The Gordon Mamon Casebook

by Simon Petrie

  “I think so too,” replied Gordon, sotto voce. “Doesn’t mean she’s not dangerous.”

  “When you’ve quite finished …” Underwire said.

  “What happened on Enceladus?” Gordon asked her, still playing desperately for time. Hoping that the Incapacitator’s barrel stayed dark.

  “That’s where they did the encoding,” said Underwire. “Someone in Havmurthy’s grilled cheese factory has synthesised a whole series of junk-protein sequences, coding for the Saturn drive’s blueprints. They were releasing them, one set a week, concealed as a trace ingredient in Havmurthy’s Red Leicester. Hints started turning up that someone was nicking IP from Saturn and broadcasting it. They’ve gone frantic trying to shut it down, monitoring every transmission possible, every piece of written material. Nobody thought to check the cheese. But it’s there, plain as day, for anyone to read. All you need is a protein sequencer.”

  “How many people does—did—Havmurthy have working for him?” asked Gordon.

  “Something like fifty-seven thousand, system-wide, I think,” said Underwire. “Where you going with this?”

  “If all you’ve got is something that was happening on Enceladus,” said Gordon, “what makes you think Havmurthy was involved at all? It could very possibly have been just a rogue employee, or a rogue group of employees.”

  “No, it had to be Havmurthy. The guy travelled everywhere. He’d been to Enceladus at least twice.”

  “He was the CEO,” Gordon objected. “The big cheese. Of course he’d visit the factories from time to time.”

  “Are you delivering this monologue, or am I?”

  “Actually,” said Gordon, “describing this as a ‘monologue’ is probably a bit of a misno—”

  “You finished?” The gun flashed towards him for emphasis.

  Gordon nodded assent, keeping his eyes focussed on her weapon.

  “Good.”

  “But I still don’t understand why I’m involved in this,” said Gordon. “Why you stunned me.”

  “I make no apologies for the effect I have on men.”

  “I mean—” Gordon began.

  Underwire interrupted. “I saw Havmurthy stop to talk to you in the Skytop atrium. I picked you for his accomplice. Made sense. I knew your module was carrying a bulk shipment of Havmurthy samples.”

  “That had nothing to do with me,” Gordon said. “Sue placed that order.”

  “Which one’s Sue?”

  “I am,” she said, peering out from behind Gordon’s shoulder. “And I ordered it because it was on special. End of story.”

  “You may be right.” Underwire refocussed on Gordon. “I certainly didn’t learn anything useful off your handheld. For all I knew, though, you could’ve been in with Havmurthy. Matter of fact, I’ve still no evidence you’re not.”

  “He was asking me the time!” said Gordon. “At least, I think that’s what happened. Memory’s a bit hazy.”

  “That’d be the Hypnotismol. Plan was to dose you and Havmurthy, pump the two of you for info, instruct you to forget the attack and the interrogation, and leave you in one of Skytop’s saunas. But when the stun killed Havmurthy, I … got cold feet. I never intended anyone to get killed. And I panicked. Best I could think of was dragging him to the nearest ladies’, dumping him there, stabbing him to disguise the method of death, and getting myself clear. After I dragged you in there as well, of course, to keep you from raising the alarm. Because I couldn’t be sure the Hypnotismol was going to work as directed. I mean, the stun setting hadn’t exactly lived up to expectations—”

  “And stripped and bound me to buy more time. OK, makes sense. But why take the handheld?”

  “I thought you were Havmurthy’s accomplice, remember? I thought I could mine it for intel. Then I found out you were one of the house dicks, and that my descent ticket was for this lift-module. Your module. Seemed like too much of a coincidence. So then I needed some way to keep an eye on you, without arousing your suspicion. It seemed prudent to ‘upgrade’ the handheld with a spot of spyware—”

  “Freeware, more like. You should at least have plumped for the ads-free version. Would’ve been a bit less obvious,” suggested Gordon. Now, at last, Sue seemed to have shuffled across behing him.

  “Well, that’s your opinion,” said Underwire. “And any second now, your opinion isn’t going to count for anything anymore. Goodbye, Mr Mandolin.” She sighted along the Incapacitator.

