“Oh, we are regulated enough, and they do have such enclosures that you speak of, but they know these little satellite communities are inevitable. If we stay small and a large portion of us go to the mines every day, we can keep this crumb of solace, this last scintilla of independence. It is beautiful, is it not? You see, even here we have little bars and salons, tiny and poor as they may be, where we can build our own community.”
As we walked through, I saw a gaggle of children playing under the watchful eye of an elderly matriarch sitting on a collapsing wooden porch. I suddenly felt weary and emotional. The chemicals were draining out of my system, perhaps, but I had a sudden surge of anxiety at the thought of uncovering the plot. I knew it was the right thing to do-to punish murderers. But as we picked our way through the communal campground and I stepped around a small herb garden that was trying to grow despite the lack of natural light, I suddenly wanted to just flee and claim that I had found no trace of rebellion.
“You look tired.” Felipe noted.
“Maybe.”
“You have been through much today, but you need not worry-your journey is nearly at an end. This may look like another of our humble encampments, but behind a secret entrance in one of our shacks lies the entrance to our base of operations. Jacques waits to meet you within.”
“Jacques is here?”
“We must hide in plain sight, behind layers of disguise and code and subterfuge. You will understand soon”, he said as we approached a small, out-of-the-way hut that leant against the stone wall of the cavern. Felipe knocked on the door-three rapping knocks, followed by a pause and then thirteen slower knocks-and then made a noise like an owl through his cupped hands. After a second, a slot opened in the door and a pair of suspicious eyes peered out. Felipe held up three fingers, and then made the rebel thumb sign.
“Layers of disguise and code and subterfuge”, Felipe repeated to me as the bolted door swung open and we walked into the musty interior of the shack. The door closed behind us and I looked around. It was unassuming, I thought. The room was populated by an old lady sitting on an ancient wooden rocking chair, attending to some knitting and listening to a small stereo that was playing low jaunty polka.
“Hello”, said the old lady warmly to us, batting her eyes innocently. There seemed to be nothing else to the room, but I noted the plethora of locks on the door as it swung shut behind us. Turning back to the old lady, I noticed a shape under her knitted scarf-a gun trained on us.
“Hello”, Felipe returned tersely.
“The work is hard today”, she commented.
“But every day strengthens my resolve”, he replied.
“You must tire, though. One body is weak”, she returned through narrowed eyes.
“My brothers and sisters aid me. I am many bodies. Together we are strong”, Felipe said in return, completing some kind of pass phrase. The old crone nodded silently at him and laid her knitting aside. She was indeed holding an ancient pistol in her lap. I noted that in order to do so, one of her knitting arms had been a prosthetic all along. Cunning, I thought, as the three armed biddy rose. She got to her feet and pulled a lever in the side of her wall. I heard the shifting of weights and the grinding of gears. Suddenly a section of it swung open and Felipe stepped through, ushering me after him. The lights were dimmer here, but after my eyes adjusted, I found myself in an even smaller room than the one before. I looked around and saw a young woman leaning on a makeshift bar. The furniture in this room was sparse, apart from the rickety bar, a kettle and a seat situated next to a stack of well-worn books. The woman looked up at us.
“Good day”, said Felipe genially.
“How do”, said this young woman, looking up at us in mock surprise. “Welcome to my establishment: a humble café with no links to any political group. You look tired, gentlemen, can I interest you in some tea?”
I looked around, puzzled.
“Why would a café be hidden in an old lady’s house?” I whispered to Felipe.
He glared at me and shushed me, whispering the word ‘subterfuge’ through gritted teeth before genially returning his look to the ‘waitress’.
“I would be delighted”, said Felipe.
“How do you take it?”
“Strong, black, seven sugars.”
“We are out of sugar. Is there anything you will take in substitute?”
“The sweet taste of freedom.”
She nodded sagely. “Oh, before I get your order, I must ask: how is the weather? My umbrella is not repaired.”
