The Ripple in Space-Time: Free City Book 1 (The Free City Series)

by S F Chapman

  Ryo mused that the name of the vessel referred to an elusive and ethereal mist that appeared without warning in the mountains of ancient Japan. With the Seiran’s speed, stealth and formidable armaments, he hoped to locate and seize the Butin Belle undetected.

  Now at last they were underway. The powerful engines were quickly pushing the sleek craft away from Earth towards the Lutetia sector of the Asteroid Belt twenty days away.

  Keira engaged the autopilot, “There’s not much to do now, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah, but there is,” Ryo chortled, “if we are to succeed and hopefully avoid a most painful death at the hands of the pirates, we need to familiarize ourselves with several vital areas of knowledge.”

  He turned to Lev, “I want you to carefully study all available information about the Butin Belle. Hopefully you can discover some weaknesses that could be exploited in its capture.”

  The young man winced at the burdensome mandate.

  Keira smirked wryly at Lev’s misfortune.

  “You, young lady,” Ryo directed in his most paternal voice, “will spend all of your spare time learning the capabilities of the Seiran, paying close attention to weaponry and maneuvering abilities. We don’t want to be figuring out how to operate the ordnance while the pirates are shooting at us.”

  She nodded ruefully.

  “With Lev’s help,” Ryo added, “I hope to learn as much as possible about the Tau Atoms that were being produced at the Lunar Lab.”

  The Seiran's speed indictor was rapidly approaching the craft’s maximum velocity.

  • • •

  Dimitri Verhovnyi could restrain himself no longer.

  He snickered triumphantly at his superb little secret. With one swift and decisive strike all of humanity would know and fear his name.

  The Warlord of the Outer Reaches had been preparing his brutal vengeance against his arrogant half-brother for years and now its fulfill was less than a week away.

  He strutted around his chamber in search of some diversion.

  Dimitri idly surveyed several routine reports detailing mining outputs but they seemed so trivial compared to his shrewd plan.

  Perhaps an early meal would relax him.

  “GIRL!” he bellowed.

  His tremulous parlormaid appeared at the door, “Yes Master?”

  He leered contemptuously at the pathetic little sprite; he resolved to replace her in the coming months with two or three more pleasing slave girls. “Bring me my supper now!”

  She nodded in distress at his command before hurrying off.

  • • •

  “Alright, I think I understand this now,” Ryo frowned as he stared at Lev. “Everything around us is made of ‘Electron Atoms’ or energy.”

  “Right,” Lev nodded. “The oxygen in the air, the gold in the banks and the calcium in your bones; these are all made of atoms that are composed of only three parts: electrons and the two lightest quarks which are called up and down. There’s some force particles and perhaps some neutrinos, but we’ll ignore them.”

  The old Investigator scratched is head in confusion, “I seem to remember something about protons and neutrons in atoms, how do they fit into this mess?”

  The younger man smiled, “Protons and neutrons are made of up and down quarks. A proton’s got two ups and one down. A neutron has two downs and one up.”

  “OK. What about those unusual Tau Atoms that your mom was putting together at the Lunar Ultra Energy Lab?”

  “That is what earned her a Nobel Prize,” Lev smiled. “Long ago, a few much heavier atoms were put together using two much more massive quarks called charm and strange.”

  Ryo laughed, “Who came up with these odd names?”

  “I don’t remember, but Physicist often have a peculiar sense of humor regarding subatomic particles. Other than the much greater mass, a charm quark is essentially identical to an up quark and strange is identical to down. Instead of electrons spinning around the atom, scientists added the identical but much more massive muons; hence the name Mu Atoms. Amazingly, we can bash these parts together and make many types of atoms that are identical to the regular stuff except they’re hundreds of times more massive.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Tau atoms were recently built with even heavier quarks called top and bottom, then surrounded by tauons instead of electrons. There are still only tiny quantities of this stuff and it can be very unstable. It’s mainly being studied by researchers for now. Tau atoms are thousands of times more massive than their electron atom equivalents.”

