Starliner (The Intergalactic Investigation Bureau Book 1) Read online

  “Hawkins,” he said, “where’s the video from the strike?”

  “Waitin’ on it myself. Them fellas at the security desk at manufacturing said they was having troubles getting after them. Something about a lock on the files. You know I ain’t much for all that techno jibberjabber.”

  “A lock?” Dresker said more to himself than anything. “Why would they be locked?”

  “Can’t say. Seems like trying to hide your own bottle of whiskey from yourself.”

  “It does?”

  “From my perch it does. Maybe somebody else was after locking it?”

  He put the rest of the images up and began sequencing them. “We really need one of those technical types on the team.”

  It was hard enough getting a budget for the IIB. President Zarliana enjoyed a bit of chaos on the CCOP, if her happiness regarding the gears locking up was any indication, and she routinely denied Dresker’s budgetary request. At least now he knew why. But since a large event took place and Zarliana did make mention of tightening security, he may yet have a chance.

  Elwood had shown some capacity for technology, but seeing that he didn’t speak up regarding the lock, Dresker assumed that his knowledge was limited.

  “Okay, folks, let’s go through this again.”

  And they did.

  After a click of digging and debating, they were finally united.

  From the perspective of the IIB, The Starliner was most definitely involved in the events that spelled the end of Bob and Walter.

  Now they faced a dilemma that would bring not only budgetary issues but also would force Dresker to do something he’d never felt comfortable doing.

  § § §

  Zimp was a BeepBot. He had no speech synthesis and it wasn’t likely that he’d ever get one.

  The CCOP kept their number crunchers quiet. The most they were concerned with is that when there was an error, it was spotted. There was no need to hear the regurgitation of the countless clicks it took to spot the error. A plain beep would do.

  It wasn’t much of a life for a bot that wanted adventure and excitement.

  Zimp devoted 90% of his mind-share to his work while allowing the other 10% to roam through the landscapes of Nodiskur, the waters of Kaenlombik, and the glaciers of Yanzilon. He jumped, he dove, he swam, and he soared...in his mind, of course. At his desk, he mostly whimpered.

  Some of his friends had saved for over ten years to afford the Zterp-302 voice synth and they all ended up going places and doing things.

  He envied them.

  Going from BeepBot to Mechanican was like winning the CCOP Lottery, except without all the money. One was often dead broke after purchasing a voice synth, but it was worth it because Mechanicans were in demand these days. Their communicative abilities alone brought in double the salary that Zimp was paid, which meant that they could get their voice synth money back quickly.

  Zimp wasn’t all that good with his money, though, so he never put away enough to build the nest egg required for a Zterp-302. While he was fantastic at managing his employer’s finances, his own bank account remained somewhat dusty.

  It was those stupid VizChannels that sold things that you just had to have. Compensated Programming shows, like Bot Shopping Network, or BSN, were the worst. BSN sold anything and everything, to anyone and anything, but they targeted bots. Zimp got a number of decent deals when the term Mechanican became mainstream. BSN tried to change their name to Mechanican Shopping Network, or MSN, but a lawsuit spun up from some small software company located in System 111B so they ended up sticking with the historical brand.

  BSN kept Zimp living paycheck to paycheck. Not a penny went into savings these days because he was so addicted to shopping. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he retired, aside from maybe going through all the junk he’d accumulated over the years and trying out each one.

  He also frequented the other non-bot shopping networks.

  He was still kicking himself for buying the AbSnapper. It seemed to work so well for the people that were using it. They looked happy and healthy. He recalled opening the box, setting it up, plugging it in, laying in it, activating the on switch, and flying across the room. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that the device may not be compatible with his kind. Later he found in the fine print that the AbSnapper was not intended for use by robots, droids, bots (beep or otherwise), or Mechanicans. This was the case with roughly half the products that littered his small home.

  He’d only bought the AbSnapper in the first place because he had been in training for another shot at a position in the IIB department.

  He internally sighed while entering numbers into the system.

  For nine years Zimp had applied to be a junior agent.

  It was well known that the IIB didn’t have any BeepBots or Mechanicans working in the division. Word on the street was that all the Mechanicans thought it a menial job that better suited other races. Their sentiment made it even more appealing to Zimp. Doing something different was what he wanted.

  The thought of chasing down the bad guy and bringing him to justice made his circuits hum every time.

  But after all those years of trying and failing, Zimp decided that he just wasn’t cut out for that life. Or, more accurately, it was apparent that IIB management didn’t think he was.

  The fact that he was a Class-3 model didn’t help either. The Class-2s were medium height and lanky, so they were adept at speed and climbing. The Class-4s were about the same height but had a little more meat to them, which gave them strength and stamina. Zimp, though, was shorter, thinner, and was made with a bright sheen.

  A couple of bottles of Sheen-Be-Gone that he’d picked up on BSN nicely dulled his exterior to an almost brushed metal, which, he thought, looked rather appealing, but he couldn’t do anything about his stature.

  Zimp’s model was fashioned for walking into small areas that needed delicate hands. This could have been beneficial for many tasks that, say, a special agent may find useful, had it not been for his programming. It was first-generation, and buggy. So when he had been sent out to fix something, he consistently fouled up.

