Curse of the Full Mental Packet Read online

  Curse of the Full Mental Packet Copyright © 2019 by Jack Q McNeil All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Germancreative

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jack Q McNeil

  Visit my website at www.fullmentalpacket.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: Nov 2019

  Curse Of The Full Mental Packet

  Jack Q McNeil

  Published by Jack Q McNeil, 2019.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  Epilogue

  Also By Jack

  Dedicated to Sharon T who appreciates the importance of huge shoulder pads

  “GO DRINKING WITH A BUG, EXPECT TO WAKE WITH EMPTY POCKETS AND A HANGOVER”—HARRY STOTLE

  CHAPTER 1

  I suppose there are planets where a four metre long arthropod snoozing on the porch would draw comment. Not Smuds though. It helps that it was the new marshal’s office porch I was lying on and I have a deputy marshal’s badge riveted to the carapace between my compound eyes.

  The staff had been out half the night to celebrate the opening of the first marshal’s office in Port City, and by staff I mean Marshal Harry the 23rd and me. Harry’s father didn’t want to change a long-held family tradition because he had a daughter.

  The porch was warm, sheltered from the spring rains and a good place to let the hangover work itself out. My eyes do not have eyelids, so I was aware of Daisy Wheels leaving the front door of the Full Mental Packet Bar and splashing across the mud track that passes for the street. Her hull is wrapped in pink gingham and tracks are painted pink. The mud splashed half of her eight foot bulk dark brown. Not an easy visual with a hangover. I was surprised when she rolled up onto our stoop and loomed over me.

  “Chunglie, get the marshal, my Sam’s been murdered.”

  “That’s no way to disturb a deputy detective marshal,” I grumbled. My cybernetic implants include a synthetic voice box. It can’t groan. I put a groan app on my wish list.

  I raised my head and looked at Daisy Tubes the right way round. The view didn’t get any better. Her twin 50 calibre blasters pointed straight at my head. Professor MicAll Widdler, when he gets half way through a bottle of single malt, tries to explain Daisy to anyone who will listen. He says she is a cargo cult, that over the centuries the robot has served as head waitress in the Full Mental Packet Bar, regulars have added a plastic bust, pig tails and working eyebrows. Plus add-ons to her computer systems, creating a personality that wasn’t there originally. He may be right because Daisy has more personality than any AI I’ve ever met.

  “Big Sam can’t be murdered,” I pointed out because I didn’t want to move this early in the day. “He’s a decommissioned warbot like you.”

  The sound of 50 cals charging is distinctive, and I squirmed to my feet.

  “But I’ll go get the marshal,” I said. “Any other damage been done?”

  “The boss is dead and the month’s takings are gone,” Daisy said. I stopped halfway through the door.

  “Loow Alsh is dead?” That was a kick in the gut. Loow had owned the Full Mental Packet for twenty years, he was as close to a local VIP as the Port City gets. Other local VIPs would ask hard questions and bring guns to get answers.

  I scurried through the front office, which had one desk. That’s right, the only deputy detective marshal on the planet didn’t get one. A door in the back wall led to the cells, and stairs to the apartment on the second level. I found Marshal Harry face down on the stairs. She was wearing one of those complicated black cloth constructions that human females like so much. It had bits cut out in some places and see through bits in other places. The purpose of all this is lost on an arthropod. I’m told by humans, she is a short but attractive woman.

  “Shall I hose her down?” Daisy asked from the door. She was too broad to enter, but had telescoped a camera into the room.

  “Why would I want you to do that?”

  “That’s what I usually do with drunks that won’t leave at closing time.”

  “Ah. No need, we don’t want her to leave, we want conscious and functional. Come on, Marshal, wake up.”

  Marshal Harry mumbled and turned over; I crawled up the stairs to her ear and whispered:

  “There’s thirty people in the room and you’re naked.” Harry sat bolt upright, clutching her chest.

  “Never do that again,” she said, checking her clothing was still fastened.

  “But it works every time.” I sometimes wish I had a face, so I could grin. I pointed my palps up at the corners to show willing.

  “What’s happening?” Marshal Harry asked, a pink painted warbot crowding the door being hard to miss.

  “Big Sam has been murdered,” Daisy got in first. “The week’s takings are gone, and the boss is dead.”

  “Loow Alsh is dead?” The marshal asked as she climbed to her feet. I reversed down the stairs, in case she stumbled and landed on me.

  “New bosses turn up on their own,” Daisy pointed out. “But there’s only ever been one Big Sam.”

  “You two have been at the Full Mental Packet since it opened, haven’t you?” Marshal Harry asked.

  “No, it was open for six weeks before Oui Lee Big bought us from a dismantler. The place was so rough waiting staff kept getting shot, Oui Lee figured getting shot wouldn’t stop us working. Then one night the place was robbed and Oui Lee murdered. All they found was a hand.”

