by S F Chapman
“We weren’t able to haul the criminals back to Free City to stand trail, but thankfully no one will be troubled by those marauders again,” Ryo assured the others.
Jana smiled wickedly; with no one onboard the Butin Belle to reset the doomsday timers on the three devices, the fate of the pirates would be settled in less than two days.
“They’ll get what they deserve,” Jana whispered spitefully as she studied the far-off purplish streak from the engine exhaust.
37. The old African Far out in the night darkened Maasai steppes, sheltered from the lingering radiation by the northern flanks of Mount Meru, the ancient African man set aside the gazelle thigh that he had been feasting upon for most of the evening.
The breeze smelled of dung and fresh grass, a favorable sign of many more successful hunts to come.
Just before sundown he had killed a juvenile gazelle with the broad-tipped steel spear that had been passed down for many generations in his family.
The old Maasai hunter had severed his favorite parts from the warm carcass after thanking the animal for giving its life to feed him.
He left the remains to the lions that he had seen earlier on the far edge of the herd. They too would surely thank the young gazelle for filling their bellies.
A mzungu doctor had visited his little hut nearly a week ago and warned him that the great fire that had seared away Arusha months ago had contaminated the animals that now grazed on the steppes. But he didn’t care. He would die when he died; until then he would live as hundreds of generations had done before him, by their skill at hunting on the broad African plains.
The campfire had dwindled to a shimmering mound of red embers. Soon he would return to his hut to sleep.
The canopy of stars above him shimmered as well. In the distance a lion roared, perhaps calling to its pride or warning away the hyenas that bedeviled the big cats at every opportunity.
Amongst the crowd of stars, he noticed a tiny blue one grow suddenly much brighter. Wispy violet flares stretched out from the celestial visitor as it moved slowly across the sky.
He watched for many minutes until the unusual comet gradually faded.
The old man smiled to himself, it was surely another favorable omen for the creatures of the Maasai steppes.
Appendix
List of Characters
In order of appearance:
Inspector Second Class Ryo Trop Mr. Trop is currently employed as an Investigator for the Free City Inquisitor's Office. He is a divorcee, has no children and is a long time resident of Free City. The 54 year-old is a sequential clone of his late father Ezo Trop.
Lev Fesai The 28 year-old only child of the well-respected Professor and Researcher Dr. Jana Fesai has been halfheartedly pursuing a Doctorate Degree in Physics at Free City University. Mr. Fesai has been a longtime member of the mildly subversive movement called the Enlightenment Crusade. He currently resides at his mother’s townhouse on Breton Street in the Old Town District of Free City.
Chief Inspector Helga Bennet The 68 year-old hard-nosed and cynical head of the Free City Inquisitor's Office rarely sleeps as she directs the many ongoing investigations at the renowned agency.
Mining Guild Appraiser Thacker Tough, corrupt and immoral, Thacker frequents sleazy nightspots in Free City and elsewhere when he is not extracting “fees” from both legitimate and illicit mining operations for the Guild.
Dr. Jana Fesai Ph.D. Born in Buenos Aires on August 23, 2393, Dr. Fesai is currently the Chief Researcher at the Lunar Ultra Energy Research Laboratory on the plains of the Sea of Crisis. The 51 year-old Nobel Prizing winning Physicist has taught for many years at Free City University. She is unmarried and has an adult son.
First Mate Bosco Kremerling Rowdy and often foolhardy, the 48 year-old pirate has spent many years in the Outer Reaches Penitentiary. Kremerling was imprisoned when he was caught at the Kuiper Belt Station with illegally obtained Xenon most likely looted from the Kuiper Belt Gas Refinement Facility. Often seen in the company of Olin Gristle, his current location is unknown.
Captain Olin Gristle Thought to be about 42 years old, little else is known about the pirate Captain who is currently believed to be involved in the recent hijacking of the Ore Runner Class Midget space freighter Butin Belle.
Dimitri Verhovnyi, the Supreme Imperial Warlord of the Outer Reaches The especially violent 46 year-old half brother of Daniel Kufuzu became a Warlord when he killed his father to assume control over the vast and thinly populated Outer Reaches which extends from Saturn to the fringes of deep space. Producing great wealth from bribery, mining, slavery, and most recently the construction of the Kuiper Gas Refinement Facility, Dimitri Verhovnyi rules from his palace on Titan, the huge moon of Saturn.
