The Freezer Page 24

  “Maybe it’ll just take a minute,” Cray said.

  “It’s the crushed nose,” Dyson snapped. “Just as I said.”

  “Stow that,” I growled. “Instead of being so negative, tell me how we can get it working.”

  He slowly turned his visor toward me. His face showed shock. “What do you mean?”

  “We need to remove the system and get it back to the base.”

  “But we need a dish, a transmitter/receiver.”

  “We’ve got one, next to the landing pad.”

  He seemed floored by that. “It’s gone though. I said that earlier.”

  “No. You said it was damaged. That means we can repair it. Now get this comm out of the console because we’re taking it back.”

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later we were hauling the unit out of the hatch and onto the hull of the jumpship. It was larger than it had appeared from the control cabin—much of it had been hidden behind the console—and the leads that attached to the dish at the nose now trailed limply behind it.

  It would be miraculous if we could ever connect it to the facility’s comm array, but we had to try.

  Dyson had tied a rope around his torso and Sato, above on the ice, had attached his end to the icetrack. We would get out of this the same way Sato and I had. Dyson rose slightly off the hull as the rope tensed, and he moved his feet along the smooth wall and walked up. It jerked slightly, he lost his footing and then he bounced sideways against the wall of ice. He swore.

  “Easy, Dyson,” I said. “Get your feet under you again...there you go...”

  The icetracks weren’t easy to handle with the extra weight, but Sato did a good job. Eventually Dyson stood on the lip of the crater above; I could see him silhouetted against Jupiter.

  We attached the next rope to the large communit, and Dyson hauled it up singlehandedly. His efforts made me grunt in appreciation. It was lighter in this gravity, yes, but thirty meters isn’t a short distance. Finally the device disappeared over the edge.

  And then over my comm I heard a scuffle, some grunts, and then an angry female voice.

  “Drop it and stand over there or I’ll kill you.”

  It was Dr. Marina Dinova.

  * * *

  Cray and I were standing on the hull of the crashed jumpship, staring up helplessly. Dinova had disarmed Snow and had her pistol. From the sounds of it, she had ordered Sato, Snow, Marius and Dyson to face her and raise their arms.

  Dammit. I should have continued to watch her, or at least told Snow to keep an eye on her. The two were enemies already because of Dinova’s dissident philosophy, and it wouldn’t have been hard to motivate Snow to be wary of the other.

  We were in a dangerous situation.

  Cray and I had weapons at least, but we were at the bottom of the crater.

  And then another commotion from over the comm. A chorus of yells and angry words.

  A moment later, Sato said, “Tanner. She just destroyed six of the icetracks. She blew them apart with the pistol.”

  Smoke rose into the thin atmosphere of the moon.

  Dyson couldn’t handle it. He yelled and another cacophony of cries assailed my ears. Sato shouted, “No!” and then there was nothing else.

  A body fell over the edge. Dyson.

  He sailed backward, arms and legs trailing as he plunged toward us. There was no cry over the comm. He didn’t gasp in fear. It was a silent fall.

  Finally he hit. At the lip of the crater, I could see helmets overhead as the others watched Dyson land.

  The front of his vacsuit was venting air, the edges of the hole charred and smoking, and his chest was a bloody, bubbling, burned mess.

  He had landed flat on his back on the jumpship and hadn’t even twitched after the impact.

  * * *

  CCF pistols fired pulsed energy blasts, and a direct hit, center mass, was deadly. It had fried his heart and instantly stopped its beating. The energy would have flooded his central nervous system and shorted neurons in the spinal column as well as the brain. Short circuit the CNS.

  He was dead before he hit the bottom of that crater.

  “Doctor,” I said, calm. I was worried she would just start shooting the others up there. “What are your intentions?”

  “Aren’t they clear?” she bit out.

  Marius said, “Marina, you just killed a man.”

  “She’s done that before, according to Tanner,” Snow snapped.

  Easy people, I wanted to yell. Don’t antagonize her.

  She said, “I’m going back to The Freezer. I’m taking Dr. Snow with me.”

  “Me? What for? What the—”

  “Shut up!”

  It was weird following a confrontation without being able to see it. But from what I could tell, she was using the pistol to move Snow to the lone remaining icetrack. Abducting her to take back to the base.

  “Why do this?” I asked. “I thought you needed me to kill Lefave?”

  “You can still do that, Tanner. But that’s not the only reason I came back to this wretched place.”

  And then silence. Eventually, Sato spoke and I exhaled. I had been worried that she had killed everyone else.

  “They’re gone, Tanner. She made Snow drive while she sat behind her with the pistol in her back.” He grunted. “What do you think she’s up to?”

  I couldn’t answer him. We had bigger issues to deal with. Namely getting out of the crater and back to the facility before we froze to death or ran out of oxygen.

  * * *

  There was still a rope dangling over the edge, and I grabbed it to test its strength. There was no icetrack to help me, so I had to pull myself up. The weight wasn’t an issue, but the rope was smooth and difficult to get traction on. Eventually, however, I reached the lip of the crater and Sato and Marius helped me to the surface.

