The Genie Out of the Vat

by Eric Flint

  “Besides, the rats all think that sooner or later they’ve got to put one over him,” said Albert, handing him a mug of tea. “The barrow is in the corner. It’s one of yours. Smells a bit.”

  “Rats need something to hope for,” said Abe, going to look at the barrow. He took a mini-stylus-pad out of his pocket and tapped a number into it. “Here you are. Snout. She’s one of the supposed sewage maintenance team your Firkin recruited, Albert. They work in the narrow tunnels better than people.”

  To Rebecca, he explained: “And sewage doesn’t offend them. People were just using empty passages at first, and something had to be done about it. Too much disease risk, apart from the smell, otherwise. Anything else you want to know?”

  Rebecca looked carefully at that bland face. “Just one thing. What is the deputy chairman of Intersolar Mining and Minerals doing here?”

  He hesitated. “You must be mistaken.”

  She shook her head. “Not likely. I never forget a face. And yours takes some explaining. There might even be a motive for murder there.”

  He looked at the puzzled face above the mayor’s beard, then sighed. “Well, if I can’t trust Albert, I can trust no-one. I was getting back to my roots, that’s all. It’s about an old leather suitcase, I suppose.”

  He seemed to think he’d said enough. Rebecca looked at him, unblinking. “Explain.”

  He laughed softly. “The inquisition had nothing on you. I am beginning to think you were well chosen for this job. Very well. I found an old leather suitcase, in what had been my grandfather’s office, when we moving to the new corporate headquarters... well, rather the movers found it. It was a cheap thing, and one of them asked me what should be done with it. It was full of old papers and pictures, he said.”

  He took mouthful of his tea. “I opened it. Looked inside—and found the life story of a man in there. My great-grandfather. Founder of the company, a few name changes back. It was his suitcase. I found out that we had not always been ultra-wealthy corporate moguls.”

  “Most of us were something else before we got to be rockrats,” said the mayor. “We don’t ask what a man’s family history was.”

  Abe acknowledged this with a wry smile. “My great-grandfather had been a pack-peddler. He sold his wares across the Northern Cape, selling to diggers across the semi-desert that was the Kimberly diamond-fields. I started reading the letters in that case. Letters from his family in Poland, letters from the board of the synagogue he helped to found in Kimberly, letters from his wife, letters from miners, letters from farmers and suppliers. I got the picture of a man. He was devout, happy, and strangely, a much-loved man.”

  Abe took a deep pull at his tea-mug. “I can’t say there are many people who loved Intersolar Mining’s and Minerals deputy chairman.”

  “No,” said Rebecca, hoping that she was hiding her feelings on that subject.

  Maybe she didn’t succeed. Or maybe he just read people well. He waved a placatory hand. “It’s a good thing I am not that any more.”

  She had a job to do. Not payback time. Yet. “And the side locks and skullcap?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “An affectation. A reminder that when great-grandfather went out there, blacks and Jews were everyone’s kicking boys. I didn’t mean to become a Korozhet target though. Is that enough?”

  “Not really.” But she was impressed in spite of herself. It was too weird to make up. “It’s a pretty story, but unlikely.”

  He allowed that faint smile back onto his face. “You really are suspicious enough to make a good detective. There was more to it all, of course, but I don’t think that I need to waste your time with it.” There was a finality in his tone which suggested that torture wouldn’t work either. “Perhaps we need to go and look for the rattess Snout. Now.”

  Act III, Scene I: Enter the great detective

  “She’s dead.” said Mercutio, quietly. “Snout is dead.” Davitta had had other brushes with Mercutio. He was normally urbane and slightly sinister, as befitted a prince of the underworld of ratly crimes. Now his voice shook.

  A furry face precluded any sign of paleness, but the voice suggested that the rat was going to pitch face forward any moment. “Sit down,” said the bat, practically.

  “And drink some of this and take heart,” said Firkin, producing a bottle from her sleeve flounces.

