Marlowe and the Spacewoman (36 page)

“Why are you keeping House in the dark?” asked Nina.  They were passing another Bucky Brew.

Marlowe told them.  It took some explaining before Nina fully understood due to her lack  of familiarity with the perils of modern-day living in the City.  But once explained, she grasped the incredibly gravity of the situation.

“Diabolical!” stammered Jebediah.

“It is pretty ingenious.  I wonder if it would have worked if I hadn’t come along and interrupted your routine,” commented Nina.

“I think it would have.  You were the one who got us up into the zeppelin.  Without you, I’d be so much star stuff right now.”  Then he explained the plan he’d cobbled together on such short notice.  “Any obvious reason to believe it won’t work?”

“Well,” said Nina, “if you’re right, there’s sure to be another attempt on your life.  We may not be able to get to House before that attempt happens.  And if it succeeds….”

“I’m counting on another attempt.  This whole thing hinges on my apparent death.  In fact, unless I miss my guess, the attack is imminent.  I’m not exactly sure of the methodology, but I suspect it involves the rather large garbage truck behind us.”

There was a pause in the conversation as, presumably, both Nina and Jebediah looked into the traffic for the truck.

“Try not to be too obvious when you look at it,” said Marlowe.  “We don’t want to tip our hand.”

“The car will never agree to this,” said Jebediah.  “The shame involved - no amount of pleading or explaining will convince the car to do it.”

Marlowe resisted the urge to nod.  “I know.  That’s why I’m not going to ask it.”

Jebediah let out a gasp.  “The car will be most displeased.  You may have to replace it when all is said and done.”

“Possibly.  One last question.  How are both of you at firing pistols?”

“I used to be pretty good, but I’ve been out of practice the last eight years or so,“” said Jebediah.  “Apparently certain…facilities…don’t feel it prudent to allow patients access to weapons.”

“I’m out of practice too, but it hasn’t been eight years.”

Marlowe weighed his options.  Nina wouldn’t be familiar with the weapon, but how much could they have changed in one hundred years?  “No offense, father, but I think I’m going to go with Nina.  However, if she needs help, I’m relying on you to provide it.”

“What exactly do you have in mind?” asked Nina.  Marlowe told her.  She had only one question.  “Am I likely to get in trouble with the law?”

“It’s a distinct possibility, but I’m hoping your new status will protect you from execution.  A fine, possibly, but I’ll cover that if it comes to it.  OK, the longer I’m muted, the greater the chance of arousing suspicions.  I’m going to restore my audio, so careful what you say.”  Marlowe squelched the mute on his PDI and looked back into traffic.  The Studebaker was a couple blocks behind them.  The garbage truck, while still far back, had gotten closer.

“Car, come get us please.  We’ll wait for you here in front of the…”  Marlowe looked around to see the nearest store and sighed at the familiar facade that faced him.  “In front of the coffee shop.”

The Studebaker sent an affirmative honk to Marlowe’s PDI.

“Well,” said Marlowe, turning to face Jebediah and Nina, “that didn’t do me any good.  I’m still completely stumped.  Maybe if I sleep on it something will come to me.”

“Just don’t use drugs to sleep,” said Jebediah knowingly.  “They did that to me at…that place, and I was never able to think clearly that night or the next day for that matter.”

It took a couple of minutes for the car to reach them.  As Marlowe climbed into the driver’s seat, he stole a glance at the garbage truck.  It was definitely getting closer, swerving dangerously through the heavy traffic to close the gap.  The Studebaker stopping to pick them up had presented the truck with an excellent opportunity to catch up.

Marlowe got in, staring straight ahead.  He could hear Nina opening the glove box, but didn’t dare look over for fear of the video feed reaching House.  In the corner of his eye, he caught the reflection of the garbage truck in his mirror, moving up on them.  He had to hope it wasn’t a bomb.  A bomb didn’t make a lot of sense because the car was heavily shielded.  Unless it was a big bomb.  A really big bomb.  It was a possibility he couldn’t entirely discount.  The car started back into traffic.