“You will be fine, ma’am. The heat may be oppressive, however the wind is changing.”
She nodded again and smiled, finally getting up from behind the desk and moving to the kettle on the counter. When she pulled up the spout, I heard the click of a mechanism somewhere behind it. The wall behind her slid to one side, revealing a smaller, dingier room beyond it. Again. We stepped through this new aperture and, squinting in the half-light, I looked at our new surroundings. An elderly man stood behind a counter, reading a newspaper nonchalantly, a smouldering cigarette jutting out of the side of his mouth.
“This is a bit much, isn’t it?” I whispered to Felipe.
“The price of carelessness is measured in lives down here!” he whispered back. I sighed and decided to try to just go along with it.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?” our new ‘proprietor’ asked.
“What is this establishment meant to be?” I asked, puzzled.
“Why, we are a simple tailor’s shop, sir. I repair the clothes of my fellow workers down here for a small price. Nothing secret or revolutionary here”, he said, flicking ash into an overloaded ashtray.
“You’re… difficult to locate”, I said, glancing back at the two shop fronts behind me.
The ‘shop steward’ flicked his eyes over to Felipe cautiously. “You ask a lot of questions, stranger”, he said.
“I have something that needs repaired!” cried Felipe, cutting off our dialogue, which had taken an uncomfortable tone of suspicion.
“What is it? A shirt or socks that need darning perhaps?” the tailor asked, falling back into what seemed to be familiar rhetoric.
“No, there is a tear in the fabric of society, sir.”
“This cannot be repaired, sir.”
“It can with the needle of action and the thread of change, sir.”
The tailor nodded at us and then unlatched his own secret door.
We stepped through and I readied myself for a new flimsy shop front, but instead we stepped into a hive of activity. People were milling around tables, spreading out maps and blueprints, soldering electronic components together and running a small printing press that was churning out a stream of propaganda posters. The smell of clove cigarettes was thick in the air. As we took a few steps into the den, a short man approached us without a word and handed us both black berets, which we dutifully slipped on our heads. Felipe led me past a mess of tables and huddled groups over to a small antechamber, where a man sat, listening to several advisors as he stared at a highly annotated wall map. Felipe went over to whisper in his ear and then came bounding back over to me.
“T-Bone, I’d like you to meet the head of the rebellion: Jacques!”
I stepped forward and went to meet the mastermind behind the Aplubian rebellion.
Some people have dirty minds.
“So that’s not what was going on?” I didn’t care for Snoopel’s tone or the way he was still suspiciously poking at the now emptied teacup with his pen.
“Sir, you insult me. Again.” I said.
We were in the dingy excuse for an office that Snoopel and his team kept. Obviously they put more effort into looking shabby than decorating the office. It was a miserable, crowded affair, each desk covered with ashtrays or sheafs of paper. I had been bundled here after the last interrogation rather quickly. ‘for my own safety’ apparently, but the damage to my sensibilities that the décor was doin
g was perhaps irreversible.
“So instead you say you were trying to make her drink your pi-”
“-My truth serum”, I broke in.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Is that what you call it?”
“It is what it is. You can ask me for the rest of the ingredients, but I shan’t tell and you obviously do not have the means to extract the information, lacking as you do any truth serums.”
He ignored the jibe. “You know, that woman is quite influential in the court.”
“Did you tell her what I was attempting? Did you explain?”
“She was... sceptical. But her House has a lot of sway. Even with the Queen’s protection, you can’t expect to upset her and come away undamaged.”
“What are you saying, Snooply?”
He looked haggard, and he wasn’t working with a grade A face like mine to start with. He wagged his droopy face at me, his jowls swaying with the shaking of his head like meaty curtains. His bloodshot eyes were level and deadly serious. When he spoke it was with a voice like a sigh falling down the stairs.
“Perhaps it would be best if my men handled the rest of the investigation. You can look for clues elsewhere. Maybe outside. Or back on your ship.”
“Is that an order, Inspector?”
