CHAPTER 16
INTO THE VALLEY OF DEATH
“House, there’s no way it will work!” Marlowe had worked himself into a lather in the family room, Gomer cowering in his cage, Nina and Jebediah watching quietly but alertly from the tattered sofa. “Even if we managed to completely bypass the external security, which, frankly, I have my doubts about, they’ll be able to track us the instant we get inside. It’s insane!” Marlowe turned to his father. “Am I right?”
“Why are you asking me? Just because I’ve spent the last eight years in an asylum doesn’t make me an expert on insanity.”
“If you’ll let me finish,” continued House, “I have found a way around the internal security.”
“Really? And just how is that? As soon as our feet touch the floor in there, their internal sensors will zero in on our PDIs. And though you’re rather fond of calling me paranoid on matters Obedere, I know for a fact I’m on his watch list. He’ll know I’m inside the Ministry building before I do.”
Nina leaned forward, hands steepled over her lap. “He won’t know I’m there. I don’t have a PDI.”
Marlowe spun around, not for the first time wishing there was a central point in his home that could be said to be House’s face. He so wanted to glare and jab a finger in House’s direction at that moment. He fixed his focus on a particularly large floor lamp. “Is that your brilliant plan? Send Nina in, a lamb to the slaughter?”
Nina bristled with indignation. “Lamb?”
“You know what I mean. Sure, you can handle yourself in a fight, but this is Ministry of Policing headquarters! The place will be crawling with troopers.”
“I wasn’t planning on sending Nina alone into peril.”
Marlowe spun around again, searching for something a little less inanimate than the floor lamp with which to argue. He briefly toyed with giving one of the wall pictures the evil eye, but at that moment it was displaying a picture of a very, very young Marlowe smiling up from his bath, his nanny holding a rubber ducky out to him. He settled on the coffee table, which had two mildly sinister cups of steaming tea squatting on it.
“I’m certainly all ears. Just how will we bypass the PDI tracking? Have you located some black market PDI that doesn’t have a T-chip in it?”
Nina looked blankly at Marlowe. “T-chip?”
Jebediah patted her on the wrist. “Tracker chip. Government mandate issued during my administration. All PDIs are manufactured with a built-in tracking ID and transponder. It also, and this is slightly less well known, allows for backdoor access by the Ministry of Policing.”
“Slightly less known, yes,” said House, “but not completely unknown. I found a workaround for the backdoor access years ago.”
Nina smiled. “So we don’t have to worry about this T-chip after all.”
“Marlowe doesn’t have to worry about government intrusion into his PDI, but he still has to worry about the T-chip. Any efforts to tamper with it trigger an email alert sent to the Ministry of Policing.”
Marlowe shook his head. “Then why are we having this conversation, House?”
“Your misadventure yesterday in the sewage treatment plant provided a bevy of ideas and information. Not only did it provide me with the method of your entry into the Ministry building, but it provided a crucial piece of information. When your PDI died, the T-chip shut down with it, and no alert went out. Even after startup, no signal was sent.”
“House, that’s a very interesting academic point, but what good does that do us now? My PDI is, thank the Governor, back up and running.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought my intent was self-evident at this point.”
Nina bounded up from the sofa. “I get it!”
Jebediah frowned, looked to Marlowe, and then shrugged. “It’s eluding me too.”
Nina stared at both the men. “Oh come on, isn’t it obvious?”
“No,” said Marlowe stiffly, “it isn’t.”
“Your continued bewilderment contrasted with Nina’s easy comprehension simply demonstrates the effectiveness of my plan. We deactivate your PDI. And dad’s. It’s so ingrained into our cultural identity to never go without a PDI that the authorities never bothered to take that possibility into account when they designed their security system. A lack of a PDI won’t trigger any alarms.”
Marlowe starting pacing. “Deactivate my PDI? But I just turned it back on!”
“You’re right, House,” said Nina. “It is ingrained. He’s horrified at the idea of turning off his PDI again.”
Jebediah chimed in. “I’m not terribly thrilled by the idea myself, and all my PDI does is send me soothing messages about doing what the nice doctors say.”