  The old investigator frowned, “Why go to all of the trouble of making super heavy atoms?”

  “E=mc2,” Lev smirked. “A tiny bit of mass can be converted into a vast amount of energy. The more mass that you can jamb into a small space, the more energy can be released.”

  “So something that’s tiny and very heavy is really just a way of storing a huge amount of energy?”

  Lev nodded, “Frightening, yes.”

  • • •

  Fortunately, Jana concluded, Bosco seemed to favor her over the group of her hapless coworkers.

  He had dragged her alone through several airlocks and left her more or less unharmed locked away in the gargantuan aft bulk cargo compartment of the Lightning with only the feebleminded cabin boy to stand guard.

  While the boy had looked on with his dull brown eyes, Jana had quickly surveyed the immense and nearly empty space. She’d found many crates of long expired survival rations, a half dozen thin blankets and an austere portable space commode.

  When she heard the First Mate clattering and bellowing his way down the passageway, Jana hurried back to the spot near the hatch where Boz had left her.

  The door creaked open and the unruly pirate flung Ramesh into the compartment. The battered grad student was encrusted with dried blood, his left eye was swollen shut and a long ragged gash ran across his forehead.

  The unlucky janitor and student intern tumbled into the chamber. Although apparently unharmed, both men shared the same expression of utter terror.

  Finally Boz hurled Erik through the hatchway. Her deranged assistant was tightly bound with a thick scratchy rope. Hideous red welts from the restraints covered much of his nearly naked body. He quivered and shrieked at the rough treatment as a wild animal might under similar conditions.

  The ruthless First Mate joined the novice slaves; “You will begin work in the morning.” He grinned scornfully at Ramesh, “As you can see, any misbehavior will be repaid with harsh treatment.”

  Boz beckoned to the cabin boy and the two pirates left the miserable group in the locked compartment.

  • • •

  The trio aboard the Seiran was crowded into the snug cockpit admiring Mars as the ship streaked across the orbit of the red planet at over 45 AU/yr.

  Ryo had insisted that his young charges should take time off from their various routines to celebrate the event.

  Lev grumbled that the ‘trivial occasion’ cut into the time that he would spend on his painstaking examination of the records of the Butin Belle. Keira had been equally cranky beforehand, maintaining that she should skip the group meeting and continue to familiarize herself with the Seiran’s copious weaponry.

  But the old Investigator knew better; after nearly eight days of tedium in the cramped interceptor with the oddly wary young people, he felt that the group would function much better following the short diversion of the Mars crossing.

  From below the sturdy external umbrella of the ship’s forward facing Cosmic Ray deflector, Ryo watched as Keira huddled next to Lev for an optimal view as the man pressed himself against the window in awe.

  “It’s really amazing,” Lev whispered.

  The tiny and scattered lights from the Martian outposts bejeweled the nightside surface of the planet.

  “I’ve been there twice,” Keira uttered as she gawked at the dusky orb, “once when I was three and again when I was about eight.”

&
nbsp; The tawny sphere rapidly receded.

  Ryo studied the spectacle from behind their overlapping shoulders.

  “The only two things that I remember about Mars,” Keira recalled nostalgically, “was jumping around like a little kangaroo in the low gravity and the fine red dust that was everywhere.” She laughed at the childhood memories; “It took weeks to clean it out of everything when we got back to Free City.”

  Lev shook his head in envy, “I’ve never been there.”

  “Twenty years ago,” Ryo reminisced, “when I was an Investigator Fourth Class, I was sent along with a big group from the Inquisitor's Office to look into irregularities at the Eos Mensa Cobalt Mine. That, I’m afraid to say, was my only trip to the red planet.”

  • • •

  Jana had spent hours tending to Ramesh and Erik’s wounds in the cavernous cargo compartment.

  She and her coworkers had talked almost nonstop since Boz had imprisoned them together. Jana finally learned that the janitor’s name was Lucas. The man was especially worried about his wife and young daughter who had lived in one of the small apartments at the Lunar Lab. She didn’t have the heart to tell the poor soul that his family had quite certainly been killed by the blast that destroyed the facility.