  “That was the start of the curse of the Full Mental Packet,” I said with relish. My new voice app is good at these kinds of tones.

  “What curse,” Harry asked as she pulled clothing from a drawer in her desk and slid her legs into it. Pants, they’re called. For decades pre-warp drive humans wondered why intelligent aliens didn’t get in touch. To the other sentient lifeforms in the universe, fur-free mammals are weird enough, but this obsession with clothes freaks them out.

  “About every fifty years, the bar gets robbed. Twice, someone’s been found dead and there’s never any evidence of who did it.”

  “It’s not about fifty years,” Daisy corrected. “It is exactly fifty years to the night. Someone told Loow, so he sat up with his gun loaded and Big Sam fully charged, to catch whoever tried it.”

  Harry pulled a uniform tunic on over her evening attire. That’s right, humans have clothes they wear in the evening, and clothes they wear during the day. They even have clothes they only wear at night. Humans never pack light.

  “That can’t be right,” Harry said. “The bar’s been there for what, four centuries and you’re telling me it’s—”

  “Been robbed eight times, yes.” I finished for
her. Harry slid into her boots and stood. It didn’t take much effort, she really is short.

  “Okay, I’m ready, let’s go.” She got as far as the door before Daisy swept her up and carried her across the street. I scurried after them both.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Why are you carrying me?” Harry demanded.

  “It is part of my job to carry drunks,” Daisy pointed out.

  “One, I am not drunk, and two it’s your job to carry drunks out of the bar, not into it.”

  “I’m expanding my range.”

  To be honest, Daisy was doing the marshal a favour. The spring rains had been going for three weeks, and I was coated in mud up to my eyes by the time we reached the door. A shower system in the lintel activated as I walked across the threshold and hot water blasted the mud from my carapace and back out into the street.

  “You lived here?” Harry said, looking around the room. “For years.”

  “Yeah, great, isn’t it?”

  “Not the term I’d use.”

  Daisy placed the marshal on her feet, next to Big Sam. Another decommissioned warbot, he was painted black, with a white collar and tie glued to his hull just below the turret guns. He boasted a knowledge of five thousand jokes in three hundred languages, and I was sad to see him like this.

  “He had a unique personality,” I said.

  “I’m hoping he can be fixed,” Daisy said. I said nothing, not wanting to disappoint an armed warbot, but I didn’t think he was repairable.

  There were blaster holes burned through his hull and a door in his chest had been ripped off, revealing a safe. Harry examined Big Sam carefully, particularly the safe and the way his weapon turret pointed into a booth.

  “This is the lounge of the Full Mental Packet Bar,” I said with reverence, running a claw along the fossilised root the booths were carved out of. “I was never allowed in here. Only ship captains and gang leaders allowed in here. This is where legends are born and myths come to die.”

  “A lot of things have died in here, by the smell of it.”

  “Hey, this was my home.”

  “Sorry. So... this room is thirty metres long and ten wide,” Harry said, tapping her scanner read out. “I assume there’s more to the place?”

  “Office and toilets in back.” I waved a claw in that direction. “Bar through that door to the right, and basement below, where regulars can bunk down for cheap.”

  “Is there anyone sleeping there now?” Marshal Harry asked Daisy.

  “Yes, some of the regulars.”

  “How many?”

  “I can’t go down the stairs, so how would I know?”

  Harry looked at the armoured safe door lying in front of Big Sam. “People sleeping below our feet and they didn’t raise the alarm when they heard this being blown off? It must have made quite a noise.”

  “They don’t usually stir until mid-afternoon,” I said. “Ah, the good old days.”

  “That’s where the month’s takings were kept,” Daisy pointed at Sam without looking. They’d been together for years. Nothing kinky, as far as I knew, they played virtual reality games in their down time. I scurried over and had a look in the safe. It was empty except for one large, wrinkled mushroom. I whistled. I had bought the whistling app for my voicebox only the week before, and was still taking every chance to get in a whistle.

  “What kind of idiot leaves that behind?”

  “The kind of idiot who had breakfast already?” Harry said, as she looked around the room.

  “That is not for eating,” I said. “That is currency.”

  “How much is it worth?”

  I checked a couple of exchanges online. “Well, one shroom will get you two and a half slongoo and that will get you eight bars of gold, this morning. Thing is there were three of them. Loow used to brag they were his pension plan.”

  “So someone stole two? I wonder if they were disturbed during the robbery.”

  “No, Loow took two out of the bar last month,” Daisy said. “Never brought them back.”

  Harry walked along one side of the room and back the other. Booths lined the walls on each side and the far end was the bar. Every sentient species has a different drug of choice, so the bar was large and crammed with stock.

  “So someone left the most valuable piece of legal tender behind? What species uses dried mushrooms for currency?” she asked.