“But House, if we turn off our PDIs, well, our PDIs would be off!”
“Big deal!” snorted Nina. “I don’t have one, and as I keep telling you, I’m just fine.”
“But you’ve never had one! I’ve had one all my life. It connects me to the whole City. It would be like losing an arm to turn it off!”
“Please! We’ll turn it back on when we’re done. You’ve already demonstrated you can survive without it.”
“I just don’t like it. We’d be completely cut off for several hours at least.”
Jebediah scratched his head and sighed. “You know, Spares, they’re right. Our PDIs need to go.”
“Don’t call me Spares!”
Two hours later, the Studebaker rolled to a halt under the shade of a tall, gently swaying building. The cables running up to the support zeppelin groaned ominously in the wind. Marlowe, still a little shaky because of his now intentionally dead PDI, got out first. The planned outage proved just slightly easier to deal with than the earlier unplanned one, and though he wasn’t happy about it, he understood the need to be completely and totally undetectable electronically. Absolute severance from the CityNet could only be attained by shutting down the PDI and all its subsystems.
Nina exited the car next, and being utterly devoid of a PDI to start with, experienced none of Marlowe’s discomfort. Jebediah, who had sworn certain death on Gomer if left alone at home, came out last. Given his PDI’s previous nefarious purposes, his induced electronic exile did not disturb him nearly as much as he had feared. He lugged a chestsack out of the car, grumbling as he put his arms through the straps and put it on.
“You consign to me the task of lowly pack mule? Have you no sense of who I am or where I’ve been?”
“It’s where you are now. Stop complaining, it’s not that heavy. Besides, I’m navigating and Nina needs a free hand in case she has to defend us unexpectedly. You’re the only choice left. We’re depending on you.” It was a weak effort. Marlowe knew it, and he suspected Jebediah knew it too, but he hoped the thought would count for something.
Marlowe actually marveled at his calm demeanor as they walked past the front of the dilapidated, gray apartment tenement. He would never have dreamed that he’d deliberately shut down his PDI.
Jebediah snorted as he surveyed the neighborhood. “What a slum! Couldn’t you find another entrance in a better area?”
“No, and be quiet. If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re off to the asylum again.”
They turned a corner and a sense of deja vu struck Marlowe. It was a little brighter this time around, during the day and with partly cloudy skies instead of a torrential acid rain storm, but the alley still exuded an unpleasant sense of gloom. House had suggested the alley where he’d met Toulene because it had a known access point to the old sewer system. Trudging through a large, scum-encrusted puddle, the trio came upon an apple green dumpster with peeling paint and a warped lid propped up by a multi-colored mound of foul-smelling garbage.
“This place stinks!”
Marlowe was forced to agree with Nina. Without his PDI, he didn’t have any nasal filters to block the stench. Jebediah snorted.
“Ha, this place isn’t half as bad as the cell they had me in at the…other place.” He took a deep, sustained breath. “S
mells like a bed of roses in the middle of a peach orchard, compared to that place. Yes indeed, quite nice.”
Marlowe shrugged. “It’s only going to get worse where we’re going.” He walked over to the sewer access cover that led to the old City sewers. Nina thrust her fingers into the small fingerholes in the metal disk and lifted it effortlessly.
“Will wonders never cease!” Jebediah leaned in close to Marlowe. “As I said before, Spares, you could go far with a powerhouse like that by your side. And she’s even attractive!”
“Don’t call me Spares.”
“You and your one-track mind! You should recognize a term of endearment when you hear it! Some great detective! Harrumph!”
Nina smiled ruefully as she stared down into the darkening hole. “Sewers again, eh, Marlowe? You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
Marlowe found it somewhat startling, as he stared down into the dark abyss before him, that there were so many holes in the ground with ladders. “Come on, don’t dawdle. We are trying to be stealthy.”
