by S F Chapman
She was quite a sight, the woman grinned. When they had first arrived at the Exposition nearly four hours ago, Dilma pointed in great glee at several other youngsters sporting colorful face paintings. Sabra located a booth that applied the makeup and Dilma sat nearly motionless for ten minutes while the artist transformed her thin freckly face into a fair facsimile of a stylized blue butterfly.
Sabra had added to the merry illusion by buying a matching blue-feathered boa for the girl.
Dilma finished up at the fountain and skipped to Sabra's side.
They stopped a few minutes later in the rose garden. The girl was fascinated by the profusion of soft petals that adorned the thorny old bushes. Sabra smiled when the child carefully plucked samples from several different blooms and let them flutter to the ground like a flock of tiny birds.
The two continued their stroll together through the park.
Dilma pointed to a crowd of a dozen or so people up ahead, “What are they doing over there?”
Sabra knew the somber location well but apparently her young companion did not, “Let's go see, sweetie.”
They joined the solemn group at the base of War Atrocities Monument.
Nearly everyone in Free City stopped for several minutes of quiet reflection at the memorial when visiting the park. Every year on Commemoration Day people would slowly file by to lay symbolic notes to the dead at the monument.
“It seems so sad here,” Dilma stared up at the woman.
“It's a way of remembering everyone who died during the Second Amero-Asian War,” Sabra whispered.
Dilma tentatively touched the cold gray stone surface of the base.
“Did a lot of people die?”
“Nearly everyone, I'm afraid.”
The girl grimly contemplated the symbol meant to mourn the victims of humanity's greatest folly.
“Why did it happen?” Dilma asked.
“Stupidity. Nations argued and fought; eventually almost everyone was murdered.”
The girl slowly nodded with an unwelcome new understanding of the treacherous nature of humanity. Lingering just below the surface of fun and frivolity was a sinister undertow of self-destruction.
17. Revelations
Keira set the patrol craft down in a near perfect landing next to the Law Enforcement hanger at the Ballyshannon Space Port.
Ryo stared out into the darkness at the deserted facility, “Where is everyone?”
Keira glanced at the ship's clock as she toggled several switches to shut down the craft, “It's 2:13 AM, the hanger is only staffed until midnight.”
“I'd like to get Nate Briggs' corpse over to the coroner's office as soon as possible,” he grumbled.
Keira smiled weakly at the old Investigator, “I'll send a urgent request over to their office. They do pick ups around the clock.”
The exhausted cop nodded, “Thanks; the sooner the body is hauled away to the morgue, the sooner I'll be back to my warm bed in Free City.”
She twisted around in the pilot's seat and woke Seamus, “Come on old man, we need to catch the 2:30 transport back to town or we'll have to wait a couple of hours for the next one.”
Seamus squinted in incomprehension at the woman for several seconds before struggling out of his seat.
Ryo caught Keira's wrist as she stood, “Before you go, I have two requests.”
She studied him with concern.
“If you'd open the cargo hatch and lower the crate with Mr. Briggs' remains to the tarmac, the coroner's men and I won't have to fumble about with that task.”
“Certainly.” The woman flipped a switch on the console and the low rumble of the opening cargo bay doors pervaded the ship. When the 'Hatch Open' light flashed green, she activated the cargo lift.
Keira bit her lip and turned to Ryo, “What was the second thing?”
The bone-weary Investigator glanced back at Seamus, “Walk him to his apartment and do a thorough but discreet search of the place before you leave him.”
She frowned and was about to ask why.
Ryo held up his hand and stopped her, “Don't ask, just do it.”
“OK;” the woman frowned, “since Lev's out of town, I'm not in any hurry to get back to my cold and lonely apartment anyway.”
The exhausted threesome straggled off of the patrol craft.
Ten minutes later, Ryo watched enviously as Keira and Seamus boarded the nearly empty transport back to Free City.
