Analog SFF, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "The other two models are the Pipe Dream, manufactured in Macao by Red Star Industrial, and the Magic Mole, manufactured in Burbank by an outfit called Whack-A-Hole. Both pieces of equipment use the same technology, matter transcompression—"

  "They eat dirt and rocks and squirt out pipe."

  "Yes. Self-contained, nuke powered. A feature of the Magic Mole, however, is its ability to fill the pipe it's made with anything the contractor wishes, whether it's an inline computer-controlled valve, a line switch—"

  "Or what it removed,” I completed. “Does Whack-A-Hole have a twenty-four-hour office in London?"

  "Yes."

  "See if Marcus Licinius Crassus can get the manufacturer to give up a customer list. Meanwhile, take the cruiser over to where Bowman's body was found. If our killer used a Magic Mole to get a portable image implanter into Champion's stall, I'm pretty certain the same was done where Bowman was killed. Perhaps we can get in at that end. The forest floor there, at least, isn't made of plastic or granite."

  * * * *

  It was well past three in the morning by the time we located the tunnel entrance. It was beneath the remaining branches of the dead tree next to the pine that had Champion's hair on it. No attempt had been made to fill the hole. It looked, in fact, as though a fox or some large burrowing animal had dug it. Shad had Whack-A-Hole's British customer list, and it was daunting. Every municipality, hamlet, and large institution in the country had one or more of the tools, as well as plumbers, drain layers, and building contractors of all types. For the mundane tasks of laying pipe or running conduit, it seemed, there was nothing like a Magic Mole. To take all the variously formatted employee databases of all of the institutions and companies and run each person's antecedents against our total name database was beyond our capacity. Shad logged into the Heavitree ABCD Center and gave the task to the mainframe. Meanwhile, we got small, copied into our micros, and entered Whack-A-Hole's underworld.

  Once the excitement of being confronted by a belligerent salamander and several alarming spiders was past, monotonous would be too generous a description of how it felt to be in a flying lipstick traveling down an apparently endless but definitely featureless length of dark pipe. After a few minutes of travel there was a very gentle arc toward the northeast, and we traveled along that, gradually descending all the while. After more than an hour of this, another gentle arc had us heading due east, but still descending. “Here's something interesting,” said my partner at last.

  "Let me have it, Shad. I'm stimulation-starved to the point where I could eagerly listen to knock-knock jokes."

  "You know how fast a twenty-five centimeter diameter Magic Mole can travel through an unobstructed pipe of its own manufacture?"

  "Can't say that I do."

  "It can top sixty kilometers per hour under its own power. With compressed air behind it, the mole can top a hundred and seventy."

  "Fascinating."

  "I only bring it up, Jaggs, because I note we are both flying along at our top speed of four kilometers per hour. Sort of made me wonder what the plan is, should we find a Magic Mole coming at us from the other direction."

  I thought on it. “In such case, we get annihilated. Now that you bring it up, it would probably behoove us to maintain a continuous data sync with the cruiser. That way, should we get swatted, we'll remember it. What's our signal like to the cruiser pickup?"

  Shad ran a quick signal strength and fidelity test. “Weak. I'm bringing the cruiser over our present position.” After a minute or two, Shad ran the test again. “Perfect. As long as the cruiser follows along above us, it should be fine."

  "Very well. Keep an eye on the autodrive monitor, though. Wrapping the cruiser around a tree or dashing it to pieces on a building or rock cliff would be all Supt. Matheson needs to sack both of us."

  "Something from Exeter coming in,” he announced. “Fantronics's maintenance division currently keeps three Magic Mole systems in its inventory. Two of the systems were replaced three months ago. Apparently the replaced systems were destroyed along with a lot of other equipment when the division's warehouse in Reading was consumed in a chemical fire. Kind of a drastic way to cover up an equipment theft,” he observed.

  "But effective."

