The Freezer Read online

  My entire life was based on that philosophy. Maybe it was why I had made so many captures and survived so many dangerous situations. Eight hundred arrests and counting. Sometimes one every day for months on end. Frequent confrontations and fights. Bar brawls. Multiple assailants attacking simultaneously. Many of my colleagues had fallen already. The ones from my earlier days in Homicide Section, in Tokyo, were all gone. We generally worked alone because there were so few of us, but we did know each other’s names. Heard when there was a death.

  I stared at my boots as they marked the ice. There was a layer of tiny crystals on the surface. Larger than snow but smaller than pebbles. Perhaps thrown up by geysers or meteor impacts or the shifting and colliding plates on the frozen ocean.

  One foot before the other.

  One foot before the other.

  Jupiter was watching over me.

  Shaheen was watching over me.

  Shaheen...

  A hollow feeling settled within my stomach. I felt it even through the chill in my suit. She needed me beside her. And when I finally fell on this moon, we would both be alone.

  It was a horrible feeling. Both of us, desperate to be together, but ending up separated by millions of kilometers.

  I finally understood why people chose burial next to each other.

  It made perfect sense.

  Shaheen was the most intelligent person I’d ever met. Already she had overcome multiple engineering challenges while working for the CCF and had been a highly respected engineer. As with my own reputation, people across Home System knew of her, and she received multiple offers every month. Shaheen was in the CCF, but her clout now allowed her to pick and choose her own projects.

  Shaheen.

  If I just gave in, would we be together? Our corpses wouldn’t, but would we, in spirit?

  I didn’t believe that, but I guess anything is possible.

  Breathing was growing more difficult with every second. It also seemed to be getting darker. Weird. Most of the illumination on the moon came from Jupiter’s blood-red reflection and the planet was, at that moment, fully lit.

  One foot before the other.

  Don’t fall.

  Minutes passed like that.

  Or was it hours? I couldn’t tell. I trudged onward, following the tracks in the ice back to The Freezer.

  I couldn’t quite believe that I was in another one of these situations. Most captures were fairly straightforward. It was all so routine now. Examine the body. Evaluate the crime scene. Question witnesses. Look into their backgrounds. Read correspondence. Study their habits. Capture the killer. Transport to CCF HQ. Watch execution.

  It might all take only a day.

  Easy.

  And yet in the past year there had now been two cases like this.

  And both had involved anti-Council ideals. That, taken on its own, was interesting. Perhaps I should inform my contacts that I was seeing an escalation in dissident activity. Warn them. Surely they already knew, however. They must have seen it. No one could rule the way they did and not expect the general populace to get upset.

  I decided that I wouldn’t send a special warning. I would just assume that they could see the pattern themselves.

  The decision made me happy for some reason.

  I lifted my eyes and watched the horizon. Still no sign of the station.

  Of course not! It’s still over fifty kilometers away!

  You’ll never make it back.

  One foot before—

  And then in front of my visor there was only ice.

  I was down.

  I closed my eyes, but just for an instant. I promised myself.

  And then my comm beeped and my eyes snapped open.

  “Tanner!” a voice was calling. “Tanner! Are you there?”

  “Sato,” I groaned. “I was hoping...”

  “Say again? Is that—”

  “I’m on the ice,” I groaned. “Here.”

  “—still a couple of kilometers—on my way—”

  I think the whisper of a smile crossed my face.

  And then I passed out.

  * * *

  I came to in the vehicle berth. Ed was pulling me off his icetrack and laying me gently on the deck. He had connected an extra oxygen bottle to my suit and had saved my life. He’d put me on his icetrack and sat behind me as he steered. I’d slumped over the handlebars as he drove. Consciousness had faded in and out for a few minutes before I finally stopped fighting it and drifted off. The facility hadn’t yet appeared over the horizon, but the lack of oxygen had plunged me further into hypothermia.

  And now we were back in Module D.

  I grabbed his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  “What happened out there?” He was stripping off my vacsuit.

  I rolled to my side and propped myself up on an elbow. I was shivering uncontrollably and had difficulty speaking. “—attacked me—fell into a crevasse. Barely got out.” I looked up at him from the deck. “How—how did you know to come?”

  “You told Dyson you’d be back by dinner. You weren’t, so I left.”

  “You disobeyed my orders.”

  “I’m not in the CCF.” He smiled. “Lucky for you.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” I groaned as I sat up. “Hurts bad.”

  He crouched. “Here’s the big question. Who was it?”

  “Depends. A man for sure. Fast, so probably young.”

  He snorted. “That narrows it down to two people.”

  Dyson and Cray.

  “Where were they?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. I was in the clinic with Dinova and Marius.”

  Something occurred to me. “Did Marius leave?” I had automatically assumed it couldn’t be him, because he wasn’t stationed at The Freezer and he was trying to save my life.

  “No. I was with him.”

  So Dyson and Cray. They had been in Module A when I left. Someone had watched my departure from the second level. Dyson had been on level three working on the communications equipment.

