by Simon Petrie
Somewhat appropriately, she also looked lost.
Gordon seized the moment, flashing his name badge as he approached her. “Welcome aboard Skyward 270. Gordon Mamon, at your service. Is there anything we—I—can help you with?”
“270? Now why does that sound familiar?” she asked. Gordon was abruptly made aware that, in addition to her stunning appearance, this woman was also possessed of a voice at once thoroughly unmelodic and several decibels the wrong side of shrill. Her pause was just long enough to ensure that every face within the lift-module’s foyer—Belle’s, Sue’s, and two of the other guests’—turned to hear whatever it was she would say next … which, as these things went, did not disappoint. “Oh, 270! So this is where all those people died! And you’re the famous Gordon Mastodon!”
“Mamon,” said Gordon, feeling the colour rise in his cheeks. “And if I may correct you, there were only ever two people who died on my watch, one of whom murdered the other.” So much for staying incognito, Gordon told himself. But he couldn’t let the guest’s remarks go unchecked.
“Only two? Are you sure?” asked the woman, in a sort of amplified, crestfallen, price-check-on-aisle-three tone of voice.
“I counted very carefully, Madam,” he assured her, trying very hard to keep his gaze focussed on her face, and to ignore the almost magnetic downward pull of her collar. “But I was asking whether there was anything with which I could offer assistance. And, excuse my impertinence, but might I know to whom I’m speaking?”
By way of answer, she produced a floral-scented business card from her purse, and passed it to him.
He glanced down at the card in his hand, which in an unnecessarily cursive fashion (the capital ‘W’s, in particular, he felt could have been rendered in an altogether less suggestively pendulous style) proclaimed her to be ‘Grace UnderWire: Purveyor of Support Services for Women’. “You were wanting to see Belle about some matter, Ms—er—Underwire?”
“I was just hoping someone could point me to the hotel lift.”
“The hotel doesn’t have a lift,” Gordon answered. “The hotel is a lift. However, if you wish to get to your room, or to visit the restaurant or obs deck, there are rampways and escaladders clearly marked. Or stairs, if you’d prefer.”
“Stairs? In these shoes? I don’t think so. But could you show me the ramp? I haven’t been up to my room yet. It’s 106.”
“Of course. This way.” Gordon led her along the corridor to the rampway, conscious of Belle’s stare drilling into the small of his back.
Hoping to strike a tone of innocent conversation, he enquired, “Might I ask whether you’ve enjoyed your time at the Plaza, Ms Underwire?”
“It’s been useful enough,” she answered, her voice a thousand cats clawing vainly for purchase on the world’s biggest blackboard.
“Useful. So business, then, rather than pleasure?”
“Goodness me, yes.”
“What kind of business?”
“Why, Mr Manhood, quite the third degree you’re giving me.”
“Mamon,” said Gordon, a little stiffly. I really must update the antivirus on my namebadge. “My apologies, I wasn’t attempting to be intrusive.”
“No offense,” Underwire answered. “I’ve been trying to get people to take a look at my goodies.” They had arrived at the door of her room. She gazed at it, as if expecting it to open automatically for her, before belatedly placing her thumb against the reader built into the doorframe. The door swung inwards. Her luggage waited beside the bed. “Would you like to see them? My goodies, that is?” she asked, in a voice Gordon felt sure must be audible all the way down in Reception.
This woman could hire herself out as a foghorn, Gordon reflected. “I really must be getting back,” he said, attempting ‘wry smile’ but achieving, he was sure, something more sadly akin to ‘leer’.
“It’ll only take a minute,” she replied, her own smile effortless, perfect. And with that, she opened the clasp on her suitcase and pulled out a brassiere, holding it up for his perusal. The smile intensified a notch or two, and was augmented by a dangerously imploring fluttering of Ms Underwire’s lashes.
“It’s—ah—very nice,” said Gordon, feeling a touch of furnace-heat start to lick seductively at his face’s sweat glands, and marvelling at the rapidity with which his hopes for learning something vaguely relevant to Havmurthy’s murder, and his own abduction, seemed to have degenerated into farce. “But I really—”
“It’s a smartbra,” she said, in the tones of an overworked tractor, sans muffler, expressing its pride at a field well ploughed.
“A what?” Gordon asked, curiosity overcoming his own better judgment.
“Smartbra,” she repeated. “It constantly monitors the wearer’s environment—gravity, temperature, air pressure—and adjusts the tension and support settings accordingly.” She held the undergarment out towards him. “This one’s an outer-planet model, set for Jupiter’s gravity, with extra elasticity and heavy-duty hydraulic support. I sold them thousands. Go on, have a feel.”
“I think,” said Gordon, “that I really must be getting back. Thank you for your time, Ms Underwear.”
And he fled.
