Tropical Punch (Bubbles in Space Book 1)

by S. C. Jensen

“I promised you I wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “If you kill me now, you will be hurting her.” My eyes flicked around the room, searching for a way out. Searching for anything that might help me. “You’ll be hurting the cause she was fighting for. She was trying to protect—”

  He lunged for me and grabbed the front of my prison suit in a red, leathery fist. He was a thin man, but I could feel his body wired with muscle beneath the blue uniform. “Be very careful what you say next.”

  Without my upgrade I was at a significant disadvantage against him. Even if you didn’t count the fact that I was being held a gunpoint, in the prison cell of a spaceship flying through outer space. There was no escape. I figured I might as well try for the truth.

  “Your wife helped to develop a nootropic drug for the Last Humanists,” I said. “But the formula was highjacked by some low-level drug dealer from the Grit. She tried to stop the delivery but it all went sideways. Did you know she worked for the anti-techers? It’s all connected. Her strange behaviour, the Last Humanists, the necklaces, the woman in the silver dress. I don’t know how yet. But it is.” I was babbling. Whyte’s grip twisted, and he lifted me onto my toes. A big smoked-meat fist hovered over my face. “Wait! the only thing I know for sure is that it was your wife’s body I found upstairs in techRose.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what started this whole thing. She wanted to meet me. Said she wanted me to deliver a message, but the message was just to make sure it was really me who came. She wanted to give me something.”

  A nervous voice, as pale and trembling as the man himself, piped up behind Whyte’s shoulder. “You want me to shoot her?”

  “No,” Whyte said. Then his fist crashed toward my face.

  Like a piston, he pulled it at the last second. Maybe he didn’t really have the heart to mash my nose into mince meat. I had the good sense to grunt and fall down anyway. I buckled at the knees, and Whyte let go of my jumper. My body collapsed in a heap on the cell floor. I kept my eyes closed and let my head loll to the side so I could keep an eye on Whyte and his shadow through a cracked lid.

  “You really nailed her, sir.” The pink-faced man stared at my body and licked his lips. His hands shook. I hoped I wasn’t going to get tased again. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Watch her, McSweeny.” Whyte snapped and the little man flinched. “I’m going to set up the interrogation room.”

  A thin smile spread across the man’s pink face as Whyte stalked out of the cell. Men like that are the ones to look out for, not the big, macho, meat-fisted thugs or the guys in fancy suits with cush oozing out of every pore. They’re bad enough, but it’s those little guys. The ones that get stepped on by the big guys once too often and are itching to grind their heels into someone or something smaller than themselves. McSweeny had the look of a rosy-cheeked child about to pull the legs of a spider. He licked his lips again. “Yes, sir.”

  I felt McSweeny approach cautiously, like a rat investigating a trap. The sole of his boot brushed my right hand and hovered there. If I moved, I was going to get tased again. If I didn’t move, bug boy was going to try to throw his weight around. First stop, my fingers. It started as a slow pressure. I held still and breathed deeply, preparing myself for what would come next. The joints popped as they crunched between the hard floor of the cell and McSweeny’s foot. Talk about being stuck between the pin and the pincher. Pain exploded like a burning jolt of electricity from my hand and up my arm. I stayed still, letting the sensation flow through me as if I could make it stop by letting it pass over unacknowledged. I figured I’d wait until they moved me to try any funny business. But without my arm, it wasn’t apt to be too hysterical on my end.

  In any case, I didn’t get the chance. Whyte came back and McSweeny pulled his foot away before he had a chance to break anything. Whyte brought in a stretcher and a cart just like the shopping scooters I’d seen down on the strip, chock full of all things sharp and pointy for all your flesh-rending, skin- tearing needs. Must have been a sale at the Torturers Tavern. They strapped me onto the stretcher, probably the same one they planned to haul me out on when they were finished, and all I could come up with was to play dead. My heart beat a little too hard in my chest for someone who was out cold, but they were too excited to notice.