  I threw the rope back and Cray tied it around Dyson’s corpse. Sato, Marius and I hauled him to the surface and his limp form sprawled across the ice. His chest wound was horrific.

  Cray was next. He climbed most of the way himself and needed just a bit of assistance to get over the edge. But finally he made it, and then I turned to look at the scene before me.

  Six icetracks were in ruins. Components burned. Batteries had exploded and still smoked. The blast had melted and pooled the tracks themselves on the ice.

  I looked to the horizon and swore.

  “How much air do you have?”

  The answers were the same to within ten minutes of each other. Four and a half hours.

  We had four and a half hours to get back to The Freezer. It was a fifteen-kilometer journey, and already we were numb from the cold. And we had no heating packs this time either.

  If we made it, there were now two threats waiting for us there.

  A cold shiver crawled up my spine as a question consumed me: Why had Dinova taken Janice Snow?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I knew that we needed to get moving as soon as possible. Oxygen was a factor as well as the cold. There were only four of us—Marius, Cray, Sato and myself—and we were all athletic and able to move quickly. It was apparent that Dinova had wanted us to survive. Had she wanted us dead, she could have just killed us. Fifteen kilometers to the facility would be difficult, but not insurmountable.

  The communit was an issue. It was fairly large and while it was not extremely heavy, it would seem so after a four-hour trek. It took only five minutes to create a sled from some damaged icetrack components. We tied it to our waists and began a fast lope across the ice. Crampons on our boots gave us extra traction, and we were soon moving quickly. The communit sat atop the sled, secured with rope, gliding over the ice on two pieces of metal. Their narrow edges carved the ice as it slid.


  A four-hour journey...

  If we were lucky. It gave us a cushion of about a half hour.

  The temperature in our suits was down to five degrees, but the exercise was helping keep us warm. The mist on the visor was a slight problem, and although the fans helped a bit, it wasn’t an ideal situation.

  Darkness was falling quickly across Europa.

  Soon all four of us were breathing heavily, speaking little and simply powering across the ice.

  * * *

  I felt miniscule and insignificant. It was a common feeling while forging the vast distances between planets or stars. The immensity of celestial objects and the spaces between colonies were difficult to comprehend. Even being out here, on the ice with three other people, made me feel tiny. Death could take us at any time. A fissure could open up beneath us and swallow us in a second. Dyson had mentioned that there were commonly spaces or bubbles in the ice. Apparently during stages of tectonic activity, gases from below would churn up through the frozen layer, melting the ice but not quite reaching the surface. The water underneath would then refreeze and leave a hollow space. The surface cracking and opening with little to no warning had happened in the past.

  Jupiter’s radiation was another issue. It was inexorable. Once already I had succumbed to its effects, but I had nearly fully recovered thanks to the meds. It was wearing away at my body again, however, like a stone in a river and the inescapable effects of erosion. Eventually the stone would be nothing but grains of sand.

  Eventually my body would be dissociated atoms, floating between the stars perhaps...

  I didn’t fully understand what Dinova had done. I had an idea of course, but she had caught me off guard, and I blamed myself for it. I had already figured out that Dinova had killed Bojdl and Shaheen, and therefore had stopped concerning myself with her. Usually I would have immediately carted her away to HQ. Had I imprisoned her somewhere at The Freezer, she would most likely already be dead. Now she had killed Dyson, and I had to find her.

  Eventually we reached the ice column and were forced to navigate around it. Marius, although fit, was breathing heavily and asked for a short break. We slumped to the ice, perhaps collectively grateful that at least one of us had had the courage to request a breather.

  “What is her agenda?” I asked Marius.

  He snorted between deep breaths. “Honestly, Lieutenant, I have no idea. I never expected any of this from her. Murder. Abduction.” He paused for a long moment. “She obviously planned it for months. And Bojdl was her friend! She sacrificed a friend for this.”

  Cray said, “Whatever it is, it must be huge. Would revenge be a great enough motivator?”

  “In my experience, without question.”

  He glanced at me. “Is it the number one cause of murder?”

  I frowned. “If you’re just talking about the planned, premeditated variety, then yes.”

  “And the others?”

  I shrugged. “Heat of the moment, sudden anger, drunken rages and so on.”

  “Your life must be difficult,” Sato muttered.

  That startled me. “What do you mean?”

  “Dealing with death all the time. The gore. You interact with horrible people every day.”

  I had come to terms with this long before. I was very good at what I did, because I had an innate ability to see through deceptions.

  Usually.

  Dinova had tricked me.

  It wouldn’t happen again.

  I said, “Marius, has Dinova ever mentioned anything related to this?”

  “Never.”

  “What about her dissident beliefs?”

  He immediately became guarded. It was, after all, illegal. “What do you mean?”

  “You two spoke about that all the time. It’s part of the reason you left The Freezer together.”

  “So?”

  “Well? What did you talk about? The Council? The CCF? Injustices? What, exactly?”

