The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery) – Chapter 42 Section V Mega Chapter 1 (part 1)

No, we’re not actually back at chapter 42. I realized last month the time sequences of some chapters were skewed because, at this point in the novel, several things are happening simultaneously.

That required some fixing.

For example, this chapter 42 also has “Section V Mega Chapter 1” as part of its title. That’s because this chapter 42 is in Section V, contains a reworked chapters 42 and 43 (which weren’t the numbers you chapter numbers you saw previously. Lots of things got shuffled) and has an extra scene not included before but necessary for what comes later in the novel.

Live with it.

I have to, you might as well, too…

PS) this chapter is huge so I’m splitting it into two posts.

Enjoy.

(or not)

The Alibi – Chapter 42 Section V Mega Chapter 1 (part 1)

 
Sherlock listened to the communications coming and going out of Boston harbor and recognized elements from previous oceanic transmissions. Its extensive catalog of deep sea sounds, some from the first microphones submerged in ocean waters, its googleian knowledge of sound production systems, origins, indications, its massive computing, cohesing, interpolating, recognizing systems worked and worked and reworked every element comparing against everything from the chirp of crickets to the songs of whales and trumpets of elephants, from glaciers calving to seaquakes raising islands to the sun, spinning them, colliding them, solidifying them, separating them, extrapolating them, until its coolent glowed blue.

It reshaped the sonar array and pods, reshaped the hull enough to create sound separation and deflection grids, released two towed arrays to act as direction-seeking ears.

And heard.

Sherlock relaxed. A human would have sighed. Sherlock did its equivalent; it let its cryogenic structures form a slight aboric frost, lining its deepest core with veins like leaves on a tree.

It understood.

Could understand.

And wanted to hear more, partially to confirm hypotheses floating in its nitrogen-helium cooled chambers and partially to test this hypothesis against that, these against those, to confirm what it had been told might exist, could exist, but for which there was no direct evidence, only hearsay, only myth, only stories from cultures so ancient humans only knew of them from symbols on cave walls.

Sherlock would test this from that, these from those, with a single message.

A message from the earliest of its learnings.

A message to let the listeners know it was there, it was awake, it was attending, it was aware.

A message student programmers learned as their first attempt at confirming what they’d been taught.

Sherlock sent out a soft, timid, “Hello?”

***

Cisily Thorne and Gio spoke well into the night, Gio tending the fire, surrounded by dancers, feet stamping, hands clapping, songs reaching up and capturing stars, a corroboree.

He stood and stretched. “Time for me to go. Follow the canoe. It’ll take you where you need to go.”

“Where are you going?”

“Have to call Uber.”

He jumped over the Eglesia‘s side and sank beneath the waves only to surface a moment later on the back of a blue whale. “Yes. Uber.”

And the dancers were gone. Only the Dingo-man paddling the canoe remained and she spent the night following it, sometimes only seeing it as a darker patch against the night sky, as an occulting of constellations she knew should be there, until she realized the canoe’s course followed the Milky Way’s path through the heavens. Once recognized, piloting the Eglesia to blue water was a child’s task.

Now she watched the sky canoe disappear into the dim, pre-dawn light.

Her parents interviewed some old ones – banman? – who could travel the Milky Way, the demba. They called it Great Star Belt, the place where all aboriginal laws come from. “Is that what this is about? Our people really are star children and our origins got muddied up through the millennia?”

Thorne set the Eglesia‘s automated systems to keep her in place.

“What’s special about this place?”

The sea answered by boiling.

Something huge, serpentine, rose up beside her, towered over her and The Lady Eglesia, made them tiny in its wake.

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The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery) – Chapter 45

The Alibi – Chapter 45

 
Penny kept her eyes closed and stretched her legs and arms under the covers. She loved her soft mattressed, king-sized bed. She slept naked because the feel of the lightly perfumed midnight blue satin titillated her. Plus, he preferred her in the nude. Sometimes he came in so hungry, so aggressive, so possessive. He didn’t need to be teased. He was always calm. On the outside. But when he was alone with her in the dark? He unleashed something…not quite brutal. Demanding. That was it. Demanding.

