The Freezer Page 3

“I was with him. We transferred here together.” He shot a glance back at Dinova, who was now pushing a cart with the draped body into the clinic.

  “So...” I frowned. “All three of you were there together? On Europa?”

  “Yes. We worked at a facility there. Fort Iridium had some openings for doctors and we thought we’d come here together.”

  Lawrence muttered, “We filled three medical positions with people stationed previously at the same place. I guess it happens.”

  Dinova moved the corpse under a scanner near the procedures tables. It was where the clinic personnel performed autopsies, usually on miners who had died working in dangerous conditions.

  Dinova pulled the sheet down and exposed the naked man.

  Lawrence took a step back. His face was slack and pale. My previous estimation was clearly correct: he could never be an investigator.

  There was a Y incision in Bojdl’s chest: a sealed but angry gash from the belly button up to the sternum, where it split toward each shoulder. The rest of his flesh was pale, but around the buttocks and the bottoms of his legs, purple splotches had begun to appear. The blood was pooling there, where it would coagulate finally into a clotted and hard mass within his veins, arteries and capillaries. The freezer had stalled the process, but now it would continue again until we moved him back into the chamber.

  There were faint scars on his lower legs, old and straight white lines each about four inches long. Also a burn on his right arm and the top of his right foot. Recent injuries.

  Lawrence cleared his throat and looked away. I pushed forward and grabbed some surgical gloves from Dinova. I gestured to Marius and he and I and Dinova hovered over the corpse.

  “Show me the aneurysm,” I grated.

  * * *

  It was exactly as pictured. Dr. Dinova had sent me images earlier and there was no mistaking it up close. The tear was there.

  “Does this look familiar?” I asked Marius.

  He was all business now, evidence of his earlier confusion gone. He was in an operating theater and was an expert in human biology and anatomy. I’d looked into his files before questioning him earlier in the day. His degree was from Gagarin, a colony orbiting between the Moon and Earth. His specialty was biochemistry and he had been a physician for fifteen years. His record was full of accolades and awards, and previous commanding officers had entered very positive things into his file.

  Marius had hunched over the corpse, his face inches from the heart. His gloved fingers had pushed open the cavity, with Dinova assisting, and I wasn’t much farther from it than he was.

  “Yes, I’ve seen them before. Generally in much older people.”

  “How old?”

  “I guess people in their eighties usually. The youngest I’ve ever seen was a sixty-seven-year-old woman.”

  “Is there anything unnatural that could have caused it?”

  My mind was racing now—an idea had occurred to me.

  He grunted. “For that we’d have to do some blood work, microscopic analysis, that sort of thing.”

  I looked at Dinova and she shook her head. “That’s not routine, Tanner. The rupture is easy to see so I didn’t call for those tests.” At my expression, she sighed. “I’ll order them now of course.”

  I’d had a great deal of experience with this sort of thing. Crime scenes contained some of the most disgusting things you can imagine, but also images that the ordinary person simply cannot fathom. Bodies twisted and manipulated by killers into various revolting states. Decapitation. Limbs missing. Bones exposed. Blood and fluid everywhere. I was also used to autopsies and had even performed the procedure myself on a number of occasions. I wasn’t an expert by any means, but I could generally detect anomalies within a corpse.

  * * *

  “Okay, while we wait for the test results, let’s go over the sequence of events.”

  Lawrence was now watching me intently, studying my process. I think it intrigued him. I didn’t care for his scrutiny; in fact, I kept flashing back to Shaheen and what had happened to her, and I was finding it hard to focus. I knew I had to throw myself into the investigation, try to decipher what had happened in order to keep moving forward. I couldn’t let myself fall into misery.

  We’d taken the blood work which the lab now studied. On any military installation like Iridium, which had a sizeable population, three shifts operated during the day. People were either working, sleeping, or relaxing, each shift lasting eight hours. Right now the on-duty personnel were struggling with our orders, which they knew superseded all other medical and scientific inquiries at the colony.

  In addition, the corpse was undergoing a microscopic analysis by a team in the clinic. Lawrence, the doctors and I had huddled in Dinova’s nearby office, working through the details of what had happened to Bojdl.

  “I saw the video,” Dr. Dinova was saying. “He just dropped.”

  “His blood pressure would have crashed,” Marius added. “His heart was pumping the blood into the surrounding cavity. None was getting to his brain. He would have lost consciousness within five seconds maybe.”

  “What about his general health?” I asked.

  Dinova said, “Fine. I was his doctor. He was mine. I knew everything about his medical history.”

  “What about his mental state?”

  “You mean the depression?” She considered this for a moment. “Everyone could tell. I asked him about it, but he wouldn’t say.”

  “You were his doctor.”

  The woman snapped a glare at me. “I wasn’t his psychologist.”

  “What about his friends?”

  Marius said, “Didn’t have many, Tanner. The two of us were his closest. We’ve been here for less than a year. When we do socialize, we do it together.”