  From one of the other cells, I heard a man’s voice pitched high with outraged screaming. “I’m telling you, it’s Valentia! She sabotaged my show, she stole my merchandise, and she did that nasty business in the cargo bay. Don’t you be fooled by her face. Her face is all right. But she could use a bag on that personality. Ugly, you know? Wrap a big ’ol burlap sack round it, tie it up with chains, and drop it on the bottom of the ocean. She’s evil, you know? You know!”

  There was a crash from somewhere, and a yelp. Then silence, except for the ragged, panting breath of the pink-faced lunatic. McSweeny’s watery eyes had a bead on me. The lights shifted as the stretcher swung out of the cell and into the corridor between Whyte and his diluted shadow. My body slid noiselessly beneath the glaring overhead lights. Careful not to blink or twitch in case the gun-happy pappy in the powder-blue suit had set his taser to deep-fry, I counted my breaths and tried to slow my heart rate.

  Whyte pulled the stretcher along with one hand and the cart along beside him. If it had been any proper kind of horror flick, the squeaking of rusted wheels would have cranked ominously along with us. Frankly, I felt a bit betrayed by the lack of attention to atmosphere. What kind of way was this to die? Framed for the death of the same woman, twice, and I hadn’t even done it once. This was worse than my failure to die in Swain’s training accident. If I survived, I vowed to commit some legitimate crimes. That way, the next time I got hammered by a sucker punch, at least I could die feeling like I deserved it.

  A door shushed open somewhere in the vicinity of my head, and Whyte pulled the gurney into a darkened room. McSweeny slipped inside after him and flicked on the overhead lights. Whyte flicked them off again. He said, “Get her in the chair.”

  McSweeny twitched and put his taser on the cart full of torture implements. He wrenched on the straps of the gurney and I rolled over and groaned, but Whyte glared at me with such venom that I decided it was in my best interest to die quietly. The pink-faced minion dragged me off the stretcher and grunted beneath my weight. I had to be at least twenty pounds his superior, and I let him have it. It was all I had to give.

  Eventually, he got me into a hard metal chair and belted me into some new restraints around my shins, my lap, and my chest. Blood dripped from my nose and into my mouth. I tried to wipe at it, but McSweeny yanked my only arm back down and pinched it into place with a rubberized belt. I was really starting to dislike the guy. When I was good and immobilized, I opened my eyes the rest of the way and looked hard at the Chief of Security.

  “Please, Whyte,” I said. McSweeny stepped in front me and sneered with a face like a naked mole-rat’s ass. I leaned to the side to look at Hank. “Whatever you do to me, do it yourself. Don’t give this little pissant the—”

  I didn’t get a chance to finish my final request. Whyte grabbed a syringe the size of a dagger off the cart and I flinched back, even though I knew there was no where I could go. Then he stabbed the needle into the mole-rat man’s neck and hit the plunger. McSweeny’s watery eyes rolled backward as if looking for his brain, and finding nothing, he crumpled to the floor of the cell.

  Whyte tossed the empty syringe into the corner of the cell where it made a pretty little tinkling noise as it smashed on to the floor. He stepped over the powder-blue uniform and reached for me with his oven-roasted hands. His white teeth flashed as he said, “Now it’s your turn, Marlowe.”

  “It’s safe to talk in here.” Whyte dropped the act like a mask and smiled apologetically. He undid the straps that cinched me to the chair. “This interrogation room has never had any surveillance systems installed. They aren’t jus
t off. They can’t be hacked because they don’t exist. It’s probably the only place on the ship that is truly safe to speak in right now.”

  “An off-grid interrogation room.” I walked around the small room and inspected the walls, the ceiling, the corners, the lights. Under the chair. Not that I didn’t trust him. I believed he believed what he was saying. “I can see how that might come in handy on a military craft. What the hell are you doing with one on a luxury cruiser?”

