MAGS HARDBOTTLE, DETECTIVE TO THE STARS: Intro and Chapter One
(high school and above, SF)
Preface
“Stop right there, Mr. Sin, or I’ll fill ya’ fulla’ photons!”
To make her point, Mags Hardbottle aimed her blaster one degree off the fleeing human’s left ear and blasted a halo of brilliant photon rays around him as he ran down the dark street. She smoothly guided her trusty blaster in an arc up one side of him and down the other.
He froze and dropped the sack he was carrying. In a moment, the dazzling display of sparktacular photons faded away harmlessly into the night, allowing the glare from the nightclubs and the nearby transport station marquee to shine onto the dark backstreet again.
From up ahead on the dark street, the reliable Major ran towards them as quickly as his long legs permitted.
“Mags!” he shouted. “You’ve got the wrong man! That’s Gill Roberts, the trustee of the orphan’s home! He’s a pillar of the community! He’s been trying to clean this town up for years!”
“What better cover for his grifting?” she asked, keeping her blaster fixed on her quarry.
“Mags!” the Major shouted. “Look out behind you!”
Two snarling men, their faces masked in black scarves, emerged from doorways on either side of the narrow street and closed in behind her.
“You’re a goner this time, Hardbottle!” one of them sneered.
The captured Gill Roberts didn’t turn to her. Hands up, he was still facing the Major as he said. “Guess your reign of law and order, truth and justice, is over Mags Hardbottle. The big boys are running this town now. Sorry Major. You’re about to be the victim of a stray bullet from my men.”
Mags kept her eyes fixed on her captive. “Yeah, y’got me right where I want you, guv,” she said, and then she shouted, “Now Kogrik!” without turning.
“Kogrik!” both of her would-be assassins shouted in dismay, not seeing the seven-foot Gronnox emerge from the darkness behind them. Before they could turn to look for him, he slammed their heads together and then neatly plucked the weapons from their hands as they fell to the street.
“More?” he shouted to Mags.
She still did not afford herself the luxury of turning from keeping the crooked orphanage manager in her sites.
“No, no more, old chum!” she exclaimed. “We got this caper just about wrapped up! And as for this town,” she said to the frustrated and furious Robertson. “Law and order, truth and justice are still players here. He’s all yours, Major!”
“How do you do it, Mags!” the Major exclaimed. He drew his silver whistle from his shirt pocket and blew three shrill notes on it. In seconds, the street and alleys echoed with the sound of the booted feet of law enforcement, heeding the call of decency. “We can never thank you enough!” the Major said. He withdrew a pair of handcuffs from his belt and took hold of Gill Roberts by the shoulder as the police flooded onto the narrow street.
“Thank Kogrik,” she told him. “’e’s the one that mighta’ knocked some brains into those two.” And now that Mr. Sin was securely handcuffed, she turned and nodded at the two fallen henchmen.
“Can knock brains into people?” Kogrik asked, dumbfounded. This innocent question evoked a hearty chuckle from the Major as he shoved the hapless, manacled criminal to two of the policemen.
“You can hope so, Kogrik,” he said. “Good job!”
Kogrik leered with happiness and was further gratified as the Major passed him three cigarettes to munch on. Kogrik nodded his massive head in thanks for the treat. The blue quills of his Gronnox mohawk tipped forward and then back again.
Her face hidden as always behind the green visor, Mags slid the blaster into the holster on her belt. “Come on then, Old Son,” she said to her trusty Gronnox sidekick. “Let’s go home!”
The two of them walked through the alternating bars of darkness and light as they strolled under the lights and marquees of the midnight street.
—FROM MAGS HARDBOTTLE, DETECTIVE TO THE STARS #67, The Killer Scrub
Chapter One
Static electricity had been building over the city all day. As night fell like a hot and weighty curtain over the surrounding desert, the dry landscape of white sand and pulverized mica released a moistureless dust into the charged air. The dry, stifling fog of dust rose like a low mist and crackled with blue sparks.