* * *
The checked-baggage compartment was, naturally enough, located in Skyward 270’s underbasement level, where it would perform, in case of an emergency re-entry, the important dual function of impact cushioning and makeshift additional heat shield. The latter presupposed, of course, that none of the luggage was in fact flammable, a criterion which—while accepted as convenient fact by the Skyward safety engineers who liked to view the vast array of possible calamities which might befall a lift-module with the rosiest-tinted glasses they could lay their metaphoric hands on—would nonetheless hold no water whatsoever in the real universe. Still, Gordon mused, if you went around worrying about all the shortcuts taken by those in charge of travellers’ safety, you’d never—
A shrill siren sliced through the air, causing Gordon to twitch and tip over a carefully-arranged, tarpaulined shape which comprised, it transpired, a stack of percussive instruments in which cymbals were a repeating, perhaps dominant, motif. His attempts to quell the tumbling instruments were scarcely more effectual than his suggestion that they ‘shush’; but, having rearranged the tarp over the scattered sprawl of maracas, tambourines, triangles, castanets, bongoes etc., he noticed that the siren still sounded with, if possible, a steadily-increasing urgency. Belatedly identifying the source of the outburst (and cursing his own misguided choice of a ringtone), he pulled his handheld out of his pocket and activated its comm feature. He was rewarded, if direct video link to a policeman can ever be considered a reward, with a view of the fresh and disconcertingly young face of Warren Tofficer.
“Gordon?”
“Yes.”
“Just thought you should know. There’s been a development.”
“What kind of development?” Gordon asked, inadventently kicking a stray steel-drum.
“Sorry, you busy?”
“No—er, please go on. You’ve identified Havmurthy’s killer?”
“Huh? No, afraid not. Just something else that I thought should be passed on to you. In connection with the Saturn Propulsions situation. There are reports coming in of an explosion at their main testing facility on Dione—no confirmed casualties as yet, but it looks as though it’s destroyed the prototype engine, and there are suggestions that it may have also wiped out the engine’s blueprints. Sat Prop’s keeping quite quiet about the whole thing, as you’d imagine, but it looks pretty major. And it’s upped the ante on whatever form of industrial espionage is behind the whole thing.”
“Sorry … uh, Warren, I don’t really see why you think I need to know this?”
“Looks like there’s a connection with Havmurthy. Or a possible connection, at least. According to some preliminary forensic evidence we’ve received under the radar, it appears that the explosion was set off by contact between a few micrograms of matter and
a few micrograms of antimatter. A mutual annihilation reaction.”
“Big-league stuff,” Gordon conceded. “But I still don’t see—”
“There’s no way of knowing, at this stage, where they got the anticheese from. But the chemical signature of the cheese part of the explosive mix is definitely consistent with the Havmurthy product lines.”
“Meaning?”
“Look, Gordon, I don’t think anyone here knows what to make of this stuff. But I just thought you should know. Watch your back, huh?”
“Uh … yes, of course. Thanks, Warren.” He closed the call, and activated the handheld’s ‘settings’ function to select a less unsettling ringtone.
Maybe he should come down and check on the luggage later, in a better frame of mind.
Man up, Mamon, he told himself, carefully lifting a large vac-resistant suitcase off a small plastimache shipping carton labelled ‘Fragile’ and ‘This Way Up’. The suitcase was light, but frustratingly difficult to heft. (Must be one of those new models with the gravity-reduction system. They’d been introduced just in the last year or so, and several of the spacelines had complained that they would go broke in no time, severed as they would be from the pecuniary lifeblood of excess baggage charges …) He placed the suitcase carefully on the floor and pulled a cargo net out from the wall stanchion to fasten the item into place.
At which precise point, something beeped.
It was a very quick beep, fairly loud, and so high-pitched that one would have to be a pomeranian to properly appreciate all of its attendant nuances of tone and timbre. Among present company, it provoked puzzlement, not least because its brevity had made it more or less impossible to pin to any particular direction. But it also touched a sore point with Gordon, who, while in principle thoroughly comfortable with the notion of luggage that went ‘beep’, in practice held strong views on the undesirability of ‘beep’-uttering containers in close proximity to his physical person. Particularly so several hours after someone had rendered said physical person unconscious and decidedly lacking in raiment, and immediately following his enlightenment as to the unexpected lethality of coagulated dairy products. Accordingly, he did what any sensible individual would do in the circumstances. He pulled out his handheld again.
“Scan,” he said. “Urgent.”
Full-function emergency security sweep will commence after these messages from our sponsors, advised the device, and then proceeded to ask him whether he preferred hard or soft cheese, and whether he’d tried any of Havmurthy’s offerings in this respect? He set the volume to ‘mute’—that really was the most annoying jingle he’d ever heard. Duly silenced, the handheld busied itself with the important task of showing him the process by which Havmurthy’s vintage wares were aged … in, Gordon was beginning to suspect, real time. But the cheesecam footage had, in fact, finished when the beep next sounded. As before, he had no hint as to its location (other than, it would appear, somewhere within the cargo deck), but this time he had a recording. He fiddled for several seconds with the handheld’s playback function, until he had isolated the fractional-second trace during which the beep had sounded.
“Identify,” he said.
Clarify, came the response.
“Identify beep.”