  “You’d be surprised at the kind of people who decide to take luxury cruises through international space when life on the surface gets a little too hot for comfort.” Whyte pulled off the last of the straps and then opened a door at the bottom of the cart. My clothes and backpack were inside, along with my upgrade. “The admiral monitors them. If the right people make the right kind of offer, sometimes we cooperate with Trade Zone authorities.”

  “Since when is Punch Blanco an ‘authority’?”

  Whyte sighed and lifted my upgrade off the cart. He held it out to me, but I didn’t take it. He said, “How did you know?”

  “Just throwing darts in the dark,” I said. “At this point, I’d have to be trying not to hit something funny. The admiral wanted me brought in. Why’d he roll on me?”

  “The admiral is a powerful man, and he likes to keep it that way,” Whyte said. “I’m not privy to the details, but I’d say he found the answer to his question on his own or someone offered him a better deal.”

  “I need your help with that.” I gestured to the arm with my chin and started to undo the top of the hideous jumper. It took me a while with only one hand. I never had gotten very good at it. I shrugged my left shoulder out from under the fabric and appreciated the way Whyte didn’t stare at the disfigured skin underneath. He could have gotten his eyeful when I was unconscious, I supposed, if he had wanted to. But he didn’t strike me as that kind of guy. He slipped the socket of the upgrade onto my arm and held it while the connection plates synched up.

  “The admiral received a call from Blanco a couple weeks ago,” Whyte said. “Telling him about the woman in the silver dress, and to watch out for her. Sent us a ’gram and when to expect her. She’s been on the ship since not long after the call.”

  “Around the time that your wife began acting strangely.” I went through a few of the standard nerve tests to make sure the arm’s basic functions were intact. It wouldn’t have the same finesse as if Rae had installed it, but it should do the trick until I got back to Terra Firma.

  “She’d gone to the surface to meet with one of her colleagues,” Whyte said. He stepped back while I put the arm through some wide, swinging arcs. “When she came back, she was the same, but different somehow. Distant. At first I thought she was having an affair.”

  “She didn’t let you touch her after that.”

  “No,” he said. “She even slept in a different room from me. I didn’t put up a fuss. Like I said, I expected something like this to happen. But it killed me a bit too. Part of me always hoped that I was wrong, and that she really did love me. One night I peered into the room, just to look at her. Just to see her without that cold, distant look she had adopted.”

  “And that’s when you began to suspect—”

  “It was horrible.” Whyte sat down in the interrogation chair and put his face in his hands. “She slept like she was a part of the furniture, completely still. Her eyes open at the ceiling. Her chest didn’t move. I thought she was dead. I thought—” Whyte took a deep, shuddering breath. “But when I stepped into the room, she sat up fluidly and locked eyes with me and spoke in her cold voice, and I knew it wasn’t her at all. She said, ‘Leave now.’ And I did.”

  “What’s her connection to Blanco?”

  Whyte put his hands on his knees and hung his head. “I don’t know. I can’t make any sense of it. She has never used drugs. She believed in that Absolute Purity bull with every cell in her body. I would have bet my life she didn’t have any connections to the HoloCity underworld.”

  Her connection went deeper than that. If I was right, her connection to the Last Humanists was more sinister than any drug lord king pin could ever be. But I didn’t think it would help to tell him at this point. “Did you know she was a Last Humanist when you married her?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I mean, she’s doesn’t wear the robes or anything. But she’s an Absolutist. That was one of the things I liked best about her. She was so brilliant and beautiful and nothing about her was artificially enhanced or simulated.”

  “Aside from the lies.”

  Whyte winced slightly. “Right.”

  “And what about you?” I asked. “Are you Pure?”

  Whyte rolled his shoulders and blushed. “That’s not really any of your—”

  “It could be important, Hank.”

  “I had them removed before Patti and I started dating.” He avoided my eyes. “I thought it would impress her.”

  “Very romantic,” I said. “That little valentine might just have saved your sunburned butt. Now tell me, when we spoke in your office, you wanted me to go check on her at the beaches. Why?”