  “Mamon. Ms Underwire. Grace. Don’t do this.”

  “I’ve got too much to lose to back out now.”

  “Havmurthy’s killing—that was an accident. Or at least—”

  “If you’re suggesting I can’t kill in cold blood, think again.” She fired. Sue shrieked.

  The energy blast went wide, grazing Gordon’s left arm. The pain was like a burst of mains electricity. Needle-sharp, backed up by scorching, numbing blunt force. Somewhere behind Gordon, the top crate on the stack of Idovist’s pop-psych books disintegrated in a noisy confetti of plastipaper fragments.

  “Piece of shit internet merchandise,” said Underwire, sighting again.

  “Don’t mind me,” explained Yuri Ligotmi, who chose this moment to appear in the doorway, clutching an electric ukelele by the neck. “I’m just looking for my green tambourine.”

  Underwire turned to face the newcomer. Gordon grabbed the cloak from the suitcase, threw it over Sue, and rushed Underwire. She turned back and shot Gordon square in the kneecap. He went down in agony.

  Ligotmi brought the solid-bodied ukelele down on Underwire’s head. She fell to the deck, unconscious.

  * * *

  ”Always wanted to do that,” Ligotmi said, when he and Sue had finished trussing and gagging the struggling Underwire in as many items of clothing—mainly, as it turned out, Smartbras—as they could lay their hands on. “Not the tying-up-chicks thing, ‘cos that’s not cool if it’s not consensual. I mean, the Pete Townsend bit with the guitar. Must see if I can work that into the act. Pity it didn’t break, though. Man, that would’ve been awesome! Don’t suppose either of you knows who makes guitars that break properly nowadays?”

  “Yuri … I don’t think you realise what you’ve just got yourself involved in,” said Gordon, sitting up with difficulty while Sue wrapped a pressure bandage around his swollen and throbbing knee. “There’ll be all manner of reports, police interviews … it could be months before they uncover exactly what was going down with Havmurthy, and whether Underwire was acting alone or was part of a cartel. It’s likely your name is going to get dragged through the mud. And you’d probably better give up on getting any revenue from that ad jingle you did for Havmurthy. It’d get you the wrong kind of attention, with what’s been happening.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Ligotmi. “Anyway, loss of revenue isn’t an issue. I’ve just had word that the U238 tour is definitely going ahead, with me and the band as the support act. So we’re better off without Cheeses Is Just Alright With Me.”

  “That’s what it’s called?” asked Sue, blushing. “I’d always heard it as She Scissors Just Alright With Me. I mean, whatever lights your candle, but maybe not quite the mental image Marketing was hoping to evoke …”

  “Doesn’t matter to me, or the band. Right now,” Ligotmi said, shrugging, “we’re more popular than cheese is.”

  * * *

  ”I wouldn’t try moving that leg for at least a day,” Sue advised. “You took a fair wallop of stun damage.”

  Gordon tried to protest, tried to sit up, tried to make himself comfortable. At length he settled for just falling back on the sick bay bed, while Sue picked up the scraps of bandages and wrappings that littered the alcove’s floor. He looked across at the other bed, currently occupied by a heavily trussed and sedated Underwire. “They look so peaceful when they’re asleep, don’t they?” he quipped. Or tried to. Deep rivets of pain hammered into his knee.

  Sue, it seemed, wasn’t having it. She frowned.

  “What’
s up?” he asked.

  Her grimace deepened. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “Doesn’t what bother me?” he asked. “Getting shot? Sure it bothers me. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Not that. I mean, doesn’t it bug you that we still don’t know who was behind it? Behind Underwire. Whose idea was it all?”

  “No,” he replied. “No, that doesn’t matter to me. I’m happy to let the police get to the bottom of it.”

  “I’m not so sure they will,” she said.

  “How d’you mean?”

