It Was Murder

  When Harry met Chunglie…

  It was murder

  Jack McNeil

  When Harry Met Chunglie Copyright © 2018 by Jack 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 Germancreatve with additions by S Taylor

  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 McNeil

  Visit my website at www.fullmentalpacket.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: Dec 2018

  ISBN-13 ooo-0-0000000-1-2

  Dedicated to Moira,

  She knows why

  Look, it’s a long list,

  It wouldn’t all fit on one page

  Author Note:

  Chunglie’s language app is set to British English. Expect an extra U in colour and humour and an extra M in comma. It won’t hurt.

  It is a little known fact that Britain mined out the America’s U’s back in colonial times, but now that we’re all friends, the Brits are slipping them back into the country.

  1.

  The Locked Room Mystery

  It woke me...

  Something wrong in the... darkness?

  Where was I? From the smell of my mouth, I’d been hitting the onions again.

  Normally, I hate that whole return to consciousness thing after an onion session. My insect eyes don’t have lids and the experience is usually blinding, so finding myself somewhere dark and cool was a relief.

  A loud noise; the same that woke me. I gave it some thought and realised it might be mammals communicating. Voices, they call it. So I powered up my cybernetic add-ons and tuned in to my in-head translator.

  “Hullo, hullo, where am I?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Who turned off the damn lights?”

  Yup, voices. Funny isn’t it? You put mammals in unfamiliar surroundings and they make demands. Put an arthropod in a nice dark, quiet room and we tuck in for a nap. I turned on my infrared system and had a look about. My antennae provided a terrific sense of smell, but for locating mammals, you can’t beat infrared cameras implanted into your head.

  I’m not a robot. I thought I’d mention that now because mammals have mistaken me for one in the past. I’m an arthropod who discovered cybernetic devices can make life easy and fun.

  An arthropod? A four-metre-long centipede.

  Various-sized containers lay around me. Near one wall, were metal frames hung with clothes and a vintage ground car wrapped in thick plastic sat beside me. The mix of stuff told me I was in the baggage compartment of a starship. Again. That meant I had gambled away most of my cash at a casino and was getting home the cheap way.

  The mammals were a puzzle, though, as in my experience they travelled in the passenger area of a spaceship. The baggage compartment is unheated and drops below zero when the ship is in space. That’s when I hibernate—unless I get hungry, or thirsty. Even more puzzling when I noticed nearly all of them were bipeds. I can count the number of bipeds I’ve met in my life on my knees.

  Memory presented a mixed bag of role play, gambling, and explaining to an android barman how to prepare a pint of pureed onions. Onions are the reason I’m the only one of my kind you’ve ever met. My species doesn’t even have a name because they’ve never left the planet. Individuals don’t have names either. The queen of the burrow says, “You do this until I tell you to stop,” and off you scuttle. Then traders brought onions to our world and a week later they took me with them.

  My four-metre-long segmented body has ears on every one of fourteen knees, and the sounds of bipeds in distress became distressing. I was about to ask them to shut up when a small biped sat on me and asked, “Does anyone remember how we got here?”

  I examined it with my antenna and identified a human female smelling of fear. She moved position as she pointed her eyes in different directions. I don’t need to do that; my eyes see everything in a 360-degree circle around my head.

  I felt homesick. Doesn’t happen often but the weight on my back reminded me of those bad winters when the whole family would curl up in the deep burrow and hibernate. Then a waving paw found my tush brush. Mine is a particularly fine brush; the bright red colour is there to warn predators I taste bad. No biped ever caressed it and drew a paw through it before, though. I felt funny in my tummy.

  “A dried bush?” she asked. “Where are we that has luggage and dried bushes?”

  “It’s called a brush,” I said. That’s when I realised no one else had infrared vision. Odd, because the salesman who sold me the system said everyone was buying it that year.

  A light turned on in the middle distance, waved around and up at the ceiling. The ceiling of a baggage compartment is where they put the automatics—the robot arms, hooks, and nets that the ship uses to load, store, and unload the baggage. Four red lights flashed, marking security cameras in the corners.

  “Where the fuck are we?” the owner of the light asked. I recognised the voice as Hoved Ummen, a bodyguard for someone I owed money to, and one of those loud arseholes I’ve never liked.

  One of the bipeds leapt up and down below a red flashing light shouting: “Help! Help! There’s people trapped in here!”

  I didn’t want to tell him he was leaping about below a smoke alarm. The other bright blobs on my infrared staggered around waving their hands in front of their knees and heads.

  “Out of here before we freeze.”

  “Calm down.”

  “Ow, my toes.”

  “Don’t want to die.”

  “I am calm!” a gaggle of voices said.

  I should point out that this all happened long before my seminal work ‘25 Human Expressions You Can Ignore—and the Three You Can’t’ was published. Or my monograph ‘101 Noses and Why They Annoy Me’, which was very well received in the literary community. In short, I was struggling to tell one mammal from another.