  Which only left Robert Cray, the geneticist and the man who’d had the affair with Aoki Tali.

  He could have killed her to keep her from telling me...something.

  And now he might have just made an attempt on my life.

  “Let’s go talk to them then, and see if we can catch a killer.”

  * * *

  But it wasn’t that easy.

  They were all still in Module A. No one had left. They hadn’t even had dinner yet.

  So who had been on the ice?

  They expressed great concern when they saw me. Asked me dozens of questions within the span of ten seconds. They seemed worried for my health and wanted to help. But I held my pistol the whole time and didn’t allow them to come close.

  Lefave gestured at it. “Put that away, Tanner, before someone accidentally gets shot.”

  “One of you tried to kill me today,” I snapped. “Killed Aoki yesterday. I’m not so sure I care if I hurt your feelings.”

  They looked around at each other. “It wasn’t us, Tanner. We’ve been here the whole time.”

  I focused on Dyson. “What have you been doing?”

  “I’ve been up in the control center fixing the comm system. It’s repaired on this end. Tomorrow I’ll have to—”

  “How long have you been up there?”

  He frowned. “The whole day.”

  I looked at the others. “Is that true?”

  Lefave shrugged. “Heard him working up there.”

  I snorted. “But you didn’t see him.”

  Dyson’s expression hardened. “Now just a minute!”

  “Save it,” I barked. I pointed at Cray. �
��What about you?”

  He blinked at the accusation. “Level two. Janice was up there with me.”

  “In your own labs?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I considered that. Could he have left for a period of at least six hours to attack me? Would Snow have noticed?

  I glanced at Lefave. He’d been peering into a microscope the whole time. A marching band could have come through there and he probably wouldn’t have known.

  It was exasperating. They didn’t seem to realize the full gravity of the situation, despite the fact that a colleague of theirs was dead. Then again, I reminded myself, she was just a NOM. Officers generally didn’t give much thought to them.

  I shoved that thought aside. No. Someone had murdered her, and two of the officers at The Freezer had been her lovers. One of the residents here was the killer. They would have cared.

  “Dyson, come with me.”

  His brow furrowed and he hesitated. “Where?”

  “The correct answer is ‘Aye, sir’!” I bellowed. And then I had to stop and steel myself. I couldn’t be so volatile. I said in a softer tone, “Don’t forget the lesson earlier, Crewman.”

  He swallowed. “Aye, sir.” He followed meekly as we crossed the travel tube toward the vehicle berth.

  “Why are these travel tubes so long?” I grumbled, half to myself. My hand was on the pistol, just in case, though if Dyson were indeed the killer, he did a good job creating the impression that he was a NOM who was just angry at officers and not used to the usual military protocols.

  He answered, perhaps to be helpful. Or maybe he was just trying to calm me down. “Do you know why the modules are so cold? It’s to keep them from sinking—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, if one of the cooling units fails, the designers didn’t want a single module bringing the rest of the facility down into the ice with it. Long travel tubes ensure a buffer in case of mechanical catastrophe.”

  Made sense, I thought absently. The travel tubes were just steel shells with a gravity field. They weren’t even resting on the ice, so they didn’t have to be cooled. They weren’t heated either, however.

  I was still shivering.

  In the vehicle module, I took a moment to gather my bearings. Then I pointed to the icetracks in their berths. There were only eight there now. Sato’s was in the center of the dome where we had left it. The one I had taken was conspicuously absent. “Find the one that was out today.”

  He frowned. “Aye, sir.” But the order perplexed him. He went to each and examined the charge in their batteries. Then he faced me. “None have been out recently.”

  I snorted. “Define ‘recently.’”

  “Well, it only takes an hour to charge them. So I’d say that in the last hour no one has been—”

  I swore loudly and it cut him off. He was still confused.

  It was now 2200 hours. The attack had occurred closer to 1700. The killer’s icetrack would have been back in its spot by 2000, nearly two hours ago.

  There was no way to tell which had been used. If any.

  I pursed my lips. “Show me all the vacsuits in this module.”

  He moved to the lockers without hesitating, though his expression hadn’t changed. He opened the lockers one by one. Most had equipment stored in them. Some had additional electronic components for the type of suit that I had just worn.

  I didn’t find the one I was looking for, however.

  “Let’s go to Module F,” I mumbled. It was the air-lock entry from the landing pad. I’d seen lockers there when we’d first arrived.

  We searched them, but still nothing.

  “There are emergency air locks in every module, don’t forget,” he said.

  He was now actually being helpful for a change. I glanced at him. “Let’s start at Module C and work our way clockwise around the station.”

  Each module had a tiny air lock on its bulkhead opposite the travel tube that connected it with the rest of the facility. Circular hatches sealed the air locks, each large enough for only one person at a time to crawl through. Yellow lettering identified them. I poked my head in the first one and was dismayed to see an empty chamber. There was a control panel on the bulkhead within, but that was all.

