When Harry Met Chunglie Box Set

by Jack Q McNeil

  “Shall I hose her down?” Daisy asked from the door. She was too broad to enter, but had telescoped a camera into the room.

  “Why would I want you to do that?”

  “That’s what I usually do with drunks that won’t leave at closing time.”

  “Ah. No need, we don’t want her to leave, we want conscious and functional. Come on, Marshal, wake up.”

  Marshal Harry mumbled and turned over; I crawled up the stairs to her ear and whispered:

  “There’s thirty people in the room and you’re naked.” Harry sat bolt upright, clutching her chest.

  “Never do that again,” she said, checking her clothing was still fastened.

  “But it works every time.” I sometimes wish I had a face, so I could grin. I pointed my palps up at the corners to show willing.

  “What’s happening?” Marshal Harry asked, a pink painted warbot crowding the door being hard to miss.

  “Big Sam has been murdered,” Daisy got in first. “The week’s takings are gone, and the boss is dead.”

  “Loow Alsh is dead?” The marshal asked as she climbed to her feet. I reversed down the stairs, in case she stumbled and landed on me.

  “New bosses turn up on their own,” Daisy pointed out. “But there’s only ever been one Big Sam.”

  “You two have been at the Full Mental Packet since it opened, haven’t you?” Marshal Harry asked.

  “No, it was open for six weeks before Oui Lee Big bought us from a dismantler. The place was so rough waiting staff kept getting shot, Oui Lee figured getting shot wouldn’t stop us working. Then one night the place was robbed and Oui Lee murdered. All they found was a hand.”

  “That was the start of the curse of the Full Mental Packet,” I said with relish. My new voice app is good at these kinds of tones.

  “What curse,” Harry asked as she pulled clothing from a drawer in her desk and slid her legs into it. Pants, they’re called. For decades pre-warp drive humans wondered why intelligent aliens didn’t get in touch. To the other sentient lifeforms in the universe, fur-free mammals are weird enough, but this obsession with clothes freaks them out.

  “About every fifty years, the bar gets robbed. Twice, someone’s been found dead and there’s never any evidence of who did it.”

  “It’s not about fifty years,” Daisy corrected. “It is exactly fifty years to the night. Someone told Loow, so he sat up with his gun loaded and Big Sam fully charged, to catch whoever tried it.”

  Harry pulled a uniform tunic on over her evening attire. That’s right, humans have clothes they wear in the evening, and clothes they wear during the day. They even have clothes they only wear at night. Humans never pack light.

  “That can’t be right,” Harry said. “The bar’s been there for what, four centuries and you’re telling me it’s—”

  “Been robbed eight times, yes.” I finished for her. Harry slid into her boots and stood. It didn’t take much effort, she really is short.

  “Okay, I’m ready, let’s go.” She got as far as the door before Daisy swept her up and carried her across the street. I scurried after them both.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Why are you carrying me?” Harry demanded.

  “It is part of my job to carry drunks,” Daisy pointed out.

  “One, I am not drunk, and two it’s your job to carry drunks out of the bar, not into it.”

  “I’m expanding my range.”

  To be honest, Daisy was doing the marshal a favour. The spring rains had been going for three weeks, and I was coated in mud up to my eyes by the time we reached the door. A shower system in the lintel activated as I walked across the threshold and hot water blasted the mud from my carapace and back out into the street.

  “You lived here?” Harry said, looking around the room. “For years.”

  “Yeah, great, isn’t it?”

  “Not the term I’d use.”

  Daisy placed the marshal on her feet, next to Big Sam. Another decommissioned warbot, he was painted black, with a white collar and tie glued to his hull just below the turret guns. He boasted a knowledge of five thousand jokes in three hundred languages, and I was sad to see him like this.

  “He had a unique personality,” I said.

  “I’m hoping he can be fixed,” Daisy said. I said nothing, not wanting to disappoint an armed warbot, but I didn’t think he was repairable.

