The Gordon Mamon Casebook (15 page)

“You don’t sound as if you know anything about the exp—uh, so you’re affiliated with … the developers? Or who?”

“Oh, you needn’t concern yourself with that, Minion. Not where you’re going.”

“
Mamon
. It’s one of those ‘you could tell me, but then you’d have to kill me’ things, huh?”

“No. I get to kill you, whether I tell you or not. And I have to say, I prefer it that way. I owe you nothing, Meson.”

“Mamon.”

“Whatever. Though I will say this. I’ve got a tidy little amount. But it’s always nice to have more. Particularly if I never have to look at another breast in my life.”

“Excuse me?”

“My every working hour is devoted to breasts, one way or another. Uplifting, shaping, enhancing, supporting. Disguising. Misrepresenting. Exaggerating. Do you realise how tiresome that gets?”

“Actually—”

“I don’t even
like
breasts, Mr Mammogram.”

“
Mamon
.”

“In fact, I could go so far as to say I
despise
them.” She gestured with her left hand. “If I could get these off my chest, believe me, I would.”

“Actually—”

“So when an opportunity like this comes along, I grab it with both hands. Marvellous what you can pick up on the net. In just 24 hours, equipment, expertise, a support team—”

“You bootstrapped yourself as an espionage agent in just a
day
?”

“Impressed?” asked Underwire, offering Gordon another of those that-smile-would-be-really-rather-fetching-if-you-weren’t-about-to-kill-me expressions. “Could’ve invested a bit more in the armament, though. Killing Havmurthy had never been part of the plan. Certainly not until he’d revealed who else was in on it. Enceladus, I had, but I still have no idea who he’s working with dirtside.”

“Enceladus? Not Dione?”

“No, Enceladus. There, now, see? I really
am
going to have to kill you.”

“For someone who didn’t want to monologue …” whispered Sue.

“The trick is to keep them talking,” Gordon muttered, keeping his eyes focussed on Underwire, still framed by the cargo bay’s doorway. He chanced another incremental step sideways.

“
What
trick?” Sue whispered back. “Gordon, I think she’s nervous.”

“I think so too,” replied Gordon,
sotto voce
. “Doesn’t mean she’s not dangerous.”

“When you’ve
quite
finished …” Underwire said.

“What happened on Enceladus?” Gordon asked her, still playing desperately for time. Hoping that the Incapacitator’s barrel stayed dark.

“That’s where they did the encoding,” said Underwire. “Someone in Havmurthy’s grilled cheese factory has synthesised a whole series of junk-protein sequences, coding for the Saturn drive’s blueprints. They were releasing them, one set a week, concealed as a trace ingredient in Havmurthy’s Red Leicester. Hints started turning up that someone was nicking IP from Saturn and broadcasting it. They’ve gone frantic trying to shut it down, monitoring every transmission possible, every piece of written material. Nobody thought to check the
cheese
. But it’s there, plain as day, for anyone to read. All you need is a protein sequencer.”

“How many people does—did—Havmurthy have working for him?” asked Gordon.

“Something like fifty-seven thousand, system-wide, I think,” said Underwire. “Where you going with this?”

“If all you’ve got is something that was happening on Enceladus,” said Gordon, “what makes you think Havmurthy was involved at all? It could very possibly have been just a rogue employee, or a rogue group of employees.”

“No, it had to be Havmurthy. The guy travelled everywhere. He’d been to Enceladus at least twice.”

“He was the CEO,” Gordon objected. “The big cheese. Of
course
he’d visit the factories from time to time.”

“Are you delivering this monologue, or am I?”

“Actually,” said Gordon, “describing this as a ‘monologue’ is probably a bit of a misno—”

“You finished?” The gun flashed towards him for emphasis.

Gordon nodded assent, keeping his eyes focussed on her weapon.

“Good.”

“But I still don’t understand why I’m involved in this,” said Gordon. “Why you stunned me.”

“I make no apologies for the effect I have on men.”

“I
mean
—” Gordon began.

Underwire interrupted. “I saw Havmurthy stop to talk to you in the Skytop atrium. I picked you for his accomplice. Made sense. I knew your module was carrying a bulk shipment of Havmurthy samples.”

“That had nothing to do with me,” Gordon said. “Sue placed that order.”

“Which one’s Sue?”

“I am,” she said, peering out from behind Gordon’s shoulder. “And I ordered it because it was on special. End of story.”

