Torn From On High: Free City Book 2 (The Free City Series) (14 page)

Luis
stared doggedly ahead through the blowing snow as the grappler tug plodded
between the chunks of sea ice that blocked much of Cumberland East Bay. A
half-kilometer ahead were the docks of New Grytviken and beyond that up on the
bluff was his little white cottage.

He had
managed to clear much of the driftwood that had been pushed into the harbor by
the relentless wind and the advancing sea ice. Several immense logs were
bobbing along behind the tug, lashed together with steel cable chokers and a
few stout chains. Most of the smaller debris was piled amid ship on the deck.
In a day or two when the weather let up, he'd drag the driftwood onshore with a
winch and add it to the huge heap that was slowly rotting just south of the
docks.

Seamus
had been right, Luis realized, the weather was far too cold and stormy to be
out on the bay in a small craft.

He
eased the tug towards the dock. A good five meters of floating ice stood
between the little ship and the ancient wooden piles of the dock. This would be
a problem; if he couldn't secure the tug firmly to the stout dock bollards then
the small craft would be battered against the ice by the waves and wind. The
hull would surely be pierced and the invaluable tug would be lost.

Luis
put the motor into neutral and stepped out onto the deck to examine the
problem.

He
stared at the thick, puzzle-pieced blocks of ice for many minutes.

Perhaps
he could use the long articulating arm of the deck-mounted knuckle crane to
force the ice sideways and away from the dock. It would be difficult and
time-consuming but he realized there was no other way that he could accomplish
his task.

Luis
activated the auxiliary steering controls at the console next to the crane and
set to work nudging the huge chunks of ice away from the dock.

• • •

“What
is it?” Jana tilted her head in concern.

Her
date with Ryo wasn't going well.

He
fidgeted sullenly as they sat together awaiting their food at the posh La
Planche à Laver bistro.

She'd
had a rare break in her normally swamped schedule at the University and decided
to spend some time with him.

Now
she was rather regretting the decision.

“I'm
sorry,” he smiled halfheartedly. “Some of the particulars of this investigation
have caused me to question whether I should have returned to police work.”

Jana
frowned, “Is it serious?”

Ryo
restlessly straightened the knife and spoon on the napkin before answering,
“That's the problem, I'm just not sure.”

He
stared moodily at her for several seconds. “On the night of the grenade blast
in New Rome, when I first came upon the thugs who eventually caused all of the
death and destruction, one of the fellows rattled off a long string of personal
details about me.”

“What
sort of details?”

“Most
of it was standard stuff, age and rank, that type of thing. But he also knew my
home address and apartment number. The Inquisitor's Office goes to great
lengths to protect that information.”

“Well;
he is dead now,” Jana tried to assure him, “so it shouldn't be a problem.”

Ryo
shook his head, “He was part of a gang and there is still one punk left.”

She
slipped her hand over his putting an end to his fidgeting, “I've seen you in
action, you're a pretty tough guy.”

“You're
right, I suppose. But that's not the problem.” His shoulders slumped, “I'm worried
about Dilma.”

• • •

After
hours of exhausting effort Luis had finally managed to tie up the grappler tug.
The huge driftwood logs that trailed out behind the vessel clattered
unsettlingly against the dock pilings.

It was
numbingly cold as he struggled stiffly up the creaky, frost-covered dock
ladder.

He
stopped halfway up as the wind and a wave surge caused the battered rocket
booster to groan restlessly against its moorings fifteen meters further down
the dock.

The
overhead lights flickered briefly high up on the standards.

It all
seemed to be a sinister omen.

Luis
shivered as he clung to the ladder.

The
wind subsided and the rocket booster settled back into the water with a
protracted rasp of metal against wood.

He
resumed his ascent.

When
Luis finally made it to the dock a harsh gust of freezing wind threw him off
balance and he tumbled awkwardly.

A
hollow snapping sound in his left ankle preceded the intense pain that shot up
his leg.

Luis
writhed on the slick wooden planks. The throbbing was excruciating. His toes
were already numb; constricted by his tight-fitting boot, the rapid swelling
had cut off the blood supply.

He
sprawled in agony on the frozen dock for many minutes. Somehow he had to get
back to the cottage. Surely Seamus would nurse him back to health.

Finally
Luis crawled to the nearest of the derelict buildings clustered around the boat
dock.

Ironically,
he realized as he dragged himself through the door, this was where he'd kept
Nate Briggs' corpse after he'd freed the man's remains from the rocket booster.

It was
nearly six hours later when Luis hobbled up the front porch stairs of the
darkened cottage using a pair of crutches that he'd improvised from some scrap
water pipes wrapped with several rags for padding.

He pushed
open the door and called for his housemate.

Not
surprisingly, he heard no answer. Seamus was a particularly deep sleeper.

Luis
struggled about until he found the old man.

Seamus
was slumped unnaturally over one side of the table that they'd used the night
before for the poker game.

His
eyes were open and glassy. The old man's skin was bluish-gray and already cold
to the touch.

Somehow,
Seamus had died.

As his
eyes teared-up at the terrible loss, Luis realized that he was once again alone
on South Georgia Island.

• • •

In the
dingy Records Room at the Inquisitor’s Office, Ryo groaned a bit as he decided
that this latest stack of documents had led him to another dead end.

In the
many days since he had discovered that Commander Frédéric Rameau had been
responsible for directing the Goons in their criminal activities, the old
Investigator had still not uncovered a firm motive for the crime wave.

The
use of the unique particle beam weapons by the Goons and the equally unique
wounds on the corpses of their many victims certainly tied the gang to the mass
murders. But what had been the rationale for the slaughter?