  There were blaster holes burned through his hull and a door in his chest had been ripped off, revealing a safe. Harry examined Big Sam carefully, particularly the safe and the way his weapon turret pointed into a booth.

  “This is the lounge of the Full Mental Packet Bar,” I said with reverence, running a claw along the fossilised root the booths were carved out of. “I was never allowed in here. Only ship captains and gang leaders allowed in here. This is where legends are born and myths come to die.”

  “A lot of things have died in here, by the smell of it.”

  “Hey, this was my home.”

  “Sorry. So... this room is thirty metres long and ten wide,” Harry said, tapping her scanner read out. “I assume there’s more to the place?”

  “Office and toilets in back.” I waved a claw in that direction. “Bar through that door to the right, and basement below, where regulars can bunk down for cheap.”

  “Is there anyone sleeping there now?” Marshal Harry asked Daisy.

  “Yes, some of the regulars.”

  “How many?”

  “I can’t go down the stairs, so how would I know?”

  Harry looked at the armoured safe door lying in front of Big Sam. “People sleeping below our feet and they didn’t raise the alarm when they heard this being blown off? It must have made quite a noise.”

  “They don’t usually stir until mid-afternoon,” I said. “Ah, the good old days.”

  “That’s where the month’s takings were kept,” Daisy pointed at Sam without looking. They’d been together for years. Nothing kinky, as far as I knew, they played virtual reality games in their down time. I scurried over and had a look in the safe. It was empty except for one large, wrinkled mushroom. I whistled. I had bought the whistling app for my voicebox only the week before, and was still taking every chance to get in a whistle.

  “What kind of idiot leaves that behind?”

  “The kind of idiot who had breakfast already?” Harry said, as she looked around the room.

  “That is not for eating,” I said. “That is currency.”

  “How much is it worth?”

  I checked a couple of exchanges online. “Well, one shroom will get you two and a half slongoo and that will get you eight bars of gold, this morning. Thing is there were three of them. Loow used to brag they were his pension plan.”

  “So someone stole two? I wonder if they were disturbed during the robbery.”

  “No, Loow took two out of the bar last month,” Daisy said. “Never brought them back.”

  Harry walked along one side of the room and back the other. Booths lined the walls on each side and the far end was the bar. Every sentient species has a different drug of choice, so the bar was large and crammed with stock.

  “So someone left the most valuable piece of legal tender behind? What species uses dried mushrooms for currency?” she asked.

  “The species who own hundreds of space dreadnoughts,” I said. “Nobody tells the Blue Smelling Snoggers what to do.”

  The marshal stopped in her tracks.

  “The what?”

  I shrugged my first segment. “There are only so many sounds made by sentient beings. I know what the name sounds like to you, but it translates as The Kill You As Soon As Look At You People. Touchy lot. They turned up from the fringes of the galaxy twenty years ago, with a lot of technology to trade.”

  “So, Daisy, I give up, where’s Loow’s body?” Harry asked.

  “In that booth,” Daisy pointed at the booth where Big Sam’s guns were aiming. We walked over and looked behind the table. There was a pair of hi
ps and orange hairy legs. The rest was missing. “Our weapons kill people without damaging the bar.”

  “Nice,” I said. “That’s expensive hardware.”

  “Yes, we are,” Daisy said.

  The marshal walked to the front door and examined a blast mark that had taken out the lock.

  “So this wasn’t done by Sam’s weapons, then?”

  “Couldn’t have been,” Daisy said.

  “That’s the second thing I don’t believe,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. It was definitely a blaster strike, and it had vaporised the lock. I believed that.

  “We’re supposed to believe an intruder shot out the lock and gunned down Loow Alsh and a skirmisher bot? Or...” the marshal walked back into the lounge and bent over the remains of Loow “we’re supposed to believe someone broke in here and then Big Sam shot Loow?”

  “He could not do that,” Daisy Tubes pointed out. “We are programmed to protect the bar’s fixtures and fittings, including the owner.”

  “You define the bar owner as part of the fixtures and fittings?” Marshal Harry asked.