  The powers that be didn’t bother to just update his programming after the multiple explosions he had caused during routine maintenance projects in the underground buildings of Zethtok; instead, they sent him off to where all the “useless” robots went: marketing. But he didn’t do well there either. Zimp was far better at falling for marketing schemes than he was at creating them.

  Finally it was decided that he would be overhauled, which was a dismal prospect. Fortunately, one of the accounting firms saw a way to get cheap help. They had him pulled off the tram, installed a numbers module, and set him to work in accounting, and he’d been here ever since.

  Drumming up his past was so depressing.

  He beeped out a moan and started to turn his attention back to the numbers when his VizScreen chimed.

  Zimp activated it and saw that a call was coming in.

  Nobody ever contacted him, so he looked closely at the identification and saw that it was the Internal Investigation Bureau.

  His mind raced as he tried to figure out what he could have done wrong.

  “Beep?” he answered, quivering.

  “Hello?” A Human male’s face came on the screen. It looked familiar. Zimp accessed his banks and found that the face belonged to the Prime of the IIB. “Is this Zimp Blitterbent?”

  “Beep,” Zimp’s beep wavered and he felt he was going to drop a pint of oil.

  “Good,” the man said. “I’m Adam Dresker, Prime of the Internal Investigation Bureau. I’ve been going over your files and I see that you’ve been turned down nine times by my group. Is that right?”

  “Beep.”

  “I also see that you haven’t tried again since the last rejection.”

  “Beep.”

  “Are you no longer interested in working at the IIB?”

  “Boop,” Zimp said, confused. �
��Boop bing.”

  “You are?” The man smiled. “Good. That’s…” he sighed, “…good. I’d like you to come in right away then because I may have an immediate mission for you.”

  “Beep boop?”

  Dresker grinned. “No sh...”

  § § §

  “…it.” Dresker disconnected the call. “Okay, he should be here in about thirty miniclicks.”

  “You handled dat good,” Truhbel said. “I know dat wasn’t easy.”

  “Yeah, well, desperate times and all that, you know.”

  Dresker was at least content now that his team members were all working on the same theory that The Starliner was the culprit.

  Things were moving in the right direction, and they were exciting again. Whether that was good or bad, he had yet to make up his mind. Again he thought that next time he should be a bit more cautious when making wishes. And again, he chided himself on the fact that he didn’t have that much power to influence the universe with his wishes.

  “Ah,” Dresker said as his VizScreen message light flashed. “Looks like we got the video from the docks.”

  He pressed a couple of buttons and the screen flashed up on the wall. It showed the image of Bob following around what looked to be a Neflir. Dresker froze the frame and zoomed in. He homed in on the Neflir and ran a check against the Hub records to pull up the fellow’s data file. Upper-management in the manufacturing division. Not surprising. Direct report into Refter.

  “The name Pezder sound familiar to you?” Dresker asked with a tilt of his head.

  “Nope.”

  “Says here that this Pezder guy reports to some guy named Refter. Wasn’t Refter the guy Lemoolie was investigating?”

  “Yep.”

  “Thought so,” Dresker said as he scanned through the rest of the document. “Also looks like he was Bob’s boss up until yesterday. The question is what happened here that would have caused Bob to take a nosedive into the gears?”

  “And why did dat Pezder go wif him?”

  “Indeed,” Dresker said. “Why?”

  “And why would Bob have an erect penis while wif dat guy?”

  Dresker shrugged. “Could be an alternate bot.”

  “You believe dat’s possible?”

  “With bots finding religion, I believe most anything these days.”

  They watched the feed a few times. Dresker kept reversing it over one of the sections where the dock worker was talking to Pezder.

  “See anything wrong with this picture?”

  Truhbel leaned in as he rolled through the video again.

  “Looks like dat dock worker is angry, but that’s to be expected.”

  “Yeah,” Dresker said and then froze the frame and pointed. “Notice that the dock guy is looking over Pezder’s head?”

  “Oh, dat’s weird.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Dresker ran the entire thing again at a fraction of the speed. “Not only is the dock worker looking way over that Neflir’s eyes, but so is the supervisor.”

  “What do you fink dey is looking at?”

  “I think they’re looking at the person that was in the video before it was altered.”

  “Huh?”

  Dresker went frame by frame now and really zoomed in. There was no pixilation at all. This was a real professional job. The background was flawless and the edges were uniformly fuzzy unlike the ones in the Walter Blitterbent feeds. But the dock people were looking into the eyes and pointing at the face of someone a fair bit taller than Pezder, and there was one frame where Bob walked into the scene and the tiniest piece of his shoulder disappeared.

  “Right there,” he said to Truhbel. “It’s just a sliver, but it’s definitely cut off.”

  “Could be a reflection,” Truhbel suggested.

  “True,” Dresker agreed.”But why is everyone pointing above Pezder’s head?”

  “Yeah, dat makes no sense.” Truhbel was tapping away at her own VizScreen now. “And da records show dat Pezder was in a conference room on da fird floor during dat time anyway.”