  “I put a tracking dot on her favourite broach, one she wore almost all the time even after she changed. She kept hanging around the Amity Beach simulation, but she never went inside. I’ve tried to meet her there, myself, but—”

  “She falls off the grid.”

  “I thought she was tracking me, too, that something alerted her to my presence like it had in our bedroom. I thought maybe you could find her when she didn’t want to be found.”

  “I found her,” I said. “As a simulation inside the Amity Beach holodeck.”

  Whyte’s ice-blue eyes met mine forcefully. “And?”

  “I spoke to her,” I said. “She left a message for me. And something more than the message. A clue, hidden in her words.”

  I thought about the simulated necklace she’d dropped in my hand. The jolt of electricity. I didn’t say anything about that. I said, “She was careful, though. She must have been scared.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just a hunch.” I wasn’t ready to lay all my cards down just yet. “But for one thing, there’s a skin lock on the door. I think your wife got herself tangled up in the politics of her religion and couldn’t get out again. Someone knows that you asked me to look into it, and that someone tried to follow me into the simulation.”

  “That’s not possible.” Whyte’s voice came out in a scratchy whisper.

  “How is a fly like the universe, Whyte?”

  He stared blankly at me.

  “Sometimes they are not exactly what they seem.”

  “My office?”

  “You need to do a manual sweep. Get rid of any bugs, balls of lint, chewed up wads of gum stuck under your desk. It could be anywhere. Don’t trust any scanners.”

  Whyte blinked at me. “That’s impossible. We have—”

  “The best security money can buy,” I said. “Yes. We’ve had this conversation before. And yet this little fly slipped past your skin-screeners and has been feeding all your off-grid conversations into the ears of someone much bigger and meaner than you.”

  Whyte put his face in his hands and groaned. “The admiral is going to have a fit.”

  “The admiral is the least of our worries right now.”

  “Speak for yourself. I’ll lose my job over this. And I already—” Whyte’s shoulders heaved once, then shook. He looked up at me with tears in his hard blue eyes. He took a shuddering breath, closed his eyes, and said, “You really think she’s dead?”

  “I’m sorry, Hank.”

  “I wish it had been an affair.”

  “You really loved her.” I crouched down next to him and put my flesh hand on his back. “I’ll find out what happened to her. I wish I could do more.”

  “Tell me what you know.”
<
br />   I sighed and stood, rolling my shoulders as I paced the room. “I know a lot of bits and pieces, but I don’t know exactly how they fit, yet.”

  “Try me,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of time. You need to get into McSweeny’s uniform and out the door before anyone realizes you’re gone. I caught this little rat phoning in your arrest to Swain.”

  I cursed under my breath. “I had almost forgotten about that idiot.”

  “He wasn’t there,” Whyte said. “Which means someone already gave him an idea. Depending on which bangtail he tried to catch, he could be—”

  “I thought he didn’t have jurisdiction up here.”

  “He doesn’t. But the admiral does.”

  I cursed under my breath. “Swain doesn’t need to arrest me to make my life hell. He’s in bed with the HoloCity drug syndicates. Would the admiral let him board?”

  “If he sees an opportunity he might cooperate, even with the likes of Swain, at least as long as it suits him.”

  “And if he’s taking tips from Punch Blanco, who knows who else could be pulling strings.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on anymore.”

  I rummaged through the pockets of my jacket on the trolley and found a piece of gum. I chewed it slowly, thinking about how to answer him. “My suspicion is this: your wife hired me to find the girl in the silver dress. But Patti really wanted me to find her. She gave me a message to deliver, like a code, I think, to prove it was really me. She planned to meet me at techRose with some sensitive information. She’d been hiding out there for at least a week, maybe more, before she made the call.”

  “Why would she call you?” he said. “Why wouldn’t she ask me for help?”

  “She got my name from a friend of mine. They worked together. He has also, incidentally, gotten himself faded. I don’t think she planned to call me, but my assistant flooded the Grit with business cards like the one you found. Patti must have found one, and kept it hidden, knowing she might have trouble.”