  I withdrew and looked at Dyson. He shrugged. “They’re just for emergencies. Not even a bench to sit on to change.”

  “Where are the vacsuits?”

  “Each module has an emergency locker.” He pointed to another section in the bulkhead, between two large viewports. “There’s one.”

  I had to yank on a small square door to open it. Inside was a compartment much like a combination safe. Two helmets, two folded vacsuits.

  “What if there are more than two people in the module when a disaster—”

  He pointed at the top of the chamber. A small shelf with two half-helmets. He said, “They’re enough to get someone to the next module, or maybe to get a vacsuit somewhere.”

  I grunted. “Okay. Let’s check the others.”

  We went through each one in turn. The last module was the living dome, Module B. The circular hatch slid aside, and once again I thrust my head through to peer into the air lock.

  On the deck in a crumpled pile was a white vacsuit and a single helmet.

  * * *

  So it was definitely someone at The Freezer. Not some mystical person who lived on the surface in a different facility.

  And he had planted the fake coordinates in Cray’s cabin hoping I’d find them. He’d been trying to lure me out to kill me and end this investigation.

  Or perhaps it was Cray himself.

  Lure me out to kill me...

  It was the same thing that had happened to the crew of that jumpship. Something or someone had brought them to Europa, and they had most likely suffered a horrible fate.

  Thanks to the man in the white vacsuit.

  But I still didn’t know why.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I stalked back to Module E with the mysterious vacsuit, which I dragged behind me. Dyson was pale; he could see my fury.

  He knew a confrontation loomed.

  Once back at the dome, I found the rest of them in the seating lounge near the games tables and consoles.

  I threw the vacsuit to the deck before them. Every eye went to it, but no one responded with anything other than bewilderment.

  “Whose suit is this?” I demanded.

  Lefave shrugged. “We don’t have that type of vacsuit here, Tanner.”

  “Dammit, it’s Lieutenant. And I don’t care if it’s not standard. I want to know who it belongs to!”

  He bent to examine it. It was large, clearly a man’s. He said, “Why don’t we just compare—”

  “What is this, Cinderella?” Cray exclaimed. “If the vacsuit fits, you must be the murderer? That’s ludicrous!”

  Dinova shrugged. “Well it’s clearly not mine.”

  He spun on her. “Why? You can’t wear something that’s too big for you? Not possible?”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It could be you. You arrived from Ceres and then someone killed Aoki! We all remember how much you disliked it here.”

  Marius stepped forward. “We disliked it enough to leave, and we did. Not to kill.”

  Cray’s face was red. “You are both traitors and Security Division should have arrested and executed you years ago!” He shot a pointed glance at Lefave. “I’m not sure why you allowed them to leave without informing—”

  The director slammed his cup of coffee down and the steaming liquid spilled over his fist. He ignored it as his face twisted in rage. “If I informed on them, the Confederacy would be without two fine doctors! We needed their skills, despite their obvious other f
laws!”

  “You’re a Council rep, Director! It’s your job to eliminate treasonous talk.”

  And in an instant Lefave deflated. He knew the other was correct, but an abrupt flood of contradicting emotions had crossed his features. “True. But getting them out of here was good enough for me.”

  Cray snorted. “And now look at our situation.”

  Dinova shoved a finger in his face. “You’d be in the same spot you are now, because we had nothing to do with this!”

  Watching the confrontation was enlightening. I decided to let it continue for a bit, to see how it played out.

  Marius was beginning to yell now too. It was a good thing I’d kept the two groups separated since arrival. He said, “Lieutenant Tanner wants to know whose suit that is because someone tried to kill him on the ice today! Is that so difficult to understand?”

  “Maybe it’s because he’s pushing us too hard!” Cray sneered. “Someone might be trying to force him out of here!”

  “Someone killed Aoki. He’s trying to figure out who!”

  “And Bojdl,” Dinova added. “Don’t forget about him.”

  “I wish I could see the video of that. Traitors deserve death!”

  That statement triggered something in me; I made a mental note for later.

  The doctor looked like she could skin the man alive. She was trembling in rage now. “How dare you! He was a great man, and you’d have him killed simply because he didn’t like what the Council does. He wanted people to have freedom of speech. Wanted the CCF kept out of our schools, workplaces, industries. He wanted to be able to speak freely about politics and to actually vote for our leaders! Is that so bad? Is that reason to kill?”

  Cray looked contrite for the first time. “The things he was saying were illegal.”

  “Is that why you killed him?”

  Cray blinked. “Wait a minute! I didn’t kill anybody! I just said that he was a traitor, just like you and Simon!”

  Marius snarled, “I’m not a traitor! I’m serving the Confederacy!”

  “Sure,” he scoffed. “You’re working for the CCF, but you’re a civilian! You have a job and prestige. But you hate the very thing you’re helping!”

  “I’m not a doctor to get—to get prestige! I work every day to help—”