As an eruption of car horns blared, Marlowe took the opportunity to look over his shoulder into the traffic, bringing the garbage truck into the center of his field of vision.  Marlowe studied it, a typical City-built overly wide Waste Management Transport.  Had it not been an overcast day, the sunlight glinting off the reflective aluminum skinned body of the truck would have been blinding.  The bulbous waste compression chamber on the back of the truck rose almost six meters above the blacktop, dwarfing the two meter tall cab.  A black robotic arm with two thick, serrated pincher fingers, rested horizontally against the right side of the chamber.  On more than one occasion, Marlowe’s work had found him up and on the streets early enough to see them operate.  When the arm rose from its harness and swung up and out to pick up a dumpster, it looked to Marlowe like the fingers were making a perverse Victory sign.  Or perhaps the similar but  more obscene gesture he’d read about as a child in some of the old English mystery books he’d found in his father’s library many years ago.

The truck struck Marlowe as a marvel of inefficient engineering.  The truck was larger than it needed to be, more style than substance in appearance.  The street’s fat green lane lines crowded in on either side of the super wide truck.  The front of the cab consisted of two enormous square headlights separated by a sliver of grille maybe half a meter wide.  The hood ornament was a bronze snake consuming its tail, a metal circle half a meter across.

It was now only a few car lengths behind them.  Close enough for Marlowe’s purposes, close enough to put his plan in motion.  “House, there’s a garbage truck that seems to be following us.  Can you check to see if it’s on its actual route?”

“One moment.  Can you get the truck’s number?”

“I’ll try,” started Marlowe, but the truck had suddenly surged forward in the traffic, the robot arm normally used for lifting large dumpsters swiveling around and grabbing one of the cars between them, throwing it out of the way.  The pincers on the robotic arm started snapping open and closed.  “House, how much force can standard garbage truck robot pincers apply to an object when they close around it?”

“One moment.  200psi normally.”  Not enough to damage the Studebaker, thought Marlowe.  “Though one third of the truck fleet is designed to military spec, for use as offensive/defensive vehicles in the event of an invasion by an outside force.”  Another car was unceremoniously flung out of the way, leaving only one car between them, the snoozing driver completely oblivious to the impending doom rolling up behind her.  “Those robotic arms have a hydraulic system,” continued House, “capable of delivering 4000psi, more than enough to crush a tank.”  And, realized Marlowe grimly, perfectly adequate to squash the Studebaker like a termite-infested Volume bar.  “Examining your video feed, I can say with 96.4% accuracy that the truck behind you is one of the modified vehicles.”

A rush of air filled the interior of the car.  Nina rolling down the window, no doubt.  Marlowe kept his eye on the mirror, watching the truck’s progress, leaving his right hand raised, fingers splayed out.  Dropping his hand would be the signal to Nina.  Marlowe moved his left hand over the Emergency Manual Override button at the base of the steering column.  He hoped he could drive – he’d seen it many times, but had never actually attempted it himself.  

The pincers had just sent the last car spinning out into space.  Marlowe absently watched it crash into a Bucky Brew.  The coffee shop walls absorbed the impact and bounced the vehicle back into traffic.  The pincers spun around, snapping hungrily as the truck surged towards them.  Marlowe dropped his hand, killed his PDI, and hit the EMO button, completely closing down the Studebaker’s computer.  The car swerved into oncoming traffic as Marlowe grabbed the steering wheel with both hands.  There was a loud popping sound from his right.

“Hey,” shouted Nina.  “Keep the car steady!  That shot went wide.”

Marlowe turned back to see where Nina’s first shot had landed – she was shooting his illegal ion pistol – when Jebediah slapped him in the head.

“Eyes on the road, fool!  You’re in control of the car now!”

Oh yeah, thought Marlowe.  He faced forward, still trying to get the hang of the steering mechanism.  They were almost on the sidewalk on the other side of the street.  They had bounced off a few other vehicles in getting there.  “Sorry, I forgot.  Did you remember to kill your PDI?”

“Did I remember to kill my PDI?”  Jebediah’s voice dripped sarcasm.  “Of course not, you dolt!”

