Authors: IGMS
Another triffid stinger smacked into the windshield. Jasmine reversed the car and aimed for what looked like an open stretch of desert. In a minute, they were clear.
"Who are you?" Jasmine asked, sliding her free hand down to her gun and laying her finger along the barrel. She kept her eyes ostensibly on the road, her left hand on the wheel.
"I'm Capers Williams, Girl Detective," the girl said, "and this is my assistant, Flaminel Bell. Together we fight crime." She extended a grubby hand in Jasmine's direction. "Glad to meet-cha! Do you have any crimes we can assist you with today?"
"You're an android," Jasmine muttered.
"I sure am!" Capers said, putting her hand back on the window. "But don't worry! We're not like those uprising robots -- although I'm sure they had valid political concerns! -- We're here to help people. By solving crimes!" She leaned back against the passenger seat and looked expectantly up at Jasmine.
Jasmine kept her hand on her gun. "Where's your assistant?"
"Oh." The girl's eyes grew wide and Jasmine's stomach tensed. "I guess he must still be hiding. You can come out now!"
There was a zipping sound from the girl's purple backpack. Capers wormed out of the backpack's straps and shifted the bag in front of her. A series of thin, string-like legs emerged, followed by a furry black mass.
"This is my assistant, Flaminel Bell," Capers said as the black mass scuttled up her arm. "He's a spider!"
The furry head of the animatronic toy peered shyly at Jasmine from the android's shoulder. The muppetbot had a pair of large googly eyes that slid in different directions.
Jasmine grimaced.
Androids.
"Who owns you?" she asked.
The girl's grin faded. She looked at the floor. The furry spider followed suit, tilting its head toward the floor, its pupils clicking in a vaguely downward direction.
"We don't know what happened to our parents," Capers said quietly. "They were lost at sea when the comet hit. Personally, we believe they were probably washed ashore on an undiscovered island and became its king and queen. One day they will sail back to America and come and find us. Until then, we will do our part to restore civilization by traveling the post-apocalyptic wasteland and solving mysteries." She looked up. "Do you have any mysteries for us to solve?" The spider removed a tiny white cloth from somewhere and blew its non-existent nose.
"Sorry," Jasmine said. She took her hand off her gun. Nothing happened. The girl and spider remained in the passenger seat, looking hopeful.
"I'll give you a ride to Gary," Jasmine continued. "It's a safe enough town these days. I'm sure there will be crimes there that you can solve."
The girl sank back in her seat and then jolted upright. "You're lying! You've got a crime we can solve! Flaminel Bell is
psychic
, you know."
"Really." Jasmine spared a glance at the fuzzy shape on Capers' shoulder. An idea was forming in the back of her mind. "What am I thinking right now?"
"You're . . ." Capers cocked her head, listening. "He says you're thinking that his psychic abilities might be useful against the telepathic cult leader who kidnapped your dogbot! Wait -- there's a telepathic cult leader?"
Jasmine grunted.
"Please let us solve your case, please,
please
!" Capers bounced anxiously in her seat. "Not only is Bell a psychic, but I have a photographic memory and encyclopedic knowledge and a magnifying glass! We could call it the Case of the Stolen Dogbot! It'll be great!"
Jasmine considered her options. On one hand, androids could make useful allies; they were strong, fast, and completely committed to the task at hand. On the other, they did not share human concerns. They were slaves to their programming. They tended to focus on whatever their programmed specialty was, and lose interest once the relevant task was completed.
"Are you Asimovians?" she asked.
Capers made a face. "Of course not! Who wants to follow boring old laws? They'd get in the way of us solving mysteries!"
That would make combat situations easier, but it was not necessarily reassuring. Jasmine directed a sideways glance at the spider, and thought about the Whispering Sisters' report about the telepathic Daimyo of the Wasteland.
She remembered Einstein yelping in the Wal-Mart.
"Okay," she said, sending up a quick mental prayer. "You're on the case."
Through the grace of God and the intercession of Saint Christopher, Sister Jasmine and her companions reached the outskirts of the Craterlands without encountering much more than the ragtag remains of a shambling zombie army. Jasmine took a certain amount of pride in the ease with which the Silver Stallion tore through the moaning horde, but without Einstein yapping beside her, it wasn't the same.