  “Of course. Every bar has to have an owner.”

  “Big Sam might have been hacked?” I thought aloud.

  “Our firewalls and virus protection are kept up to date by law,” Daisy scoffed at that suggestion. “No one wants hackable warbots rolling around town.”

  “I know guys that could do it for a price,” I said.

  “No way. Bring them,” Daisy said. My sensors registered target lock. I activated my mag pulse rifle, Pistol Pete, and prepped to fire. Marshal Harry held up a hand.

  “Can we stick to the task in hand?” she said. “You were lying on the porch last night, Chunglie, did anyone leave through the front doors after closing time?”

  “I should have thought of that,” I said. “Sorry.”

  I brought up my cybernetic dashboard. The colourful readouts projected directly into my optic nerves and allowed me to see in the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Even though I was asleep, the infrared was still scanning. I fast forwarded through the record.

  “Nothing after Slognor of the Deepdip left at three o’clock in the morning,” I said. “He’s always last to leave the lounge.”

  “Good to know. Did anyone leave the back way, Daisy?”

  “No. My sensor logs show no one left that way after we did, or before our shift started.”

  “And what size weapon could blow Big Sam’s armour open like that?”

  “You’d need something like Old Number Seven,” I said, patting the weapon holstered along two segments of my body. “Or Trembling Bob.”

  Harry gave me the “we don’t talk about Trembling Bob” look, which I ignored.

  “Why have you taken against Trembling Bob,” I said. “It likes you.”

  “It’s creepy,” Harry said. “There’s something almost alive about it.”

  “It’s just a weapon,” I said, stroking the handle.

  “That thing is not just a weapon, and it is creepy,” Harry said, as she walked around the bottom half of the corpse, with a hand scanner.

  “Been dead four hours, according to this.” She tapped the scanner. That reminded me we were working, and I scanned the room with my cybernetic systems. The feed connected directly to my brain, displayed an anomaly on the bar top. I moved closer to the corner where bar met wall.

  “Scanner shows blood spatter in this corner,” I said poking it with a claw. “Still sticky in places. It’s Loow’s.”

  “Wonder why he was sitting on the bar top?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “That was a rhetorical question,” Marshal Harry said. “Could he have been shot there and then moved to the booth and shot again by Big Sam? That one’s not rhetorical.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Harry walked into the short corridor that led out back. The floor was concrete, with a double groove worn in it by the staffbots treads. The walls were coated in fossilized layers of wallpaper; the top layer of which had, at some time years past, been powder blue. There was a door in each side. They may have been made of plastic, it was hard to tell under the peeling layers of paint. She opened the door on the right.

  “Here’s a question for you, though, why are there barrels of dirt and mud in this room?”

  “That’s the toilets,” I said. “It’s one-size-fits-all species. Do your business of choice into the barrel and then drop fresh dirt on top.”

  “Oh, god, there are blue maggots in this one.”

  “That’s the snacks,” I said. “Blue means they’re ripe.”

  I tried slipping past the marshal, but she gripped the door frame and refused to budge.

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, come on, I haven’t had breakfast this week.”

  “Sorry, definitely no,” she said, firmly closing the door. “If I have to watch you eat those things I’ll barf. Show me what’s through here.”

  “This is Loow’s office.” I pushed a claw through the hole burned in it. “The lock has been shot off.”

  “Yes, and they shot the lock off the toilets.”

  “Can’t be a bar regular then, the lock on the toilet hasn’t worked for years.”

  The office had a desk, computer terminal, two chairs and empty glasses on every flat surface including most of the floor.

  “Daisy and crew do the cleaning,” I said. “But they’re not allowed in here.”

  “Wow,” Daisy said from the doorway. “Now I know why we’re always short on tumblers.”

  Someone had dropped the holopic of Loow’s clutch lining up for their first migration on the floor. The Heedyin species consider that the entry to adulthood. The pic had covered a small wall safe which had been burned open. Marshal Harry ran a finger around the hole, thoughtfully.

