Starliner (The Intergalactic Investigation Bureau Book 1) Read online

  “Boop,” Zimp replied with a drop of his shoulders.

  “That’s okay,” Dresker said, waving his hand. “If running an obstacle course was a requirement to maintain status here, I’d lose half my crew.”

  Everyone laughed, even Zimp, whose laugh sounded like a slew of crickets making a mating call on a warm summer night. In all his years, Dresker had never seen a bot laugh. It was strangely endearing.

  “Anyway,” said Dresker, “the question isn’t whether you can jump through hoops physically, the question is can you handle high-pressure situations?”

  “Bee—”

  “Now, just a second,” Dresker said, cutting the bot off. “I want you to think about this before you answer. I’m not talking about citing pedestrians for walking across the street when the indicators tell them not to. I’m talking about taking on a mission that puts you in the middle of a situation that could cost you your reputation, your solitude, and even your life. I’m talking about going undercover.”

  Zimp’s entire body came to life. His eyes brightened considerably and he moved to the edge of his seat. The Class-3 was literally bouncing in his chair.

  “Beep!”

  “Now get after that,” Hawkins said. “I do believe you just put a bee in that boy’s bonnet.”

  “What?” Dresker asked.

  “Beep?” Zimp asked at about the same time, ceasing his bounce.

  Dresker looked back at Zimp, surprised. Maybe this bot wasn’t so dumb after all.

  Hawkins uncrossed his arms and ran his fingers along the rim of his hat. “I’m just saying that the boy seems excited, is all.”

  “Beep boop bing.”

  Dresker grinned at Zimp and raised an eyebrow. One thing was certain, there was something different about him.

  “What did he say?” Hawkins said with a squint.

  Not everyone could understand BeepBot as well as Dresker. Growing up on a planet full of them gave him that advantage—if it were possible to consider any advantage coming from the experience. Hawkins prided himself on being slow technologically, claiming all the gadgetry was the problem with things today, so he would never go out of his way to learn BeepBot. Dresker never saw a reason to argue the point.

  “He said that...,” Dresker looked at Zimp, who somehow expressed worry. “He said he agrees with you.”

  Zimp inclined his head.

  “Why don’t we get past the communications barrier here. Elwood?”

  Elwood pulled out a small device that had wires hanging from it. It looked about as bumped and bruised as Zimp did, but it was shiny. At least in spots.

  Zimp jumped out of his chair. It was well known that most BeepBots spent the majority of their lives hoping for speech. Some didn’t, such as Clenk, but he was not the norm. And for some reason, Dresker found himself interested in seeing how this little fellow would blossom further than he already had. There was the risk that he would become an egotistical jerk, but one could only wait and see.

  “Beep boop?”

  “Yes, it’s for you.”

  “Boop boop bing bip?”

  “No, we don’t have the budget for that model. Which one is this, Elwood?”

  Elwood held it up to Zimp and said, “It’s the B-720.”

  “Boop beep boop bip?”

  Elwood looked at Dresker.

  “Rhetorical,” Dresker said. “Just hoped it was a newer model. Zimp, bottom line is that this is what we have. Want to back out? I’m sure we can find another willing—”

  “Boop, boop, boop. Beep bip bing.”

  Dresker smiled and nodded at Elwood to continue the installation. It took a little longer than he’d expected, even though the packaging insisted that installation was so easy that even a Neflir could manage it. Zimp’s inability to sit still didn’t much help Elwood’s progress.

  Truhbel moved over and pressed Zimp down so that he couldn’t move, and Elwood clicked the unit in place.

  “Zimp is happy.” It was a monotone voice. Zimp jolted at the sound. “Zimp is very happy!”

  “Well done, Elwood,” Dresker said. “Now, Zimp, we need to talk to you about your mission.”

  “Zimp is listening.”

  “Are you going to keep doing that?”

  Zimp looked around. “Is Zimp going to keep doing what?”

  “Talking about yourself in the third-person.”

  “Was Zimp doing that?”