  He sighed. “You realize you’re asking me to incriminate myself. You could very well arrest me when this is all done.”

  “You’re required to answer. But if it makes you feel better, I’m here to catch killers. Currently there are two loose on Europa. I need your help to get them.”

  A long, pregnant pause. And then, “She hates the Council. Hates the Confederacy. She hated every second at The Freezer, but her commanding officers assigned her here. But Tanner, I can honestly say that I don’t think she’s a violent person! This whole experience has shocked me! It’s like she’s become someone that I never knew existed!”

  I frowned. It was absurd. He had just watched her kill Dyson. “And you? What are your opinions about the Council?”

  That startled him. “I thought you said—”

  “I’m just trying to figure out how you fit into all of this. What part you played.”

  “It was just talk. All just talk, nothing else. I never conspired with anyone to do anything.”

  Cray grunted. “Really.”

  “You don’t believe him?” I said.

  “Frankly, no. He got removed from here for all the talk. He, Bojdl and Dinova. They were always badmouthing the Council. Meanwhile, look how far the human race has come! And it’s because—”

  “We’ve ended up torturing humans to create the perfect soldier.”

  Cray grew incensed. “We’re on one of Jupiter’s moons! Look above you, dammit! There are people right now establishing colonies on the periphery of human space, trillions of kilometers from here! There are one hundred billion humans, and few suffer from hunger, disease, crowding! We have an entire galaxy to settle now!”

  Marius sighed. “It always came to this in our arguments, Tanner.” He flung his arms out around him. “This is supposedly proof of how great the Council is. But where you see progress, many others see a lack of civil rights—torture, abuse and corruption.”

  “What others are you talking about?”

  He blinked. “Other dissidents.”

  “Who are they?”

  He stared at me for a long moment. “Don’t make me think that Dinova is right about you. Digging for names to turn over to the CCF.”

  I shook my head. Lies and deceit. My life was full of them. Such things had killed Shaheen and weighed me down from the instant my parents had died.

  I thought back again to the girl in Star City on Earth. The Russian who had so captured my attentions on that case. I could never bring myself to look her up again.

  I just assumed that she was dead.

  * * *

  We began moving again and remained absolutely silent for at least an hour of running. We were using large amounts of oxygen now, due to the exertion, but it was important to get back as quickly as possible.

  During the trek I had time to think about everything that had transpired. The bomb in my aorta, continuing its deadly work even as I struggled for survival. The dissidents on Ceres and how I had stumbled into their lives. Shaheen, murdered to force me to Europa...

  Something was tingling at the back of my brain now. Something had occurred to me...it was percolating back there.

  I shook my head as I tried to figure it out. I was freezing cold and finding it difficult to focus. I just continued moving my feet and pumping my legs as the weight of the sled tugged at my waist.

  This was a complicated case. In the past I had been compassionate toward dissidents, because I felt they had legitimate reasons to object. However, one woman’s dangerous philosophy had now resulted in three murders.

  Dinova had killed when she worked for the Council at The Freezer. Those deaths had been authorized.

  But she had also caused deaths working against the Council.

  It seemed that she caused death no matter where she was or what goals she wo
rked to achieve.

  * * *

  Soon the facility appeared on the horizon, at the base of the ice ridge. We stopped and stood there for long minutes, gasping for breath and collecting our thoughts. Our vacsuit visors were all fogged up; the temperatures within were close to freezing and the fans couldn’t keep up with the condensation.

  “Where to?” Cray said. He deferred to me.

  I glanced at the man, pleased with his attitude. He had done a complete reversal since I had outlined the facts in this case as I knew them and revealed who had killed his lover. He would be useful to me, I was sure. I needed, more than ever, to rely on the three men with me. Otherwise Lefave would kill us all.

  “We need meds first, to counter the radiation,” Sato said.

  “Lefave will guess that,” I muttered. He had probably searched the facility and noticed the missing icetracks. Then he would wait in the clinic.

  We should have brought the meds with us, but we were in too much of a hurry to get out while he was injured and repairing his vacsuit.

  “We can hold off on the meds for a bit,” I said. “We have to find Dinova and Snow.”

  Cray said, “Where do you think they are?”

  “In the ice cavern beneath Module A.”

  He blinked. “But why?”

  There was only one reason, and to me it was obvious.

  * * *

  As we closed on the base, we could see the results of the melting. It had left some of the modules tilted at crazy angles. Module A seemed lower in the ice than normal, and there was even something off about the travel tubes.

  “Oh, my God,” Cray said. “The tubes—some have cracked and bent.”

  In particular, the uneven rate at which the modules were descending into the ice had twisted the tube joining the mess/galley with Module A; there was a large fracture at the midway point. It had already vented its air. Luckily the hatches on either side closed on entry or departure, so the rest of the facility was fine. However, it was a sign of things to come.

  There was also a mist surrounding the station. It was difficult to make out—everything seemed slightly blurred—but it was there nonetheless.

  “Sublimation,” Cray whispered. “It’s speeding.”