Desiree MacFarland This quirky 24 year-old art student at Free City University is a long time member of the Enlightenment Crusade. She lived with Lev Fesai for nearly two years at his townhouse on Breton Street.
Sabra MacFarland Nineteen years old and a part-time student at Free City University, Sabra is Desiree’s younger sister. Idealistic and naive, she often emulates the antics of her idolized older sister.
Cyndi Currently one of the many housemates of Lev Fesai.
Deputy Assistant Liaison Agent Norton The 26 year-old spent several years living in the fiefdoms as one of the several chidden of Jen and Bill Norton while the family searched for merchandise for their well-known Free City business “Leitrim Importers.” This early experience abroad provided Agent Norton with invaluable knowledge of the people and conventions in the fiefdoms. Agent Norton is considered an especially promising new addition to the Free City Fiefdom Liaison Office.
Professor Malcolm Evans/ Lieutenant Zmuda Very few know of this 43 year-old’s dual personas. As Lieutenant Zmuda he is currently the leader of the super-secret CRAMP Operation, a covert organization centered at Free City University and dedicated to the overthrow of the Warlords and the return of freedom to the citizens of the fiefdoms. As Professor Malcolm Evans he is a beloved instructor in the Department of Advanced Applied Molecular Biology and an occasional advisor for the Enlightenment Crusade.
Daniel Kufuzu, the Exalted Warlord of EurAfrica Although thoroughly corrupt and manipulative, the EurAfrican Warlord is considered by many to be the least tyrannical of the seven Warlords that rule most of humanity. The 62 year-old oversees the wealthiest and most populated of the seven fiefdoms from his opulent palace in huge capital city of Arusha in East Africa.
Dr. Carla Stuhr The tall, dark haired 25 year-old is a Junior Researcher Astronomer for the Solar System Gravitational Anomalies Project at Free City University. Although currently single, Dr. Stuhr briefly lived on Breton Street with Lev Fesai.
The Spanish teenager The nearly 18 year-old young man from Madrid has been backpacking across Europe and Africa. His goal is to scale at least three of Africa’s highest peaks before he turns 19.
The old African It is entirely unclear as whether this is two different people or merely one.
Mixion Fahmi A mysterious sequential clone of a long dead petite Australian Aboriginal woman from the mid Twenty-first century, Mixion was secretly produced by Lieutenant Zmuda using an unusual new procedure in the Advanced Biology lab at Free City University. She has been working since then as an agent for the CRAMP.
Jasper Pomeroy Originally from Blackall, Queensland. Like Mixion, Jasper is also a clone of a long dead Australian. Big, burly and redheaded; Jasper was produced by Lieutenant Zmuda to act as an untraceable agent for the CRAMP.
Dilma The tremulous eleven-year-old slave girl is currently a parlormaid at the Titan Palace for Warlord Dimitri Verhovnyi of the Outer Reaches. It seems likely that she will be sold into sex slavery in the coming years.
Benny With his brothers, 15 year-old Benny secretly mines Rock 853111, a small asteroid near Lutetia in the Main Asteroid Belt. He frequently delivers ore to the Lutetia Asteroid Mining Facility.
The spacecraft:
Butin Belle Built at the Vesta S
hipworks in 2429, the comparatively small, fast and highly maneuverable Ore-Runner Class midget space freighter was used by illicit miners in the Main Asteroid Belt for many years to evade Mining Guild inspectors. More recently the small freighter has been used by Celestial Delivery Systems as a quick transporter between Mars and the Kuiper Belt Station in the Outer Reaches.
Xenon Lightning 54 Plying the Solar System for the past four years, the immense robotic gas supertanker is the first of five vessels to be built to transport valuable Xenon gas from the huge Kuiper Gas Refinement Facility in the Outer Reaches to the inner Solar System. The Xenon Lightning 54 is currently valued at an astonishing 3.5 trillion Standard Units.
Seiran The newest of more than a dozen long-duration patrol craft used primarily by Free City Law enforcement personal. The Seiran can easily accommodate up to six people for more than a year. The heavily armed and very maneuverable Interceptor Class ship can reach speeds of up to 45 Astronomical Units per year. The Seiran is currently registered to the Free City Inquisitor's Office and stationed in Low Earth Orbit.