  That was all the excitement we had until we came to a point just west of Old Bones Village Ruin. Twenty meters north of the National Park Information Center was a junction. To our left a tunnel led due north. That was likely the other end of the tube that led to Champion's stall. Straight ahead, however, was the real question mark. Without discussion, Shad and I had both flown in that direction. Another few meters and the tube took a ninety-degree turn south.

  "Oops!” said Shad.

  "What is it?"

  "Nothing."

  "You said ‘Oops,’ Shad. Oops is never good."

  "We—I almost ran the cruiser into that little information center in the ruins. I put it in hover park.” He aimed his sensors at me. “That's where the tunnel leads, Jaggs: the basement of that building."

  "Find out who is employed there."

  While Shad accessed the park authority records, we moved ahead until suddenly there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Several lights, actually. I zoomed in on them and they looked like instrument lights on some sort of control panel.

  "Hold up, pard,” said Shad, causing both of us to come to a halt.

  "Who did you find?"

  "No one—I mean, there's no record of anyone ever being employed there. According to the Park Authority, there is no information center there. There's no record of anyone even thinking about it. It's a front."

  "Shad, give me the cruiser controls.” In a moment, I was looking through the cruiser's forward camera. It was still dark. The infrared illumination revealed the back side of the little building. A late-model Honda electric was parked there on the uncut grass. I maneuvered the cruiser around until I could see the front of the building. As evidenced by the weeds and grass growing in it, the crushed gravel path to the front door had seen little traffic. There was a sign on the door saying that the center was closed for repairs and thank you for all your patience. I left the cruiser hovering there and turned to Shad. “Let's go."

  We moved toward the end of the tunnel, and long before we reached the end we could tell the space beneath the small building was much larger than the structure above, the curiously scalloped walls apparently carved from the granite bedrock courtesy of a Magic Mole. There was the sound of a small internal combustion engine running. The panel lights we had seen from inside the tunnel were mounted in the face of a large orange-colored console. Mounted above the lights was an identification plate, which cleverly named the machine upon which it was mounted a genuine Whack-A-Hole Magic Mole Control. To the right of the console on the wet granite floor were what looked like pipes of different diameters. Shad moved over to them to see what they were. Beyond the pipes and extending as far as I could see in the carved-out space were what looked to be piles of purple glass hockey pucks—millions of them.

  "These pipe thingies are different-sized Magic Mole bits in their containers,” said Shad.

  "See if you can tell what those piles of purple things are."

  "Puckets,” he answered immediately.

  "Sorry?"

  Shad aimed his lens at me. “I ran across it when I put in the search for boring equipment and came across Whack-A-Hole. Transcompression equipment manufacturers call them puckets. When the Mole goes through certain dense materials, like granite for instance, there's stuff left over after the matter transcompression forms the tube lining. The Mole compresses the excess material to about a sixth of its volume and excretes it in this form: puckets.” Shad aimed his lens to his right. “Hello?"

  I turned in the direction my partner was facing. Behind the Mole control unit was a refrigerator, a table with a hotplate, and a shelf with a few tins and boxes on it: biscuits, crisps, jam and such. To the right of this rudimentary kitchen, standing next to a stairway,
was a forty-year-old vertical EMU capsule, its casing scratched and dented, its bottom sitting in at least five centimeters of water. “Where's all this water coming from?"

  I slipped a bit to my left and saw the companion capsule standing next to the first in a send-receive configuration and a massive old engram management unit console beyond it. I hadn't seen equipment that old since I copied into my first bio. The EMU console was located next to an equally vintage stasis bed. In repose upon the bed was a middle-aged woman dressed in Wranglers and a Harris tweed jacket over an olive turtleneck. Her hair was graying, unusually short, and she wore heavy black-framed eyeglasses. Her skin color was bright red. “Shad, run the air quality."

  After thirty seconds, Shad said, “I'm glad we're in the mechs, Jaggs. The carbon monoxide level in here is lethal. If she's not dead, she's not an oxy breather."