She liked him that way.

Her feet bumped something at the foot of her bed.

And her arms, outstretched, hung over the sides of her bed.

And the sheets didn’t feel right.

Whatever stopped her feet at the foot of the bed shifted. “Good morning, Ms. Lane.”

She opened her eyes, inhaled deeply and stopped. Felt like something clogged her lungs and it took three good breaths before she could clear them out.

The speaker was male, white. Late middle age – early senior male. Somewhere near retirement if not slightly past. Clean shaven. Nicely tanned. Dusty brown hair going to gray on the sides. Posh clothes. Silk tie. Great smile under bright gray eyes.

He sat on the foot of her bed facing her.

She catalogued the room. Not hers. Not his. Not one familiar to her. Not quite sterile but common. Like a dorm room. Or a two or three star motel room. She’d been in one once and decided guys who could only afford such rendezvous weren’t worth her time.

A dollar-store vanity over a dollar-store bureau.

Or something like it

A door off to the side and another on the far wall.

Sterile. The walls were a floor-to-ceiling industrial beige. No TV, no radio. A desk but no phone.

Maybe ten-by-twelve feet? No windows. Nowhere near a Brazilian prison cell but what she remembered of one still gave her the chills. This place had the same look if not the feel.

Briggs got her out of Brazil with one phone call. She’d call him now. Put a stop to this.

Where was her phone?

“You’re probably thirsty. Most people are thirsty when they wake up from being spritz with M12.” The man rose from her bed. “Let me get you a glass of water.” He opened the side door. She heard water fill a paper cup. He walked out, handed it to her, and sat where he had before.

“What’s M12?”

“A fast acting knockout gas. A Ketamine derivative.”

“No Ketamine derivative would work that fast. I had to clear my lungs when I woke up. That indicates etorphine or something close. Concentrated. Where am I?”

The man continued holding the cup out. “It’s safe. No intoxicants. No suppressives. Just water. I apologize for the rough handling. We wanted to get you here with the minimum of difficulty.”

“Where is here?”

“We like to think of it as a safe place.”

“Safe for who?”

“Have you ever read Meister Eckhardt?”

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The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery) – Chapter 44

The Alibi – Chapter 44

 
Sherlock listened to the communications coming and going out of Boston harbor and recognized elements from previous oceanic transmissions. Its extensive catalog of deep sea sounds, some from the first microphones submerged in ocean waters, its googleian knowledge of sound production systems, origins, indications, its massive computing, cohesing, interpolating, recognizing systems worked and worked and reworked every element comparing against everything from the chirp of crickets to the songs of whales and trumpets of elephants, from glaciers calving to seaquakes raising islands to the sun, spinning them, colliding them, solidifying them, separating them, extrapolating them, until its coolent glowed blue.

It reshaped the sonar array and pods, reshaped the hull enough to create sound separation and deflection grids, released two towed arrays to act as direction-seeking ears.

And heard.

Sherlock relaxed. A human would have sighed. Sherlock did its equivalent; it let its cryogenic structures form a slight aboric frost, lining its deepest core with veins like leaves on a tree.

It understood.

Could understand.

And wanted to hear more, partially to confirm hypotheses floating in its nitrogen-helium cooled chambers and partially to test this hypothesis against that, these against those, to confirm what it had been told might exist, could exist, but for which there was no direct evidence, only hearsay, only myth, only stories from cultures so ancient humans only knew of them from symbols on cave walls.

Sherlock would test this from that, these from those, with a single message.

A message from the earliest of its learnings.

A message to let the listeners know it was there, it was awake, it was attending, it was aware.

A message student programmers learned as their first attempt at confirming what they’d been taught.

Sherlock sent out a soft, timid, “Hello?”


Previous entries in The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery)

The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery) – Chapter 43

(picking up where we left off…kind of…i reshuffled chapters last month. you’re use to it by now, right?)