Just as the casinos were lighting up for the evening rush, the static suddenly discharged from horizon to horizon in a single, brilliant flash. For a moment, the huddle of glowing signs and false fronted buildings were bleached white by it, and the clutter of living units on the edge of the city were pulled from shadow: hive-like clumps of huts and one-room cottages built with sagging, fibrous walls.
Few inhabitants were at home to admire the lightning flash. It lasted just long enough to illuminate a solitary female figure that strode towards the casinos from the slum of crazily tilting living units. And it afforded her a moment to glimpse a flurry of motion on the edge of the waste disposal zone that bordered the enclave of squashy, bulging huts.
A single, featureless biped creature—perhaps Gronnox, Tark, Salafian or the like, suddenly leaped from the heart of the waste dump and scrambled to the top of a great heap of cast-off bottles and broken glass. He plunged over the summit, slid, and then scrambled down the other side toward the street.
Five larger pursuers charged to the top of the mountain of shards and then leaped off the pile and came down on top of their prey. They seized their captive and dragged him back over the mound and into the dump, all of them caught for a moment by the flash of static lightning.
The night rushed in to hide them, but the light had revealed the extra pectoral limbs of the pursuers. As they pulled their struggling captive back over the mound of garbage and into cover, the passerby on the street stopped. Robbery at the dump was nothing unusual, but this was a rarity. A four-handed thief was almost unknown in the galaxy, even among the casinos.
“You’ll pay for this!” a voice shouted from the waste zone. “I tell you, I am Theskulis, a name you shall learn to fear!”
This claim was followed by the sound of several small explosions, and instantly the two-handed captive broke free and raced to the top of the garbage heap again. The female on the street broke into a run towards him, just as three remaining pursuers once again clambered up the heap after their prey.
Alarmed at sight of a new adversary from the street, the quarry gripped something and turned from side to side, seeing himself caught either way.
“Need a hand?” the female called, and she scrambled part way up the slithering pile of glass, crockery, rags, and other refuse. “Come this way!” And she waved him towards herself. “Let’s go!”
He abruptly decided to trust her and came down after her, but one of those from the dump suddenly launched himself down the mountain of shards in a tackle.
The small, slighter female stepped in close, embraced the bigger attacker on his outer arms as he came down, rolled under him before his inner hands could grip her, and straightened her legs up into him as he flew over her. He was catapulted off the hill of glass shards and onto the brick street below with a thump that told of broken bones. She rolled to her feet, a little unsteadily on the slithery mountain of shards and garbage.
“Tark!” she shouted after him. “Practice your basics and live longer!”
“Shoot the small one!” one of the pursuers shouted, but her new ally suddenly threw something back at them, and the two remaining creatures fell backwards off of the towering heap as they recoiled while trying to draw weapons. An explosion rocked the debris on the heap and sent shards of glass and stone flying everywhere.
“Let’s go strip them!” she exclaimed, her body now erect and energized by the prospect of plunder. “They’re our rightful prey now!”
She would have gone up the hill of rubble, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her away. “There are more of them coming! It was an ambush!” he exclaimed. She nodded up at him and followed him down the pile to the street, but another flash of the noiseless lightning showed her that a second band of Tarks was running towards them from the city.
“Tarks aren’t thieves,” she exclaimed, confused. “They don’t steal! What are they after?” But she pulled her new ally by the hand towards the slum of living units.
Loud outcries from the pursuit told them both that this was what the pursuers had feared. In the maze of tilting houses, bits of fence, and twisting footpaths, they could lose their pursuers and perhaps even pick them off one at a time.
The one who called himself Theskulis let her lead him into the incredible maze of fibrous huts and cottages. Her hand was small but strong with a wiry grip. She seemed completely unafraid, and even as he contemplated the necessity of killing her in order to be able to go on alone, he felt a certain admiration for her coolness.
For several minutes they ran without stopping, twisting and turning around the sagging huts and cottages until there was no sound of pursuit from behind. The smell of poverty was all around them—reeking, rotting bits of meat from leftover meals, excrement from several different intelligent species all crammed together, acrid smoke from cooking fires, and cheap fuel.
