• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

M. Darusha Wehm

Explorer of Worlds Real and Imagined

  • News
  • Buy Books
    • Digital Download Store
    • Get Print Books
  • Podcasts
  • About
    • Bio
    • Demographic Info
    • Bibliography
    • Press Kit
    • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
  • Now
  • Short Stories
    • Bodies at Rest, Bodies in Motion
    • Fire. Escape. – Sample
    • The Foreigner
    • Major Tom and the Lucky Lady
    • The Interview
    • Lucidity
    • Fame
    • Chekhov’s Phaser
    • Career Opportunities
  • Science Fiction
    • Beautiful Red
    • Children of Arkadia
    • Andersson Dexter
      • Self Made
      • Act of Will
      • The Beauty of Our Weapons
      • Pixels and Flesh
    • Modern Love and other stories
    • The Voyage of the White Cloud
    • Retaking Elysium
    • The Qubit Zirconium
    • Hamlet, Prince of Robots
  • Mainstream Fiction
    • Devi Jones’ Locker
      • Packet Trade
      • Sea Change
      • Storm Cloud
      • Floating Point
    • The Home for Wayward Parrots
  • Anthologies
    • The Stars Beyond
    • Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy, Volume 4
    • KeyForge: Tales From the Crucible
    • Trans-Galactic Bike Ride
    • Fireweed: Stories from the Revolution
    • Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I
    • The Dame Was Trouble
    • Dystopia Utopia Short Stories
    • Science Fiction Short Stories
    • Procyon Press Science Fiction Anthology 2016
    • Use Only As Directed
  • Games/Interactive
    • The Martian Job
    • Alexander Systems
    • You Do You
    • if ink could flow backward
  • Books

specficnz

‘A Night to Remember,’ part four

September 20, 2012

I am pleased as punch to present part of Simon Petrie‘s live-written serial “A Night to Remember,” featuring reluctant hotel detective Gordon Mamon. The first part of this story was posted on Monday on Simon’s site – go read it, then follow the links to get back here. A list of all parts is available here.

If you like this story, you should get a hold of Simon’s collection of short stories Rare Unsigned Copy.

This free-fiction folderol has been furnished by SpecFicNZ Blogging Week 2012.

A Night to Remember: Part Four (by Simon Petrie)

‘A Night to Remember’ is a seven-part story, written for SpecFicNZ Blogging Week 2012.

Part One of this story can be found here. Part Two is here. Part Three is here. A full listing of links to the story’s instalments, updated daily, is here.

Gordon stared at the remains of Claudia Iyzowt’s doorway. He wasn’t sure what kind of damage would be inflicted on a plastimahogany door by a rampaging villain in a suit of armour, but he was fairly certain he was looking at it. And of the heiress to the Iyzowt fortune herself, there was no sign.

She’d been in the room, though. The cooling mug of the vending machine’s atrocious coffee blend stood undisturbed on an occasional table near the room’s viewing window.

He pulled out his handheld, switched it to ‘Forensic’ mode, and waved it around the room in an attempt to find clues, DNA, fingerprints. The handheld took a minute to announce the detection of traces of five humans: Gordon Mamon himself, Iyzowt, and three long-time members of Skyward’s cleaning detail. Which, regrettably, made a certain kind of sense: suits of armour didn’t have fingerprints. Nor did waxworks. But the assailant’s DNA should still have left traces, assuming there was any kind of struggle …

No extraneous blood, nor skin cells. Not even a length of hair.

A sudden sway in the freight tower’s motion momentarily unnerved Gordon, and he turned to check the doorway behind him: nothing. Probably just turbulence: they weren’t yet clear of Earth’s atmosphere, and the space elevator’s braided filament was not immune to a little atmospheric push-and-shove. But the scene of the crime was never a good place to loiter.

Where was, though? The freight tower was a twenty-storey structure, with multiple access routes—escaladders, rampways, an old-fashioned staircase—connecting the floors. If he picked a good hiding point, he could stay undetected for a good long time … but it would be three days before the tower module completed its ascent to Skytop, and twenty storeys or not, he doubted his ability to stay concealed for that length of time.