At 4:03 the boxy black Free City Coroner's vehicle screeched to a stop next to the patrol craft.
The pimply-faced driver loped out and approached Ryo, “Good morning, I'm here for a pick up. Are you Inspector Trop?”
Ryo nodded in dismay, “Yeah, but the two of us won't be able to get this crate into your rig.”
“It's not a problem for a change,” the young man waved to the vehicle, “my boss sent me out with another guy for some reason. I would have been here sooner but I had to stop by the University to pick him up.”
The side door of the transport slid open to reveal a uniformed middle-aged man who sported a wide grin.
Ryo smiled in surprise, it was Lieutenant Zmuda dressed as a Coroner's Assistant.
Zmuda joined the men at the crate.
“Inspector;” the Lieutenant adeptly played his part, “I'm Uloff Lebrinski, Suspicious Deaths Auxiliary Pathology Technician.”
Ryo winked at his old friend; now it was his turn to fabricate a story. “We came upon this poor chap floating around off the coast and some gents in a passing fishing trawler crated him up for us.”
Zmuda stroked his chin in mock dismay, “Alright, we will see what we can find out about him.”
The three men lugged the heavy packing crate into the Coroner's transport.
When the box was lashed in place, Zmuda turned to the driver, “Wait here with the body, I need to get some details from Inspector Trop for the Preliminary Report.”
The two older men returned to the patrol craft.
When they were finally inside the spacecraft, Ryo chortled at Zmuda, “Uloff Lebrinski? Where do you get these names?”
The Lieutenant grinned in reply, “We did a study at the University a few years back that proved that people will often only remember that a name is unusual but invariably couldn't actually recall what the name was.”
Ryo rolled his eyes.
Zmuda's smile faded, “What's your best guess as to how Nate Briggs and the others on the Billikin died?”
“Murdered, or at least disabled, using some sort of new narrow-beam energy weapon. It was all quite gruesome.”
The Lieutenant drummed his fingertips on the side of a bulkhead, “Well; that part seems to be falling into place, I’m afraid. The EurAfrican Commander of Covert Operations in Tunis had three handheld particle beam weapons specially produced that could really cause problems. They appear to be remarkably effective as an assassin's side arm.”
“So someone has gotten a hold of one and is blasting junkmen in Low Earth Orbit?”
Zmuda winced, “So it seems.”
Ryo frowned, “Bigger and better guns, that's all we need in the hands of lunatics. I'll poke around in the office in the next few days and let you know what I find out.”
“Thanks.” Zmuda glanced out of the cockpit window, “Do you know a Liaison Agent named Hugo Mackillroy?”
“Mac?” Ryo nodded with a yawn, “Yeah; he and I have worked together off and on for years. Why did you ask?”
“He sent a message to your boss indicating that he had some vital information for me.”
Ryo smiled a bit, “Mac's always turning up good leads.”
“I was afraid of that.”
Ryo could tell that something was amiss, “What's the problem?”
Zmuda's eyebrows arched up, “Agent Mackillroy insisted that he would only reveal what he knows to a top official of the CRAMP in person. Helga says that he was adamant about meeting with me in New Rome.”
“Well;” Ryo nodded, “that is u
nusual but not unheard of with Mac.”
The spy was visibly relieved.
“The meeting is in two days and Helga wants you to accompany me.”
“Of course she does,” Ryo shook his head in dismay. “I just want to relax at home and spend some time with my kid.”
“After a short trip to New Rome, I promise that I will leave you alone for awhile.”
• • •
The urgent “message” slowly blinked in a long string of red dots and dashes on the desktop interface screen.
Mixion stared sleepily at the characters in the warm, quiet workroom. It was 5:47 AM and she was unlucky enough to be on duty in the CRAMP office.
Lieutenant Zmuda had been anxiously awaiting dispatches from the spy at the EurAfrican Imperial Military Base in Tunis. He'd deemed the messages so vital that the communication link to the contact in Sicily had been continuously monitored for the last several weeks.