He stared at me flatly. “You will no longer be afforded the freedom of the palace. My guard have been instructed to bar you from restricted rooms and restricted persons, and as far as you’re concerned, every person that’s not the Queen or myself or your little sidekick or the toilet attendants is a restricted person. Do not test this... please.”
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. This was rare since I usually had something to say.
“Sometimes investigations just... get away from us”, Snoopel persisted, “but you can get away. You can get in your ship and leave all this behind and maybe that might be for the best, Captain. Don’t you think?”
He patted me lightly on the shoulder and, flanked by two of his guards, left.
It took me a second to realize it.
I hadn’t socked him, I hadn’t remonstrated him, I hadn’t assured him that the investigation was proceeding apace.
Because it wasn’t, I thought.
Because I had nothing.
* * *
Chapter Eleven!!!!!!!!!!!
The Straight Dope
In which Space interrogates the fake Ebenezer with calamitous results, Funkworthy enters the terrifying hyper-prison and the Albino Regent makes good his escape.
If I had to choose my least favourite thing about iconoclastic underground revolutionaries, it wouldn’t be the political ideologies or even the questionable methods they sometimes employ to effect change.
No, it’d be the bloody handshakes.
I was introduced to the head of the rebellion and I extended my hand in a fairly traditional greeting. Open hand, vertically held, clasped fingers with just a hint of sweat-perfectly normal. He grasped it and we exchanged a standard three-pump shake. I went to move away, comfortable that my part in the social contract of greetings had been fulfilled. But this Jacques has other plans. Hang about, I thought, he may have pulled away but he’s balling up his recently shaken hand and has it sat there in front of him, ready to further interact with my hand in some baffling new way. It was then that I appreciated that, in handshake terms, we were merely at the beginning of a long road. We bumped fists and somehow this turned into a situation of grappling interlocked fingers. What happened then was a gesture of heretofore unfathomable brotherhood: he used the leverage and pulled me into a half hug, our squashed pseudo-handshake sitting between us uncomfortably. He then patted my back and released me, and I sighed to myself, sure that the ordeal was over. Then he pulled me closer again. I didn’t save this man’s drowning father from an icy river, for god’s sake, I thought as he bumped his free fist against my heart; I didn’t donate bone marrow to his infant son. I disengaged finally, sweat beading on my forehead. My hand dropped mercifully to my side, defeated and unfathomably stressed. I looked around and saw people staring at me, aggrieved, and I quickly looked back to see the man they called Jacques standing there with his hand held up high. Good god, I was in the process of leaving this man hanging. This would never do. I snaked my hand out to complete the high five and my host nodded his head at my martial skill. Finally, mercifully, he bid me sit on a nearby chair. I wiped a sheen of sweat from my bow and complied.
He was a rail thin chap with a scragglebrush of pepper black stubble speckling his chin. A pencil moustache sat atop his lip like a hat for his mouth and a beret sat atop his head like a moustache for his hair. His sharp features were complemented by a high forehead and swept-back tuft of hair. All of his features seemed to be in an unspoken competition over which one could be the pointiest, with his nose taking the prize so far, hanging over his scowling mouth like a large-pored beak with bogeys all up it (presumably). He jammed a smouldering cigarette into the corner of his frown and looked me up and down.
“Felipe, he says you are an azzet”, he said finally. An ‘azzet’? I frowned and tried to decode the word. Should I be aggrieved or jubilant, I wondered. Maybe it was a word for a very good hand shaker.
“…. Asset?” I asked timidly.
“Yes. Zat is wha’ Ah said-an azzet. You are an azzet, aren’t you?”
I nodded fervently, wishing to impress him, despite not quite knowing what he was saying. “I do wish to serve the glorious cause”, I said.
“And you ‘av. Your efforts ‘ave reached mah ears, and ah ‘av to say I am impressed.”