Plus, regardless of the death threats he’d received, there was the small matter of Claudia Iyzowt herself. As the staff member on duty for the next three days, he plainly had a duty-of-care towards her. It wouldn’t do to cower meekly in some hidey-hole, while she was in the hands of … who?

He took the escaladder down two flights, and let himself into a dimly-lit storage room with three connecting doorways and a somewhat disconcerting conclave of waxwork pirates in sundry menacing poses. After sweeping the room, and those adjoining, for signs of life and detecting only himself, he applied his mind to the tasks at hand, which were, as he saw it: (1) to not get killed, (2) to locate and rescue Claudia Iyzowt in some manner commensurate with task (1), and (3) to apprehend or otherwise immobilise whoever might be the occupant of the mysterious suit of armour, provided that this could be effected without breach of criterion (1) and, if possible also, (2). Viewed in this way, the problem constituted a puzzle, and Gordon liked puzzles. (Though he generally far preferred them when they didn’t involve all this pain-of-death-or-serious-injury stuff.)

So: how to approach it?

The voice messages he’d received, those foreshadowing his appointment with certain death—quite aside from however paradoxically, unfairly vague was the concept of ‘certain death’ itself—had sounded not merely sinister, but angry. Which took a lot of doing, considering that the recorded death threats had featured a mechanical voice, impersonal and remote. Anger obviously made it personal, very personal. Gordon wondered who might hate him with sufficient intensity to not only wish him dead, but to go to substantial lengths to give effect to said wish.

Try as he might, and discounting for the moment certain ugly incidents involving lost luggage, Gordon could only imagine one class of people who might hold such an aspiration. Murderers. And in particular, one small subset of the set of murderers.

He turned his mind to reviewing—in a totally non-spoilerish fashion—the outcomes of his previous cases.

Formey’s killer was clearly out of the equation. Kurtz’s attacker was, so far as Gordon knew, out of the system, safe in Alpha Centauri’s maximum-security facility, Alphatraz. And Havmurthy’s assailant, Gordon was sure, was still being questioned by the Saturnian police force. It might, in principle, be possible that an accomplice could be acting on behalf of one of these, but Gordon’s gut said otherwise …

Well, it fitted. The apparent modus operandi, the professional’s keen desire to stay in the game, the ruthless drive to settle any scores. Because when the other killers were eliminated from consideration, it left just the hit-man.

“Haier,” Gordon murmured to himself.

“Correct,” said a voice that was unrecognisable as Gunther Haier’s, from the suit of armour now advancing slowly through the room’s doorway. “Though there’s been a name change, along with everything else.”

Gordon retreated through the thicket of life-size pirate figures, backing towards one of the room’s connecting doors. Trying to remember whether the door opened inwards, or outwards. “Is that so?” he asked. “Why?”

The connecting door opened outwards. Good. Gordon pushed through, and started running.

Behind him, Haier—the suit of armour—was lumbering in pursuit. “Business reasons. Marketing. Image, if you will.”

“Didn’t think you hit-men cared about image,” Gordon called back, reaching the hallway and trying to choose between the rampway and the escaladder. Escaladder, he decided quickly. Upwards. Gordon wasn’t good with heights, and the escaladder was all about heights, but Gordon was even less good with impending violent death. And if Gunther Haier in a suit of armour wasn’t all about impending violent death, then Gordon wasn’t as shrewd a judge of homicidal character as he fancied himself to be.

“To a hit-man, image is everything,” Haier proclaimed. “Hence the armour, and all the other augments. So you can call me—”

At the foot of the escaladder, Gordon turned, transfixed by curiosity despite himself. “Call you what?”

“My new name,” Haier bellowed, with evident pride and not a little menace, “is Sir Tin Death.”

Part five is on Beaulah Pragg’s site.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: short stories, simon petrie, specficnz

Nothing Exists in a Vacuum

September 20, 2011

Recently, we celebrated the third anniversary of leaving Canada. It’s not that we’re particularly happy to not be living in Canada – rather, we miss the places and people all the time. But instead we were celebrating the three years of traveling the world, testing our limits and living the Big Adventure of living on a small (relative to the grand expanse of the ocean) sailboat.