  “So, again, we have someone tinkering with the feeds,” Dresker mused. “It would explain the lock on the files earlier too.” He deactivated his VizScreen and scratched his ear. “Maybe we should talk with this Pezder fellow anyway, just to get his take on Bob and what kind of Mechanican he was.”

  “Managers don’t pay attention to der workers,” Truhbel said with a look. “You know dat.”

  “Let’s at least get the foreman and that other guy in for questioning.”

  “Already tried. Foreman left right after he walked off da job. Off world on a private ship. Won some prize. Couldn’t even get a connection.”

  Dresker grunted. “That’s convenient.”

  “Yep, and dat muscley guy is nowhere. I searched the entire CCOP system. It’s like he don’t exist.”

  “So our video tinkerer is adept at hacking into the major systems as well,” Dresker said with a shake of his head. “Well, this just makes our job more interesting.”

  They sat in silence for a few miniclicks. Whoever was calling the shots on this little caper had some skills, but playing cover-up only works for so long. It’s like telling a little lie that needs more lies to support it, and even more to support those. After a while, you just can’t keep a handle on which was which and you get busted.

  Dresker’s VizScreen message indicator went off. “Just got a note about some informant down at DaPlace.” He forwarded the message to Truhbel, noting that it originated from an anonymous address.

  “An informant? When does dat happen?”

  “Never,” Dresker said.

  “Must be a setup.”

  “More like one of those...what was the term that Hawkins always uses for this?”

  “Wild goose chase.”

  “That’s the one,” Dresker said and then stood up and stretched while trying to stifle a yawn. “Regardless, we still have to follow it up, just in case.”

  “Hawkins and Elwood?”

  “No, send Pat and Cleb to check that one out. I’d feel better with Cleb going to DaPlace, if you know what I mean. Let’s send Hawkins and Elwood down to GPS and see what kind of packages have been coming and going with that cult. And if you could check the GalactiNet usage to and from The Starliner, that may help us figure out if they’ve been involved with all these edits or not.”

  “Sounds good,” she said as she strolled out.

  Dresker watched the video a few more times as he finished up his cup of Carbenian’s.

  Whoever was masterminding the events over the last couple of days was good. Almost good enough that he had to be one of the lesser flawed races. No Human was this good, Neflir were too clumsy and honest, and Gheptians were too detail oriented to ever get a plan like this off the ground. Tchumaichians were too flighty for this kind of cover up. There were a handful of other races that were somewhat intellectually bland, but, unless there was some serial killer on the loose as Pat had suggested, Dresker couldn’t believe any one of them was a possibility.

  That left Hyzethian and Mechanican.

  He ran a trace and found that Zarliana was a lone Hyzethian stationed on the CCOP. They were quite territorial, after all. While nobody was above the law, Dresker doubted she was capable of this, regardless of her recent discussions about the good of chaos in the realm of society.

  The Starliner was the only thing that had its grubby little hands all over this case. They had to be involved somehow. His earlier meeting with that SensualBot did nothing to dissuade them from being suspect number one, either.

  Religion had been the cause of more deaths in the history of most planets than any other infestation. Dresker winced at the recognition that his mind used that particular word to describe religiosity. Still, history didn’t often lie. Exaggerate, yes. Tell a one-sided story, certainly. But outright lie? Well, possibly. At least to some degree. But every single world’s history told similar stories and they couldn’t all be falsehoods.

&nb
sp; But a religion full of bots?

  FOUND MY VOICE

  LIKE OTHER BOTS of his caliber, Zimp donned a collared pull-over shirt that he kept tucked into his brownish, loose-fitting pants. Unlike most Class-3s, though, Dresker noted that Zimp had more of a brushed look than the standard shiny metal.

  Dresker motioned Zimp to a chair next to Truhbel. Elwood and Hawkins stood off to the side.

  “I take it you were surprised by my call,” Dresker said lightly.

  “Beep.”

  Everyone else had accepted bots as sentient many years ago, and maybe they were. Then again, maybe not. All Dresker knew was that he saw the droves of hard-working people on his home planet lose their jobs to machines. It was called progress. From his perspective, people living in the streets hunting for a way to feed their families seemed to counter the societal norm for forward movement.

  Had he been an activist, he could have been a catalyst for change, but he was too concerned about getting a job himself.

  From a different view, there was Clenk, one of Dresker’s good friends on the CCOP. He was just as lucid, if not more so, than ninety-nine percent of the “regular races” on the floating city. It didn’t hurt that Clenk also provided him with the best booze a man could ask for. That wasn’t fair, though. Dresker had spent many clicks chatting with Clenk while not being intoxicated, and he found the bot was just as rational then.

  Sentient or not, Dresker hated playing politics. He just somehow found it easier with bots.

  “Well, Zimp,” he said purposefully, “I was going over your records and I was impressed. Anyone determined enough to keep trying to get on our team, dealing with rejection after rejection—nine times, to be exact—well, that shows a level of tenacity that warrants some attention.” He forced a pleasant look. “I found it particularly interesting how you failed consistently on the same portion of the exam.” He thumbed his VizScreen. “Not much in the way of athletics?”