  “Can everyone please quiet down? We must think this through,” the woman said. “Does anyone remember how they got here? Or know where `here` is?”

  A bleating of noes answered.

  The herd fumbled around in the dark, moving closer together. I counted them. Eleven bipeds who don’t know each other wake up in a baggage compartment with me? Wonder why.

  “I remember becoming tired and going to bed early,” the female said as she rubbed her feet. “After a glass of the complimentary wine. I wonder if they drugged us. Did anyone else drink from a bottle left in their suite?”

  There were a chorus of yeses, and questions, silenced by-

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Hoved Ummen said. He smelled angry. No surprise there, tooyr males are usually angry. He waved his antlers around in the dark. “We all fell asleep in our rooms and then wake up in Baggage. Of course they drugged us or I’d’ve woken up and killed someone.”

  “There’s no need to use that kind of language,” the female said.

  “I’ll use any fucking language I like. I paid a lot of money for this translator. What makes you think you’re in charge?” Antlers pointed in our direction then wiggled, a gesture that translates as go perform a bodily function with an orifice that humans don’t in fact possess.

  “I’m a Styern[MVN1] system marshal,” she said. I panicked for a moment. The fuzz! “My jurisdiction covers anywhere in this star system.”
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  I realised I couldn’t be too far from my home on the planet Smuds since it orbited the star Styern. Checking through my on-board cybernetics, I found I’d pawned my guns to buy passage on this starship.

  Ummen laughed as he began picking his way around the rubbish. “Did you hear that? She’s a marshal.”

  “Yesh, sho what? We don’t have our weaponsh,” Senex Leebris told the room. Leebris is another of Stormen’s bodyguards. His species are reptilian, two metres tall, two metres broad, and all muscle. The males have four tusks at the front of their muzzle, but Leebris lost his in a fight. It would be even more shameful for him to get false tusks, so he does without.

  How many more bodyguards are on the ship and where’s the boss? I didn’t need my guns to handle these two, but everyone has their limit and mine is about six of anything. As the two bodyguards used Ummen’s small torch to make their way through the luggage stacks, I realised that my new friend was in trouble. Scared and angry, Ummen and Leebris were going to hit something. Still, she would be okay if she had her service weapon.

  “Right… that’s right, they stripped us of our weapons,” Ummen said. “So they must have taken the marshal’s weapon.”

  Ah.

  “This is not a smart move,” the marshal said. “You’re locked in a room full of people threatening a marshal?”

  “They don’t know ush an’ it’s too dark for them to shee anythin’,” Leebris said. His scent changed; he was expecting fun.

  “If I don’t turn up healthy…” the marshal said, standing and waving her arms around blindly. “There’s nowhere you can run that the marshal service won’t find you. This is stupid. The air’s stuffy, and it’s getting colder. That could mean we asphyxiate or freeze, and instead of trying to escape, you two are going to waste time assaulting me?”

  The marshal stumbled and fell over in the dark.

  I was in two minds. Well, more than two. If I didn’t intervene, the marshal was dead. Outnumbered and overpowered, she was standing to face her attackers. I liked that, but she was the law and I was a gun-for-hire. I made up my mind. Ummen and Leebris were a couple of arseholes.

  “Hi Ummen, Leebris,” I said. I have an artificial voice box; it has an American accent. All aliens have an American accent when they speak to humans; no one knows why. “You want the marshal, you have to go through me.”

  “Who said that?” the marshal demanded.

  “Chunglie?” Leebris asked, startled. “Ish that you?”

  “What d’ you mean ‘Chunglie’?” Ummen roared. “What the hell would that psychotic centipede be doing in here?”

  “I always travel baggage class when I’m broke,” I admitted. “And I’m not a centipede, I’m an arthropod.”

  The marshal took a step away. “Was I sitting on you?”

  Ummen’s torch found me and the light ran the length of my four-metre-long body. I stayed on the floor because I carry my guns in cross draw holsters riveted between my first eight limbs. He couldn’t spot the empty holsters unless I reared my front half to vertical.

  “I forgive you,” I said as she backed away and fell over a case. “Stay close until we get out of here. Ummen is faster than he looks.”

  “We’re not getting out of here,” a short guy called from the back wall. “They locked the doors.”

  “So we’re locked in? Has anyone tried calling room service?” I asked.

  “No, because they took all our gadgets from us,” the marshal said. “Including our phones. Why is everyone backing away from this Chunglie? Does he eat people?”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “I’ve been vegan for six months.”

  “So why are you hard asses afraid of this… cent-er- arthropod?”

  “Becaush,” Leebris pointed out, “he doesh whatever he’sh been paid to do an’ maybe he’sh been paid to do ush.”

  “If you were travelling in here anyway,” Ummen said, “does that mean you have your guns?”

  “That’s right,” I lied. “So you fellas keep backing up there. Marshal, you’ll be safer with me.”

  “Have you been paid to do someone?” the marshal asked.

  “No, I was travelling home when you people woke me,” I said. The little guy had both hands on the door handle and one foot on the bulkhead as he heaved. He kept pointing eyes at me and then yanking at the handle.