Nina, hanging halfway outside her window, fired another shot.  Marlowe peeked in the rear view mirror, delighted to discover he could use the mirror to see what was behind him while still looking straight ahead at traffic.  This shot hit the robot pincher, which had started to close on the rear of the car, dead on.  One of the fingers snapped off and flew backwards into the cab of the garbage truck.

“Aim for the cab.  Take out the interior!” shouted Marlowe as he tried to ease his way back onto the right side of the street.  He was starting to get the hang of the steering wheel.  And Nina, evidently, was getting the hang of the ion pistol.  While the truck swung its one-fingered pincher back to deal a sliding blow to the car, she fired three more rounds, hitting the the grille, hood, and windshield of the car.  The grille and hood withstood the ion projectiles, but the windshield didn’t.  It cracked and partially collapsed.

Marlowe worried about the arm swinging back at them.  “Shoot the arm!  Shoot the arm!”

“Hit the gas!  Hit the gas!” screamed Jebediah.  

Marlowe looked back at him quizzically, getting another slap on the head.

“Eyes ahead!  Hit the accelerator pedal, we’re slowing down.”

Ah, thought Marlowe.  That’s why the car seemed to be slowing down.  It required user input for velocity.  The truck’s robotic arm struck the Studebaker, lurching them across the street and into the sidewalk.  A Bucky Brew arrested their progress into the retail building, bouncing them back into the street.  Strange, their walls seemed to have been designed to repel vehicles crashing into them.

“The rightmost pedal on the floor,” screamed Jebediah.  “Push it down to the floor!”

Marlowe reached down with his right hand, searching for the pedal.  Damned inconvenient, he thought, putting the accelerator so out of reach.

“No, you idiot!  With your foot!”

With the foot, thought Marlowe as Nina fired two more rounds.  That makes more sense.  He stomped on the pedal and the Studebaker, with a groan, jolted forward, causing the robot arm to just miss.  Checking the mirror, Marlowe noted that Nina had apparently taken out the remainder of the windshield with one of the last shots.  The truck seemed to be sensing that it was at a tactical disadvantage and seemed to be slowing down.

Two more rounds exploded from Nina’s direction, and Marlowe had a satisfying view of the cab of the truck exploding.  Debris rained down on the the back window and roof of the Studebaker, not to mention the other cars and pedestrians on the street.  It was a real mess, and not one Marlowe wanted to be near when the constables arrived.

“Nice shooting, Nina,” said Marlowe as she slid back into her seat.  “The gun didn’t give you any problems, I see.”

“Surprisingly, no.  The ammo may be different, but the operation is almost identical to the guns of my day.”

“Idiot!  Stupid, stupid idiot!”  Jebediah was pounding the back of Marlowe’s head.  “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t know how to drive!  I would never have let you get behind the wheel if I’d known.  You almost got us killed!”

Marlowe felt suitable chastened as he grabbed his father’s hands and stopped the blows.  “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know that I didn’t know.  It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to handle the car.”

“Fool!  Crazy, headstrong moron!”

Nina grabbed Marlowe’s arm.  “It took some time to take out the truck.  Do you think it worked?”

“I don’t know.  I hope so.  I suspect he needs me dead so badly that he’ll want to believe it worked.  The lack of any PDI signal from Jebediah and myself, and the car’s computer being offline, should be enough to create the illusion we’re dead.”

Marlowe took the ion pistol and checked it.  One shot left in the clip.  He shuddered to think what would have happened if Nina had run out of shots.  The refills were back with House.  He put the gun back in the secret compartment in the glove box.

“Right, now we need to pay a visit to our dear friend House.”

“Hold on,” said Jebediah, his iron grip closing on Marlowe’s shoulder.  “I’ll drive.”

CHAPTER 20

BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE…

“None of this would have happened if you hadn’t helped,” grumped Jebediah as he drove.  “I always tried to instill that value in my kids.  Helping gets you kicked in the nuts, stunned, hog-tied, worked over with a rolling pin, and dumped into a mental facility.”