It’s been a fabulous experience, but we both feel like it’s time to slow down. We aren’t necessarily giving up cruising, but we want a bit of a normal life for a while. So when we get to New Zealand this spring (fall, for you northern hemisphere folks), we plan to stick around for a while.

One of the reasons that this is a compelling choice for me, is that I really miss having an in-person writing community. I am well connected with other writers via the internet, and feel like I have a very supportive online community. But I often miss the meetings I had with the critique group I was involved with back in Canada, and am really looking forward to participating in the vibrant artistic community alive in New Zealand.

I’m already a member of SpecFicNZ, though I never managed to make a meetup when we were there last year. I’m hoping to remedy that situation in 2012, and also hope to possibly attend one of the Spec Fic conferences.

While writing is fundamentally a solitary activity, it doesn’t have to be a lonely one. I’m looking forward to connecting with new colleagues in an active scene in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: specficnz, travel, writing

Primary Sidebar

Book cover for “Hamlet, Prince of Robots” by M. Darusha Wehm. A blue-green robot skull with a golden crown in the style of a neon sign, over a dark glitchy background. In the top left is a quote reading “Enormous fun and a real gift to lovers of Shakespeare or science fiction or both. Familiar and surprising, clever and moving.” From Kate Heartfield, author of Sunday Times bestseller The Embroidered Book.

Hamlet, Prince of Robots

Like Succession meets Blade Runner … an extremely compelling and satisfying read that allowed me to investigate my own place in our time of communion and interdependence with machines.

—Pip Adam, author of Acorn Prize winner The New Animals

Something is rotten in the state of cybernetics.

Elsinore Robotics is on the cusp of a breakthrough—the company is poised to create the first humanoid androids powered by true artificial intelligence. Their only rival, Norwegian Technologies, lost a publicly streamed contest between their flagship model, Fortinbras, and Elsinore’s HAM(let) v.1.

But when the first Hamlet model is found irreparably deactivated, the apparent victim of wild malware, the field of consumer cybernetics is thrown wide open.

Learn More

Free Stories

Major Tom and the Lucky Lady

I was balancing a cup of tea in one hand, while hanging on to the side of the companionway hatch with the other. I climbed into the cockpit sideways, compensating for the roll of the boat. I was only … Read More... about Major Tom and the Lucky Lady

Career Opportunities

Jo-Lynn had always laughed at Charlotte, her stupid sister-in-law, who believed the crap in those so-called newspapers she bought at the supermarket every week. It was no wonder that her no-good … Read More... about Career Opportunities

Chekhov’s Phaser

I never planned to end up here. I've never planned anything, really. All my life has been like that: I see an opportunity and I take it. Sometimes that works out better than other times. So why should … Read More... about Chekhov’s Phaser

Publications

  • . ….. ..story .. time
  • A Most Elegant Solution
  • A Most Elegant Solution (audio)
  • A Thorn in Your Memory
  • A Wish and a Hope and a Dream
  • Alexander Systems
  • Fear of Lying
  • Force Nine
  • Good Hunting
  • Home Sick
  • Home Sick (audio)
  • Homecoming
  • I Open My Eyes
  • if ink could flow backward
  • Microfiction @Thaumatrope
  • Modern Love
  • Modern Love (audio)
  • Preventative Maintenance
  • recursion
  • Reflections on a Life Story
  • Showing the Colours (audio)
  • The Care and Feeding of Mammalian Bipeds, v. 2.1
  • The Interview
  • The Stars Above Eos
  • War Profiteering
  • War Profiteering (audio)
  • we are all energy

Footer

Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Connect

  • Email
  • RSS

Poetry

  • . ….. ..story .. time
  • 140 and Counting
  • creation myth
  • Force Nine
  • how to make time
  • if ink could flow backward
  • recursion
  • the chrononaut
  • we are all energy

Non-fiction

  • 90ways.com

Elsewhere

  • Darkly Lem
  • Many Worlds
  • Mastadon

Copyright © 2023 M. Darusha Wehm