The Freezer Page 11

  I had arrived to the city early in my career. I had dealt already with a few cases, including one very high-profile incident in Tokyo, and I wasn’t the most skilled investigator yet, although I did have those hunches to rely on.

  When I discovered a small dissident movement, the situation had conflicted me until Angela had captured my attention. I was still oblivious to how blank and empty my life was, even while Angela and I experienced a short fling that consisted mostly of heated sex in her small apartment that overlooked a taxi aircar depot. It had been fun, but that hole that was always in my heart refused to close. I was still in my twenties and didn’t fully understand my own psyche. Funny, but I was better at interpreting others’ needs and idiosyncrasies than my own. I was like a safe that I was unable to crack. The bigger problem, however, was that I didn’t even realize that figuring out the combination was what I needed most.

  Our relationship fizzled out quickly, and because I had caught the murderer and sent him off for execution at the nearby CCF HQ, my contact sent me on my next case. I hadn’t seen or heard from Angela since, and sometimes I wondered if the CCF had eventually captured and disciplined her as a dissident. Because I had access to an immense database of people and crimes in Home System, I could have checked at any time in the past decade at an instant’s notice. But, for some reason, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  A long, moaning crack reverberated through the base and hauled me back to the present. I was in the mess hall, staring out the viewport at the surface of the moon.

  And I felt cold.

  Nearby, the others were now eating dinner, though it was halfhearted and sullen. Their colleague and friend—and for Janice Snow, lover—was gone. Her body still lay nearby, and afterward I would have Cray and Dyson move her to the clinic so I could take a closer look.

  I studied Snow and Robert Cray silently as they picked at their meals. It was quiet in the dome except for the clinking of cutlery on steel plates. Nearby, the couches in the seating area were empty and the ping-pong table unused, as were the base’s games consoles and the holoprojection center.

  The mood was deadly. I needed more information about Snow and Cray. I didn’t yet understand them. Snow, a beautiful and highly intelligent woman working at a frozen moon. And Cray, a brilliant geneticist all the way out here, upset at our appearance from Ceres.

  I realized dully that our presence had annoyed nearly every person at The Freezer. The only one who hadn’t seemed too upset was Tali, and she was now dead.

  * * *

  After dinner I marched to Module C, the clinic, at the east side of the station. This dome was the same size as the others that surrounded the workplaces and control module, about twenty meters across and five high. Procedures tables, work consoles, lab tables and cabinets lined the periphery. The deck was bare except for a small cluster of crates and equipment. The ventilation system was louder here and accompanied by a noticeable breeze against my skin. The base’s lone freezer was on the north side. Aoki Tali would soon be inside that chamber, preserved until we could cremate her.

  The corpse was on a procedures table. It was naked and pale. Blood had pooled under the compound fracture. I was alone in the clinic, and had left strict instructions for the others to remain together in the rec area. It was getting late—soon we would all be going to sleep, and at that point I would seal everyone into their cabins. It was the only way to be safe.

  A cursory exam showed everything that I already knew. The broken ribs and neck, the hemorrhage and so on. Blood work turned up nothing. No drugs or alcohol. She had been a good person, and her death was tragic.

  Murdered because she wanted to help the investigator. It made me sick.

  I stepped back and stripped off the bloody gloves, thinking. There was an odd odor in the clinic. Not from the corpse. I stalked the perimeter of the module, examining everything. The cabinets, refrigerators, the freezer, even the desk.

  Nothing.

  And then my eyes turned to the crates. I gave one a savage pull and it skidded across the deck. Then another, and another. Medical equipment, still unpacked after two years of base operation. It triggered a question in my mind, and within minutes I had moved everything. And in the deck, I discovered a hatch of some sort. Nothing protruded to give it away, there were no markings common to military facilities to identify its purpose and there was no handle to open it.

  What was this?

  Keying the communit, I called Janice Snow to the clinic. Although there were three doctors at the station—Lefave, Snow and Cray—she was the physician on record at The Freezer. This module was her domain, and she would tell me what I wanted to know.

  * * *

  The hatch to the travel tube slid open, Snow stepped through and it clanged shut behind her. When she saw that I had uncovered the hatch in the floor, her expression changed instantly. The revelation horrified and scared her all at once.

  I pointed. “What is it?”

  She simply shook her head.

  “Open it.”

  Still she remained silent, and her face had now hardened to steel. Her eyes were like ice.

  I did the only thing possible: I drew my pistol.

  “Dr. Snow, I don’t know much about you at this point in my investigation. But over there lies a woman murdered because she was trying to help me. If she died because she wanted to help, you can fucking well expect to die for not wanting to help.”

  The pistol fired focused energy bolts. Her face would burn horribly and her brain would boil inside her skull. Death would be nearly instantaneous, but for that brief moment, it would be excruciating.

  She could tell that I meant it.