  The pudgy student intern was named Philip; he was a bright fifteen year old on his first trip away from home. If he ever saw his parents again, the teenager would have nearly unbelievable traveler’s tales to share with them.

  Philip and Lucas told her about the terrible abuse that Ramesh had suffered since the Lightning had arrived. Both Bosco and Captain Gristle had repeatedly beat the sometimes-arrogant and often defiant man.

  Jana listened in alarm as the men described Erik’s rapid and unexplainable descent into madness shortly after the pirates had snatched them from the Moon.

  All were starved.

  The slaves greedily devoured dozens of the moldering rations. Although eventually satiated by the substandard fare, Jana felt quite queasy after the rancid feast.

  They slept fitfully heaped together, loosely bound against the lack of gravity by the rope that had constrained Erik.

  When they heard the approaching pirates in the passageway, the five slaves trembled and groaned uncontrollably in despair.

  • • •

  The respite during the Mars crossing earlier in the day had paid off, Ryo noted as he pulled himself through the dark narrow passageway towards the cockpit. For the first time in weeks, his shipmates had spent much of the day together as they worked through their various tasks. As he had returned from the lavatory, he’d glimpsed Keira and Lev clenched in a passionate embrace in the dim sleeping berth of the Seiran.

  Thankfully the sexual tension and the inexplicable animosity between the two was now likely to vanish.

  Ryo smiled smugly as he slipped into the pilot’s seat for the second half of the midnight watch; to his surprise, he rather enjoyed his burgeoning role as the group’s patriarch. Perhaps he would expand upon the notion when he returned to Free City.

  The old Investigator’s mirthful contemplation was interrupted when the incoming message light flashed several times.

  Ryo studied the sender information; the dispatch was from Carla Stuhr.

  He watched the recorded message that she had sent hours earlier, “I’ve just discovered another unusual ripple.”

  The shadowy image of the woman glanced at the desktop display, “It’s much smaller than the earlier one.”

  She made several adjustments to the bright image before continuing; “It’s a single small very dense object with a mass of about 1,200 grams traveling at around 75 kilometers per second.”

  Carla stared at him in concern, “I don’t have a very good plot on the trajectory yet, but it seems to have originated near Lutetia and is headed towards Earth!”

  20. News Item: The war of words continues Dateline: 30th of July, 2445; Arusha, EurAfrica, Earth

  The bitter rancor continues to escalate between Daniel Kufuzu, the Exalted Warlord of EurAfrica and his much younger half-brother, Dimitri Verhovnyi, the Supreme Imperial Warlord of the Outer Reaches.

  The current war of words was set off many years ago when Verhovnyi claimed that Kufuzu had attempted to clandestinely derail the construction of his immense Kuiper Belt Gas Refinement Facility. The Free City Inquisitor’s Office has since determined that, in fact, Kufuzu had secretly meddled with the establishment of the facility because it would eventually out produce the Xenon gas monopoly of the EurAfrican Exotic Gas Consortium of which he is the primary stakeholder.

  In the current wave of acrimony, Kufuzu accused Verhovnyi of complicity in the assassination of his third wife, Sophia, as she attended trade talks in New Rome. The still unexplained murder in late May has continued to baffle New Roman investigators.

  Speaking from the capital city of Arusha yesterday, the EurAfrican Warlord promised brutal retaliation against his brother if he is implicated in the crime.

  Verhovnyi for his part accused Kufuzu of using the assassination of his wife to fan the growing anti Outer Reaches sentiment on Earth. The Warlord of the Outer Reaches even went so far as to imply that his brother may have had a hand in the woman’s murder.

  Dimitri Verhovnyi luridly proclaimed in a press release from the Outer Reaches that “death would soon rain down upon Kufuzu for his treacherous misdeeds.”

  21. The plummeting sky The Spanish teenager shivered as he crawled out of the warm little backpacker’s tent. It was a surprisingly cold evening for equatorial East Africa.