  "Get a DNA and liver temp."

  While Shad was sticking a needle into the corpse, I flew past the stasis maintenance console following the sound of what I suspected was a generator. Indeed it was, and a petrol burner at that, the fuel bladder tucked into the northeast corner of the chamber. Air was piped into its carburetor from outside and the exhaust fed into a stack that went up through the floor above. The seal between the purple glass exhaust pipe and stack was leaking badly, the glass apparently cracked. Just behind the generator, the scalloped chamber wall was wet and dripping. It was rainwater seeping through the dirt between the edge of the building and the bedrock.

  I reversed course and as I passed the stasis bed, Shad was running the DNA ID on the body. Past the EMU capsules I turned left and left again to go up the long staircase. The door to the upstairs was open slightly and I moved in, the overcast sky visible through one of the windows just beginning to grow light. There was enough furniture and decoration in the room to convince someone looking through a window that this was indeed an official information center. There was, however, only the one room, a closet with nothing in it, and the stairwell leading to the mysterious cavern below.

  I did a quick analysis of the upstairs air and the carbon monoxide level above ground was even more concentrated than below. The exhaust stack from the generator came up through the floor at the back of the building, apparently with the assistance of a Magic Mole, which had made the glass stack pipe, as well. The piping ran across the open ceiling and up into the casing of the pseudo brick chimney. Prefab the building might have been, but it was fairly tight, without a crack or hole large enough for me to get to the outside. I was about to call an end to my meat suit's stasis and have myself land the cruiser and open the door with a pry bar, but I hate doing that. When the mech and the meat suit both are running at the same time and independently altering our engram content, there are always sync problems with useful items frequently deleted in the resolution. It was unnecessary, though. I opened the mail slot in the door and exited through it. Once outside I moved up to the roof and over to the chimney. One glance down the chimney showed what was blocking the generator exhaust port: dead birds.

  As I came back through the mail slot and down the stairs, Shad was returning from the direction of the pucket dump. We both altered direction and stopped at the stasis bed. “Did you ID the body?” I asked Shad.

  "DI Jaggers, I'd like you to meet the late Dr. Shirley Wurple. She's been dead a little over three hours. Find out where the water's coming in?"

  "In the back. There's no foundation. The rain caused the building to settle slightly, which cracked the exhaust seal and probably toppled a couple of dead birds in the chimney over the exhaust port, blocking it."

  "Something doesn't mesh, Jaggs. She's a wheel at Fantronics, right? She has to have access to better equipment than these old junkers."

  "Probably left over from her research days with Dr. Widdows, Shad. She wanted her plans under the radar. Junkers are junked, you see, not registered."

  "So, why? We're back to motive. Why'd she try to kill us and, presumably, Miles Bowman?"

  I thought on it until, at last, a mouse brought me the answer. “When you were married, Shad, before your flying days, did your wife ever bring you a sweetie when you were feeling low, some sort of little treat to bring you out of your doldrums?"

  "Sure—” He aimed his light at me. “The mouse! That doesn't happen with real critters and their mates."

  "She tried to kill us, Shad, because she didn't want us to discover that she killed Bowman. She killed Bowman for the very noblest of reasons: to protect her family. She's Archie Quartermain's mate and is about to become a mother. I think if you check inside those EMU capsules you'll find fox hair that won't match up with Quartermain's. Have you seen that image implanter?"

  "I haven't found it, and I looked."

  "Unfortunate."

  "Jaggs, don't you think Archie's in this with her?"

  "No. I believe your old roommate thinks his mate is a genuine vixen. Why should he think anything else? He's not a proper fox himself. Where's his den?"

  "When I was mapping the dirt tunnels, I found a couple of wide spots, but nothing like a place to sleep or make little foxes. No little animal bones—"

  "Can you get us back to Old Bones, where Quartermain first talked to us?"

  "Sure, but it'll take hours to go back the way we came."

  "Let's take a shortcut. We can get out through the mail slot."