“I’m just glad to be helpful in the struggle… Hang on.” I looked him up and down. The beret, the cigarette, the features… I had seen them before somewhere. Suddenly a light went on in my head and I remembered. “You! I remember you from when I came in here! From the first level. You gave me this.” I put out my hand and made the rebel’s gesture. My jaw gaped open. I had been searching for the leader of the rebellion all this time and it turned out that he had been one of the first faces I had seen in the underground.
Jacques smiled at me wryly. “Ah mus’ be in many places. Ah make it mah business to see all our new prisoners. You ‘ad an impressive pedigree so Ah gave you one little tool to meet us: the sign. Look ‘ow far you ‘av come wiz just zat”, he said, smiling.
“I’m glad I have made an impression”, I said earnestly.
He nodded his pointy face at me for a while, seeming to come to some internal conclusions about me. I sat there and watched him waggle his face, since I had little other recourse.
“Let uz zee…” He depressed a small button on the table and a flickering holographic image popped up on the screen. It looked like a map of the caverns in red with a dizzy web of catacombs running all around it. The main feature, though, was a thick, flashing line of white that moved from one layer to the other. Jacques looked it up and down while rasping his hand along his stubble. He regarded me warmly.
“Ze bug you so expertly planted, mah friend. Zat is what you are seeing. It will lead us.”
A small scrum of intense activity and speculation surrounded the display as the nearby rebel intelligentsia huddled round to make sense of the map.
“Zo, zey are keeping zee prisoners in the third chamber of level D? Of courze! Ah should ‘av seen zis. Felipe! Prepare a team. When ze night falls, we will be taking back ze people who are wiz us. Jus’ in time too. It will be close, but we can prevail. Vive!”
Felipe nodded and motioned to me. “What about T-Bone?”
Jacques waved his hand. “Ve must talk-just ze two of us. Leave, Felipe, I will join you soon.” I? I thought. Should that not be ‘we’? Linguistic disability aside, that word seemed ominous. I stirred in my chair and looked to the exits. Was it possible that I had been compromised?
Felipe turned his back to Jacques and made to leave, but shot me a cautionary look out of his good eye.
“What’s wrong with his
voice?” I whispered, as he went to leave.
“Still your tongue, T-Bone! He’s very sensitive about his speech impediment. He was electrocuted when he was very young. Don’t bring it up whatever you do!” And with that, he left the room, letting rickety door shudder closed behind him, and Jacques and I were alone.
Jacques got slowly to his feet and mixed himself a drink, neglecting to offer me one, and then turned round to me with a blunt look in his eyes.
“Vot do you vant from us?”
I floundered for a second but offered up meekly, “I vont... I want to… help your cause.”
“An outsider? An off-worlder? Pah!” He spat the words at me and then spat some spit in the corner for emphasis.
“I… uh, I come from a planet far away, where the monarchy trod on the underclass with their boot heels”, I fumbled, trying to recall the story I had given to Felipe. But he waved my words aside.
“Yes, yes, Felipe told me the story. But here iz mah problem: You come ‘ere, make contact with mah highest lieutenant, then penetrate a detention centre, place a bug on a prisoner and find where a group of important prison are being held. You are clearly a man of some talents-if you wanted off zis planet do not try to tell me that you could not ‘av commandeered a transport off-world. Ze Aplubians may be insular but zey do receive imports and send out exports. So why stay? Why aid us?”
I was thrown. Partly, I admit from receiving a compliment. I tried to remember the last time Space had paid me one and came up short.
He levelled his eyes at me-piercing green orbs that seemed to implore truths. I wondered how far I could go, what I could get away with asking. “The Benefactor...“ I began, but Jacques immediately sat back and crossed his arms, defensively. “... has employed a man. A baker.”
Jacques arched an eyebrow and leaned forward slightly. “Ze Master Baker, yes”, he allowed.
“… A mercenary, a hired killer known throughout the galaxy.”
“Yes, it is unfortunate to rely on ozzers but ve must”, he conceded indecipherably. Was he talking about otters? Possibly. I ploughed on.
The Court of Crusty Killings: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Page 12