Kangaroo Too

by Curtis C. Chen

  “Well,” I say. “It seems we have a stalemate situation.”

  “Not really,” she says, “since I’m pretty sure I can sneak a tranq dart into you more effectively than you can stop me from doing anything.”

  I ponder the situation for a moment. She’s not joking. Jessica never jokes. Well, I’ve seen her joke exactly, let’s see, maybe three times since I’ve known her. And it’s really scary every time, because you’re not sure whether she’s joking, and if she’s not, it’s a really horrible thing she’s suggesting. And then one time it was just the worst pun in the universe.

  I’m not going to win this argument on any level. Worst case, she does exactly what she’s threatening to do, and I wake up back on Earth not having completed our mission. Best case … what is the best case here?

  “Okay,” I say. “How about this. It’s going to take you a couple of hours to pack up and book us on a flight out of here, right? The transport situation is going to be a little complex, to say the least.”

  Jessica lowers the medkit and turns down the intensity of her stare just a little. “Probably. What’s your point?”

  “You’re the one who’s a person of interest in a homicide,” I say. “I have an alibi. You stay here and make our exfil arrangements. I’ll go to the nursing home, meet Clementine, make the buy. Then we don’t go home empty-handed. Win-win.”

  “She doesn’t know you,” Jessica says. “She wants to talk to me.”

  “And why is that, exactly?” I ask. “Are you old war buddies or something?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Just tell me what to say. There must be some kind of shibboleth you can give me, right?” I’m sure she knows the Bible well enough to know what I mean by that: some kind of passphrase that will identify me as a friend.

  Jessica puts down the medkit and taps the side of her suitcase thoughtfully. “Fine. Tell her you came to the Moon with me. Tell her about the police investigation; don’t leave anything out.”

  “Except whatever it is you haven’t told me.”

  She ignores that comment. “Explain that I can’t be there myself because I’m being watched by the authorities, just in case I try something else.”

  “Like fleeing the jurisdiction?”

  “I’m not under arrest yet,” she snaps. “They can’t stop me without some actual evidence. Tell Gladys that you’re my colleague. Tell her there’s no orange juice in his shoe.”

  “No orange juice in his shoe,” I repeat. “Got it. Anything else I should know? Is she going to ask follow-up questions?”

  “She can’t know about the pocket,” Jessica says. “So you’ll have to go into the bathroom or behind a privacy screen or something when you pull the cargo. Can you handle it if she asks how you smuggled the precious metals up here?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’ve had lots of practice making up stories about what the pocket isn’t.”

  Jessica sits down on the bed. “We can set up the laptop for full comms. I’ll be able to see and hear everything from your eye, and transmit instructions by audio to your ear.”

  “Just like old times,” I say.

  * * *

  Breyella is very concerned when I show up at Silver Circle’s front desk by myself. I called ahead to let her know I was coming, but didn’t want to say too much over the phone.

  “Is Dr. Chu all right?” she asks.

  I nod. “We probably shouldn’t talk about this out here.”

  “Of course.” Breyella leads me into a privacy booth toward the back of the lobby. She slides the door closed behind us, and the transparent plexi turns cloudy. “What happened? Is everything all right?”

  “We’re fine,” I say. “The marshals just wanted to ask Dr. Chu some questions.”

  “About the man they found—outside? Her friend?”

  “Not a friend,” I say, hoping it’s not too much of a lie—or at least that it won’t blow back on me later. “Just some guy she met at the bar.”

  “But that’s great. There were tons of witnesses at the hotel,” Breyella says. “They can tell the marshals where Dr. Chu was.”

  “Unfortunately, not between midnight and seven A.M.,” I say. “When she was asleep. That’s apparently when the man died. And Dr. Chu was alone then.” Boy, if any of this turns out to be untrue, I’m going to look like a real tool.

  “Oh my God,” Breyella repeats. “So what now? Is Dr. Chu still with the marshals?”

  “No. They didn’t have enough evidence to hold her,” I say. “But I don’t think she’s going to want to go through with her presentation tomorrow.”

  “I understand,” Breyella says.

  “Have the marshals been back here? To talk to anyone else?”

  “No. I haven’t seen any more marshals. And nobody else has mentioned them showing up. I would have heard about it.”

  “Okay.” I make a big show of taking a deep breath and letting it out. “I have a favor to ask.”

  “Anything I can do to help.”

  “I need to see one of your residents.”

  Breyella frowns again. “Why?”

  “Dr. Chu reviewed the files you gave us access to earlier,” I say. “She wasn’t feeling up to coming here herself—you understand—but she wanted me to interview one particular person. For her research.”

  “Of course.” Breyella nods. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait? Until Dr. Chu is feeling more settled and can come back herself?”

  I can’t tell her we’re planning to leave. That would require a whole new level of deception. It’s not that I feel bad about lying to Breyella—it is unfortunate that she’s done nothing wrong and is still being subjected to this deceit, but it’s just part of the job. I just don’t like going off book this much in so short a time, without any consultation.

  But we are on the clock.

  “To be honest,” I say, “sooner would better. I think having something to distract her from this situation with the marshals will be good. I tried to talk her into coming herself, but she’s still pretty shaken by the whole encounter here earlier.”