She stopped to catch her breath with him in the lee of one of the baggy, tilting huts, and he said quietly, “I assure you, I will reward you very well if you get me out of here.” He dismissed the necessity of killing her. She was a good and useful ally. In a very different voice she startled him: “Come off it, guv. What’d you do, end up on the wrong side of a casino? Them was Tarks back there. They ain’t cut throats. What’d you do to offend them?”
“Nothing,” he said curtly. “Even I have my limits, and I would not try to offend the Tarks.”
“Then you offended someone they owe loyalty to,” she said. “What’d you do, get in debt to a casino? Gonna slope off on your bill, then?”
Her London accent was so incredibly bad, so much like a staged version of a cockney, that he stopped from his own account and said abruptly and with acid courtesy, “May I ask who you are?”
“Sure, guv. I’m Mags Hardbottle, Detective to the Stars. At your service. But I don’t expect much in the way of reward from the likes of you.”
“Please be serious!” He snapped. “Who are you, really?”
“I’m Mags Hardbottle, matey. And you can put that into your pipe and—uh-oh, come on!”
They were unlucky in that the lightning flashed again, illuminating them just as a band of the Tark pursuers came wending up one of the alleys between the fiber walls of the houses and huts. She led him again through the twisting paths at a run.
They slammed into a light, wire fence where evening insects had collected to cool off from the hot and dry day. She rattled up hand over hand, heedless of the slithery mass that swept under her and over her to escape the disturbance. He expertly followed. A phosphor dart skimmed past her shoulder, and they heard one of the Tarks cry out an order not to shoot again. She and Theskulis dropped over the top of the fence and resumed their running.
The Tarks hit the fence, but they were too heavy to get over it easily. The light metal mesh swayed and billowed on overtaxed struts as the first three tried to climb over, then crashed down part way, caught like sheeting between the walls of two of the houses. As the fencing gouged into the fibrous walls of the frail housing units, the Tarks slipped and rolled into each other. The creature who called herself Mags Hardbottle laughed as she and Theskulis ran again through the twisting alleys. She took his hand again in her small, wiry grip. “Come on, guv. I got an idea. Them Tarks’ll burn these huts down if they want you bad enough.”
“Are you human?” he asked her as they burst out from the clutter and stench of the slum and into the dry, hot darkness.
“Course I am. Ain’t you heard of Mags Hardbottle? I’m the galaxy’s most famous detective.”
She brought him out to the top of a great embankment of sand, and they slid down. In the rainy season, the river would flow here, but now the dry bed afforded them the cover of low ground. He jerked on her hand to indicate that they should run to the west, towards the spires of the city. There were piers up ahead, and they could hide among the pilings and stored boats.
They scurried to the cover of the first pier, a high rickety structure that soared above them.
Both of them were panting, and they dropped into the shadows under the planks above. She swept a few of the insects from his shoulder and with no shyness at all ran her hands quickly over his face and head. After a pause, he did the same for her, avoiding the visor that masked her eyes.
“Ugh! Hate those things. You run all right for an old duffer,” she said in a low voice. “You come here all alone?” She slapped her arms and sides, and he did the same, ridding themselves of the last of the insects and the slithery feel of them.
“If you are taking me for an ordinary human, you are mistaken,” he said woodenly. She glanced at him, her vision apparently uninhibited in the darkness by the opaque, green visor. She sized him up quickly. He was tall but well knit in build, dressed in dark clothes, with a small dark beard. Even in flight from a band of very warlike Tarks, there was a steady, almost aloof composure about him, as though he were indeed master of himself in any situation.
“Well what’d the Tarks want you for?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I had to—” He hunted for words. “I suppose you would say I had to land here—this waste land of yours. And once I was here, I could not leave. I wasn’t eager to venture out into it at first, but there was no other way.”
She snorted and said something under her breath that sounded like “fancy pants,” and he added, with great sternness, “Small time gambling is beneath me. And all the rest—the thievery of this place, the body piracy. Scavengers all. All of you. God has rejected you!”
“I’m human!” she snapped. “And I’m not the one runnin’ for me life. And if this scavenger—” And she pointed to herself, “hadn’t showed up, them Tarks would be testing their knives on you right now. But, cursed by God or not, Tarks don’t steal, and Tarks don’t sell blokes to the body pirates. What’d you do to get ‘em mad?”