  “Zimp just did,” Dresker said.

  “Sir,” Elwood said, holding up the box, “one of the problems with this model is exactly that.”

  “Exactly what?”

  “That the bot...”

  “Mechanican,” Zimp said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Zimp is no longer a bot,” said Zimp proudly. “Zimp is now a Mechanican.”

  Dresker stifled a groan. “Right,” he said with a hint of annoyance. “Continue, Elwood.”

  “The B-720 makes, um, Mechanicans talk about themselves in the third-person.”

  “That’s odd.” Dresker kicked his feet up on his desk. “You would think that would be a logic issue, not a synth issue.”

  “Yes, sir, but the B-720 actually ties into the section of his brain that controls the flow of words and that’s where the jumbling happens. At least that’s what it says here.”

  “Anything we can do to fix it?”

  “Get him a Zterp-302,” Elwood said with a shrug.

  “Zimp would like that.”

  Dresker would too, all of a sudden. But there was no budget for it so it would have to suffice for the time being.

  “It’ll do fine for the mission,” Dresker said. “I’ve got budget planning with the president in a few months, we can revisit this then. For now we have just enough money to pay your salary, assuming you want the job?”

  “Zimp does want the job, yes, but Zimp has a problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Zimp already has a job in accounting.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Dresker said with a flick of his hand. “Nothing to worry about there. Unless you’d prefer to stay there?”

  Zimp hesitated. Dresker was somewhat shocked. With most races you could see that defining moment when a person got what they thought they wanted most. Did they accept it and start a life down the path they believed they really wanted, or did they roll back into self-preservation and sabotage their opportunity? More often than not, people walked away. But a bot doing that seemed strange.

  “You’ll contact them for Zimp?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “So Zimp doesn’t have to face Mr. Ootibon?”

  Dresker shook his head.

  “Zimp will take the job.”

  “Excellent,” Dresker said as he slapped the desk and put his feet back on the floor. “Now we have some planning to do.”

  “Zimp is excited.”

  “Great. So, Truhbel, you’ll have to give Zimp a rundown on what we witnessed earlier at The Starliner.”

  “Zimp is an officer now.”

  “That’s right, Zimp,” Dresker said. “Now, we should probably get our new recruit up to speed on what we’ve learned thus far.”

  “Zimp made it to the big show.”

  “Okay, Zimp, we got it. Elwood, give Zimp the basic backdrop of the IIB department and get Bintoo to add him to the roster. But make sure to keep it under wraps for now so that nobody can sneak a peek at his file or see that he works here. We have to keep this under the radar until we have what we need.”

  “Zimp is a copper!”

  “That’s it,” Dresker yelled. “Either stop it with the chatter or I’ll have that damn box removed, got it?”

  “Zimp’s got it,” Zimp said meekly. “Zimp is not allowed to talk using his new voice unit.”

  Dresker opened his mouth for a moment, thought better of it, and simply shooed everyone out of his office.

  A BIGGER HAT

  GALACTIC PARCEL SERVICES, or, as the locals called it, GPS, was wholly o
wned by the CCOP. Not much wasn’t. But just because something was owned by a parent company didn’t necessarily mean that it would just roll over whenever the parent company wanted something.

  “Now the main thing you gotta get,” Hawkins was lecturing Elwood before they entered GPS, “is that folks appreciate it when you remember them. If you squint at a fella and bring up his name in a knowing way, that boy’ll help you with just about anything.”

  “Got it,” Elwood said, filing away another fine tidbit in his Tucker Hawkins Philosophy database. “But do you know anybody here?”

  “No,” Hawkins admitted. “But that don’t make no never mind.”

  “So how do you bring up someone’s name if you don’t know it?”

  Hawkins got that look that said he wasn’t going to outright tell Elwood the answer to his question. This was one of those “learnin’ moments” that Hawkins often talked about. Hawkins had a fondness of saying, “If you give a man a bottle of whiskey, he’ll get to go on a bender once or twice; if you tell that fella where to buy his own bottles of whiskey, he’ll be able to go on a bender whenever he wants.” Elwood had noted that this was only one of a few sayings that Prime Dresker seemed to appreciate.