Frequency seventeen-thousand three hundred and forty-one hertz. Duration twenty-seven point eight milliseconds. Apparent volume seventy-one point nine decibels. Margins for error on these measurements will be available after this brief message from our sponsors …
Gordon learned a lot about cheese in the next half an hour. He also learned, eventually, that there were only three corporations in known space which produced devices programmed to automatically emit such a ‘beep’ tone. Two of these corporations, both based in the far-flung zeta quadrant, had had an interstellar embargo placed upon their specialised asteroid-mining bots, and were respectively plaintiff and defendant in a bitter sonic copyright infringement suit. The major product marketed by the third such corporation was a stealth cloak.
Well, it fitted. But it also left Gordon severely disquieted, as well as provoking the dual questions of (1) how a top-of-the-range stealth cloak—exactly the kind of overgarment worn by whoever had attacked Havmurthy—would have found its way into the area set aside for Skyward 270’s passengers’ luggage, and (2) why such a cloak would be manufactured with an inbuilt, highly-audible, and frankly disconcerting ‘low battery’ indicator.
* * *
Gordon spoke into his handheld. “Sue? You busy?”
“A little,” she replied. “I have to reprogram dinner as gluten-free, low GI, non-dairy, and organic—or at least as something which will appear that way, if I turn the restaurant lighting down low enough. That ought to tie me up for the next hour or so. Then I’m supposed to be cleaning out that malfunctioning fridge unit, after which I’ll need to be finding somewhere to store all that cheese. What’s up?”
“Sorry, Sue, did you say cheese?”
“Uh, yes. Why?”
“What d’you mean, ‘store all that cheese’?”
“We’re carrying quite a large consignment. Havmurthy was running a special a week back, major discounts, and I was looking to re-provision the pantry for the next few ascent / descent cycles. Made perfect sense, until this fridge decided to pack a sad—but then I don’t suppose you contacted me to talk about cheese.”
“No, I suppose not,” Gordon said, quite unsure on the topic. “It is all cheese, though, I suppose? I mean, no anticheese?”
“What in heaven’s name is anticheese? Is that that new soy-based—”
“No. Uh, forget it.”
“OK. So what’s up?”
“I need you to build me a locator.”
“Lost your keys again, Gordon?”
“No. There’s a device on the cargo deck somewhere. I need to find it.”
“What kind of ‘device’?” Sue asked. Gordon could hear the sudden anxiety in her voice.
“It’s harmless in itself.”
“Gordon—”
“Sorry. Look, it’s a stealth cloak, emits a low-battery beep. I can give you the specs. I need to find out whose luggage it’s in, and I don’t have time to stand around on Cargo for the next few hours playing echolocator. Can you whip up some kind of detector for me, please?”
“Sure, give me a couple of hours. I should have it done by the time we hit thirty-one thousand, at any rate. But why—”
“—would it have a low-battery beep?” Gordon interrupted.
“Don’t know.”
“No, that wasn’t what I was going to ask.”
“Oh.”
* * *
Gordon had a distracted dinner in 270’s sparsely-populated restaurant, striving all the while to find a setting on his handheld which would circumvent the device’s sudden fascination with the world of dairy protein products, then busied himself with lift-module maintenance and airlock safety testing for the next couple of thousand kilometres. When the ‘descent progress’ display had counted down to twenty-eight thousand, he went looking for the guests. He was particularly keen to make contact with Miharties, since she hadn’t come down to dinner, electing instead to stay in her room.
But there were the two in the bar, right next to the restaurant, so it made sense to talk to them first.
“Just four little words. And it wasn’t until I got to the showers, and the soap, that I realised the wisdom of—”
The voice was like gravel over a rockslide, and Gordon couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to pay to listen to it, but there was no accounting for taste.
Idovist was short, broad-shouldered, with an almost-military-standard salt-and-pepper crewcut, a slight paunch, eyes that were simultaneously watery and piercing, a nose which looked as though it had led a life sufficiently interesting as to merit a biography all of its own, and an impressive collection of vintage scars upon his forearms. He was seated at 270’s bar, which since last year’s refurbishment had been reinvented as a particu
larly unconvincing replica of a Hollywood-style western saloon, complete with buxom robotic barmaid, animatronic piano player, a trompe l’oeil poker-game backdrop, a moustachioed and black-hatted holographic sherriff that entered repeatedly through the swinging saloon doors in a manner reminiscent of nothing so much as a cuckoo clock’s eponymous bird, and a soundtrack featuring whinnying horses and occasional gunfire on much too short a repeat cycle. Ignoring all this and the plastic tumbleweeds besides, Idovist was deep in conversation with the other male guest—Ligotmi, wasn’t it?—when Gordon spotted them, and approached. He’d get to Ligotmi soon enough; but for now, according to the checks he’d run on his handheld, Idovist was his primary concern.
“Mr Idovist? Excuse me for interrupting,” said Gordon, standing a couple of places along from the men at the bar, and manfully resisting the urge to slide his thumbs in behind the band of his belt. “How are you finding things, this trip?”
Idovist turned to look at Gordon. “You mean the floor plan?”
“Well, no. I mean—uh—have you had a successful visit, to, er—”
“Uranus? Yeah, it went well.” Idovist twisted back to face Ligotmi. “Anyway, like I was saying—”
This wasn’t going as smoothly as Gordon had hoped. “Look, I’m sorry to intrude, Mr Idovist—”
