“Pretty fancy name, Tito”, he said suspiciously, squinting one visible eye and (I had to presume) the one behind the patch at me.
“Yeah, but everyone just calls me... T-Bone.”
He nodded. “Well alright, T-Bone. What’s your story?”
We had halted at the outer perimeter of the camp and he was inspecting me closely. Clearly this was to be some kind of test. I had to think fast, appeal to a rebel's sensibilities. I sighed and tried to look wistful.
“Well, you can tell by the colour of my gills and the arrangement of my organs that I ain’t from around here, I guess. I was born off-world, on a planet ruled by a tyrannical aristocracy that trod the underclass under their boot heels and made them toil in slavery. I was one of this underclass, so I did what I thought right. I started a revolutionary group to tear down the system! I was good; within a few short weeks we had affected a total coup. But when the dust settled, my former comrades moved into the towers and palaces they had once hated and set the old aristocracy to work down the pits as they once had. The aristocracy were made into a new underclass and the tyrannical revolutionaries trod the aristocracy under their boot heels and made them toil in slavery while they lived in the finery of the palaces. I couldn’t stand for that. So I started another revolutionary group to topple the system again, and in a few short weeks I had launched another coup, installing the upper classes back into their palaces and towers. You’d think they’d be grateful, but they put me back to work in the pits, where the aristocracy-again-trod the underclass under their boot heels and made them toil in slavery. After another five coups, I got on the first flight out of there and crash-landed here. The Aplubian royalty took me in as a curiosity; I was a jester, and had to dance as they shot at my feet. A miserable life, even though it was filled with dance. I toiled for weeks until the Queen exploded and I was accused of colluding with the revolutionaries and sent here for punishment. Now, revenge burns in my heart and I wish nothing more than to aid the cause and topple these monarchs! This is why I have put my life on the line and come to you, brother!”
I waited. My audience stood in front of me, motionless. Had I gone too far? Should I have stressed the bit about boot heels and the underclass more? I held my breath.
“Your story... touches my heart, brother. We are joined in the pain of subjugation, but we are bonded in the will to rise.” He grabbed my shoulder roughly and touched his fist to where I supposed Aplubian hearts were-the left buttock. “You may enter our camp. There are many settlements in these caverns, but a few are ours. This is where we rest and scheme and feast, brother. You have freedom of it.” He spread his arms out to the small settlement, with its many fires and rudimentary shacks. I was sore and in need of food, but I had to press my temporary advantage.
“I’m one of you? I want to prove myself as soon as I can!” I said eagerly.
He threw his head back and laughed. “Ah, such fire in the belly”, he said, touching his hand to where I supposed Aplubian bellies were-the right knee. “You remind me of myself before the years wore on me. But we survive through care and caution, T-Bone. If you want the attention or the trust of someone like Jacques, you will have to earn it.”
“But the Queen is exploded! Now is an important time. If we are to act, I know it must be soon”, I gambled. “With the Baker on our side... I want to help the people who planned it. Or at the very least shake their hand and swear loyalty to the glorious cause.”
“Ha! A savvy one”, he said, regarding me with respect. “You already know of the Baker and the actions of the Benefactor! Well, you may well meet them both soon, if you are as much of an asset to us as I think you may be.”
“I’m ready to do what it takes.”
He gripped my shoulder and looked at me sombrely. “Tito D. Rompenham, I am impressed by your enthusiasm. Come, sit a while and eat of our meat and drink of our toilet-wine-what it lacks in vintage it makes up for in ammonia. As you make yourself comfortable, I will see what tasks are needed to further our cause; but please, rest easy for now.”
I took up a seat on an upturned bucket near a fire. After a minute, an old chap with a face like a haunted newt came along and deposited a steaming bowl of... stuff into my hands. It came with a spoon, so I started eating it, even though it looked and tasted like the slurried remnants of a pig that had chosen to die by eating twenty rubber tyres and then jumping into a blender. Still, after a bowlful, I found some strength returning, and the flickering fire was lulling my senses with warmth.
Another glow came from the leads I had. My cycloptic friend had acknowledged the presence of the Master Baker and I had the names of two leaders: Jacques and above him, this Benefactor character. Benefactor-the name was evocative, after all one can only ‘benefact’ those with less than oneself. Yes, a benefactor would have to be higher up than the resistance, maybe even inside the palace itself. I had an uncharacteristic stab of confidence-maybe I could crack this thing.
With that thought, I scanned the encampment and surprised myself at the warm feelings I had for the people, despite their involvement in a breaded plot. I saw workers rotating aching shoulders, friends applying ointments to whip wounds. Workers picked jangling tunes out of makeshift instruments and told tales to groups of youngsters who otherwise chased and zigzagged between the smattering of roaring fires, laughing gaily.
A hand at my shoulder startled me from my reverie. It was my friend with the eye patch again. He smiled as I turned round to him.
“Don’t fall asleep just yet. Word’s come down. You want a job? You’ve got one.”
I snapped to attention. “Just point the way.”
“You might not be so keen once I explain it to you, T-Bone. Walk with me and tell me... how are you with… pain?”