  I nodded. “Were you intimate with him, Marina?”

  She looked as though she were going to argue with me, then thought better of it. Besides, the man was now dead and she must have known I was just trying to solve this thing. “No.”

  I turned to Marius. “And you?”

  He looked startled, then shook his head. “He didn’t have any lovers, as far as I know.”

  I filed that away as important information. Lovers—or spouses—were the most common guilty party in a homicide. Then family and friends. Then coworkers.

  The others watched me silently. And I them.

  I remembered something from the recording I’d seen earlier. “Tell me about the bandage on his arm.”

  “He spilled some acid in a lab,” Marius said. “He didn’t realize it until he put his elbow down onto the bench. He neutralized it quickly, but there was an open wound. I injected some priority nanos and bandaged him up. Some fell on his foot as well, ate through his shoe.”

  Nanos were microscopic robots that did a variety of tasks for us. People universally thought of them as the greatest invention ever, and our colonization of the galaxy—the Terran Confederacy now occupied a quarter of the Milky Way—was a direct result. Nanos manufactured for us and maintained equipment for us, and the medical variety healed things within us. Priority nanos could repair most injuries, remove cancers and clots, heal incisions. They performed their tasks and then migrated to the bladder where natural processes expelled them.

  “When did you inject the nanos?” I murmured.

  “Yesterday, following his accident.”

  “He died shortly after.”

  Marius looked suddenly worried. “Are you implying—”

  “No. But shouldn’t the nanos have repaired the aneurysm?”

  Dinova shook her head. “That sort of injury kills nearly instantly. Nanos need time to do their work.”

  I studied Marius silently. The fact that he had injected Bojdl shortly before his death stood out to me like a flare in spa
ce. He turned away from me. He knew it didn’t look good.

  I shook my head. There was something else here. Something I hadn’t told them.

  “How long before his death did you treat him?” I asked.

  “About fifteen minutes actually.” He frowned. “I didn’t really think about that, you know. Never connected the two incidents. One seemed so innocuous compared to the other.”

  Which was usually the case in my line of work.

  The communit beeped and Dinova bent to it. A voice warbled, “No sign of any foreign substance, Doctor.”

  “Did you check the bladder?”

  “Yes, urine is fine. No drugs, no toxins, nothing abnormal.”

  She glanced at me. “Nanos?”

  “None.”

  Marius said, “They are still inside of him then. Probably caught up in the clotting blood.”

  Dinova signed off and turned to me. I stared at the deck. I’d seen some strange things in my time, and this was definitely one of them. A case eleven months earlier had been another. Trapped in a location with a group of people, one of them a killer. I’d survived that situation, and had found Shaheen during it in fact, but it had definitely been harrowing, to say the least.

  Unlike my other investigations, however, this one at Fort Iridium had affected me in the worst way possible.

  A voice from the clinic attracted our attention. “We’ve got a look at the aneurysm now.”

  We marched to the procedures table and Bojdl’s corpse. A robotic arm peered into the chest cavity and a nearby holographic projection displayed the surrounding anatomy. It had zoomed right into the ruptured aorta.

  Dinova muttered as she examined the scene. She and Marius began discussing the nearby structures, pointing with light pens, and had the camera shift perspective several times.

  Finally something appeared on the projection, inside the aorta and several centimeters from the break in the artery, that attracted my notice. “What’s that?”

  Marius frowned. “A clot.” He sounded perplexed as he said it.

  Dinova’s eyes narrowed. “Zoom in on that.”

  It appeared on the projection and expanded into a meter-wide image. It was dark and tangled, seemingly held within the thickened blood of the artery.

  “How large is that?” I asked the technician who operated the robotic camera.

  He referred to a device in his hand. “Half millimeter.”

  The size of a pinhead.

  Lawrence, who was standing several meters away, spoke up. “Is it a tumor perhaps?”

  “No,” Dinova said softly. “It’s not natural.”

  I glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve never seen something like that before.” She gestured to the technician. “Zoom into those dark strands. I want to see one.”

  I knew immediately that it was an important find. It was not something that would have been visible in an autopsy because it was inside the aorta and had moved away from the area of study due to the last few beats of the man’s heart. It was also too small to really be distinguishable from the rest of his blood by the naked eye.

  The image leapt up in front of us, and as one, we gasped.

  “Oh my God,” Lawrence moaned. “That looks mechanical.”

  Chapter Three

  “It’s a bomb,” I said.

  The others turned to me, disbelief in their eyes. “That’s a sick joke,” Marius whispered. But still, he stared at the evidence holoprojected before our eyes, and he traced the lines of microscopic circuits and processors in the twisted debris that had lodged in Bojdl’s artery. “Who could think of such a thing?”

  “And how would the killer deliver it?” Lawrence asked. He was looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking.

  “Get your best programmer in here now. I want that bomb examined. And I want to know Bojdl’s movements in the days leading up to his death.” I pursed my lips as I considered this. “I need to see all of his correspondence, so have the colony’s information officer forward his files to my reader.”

