Torn From On High: Free City Book 2 (The Free City Series)

Torn From On
High

Free City Book
2

S F Chapman

Torn From On High

Free City Book 2

by

S F Chapman

is also available as a
trade paperback

at Amazon.com

Learn more about the
author at
www.SFChapman.com

The pawing cat logo and
the phrases

“The Free City Series,”
“The MAC Series” and

“From the files of the
Free City Inquisitor’s Office”

are trademarks

of Striped Cat Press.

Cover by Mae Yamo

Copyright ©
2014 S F Chapman

All rights
reserved.

ISBN-10: 0985536985

ISBN-13: 978-0-98553698-5

Striped Cat Press

First e-book Edition,
Fourth Printing:

April 2015

K1e4pb

Works by S F
Chapman

Literary
fiction:

I’m here to help

Science
fiction:

The Free City Series:

The Ripple in Space-Time

Torn From On High

The MAC Series:

Floyd 5.136

Xea in the Library

(Coming Soon)

Beyond the Habitable Limit

(Coming soon)

Contemporary
fiction:

On the Back of the Beast

To Mark,

the best of all brothers.

A
cknowledgment
s

Producing
a novel is a cooperative endeavor. The author struggles with the words and
story for many months in the quest to create a manuscript but it is the editors
who really make the work into a novel that can be enjoyed by nearly everyone.

I
would like to thank my three longtime editors for their efforts in helping me
to craft
Torn From On High
into the exciting book that you hold in your
hands. Christina, Mark and Clint spent many hours reading, marking up and
discussing the early manuscripts with me and I believe that it is a better book
because of their hard work.

Thank
you all.

Introduction

If by
chance you have not yet read
The Ripple in Space-Time
which is the first
book in the Free City Series, may I suggest that doing so will greatly increase
your understanding of the characters in the series and the gritty
post-apocalyptic world of 2446.

It is
a dark Film Noir-like world with danger and scoundrels skulking around every
corner. Nearly all humans on Earth and beyond live in subjugation as serfs or
slaves under the domination of a few corrupt Warlords.

The
exception is the small autonomous zone of Free City at the northern end of the
Shannon River valley in what was once known as the Republic of Ireland. Free
City could easily be mistaken for twenty-first century London, San Francisco or
Manhattan. Although it has the typical ills of all metropolitan areas, Free
City is the sole bastion of Law, scientific research and progressive thinking.
By long standing agreement with the Warlord Syndicate, the Free City High Court
tends to all judicial matters. The Registry Bureau regulates motor vehicles,
boats and ships, aircraft and spacecraft. The Free City Inquisitor's Office, a
future version of Scotland Yard or the FBI, is often called in to investigate
difficult crimes wherever they occur.

The
Free City Series follows many of the cases that Inspector Second Class Ryo
Trop, the Inquisitor's Office’s most talented cop, has undertaken.

As a
counterpoint to the action, I have included several News Items from 2446. These
short articles are often written in what would now be called a sensationalized
tabloid style with the heavy-handled use of adverbs and adjectives. The News
Items sometimes provide subtle clues for readers who like to “solve” the crime
before the protagonist does.

A list
of the characters along with brief personal histories has been provided in the Appendix.

Please
enjoy
Torn From On High
.

1.
Dreg's
Scamp

“There
it friggin' is!” Nate Briggs scowled.

Far
below him was the derelict hulk that he'd been sent out to recover.

Clad
in an ancient and ill-fitting spacesuit, he dangled precariously upside down at
around a hundred and twenty kilometers above the northwestern Pacific in the
open cockpit of the beat-up little salvage runabout that long ago had been
scornfully dubbed
Dreg's Scamp
.

At the
ragged and turbulent boundary between the thin outer atmosphere of the Earth
and space, buffeted relentlessly by ionized oxygen atoms, the house-sized
object glowed with a faint pinkish hue.

At
least a dozen times a day for many years, Captain Takahashi had dispatched Nate
from the mother ship, now thirty kilometers higher up in a much safer orbit, to
wrangle and retrieve marginally valuable space debris before it plunged into
the thicker atmosphere below and burned up.

The
Captain had made millions over the years in the risky business of space junk
recovery; Nate, of course, had made nothing. Serfs were rarely paid.

“Come
on, Nate! I don't friggin' have all day,” the Captain harangued him over the
radio. “Pick up the pace. Time is money!”

“Yes
sir, I'm working on it,” Nate meekly replied.

This
particular bit of scrap metal, which Nate guessed was probably a three hundred
year-old rocket booster from the late 21st century, was going to be an
especially difficult snatch. “I won't be able to use the dragline, I don't see
anything that the hook could snag.”

“Use
the bridle, you moron!”

