrative of extreme disregard for human life.”

“First things first, House.  We need to get out of here before we worry about who set it and why.”  Marlowe looked around him.  The room was completely enclosed, but he had an idea.

“Hold tight,” he blew to Tray.  “I have an idea.”

“I’m doomed,” popped Tray.

“Nina, help me clear away the dirt at the top of the doorway.  Maybe we can climb through the ceiling to the third floor.”

“What does that buy us?  We still can’t get out.”

“Access to the roof.  If we can get to the roof, there’s a chance we can avert a disaster.”

They climbed up the sloping hill of dirt and started digging with their bare hands.  Nina moved much faster than Marlowe, and despite some frustrating avalanches of more dirt from above, they managed to open a gap in just a few minutes.  Nina kept digging, widening the gap, while Marlowe went back down to Tray with his bottle of bubbles.

“Tray, listen to me.  I need you to hold on as long as you can.  I don’t know if there’s a way to save ourselves, but I think we can save the lives of everyone else in this building.  You think you can hold out for a little while longer?”

Tray was rocking back and forth in his harness, the prosthetic arm twitching violently.  “So itchy!” he blurted out in a spurt of bubbles.  His bubble blower, a thin narrow tube with a hydraulic switch that resembled the hammer of a gun, quivered.  “But I can hold on.  I’m sorry you got dragged into this Marlowe.  I may not have been the most upstanding citizen to deal with, but I always liked you.  You treated me fair and payed me a living wage when we did business.  I appreciate that.”

“Don’t get all sappy on me,” replied Marlowe.  

“It helps me ignore the itching.”

“Ah, well, in that case, make like a tree.  By the way, I’m going to take you out of the tank and put you in my pocket.  Can I do that without triggering the bomb?”

“I don’t know.  I suppose we could try it and see.”

“Hmm, maybe not.  I guess I’ll just have to hold you.  Will that work?”

“As long as I can see some part of you.”

“They sure didn’t make it easy, did they?”

“Marlowe,” bubbled Tray morosely, “I don’t want to die in this place.”

“Neither do I, so we’re not going to.  You’ll see the sun once more before everything is said and done.”

“And then I’ll become a sun, briefly.”

Marlowe thought he saw some shaky laugh bubbles erupt from Tray’s blower.  “That’s right.  Keep your sense of humor about this.”

“Marlowe,” called Nina, “there’s room for us now.”

“On my way.”

Marlowe pried the lid off the tank and reached in, carefully avoiding the syringe and gingerly removing the harness holding Tray down.  The soapy green liquid mildly burned his skin, but the nano probes quickly neutralized the caustic agent and repaired its deleterious effects.  He wrapped his hand too tightly around the softer, soapy portion of Tray, who slipped out in a spurt of suds, landing on the floor half a meter in front of Marlowe.   The nano probes had to apply a jolt of electricity across Marlowe’s heart to start it up again, and after that Marlowe held Tray by the unreconstituted half of his exoskeleton.

“Watch it, butterfingers!” bubbled Tray.  His blower had automatically adjusted for the change from a liquid to air environment.  The bubbles had the slightly green tint of the reconstitution fluid that was being supplied by a small ballast tank nestled inside Tray’s frame.  The hammer of the hydraulic switch gave off faint, staccato clicks as Tray spoke.

“Marlowe, what’s keeping you?  Hurry up!”

“Sorry, just thought I’d do a little washing up.  You expect me to fit through that?”  Marlowe had reached Nina and the narrow crack of space she had declared an exit.

“Suck in your gut and you’ll do fine.  I could make it wider, but we’ll lose time.  I gather time is something of the essence?”

Marlowe grunted.  “You can stay here.  If I succeed, the fire department will have you out of here in an hour or so.”

“Excuse me?  I don’t think so.  I may not have been in this world very long, but I know what will happen if they recover me from the site of an explosion, my legal escort missing.  You may dislike it as much as I do, but there’s no escaping the fact that my fate is intertwined with yours.”  And then she dropped down, slipped through the opening, and called back to Marlowe to get a move on.

 Marlowe got down on his belly, and grunted again as he squeezed and wriggled his way through the narrow gap.  The grimy dirt, sand, and bits of StyroCrete got in his nose, mouth, and eyes.  The nasal filters fought a valiant battle, holding the dust at bay there, but his eyes burned and his mouth puckered at the dry, bitter taste.  Even worse, the sandy mix was getting into his shirt and pants, rubbing his skin raw and making him itch all over.

Midway through, Marlowe stopped.  “Nina, I’m stuck.  I told you this was too small!  I’ll wriggle back and we can widen it from both-  Aaah!”

Nina had grabbed both his arms by the wrist and yanked, hard.  Twin sensations of agony burned through Marlowe as each arm popped out of its socket.  Adding to this was the intense scraping discomfort of being dragged through the tight opening.  The nano probes set to work immediately, buzzing joyously at the opportunity to again ply their trade, and wistfully wondering just what Marlowe had done to incur yet more damage in such a short span of time.  Before tapping into his optic nerve to survey the situation, they started a pool.  The odds were on a visit to the Governor’s office, and a lot of probes returned to the sac grumbling when the truth was revealed.