We walked into a nearby shack; I was already regretting my enthusiasm. Whatever the job was, I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off.
I was sure I could pull it off.
“Get off me, you maniac!”
It was convincing, sure, and it was made from a realistic substance, but I knew I could see the seams. I had pounced on him halfway through a question and snatched at the flaps at the side and tugged, but it held fast. Some kind of glue? A zipper?
“Heeeelp! He’s gone mad! Get him off my face!” he cried.
Face nothing-that was a mask. The old man had seemed too innocent, too nice to be in my line-up of suspects until I noticed the drooping skin around his mouth and eyes. Of course! The enemy hides in plain sight and the droopy, gravity-worn face of this old codger would hide a mask from all but the most trained and piercingly blue of eyes.
But alas, the tide of the investigation and the arms of several of the other suspects in the room bore me away from the man before I could yank his face clean off. I waved away the restraining arms and, panting, looked at the ‘old man’. He was flustered and huffing and stroking his ‘face’ as if in pain. The mask even bloomed red in the shape of my fingers. Advanced mask-work, I thought. After ensuring that I was not going to resume my attack, the suspects all took up their favourite new pastime: looking for an exit.
I had to admit, the questioning was not going well. The lady I suspected of having an affair had turned out to be a devoted nun, the three people I had been sure had borne bastard children had (awkwardly) admitted to being medically infertile, the fellow that looked like a secret gigolo had been unmasked as a eunuch, another fellow I had accused of being gay was straight and a lady I had accused of being straight was very gay indeed.
Or so they said.
Sure, it’s easy to deny when the investigator suddenly accuses you of being a secret sister to an adopted uncle who had been replaced years ago by his evil twin-that’s what everyone would do. It’s obvious that your first reaction would be denial, but I was having difficulty penetrating through this first level of denial.
Frankly, by this stage I had hoped to have battered the truth out of a couple of the suspects, causing teary confessions of guilt a
nd maybe incest, at which point the whole lot of them would tear each other apart in a display of defensiveness and infighting, with me acting chiefly as instigator and observer. But when Carstairs and Beltock had kept their cool against all odds, I was left with the game stacked against me. The questioning had somehow lost its heat and it had become easier to deny me. The group dynamic had turned against me. I was set to turn into a whirling self-destructive energy that would collapse in on itself to reveal one single truth like a sun going supernova and producing a black hole but somehow that foolproof plan had gone awry. If I was going to continue, I would have to pick them off one by one.
But then the banging started.
The door shuddered in its frame and everyone jumped back just in time for it to be kicked loose from its moorings. A foot-the foot responsible for the vandalism-stepped into the breach and at the other end of that leg was the rest of Detective Vacto Snoopel. I recognized the face of the flamboyantly dressed guard Eduardo behind him, who shot me an egregiously dirty look.
“Thank God you’re here, Snooply”, I cried, drawing quizzical looks from the people I had (technically) been taking hostage as I tried to take their faces off.
There followed a tumultuous period of shouting and accusations as the suspects swarmed Snoopel and bombarded him with their exaggerated and borderline liblous accounts of my accusations. I turned aside from this as I abhor exaggeration; it is literally the worst thing in the universe. But soon enough Snoopel’s men and the fact that I had locked them in a room for eight hours got to the bunch and they filed slowly out.
The murmur of dissent died away with the suspects as they crept back to their secretive lives, where they could hide from my probing light and fingers and my masculine musk. The guardsman Eduardo took delivery of these fleeing souls. Eduardo lingered at the door, though, long enough to cast a threatening look my way and to draw his finger across his throat and then other more colorful areas, as though I was the least bit afraid of his finger. However, as soon as he left the detective and me were mercifully alone. I strode over to the inspector and pumped his hand in gratitude.
“Just in the nick of time, Detective. That avenue of investigation was bearing no fruit. Your interruption was quite necessary.”
Needless to say, Snoopel still did not see himself as an ally (or more accurately aide) to me; he reflexively rubbed the spot where I had punched him upon our first meeting. He really would have to get over that, I thought, though I stopped myself from pointing this out to him aloud.
“I didn’t come for your investigation, Hardcore”, he spat. “I came because of this.” He flipped open his communicator and glanced at it. “I have received three hundred and forty-two distress calls from this room in the last hour. At first I took them to be gibberish and turned off my communicator, but then I realised that these people were working their communicators from inside their pockets. They got quite good towards the end, I must say.”
“So that’s what they were all rummaging about in their trousers for”, I marvelled, outfoxed for the first time in recent memory.
“What did you think they were doing?”
“Hm? Oh, uh, nothing. I just thought it was odd”, I lied. With the benefit of this new information and my old foe hindsight, I wished I could take back some rather... off-colour accusations I had made about the people attempting these communications.
“What have you been doing here, exactly?” Snoopel probed.
“Investigating! Breaking down the barriers, uncovering buried skeletons!”
Snoopel looked down at his communicator. “The Viscount of the House of Foffenhoff said you accused him of being a robot!”
