A quick inspection revealed how to reactivate the high voltage function of the man in gray’s phone and he became very attentive when I placed it a centimeter or two away from the juncture of his legs and torso.
“Who paid you?” I said. I leaned my mouth next to his ear and made a “Zzzzzzttt!” sound like arcing current.
He flinched. “It was all anonymous,” he said. “I got text messages from an untraceable phone with the details.”
“What about the payment?”
“Fifty thousand galcreds in a gym bag in a locker at the Buckhead YMCA.”
“Are you an Isolationist?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” he said. “I like to have a smoke every now and then without worrying about dying.”
“Then why the anti-GaFTA comments?”
“The script was all in the text messages.”
“So you’re going to play the part of an Isolationist when the cops get here?”
“The texts said there’s another fifty thousand in it for me if the cops and press believe it,” he bleated. “Don’t squeal on me, I need the money.”
“We’ll see. What’s your name, Sparky?”
“Cornell,” he said. “My associates are Penn and Princeton.”
“Okay. You and your Ivy League colleagues…” I indicated the two trussed and concussed men in blue pinstriped suits who were now coming around, “…follow my lead.”
I turned off and pocketed Cornell’s stun phone and asked my phone to remind me to analyze it tomorrow. Then I heard what sounded like the pitter-patter of dainty six-ton bull Dauushan feet at the far end of the corridor. The donut-happy capitol police officers were almost here. I pasted a dumb and helpful look on my face and waited for them to arrive.
Chapter 4
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” – Harry S Truman
When the squad of police reached the antechamber the room felt a lot smaller. It was clear that most of the officers hadn’t been skipping the fried peach pies at The Varsity. There were five of them. Four deputies were all cut from the same central casting rural Southern cop mold with prominent jowls and guts straining Sam Brown belts. The capitol police force is a dumping ground for county sheriffs who lose elections. The fifth one, a lieutenant, was a total contrast. He was tall, black, in good shape, and serious. He looked me over professionally. This would be harder than I’d thought. The deputies took up most of the space, but the lieutenant had a brain and asked the questions.
“I’m Lieutenant Lee,” he said. “Did you call this in?”
There were two ways to play this—stupid or short. I opted for short.
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s your business down here?”
“I maintain the equipment in the network room.”
“I see,” said Lieutenant Lee. “What did you find when you got here?”
“These three men tied up on the floor.”
Cornell, Penn and Princeton looked at me from the concrete floor and nodded.
“Did you see anyone else in the area?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you notice anything unusual?”
“Just all the empty boxes. Vendors are supposed to break down their boxes and take them away when they’re done.”
Lieutenant Lee made a note on his tablet with a stylus.
“Did you know about any new equipment being installed?”
“No, sir. That’s another reason why I thought it was unusual.” Not that I was always told about deliveries ahead of time. The big communications companies could be cavalier about installing equipment for new affiliates and not telling me about it until days or weeks later.
The deputies were pacing around the antechamber with their thumbs in their belts. Lieutenant Lee noticed and used a slow, firm command voice to issue orders.
“Photograph and video the scene then untie these gentlemen.”
“Yes, sir!” said the deputies. They looked at each other with puzzled expressions, trying to work out who would take photos and who would shoot videos. I guessed they weren’t all that skilled in using their police-issued smart phones and hoped I wouldn’t have to show them how to enable the flash or switch from still photo to video mode.
“Do you know any of these gentlemen?” asked Lieutenant Lee.
“No, sir.” I said. Just the facts, man.
“May I please see your ID?”
“Yes, sir.” I handed the lieutenant my state-issued identification and he scanned it with his tablet.
“How can I get in touch with you if I have any further questions?”
I held out my phone to his tablet and our contact information transferred.
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “You can be on about your work. Please inform me if it looks like the network room has been compromised.”
“Yes, sir.” I’d have to check with the major network contractors and do an equipment reconciliation. Later.
By this time the Sweet Tea Tweedle-Dees had finished capturing the crime scene. They’d untied the three men in suits and were helping them to their feet. I didn’t want to be present when Cornell, Penn and Princeton were interrogated so I moved to the right of the network room’s door, swiped my ID and started to run the gauntlet of biometric security tests. I put my palm on the hand geometry reader and my eye to the retinal scanner. Then I licked the DNA analyzer and recited a mildly risqué limerick into the sonic signature microphone before I was finally verified and allowed to enter the network’s inner sanctum. The heavy steel door shut behind me with an audible thunk.
I took a few minutes to check everything. All the status lights were green—or rabbot pink for the Dauushan equipment—so I took a seat at the primary maintenance workstation and switched to a visual and audio feed from the external camera and microphone built into the security hardware. The three men in suits were assembled in front of Lieutenant Lee with a deputy standing behind each of them. The fourth deputy was stringing bright yellow crime scene tape across every available surface. Cornell was trying hard to earn his bonus pay. He looked like a hard shell Baptist preacher working up a good sweat to move into the second hour of his Sunday sermon as he ranted on from his script filled with Earth First Isolationist twaddle. Penn and Princeton did their part by tossing in the Isolationist equivalent of “Amen!” or “Praise the Lord!” at intervals.