Marlowe climbed down into the darkening, deepening stench. Jebediah followed, then Nina, who dragged the sewer access cover over the opening before joining the rest of the party. Marlowe was prepared for no optical extras this time, and already had a lightbead out. Nina pulled out what she called a makeshift “flashlight” from one of her zippered pockets. She had made it before they left House, taking some transparent StickAll and gluing a lightbead into the center of one of Marlowe’s ultra-stylish chrome wine glasses. She held the glass by the stem, pointing the mouth out in front of her. When she activated the bead, the parabolic shape of the bowl focused the light into a rough ellipse that rippled on the brackish water before them.
Marlowe peeled his eyes away from Nina’s contraption, reached into his hidden pocket and pulled out a thin, flimsy tube. He gingerly unrolled the tube to reveal a series of lines and squiggles printed on vellum. The lines and squiggles, taken as a whole, formed a map. They’d lost almost an hour trying to find a way to make a physical copy of the map House had generated. Fortunately, Marlowe’s attic held another useful toy – the Li’l Bolshevik Revolutionary Printing Press. A toy once marketed at eight year olds, it now served Marlowe for, he hoped, one last time. Though finding it did evoke pleasant memories of leaving subversive and slanderous missives stapled to his brother’s bedroom door while growing up.
The act of holding a map printed on physical material felt alien to Marlowe. Two-dimensional and non-interactive. Well, not entirely. The corners he wasn’t holding kept curling over the rest of the map. Marlowe didn’t like it at all. He made a mental note of the positions of the street and alley above them, and rotated the map to match. It showed the surface streets and underneath those, a string of tunnels and interconnects, all part of the old sewers system before the City switched to mandatory closed-loop recycling water systems and composting in all buildings. This did not mean, however, that the system they were in was clean or dry. Stagnant water lapped at their ankles and slowly seeped into his supposedly waterproof shoes. The tops of Nina’s boots rose well above the line of water. Marlowe really admired those boots.
The voyage through the old sewer tunnels proved remarkably unpleasant, with the trademarked ankle (and sometimes knee) deep sewage sludge, and the ever-present thick, cloying stench. Dead rats and occasionally other, less identifiable carcasses rotted while bobbing on the surface of the vile slime. The poorly marked tunnels caused Marlowe to lead his party astray more than once. This invariably ended in a stream of invective issuing forth from Jebediah, who, while showing signs of steadily improving mental acuity, did not exhibit any symptoms of being cool-headed.
About thirty minutes in, while rounding a bend in the tunnel, they were suddenly enveloped in a shrill squeaking sound.
Jebediah started shouting first. “Frats! Frats! Everyone duck, it’s frats!”
Nina squatted beside Marlowe, trying to keep as much of herself out of the brackish water as possible. “Why are we ducking for rats,” she asked over the now quite loud squeaking.
Just then the roar of hundreds of wings flapping beat down on them as red-eyed, sharp-nosed creatures soared overhead, a solid gray mass. Tiny pink feet swiped at their hair and thin pink tails slapped against their heads.
“Not rats,” said Marlowe. “Frats. Flying rats. Just keep your head down - they like grabbing fistfuls of hair. Tiny fistfuls to be sure, but it can still hurt.”
A faint ammonia smell began to compete with the overall stench of the sewers as the grasping cloud of claws streaked by, some of the flying rats practically tumbling on their heads as they soared past. Marlowe could feel the heat of the undulating mass as it zipped by, angry squeaks and trills cutting into his ears.
Less than a minute later the frats had completed their transit and vanished behind them. Jebediah was the first to rise, visibly shaken. “Frats. I hate frats.”
“When the hell did rats develop the ability to fly,” asked Nina.
“They were helped,” said Marlowe as he raised himself up. “During a particularly low point in our relations with Mirth City. It wasn’t all out war, but they felt justified in flooding the City with thousands and thousands of genetically modified flying rats.”
“This was on my watch,” said Jebediah. “We could never prove it was Mirth City, but that didn’t stop me from sending rabid sheep over there.” He chuckled softly. “Took their wool industry years to recover.”