  “All right,” she whispered. “I’ll open it. But I can’t say more. Whatever you find, you’ll have to kill to get more out of me.” She marched to a control panel near the hatch. It was a diagnostic console, I thought, to identify viruses in patients. A toggle triggered a noise in the deck, and a clunking sound marked a disengaging lock.

  The hatch lowered, revealing a ladder into a chamber below the clinic.

  It was metal and engineered to CCF standards. It matched the rest of the construction at the base. The builders would have inserted it into the ice before the clinic was there. That much was interesting on its own. But even more so was the smell.

  I turned to Snow, my eyes questioning. “There are animals down there.”

  * * *

  “Primates,” to be precise, I said to Sato later in the rec module. Snow had gone straight to Lefave to tell him what I’d found. That couldn’t be helped; but in a minute, I would be questioning him.

  Sato was working on the data chip he had removed from the crashed jumpship earlier in the day. He had plugged it into his reader and was paging through numerous technical reports of some sort. To anyone watching, it would simply appear as though he were reading a document.

  Everyone else was already there, in the module.

  “What are the animals here for?” he asked.

  “No idea.” I considered it for a moment. “Do you think it has anything to do with their search for life?”

  A frown. “I’m not a biologist. I wouldn’t have a clue.”

  It didn’t make much sense, unless the animals were there to study potential reactions to bacteria or other such organisms if they were ever located under the ice. Possible, I guess. But if so, why hide them? Why not tell me?

  “Did you find anything yet?” I asked him with a gesture at the reader.

  “Still looking. I’ll have something for you soon.”

  “All right.” I turned my eyes to Lefave. He was watching me silently, his face grave.

  I marched toward him, and Snow moved to speak with the other residents at The Freezer.

  “Director,” I said. “You obviously know I found your animals. But f
irstly, Aoki Tali.”

  He sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “Nothing unexpected. A cruel death. Hopefully the pain didn’t last long.” I studied his eyes while he pondered it. They seemed youthful and betrayed the lines on his face, the color of his hair and moustache. Young and sharp, with the spark of extreme intelligence. The CCF would have stationed someone experienced to a post such as this, and no doubt he was competent. Still, his shifting moods concerned me. I needed to go through his personnel files when I could find a pause in the case.

  “And now the primates,” I said. “Why are they here?”

  “There’s nothing odd about it. We keep them to study in the event that we do find something here in the ocean. Experimenting with animals is an ancient practice.”

  I frowned inwardly. I had expected that answer, and yet Snow’s reaction didn’t seem to match the story. They had been trying to hide the primates from me.

  “Who cares for them?”

  “Dr. Snow. It’s one of her most important responsibilities.”

  I mulled that over. “They’ve been here for eighteen months just...waiting?”

  “Precisely. Cruel perhaps, but that’s what they were bred for.”

  I decided to leave it at that for now. I needed to do more research, obviously, more investigation. Study the personnel files, look around more. However, the communications disruption was serious. Captain Lawrence had been going to send me information about Bojdl’s activities in the days leading up to his death. I had hoped to see the killer meeting him somewhere, at some point, but now that would not happen. Unless...

  Dyson sat by himself staring at his reader. I lowered myself next to him and he looked up. His eyes were red.

  “Just reading old messages from Aoki,” he murmured. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  I had carted her body into the freezer only minutes earlier. I had felt little emotion about it, but of course I couldn’t say such a thing.

  “Dyson, do you think you could fix the base’s communications array?”

  He blinked at the question. “With so much damage, I have no idea where to start, really. The entire pad is gone. The dish is badly damaged.”

  I snorted. “Jumpships can land anywhere if they have to. That’s not important. The priority is the array. Can you fix it?”

  “If I have enough time, the right equipment, the tools—”

  “Then that’s your assignment.”

  “But what about—”

  “It’s all about priorities, Dyson. Do it.” Checking my reader, I saw that it was nearly midnight. A lot had happened so far, but I dreaded what was to come. I knew I had to watch my back. A killer was in that dome with us, and he would strike again to protect his identity. I studied the people around me. It could be any one of them. I had assumed a male, but you never really knew. I’d seen the worst killers in society, men and women. Old women, even, evil enough to dismember bodies and dispose of them in small pieces. A killer was a heartless and cold creature. They had ice water for blood.

  Sato approached with a strange look on his face. That persistent smile was still there, but superimposed on it I could see nerves of some sort.

  We moved away from the others where he could speak in private.

  “Tanner, I went through the jumpship’s most recent voyage. It came from Titan and was en route to a colony near Neptune. About a year ago.”

  Titan was very close to us. A recent campaign to market it as an exotic tourist destination had attracted many people so far.

  Sato continued, “I can’t see how many were on the ship. The data is telemetry and control systems only. But I can tell that they received a signal from here. They diverted course and something went wrong during the descent.”

  I absorbed it all slowly. Someone had deliberately brought them to The Freezer.

  And something had destroyed the ship on approach.