  A slap would hardly have shocked Mercutio more. “You... giving out drink?” He hastily snatched the bottle and swigged. And spluttered. ”It’s cold tea!” he said both incredulously and indignantly. “Not even some vile sack. Art trying to kill me?”

  “And do the world a favor.” Firkin snatched the bottle back. “Why did you kill Snout?”

  “T’was not I. I would have done the thing quietly and eaten the evidence. Methinks... she may have been murdered. Come.”

  He led them to a chamber—which one might have passed ten times without finding it, as the door was so neatly hidden in a fold in the rock. There, within, was an Aladdin’s trove of loot. And a small female rat, sprawled. Dead.

  “Out, brief candle,” said Firkin, quietly. “What killed her?”

  “I don’t know. But I will find out,” said Mercutio with grim certainty.

  “The polis... “ said Davitta, fluttering her wings.

  ”Methinks I’ll solve my own problems.”

  Firkin shook her head. “Nay, methinks that it is we, and they, who need you to solve theirs, Mercutio. They have Albert, accused of these murders. We need whoever did that. I was on my way to beg your help.”

  Mercutio looked her in the eye. Nodded slowly. “‘T’was done by the same hand, methinks. Let us go to the Last Chance.”

  “I am not very welcome there,” admitted Davitta, thinking, not for the first time, that even the heroes of the Easter Rising had it easier than a bat trying to follow her conscience. Doing so seemed to have unforeseen consequences, like discovering that your official worst enemies were your friends, and actually drank cold tea.

  Mercutio snorted. “Methinks Laggy does not welcome any non-human. But there is another entrance, and I have connections.”

  “Comrades in thievery, no doubt,” said Davitta.

  “Naturally.” The rat led them off down a passage far too narrow for humans, and too narrow for comfortable flying either. It brought them out a few yard from the Last Chance, in time to see a drunk being ejected through the bat-wing doors. Davitta wondered, as she had many times before, if it was possible to sue the door-makers for slander.

  The drunk must have truly believed he was seeing things, when the bat and two rats pushed stubby digits into four little holes on a low bit of wall, and then disappeared into the hole that appeared... and then the wall sealed up again.

  “What’s this?” squawked Davitta. “Are we trapped?”

  “Be still,” said Mercutio. “Methinks it is just a part of the air recycling system. We have found a few such ducts, but there are doubtless many.”

  “But why have they hid it thus?” The bat fluttered down the dim passage filled with machines, some of which plainly were still working.

  “Without intent, mayhap. It is just neatly cut, we think with a laser. The chamber Laggy has turned into the Last Chance was perhaps a machine room or a dormitory. Be careful of that machine over there. ‘Tis hot.”

  “But... but where does the power come from?” asked Davitta. This was a whole world that she’d not known existed. It was a little alarming to think that they relied on this abandoned Korozhet machinery.

  The rat shrugged. “Why should we care? I was interested for a while when I heard you say, some time back, that all power corrupts, but I stole several batteries and, as yet, I have seen nothing but decay, and not one single offer of a bribe.”

  Mercutio sounded suitably disappointed in this further betrayal by the English language. “Ah. Here we are. The kitchens. The drains. Laggy used what was here. He plainly explored it well.”

  “Ach, that old voyeur. He explores everything wel
l. He has minicams concealed in the girls rooms, I have heard tell,” said Firkin.

  “Hush,” said Mercutio. “We need to go up the stairs. Cookie is a friend of mine.”

  Cookie was short and rotund. And brown. With pink sugar frosting. Well, it probably wasn’t sugar frosting, though with alien life forms you couldn’t be too sure. The alien must have had eyes somewhere, even if Davitta couldn’t see them, because it spoke to them. Or maybe it used some other way of detecting them.

  It spoke in Korozhet, which was still the default language of the soft-cyber units which the Korozhet had used for uplift and enslavement. The enslavement module had been cracked in the rebellion on Harmony and Reason, but the language remained. Hearing it set Davitta’s sharp white teeth on edge.

  “Tell it to speak a decent uncivilized language,” she snapped.