“You may be right.” Underwire refocussed on Gordon. “I certainly didn’t learn anything useful off your handheld. For all I knew, though, you could’ve been in with Havmurthy. Matter of fact, I’ve still no evidence you’re not.”

“He was asking me the time!” said Gordon. “At least, I think that’s what happened. Memory’s a bit hazy.”

“That’d be the Hypnotismol. Plan was to dose you and Havmurthy, pump the two of you for info, instruct you to forget the attack and the interrogation, and leave you in one of Skytop’s saunas. But when the stun killed Havmurthy, I … got cold feet. I never intended anyone to get killed. And I panicked. Best I could think of was dragging him to the nearest ladies’, dumping him there, stabbing him to disguise the method of death, and getting myself clear. After I dragged you in there as well, of course, to keep you from raising the alarm. Because I couldn’t be sure the Hypnotismol was going to work as directed. I mean, the stun setting hadn’t exactly lived up to expectations—”

“And stripped and bound me to buy more time. OK, makes sense. But why take the handheld?”

“I thought you were Havmurthy’s accomplice, remember? I thought I could mine it for intel. Then I found out you were one of the house dicks, and that my descent ticket was for this lift-module.
Your
module. Seemed like too much of a coincidence. So then I needed some way to keep an eye on you, without arousing your suspicion. It seemed prudent to ‘upgrade’ the handheld with a spot of spyware—”

“Freeware, more like. You should at least have plumped for the ads-free version. Would’ve been a bit less obvious,” suggested Gordon. Now, at last, Sue seemed to have shuffled across behing him.

“Well, that’s your opinion,” said Underwire. “And any second now, your opinion isn’t going to count for anything anymore. Goodbye, Mr Mandolin.” She sighted along the Incapacitator.

“
Mamon
. Ms Underwire.
Grace
. Don’t do this.”

“I’ve got too much to lose to back out now.”

“Havmurthy’s killing—that was an accident. Or at least—”

“If you’re suggesting I can’t kill in cold blood, think again.” She fired. Sue shrieked.

The energy blast went wide, grazing Gordon’s left arm. The pain was like a burst of mains electricity. Needle-sharp, backed up by scorching, numbing blunt force. Somewhere behind Gordon, the top crate on the stack of Idovist’s pop-psych books disintegrated in a noisy confetti of plastipaper fragments.

“Piece of
shit
internet merchandise,” said Underwire, sighting again.

“Don’t mind me,” explained Yuri Ligotmi, who chose this moment to appear in the doorway, clutching an electric ukelele by the neck. “I’m just looking for my green tambourine.”

Underwire turned to face the newcomer. Gordon grabbed the cloak from the suitcase, threw it over Sue, and rushed Underwire. She turned back and shot Gordon square in the kneecap. He went down in agony.

Ligotmi brought the solid-bodied ukelele down on Underwire’s head. She fell to the deck, unconscious.

* * *

”Always wanted to do that,” Ligotmi said, when he and Sue had finished trussing and gagging the struggling Underwire in as many items of clothing—mainly, as it turned out, Smartbras—as they could lay their hands on. “Not the tying-up-chicks thing, ‘cos that’s not cool if it’s not consensual. I mean, the Pete Townsend bit with the guitar. Must see if I can work that into the act. Pity it didn’t break, though. Man, that would’ve been awesome! Don’t suppose either of you knows who makes guitars that break properly nowadays?”

“Yuri … I don’t think you realise what you’ve just got yourself involved in,” said Gordon, sitting up with difficulty while Sue wrapped a pressure bandage around his swollen and throbbing knee. “There’ll be all manner of reports, police interviews … it could be months before they uncover exactly what was going down with Havmurthy, and whether Underwire was acting alone or was part of a cartel. It’s likely your name is going to get dragged through the mud. And you’d probably better give up on getting any revenue from that ad jingle you did for Havmurthy. It’d get you the wrong kind of attention, with what’s been happening.”

“You’re probably right,” said Ligotmi. “Anyway, loss of revenue isn’t an issue. I’ve just had word that the U238 tour is definitely going ahead, with me and the band as the support act. So we’re better off without
Cheeses Is Just Alright With Me
.”

“
That’s
what it’s called?” asked Sue, blushing. “I’d always heard it as
She Scissors Just Alright With Me
. I mean, whatever lights your candle, but maybe not quite the mental image Marketing was hoping to evoke …”

“Doesn’t matter to me, or the band. Right now,” Ligotmi said, shrugging, “we’re more popular than cheese is.”