They stopped to trade for water on the outskirts of Gary. From the edge of the Craterside cliffs, Jasmine gazed across the peculiar glistening plains of Old Chicago. Small pools of water still collected in the basin of what had once been Lake Michigan, before its vaporization.
"I heard they had really good pizza here," Capers said, eying the cracked vastness of the Crater. "It must have been nice to eat pizza, huh?"
The girl detective was striding around with the most irritating cheerfulness. Jasmine bit down on her temper --
do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth
, she reminded herself -- and said, "Has your spider picked up any signs of psychic activity?"
"Flaminel Bell," Capers corrected her. "And he's not
anybody's
spider. He's a detective."
Jasmine suppressed her irritation. "I'm sorry," she said. "Has Detective Bell picked up any psychic activity in the area?"
Capers cocked her head. "He says there are definitely some telepaths to the north. And some other people he's having a hard time seeing."
Those would be the ninjas,
Jasmine thought. She felt a flare of anger as she remembered Einstein disappearing under a black swarm of
shinobi-no-mono
.
"In
The Secret of Red Gate Farm
, Nancy Drew disguised herself in white robes and hoods to infiltrate a nature cult's cave hideaway," Capers said enthusiastically. "We could do that!"
"I'll keep that in mind," Jasmine said. She checked her Saint Dymphna's medal of psychic shielding to make sure it was still in place. "Can your -- can Detective Bell shield both of your minds to make sure they don't know we're coming?"
"But they already know we're coming," Capers said. "They're almost here."
For a moment Jasmine forgot herself. By the time the first ninja assassin slipped over the ridge, she'd taken the Lord's name in vain at least thirteen times. She'd also managed to get the modified Gatling gun out of the coffin in the backseat and onto its hood mount.
"Take that, bad guys!" Capers Williams howled while .50-caliber jacketed rounds tore through the air. She brandished a Borrible-brand slingshot. "Evil will never triumph!"
Detective Bell stopped cowering on Capers' shoulder long enough to tap the girl detective on the arm and point at the ninja cartwheeling towards them. Capers took the approaching ninja out with a well-aimed shot to the eye. The Detective went back to hiding his fuzzy face in her synthetic hair.
Turning the Gatling gun on the hood mount, Jasmine cut down a line of approaching black figures and then swept the gun back again to eliminate those who had managed to backflip out of the way.
"Get in the car!" she shouted at the child detectives.
Thankfully the androids obeyed
some
orders. Capers flung the door open and dove inside. Jasmine flipped the hood latch up on the Gatling and moved around to the driver's door, blasting cartwheeling ninjas with her Glock.
"Don't worry!" Capers shouted from somewhere inside the vehicle. "I know how to hotwire cars! It's essential detective knowledge!"
The image of Capers' tampering with the Stallion's precious circuitry alarmed Jasmine. She took her eyes off the approaching ninjas and turned towards the door, realizing even as she did so that she'd made a mistake.
The last thing she saw before the ninja's foot struck was the toy spider pressed against the glass, waving its legs in warning, its googly eyes jiggling in alarm.
Jasmine woke. Her face was pressed into a cold surface. Every part of her body ached.
She twitched, about to roll over, then thought better of it. She listened instead.
The sound of her own breathing. Distant shouts and rumbles. The grate of stone on stone, and ringing clangs of metal.
"We know you're awake," a voice said. The accent sounded vaguely Irish, but not like Sister Brigid's Dublin accent; the words were weirdly shaped, and the voice rose and fell in the wrong places.
Jasmine rolled over. Her face smarted as the blood rushed to it. She was lying on the floor of some kind of small cave. A torch in the corner cast flickering light through the grid of bars that separated her from the humans standing on the other side.
There were three of them. A tall grim-faced man with a beard and wearing a type of battered leather armor aimed a gun at her. There was a bulge at the hip of the thin, frail-looking man on the far right, covered by the fabric of a gray overshirt. The mid-sized white man at the center had a knife in his belt, but no other visible weapon. His arms were folded on his chest. He carried himself with a kind of nervous authority.