The previous three reports had been mundane: the first merely acknowledged that the tall “mute” had activated the tiny transmitter, the second confirmed that he had been working in Commander Rameau's office and the third indicated that he was able to search through documents on the Commander's desk.
Mixion refocused her flagging attention back to the screen. In her current thick and heavy-eyed state she'd never be able to unravel the mishmash of flashing dots and dashes.
She sighed and withdrew several sheets of white paper and three pencils from the desk drawer. With mind-numbing concentration so as not make an error, she copied the Morse Code onto the paper.
Mixion was well-aware of the limitations of the tiny transmitter, the far less than optimal antenna and the especially narrow bandwidth, all of which meant that the message had to be absurdly short and repeated many times to increase the chances of successful communication. Errors were to be expected in the messages.
The woman retrieved the Southern New Mexico Regional Variant of American Morse Code reference that the spy had produced before Zmuda had sent him off to Africa. She set to work transcribing the dispatch.
A half an hour later she had finished and began studying the long string of letters and numbers earnest.
922E17221M98012E1?22?N080??E17221N08
She'd placed question marks where the symbols had been too garbled to assign a character with any certainty.
“E1” popped out right away, the letter and number combination repeated three times in the 36-character segment.
She cautiously wrote out “E17221” because the five symbols appeared together in two out of the three occurrences that started with “E1.”
It was just past eight o'clock.
Mixion carefully reread the two-page appendix at the end of the Morse Code reference. 'The number one can often be misinterpreted as two,' she grinned with newfound comprehension. 'Nine and zero were often mistaken for each other. M and N have a similar problem.'
She scratched away at the message for many minutes. Mixion patiently substituted letters and numbers that were commonly misinterpreted or transposed as she rewrote the message seven different ways.
The woman finally underlined her interpretation: Probably E17221N0801?
Mixion took a deep breath and changed the question mark to the number two, producing E17221N08012.
That was it, she smiled weakly, the twelve-character combination had repeated itself at least twice in the middle of the string and in consecutive fragments at either end.
But what did it mean?
After several minutes of consternation, she tapped on the communications device and summoned Jasper from the Situation Room.
When the big man arrived, Mixion showed him the short message.
“What can you make of this, Jasper?”
Mmm; I don't know, sweetheart.” He tipped his head, “The 'N' and the 'E' remind me of compass settings, but the order is wrong and I have no idea how the numbers fit in.”
Mixion stared up at the big man, “There's an order to compass settings?”
“Yeah; I learned about it in the Boy Scouts as a kid, you start with North and move clockwise around the compass face. So North, East, South, West.”
“Mmm;” Mixion glanced at the sheet, “well that helps.”
She methodically recopied the message in reverse yielding 21080N12271E. “Apparently our spy was taking no chances and has decided to disguise the information further by sending it backwards.”
Jasper nodded, “Add a space between the N and the 1.”
Mixion complied. “Are these map coordinates?”
“I think so, but there should be decimal points in there somewhere.”
“OK; I have a hunch that I want to play out.” She tapped at the desktop interface screen and called up a World map. “Our spy is in Tunis, so let's start with Africa.” She highlighted the section of the continent North of the equator and entered the string of numbers and letters.
Four possible locations appeared on the screen. One was in deep water off the coast, one was in dense jungle and two were in the immense Saharan Desert.
Jasper chuckled, “I think we can rule out the Atlantic and the rainforest for now.”
She pointed at the screen, “Alright; we'll start with these two spots in the desert.”
“One is on the border between Algeria and Mali and the other is a high desert plateau in Niger,” he summarized. “Let's look at the satellite images for these sites.”
Mixion tapped at the Algerian border coordinates and toggled the resolution to five square centimeters. “Mmm; I don't see much of anything but empty desert for twenty or thirty kilometers in any direction.”
“Try the other one,” Jasper suggested.
She switched to the second location and smiled, “Bingo!”