Nate
winced; the bridle was a huge, cup-shaped steel net that could be tugged behind
the little salvage craft by long cables. It worked quite well when recovering
large, well-behaved objects in much higher orbits, but at the fringe of the
atmosphere the giant net might catch the thermosphere and act like a braking
parachute. He and the rickety runabout would be pulled inexorably downward to a
fiery demise.

“Alright;”
Nate sighed, “I'm deploying the bridle.”

He
pulled himself out of the tight cockpit, stood cautiously on the open deck of
the runabout and cast off the heavy net. The bridle wafted and fluttered
slightly as it unfurled. With his safety cable firmly clamped to the railing,
Nate straightened up to watch the progress of the drifting net.

“What
the hell?” At the far edge of his peripheral vision, a curious pulsing purple
glow caught his attention.

Nate
cringed in agony.

Several
vertebrate in his neck briefly sizzled and sputtered under the narrow intense
beam of high-energy neutrons before they shattered and severed his spinal cord.

He was
paralyzed!

The
spacesuit air leak alarm squealed and the self-sealing membrane slowly
contracted.

Nate cursed
to himself.

He’d
been saved from a quick and merciful death by the automatic safety system only
to undoubtedly suffer a much more gruesome fate.

He
could barely breathe and certainly couldn't speak.

“NATE!
Get it friggin' together and haul that crap back up here!” The Captain was
obviously unaware of his predicament.

The
falling bridle caught the edge of the booster and the cables drew taut. The
added drag and mass of the net jerked the rocket and the trailing runabout
downward. Nate was flung limply from the little vessel. Still tethered to the
Scamp
by the safety line, he bobbed face down like a buoy in rough seas.

Below
him, the jumble of ensnared debris was rapidly falling out of orbit.

He
watched impassively for several minutes as he was dragged steadily towards the
cloud-dappled ocean below.

Nate
lost consciousness just as the outer layer of the spacesuit burned away in the
angry and abrasive atmosphere.

Two
minutes later, he was dead.

The
adorable little group of a half-dozen six and seven-year-old violinists were
nervously preparing on the high auditorium stage.

Two
dour instructors pointed and nodded sternly to each of the girls as they took
their places and tuned up their ancient violins.

Tentative
squawks and screeches emanated from the finicky instruments.

Seated
nine rows back in the crowded venue, Ryo smiled at the protracted preparations;
the set up alone would likely take longer than the allotted seven minute
portion of the show by the aspiring young recitalists.

With
the tap of a long thin baton, the group began with a scratchy rendition of
“Mary Had A Little Lamb.”

They
were surprisingly good for first year music students at The Connaught School
for Disadvantaged Girls, Ryo realized.

He had
come to the early evening Mid-Summer Recital not for the sextet of former
ragamuffins-turned-string virtuosos but for one particular twelve-year-old girl
who would perform at the end of the show.

Fifty-six
year-old ex-Investigator for the Free City Inquisitor's Office recently turned
Government Granted Guardian of a Minor, Ryo Trop, had come to watch his charge,
Dilma, at her first big public event. She was now a lovely and cheery young
lady, Ryo mused, but nearly a year ago she'd been a downcast and enslaved
parlormaid for the recently assassinated Warlord of the Outer Reaches.

Dilma
had provided invaluable aid to a group of three spies that had eventually
dispatched the despised Warlord and they had returned the favor by rescuing her
from the palace on Saturn's moon Titan.

A
mutual friend had introduced her to him four months later at the Low Earth
Orbit Acclimatization Station. Dilma urgently required an especially steady
hand to guide her into adulthood and Ryo needed a suitably compelling
justification to nudge him into early retirement.

For
two weeks the former slave girl and the soon-to-be retired Investigator got to
know each other as they ran on treadmills and worked out on exercise machines
to strengthen themselves for the rigors of terrestrial gravity.

Ryo
spent hours at the large portholes of the space station patiently identifying
the ever-changing features for her on the Earth below.

Dilma
was fascinated by the size and stark detail of the planet. She had heard
astonishing assertions about the beauty of the home world of humanity during
her eleven years on Titan but had never conceived of personally substantiating
the claims.

Ryo
smiled as he recalled that early on she had pointed in awe to the wide and
irregular sections of blue that adorned the surface. He explained that vast
amounts of liquid water covered much of the Earth. The refugee from the icy
Saturnian moon spent hours afterwards asking him progressively more complex
questions about the oceans.

At
“night” she would sleep nuzzled next to him as they floated about in his tiny
cabin. She was a fidgety and turbulent bedmate. He had often lain awake and
considered the nearly crushing adversities that she had thus far endured. With
disconcerting regularity Dilma suffered through horrifying nightmares; in the
“morning” she would often share them with him after some negligible prompting.