  He smiled to himself as he stood up; the chilly air probably had much more to do with elevation than anything else. After all, at nearly 4,600 meters above sea level, he could easily have expected a light dusting of snow on Mount Meru.

  He switched on his lamp and studied the tiny campsite. The little ravine that he’d hastily chosen earlier after the bleary all day solo hike from the outfitter’s base camp now seemed ideal after a much needed nap. The steep cliffs of gray volcanic rubble that surrounded the tent shielded his flimsy abode from the ever-present wind that buffeted the peak.

  Overhead, thousands of glinting stars populated the indigo sky. He checked the time, it would take about twenty minutes to hike to the vantage point and witness the spectacular view far below on the Maasai Steppes that he’d come all this way to see.

  He closed the flap of the tent and started off.

  He’d left the stodgy comfort of his parent’s home in Madrid nearly six months ago as a naive seventeen-year-old, full of himself and the unattainable ideals of the Enlightenment Crusade. His new Crusade “friends” had robbed and abandoned him after a long, slow train ride together to New Rome. He’d reluctantly contacted his parents for help after only eleven days on the road. His father had grudgingly sent him five hundred Units and indicated that no more would be forthcoming should other disasters arise.

  The experience had left him much more wary of entanglements. He’d met two beautiful young women on the Mediterranean crossing. Both seemed mildly interested in him, but they were bound for a western Morocco beach enclave and he for the Great Rift Valley. After a long night of drinking together in Tunis, they’d split up.

  He’d wandered eastward alone across North Africa to Egypt before arriving at the Nile and the ruins of the ancient city of Cairo. He’d lived with an ever-changing group of like-minded vagabonds in a squatter’s camp outside of Memphis for nearly a month. On his eighteenth birthday, he’d set out for the Rift Valley far to the south. He told his casual companions at the camp that he planned to scale at least three of East Africa’s tallest mountains before his next birthday.

  After much effort, he had arrived in Nairobi and several days later ventured to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. But Africa’s highest peak had been a disappointment. The towering volcano was an unsatisfying tourist trap catering to rich and flabby tourists and curio hunters. More than once on the tame and well-paved trail up the mountain, street vendors had offered him “Kilimanjaro
Kocktails” or flimsy volcano snow globes.

  At the crowded peak, a young and athletic couple from New Reykjavik had suggested Mount Meru as a much more challenging and solitary undertaking.

  Days later on the trip to Arusha, he had met an ancient black man who professed to be the descendant of Maasai warriors that had stalked lions around the banks of the Mara River before it was channelized and diverted for agricultural purposes in 2280. The old man had claimed to have seen huge herds of zebra and gazelle trailed by a few vigilant big cats north of the bustling capital city. When he scoffed at the man’s tale, the elderly African produced a tattered travel brochure as proof of the elaborate reforestation and “reanimalization” projects initiated by the EurAfrican government a few years earlier.

  The old man had left him on the outskirts of the opulent capital city, mumbling something about great swarms of animals returning to the Maasai Steppes when, at last, the human hindrances had been seared away.

  He shook his head and chuckled as he thought of the old African while he hiked in the cold blustery night air. Ahead was the outcropping that had been described to him earlier. He carefully scaled the craggy face of the dark edifice.

  And there it was spread out below him.

  Millions of lights from Arusha shimmered across the lowlands and oddly mimicked the droves of stalwart stars above. The immense and orderly arrangement of street lamps split the metropolis into tiny squares and rectangles each filled with dozens of wavering building lights. Long streams of headlights seeped down the main thoroughfares, conveying work-weary Africans back home.

  At the horizon far to the southwest, the lights of the megacity merged with the star-splattered tapestry of the night sky. The cool and dispassionate celestial vista above was tremendously older than the cheery and emotional earth-bound construct below.

  No doubt, he mused, his ancient ancestors had also marveled at the vast overhead realm many millennia before.

  Slowly moving ruby or emerald lights plied purposefully through the star field, most likely satellites and space freighters, he realized.