“Ruins of some sort.” He squinted at the screen, “Are those people?”
Mixion zoomed in on two conspicuous orange and green striped dots. “It looks like a couple of gun-toting Desert Serfs.”
He kissed the top of her head as she stared at the screen, “I'll tell the boss that we've found something interesting.”
Jasper trotted off in search of the Lieutenant with a hastily made copy of the map coordinates.
Mixion slowly scanned the area that surrounded the Desert Serfs.
“I wonder what these two are doing out in the middle of nowhere?”
18. News Item: Space salvage deaths soar
Dateline: 22nd of August, 2446; New Rome, EurAfrica, Earth
This morning the Warlord Syndicate Underwriting Cartel reported an alarming rise in losses in the space salvage industry. Cartel spokesman Ludwig Tanaka released statistics for the last twelve months about the most perilous of human occupations at the Underwriting Cartel's headquarters in New Rome.
Long considered one of the deadliest professions, space salvage recently eclipsed both asteroid mining and the Bering Sea fishing trade in claims per policy.
Tanaka pointedly warned the salvage industry that it must improve operations to reduce claims from damaged equipment, injuries and loss of life. The Cartel may soon require all salvage operators to replace high-risk employees such as Retrieval Specialists and Wreckage Wranglers with expendable slaves and serfs. Since the Cartel does not offer insurance for unpaid workers, their loss would not warrant compensation.
Outside of the headquarters, a noisy and begrimed group of Enlightenment Crusaders rallied in support of slave and serf rights. Many of the Crusader crackpots demanded that servitude and slavery be abolished in EurAfrica as was done long ago in Free City.
New Roman police dispersed the protesters at 3 PM without incident.
19. The subtlety of the moment
It was just past 6 AM.
Ryo trudged down the long hallway towards his apartment.
Lieutenant Zmuda and the Coroner's Assistant had dropped him off in front of his building in the Ballaghaderreen District of Free City and now the bleary Investigator just wanted to get a few hours of sleep.
As Ryo
fumbled with the lock he realized that at least he could take the morning off and recover. The equally hardworking Zmuda had planned to turn over Nate Briggs' body to the Special Investigations Pathologist and then dash over to Free City University for a long day's labor as Professor Malcolm Evans.
Ryo pushed open the door.
The flickery overhead light in his minuscule kitchen was on. He frowned at the anomaly. Had he left it lit when he departed three days ago?
A short and full-figured young woman wrapped in a yellow terry cloth bathrobe with a half-dozen long braidings of honey-brown hair smiled at him from the stove.
Was he dreaming or perhaps in the wrong apartment?
He stared dumbly at the winsome cook. Who was she?
“Oh good, you're back,” the woman said. “Your wee tyke will be so happy to see you before she sets off for school.”
Ryo nodded with long-delayed recognition; it was Sabra MacFarland, Dilma's new nanny.
• • •
Unfortunately, Jasper realized with some exasperation, he had no idea of where Lieutenant Zmuda was just now. He glanced at the message that Mixion had just decoded from the contact in Tunis. The Lieutenant would certainly want to study it as soon as possible; but where was he?
Unlike Mixion who seemed to know with almost spooky accuracy where their elusive boss was at any particular time, the big Australian often struggled for hours to find him.
Zmuda rarely answered his communication device and often didn't even carry the unit with him.
He frequently neglected to tell his CRAMP sidekicks about his plans for the day, and if he did, he seldom followed his own agenda.
Jasper passed a few students in the 12th floor hallway on their way to early morning classes.
The big man produced a ring of keys and let himself into the little faculty office that Zmuda sometimes used as Professor Malcolm Evans.
The cramped room was piled high with scientific journals, long-lost student papers, misplaced biology projects and a disturbing number of abandoned coffee cups; but no Zmuda.
Jasper rolled his eyes at the messy workroom before locking the door. Perhaps the head spy was in the basement lab or maybe at the Student Union.