  “Lucky he’s dead,” I said picking up the broken frame. He loved this picture, seeing it damaged would have broken his hearts.”

  “Two safes?” she asked.

  “Loow stopped using that one after he got Big Sam adapted. He said a safe that shoots back must be more secure than a hole in the wall with a lid.”

  “Someone expected the cash to be in here, though, must have been a nasty shock to find it empty.”

  “Good. Let’s find them and give them another nasty shock.”

  “No killing, though.”

  “But Loow was one of my oldest friends.”

  “No killing,” Marshal Harry said. “Or I take you off the case. Which will make things difficult since we’re the only marshals on the planet.”

  “But Loow was one of my oldest friends.”

  She gave me expression number seven, which meant the subject wasn’t open for argument. Humans have so many facial expressions I found it easier to number them.

  “Okay,” I held up six claws in surrender. “I’ve already set most of my weapons to stun.”

  “Most? Let me guess, Trembling Bob and Old Number Seven don’t have a stun setting.”

  “Well, Old Number Seven’s an anti-tank gun and you can’t stun a tank. I’ve tried explaining it, but Trembling Bob doesn’t understand the concept of a stun. But I promise not to use them.”

  “Good enough.” Marshal Harry took another scan of the office. “Break out your crime scene kit.”

  I took out the chem lab, all four samplers and one general poker and went to work. Sometimes it is handy having fourteen claws. I used the general poker to work through a pile of empty glasses. Readings showed the hard gunk holding the glasses together was two centuries old. One centimetre long Tribblers piled out of a nest and attacked the poker.

  “Sorry, ladies,” I said. Funny how speech can become a habit. I leaned down and drooled an apology glob of pheromones to one of the soldier Tribblers and then gently pushed the nest back into hiding. The Tribblers ran back into the pile.

  “How come,” I asked as I worked my way round the floor, “it’s always me doing the crime scene stuff?”

  “Because it
takes me half an hour, while it takes you three minutes.”

  I took a piece of chalk from one of my pouches and drew a circle reverently on the floor between the desk and the window.

  “This blood stain is four centuries old,” I said. “It must belong to Oui Lee Big, the first owner of the bar.”

  “Okay, but we need more recent evidence,” Harry said. “Any organic residues from the thief?”

  “Hey, this stain should be in a museum. This is part of the history of Port City.”

  Marshal Harry raised one eyebrow.

  “Okay.” I sterilized the poker and ran the tests a second time on the old unused safe that had been blown.

  “Nothing,” I said. “No trace of organic residue, fingerprints, claw or tooth marks. Someone used the same explosive to blow the office door and this safe, and left no trace of themselves.”

  “Right. In that case, we’ll have a look round the bar and then wake up the suspects.”

  “So you think one of them shot Loow then made an arse of setting up Big Sam to take the blame? That’s my theory.”

  “I won’t know until I speak to them and please don’t use that form of language.”

  “Sorry, my latest language app is Scottish, certain words just slip out.”

  We heard movement from the toilets.

  “I only looked in there a minute ago,” Harry said. “It was vacant.”

  “The trapdoor to the cellar is in there,” I said. “The killer could have hid downstairs and then come back?”

  “Oh, come on, what kind of idiot commits a murder and then hangs around at the crime scene?”

  “Two murders,” Daisy said from the doorway.

  “A criminal idiot.” I said. “You must agree that whoever shot Loow and then left the most valuable currency in the safe, isn’t going to be a genius.”

  “Good point.”

  I pulled my flegmatic pistols and showed the marshal they were set to stun.

  “Daisy, open the door?” I asked.

  When a two ton warbot opens a door, it stays open. I sprang through, rolled and reared my front half. “Nobody move! Armed marshals- and we haven’t had breakfast!”

  A large quadruped squatted on one barrel. His mouth fell open revealing long yellow canines. I covered him with one pistol and another quadruped shovelling the blue snacks into his mouth with the other.