  “I understand,” Breyella says. “I should be able to arrange something. Who’s the patient?”

  * * *

  Gladys Löwenthal’s room is toward the end of the one of the hallways on the second floor. Breyella gestures for me to hang back while she walks up and knocks on the door. I get a glimpse inside when she steps inside to introduce me: the walls are covered with what appear to be vintage, possibly original, posters from a variety of music concerts. I don’t recognize any of the band names.

  I’ve already started my comms link to Jessica. I can’t see her, but I can hear her, and she can see and hear everything from where I am.

  “Remember the passphrase?” she says in my ear.

  “Shibboleth,” I say under my breath.

  “Pedant.”

  Breyella steps back into the hallway. “Go on in. Call me if you need anything.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “This won’t take too long.”

  I enter the room, and Breyella closes the door behind me. I take a moment to give Gladys Löwenthal a once-over with my eye’s bio-scanners. Tufts of white hair ring her round face, which has the tanned and wrinkled texture of a longtime deep-space laborer. My scans confirm that her bones are brittle from living in microgravity for so long.

  She moves a hand over the controls in the arm of her wheelchair, and the motorized seat glides up to me. “So. Breyella says you’re here to service me?”

  I blink at her. “No. What? I don’t—that’s not—”

  “Oh, relax.” Gladys laughs and backs up a little. “I’m just messing with you, son.” She looks me up and down. “Though I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to fool around a little.”

  “Just ignore her,” Jessica says. “Introduce yourself.”

  “My name’s Edwin McDrona,” I say. “I work with Dr. Jessica Chu. She said I should tell you that there’s no orange juice in his shoe.”

  Gla
dys stares at me—my face this time, thankfully. “You like music, Edwin?”

  Masking noise. Old tradecraft dies hard. “Sure. Whatever you like.”

  Gladys taps at her wheelchair’s control panel some more, and a very loud, rhythmic, and atonal barrage of sound explodes from the wall above the bed. I wince as she cranks the volume up even higher, until I wonder how bad her hearing actually is.

  “Custom sound system,” she says, grinning. “Had them install it special.”

  “Nice,” I say. “What are we listening to?”

  “Charley Horse Manipulation Strategy.”

  “Is that the song or the band?”

  She shakes her head. “You kids these days. No education in the classics.”

  I don’t feel it’s worth debating this point. “We were told you have information to share.”

  “Can I offer you a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I say. “I can’t really stay long.”

  “You mind if I do?” She turns and rolls over to the kitchenette in the corner of her room, where there’s a small sink and refrigerator and pantry.

  “Go ahead.”

  “So where is Jess, anyhow?” she asks, pouring a glass of cranberry juice from the refrigerator. “I was hoping to see her. Catch up a little before getting down to business.”

  “She couldn’t be here. She does send her regrets, though.”

  “Agency got you two doubling up on objectives this trip?” she asks, then sips her drink.

  “It’s a little complicated.”

  “How long are you going to be around?”

  “We actually can’t stay,” I say. “There’s been a … variation. We have to head back tonight, actually. Sorry.”

  Gladys squints. “That’s disappointing.”

  “I hope this won’t affect the arrangement you made with the agency. The exchange of information for goods?”

  “No, no, I’m a woman of my word,” she sighs. “I was just hoping for one last indulgence.” She finishes her drink, puts the empty glass down on the counter, and looks up at me.

  “I can talk to her,” Jessica says in my ear. “We need her to cooperate. You can relay messages between us.”

  I’m not sure this is a good idea, but the very loud music is making it difficult to think clearly. And I’d rather not argue with both Jessica and Gladys. “If I may, Mrs. Löwenthal. I’m actually on comms with Dr. Chu right now.”

  She perks up at this and studies my face carefully. “No kidding. They really make those implants invisible, don’t they?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m transmitting back to her right now. She can see and hear everything. I can’t broadcast her voice to you, unfortunately, but I’ll be happy to relay whatever she says.”

  Gladys rolls forward and leans toward me. “Why aren’t you here, Jess? Didn’t want to see me in the flesh? What’s the deal?”

  I hear Jessica sigh. “Tell her I was unavoidably detained. Tell her about the police situation. Don’t leave anything out.”

  I give a quick summary of our little dance with the U.S. marshals. Gladys chuckles as I finish.

  “Jess motherfucking Chu,” she says, grinning toothily. “Can’t take your ass anywhere, can we?”

  “Okay, now she’s just being a jerk,” Jessica says.

  “She ever tell you how we met?” Gladys asks me. “It’s quite a story.”

  “I like stories,” I say.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Jessica says. I ignore her and gesture for Gladys to continue.

  “It was in the belt. Before the war.” She doesn’t have to specify; there’s only been one interplanetary disagreement that escalated to open warfare. “I was working a private excavation on a previously uncharted asteroid. Big rock, metallic. We dug through some lead deposits and straight into a vein of transuranic ores. You know what that is?”

  “Radioactive elements,” I say. Oliver would be so proud right now. “You were exposed?”