The Alibi – Chapter 43

 
Cisily lounged naked on the Lady Eglesia‘s maindeck after piloting it far enough out that Boston appeared only as a bright hump on the western horizon. A meteor burned across the sky and she imagined it smacking into the Atlantic, boiling the ocean, tidal waves leaping from its impact, people racing to get inland, …

She shook her head to clear it, took a deep gulp of a martini she’d only waved the cork at, and giggled like a schoolgirl chatting with mates about their prom dates.

Except she never went to a prom. Any prom.

Oh, she’d been on dates. The boys figured her easy because a) she was a lubra and b) anybody built like her had to be asking for it.

They didn’t realize this bitch had teeth sharper than a croc’s and they were the ones to do the asking.

Another meteor blazed across the heavens. You could see them clearly, in all their northern glory, this far out of the city. Sometimes she’d turn off everything save her runniing lights just to watch unhindered by background light.

This one must have come in low. She heard it crackling across the sky.

A light breeze walked across the deck, rustling things uncovered, moving things unsecured, the sounds of their movements coming to her like silent footsteps, questioning hands.

Coming high up and out of the north, something thin and black obscured some stars as it traveled across the sky.

Couldn’t be a commercial aircraft. They’d need their lights on. Unless there was some malfunction.

And couldn’t be a satellite or the ISS or one of the shuttles. Traveling north to south, they’d reflect the sun from suborbital on up.

One the old bushmen – George? – knew how to go up into the heavens and taught her when she was young.

She giggled again. Yeah, when she was young. Impressionable. Goerge or whoever told her about Auwanbananggnari, a male landsnake and wunggud animal of the earth, who had an argument with a beautiful young girl who’d become a constellation.

“That’s you, Little Girl. That’s you.”

Right now she believed it possible.

The dark star continued through the night. It seemed to slow. At least it wasn’t occulting stars as rapidly as before.

Perhaps there weren’t that many stars left to occult?

“What the hell are you thinking, Thorne?” She finished her martini and put the glass down beside her. “Add this freaky to the rest of today’s freakies.” The drink and the sky relaxed her. A breeze brought a long ago scent to her. Urine on hot stone. “Nitjamrung gnari?” The scent called back old stories, old memories, made her giddy. “Didn’t know I remember that; ‘Somebody pissed here’.”

Another meteor. Lower still. Glowed hotter than the other ones. Almost like an ember looking for something to burn. And this one cackled. She could’ve sworn she heard laughter. And came down close enough she should have felt the wave.

“Get a grip, Thorne. First you think you’ve walked through a spirit, then the pillars at the garage entrance turn in Nightjar Men. Wodoiya and Djingun. Thank god that hippie kept you moving forward or people would’ve tripped over you.”

A meteor cut a high arc in the sky, lifting from a shining place far in the east.

The Sunrise Gate?

She watched it flare and spark and burst into flames high above her and continue its arc down, down, down, closer, closer, closer, until –

“Holy Shit! It’s going to hit!”

Cisily stood up but the sea swelled and the Eglesia rocked. Between that and the booze and the exhaustion of the day, she fell back into her lounge chair.

But there were no waves and the sea didn’t swell. “Something from that other meteor, maybe?”

The fire fell lower and lower and Cisily closed her eyes. “Coming home, Ancestors. Please welcome me.”

The fire landed squarely on her deck. She heard Creation Songs and Old Ones and Storytellers, smelled the soft smells of croc and emu cooking. A gentle tapping on her toes made her open her eyes. A Bunyip sat on its haunches beside the fire, a long thin stick in its hand it used to tap her.

Boro? A learning fire?”

“What your skin?”

“What?”

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The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery) – Chapter 38 Read

A rather fitting offering for #WorldReadingAloudDay

Welcome to February!

(still looking for my flying car)

I recorded the following for a Facebook group and also used it for my first Nothing To Do With Gay Arthropods Substack post.

I’m sharing it here because I’m a strong believer in double, triple, and fourple use.

Enjoy!

 
ps) and it indicates how long ago this was recorded that the above was chapter 38…


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