  “I think Grace was a patsy. I think she took the rap … Gordon, this is big-league stuff. Industrial espionage, murder, intellectual property … you don’t just decide to try your hand at this, on the off chance. On a whim. No way Underwire was acting alone—I mean, be fair, she doesn’t look remotely like the lone-wolf type. This cheese-explosion thing that she didn’t seem to know anything about. And no genuine hardened crim would have let that standoff run on anywhere near as long as it did …”

  Everyone’s an expert, Gordon thought to himself. “Sue, she was just out of her depth, the whole thing had ballooned out of her control. Hell, if my knee and my arm didn’t hurt so bad I might almost find it in my heart to feel slightly sorry for her. But it’s done. She got greedy, she tried something she wasn’t cut out for, she made mistakes, and we’ve got her tied up. End of story. Poetic justice, in the circumstances. Hell, at least she gets to keep her clothes on.”

  “But … you’re just not getting it, are you?”

  “Getting what?”

  “Who would be behind this, I mean, Gordon. Who would have the most at stake.”

  “Look, if you want to go down that path, I guess it’d be the spacelines. Any one of them gets a competitive edge—and let’s face it, the new drive would be one hell of an edge—they could very easily put the rest out of business.”

  “That’s who’d have the most to gain from buying into this. What about who’d have the most to lose from its adoption? Think about it, Gordon. A hyperspace drive, able to operate arbitrarily close to any planetary surface, offering near-instantaneous travel between any of the planets in the solar system … Thanks to Underwire, Havmurthy’s dead, and the cheese feed has presumably been turned off. So although some of the drive specs have been leaked, it’s not the full set of blueprints. And aside from Underwire—and let’s face it, there’s no way she could be directly involved in the explosion that took out the prototype drive and the original plans, given that that happened half the Solar system away … look, I’m really not sure how much of the genie is left to put back in the bottle, and maybe I’m just letting my paranoia get the better of me, but … you’re the detective here, Gordon. Maybe you can see something I’m missing. Because I really don’t think Underwire was acting alone, or even off her own bat. I certainly don’t think she was the one calling the shots.”

  “But—”

  “It goes deeper than that, I’m sure. Why the explosion at Dione?”

  “Havmurthy trying to eliminate the prototype, I guess. Makes his blueprints all the more marketable.”

  “Gordon, there’s no way that explosion was down to Havmurthy.”

  “His cheese,” Gordon protested.

  “Precisely. Why would Havmurthy advertise his own involvement, when the whole blueprint-smuggling schtick depended on running under the radar? It’s obviously someone out to discredit Havmurthy, take him out of the equation.”

  “But Dione—doesn’t seem likely Underwire could’ve been involved in that. The distance—”

  “Exactly. Like I said, Underwire’s just a pas—a patsy. Someone that allows the police to conclude ‘case closed’, just because they’ve got Havmurthy’s killer. When in reality, the whole thing’s anything but closed. I keep telling you, someone’s been playing really dirty with this. Someone who wanted both to stick it to Saturn Propulsions, and to any competitors that might’ve tried to jump on that bandwagon. Someone with plenty to lose, and deep pockets. Deep corporate pockets. Someone with enough collateral to synthesise anticheese—and you can’t tell me that’s going to be cheap, nor easy. Must be some organisation with a helluvalot invested, for one reason or another, in keeping up the obstacles to prompt and straightforward planet-to-planet travel.”

  “Not getting your point, sorry, Sue,” replied Gordon, reaching for his handheld.

  “Just take a step back, huh? Try to see the big picture …”

  “Sue, I’ve no problem with taking a step back, as long as there’s a safety rail. But as for the big picture … I’d rather leave that side of things to the cops.”

  She mumbled something he didn’t catch, and left to get a start on the breakfast menu.

  Gordon, revelling in his hardwon solitude, flicked a crossword up onto his handheld’s screen. He was soon lost in an interlocking set of cryptic clues, as all the while the Skywards Corporation’s lift-module 270 carried its lucrative cargo of passengers and freight on the ponderous three-day descent from the sprawling geostationary hotel towards the Earth’s surface.

  A Night to Remember

  (originally written as an ‘event’ for SpecFicNZ Blogging Week 2012, in seven daily episodes.)