  “The species who own hundreds of space dreadnoughts,” I said. “Nobody tells the Blue Smelling Snoggers what to do.”

  The marshal stopped in her tracks.

  “The what?”

  I shrugged my first segment. “There are only so many sounds made by sentient beings. I know what the name sounds like to you, but it translates as The Kill You As Soon As Look At You People. Touchy lot. They turned up from the fringes of the galaxy twenty years ago, with a lot of technology to trade.”

  “So, Daisy, I give up, where’s Loow’s body?” Harry asked.

  “In that booth,” Daisy pointed at the booth where Big Sam’s guns were aiming. We walked over and looked behind the table. There was a pair of hips and orange hairy legs. The rest was missing. “Our weapons kill people without damaging the bar.”

  “Nice,” I said. “That’s expensive hardware.”

  “Yes, we are,” Daisy said.

  The marshal walked to the front door and examined a blast mark that had taken out the lock.

  “So this wasn’t done by Sam’s weapons, then?”

  “Couldn’t have been,” Daisy said.

  “That’s the second thing I don’t believe,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. It was definitely a blaster strike, and it had vaporised the lock. I believed that.

  “We’re supposed to believe an intruder shot out the lock and gunned down Loow Alsh and a skirmisher bot? Or...” the marshal walked back into the lounge and bent over the remains of Loow “we’re supposed to believe someone broke in here and then Big Sam shot Loow?”

  “He could not do that,” Daisy Tubes pointed out. “We are programmed to protect the bar’s fixtures and fittings, including the owner.”

  “You define the bar owner as part of the fixtures and fittings?” Marshal Harry asked.

  “Of course. Every bar has to have an owner.”

  “Big Sam might have been hacked?” I thought aloud.

  “Our firewalls and virus protection are kept up to date by law,” Daisy scoffed at that suggestion. “No one wants hackable warbots rolling around town.”

  “I know guys that could do it for a price,” I said.

  “No way. Bring them,” Daisy said. My sensors registered target lock. I activated my mag pulse rifle, Pistol Pete, and prepped to fire. Marshal Harry held up a hand.

  “Can we stick to the task in hand?” she said. “You were lying on the porch last night, Chunglie, did anyone leave through the front doors after closing time?”

  “I should have thought of that,” I said. “Sorry.”

  I brought up my cybernetic dashboard. The colourful readouts projected directly into my optic nerves and allowed me to see in the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Even though I was asleep, the infrared was still scanning. I fast forwarded through the record.

  “Nothing after Slognor of the Deepdip left at three o’clock in the morning,” I said. “He’s always last to leave the lounge.”

  “Good to know. Did anyone leave the back way, Daisy?”

  “No. My sensor logs show no one left that way after we did, or before our shift started.”

  “And what size weapon could blow Big Sam’s armour open like that?”

  “You’d need something like Old Number Seven,” I said, patting the weapon holstered along two segments of my body. “Or Trembling Bob.”

  Harry gave me the “we don’t talk about Trembling Bob” look, which I ignored.

  “Why have you taken against Trembling Bob,” I said. “It likes you.”

  “It’s creepy,” Harry said. “There’s somethin
g almost alive about it.”

  “It’s just a weapon,” I said, stroking the handle.

  “That thing is not just a weapon, and it is creepy,” Harry said, as she walked around the bottom half of the corpse, with a hand scanner.

  “Been dead four hours, according to this.” She tapped the scanner. That reminded me we were working, and I scanned the room with my cybernetic systems. The feed connected directly to my brain, displayed an anomaly on the bar top. I moved closer to the corner where bar met wall.

  “Scanner shows blood spatter in this corner,” I said poking it with a claw. “Still sticky in places. It’s Loow’s.”

  “Wonder why he was sitting on the bar top?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “That was a rhetorical question,” Marshal Harry said. “Could he have been shot there and then moved to the booth and shot again by Big Sam? That one’s not rhetorical.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Harry walked into the short corridor that led out back. The floor was concrete, with a double groove worn in it by the staffbots treads. The walls were coated in fossilized layers of wallpaper; the top layer of which had, at some time years past, been powder blue. There was a door in each side. They may have been made of plastic, it was hard to tell under the peeling layers of paint. She opened the door on the right.

  “Here’s a question for you, though, why are there barrels of dirt and mud in this room?”

  “That’s the toilets,” I said. “It’s one-size-fits-all species. Do your business of choice into the barrel and then drop fresh dirt on top.”

  “Oh, god, there are blue maggots in this one.”

  “That’s the snacks,” I said. “Blue means they’re ripe.”

  I tried slipping past the marshal, but she gripped the door frame and refused to budge.

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, come on, I haven’t had breakfast this week.”

  “Sorry, definitely no,” she said, firmly closing the door. “If I have to watch you eat those things I’ll barf. Show me what’s through here.”