“There, you see,” said Nina, wiping her hands together to brush off the dust.  “You fit no problem.”

Marlowe didn’t dawdle with pointless yelping.  The nano probes had managed to dull the pain after the initial shock, and he wasn’t sure, with all the dirt and grime getting into everything, how Tray was doing with his attempts to resist itching.  The emergency lighting was brighter on the third floor, despite being the epicenter of the explosion.  Those self-repairing tungsten bulbs were tough as nails.  Marlowe made a mental note to start replacing the bulbs at home with tungsten ones, and then began climbing.  Climbing, because the floor consisted of steep hills and deep valleys of dirt, jagged chunks of smoldering StyroCrete with twisted protrusions of rebar, and horribly splintered timber.  The fumes burned his eyes, and because the dirt had clogged his nasal filters, his throat and lungs as well as he breathed through his mouth.

Nina had taken point, searching for a way up.  “So what are we looking for now?”

“Exterior wall,” gasped Marlowe.  “A window.  House, where’s the Studebaker?”

“The car started looking for another way to the building the moment you entered it.  With some success.  Even more now that it’s ignoring some of the more urbane rules of road etiquette.  What did you have in mind?  A jump from the third floor, while unpleasant, would be survivable.”

“Getting out of the building doesn’t completely solve the problem.  Tray’s still wired up.”

Nina blazed forward, guiding Marlowe around debris.  Finding a window wasn’t the problem; they could see all the exterior windows from where they stood.  Getting to a window was proving more problematic.  They trudged past a now-defunct SpringStep escalator along the remnants of a former interior wall, its spring-loaded stairs useless without power.

“House, does this building have electromagnetic reinforcement?”

“Yes.”

Nina wiped a sludge of dust and sweat from off her brow.  “Electromagnetic reinforcement?”

Marlowe pointed with Tray towards the nearest window.  “Window first, then I’ll explain.  House, are you still able to track us?”

“Of course.”

“Query the car.  Does it think it can meet us at the window we’re heading towards?”

“Hmm, one moment.”  Marlowe slipped, raking his forearm and elbow against the jagged edge of a piece of StyroCrete.  Bits of tiny white chunks stuck to his arm as he righted himself, and no amount of wiping could shake all of them loose.  “The car isn’t thrilled.  It’ll have to amp up its gauss field well beyond spec.  You’ll have a hell of a maintenance bill afterwards if you survive.”

More StyroCrete crumbled under Marlowe’s feet as he crossed the last few meters to Nina and the window.  The awning was two meters tall and one meter wide.  The blast-proof plastic window, like all the others, had been blown out, leaving just a gaping hole in the aluminum frame.  Marlowe leaned out, searching for the Studebaker, but all he saw was the intact rectangles of blast-proof windows lying at various angles and orientations on the ground below.

“Now what?”

“We’re waiting for my car.  House, where is it?”

“Clearing a path through the emergency vehicles.  The new powers your brother vested in you are actually helping, though don’t expect a rapid response from the fire department if I ever catch fire.  Apparently your Studebaker is throwing its weight around and really lording it over the fire trucks.  Ah, it’s approaching the east-facing wall, to your right.”

“Waiting for your car?”  Nina looked impressed.  “It can fly?  Wow.”

“No, it can’t fly.”  Marlowe watched as the Studebaker nosed up to the building and started popping its front end up and down.  He could actually hear the generator whining as the car started gaussing up its magnetic field.  With each octave increase in pitch, the front bumper popped up half a meter higher.

“It can’t fly?  Then how are we going to get to it?  Jump?  Does it have some sort of exterior car-top airbag or something?”

“No, it’s going to drive up here, if it can get itself oriented.”  Down below, the Studebaker paused for a moment, as if considering the situation.  Marlowe could almost visualize the chrome front of the car furrowing in thought.  A decision reached, its generator jumped in pitch two octaves, causing all the blast-proof windows littering the blast radius to shatter.  Then the car popped up, lurching forward against the wall as the front bumper pointed skywards.  It seemed to waver for a moment, swaying backwards slightly, and then clamped down against the building exterior.

“That’s the stuff.  Car’s on the way.”

“How is the car getting here?”

Before Marlowe could answer, the Studebaker arrived just under their window, the driver’s side door swinging wide open.  “Pearls before swine,” said Marlowe as he helped Nina jump down into the car.  “Try and belt yourself in so I can fit; it’s all a bit awkward at this angle.”

Marlowe slipped in a moment later as Nina shifted her way into the passenger seat.  The car started back down.  “No, to the roof.”  

The Studebaker honked questioningly but complied.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“How did the car drive up here?  Cars use magnetic fields now for moving around.  My car is one of the few that actually still has tires.  That’s because it’s a retrofit of an old-style internal combustion vehicle.  Well, it turns out that when they started building skyscrapers with StyroCrete, they had this problem with them falling down.  So they attached zeppelins to the roofs to hold them up.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.  And you didn’t always know right away if it would work.  A lot of people and furniture in a building can add significantly to the stress load.  So after a few tragedies, someone came up with the bright idea of using magnetized rebar in the StyroCrete and a magnetic field to hold the rebar, and thus the building, together.  In concert with the zeppelins, they hit on an affordable combination that worked.