  Lured in to die.

  His next words were a hiss. “What exactly is happening at this place, Tanner?”

  Part Three: Thursday—Two Days Left

  Chapter Eleven

  Dr. Marina Dinova and Dr. Simon Marius had known about the animals at The Freezer, and yet they had kept it from me. Perhaps they had just assumed that it had nothing to do with the murder investigation and was therefore not relevant. However, I approached every case with the philosophy that I needed to fully understand the situation in order to truly grasp motivations. The reasoning behind the animals might have made sense on the surface, but underneath, I sensed that there was something else behind it all.

  And the fact that the crates had been on top of the hatch...

  And the look that Dinova and Marius had shared when I questioned them said a lot as well.

  After the confrontations in the rec module, which had followed my discovery and examination of Aoki’s corpse, I ordered everyone to their cabins. Once they were there, I sealed them in. This outraged Lefave, who declared it absurd and unnecessary. However, one mention of Aoki silenced him. One of the people at that facility was a killer, and he needed to come to terms with it. I was trying to protect them.

  In my own cabin, well past midnight but before sleep took me for tortured dreams about Shaheen and exploding hearts, I paged through personnel files in my reader. I had met everyone already, but really had only questioned Lefave, Aoki and Dyson. There was still Snow and Cray.

  Lieutenant Janice Snow was in her thirties, young to be chief physician at a CCF research outpost. However, her record showed her to be capable, highly decorated and very intelligent. Enrolled in the CCF at age sixteen. Early graduation from every school she’d ever attended. A fully certified doctor at age twenty-three. Expert in human anatomy. She had a PhD, in fact, and I noted that with interest. Assigned to warships right from the beginning of her career, before moving to CCF outposts and eventually to The Freezer.

  It made me frown.

  She had been on the fast track to becoming the chief physician of a warship by thirty, but instead had ended up at this remote outpost, looking for life on Europa. It indicated an incident that marred her record in some way. However, I couldn’t find anything. Only accolades and positive notations at every turn in her career.

  Lieutenant Robert Cray had a similar record. Brilliant physician and geneticist, serving at some of the best CCF hospitals on Earth, Venus and the Moon. Not a single negative thing mentioned. In fact, he was one of the foremost experts on human genetics in the Terran Confederacy and had pioneered numerous advances in understanding the human genome and central nervous system.

  And now here, to The Freezer.

  There was something else in Cray’s file that stood out: he was an expert in programming and using medical nanos to combat various neurological diseases.

  I’d have to take a closer look in his cabin.

  I thought about the primates in their pen under the clinic. There had been twelve of them. Two rows of six cages. A cabinet with food and medicines. The smell had been overwhelming, and some of it had most likely escaped the last time the chamber hatch had opened. I had just been lucky that I’d noticed; otherwise, the Europans would probably have remained quiet about it.

  Sleep overwhelmed me before I knew it, and I lay sprawled on my bed fully clothed with my reader on my chest where I had dropped it.

  My dreams were horrible.

  * * *

  The next day I woke early, showered and changed into a fresh uniform. The shower was just as unpleasant as the rest of the experience at The Freezer. The water was lukewarm, and stepping from the metal chamber into the frigid air of my cabin was numbing. I quickly toweled off and dressed. The thick wool sweater was a welcome comfort.

  I keyed open everyone’s cabins and we marched together to the mess for breakfast. There wasn’t much chatter; the murde
r the previous evening had shocked people. As we perfunctorily drank coffee and ate toast, Lefave cleared his throat.

  “What are your plans for us today, Tanner?” The disdain in his tone was clear.

  I glared at the man. He was back to being abrasive. I understood his stresses as the director of the project and the commander responsible for his people, but I just could not figure him out. He seemed to have a split personality. I guessed I should give him some latitude in this bizarre situation, but still.

  “You and the other scientists can work in your labs. You’ll all be in the same module, so the danger should be minimal.”

  He grunted. “Thanks, sir.”

  The others raised their eyes at this.

  “You’re lucky I don’t chain you in your cabin,” I snapped. “But I would appreciate your cooperation, Lefave.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m trying to catch a killer.”

  He motioned to his people. “They will follow my orders just fine. You don’t have to come here and pretend like you’re the boss.”

  “You made it clear that you didn’t want to help earlier. Obstruction of justice is a crime.”

  He blinked and hesitated. “You mean—”

  “I could arrest you right now for conspiring with the murderer.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Causing a lot of bullshit for me!” I bellowed.

  The only sound now was the ventilation equipment, the normal humming and sighing of station systems. Everyone else stared openly; jaws had dropped.

  I lowered my coffee and rose to my feet. I had suddenly had enough of the opposition, the struggles with personnel, the need to constantly explain myself. “Someone in this room murdered my goddamned lover, and I am going to find out who! So if you don’t want to assist in the investigation, I’ll just assume you’re guilty and execute the lot of you...right fucking now!”