Marlowe glared at his father from the back seat, the rear view mirror serving as an intermediary.  “You only instilled values in your second-born son.  The clone was left to his own devices once medical science made him unnecessary.  Besides, I had to help.  I had a debt to repay.”

“Hmm.” Jebediah shook his head.  “So naive, Spares.  A debt that was, I’m sure, carefully arranged.”

“Marlowe!”  Marlowe sighed dejectedly.  “And yes, you’re probably right about the debt.  How could I have been so stupid?”

“Well-” said Jebediah before being interrupted by Nina, who put a hand on his shoulder.

“Why don’t you concentrate on driving, Jebediah.”

They reached the neighborhood five minutes later in surprisingly light traffic.  Apparently the disaster downtown had altered the flow of traffic – all the vehicles were heading out of town now.  Way out of town, where there were fewer garbage trucks about.  Marlowe had insisted on parking several blocks away so House wouldn’t see the car.  His external video feeds would pick them up as they approached the house, but if they were moving fast, it shouldn’t matter.  And it was just possible that they wouldn’t be noticed, if Marlowe’s plan had actually worked.  

The neighborhood was quiet.  Too quiet.

Marlowe put his fingers to his lips and whispered.  “Father, stay in the car until we give the all clear.  Nina, follow me.”

They double-timed it to the front of the house, stopping at the front door.

“Nina, we face a terrible evil right now.  One far larger than I can possibly ask you, as a newcomer to our City, to face if you have any reservations.  And I can’t promise either of us will survive this.  You still in?”

“Didn’t you just hire me as a bodyguard?”

“Yeah, but that was more for goons like Artie and Gwen and the occasional rampaging garbage truck.  This is different.  We’re facing what the Id Box Corporation likes to call the True, Final Death™.”

“Marlowe, who are you talking to?  I face the True, Final Death every time I get out of bed.  I’m in.”

“Then please kick this door in.”

Nina kicked the door in, then let Marlowe past her to enter first.  He pressed himself against the wall, pausing at the threshold to the living room.

“If we’re lucky, he thinks we’re all dead and he’s proceeded with his plan,” he whispered to Nina.

“Where now?”

Marlowe surveyed the living room.  It was a huge mess.  The self-updating pictures were on the floor, the sofa badly mauled, Gomer’s cage wide open and lying on its side, food spilled everywhere.

“Bedroom.  That’s where House’s main access point is.”

“What a mess.  He’s pretty mad,” observed Nina.

Marlowe felt a surge of irritation.  It would take the sweeper snake and the vacuum viper hours to clean up the mess.  “I don’t care how angry he is.  There was no need to do this.”

Marlowe drew his BB gun.  He gestured to Nina to pull out hers, and then started down the hall towards his bedroom and, he strongly suspected, destiny.  He had been so stupid, so gullible, to have been taken in so easily.  His palms were sweating as he gripped the gun.  Each step brought the closed bedroom door closer.  He could hear strange sounds from behind that looming door, scuffling, scratching, gabbling sounds.  Clipped English, slightly mumbled, with the occasional frustrated trill and consternation-filled squawk.

Marlowe double checked his rapid-repeating, semiautomatic double-barreled BB gun, thumbing off the safety.  He raised his free hand, holding up three fingers.  Nina nodded as he lowered his fingers one at a time, counting down.  Both of them tensed as he reached one.  He took a deep breath, lowered the last finger, and burst through the door.  His rolling entry was accompanied by a mighty battle cry.  Nina’s.  It was a good one, too.  Devastatingly good in the Loud Department particularly.

An eruption of feathers greeted this entrance, along with panicked squawks.  Colors streaked past his head, a bundle of green bouncing off a wall and landing on the floor with a thud and a blue and gold form piling out of the bedroom window, which was wide open.  This brief period of confusion was their truly vulnerable moment, and Marlowe tried to take advantage of it.  He fired in rapid succession at everything that moved (except Nina, who would have found the BBs annoying).  He wasn’t sure if he was hitting anything.  Nina was having trouble hitting the mark too.

Something flew overhead, and Marlowe ducked, the talons narrowly missing his eyes and instead plowing a furrow of blood across his scalp.