Lieutenant Lee tried to get the interrogation back on track.
“I understand you object to GaFTA and Galactics,” he said, “but how did the three of you end up with network cables tied around your wrists and ankles?”
“We came here to strike a mighty blow for Terra!” said Cornell. “Our companies must be protected from rapacious multi-stellar corporations by high tariffs on Galactic imports and our women must be protected from slavering, multi-tentacled alien invaders.” Cornell really had a head of steam up.
Princeton went off script and piped in. “We got here an hour ago to ambush the tech guy but got really sleepy.” Lieutenant Lee waved his hand in a go on motion. “We all fell asleep and when we woke up we were hogtied on the floor.”
The lieutenant tapped his badge to activate his phone and contacted what I assumed was capitol police headquarters. “Get a lab team down here ASAP to analyze the air outside the network room,” he said. “Some sort of soporific agent may have been used. And pull the feeds from any security cameras.”
Crap. Cameras. I really didn’t want to be on the evening news, even as a five-minute celebrity. And I certainly didn’t want to be stuck in a capitol police interrogation room for the next twenty-four hours. I had a date tonight.
I pulled up the security camera database and was relieved to see that there was only one camera outside the network room. It was the unit I was currently using to observe Lieutenant Lee’s interrogation of the trio in suits. This particular camera wasn’t motion activated or always on—it’s only enabled for a brief interval when someone’s trying to validate their id
entity to the biometric security system. I made a mental note to change it to motion activated and decided I’d need to add another camera to the antechamber for redundancy. I didn’t want to have to go through this sort of nonsense again.
Cornell seemed relieved that Princeton had come up with an explanation for their situation that would be difficult to dispute. He smiled and started in on another verse from the Isolationist hymnal with Penn and Princeton joining in on the chorus.
“Take these gentlemen upstairs,” said Lieutenant Lee to the deputies. “I want the captain to hear what they have to say.”
At first, Cornell, Penn and Princeton could have pleaded that they were just lost lawyers. However, after Cornell’s diatribes and detailed descriptions of planned acts of sabotage in support of the Isolationists’ cause, their status had definitely changed to prisoners. The deputies handcuffed them and tugged them toward the stairs with the grace of a bloat of hippopotami. Lieutenant Lee lingered behind so I sent him a text to let him know everything was fine in the network room. He sent me back a crisp, “Thanks,” and followed the deputies up the stairs.
I allowed the smile on my face to grow wider. I’d saved the network room, avoided unwanted publicity and sidestepped a police investigation, all to ensure nothing interfered with my date. Well, okay, saving the network room also saved a highly lucrative Xenotech Support Corporation contract. And it was hard to puzzle out why the Earth First Isolationists would send three such incompetent thugs to ambush me or what they’d hoped to accomplish if they’d actually gotten into the network room. I’d circle back and check on that later. Right now I needed to beat rush hour so I could head home, shave, shower, put on a suit of my own and hit a flower shop before getting to the Teleport Inn early enough to enjoy my date’s entrance. I hadn’t been this excited since the first time I went off-planet.
Everything was going so well—I might have even been ahead of schedule—except that when I tried to leave and open the network room door I discovered that the Tweedle-Dumbest deputy had sealed it completely shut with seven layers of adhesive yellow crime scene tape.
Damn.
Chapter 5
“Say hello to my little friend.” ― Al Pacino in Scarface
I tried to push the network room door open and slammed my upper body into it several times in frustration. I couldn’t even dislodge the heavy door far enough to slide a blade out to cut the tape. The external camera showed that the deputy had been very efficient in sealing the door shut even if he wasn’t very observant about noticing that I’d recently entered. The lieutenant must have made him nervous—either that or stringing highly adhesive yellow crime scene tape was one of the few actions in his zone of competence. No matter his motivation, the end result was he had me stuck on the wrong side of the door.
I could call Lieutenant Lee and ask him to send someone down to get me out, but I didn’t really want to interrupt him during his interrogation or remind him that I existed. Carlos couldn’t leave his post and the production team in the aerie would be busy capturing the state legislature’s latest affronts to reason and common sense. It was time to call in a chit.
I slid my backpack tool bag off my shoulders and unzipped a small, padded compartment, extracting an amber-shaded pill bottle with a childproof cap. I opened the bottle and held it up at eye level.
“Wadda’ya want?” came a surprisingly deep voice from inside the bottle. “I was watchin’ a New York City Council meetin’ – those guys crack me up!”
“I need your help right now, Chit,” I said. “You can watch the recording.”
“It’s not da same,” said the voice. “I’m comin’, I’m comin’ – just let me put somethin’ on first.”
