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

  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.

&
nbsp; Two minutes later, he was dead.

  2. The Connaught School for Disadvantaged Girls

  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.

  3. Transits

  Halfway through their slow and unfortunately unescorted tour of the University's Ultra Energy Lab, the wide-eyed preteen stopped to handle some lab equipment left unattended on a workbench.

  “What's this thingy?” Dilma held up the oddly shaped metal widget.

  Ryo studied the strange curvy object for several seconds before shrugging, “I have no idea. You can ask Dr. Fesai when she not too busy.”

  Dilma glanced back towards Jana's office where the overworked scientist was shuffling through a tall stack of paperwork.

  Ryo noticed that the youngster had her all too common look of curiosity and annoyance as she returned the implement to the table. He had seen the expression enough recently to know that the former slave girl craved to learn of every tiny detail about the fascinating world in which she now lived and was exasperated when she could not gain the precious knowledge immediately.

  An hour ago they had stopped by the lab to take Jana up on her standing offer of a tour. But a frantic grad student had waylaid the woman with some anomalous results in a massive particle collision study that threatened to disrupt the ongoing experiment. Jana had profusely apologized to Dilma before retreating to her office to deal with the minor catastrophe.