Nina instinctively swung at the bird, almost catching it in mid-air.  The bird dodged the blow, but by missing Nina’s fist instead slammed into the wall and then landed with a thud on the floor.  Marlowe noted that the bundle of green feathers shaking its head on his carpet was a Yellow Nape Amazon, an identification he was able to make because of the patch of yellow on the back of the parrot’s head.  

A voice cried out, “They’re alive!  Cheese it, boys!”

Marlowe emptied his BB gun into the air, following the path of what he swore was a rose colored parrot wearing really thick glasses.  But before he could identify the species of bird properly, it had alighted out the window and was gone.  If he’d hit the bird, it showed no signs as it flew away.  The Yellow Nape, which he’d turned his back on, had evidently recovered enough to regain flight and raked the top of Marlowe’s head on its way out the window.  He could have sworn the bird called him a ‘despicable pink Neanderthal’ as it swept by.

And then all was silent.  A single feather wafted down to the floor in front of Marlowe, who still had his gun raised and ready.  He thumbed the cartridge, which clattered to the floor, and slotted a fresh one.  One bird went out the window when they first entered, and two others after they started shooting.  The one with the glasses was probably the computer expert brought in to hack House.  Would they have sent any more birds?  He swept his peacemaker back and forth, looking for a specific color.  A drab color, with a splash of crimson at one end.  Grey.

He found it hiding behind the closet door where the access panels to House’s hardware and wetware resided.

“Hello?”  Gomer’s voice was tentative, scared.  “Marlowe, is that you?  Oh, thank the Governor!  I was so scared!  They broke in and threatened to pluck me alive if I struggled.  Oh, I thought I was a goner.”

Marlowe was having none of it; he squeezed off a round, winging the parrot to prevent his escape.  This one was not getting away.  Marlowe had a personal score to settle with Gomer.

“Ow!  You son of a mundane!  You shot me!”  His eyes were pinning with rage.  “You!  Shot me!”  He flapped about pathetically, his wing feathers in disarray.

“Damn straight.  You can drop the act.  I’ve figured everything out.”

“You figured everything out?”  Gomer waddled out to the foot of the bed.  “You’ve figured everything out?  What do you mean?”

“I know that you’re a plant.  I know you helped arrange my murder in the shower.  And I know why.”

Gomer eyed the door behind Marlowe, which Nina promptly moved in front of, and then the window.  He edged slowly sideways towards the opening.

“Uh uh uh,” intoned Marlowe, waving Gomer back with the BB gun.  “Stay away from the window.”

“Figured it all out, eh?  Dashed clever of you.  And I was so sure I’d win.”  Gomer glared at Marlowe for a moment, glared at Nina for a moment, and then noticed the ruffled state of his feathers.  “So what, exactly, have you figured out, smarty pants?”

“I know you doctored the video surveillance images while I was being resurrected, altering the pictures of the soap bar assassin so I’d think it was Tray.  You wanted me dead, but permanently dead.  Only that’s really hard to do these days, since most damage can be repaired.  Killing me temporarily with the soap bar was merely a ploy, a clever trick to set me off looking for Tray and the very large, very permanent-death causing bomb inside of him.

“I have to admit, you had me fooled.  Planting the mushrooms, making me think you’d been drugged, that was a nice touch.  Threw me off for quite a while.”

“I’m surprised you managed to figure it out at all, mundane boy,” replied Gomer, fighting to maintain eye contact as he struggled against the inherent need to straighten his feathers.  “After all, I am a super genius.  Ah crap!”  He turned and began to preen.  “Why, with all the improvements they made, didn’t they breed this urge out of us?  Absolutely senseless!”

“Don’t you want to know what gave you away?” asked Nina smugly.

“Oh, very well, if we’re going to turn this into an Agatha Christie finale, I’ll play along.  What led you to this brilliant piece of deduction, oh master detective?”  The sarcasm wasn’t even thinly veiled.  Gomer sounded like someone who hadn’t just been defeated.  It made Marlowe nervous.