“Anyway,” continued Marlowe, “we got the frat population under control with the development of spring-loaded, flying rat traps. I can still remember summer evenings catching fireflies and dodging those frat traps. They kept flying, even after the trap had sprung, so they could be pretty ripe.” Marlowe smiled. “And then there was frat baseball, a summer favorite, where you’d hit a trap towards players on the other team-”
“OK, OK, I get the picture,” said Nina. “Obviously the traps didn’t get all of the frats.”
“Nope,” said Jebediah. “They’re cunning bastards and started hiding down here. We could have sent frat traps down after them, but the things are damned expensive and a maintenance nightmare to boot. We figured, as long as the frats stay out of sight, well, live and let live.” He started rummaging around in his pockets. “Anyone hungry? I’m hungry. Ah, here they are! Marie Antoinette, anyone?”
“What’s that,” asked Nina.
Jebediah produced a small foil-wrapped package. “Snack cake. Chocolate with cognac liqueur center and a delicate gold leaf frosting on top.”
“They’re terrible,” said Marlowe.
“Maybe,” said Jebediah, “but the ads were great. Remember the ads?”
“No,” said Marlowe in a tone indicating he did but didn’t want to be reminded.
“Imagine,” said Jebediah, hands drawing a square in the air, “it’s night, and a mob is forming outside a castle. Zoom into the castle, just behind a courtier who is walking in a panic, down richly apportioned halls, the sound of music growing as he moves. Suddenly we’re in a huge ballroom, with hundreds of well-dressed aristocrats dancing in concentric circles. At the center of these rings, draped in jewels and naked from the waist up is-”
“She wasn’t topless!” barked Marlowe.
“You remember it your way, I’ll remember it mine, thank you very much. Now where was I? Ah yes,” continued Jebediah, his voice growing wistful, “her honey brown hair flowing over bare shoulders, like milk chocolate on ivory. The courtier exclaims, ‘Your highness, the peasants, they’re revolting!’ ’Yes,’ she replies in a posh accent, ‘ they are disgusting little trolls, aren’t they.’ ’No, no,’ says the courier urgently, ‘they are revolting. Up in arms and about to storm the castle!’ ’Oh how droll,’ she replies. ’Let them eat cake.’ Cut to the peasants. Each, in one hand, holds a weapon, a torch, a pitchfork, a sword. And in the other, a Marie Antoinette cake. As they eat the cakes, their mood lightens, they break out in smiles, and they drop their weapons. ’Let them
eat cake,’ says the voice over. ’Snacks for the riff-raff.’ I made efforts to find that actress, you know, but the ad was filmed in another city. I could never touch her.” He sighed.
“Yes,” said Marlowe. “Mirth City, as I recall. Which is how the whole frat thing started.”
“I just wanted to talk to her,” said Jebediah petulantly.
“A stupid campaign,” said Marlowe, “and even worse snacks, if you ask me.”
Nina shook her head. “I’ll pass. But I could sure go for a coffee about now.”
“Coffee,” asked Jebediah incredulously. “How can you think of coffee at a time like this?”
“I don’t know,” shrugged Nina. “I just feel an urge for a coffee.”
“There used to be a Bucky Brew down here,” said Marlowe. “Next to the underground water park. Not sure exactly where, and it may not be open any more. Most of their business came from the park, and they had to shut that down last year due to pH balance problems.”
“Enough!” shouted Jebediah. “I thought we were trying to break into the Ministry of Policing!”
It felt like hours, hours crouched over the wrinkled vellum with a light bead, hours groping in the dark, before finally reaching their final destination. They’d noticed the tunnels sloping slightly upwards for the last twenty minutes, so when they finally reached OSD203-J6, affectionately known as Outskirts Storm Drain 203, Junction 6, the standing water had receded and the bottom of the tunnel consisted of crunchy, dark powder. Marlowe groaned as he saw the next leg of their journey – yet another rusty ladder rising up out of brown muck.
“According to House, this will open up into a large drain in a custodial closet adjoining detention block thirty eight. This is where the heavy torture supposedly occurs.”
Nina looked up, using her glowing wine glass as a pointer. “Will the drain be large enough for us to fit?”
Marlowe and the Spacewoman Page 25