Jasmine clambered to her feet. She tried to move slowly, and keep her muscles relaxed. The metal bars across the front of her prison were obviously scavenged, probably from the melted remains of skyscrapers. They'd been crudely forged together to provide a grid-like barrier; the gaps between the bars were uneven, and some sections lacked horizontal bars. She hoped that when she examined the door hinge that the work there would prove equally shoddy.
"Who are you?" Her voice was rough, and her mouth tasted of old blood. She needed water.
"I am the Daimyo of the Wasteland," the central figure said, in his strange not-Irish accent. He looked less nervous when he spoke, but something about his posture still suggested discomfort.
Not a born leader,
Jasmine thought. The man's face twitched.
"I heard that," he said angrily. "We removed your medal. All your thoughts are open to me. I know all about you, Jasmine Brown."
Jasmine stifled the thought she might have had in response. She focused on receiving information: noticing the hot, humid air drifting in from the tunnel, the relative youth of the Daimyo, the fact that there didn't seem to be anything remotely Asian about him.
Goddamn anime fans
, a distant part of her brain whispered before she could snuff it out.
"But you know nothing about
me
," the man continued. His Adam's apple bobbed in his neck. "While you and your Order have been hoarding human knowledge in the wasteland, I've been bringing order back to the world. I alone can communicate with the cellular-psychotics; I alone formed the army that took over Mukwongo, and Elk Grove, and New Tokyo. My army grows at every stop. Once we have finished forging our weapons from the remains of Old Chicago, there will be nothing that can stop us! I already rule part of the wasteland, Ms. Brown. Soon I will rule it all."
The grim-faced man did not look particularly happy during the Daimyo's monologue. He darted a look at Jasmine, but she kept her face -- and her mind -- as blank as possible.
When the Daimyo seemed to have run out of steam, she prompted him with a question. "So what do you want with me?"
"Your mind," the young man said. He looked vaguely uncomfortable. Apparently the threatening kind of histrionic boasting came less easily to him. "To complete the rebuilding of the wasteland we need the information your Order has been collecting. Technology, Ms. Brown," he said, warming to his theme. "Technology that your Order has been unfairly hoarding inside your 'safe zone.'"
"With respects, Tono --" the grim-faced man said.
"
Daimyo,
" the young man whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
The man grimaced in frustration. "
With respects,
she doesn't need to know this.
Take the information from her
."
The Daimyo frowned, then nodded, licking his lips nervously.
"It would be easier," he said to Jasmine, "if you would voluntarily think of the information we need. Then there'll be no need for . . . unpleasantness."
"Torture, you mean," Jasmine said. The Daimyo winced. The grim-faced man shot her a look that said
if I was in charge, you'd already be on a rack
.
"We want the plans to the safe zone's outer defenses," the Daimyo said.
Luckily, Jasmine had experience dealing with telepaths. She quickly diverted her mind away from the Daimyo's question, forcing herself to concentrate on an earlier part of his speech.
"What kind of technology do you think we have?" Even as she asked the question, Jasmine thought of the rows of tiny vials in the convent's "hot" laboratory, pestilence and plague swirling in frail glass tubes. Those, the convent wouldn't distribute. From the Daimyo's sudden change of expression, she knew she'd guessed right.
"If you won't cooperate, we'll have no choice but to torture you," he said uncertainly. He turned away. "I'll give you an hour to think about it."
The grim-faced man looked like he wanted to shove both Jasmine and the Daimyo's head through the wall, but he followed his leader out. The other guard shot Jasmine a murderous look as he exited.
Jasmine sat down on the cold floor of the cave. Someone had left a gourd of water and a plate of food in the corner. She stared at it, then turned away. She couldn't risk being drugged.
Telepaths,
she thought despairingly. How could she escape when her thoughts advertised her plans to whomever was listening? And she was sure there were telepaths listening. She wasn't sure of their numbers or their strength; it was quite possible that the Daimyo was the only psychic on the premises. Indeed, that would explain why he was nominally in charge.