“The fluttering around the edges of the video at the end.  Once I figured out why I’d been murdered, everything else fell into place and it was obvious what that was.  You came into the room to access the main interface for House, and your flapping wings cast a shadow picked up by the camera.”

“Pure supposition on your part.  You have any hard evidence, anything that will hold up in a court of law?” asked Gomer from under his wing.  “I mean, you have passwords and voice recognition to prevent unauthorized access like that.”

“Court of law?  You have no rights.  Your very existence is cause for your execution.  But getting past the security was easy enough.  You’ve heard my voice every day for almost a year.  You’ve almost certainly overheard me speaking my passwords.  You just crept out of your cage, pressed one of those sensitive ears against the door, and eavesdropped.  You still have plenty of African Grey in you, and they are renowned for their mimicry.”

“OK, let’s say for the sake of argument,” said Gomer as he looked away momentarily to straighten his bright red tail feathers, “that I did somehow learn to duplicate your voice, and I did overhear your passwords.  So what?”

“You hacked into the surveillance system, but didn’t have enough time to hack into the computer and get the information you’re really after.  Breaking into the surveillance system was just the first part of your plan.”

“Plan,” sneered Gomer.  “So I had a plan, eh?  What plan was that?”

“You missed a feather,” lied Nina.

“Huh, oh, thanks.”  Gomer checked the feathers on first his left wing, then his right.  “Where is it?  Oh dammit, I did not!  That was mean!”

Marlowe ignored the outburst.  “Seeing the altered video, I started looking for the soap I thought killed me.  But it was all a digital fantasy you constructed to get me to that recon parlor and blow me up.  Too bad the Governor ordered me to investigate Nina, delaying your little plan.”

“That meddling idiot.  He’ll be the first to go when I…, er, such a fascinating story you’ve concocted so far.  Pray continue.”

“But eventually I did find time to confront Tray.  Only your penchant for mischief left you unable to simply blow me up.  Living with me, pretending to be a simple-minded GMP must have driven you to the edge of insanity with rage and frustration.  So you decided, once you had me where you wanted me, trapped in that building on that floor, to toy with me.  Escape was supposed to be impossible, so I was gonna have to sit there pondering my own permanent death while poor Tray staged a futile struggle against the itchy trigger.”

“If I’m as smart as you claim, you wouldn’t have escaped.”

“Ah, but even you knew there was a slim chance that I might figure a way out.  Your desire to make me suffer overrode your common sense, but you took additional precautions.”

“Did I now?”

“Yes.  Tray asked me to contact his wives and kids with the touching message that he loved them.  How could I refuse?  He beamed over the addresses, and with them a very clever, very devastating virus that killed my PDI.  He talked about being conscious of what was being done to him, but it never occurred to me that he’d been hard-wired not just with a bomb, but with a backup trap, a program that forced him to transmit the virus to me.  A virus that would lie in wait, dormant until I received the message that would trigger it.

“But unknown to you, some part of Tray was still fighting your electronic brainwashing.  When he beamed his message over, he sent bogus addresses.  Probably hoping I’d check them right away and notice they weren’t legitimate.  Maybe if I had checked, I would have discovered the virus.  But I didn’t.”

“Very touching, Marlowe.  A bar of soap with a heart of gold story.  The publishers will be chomping on the bit to get their hands on it.  But what possible motive could I have for killing you, permanent or otherwise?”

“To keep me out of your hair while you set upon House in earnest.”

Gomer dropped the pretense with a sigh.  “You know what I’m after?”

“Yes, I do.”

Gomer looked up from grooming his chest.  “Well, surprise, surprise, surprise.”

“My eureka moment was this afternoon, driving back here after Nina’s trial.  When I drove past that alley, the one I keep finding myself in lately.  The alley that set this sorry set of events  in motion.  A very forward thinking, long term plan.  Setting up events so you could save me from that gang of genetically modified gorillas, using that to con me into taking you into my home.  And then you sat here, sitting in my cage, eating my cat food, answering my phones, waiting and waiting for that one call that would bring your scheme to fruition.  How frustrating it must have been, waiting for a Better Pets scientist to come to me for help getting out of the City.