  I led the way and we hurried. There was no telling what Shirley Wurple might do with that image implanter once she awakened and found out she was dead.

  * * * *

  Once we left the mail slot, it was a mere thirty meters south to reach the entrance to the burrow. After reaching his rather lean receptionist, I led the way over Old Bones's ribcage to the back of the chamber and into the hole between the two rock slabs. According to Shad's map, the hole turned abruptly down, then zigzagged generally southwest until it entered an inclined shaft carved by groundwater. The shaft led to a small grotto illuminated by two very dim cracks of natural light from the surface. There was not even enough room for a man to stand upright, but the tiny cave averaged between one and two meters wide and well over forty meters in length where it began sloping down, the overflow pouring into a rubble-filled channel that presumably found its way to Becka Brook.

  "When the vixen brought Quartermain his mouse, this is where she came from. This is to where Quartermain followed her after leaving me.” I turned and aimed my lens at Shad's micro. “Something I don't understand. With the research Quartermain did on foxes and the hunt, your old roommate had to know about that mouse—that it didn't fit. Is it possible that Archie Quartermain deluded himself into thinking Shirley Wurple is a real vixen?"

  "You should've seen me stalking that hooded merganser all over Maine. It's a good thing she was a real bird or she would've taken out papers on me. When you're lonely and desperate, you can talk yourself into believing anything. Archie lives in a hole in the ground. By the time he could afford to buy himself a designer meat suit he was already a fox in his head. Trouble is, when we copy into one of these ams, we bring that human need for companionship along with us. After a lonely couple of years by himself, running before the hounds his only meaning in life, along comes this warm, cute, sexy little vixen who wants to rub, cuddle, bring him mice, and make little foxes. You bet he could delude himself—Hold it."

  After Shad's warning, we both fell silent and streaked for cover. We were behind a small ledge, our lights off, our sensors on. A warm mass was entering the chamber from above. “I heard that,” said a voice. It was Quartermain. Shad and I moved our mechs out from behind the ledge. The fox was standing beside the pool of water. “What are you two doing here?” he demanded.

  "Where's your mate, Arch?” asked Shad.

  "My mate?"

  "The vixen who's fixin’ to make you a pappy."

  He walked a few steps in one direction, then turned and walked back, leveling his gaze on Shad's micro. “What do you want with her? She's a fox—a real fox."

  "She's nothing of th
e sort,” I said. “She's a Fantronics bio imprinted with the engrams of a woman named Shirley Wurple."

  Quartermain was so still he could have been a taxidermist's showpiece. “Doctor Shirley Wurple?” he said to my micro.

  "Yes."

  "The person who ... Bloody hell.” He sat next to the water and stared deep into the pool. “She killed Miles, didn't she?"

  "Yes,” I answered as Shad crossed the pool to investigate something. “I don't know if this helps, Quartermain, but I think she believed she was doing it for her family: you and the coming cubs."

  "How did she do it?"

  "During the run, after you passed that spot in Quik Grove lane, she cut your scent trail with probably some sort of chemical, then laid a drag trail into the thick woods, probably with one of your former body parts from a previous hunt."

  "She has an old tail of mine. A bit morbid, but I thought it was kind of touching."

  "When Miles reached that particular spot in the grove, she hit the horse with an image implant that drove the animal insane. Champion saw Miles Bowman as a threat—"

  "—and then Champion trampled to death the man who loved him more than anyone else in the world,” completed Quartermain. “This is insane. Back in the Fantronics lab, that woman—I thought she was joking. She made like she was flirting with me when she was getting me ready to print into my fox suit—making jokes about buying my human self and bringing it home with her for fun and games—She must've been sixty! You don't suppose she actually bought me."

  "No,” Shad said from the other side of the pool. “The old you is in Hollywood right now under the name of Trent Scanlon playing the feature role of Saddam Hussein in the black comedy Uday and Qusay are Ed-day. Principal photography began last February."