  “Well, you used to be able to just look at a feller’s name tag and that’d be enough to go on right there,” Hawkins said. “These days that ain’t much of an option. So what do you think you could do?”

  Elwood thought about it for a few moments. He wasn’t very good at this game. If you wanted an answer to something in Elwood’s world, you looked it up. If you couldn’t find that answer then you would hire someone to find it for you, write it up, and give you the location of the information.

  “You could ask him his name and then come back a couple of miniclicks later, but anyone would figure that out,” Elwood mused. “I suppose we could just look up their records and match a name to a face?”

  Hawkins brimmed his hat. “Well, well, well. My boy, you make me proud when you pick a limb to jump out on and it don’t snap.”

  Elwood didn’t get it. Again, he rarely got it. The term “proud” was used, though, and that’s all that truly mattered.

  Hawkins opened his VizScreen and moved next to Elwood. He had a list of GPS employees pulled up. There were names and titles for each person on staff, and it even showed who had checked-in that day. Unfortunately, there weren’t any pictures coming up with the names. All the images had placeholders instead. Elwood assumed that the system in charge of image-serving was down.

  “Well, that dog don’t hunt,” Hawkins whispered.

  Elwood looked around but saw no dog.

  “I guess we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

  They entered the building and circled down to the shipping and receiving section. Hawkins tipped his hat to each person as they walked through. Elwood tried to mimic the action but his hat was much smaller so the effect just didn’t carry the same weight. Elwood had wanted a larger hat but Hawkins told him that he had to do these things in stages. “A man,” Hawkins had said, “can’t just be after getting the biggest hat around unless he’s got a good fixin’ on how to pull off wearing smaller ones first.” Elwood never asked him why because Hawkins would have just said that there were things that an apprentice had to learn on his own.

  They stopped and scanned the room for a moment. Then Hawkins referred back to his VizScreen. He got that typical grin and tilted his head at a young Neflir at one of the side-desks.

  “That’s the one,” Hawkins said with a wink. Then he looked around, nodded at a doorway that said, “box compactors,” and pushed his way through and back out into the sunlight.

  There were boxes everywhere. Large, small, round, flat, and even multiple colors, depending on the type of synthetics they were made of. Hawkins was navigating through them as if he’d had a map. Elwood dutifully trailed behind, never quite certain what was going through his mentor’s head.

  One of the machines, a box compactor, was going about its business. The sound wasn’t quite deafening, but there were screeches that accompanied the pistons that made Elwood wish for earplugs.

  “Hello there, my friend,” Hawkins said to the young Neflirian who was manning the machine. “I was wonderin’ if you could help a poor fellow out?”

  The Neflirian stopped the machine for a moment, looked Hawkins and Elwood over, and then said, “What can I do for you, mister?”

  “Well, it’s a bit dicey, you see.” Hawkins coughed. “There’s a particular lass that works up in shipping. A real looker, if you know what I mean.”

  “Probably don’t,” the guy responded. “Unless, she’s Neflirian, which, seeing that you’re not, I kind of doubt.”

  “Ah,” Hawkins said, pulling his hat off and placing it on his chest, “but she is, my friend. She is.”

  “Seriously?”

  Elwood nearly said the same thing.

  “Looks is only skin deep, son,” Hawkins replied, repositioning his hat. “We talked for a while through a wall at a club. I was sittin’ on the one side and she was on the other. It was like we didn’t want our minds all cluttered with the visual, you see?”

  “Not in the least, no,” the Neflirian said.

  “Well, the bottom line is that by the time we finally did see each other, we were both a shade disappointed.”

  The GPS guy hovered his finger back over the compactor’s panel. “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “Well, it’s just that I done thought about it a lot, and I’m after thinking that if a crow and coyote can learn to like each other then we owe it to ourselves to at least give a shot, too. If you catch my meanin’.”

  “I really don’t.”