  Mercutio shook his head. “Cookie can’t. That’s why he has to put up with working for Laggy. He was one of the left-behinds when the Korozhet cut and ran. He cleans here.”

  “He is in bondage, you mean?” demanded the bat.

  “Nay. Though a couple of the girls will do that, if the price is right.”

  “I meant a slave,” she explained coldly.

  Mercutio considered this. “I don’t think he is, in the strictest sense of the word. He just doesn’t speak anything but Korozhet and Laggy feeds him. At first there wasn’t anyone else, and I don’t know if he has figured out that he has any other options now.”

  Davitta hissed angrily, despite knowing that it made her sound like an exploding kettle. “And I don’t suppose you saw fit to tell him.”

  Mercutio blinked. “No. Never thought of it. We’ve got a bit of barter and exchange going with him. There is good loot around this place.”

  “Rats!” she snarled. Mercutio was probably merely being truthful. Rats were the epitome of natural selfishness—not that they couldn’t rise above it, it just never occurred to them that there was any need to. “I will liberate him!”

  “Good luck finding the words,” said Firkin. “Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be solving a murder and saving Albert’s groats, seeing as us rats are too idle.”

  The language was literally the problem. The word “liberty” was not in the Korozhet download. It might not even exist in the Korozhet language. It was very hard to think about something you had no word for. She sighed. Was nothing simple?

  “Very well. But as soon as we have this sorted out, I’ll talk to the Jampad about this. They’ll free him even they have to blow the place up to do it.” The humans and even the rats would support that—or at least not prevent them from doing it. Slavery was something abhorrent, especially for the miners that had come from the Korozhet invaded world of Harmony and Reason. Admittedly, the rats only worried about it happening to themselves, but they had been brought to think that if it were done to others, they just might be next.

  “You will do what you will do,” said Mercutio, shrugging.

  Act III, Scene II: into a den of lyings

  “Only a rat will ever get information out of another rat,” said Abe with a shrug. “If they have decided not to tell us where the rattess Snout can be found, we’re not going to find her.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “That’s not why I said I’d be damned. It was that... bar.”

  Abe snorted in amusement. “The pictures on the walls don’t leave much to the imagination, do they?”

  “Not if you’re a lonely rat miner, no,” said Albert with perfect seriousness. “So what do we do now?”

  “Sun Tzu,” said Rebecca.

  “What?” said the mayor, puzzled. Military strategy was not one of his interests, obviously.

  “We take the battle to them,” said Rebecca. “The center of all of this is the Last Chance. It’s not the only brothel around, is it?”

  They both looked a little taken aback at the question. The mayor found his wits first. “No. There are nine such establishments and a fair number of freelancers,” he said.

  Abe coughed and continued: “It’s a refugee colony now, but it was a miners R&R place. That’s what they wanted and they had the money to pay for it. Demand creates supply.”

  “Yet all the murdered women came from just one of those places,” said Rebecca. “I smell a rat, and it isn’t just Firkin, or the missing Snout. Let’s go to the Last Chance and ask some awkward questions.”

  “Man, but that’s a lynch mob brewing in there!” said the mayor uneasily.

  “Exactly. Is there one place a guilty man wouldn’t go, as bold as brass?” asked Abe, grinning. “Besides, as the mayor, tasting the local brews is your civic duty.”

  “That’s part of the problem,” said the mayor, tugging his beard nervously. “No one knows exactly where Laggy stashes his still. God alone knows what goes into the stuff. Evil bastard. He’s changed since the Epsilon III rush. I met him back then. He used to be a nice bloke. They called him ‘honest’ back then because he was too dumb to cheat even the local tax men. He’s learned a lot since then, that’s for sure.”

  “Unusual for a man to learn to have brains,” said Abe, as they walked towards the flashing light outside the bar.

  “He used to drink a lot,” explained the mayor. “Always had his own still. I reckon he drank some bad stuff. He’s given up. Or at least he barely drinks now.”

  “Could happen, I suppose,” said Abe

  “Unlikely,” said Holmes, with a look that said he’d known a few serious drunks.