“I had to eliminate the possibility that he was a murder-borg from a distant future.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“When you eliminate the improbable, however fanciful it may seem, then whatever remains, even if it’s predictable, must, by necessity, be true. That is my detective-ing credo.” This was true. I had had the phrase embroidered on several cushions and embossed on the lens of my favourite oscillating multi-frequency magnifier (which subsequently became useless because I could not see past the inscription). “I had to eliminate the possibility or it would have hung between us in the air, like the stench of your queen does in the banquet hall.”
“I’ll hear no more of that talk”, he protested.
“Oh, calm yourself. It’s just a common figure of speech.”
He looked at me suspiciously and then back at his communicator. “You tried to pull the Archbishop’s face off?”
“I’d like to re-open that line of enquiry. It is suspiciously saggy, Snooply.”
“You accused Lady Astrompo and her manservant of being pregnant?”
“In my defence: they both put on weight in weird places.”
“You seem to have accused everyone in the room with sleeping with everyone else in the room at some stage.”
“There was a lot of sexual tension in here, but that may just have been because of me.”
“You propositioned three of the women-”
“I needed to know how honest they were.”
“-And they rejected you, of course.”
“And I found out they were all liars.”
“You poured a glass of water down the trousers of our esteemed Treasurer?”
“I thought he was wearing a listening device because he kept fussing with his back pockets.”
“And what did you discover?”
“... Chronic haemorrhoids. It was like an angry grape minefield down there, but hairy.”
“You snatched the tiara from Lady Olivio’s head then pulled her hair?”
“I suspected a wig and, to my credit, I think you’ll find that I was right.”
“The lady has chronic alopecia, Captain; it is very obvious and she is very sensitive about it. You combing through her hairpiece for ‘tiny cameras’ did not help.”
“I shan’t apologise for being thorough.”
“And trying it on? What’s the rationale behind that?”
“It suited my colouring. I like to look pretty sometimes too, detective. I’m only human.”
He sighed and took off his glasses, finally folding away his communicator. I was tired of reliving my past adventures and people recounting my own actions back to me in an incredulous tone was a tiresome consequence of being fantastic. ‘You just punched X?!’, ‘You blew up Y?!’, ‘You Xed my Y’s ornamental, ancient Z on a trampoline?!’. Please. I prefer to keep moving.
But Snoopel was clearly among the class who wanted to nag at me. “I’ve got complaints coming out of my ears”, he whined. “I’ve got people from influential families calling for your head! What am I meant to say to any of the people you’ve assaulted today?”
“Show them a picture of the Queen’s cadaver and ask if they’d stop at anything to see the perpetrator of that atrocity brought to justice. If they say no, then you arrest them or punch them or both. I’m beginning to think I’m the only one in Aplubia that was the least bit affected by it. Frankly, I’m incensed! That explosion really ruined my dinner and ever since then I’ve been knocking down doors looking for answers and maybe I don't always have the proper warrant and maybe I don't ask politely before I knock some perp to the ground and maybe I don't promise to respect you in the morning, but dammit I’m going after this case.”
Snoopel looked me up and down, somehow unimpressed with my impressive speech. “Big talk”, he sneered. “All I see is a bunch of harassed pillars of our society and a man with no answers. This whole operation was a bust. Me and mine are out there working the case like actual investigators while you run around and play-act under the Queen’s indulgence.”
My mouth was agape. This shabby man was insulting my methods and me and trying to claim some kind of superiority over me by pouring cruel insults into my ears. He was, no doubt, the kind of man that would think that taking the moral high ground meant call
ing me ugly from on top of a stepladder. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to sock him in the jaw, but I could see he wanted an excuse to denigrate me further. I reigned myself in.
I raised my jaw and addressed him as I looked down my nose. “As long as I have the favour of the Queen, I shall conduct myself in the manner that I find most beneficial to this investigation. It is but a short time until the celebration of the Hailstrom comets-“
“What of it? Of what relevance is a society gala and a curiosity of the stars?”
“Why, it’s the perfect time for them to strike. Can’t you see?”
“Who’s they? Who are they striking? For what?”
I stalled for a brief second. Why was he trying to undermine my hunches? If he was a Butler I’d have arrested him there and then but instead I replied, “All questions that my investigation shall answer.Now, since a group confrontation has proved to be of little use due to the notorious Aplubian cowardice, I shall see fit to begin my one-on-one interrogations. I have three suspects in mind. When in my questioning I would break off suddenly and shout ‘Did you do it?!”’ these were the people that seemed most startled and thus most guilty. I shall take them aside in a private room and use one of the many gambits at my disposal to pump them for information.”
“Your many gambits?” Snoopel asked archly.
“Oh, the old playbook of interrogation tactics: make friends with them, make enemies with them, make friends with their enemies, make love to their friends, be their boss, be their priest, be their priest’s boss, be their father, be their older brother, be their younger brother with the degenerative genetic disease that makes them look like an older brother, the ‘bait and switch’, the ‘switcheroo’, the ‘cat and sack’, the ‘Dronian tango’, the ‘mushroom tickle’, the ‘half time prime lime’, the ‘sidesaddle singalong’, the ‘leather milkshake’, the ‘midnight meat train’, the ‘high five’, the ‘low ten’, the ‘electric apple buffer’, th-”
The Court of Crusty Killings: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Page 8