“Nothing!” he snapped. “A circuit in my controls must have burned out, and I was forced to—to land.” That was not quite accurate as Theskulis, like his adversary, Doc Thorson, was in possession of one of the seven ancient Gates of Peril. It was not exactly a spaceship, but this was no time for explanations “I at last ventured out to buy or trade for a replacement. I was just leaving a vendor’s stall when those mercenaries tried to cut me off and chased me towards the city’s garbage tip.”
“That don’t sound like Tarks,” she muttered, but she did not contradict him. She sighed and then said, “All right, let’s see this through to the end. Which way to your ship? I’ll help you get there.”
* * * *
Oh I love a girl from an alien race!
She eats flies and spiders and leaves not a trace!
We trundle about in time and in space!
Just me and my girl from an alien race!
Doc Thorson’s voice, happy as only a science teacher’s voice can be when his students have cleaned and organized his lab for him, woke up Penny Derwood from her sleep. He strode through the open doors into the hidden control room of his Arch, to see her curled up in a chair. She grimaced at the protest of cramped shoulders and knees as she woke up and moved. Stiffly, she sat up and looked around.
“Wake up, Penny,” he said, a trifle cross with her for keeping a vigil inside his precious Arch. He strode over to her and looked down at her indignantly, his eyes stern in his lined face. “What are you doing in here this early in the morning? Did you spend the whole night in here?”
“Yes I did,” she replied innocently. She stretched and tried to look as though she were not very sore from sleeping all night in a cramped chair.
“Oh I see,” he began. He abruptly turned away from her and went to the control console that took up half of one wall. He pushed one hand through his shock of white and gray hair, a sign of agitation. “Look, you aren’t going to stop me, you know!”
“I know,” she agreed.
“Well what’s the point of this ridiculous vigil of yours, then?” he demanded. She did not answer.
Ever since word had reached them that Theskulis had escaped the high-security prison where he had been incarcerated, Doc had been talking about leaving. He wanted to pursue his rival and bring him back. And he wanted to go alone.
His voice spoke again, this time right over her, startling her into looking up at him. He looked fresh and alert in his narrow tie, freshly pressed shirt, and tan corduroy jacket. An ordinary science teacher on the first day of school at Peabody Master High. Only, he wasn’t ordinary.
He lowered his voice. “I cannot take four high school children with me,” he said quietly.
“You know we’re not children any more,” she said. “We were part of the team that brought you back from the Sphinx’s lair. We went through Hoffshire with you, with those fireballs falling all around us, and we never even asked to leave.”[1] Her voice was even, not angry, her eyes steady and her gaze now intense.
For a moment his eyes, deeply quiet with that quietness she had seen only in him, met her wide, dark eyes.
“Yes,” he said at last, and his tone showed his respect. “You did.” The stare contest between them broke.
“And Scruggs has graduated!” she reminded him.
Doc straightened up and tried reasoning with her again. “All the more reason that none of you should go with me now. You have seen and done enough. You need to enjoy your youth, not burn it up. Which is what you would do if you went with me to find Theskulis.”
“Why?” she asked, and her tone was genuine, not demanding. “We all want to go with you! Well,” and she hesitated. “Jack and I really want to go with you!” She threw her glance at the doors that led out of the transcendent interior of the Arch to the much more ordinary high school science lab. “He was here with me, but I think he went to find something to eat.” Typical Jack.
“Really!” Doc exclaimed. “I cannot have the lot of you wandering in and out!” He stopped himself, not wanting to scold her. Then he spoke with greater deliberation. “We will have to set up some rules about coming and going into the Arch!”
“We’re not wandering in and out,” she insisted. “We wanted to catch you before you left and convince you to take us with you! Jack really wants to go!”
Doc knew that Penny was being sincere. He also knew that Jack didn’t want to launch into another cosmic journey. Jack was as true and courageous as could be wished. But he was a home-body. He’d had enough of adventure. It was his loyalty to his sister, Doc knew, that had made him agree with her to pursue Theskulis.