I heard the sound of tiny nozzles spraying and smelled the scent of fresh ink. It brought back fond memories. I love that smell and still enjoy inhaling a freshly printed page from an old-style ink-jet printer. A small beetle-like creature with a body the size of a quarter and a head the size of a dime with long curved antennae was perched on the edge of the pill bottle. Chit had outdone herself with her outfit. Her chitinous dark blue exoskeleton was covered with the yellow and white swirls of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
“You look marvelous,” I said.
“Don’t try to butter me up,” said Chit, “I never go out in public on this planet unless I’m dressed wit’ a nice design.”
“Too easy to be stepped on?”
“Nah,” said Chit. “Too easy to be taken for one of da locals.”
“We can’t have that,” I said. “How do you produce that big voice, anyway?”
“Wouldn’t cha like to know,” said Chit, waving her antennae dismissively. “Size ain’t everything, bucko. So wadda’ya want?”
* * * * *
It always surprised me how much stuff Chit managed to fit into her pill bottle. I’d swear it was bigger on the inside than on the outside, but that’s impossible, right? She’d found the bottle in my modest graduate student apartment back on Orish and had claimed it for her own. Most of the time she liked to stay in there watching Terran news shows and reality comedies—which she said were hard to tell apart. I could see her point.
I’d first met Chit at a college dive bar on Orish, 407 light years from Earth. It wasn’t exactly a bar and wasn’t precisely a dive but I was being paid under the eating and drinking surface by entities that weren’t too scrupulous about following labor laws, or other regulations for that matter—not that there were many of either. I was studying for an advanced degree as part of a GaFTA student exchange program. My stipend didn’t really cover things like food and shelter if I had to pay the bribes, umm, extra fees the faculty expected, so I had to find work wherever I could. I didn’t begrudge my professors for that—academic funding is always a challenge. Still, having a small stash of chocolate as trade goods made things a bit easier. If my mother hadn’t given me a package of M&Ms to sell I probably would have starved my first semester. Three red ones bought me enough professorial attention and lab time to learn Transdimensional Thermodynamics and still afford the off-planet equivalent of ramen.
I was cleaning one of the eating surfaces at the bar and had just picked up a bowl of salted borsum nuts to toss in the trash when Chit stuck her blue head up out of the bowl and said “Wadda’ya think you’re doin’, buster?” She’d nearly scared me off of my endoskeleton but we started talking and ended up becoming good friends. Chit was a Murm, part of a collection of hive-mind species that was well established in the Carina-Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, but not over here in the Orion Arm.
As far as we know the Murm are the only species to evolve with built-in congruencies—tiny wormholes that instantaneously connect two points in space. Congruencies in their head segments allow individual Murm bodies, like Chit, to stay connected to their various hive minds over interstellar distances. I’m not sure how that allowed each Murm to have a distinct personality, but there was no disputing the fact that Chit and members of other Murm hives did.
Congruent technology is responsible for a lot of the advances of galactic civilization. We get limitless thermal energy from wormholes linked to stellar coronas, continuous boost spaceships from wormholes that provide an unending supply of reaction mass and warp-drives from congruencies linked to black holes. We get low latency galaxy-wide communications, too. The cables in the network room below the Georgia capitol building plug into congruencies that link to similar network rooms on a hundred-plus planets. Magellanic Cloud computing provides nearly unlimited processing power and the opportunities for geoengineering and terraforming are amazing. The Sahara Sea is already partly filled with fresh water transported via congruent tech from Saturn’s sixth largest moon, Enceladus.
The Galactic Free Trade Association had been aware of Earth for millennia, but by their own rules hadn’t been allowed to contact us until we’d discovered congruent technology for ourselves. A team of researchers working on quantum computing for DARPA designed a prototype of a chip that generated
the right topological stresses to create a congruency. They only had a chance to test it once before their funding was yanked due to Congressional budget cuts—but it had worked. The Galactic Free Trade Association observers noticed and we were invited to join GaFTA soon after. The research team got the last laugh, however. The company they founded, Galactic Congruent Systems, generates enough revenue to buy half of Congress.
Chit’s hive mind had a curiosity streak—or perhaps a strong appreciation of the value of an extensive intelligence network. It sent individual Murm bodies out across the galaxy to seek out strange new worlds, etc. Chit hooked up with me to get to Earth—as a scout or a spy or a tourist, who knew? Whatever her motivation, she was a friend and I needed her assistance.
* * * * *
“I want you to help me with some yellow tape,” I said.
“Shouldn’t that be red tape,” said Chit. “I’m pretty good with puttin’ bureaucrats in their place.”
“I’m sure you are, but not in this case.” I showed her the video feed of the outside of the door and told her about Lieutenant Lee and his deputies. “Can you help detach the tape?”
“Sure. I got just the thing for it. How do I get outta here?”
I reached up to a spot on the wall above the door, just below the ceiling. A large, grapefruit-sized hole was drilled there. It was filled with cables heading out to the antechamber except for a small gap plugged with epoxy resin. I dug into the plug with my fingernails and it popped out, leaving a narrow tunnel just big enough for Chit to fit through.
Xenotech Rising: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 1) Page 4