  “Yeah, that was the bad news. We weren’t prepared for that kind of radhaz; our pressure suits weren’t adequately shielded. Lucky for us, the OSS hospital ship Virginia Apgar was in range and heard our distress call before we started losing hair and coughing up blood.”

  “This all seems pretty straightforward so far.”

  “Oh, it gets weird,” Gladys chuckles. “See, transuranic ores are extremely rare in nature. This was a major find, both scientifically and commercially. The captain of the Apgar got it into his head that he could seize the rock under eminent domain or some shit like that, deliver it to Outer Space Command, and score himself a medal or a promotion or both. When we protested our claim, he decided to cut off our medical care.”

  “That’s … illegal?”

  Gladys shrugs. “Hey, you’re patrolling the outback, all alone for months at a time, you have wide discretion to prosecute the mission at hand. Treating radiation sickness is pretty standard. But with transuranics, it’s heavy metal poisoning that’ll get you—they’re all a little different, and you never know if it’s going to be brain bleeds or liver failure or some other life-threatening problem. The continuing care can be a real drain on resources.

  “The captain ordered us to be discharged from sickbay as soon as basic radiation treatment was done—the minimum care he was legally required to provide—and then put off the ship at the nearest space station. He was betting that by then we’d all be too sick to file the official claim documents on the asteroid we’d been mining. Then he could circle back and annex the rock before our company could put together another crew with proper radhaz gear.”

  “And the other officers didn’t have anything to say about this?”

  “One of them did.”

  I nod. “Jessica Sunshine Chu.”

  “That’s not my middle name,” Jessica says in my ear. I turn down the volume.

  “Of course, she wasn’t dumb enough to confront the captain directly,” Gladys says. “She knew the score. Her priority was treating her patients. She found a way to remove the obstacle that was preventing her from providing care.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “This is the genius part,” Gladys says. “You know how OSS makes all personnel requalify on unassisted spacewalks every so often?”

  “I’m familiar with the regulation,” I say. I’m not technically in the military, but the agency borrows a lot of procedures from the Outer Space Service. It’s always a laugh and a half when I have to flail around in a spacesuit for the review board.

  “Well, the captain was already overdue for his requal, and I think he also just wanted to see with his own eyes what treasure he was stealing,” Gladys says. “Jess supervised his spacewalk. Including prepping his suit.”

  I nod. “I see where this is going.”

  “Wait for it.” Gladys raises a bony finger. “Crafty ol’ Jess reprogrammed the interlocks in the captain’s life support backpack. So instead of separating all the input liquid into new breathing gases, the catalyzer evaporated just enough of the original compound to dose him with nitrous oxide.”

  “Laughing gas?” That, I wasn’t expecting. I had a vague notion from Oliver’s many lectures that modern life support systems stored oxygen and nitrogen in a compact liquid form that could easily be turned into breathable atmosphere—two parts nitrogen to one part oxygen—but I didn’t realize they could also be sabotaged in this way. “She got the captain high?”

  “Lowered his inhibitions,” Gladys says. “So he was, shall we say, easily persuaded when she met him after the spacewalk and escorted him back to duty.”

  “And what did she persuade him to do?”

  “Authorize additional medical treatment for us. He wasn’t going to check on us before we got to the station anyway—plausible deniability and all that—but Jess got his thumbprint on an order to take any and all medical action to treat our symptoms, at her discretion. You can imagine his surprise when we were all alive and well and notarizing our claim before the Apgar eve
n docked.”

  “But he didn’t find out what Dr. Chu had done?” I’ve blinked up Jessica’s military service record in my eye, and the dates indicate she continued in US-OSS for quite a while after that particular incident.

  Gladys shrugs. “People who make bad decisions while drugged up don’t typically like to admit it. Besides, the captain got a commendation for going above and beyond to save our irradiated asses. Not a bad consolation prize for such a jerkwad.”

  “And how do you know all this?”

  “I was awake when Jess brought the captain back to sickbay after his spaced-out spacewalk. When she got him to sign the authorization. I saw it go down, and I wanted to know what the hell had just happened before she injected me with anything else.” Gladys grins. “Jess figured I had just as much reason as she did to keep this secret. We parted ways at the station, but I kept an eye on her from then on. She had demonstrated a willingness to bend the rules for a higher purpose, and that’s the kind of friend the agency likes to make.”

  “You recruited her?” I always wondered how Paul had lured Jessica into his web.

  “Oh, no. That’s above my pay grade.” Gladys shakes her head. “Lasher simply asked me for some background later, and I was happy to give my recommendation. Jess Chu’s a good egg. She’ll get the job done, come hell or high water.”

  I can’t argue with that. The question is, what job is Jessica doing now?

  “Well, thank you for the backstory,” I say, turning my radio volume back up, “but we are on the clock here. Let’s talk about the intelligence data you agreed to share with the agency.”

  “Thank you,” Jessica says, with only a mild tang of bitterness.

  “Fine.” Gladys nods. “Where’s the payment?”

  “I’ll produce it once you provide the data.”

  She frowns at me. “I asked for twenty bars of gold bullion. You want me to believe you’re carrying it on your person right now? Let’s go to wherever you stashed it.”