For
nearly two weeks, she'd been a ravenous eater. Ryo had mused that in less than
a fortnight she was attempting to make up for over a decade of starvation.
Finally, near the end of their stay, Dilma tapered off to the normal appetite
of a healthy preteen.

On
their final day at the space station, the Psychologist met privately with Dilma
to ask her if she would be willing to live with Ryo in his cramped apartment in
Free City. The doctor reported that she stared at him in amazement before
answering; she had never been given a choice of any consequence in the past,
“Of course;” she'd whispered, “Who else would I live with?”

The
tiny violinists finished up their final song and stood proudly to receive the
hardy applause. After several ungraceful and uncoordinated group bows, the
little girls filed off the stage.

During
the doldrums between acts, many members of the audience quietly rearranged
themselves.

Ryo
felt a tap on his shoulder.

It was
Dr. Jana Fesai, his companion of late and perhaps, he hoped, eventually his
sweetheart. Ryo and his colleagues had freed the brilliant fifty-three year-old
Physicist last year from the space pirates who had kidnapped her. The two had
slowly become good friends on the long trip back to Earth.

“Hi,”
she whispered.

Ryo
shuffled over one seat and Jana sat next to him.

“I'm
glad that you could make it.”

The
show began anew with a short skit by several eight and nine year-olds.

Her
hand wandered over to his and Ryo clasped it in smug victory.

She
had returned to Free City after her abduction and taken up the long-vacant
Research Director position in the Department of Ultra Energy Physics at Free
City University. The occupation was maddeningly time consuming, which had led
to an unforeseen side effect; they both cherished the brief and scattered
intervals that they spent together.

The
skit ended and the players left the stage to be replaced by a quartet of
guitar-wielding ten year-olds.

Ryo
spotted Dilma waiting nervously in the wings; she would be the next to perform.

A few
weeks after they'd left the space station for Earth, Ryo enrolled his young
charge in the acclaimed Connaught School for Disadvantaged Girls in the
Ballaghaderreen District of Free City.

A day
or two after she'd begun her studies, Ryo ventured back to the Inquisitor's
Office at City Hall with the full intent of asking for his early retirement.
After more than thirty-five years of hard work as an Investigator, he reasoned,
he certainly deserved an early release. Dilma would surely require nearly
constant oversight for years to come.

His
perpetually sour seventy year-old boss, Chief Inspector Helga Bennet, thought
otherwise.

The
Inquisitor's Office could not risk permanently losing its best Investigator,
she sternly told him, particularly not during the current state of
unprecedented upheaval in the city and beyond.

The
two old friends doggedly debated the issue for hours.

Finally
a compromise was reached that satisfied neither of them: Ryo would be
immediately promoted to the nearly unheard of rank of Inspector First Class,
second only to Helga's standing as Chief Inspector, and be placed on indefinite
paid leave. He would return to service only if dire circumstances required it.

In the
many months since then, Helga had contacted him only twice with several minor
questions regarding past investigations.

At
last Dilma journeyed alone across the empty stage. She looked disconcertingly
small and timid as she waited for the audience to quiet down.

The
spectators gradually fell silent.

“All
our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death!” she thundered. “Out,
out, brief candle!”

Jana
squeezed Ryo’s hand in excitement at the girl's choice of material; the woman
had been an avid reader of Shakespeare for most of her life and undoubtedly
knew the speech from
Macbeth
well.

“Life's
but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the
stage,” Dilma continued.

Ryo
glanced sideways; Jana was silently mouthing the lines along with the girl.

“And
then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,”
she paused dramatically and held her hands high, “SIGNIFYING NOTHING!”

The
audience roared for the passionate young thespian.

Dilma
continued with a speech from “Romeo and Juliet” and “As You Like It” before she
bowed proudly and swaggered off the stage.

The
recital ended and the audience stood to leave the venue.

Jana
kissed Ryo's cheek, “I've got to get back to the lab, dear. We're right in the
middle of a finicky ultra energy particle collision study.”

The
old investigator smiled at his incessantly busy friend.

“Oh; I
almost forgot,” Jana handed him a rumpled copy of the Recital program,
“Professor Evans asked me to give you this note.”

“Malcolm
Evans from the School of Biology?” he stared at her in surprise.

She
nodded, “He was in the back row; although I don't see him there now.”

Ryo
swiveled around and tried in vain to spot the elusive middle-aged Professor.

Jana
slipped on her overcoat and shrugged, “I guess he had to get back to the
University as well, but he did mutter something about wanting to see a
parlormaid perform. Whatever that means.”

“Who
knows,” he frowned.

Ryo
watched her hurry off towards the exit.

When
Jana disappeared into the throng of fashionably attired attendees, he glanced
down to study Malcolm's note.

In
overly large and scrawly black handwriting it simply read:

Contact Zmuda As Soon As
Possible.