  Hawkins sighed. “She works in shipping. She’s Neflirian—”

  “Vera Dardenella,” the guy said. “Has to be. Only other Neflirian in shipping is Cardoo Thmappler. Even if you do have a thing for Neflirians, I doubt you like them in their nineties.”

  § § §

  “...but you never were at a club.”

  “I know that, Elwood,” Hawkins responded as they stood at the doorway. “You know that too. But our friend over there don’t know that. I needed a name and I got a name.”

  “But why would you seek out...” and then it hit him. He grinned. “Oh, I see. You sought him out because he’s Neflirian. He’s not going to lie.”

  “Back out on that limb again, my apprentice. Well done.” Hawkins pulled up his britches. “Now we’re off to spin us yet another fine yarn.”

  Elwood knew what that meant. A yarn, as Hawkins had explained, was essentially a story that unraveled as it went on. Whether there was truth to the story or not was mostly irrelevant. The purpose was either to garner information or to entertain. Hawkins tended to make his yarns accomplish both.

  “I do declare,” Hawkins said with a very thick accent as he stepped up to a large metal desk. “You ain’t Vera Dardenella, now, is you?”

  The young woman looked up and pushed her matted brown hair away from her face. Almost immediately, Elwood had wished she hadn’t. There was a major boil sitting right on her forehead that was slowly leaking down her nose. How she managed not to wipe the juice away was beyond Elwood’s comprehension. Her smile displayed a mix of pearly browns and cavernous gaps, all framed by chapped and cracking lips. The fact that her greenish-brownish-reddish eyes were crossed was the only physically redeeming quality that Elwood could place.

  “I am,” she said nasally.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Hawkins said, leaning on her desk lightly. “I told ya, Elwood, I never forget such a pretty face.”

  Elwood surveyed Vera Dardenella again and came to the conclusion that Humans had a very strange sense of taste. Then again, compared to other Human males that Elwood had seen, Hawkins wasn’t much in the way of looks either. He just had a personality that people felt comfortable with. According to Hawkins, that was half the battle.

  Vera giggled a bit and adjusted her collar.

  “Maybe
it was at a dance?” Hawkins suggested.

  “I don’t dance,” she said with a frown.

  “I barely do,” Hawkins said, laughing. “Most of the ladies tell me that I look like a baby deer that done got the trots when I try brushing my boots up to the fiddle.”

  “What?”

  Elwood stepped in, trying to determine which of her eyes was looking at him, picked one, and said, “He’s saying that he cannot dance very well.”

  “Oh,” Vera said with her face scrunched so tightly that Elwood thought for sure that boil was going to soak the desk.

  “That’s right, that’s right,” Hawkins said and then he snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “I know! I saw you on one of them VizChannel shows. You’re a beauty model!”

  “Me?” Vera looked shocked. “No, no, no... You have me mixed up with someone else, I’m sure.”

  “Well,” Hawkins said, hand on his chin, “I think you’d be a shoo-in for a job like that.”

  “You do?”

  “‘Course I do. Don’t you, Elwood?”

  “Hmm? Oh, um, yes? A Neflir one at least—”

  “Ya see,” Hawkins said with a sincere grin, “you even got this lad’s mind mixed on the subject.”

  Vera blushed. Elwood found the reddish hue did improve her look. Maybe if she just used a bit of makeup, or a lot of makeup, or the entire jar of makeup.

  Out of nowhere a box came flying through the air, landing with a loud crunching sound about two feet from Vera’s desk. A young, muscular Human male followed it out a miniclick later with a big grin on his face. “It’s good to be back,” he declared to nobody in particular as he swept up the heavily dented box before disappearing back to the loading area. Seeing how the man had pulverized the box he’d just thrown in, Elwood promised himself to thoroughly check any new deliveries before signing for them.

  Hawkins hadn’t taken his eyes off the Neflirian woman. “I could go on and on about your beauty, Mrs. Dardenella.”

  “Miss,” she corrected him, batting her lashless eyes.