  “And now I’d like to know why we’re locked in here. For fuck’s sake, will you calm down before you have a stroke? I told you I’m a vegan,” I said to the little guy. Ummen lumbered forward, hands out and ready to grab. “But if I did fall off the wagon, I’d start with the one ton of venison under those antlers.”

  Ummen backed up as far as the bulkhead would allow.

  “I’m terrified of that creature with the antlers,” the little guy pointed out. “And he’s terrified of you. So I’m, like, twice as terrified of you.”

  “Chunglie hash a poisonoush bite,” Leebris chose that moment to inform the room.

  “I do not,” I said. “I have a venomous bite. ‘Poisonous’ means if you bite me, you die.”

  “Are you poisonous?” the marshal asked.

  “No idea,” I lied. “No one’s bitten me to find out.”

  I reached out to the ship’s system with my cybernetics. “Okay, I tried to get room service and there’s no answer. That could mean the kitchen’s closed, or it could mean something weird is going on. Since someone has locked eleven bipeds in the baggage compartment, I’m thinking it’s something weird.”

  “Eleven people,” the marshal said as she moved back towards me. “I wonder what connects us.”

  “Why would we be connected?” the little guy asked.

  “Someone drugged us and locked us in the hold of a spaceship. They must have a reason.” The marshal sat next to me, facing the torchlight.

  “You think you’re safe with him?” Ummen waved a hoof in my direction. “You ever hear of the Looming Horde?”

  “Nine-foot-tall killing machines that eat anyone that doesn’t run away fast enough,” the marshal said. “Who hasn’t?”

  “Right. He’s the reason theresh none on Shmuds.” Leebris pointed at me.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I replied. “They ate the wrong person, and I was paid to remove them.”

  “He’sh alsho the reason I don’t have any teesh.”

  “I warned you not to head butt me.”

  The marshal sidled closer.

  “My name is Marshal Harry Ward the 23rd. Am I to understand you are some kind of killer for hire?”

  “Not at all.” I chose my next words carefully. “I… hang out… in the bar of the Full Mental Packet and people come in and pay me to help them. The hired killers are standing behind you. Those guys do whatever Mr Stormen tells them to.”

  “You were not drugged and carried in here?” Marshal Harry asked. “Does that mean your cybernetic implants are functional?”

  “That’s right. I can see in low light, infrared, and ultraviolet.”

  “Great, because the rest of us have had our cybernetics disabled. Can you look around and find a way out of here? It is getting hard to breathe.”

  “Don’t need to look around,” I said. “I know how to get out of here.”

  Like I said, sometimes the kitchen is closed and I’ve never been one to go hungry or thirsty. I scurried over to the bulkhead and walked my front half up the wall. There was a nasty moment when two limbs carried my whole weight and then my claws caught hold of the junk on the ceiling and hauled me up.

  Attachments for movable bulkheads were fitted at intervals across the ceiling and I grabbed hold of a couple and pulled myself along. This is where having seven pairs of claws scores over hands and feet. Hanging upside down, I made my way across the ceiling to the air recycling vent.

  “There’s no air coming through,” I said. “If there’s a block in the pipe, I won’t be able to crawl backwards.”

  “Is that why you find dead bugs in strange places?” U
mmen asked.

  “How long can you hold your breath?” I asked. Then I pulled out the one screw holding the grill in place. Someone had come this way before—cough cough—and not bothered to put all the screws back, in case he got hungry again.

  The grill was hinged, so I let it go and pushed my head into the duct. It only just fit, but anywhere my head can go, my body can squeeze through.

  I found out why there was no airflow when my antennae bumped against an emergency seal. The seal was designed to stop air escaping if the hold was breached in an accident, but it worked just as well at keeping me from moving any further. I felt around with my antennae and realised the seal was a metal flap with a rubber edge that fit into a groove in the duct. I used my maxillae to pry it out. For you non-invertebrates, that means I stuck my tongues into the rubber seal and dragged it out, and it tasted every bit as disgusting as it sounds. The seal had been in that pipe for decades, but ‘waste not, want not’ as the old queen used to say.

  I levered up the metal with my jaws and wriggled on through. The air tasted fresher in this part of the pipe, but my body was too crushed to let it flow through me. It got harder to wriggle and my head felt thick. My vision would have been blurry for lack of oxygen if there was anything to see.

  I reached a fork in the pipe and pushed on to the left. The right went down to the air scrubbers in the engine room and, the way my body felt, I’d be dead before I got that far.

  I found an air vent and pushed until it burst and let me fall through. I lay on the floor, legs in the air, while the cybernetics pumped air into my trachea.

  Once my strength returned, I squirmed right way up. I had reached the kitchen complex and the lights were on. There should be drones preparing food and servers coming and going, but there was no one about and the food preparation equipment was still. There were several plates of cold food. Odd. I emptied a couple of plates straight down my gullet and decided to head for the staff dining room.