* * *

”I wouldn’t try moving that leg for at least a day,” Sue advised. “You took a fair wallop of stun damage.”

Gordon tried to protest, tried to sit up, tried to make himself comfortable. At length he settled for just falling back on the sick bay bed, while Sue picked up the scraps of bandages and wrappings that littered the alcove’s floor. He looked across at the other bed, currently occupied by a heavily trussed and sedated Underwire. “They look so peaceful when they’re asleep, don’t they?” he quipped. Or tried to. Deep rivets of pain hammered into his knee.

Sue, it seemed, wasn’t having it. She frowned.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Her grimace deepened. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Doesn’t what bother me?” he asked. “Getting shot? Sure it bothers me. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Not that. I mean, doesn’t it bug you that we still don’t know who was behind it? Behind Underwire. Whose idea was it all?”

“No,” he replied. “No, that doesn’t matter to me. I’m happy to let the police get to the bottom of it.”

“I’m not so sure they will,” she said.

“How d’you mean?”

“I think Grace was a patsy. I think she took the rap … Gordon, this is big-league stuff. Industrial espionage, murder, intellectual property … you don’t just decide to try your hand at this, on the off chance. On a whim.
No way
Underwire was acting alone—I mean, be fair, she doesn’t look remotely like the lone-wolf type. This cheese-explosion thing that she didn’t seem to know anything about. And no genuine hardened crim would have let that standoff run on anywhere near as long as it did …”

Everyone’s an expert
, Gordon thought to himself. “Sue, she was just out of her depth, the whole thing had ballooned out of her control. Hell, if my knee and my arm didn’t hurt so bad I might almost find it in my heart to feel slightly sorry for her. But it’s done. She got greedy, she tried something she wasn’t cut out for, she made mistakes, and we’ve got her tied up. End of story. Poetic justice, in the circumstances. Hell, at least
she
gets to keep her clothes
on
.”

“But … you’re just not
getting it
, are you?”

“Getting what?”

“Who would be behind this, I mean, Gordon. Who would have the most at stake.”

“Look, if you want to go down that path, I guess it’d be the spacelines. Any one of them gets a competitive edge—and let’s face it, the new drive would be one hell of an edge—they could very easily put the rest out of business.”

“That’s who’d have the most to
gain
from buying into this. What about who’d have the most to
lose
from its adoption?
Think
about it, Gordon. A hyperspace drive, able to operate arbitrarily close to any planetary surface, offering near-instantaneous travel between any of the planets in the solar system … Thanks to Underwire, Havmurthy’s dead, and the cheese feed has presumably been turned off. So although some of the drive specs have been leaked, it’s not the full set of blueprints. And aside from Underwire—and let’s face it, there’s no way she could be directly involved in the explosion that took out the prototype drive and the original plans, given that that happened half the Solar system away … look, I’m really not sure how much of the genie is left to put back in the bottle, and maybe I’m just letting my paranoia get the better of me, but … you’re the detective here, Gordon. Maybe you can see something I’m missing. Because I really don’t think Underwire was acting alone, or even off her own bat. I certainly don’t think she was the one calling the shots.”

“But—”

“It goes deeper than that, I’m sure. Why the explosion at Dione?”

“Havmurthy trying to eliminate the prototype, I guess. Makes his blueprints all the more marketable.”

“Gordon, there’s
no way
that explosion was down to Havmurthy.”

“His cheese,” Gordon protested.

“Precisely. Why would Havmurthy advertise his own involvement, when the whole blueprint-smuggling schtick depended on running under the radar? It’s obviously someone out to discredit Havmurthy, take him out of the equation.”

“But Dione—doesn’t seem likely Underwire could’ve been involved in that. The distance—”

“Exactly. Like I said, Underwire’s just a pas—a patsy. Someone that allows the police to conclude ‘case closed’, just because they’ve got Havmurthy’s killer. When in reality, the whole thing’s anything
but
closed. I keep telling you, someone’s been playing really dirty with this. Someone who wanted both to stick it to Saturn Propulsions, and to any competitors that might’ve tried to jump on that bandwagon. Someone with plenty to lose, and deep pockets. Deep
corporate
pockets. Someone with enough collateral to synthesise anticheese—and you can’t tell me
that’s
going to be cheap, nor easy. Must be some organisation with a helluvalot invested, for one reason or another, in keeping up the obstacles to prompt and straightforward planet-to-planet travel.”