“Fast prototype interceptor” Little is known about this secret, diminutive and unnamed experimental four-seater spacecraft. It is equipped with a tiny landing craft suitable for two passengers. The highly innovative vessel was produced by Free City engineers for the Municipal Government and its speed is rumored to exceed 75 Astronomical Units per year. It has been recently speculated that the craft is housed in a top-secret black ops hanger at the Ballyshannon Space Port.
Special Bonus Material:
Torn From On High
Free City Book 2
Chapter 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.
Torn From On High is now available at Amazon.com.
About the novel:
During the warm and sleepy midsummer’s days of 2010, I had a few gossamer ideas for a new science fiction tale floating around in my head.
I now suspect that these bits and pieces came to me at that particular time mainly as an intriguing distraction to draw my attention away from the more pressing and daunting task of beginning my third novel, the soft science fiction piece entitled Xea In The Library.
Xea is the sequel to my first work, the post-apocalyptic mystery called Floyd 5.136.
In one of those wonderful little moments of inspiration that led to much larger things, an irresistible title came to me while taking a long, hot shower: The Ripple In Space-Time.
I’d been considering the intriguing notion of ‘Space-Time,’ Albert Einstein’s speculation that space and time are inextricability linked together as the fourth dimension, after enjoying Isaac Asimov’s nonfiction work Atom: A Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos, CalTech’s fantastic Mechanical Universe video lectures and Carl Sagan’s seminal series Cosmos.
The title fused together with a first chapter during a burst of nervous energy on the afternoon of August 12th.
For months I had been playing around with the idea of alternating viewpoints in a novel and I decided to write chapter 1 in the dry, formal style of a newspaper obituary. Where the novel would go from there, I had no idea at the time.
With Xea In The Library looming, I set The Ripple aside.
Almost exactly 6 months later, I returned to The Ripple In Space-Time.
Of all of my four novels to date, I had the most fun writing this sometimes brutal, sometimes poignant and often quite tongue-in-check tale.
The Ripple In Space-Time is one of a large group of novels that I’ve written or plan to pen soon that fit into a consistent history that stretches from the present to more than eighteen thousand years into the future. Several of the novels are consecutive and are best enjoyed and understood if read as such. These are part of the MAC series: currently Floyd 5.136, Xea in the Library and Beyond the Habitable Limit with others likely to follow.
The Ripple In Space-Time is not part of the MAC series but refers to much of the same history. Enjoy it separately or at any point while reading the MAC series.
All three of my editors expressed a desire to read at least one more tale involving the characters and settings in The Ripple In Space-Time.
Perhaps Inspector Ryo Trop and the others will return.
Enjoy,
S F Chapman, July 2011.
Science Fiction Detective Adventure
/>
The Adventures of Ryo Trop and Lt Zmuda continue in Torn From On High.
Torn From On High is a fast-paced detective adventure set in the dark and gritty Film Noir-like world of the near future. Detective Ryo Trop struggles with a gruesome murder in Low Earth Orbit and a clandestine plot for human domination in the Sahara Desert.
Buy a copy in the USA
Buy a copy in the UK
Buy a copy in Australia
Who was she? Floyd stared with great interest at the slumbering woman as she was slowly freed from the cocoon. She was the first new person to be generated in over fifteen thousand years!
For eons, the same seven people had been cloned innumerable times. They lived ordinary lives and died ordinary deaths. But Floyd and his companions always started out in the same very unhuman-like way as cocoon-bound twenty-five year old adults in full possession of their past memories.
Everything would change with the arrival of the intriguing young woman.
Buy a copy in the USA
Buy a copy in the UK
Buy a copy in Australia
Everyone knew that it was coming. No one was ready when it finally hit.
It has been over a century since the last big earthquake decimated the San Francisco Bay Area. Another massive tremor is long overdue. The slumbering beast that is the Hayward Fault will finally awake on an ordinary October morning, catching millions of people by surprise. Will troubled seventeen-year-old Kayla Hendley, veteran airline pilot Burt Weaver, precocious second grader Gwen Mills and many others survive the convolutions of the angry earth?
Buy a copy in the USA
Buy a copy in the UK
Buy a copy in Australia
You might also like the literary fiction novella I’m here to help
When seventeen-year-old Renita discovers that her long-held belief that she was adopted might not be true, she confronts her mother with her suspicions and finally learns of the convoluted events that transpired in the months before her birth.