It all
seemed to circle back to Commander Frédéric Rameau and, by extension, the
unendingly troublesome EurAfrican Imperial Military.

Ryo was
certain that Nate Briggs and the crew of the
Billikin
had been murdered
for reason, but as of yet, that reason had eluded him.

Perhaps
Lieutenant Zmuda could deduce why the dead Commander would have wanted to kill
off an obscure Space Debris Retrieval Specialist in Low Earth Orbit.

Ryo
produced his communications device and connected to his boss's office ten
floors above him.

“What
is it, Inspector Trop?” Helga glanced tersely at the screen as she read through
some documents.

“I'd
like to head over to the CRAMP headquarters and meet with Zmuda,” he started.

“Don't
bother;” she scowled, “he's in the Forensic Signal Processing Lab right now.

The
screen abruptly went blank.

Ryo
smiled a bit; finally some good luck.

Ten
minutes later he pushed open the Lab door. The facility was utilitarian in the
extreme, with dozens of mismatched racks of both antiquated and
state-of-the-art gadgetry most of which were interconnected with chaotic
tangles of black and gray cables.

He
stepped over a small open crate that blocked the only obvious pathway through
the maze of equipment.

Ryo
ventured cautiously past a cluttered workbench with several odd and
unidentifiable devices sporting blinking blue and yellow lights. Two of the
machines seemed to flash back and forth to each other while they were
apparently solving some sort of enigmatic matter.

Near
the back of the overstuffed workroom, Ryo found the Lieutenant with Forensic
Technician Second Class Nicola Jenks.

Zmuda
beamed at Ryo's arrival, “Inspector, you're definitely going to like what Ms.
Jenks has unearthed.”

She
smiled pleasantly at Ryo and tapped at a large wall-mounted display screen, “We
extracted the radar information from the Salvage Ship
Billikin.”

A
fuzzy black and white image of wavy lines and indistinct shapes appeared.

Nicola
pointed to a ghostly outline of a small runabout class spacecraft, “This is Mr.
Nate Briggs in the
Dreg's Scamp
on the day of his death.” Her finger
slid down the screen to a large cylinder, “Based on the radio chatter at the
time, I'm nearly certain that this is the rocket booster that was recovered in
New Grytviken along with the decedent's body.”

“Play
the video for Inspector Trop,” Zmuda prompted.

She
set the image into motion.

A
large net of some sort wafted away from the runabout and drifted towards the
booster. An ethereal likeness of a man could be seen on the deck of the small
craft.

“Now
watch in the left hand corner,” she said.

A
small and nearly invisible vessel glided to within a hundred meters of Nate
Briggs and stopped.

“What...?”
Ryo wondered.

“Wait;”
Zmuda held up his hand to stop him, “keep watching.”

A very
thin gray beam flashed from the stealthy vehicle and struck Nate Briggs just
below his helmet. The net caught the booster. The apparently now debilitated
junkman drifted limply away from the deck, attached only by a long lifeline.
The ensnared rocket lurched downward pulling the runabout and Nate Briggs off
the bottom of the screen.

The
phantom craft that had set the whole catastrophe into motion sped away.

Nicola
froze the picture with the mysterious vessel in the upper right corner.

“This
footage has been greatly enhanced,” she pointed to the still image, “in the
unprocessed file the intruder is not visible at all. Certainly Captain
Takahashi wouldn't have spotted it from the
Billikin.
”

“I had
a hunch about this when I first saw it,” the Lieutenant said as he stared at
the craft. “I came across a tidbit sometime ago from an operative at the
Imperial Spaceport in Madagascar noting that the EurAfrican Military had
launched a tiny stealth interceptor barely larger than a man.”

He
produced a blurry photograph and held it up to the screen, “We believe that
this is that vessel.”

Nicola
nodded in agreement.

Ryo
spent several minutes comparing the photo and the image on the screen. “So
someone apparently snuck up on poor Mr. Briggs while he was tending to his job
and shot at him with some sort of weapon. In short order he was pulled to his
fiery demise. Weeks later, Harbor Master Luis Hernandez towed the badly singed
rocket booster to the docks at New Grytviken and discovered Nate's remains.”

“So it
seems.”

“I
believe I know the answer already,” the old Inspector turned to the others,
“can you tell from the radar images what type of weapon was used in this
attack?”

“Ah;”
Nicola ran the video backwards to the point where the beam emanated from the
tiny intruder, “this weapon's spectral discharge is unique. I was unable to
discover any similar radiation patterns until the Lieutenant arrived about an
hour and a half ago with some new data.”

Zmuda
grinned and produced the small particle beam weapon that he had recovered
earlier in New Rome. “Either this particular weapon or one of the two identical
others was used in the attack on Nate Briggs.”

Ryo
studied the odd side arm, “How did you conclude that?”

The
Lieutenant set the strange gun on to a cluttered workbench, “I have been
testing this gruesome device for days. I did a routine spectrum analysis on
Tuesday. Yesterday the spy that killed Commander Rameau in Tunis joined me in
the Lab and he added several invaluable insights as to the internal workings of
the weapon. Additionally the fellow indicated that he had personally seen
records about the gunsmith who had produced the three copies of the unique weapon.
Apparently Rameau had him killed to insure that there would be no further
production of the guns.”

“A
small and very deadly weapon that no one else has,” Ryo stroked his chin in
thought.

Zmuda
nodded, “It emits a very narrow stream of ultra high-speed neutrons. The amount
of highly focused energy is quite extraordinary. In the thick atmosphere of
Earth, say in a bar in New Rome, the effective range is maybe 5 meters. In
space, without the encumbrance of atmospheric gases, the range is almost infinite.”