  They walked through the bat-wing doors and into a sudden silence—from what had been a tumultuous racket moments before.

  Laggy appeared from the midst of what had been the hubbub. “What do you want here, Captain?” he demanded, with a nasty edge to his voice.

  “Just pursuing my enquiries, Mr.. Laguna,” she said, evenly. “I have several lines of enquiry that lead me... here.”

  “The girls weren’t killed anywhere near here!” protested Slim. The crowd stirred like an angry beehive.

  “No,” said the captain, calmly, “but they all came from here. Unusual, I gather for them to even be out of your establishment—and it’s only women from this place who’ve been attacked, even though there are others working the corridors and tunnels. I’ve seen them.”

  There was silence again. Some thoughtful looks.

  “They were all lured out of here,” Laggy insisted. “By that bat.”

  It was such a pity that he lacked the physique to have done the deed.

  Laggy stuck his hand in his pocket. “I was just going to show the boys. I found this note from that bat in Cindy’s things.”

  He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. “That bat lured them out to their death,” he said, as Rebecca untwisted the screw of paper.

  “It sounds to me as if you have a grudge against the council,” said Abe evenly. “First the mayor and now Zed.”

  “It’s obvious. They’re in it together. They want to destroy my enterprise.”

  “Indade, not!” snapped the bat, fluttering out of an air-vent. “You’re a blackhearted vile exploiter.”

  Laggy gaped at her. “I won’t have any non-humans in my bar!” he snapped.

  “No, you’ll keep them as slaves and cleaners instead,” hissed the bat.

  Laggy went white. “I... I...” He fumbled for his flechette pistol.

  “That’s enough,” said Rebecca. “I‘ll remove the bat once we have discussed a few matters. Firstly, would you like to clarify a few matters as concerns this wallet?”

  “I heard that rat of his,” said Laggy, pointing at the mayor, “tell that it was found under the body.”

  Act III, Scene III: Enter the element of surprise, possibly not Watson, but Mercutio

  “I’faith you have mighty keen ears, to hear something I have not said,” said Firkin loftily, from the air-vent. “I bite my thumb at you, Sirrah. But Cookie tells me that he found the wallet here. It was, as is the custom with such items, placed in the container on the bar.
”

  There was a silence. Several people looked at the big glass jar on the end of the bar.

  “Who are you going to believe? Me or some rat?” demanded Laguna.

  “Knowing you, the rat, I reckon,” said one wag, grinning.

  “They’re rogues and liars!” shouted the offended proprietor of the Last Chance saloon.

  “Yes, I am,” said Mercutio, appearing next to Firkin. “But who better to set to catch one?”

  He leaped onto the table—a prodigious jump, but one he was easily capable of. “Attend!” he said to the crowd. “Methinks, you have reached several wrong conclusions. Firstly, you assumed that because the victim was robbed, robbery was part of the motive for the killing.”

  “But they were robbed. All of them,” said Slim. “Are you trying to tell us they were robbed before they were attacked? I might believe that happened once...”

  “The bodies were robbed after death. After they had been murdered. Not by the murderer.”

  “Who would do that kind of thing? Anyway, we found them,” said Slim, waving at several friends of his in the crowd.

  The rat reached into his pouch and flung a rather distinctive silver filigree hairgrip on the table. Several people plainly recognized it by the gasps. “Ah, but methinks you did not find them first. Ask then of the captain. What artifact did she find at the last murder?”

  “A rat barrow,” supplied the captain.

  The rat nodded. “Rats move through the passages. They will loot. You all know that.”

  The crowd laughed.

  “Indade. As it happens a rattess named Snout did find the last body. She did rob it. And she too has been killed,” said the bat. “We seek her murderer.”

  “Who cares if another bloody rat is dead? They’re scavengers and thieves. And what does it matter if they robbed the victims?” Laggy calmly reached for a bottle and began filling glasses, as if nothing could ever upset his equilibrium.

  “Methinks it matters because if you are wrong about the sequence of events of one part of the crime, you could be wrong about another,” said Mercutio.