  There were several ‘alert’ tones programmed into Gordon’s handheld. The tone it was emitting now was reserved for the higher-ups in Skyward’s admin hierarchy (who, ironically, seldom shifted upshaft from Skyward Island, with more than one voicing the opinion that “they wouldn’t go on that thing if you paid me”) was that same ‘baaa-dum’ sound that occurs to nine out of ten middle-aged people when they see slow-motion footage of an approaching shark. From the way the handheld was sounding off, it seemed as if Gordon, and the beachfront hoverbus he was currently travelling on, must be surrounded by a veritable school of white pointers. He looked out the hoverbus’s window, at the happy vista of palm trees, tourists, and mid-afternoon tropical sunshine, and toggled the handheld’s ‘Mute’ setting.

  The handheld baaa-dummed again. Damn. There weren’t that many people who had an admin override code for Gordon’s device. Whoever it was must really have a good reason for contacting him. Which was precisely why Gordon thumbed the handheld once more to ‘silent’.

  With the next override, the alert tone evinced not sharks, but an infamous shower sequence in which a knife might just possibly have featured. It was probably unwise to delay further.

  “Gordon here.”

  “Gord! Thank goodness—been trying to reach ya. Where you at?”

  “Col?” Gordon’s heart sank (not that it had been at that high an altitude to begin with, what with the inferred sharks and all). He could remember the upshot of the last call he’d taken from Colum O’Cable, the space elevator’s ops manager and HR troubleshooter. And the call before that, and the call before that. None of them had ended well, from Gordon’s perspective at least. “I’m … look, what is it you’re after? I’m kind of busy.”

  “Got a job for you. Urgent. Freight run, climb commencing in one hour.”

  “One hour? Sorry, Col. I’ve only been dirtside six hours, after the last descent. And I’d never make it back to Skyward in time. I’m … uh, in the Swiss Alps.”

  “Swiss Alps? Then how come I can hear a carousel in the background?”

  “Ah … yeah. They have carousels in the Swiss Alps, you know. One or two. Wish I could help, Col, but …”

  “And a splash pool, from the sound of it. Waterslide. Kids laughing. At this time of night? In winter?”

  “Sorry, Col, did I say ‘Swiss Alps’? I meant, ah, Acapulco Beach.” (Was Acapulco Beach more than an hour’s flight from Skyward I? He sincerely hoped so.)

  “Gordon. Are you forgetting there’s a GPS telltale on your handheld? It’s showing you here on Skyward, at the corner of Clarke and Heinlein, just opposite the Marsport Without Hilda nightclub. I can see the hoverbus from … look, if you’re at Acapulco Beach, I’m at Santa’s grotto.”

  “No, I—”

 
“Splendid. I’ll have a flitter there to pick you up in five minutes. Get off at the next bus-stop.”

  “Five minutes? Col, I—look, isn’t there anywhere else crewed for this run?”

  “There was. But the regular freight jockeys missed their air-taxi connection. Some team-building exercise at a stately home, in old England, that went a little too well—power failure, alarm clock malf, jetlag. Hangovers, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m still sorting out the details, and there will be blood. But right now I need boots on the ground, and you’re the only qualified pair of boots I can get my hands on. Thanks, Gord. There’ll be a bonus.”

  For you or me? Gordon wondered. “It’s not about the bonus, Col, it’s—oh, what the hell. What’s the freight?”

  “Tell you when you get here,” said Col.

  “It’s not another conference, is it? Because I swore after that last one, what was it, the First Interorbital Symposium on Solipsism—”

  “What are you complaining about? That went well, by all accounts.”

  “Well? That’s what you’d call ‘well’? One hundred and ninety attendees, one hundred and eighty-nine of whom took it as a personal affront that they hadn’t been offered the keynote speaker’s spot, and who then decided to mob the lectern, all shouting “Impostors!” at each other … worst four days of my life, Col. I’d almost rather spend my time looking down the barrel of a needle-gun, wielded by this month’s homicidal maniac.”

  “Ah, well. You needn’t worry about that. Just freight. Unless you wanted to swap with Barry, and depart an hour later. That one’s a conference. ‘Legless and Lethal’, I think it’s called, overseen by Electra Keel and Anna Conder.”

  “Thank you, no. Freight? What sort of freight?”

  “Tell you when you get here. It’ll be fun.”

  I rather doubt that, Gordon told himself as he reluctantly alighted from the hoverbus, to be met by the sauna-like heat of a Skyward Island afternoon, and shortly after by the promised flitter.