  I spun and marched from the clinic.

  * * *

  Once back in my cabin I stopped and leaned against the cold hatch. I closed my eyes and listened to my breath as I let it out of my lungs. I banged my head against the steel once, twice, five times. A minute passed like that as I reviewed the last day. Shaheen and I in bed. Shaheen and I using the lavatory. Shaheen, brushing her long hair in front of the mirror. Shaheen, getting settled as Lawrence briefed me on the case. Shaheen, sleeping soundly on the bunk. Dressing together and getting ready to say our goodbyes before her jumpship launched. Touching the communit.

  We had both been everywhere in the cabin over the course of several hours.

  I snorted to myself and then savagely punched the hatch release. Back to the clinic. Hopefully for more answers.

  And a medical exam.

  * * *

  The video technician was gone when I returned, but there was now a newcomer: a short Chinese man in his sixties. His hair was close cropped—just stubble—and his face heavily lined. His expression seemed to display a constant grin no matter what he spoke of. It was calmly comforting; he seemed pleasant and eager to help.

  And, I hoped, he was an expert in microscopic machines.

  Lawrence gestured to him. “This is Ed Sato. A civilian programmer here at Iridium. On contract to the military. He specializes—”

  “I specialize in nanobots, nano-weapons and micro-bombs. I’m the perfect candidate for this case.” He spoke without a trace of an accent, which was actually quite normal: with every culture spreading out across Home System as well as the galaxy, regional accents were dying.

  Marius was looking at the man as if he were crazy. “You mean they really make things like that?”

  Dinova grunted. “Weapons engineers will use any technology at their disposal to assassinate silently. You know that.”

  He glanced at her for a heartbeat before he gave a slight nod. “I guess they do. I just never thought...”

  I stepped toward the newcomer. “Have you ever had contact with Lieutenant Marek Bojdl?”

  He looked startled. “You mean, did I kill him?”

  “Answer the question.”

  The response was instant this time. “I believe I saw him around the colony on occasion, or even here in the clinic, but we have never spoken and I had nothing against him.”

  “Were you in the mess at the time of his death?”

  He shook his head.

  I would look into his files, of course, but his responses and mannerisms seemed normal enough.

  “Did the others show you the...device?”

  He grimaced. “You were right. It’s a bomb.”

  “The area around it is vaporized blood,” Dr. Dinova grated. “It detonated next to the lining of his artery near the heart.”

  “A very effective weapon,” Sato said.

  I glanced at him and his smile and wondered if that expression had ever unintentionally angered someone. “You admire it?”

  His brow furrowed. “I admire the concept. The manufacturing obstacles and the delivery mechanism.” He glanced at me before his tone softened. “I understand how close you are to this issue, Lieutenant Tanner, and I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be callous.”

  I waved aside his apology. He was an expert in this, and I had learned long ago to accept and use knowledgeable people whenever possible.

  “And the delivery device?”

  A shrug. “Could have been ingested through food or drink.”

  “Could it have been something he touched?”

  “Most definitely. He might have handled the delivery device—which could even have been a piece of paper or metal or even a flower—and had the b
omb penetrate his skin that way. The methods are nearly endless.” He looked at the projection in the air and shook his head. “Brilliant really.”

  The others shot looks at him, then turned to me. I snorted in dismissal. “While you check the debris, I need Dr. Dinova to do something for me.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Give me a complete medical.”

  “But why? What’s so pressing—”

  “A complete medical, but I want you to pay close attention to my vascular system, particularly my aorta.”

  Her eyes widened. “You don’t think...”

  “I need to know how much time I have.”

  * * *

  The holoprojection of my body appeared before us and we studied it intently. Lawrence watched with openmouthed fascination as blood circulated, as odd muscles twitched or moved—I had tried to stay motionless during the exam, but it had been impossible—at each breath I took as well as each swallow.

  Simon Marius and Marina Dinova were doctors and saw this sort of thing on an hourly basis. Simon was an expert in human anatomy and biochemistry, and Dinova’s fields were cardiovascular systems and neurology.

  Sato thrust his face directly into the chest cavity—so he was actually inside the image—and struggled vainly to see if my supposition was correct.

  “It’s too small to see like this,” Dinova muttered to him. “Let’s adjust the image.” She gave an order into a console beside the projector and the chest—my chest, rather—swelled by a factor of five. The rest of my body now dissolved at the edges of the view.

  A yellow light, much like a target on a weapons display, shone on something near my heart, which was beating slowly and surely. Blood was visible moving through the chambers of the organ, in through the veins and out through the arteries. Had that yellow target not preoccupied me, I would have been in as much awe as Lawrence.

  “Is that it?” I asked quietly.

  Marius glanced at me and said nothing, but the look was enough.

  I was a dead man.

  * * *

  “We can remove it,” Dinova said as she studied the video. It was on an endless loop now. The actual exam had only been five minutes. We’d been studying it for over twenty.