Doc made his voice conciliatory. “I know you’ve traveled through the Arch before. But this is different,” he told her. “This is a real commitment to go—to jump off the earth into the unknown universe. And there’s always the chance of being lost or left behind on some distant planet. The potential for catastrophe is enormous.” He crouched down to get on eye level with her.
“That’s why all of us should go,” she told him. “We all help each other.”
He shook his head. “Even if I wanted to, I cannot. Scruggs—William—does live on his own now. So I no longer answer to his mother. But you are still a senior in high school, and Jack—”
“Jack’s a junior and Jean is a sophomore,” she said. “Yes I know. Just kids. But in all of this, we have a duty, too.”
He stood up, his mind unchanged. “Your father and mother have been remarkably tolerant. But even if I invited your father along, he would not permit you to come. No, this is a solo job. And if it goes well, you won’t even notice that I’m gone!”
That was true enough. Penny had already learned that, though the Arch was not a time machine (indeed, Doc insisted that time travel was a myth), measurable time flowed differently across the entire cosmos. It was possible to go to a distant planet, spend several days there, and return only a moment after having left.
But the equation could be flipped, and a person could return after a hundred years had elapsed on earth. And there was no going backwards to resolve the problem. Everything on the material plane moved only forward. So travel was risky.
He returned to the controls console. “Just come look at this,” he said coaxingly. “Come and take a look.” She stood up on stiff legs and joined him at the console. He nodded down at the console and told her, “I’m checking the interface between the Arch and the cosmic center: essentially creating a channel from this console into the cosmic center right now—sending a signal.” His comment startled her.
“Doc, is that safe?” she asked. “Fooling with the Arch—well, and fooling with the center of the cosmos like that?”
They were both looking down at the console, and so they didn’t notice Jack, his hands filled with a turkey and ham sandwich on a paper plate, and a wicker basket full of potato chips on top, enter from the interior door behind them. Jack saw what they did not yet see: a white light pooling outward from the control console, behind them. It was building up around the room, but they had their backs to it. He gazed around in wonder at it. Then he looked down at the tantalizing heap of potato chips just under his nose. He wondered if he could grab one with his mouth. Because he really, really, wanted a potato chip.
Doc answered Penny: “Checking the signal is necessary after an entire summer in dry dock. The Arch has to transmit its passengers through the cosmos in ways that defy the physics of matter, Penny.” He switched off two toggles on the console. “The signal went through and echoed back undistorted. That means the Arch should function safely. I can leave at any time.” He looked at her with an expression that was both rueful and stern. “Alone.”
Behind them, Jack was suddenly enveloped by the building light. He opened his mouth, but before he could make a sound, he winked out, and the light also vanished. He was gone.
Unaware of what had just happened behind her, Penny pleaded with Doc. “Please don’t go. Just let Theskulis be. He must have other enemies. Let them find him!”
Doc was adamant. “You know I can’t do that. Look at what he hurled at us last time: The loss of human life was enormous. All from one small creature that in its previous environment literally could not even hurt a fly.”
An enormous blue spark suddenly erupted from the panel. Penny jumped back without thinking, but he frowned at it. “Now what’s going on here?”
He would have stepped closer to the controls, but they began to shimmer.
“What is it?” Penny asked. “What’s it doing?”
“I don’t know. It’s like the physical matter of the controls is unstable. Penny, you clear out of here! At once!” he shouted.
She would have gladly obeyed him, but suddenly a great weight seemed to bear down on her, locking her in place. “Doc! Help!” she exclaimed.
He threw a glance at her and reached his bare hand towards the shimmering controls. A tremendous push threw him all the way back to the doors. They swung halfway closed as the interlock engaged, and then stopped. For a moment, everything swam before his eyes.
He shook his head to clear his vision and then sat up. “Penny?” Everything in the control room was still and quiet. The controls were solid again, but offline. “Penny?” he asked again. The chair and Penny were both gone. He leaped to his feet and darted to the console, furiously checking the controls and the readings.
[1] Blood-Dimmed Tide, Peabody High Mysteries, 2024.