The Cryonite Caper Read online

  THE CRYONITE CAPER

  A CAULDRON OF STARS

  PREQUEL

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  FELIX R. SAVAGE

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  Copyright © 2018 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

  Cover design by Jamie GloverPhotography by Andrew Dobell

  First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Knights Hill Publishing.

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  1

  I rang Risk’s doorbell with my chin, since I was balancing two hot coffees on top of a plastikrete crate of Barbie dolls. I was hoping one or the other would revive Risk from his lager-induced coma. We had celebrated a profitable cargo run to Diaz de Solis last night, but that was no excuse for spending the day in bed. I was an independent freighter captain and Risk was my weapons officer. We had to hustle just to keep up.

  The doorbell echoed through the apartment on the other side of the peeling, pink front door. For some reason it gave me the chills. The apartment sounded empty.

  I put down my crate and leaned on the bell. Then I cupped my hands to the window beside the door and squinted through the frosting of salt on the outside of the glass.

  I saw nothing but Risk’s front hall, heaped as usual with boxes of stuff he was trying to offload on the side. I really had to talk to him about that. Through a chink between the boxes, I saw one of his deck boots lying in the kitchen doorway.

  It lay at a funny angle.

  Toe up.

  I pounded the window. “Risk!” I yelled.

  The only effect this had was that his upstairs neighbor came out on her balcony. Many of these old townhouses in Shiftertown have been subdivided into four or more apartments. This one had only been divided into two. The neighbor looked down through the branches of the gravelnut tree growing up through the sidewalk. She was a surprise—an attractive, fit young woman with her hair pulled back in a tight braid. My mental image of Risk had him surrounded by felons and junkies. A toddler wriggled around the woman’s legs and waved hi. After giving me the once-over, Mom pushed the child back inside. Shiftertown folks are wary; they’ve got to be.

  Midday traffic honked and crawled along 90th towards Shoreside. The cars crushed the malodorous nuts of the gravelnut trees, stinking up the humid air.Tourists clustered around stalls vending back-home specialties, basically meat burned in various ways. I moved my crate to one side of the porch and kicked Risk’s front door. Tourists glanced at me from the sidewalk. I smiled back at them. Just part of the local color, ladies and gents and aliens. Carry on as you were. I kicked the door again, and it popped open.

  It hadn’t been locked.

  That was unlike Risk.

  Warily, I moved into the hall. My hand snaked inside my lightweight suit jacket and closed around the butt of my Midday Special. I picked my way between the boxes of crap that fell off the backs of spaceships, to the kitchen doorway.

  Risk’s deck boot was on his foot.

  Kinda.

  His foot was a fox’s paw.

  It was attached to a dog fox the size of a man, wearing a misfitting t-shirt and jeans.

  The old fox lay on a sheet of polythene spread across the kitchen floor, like builders use when they’re painting. But he wasn’t exactly lying on it.

  Risk was frozen.

  He was encased in a transparent, slightly sparkly, six-foot-long ice cube.

  *

  What the everloving heck had the old fox done now? I crouched down and touched the slab of ‘ice’—and jerked back. I sucked my fingers. Goddamn stuff was as cold as frozen CO2.

  Well, of course it was. And that was only the surface. The interior would be much colder. The material was cryonite, a substance invented by the long-gone Urush, which is disappointingly easy to manufacture. We don’t know if they used it to imprison people, to preserve fresh fruit on long voyages, or to make non-melting ice cubes for their drinks. On Ponce de Leon it was used for all three purposes.

  I straightened up, drawing my Midday Special. I wasn’t even really aware of what I was doing until my eyes registered what my subconscious had already noticed.

  Across the kitchen, the door of Risk’s refrigerator stood ajar.

  And two size sixteen boots stuck out from under it.

  Just…boots? It was so odd I still didn’t understand. Then the mystery solved itself.

  The fridge door flew the rest of the way open. A human male the size of a linebacker charged out, straight at me.

  I had a split second to decide whether to shoot.

  My long-dead commanding officer screamed, Blow the blanking hostile away, you blankety-blanking blanker! Rational me pointed out more quietly that the thug was empty-handed.

  This inner debate ate up my split second of thinking time. The thug leapt onto the kitchen table and kicked me in the face. The kitchen spun like a carnival ride. My Midday Special went flying.

  It was a glancing blow because by this point in my life, I had taken several kicks to the face and I knew I didn’t like them. I pivoted and missed the worst of it. Then my commanding officer was back with more advice, grab the blankety-blank’s leg, and I caught the thug’s foot in the air.

  This was more like it. Action hero stuff. Just like the old days—

  Without a moment’s pause, the thug switch-kicked with his other foot. He landed his boot square in the middle of my chest and knocked me back from the table.

  So, spinning head, and now good-bye air. Maybe I’d land on something soft. I’d been in this situation before, too—thanks to the army and then a sketchy career in space—and I knew I’d be in bad shape when I landed.

  I held onto the thug’s foot. Not from any plan. It was basic reflex, my only way of being disagreeable to him.

  I got lucky.

  His kick knocked me back, and I took his foot with me, and he landed with a satisfying crash on the table. He bounced to the floor headfirst. He caught himself with his hands—on Risk.

  They probably heard him yell uptown.

  I still had his foot. I twisted it, tumbling him off the fox-cube, and then pinned him in place with my boot on his ass. “Who are you?” I wheezed, breathless. “Why did you ice my weapons officer?”

  “Screw you, man,” he growled.

  I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Something about being kicked twice in one minute, by the biggest thug I’d seen in a year—it made me want firepower.

  I stooped to pick up my Midday Special, which had skittered next to Risk’s cube. I saw the thug’s fist just in time and took the punch on my shoulder. It still knocked me across the kitchen. I fetched up against the sink, my shoulder radiating pain. This time I didn’t drop the pistol. I leveled it at him. “Talk, asshole.”

  The thug glanced at my .22 and gave a snort of disdain that the gun probably found demoralizing. I know I did. Really, unless I got a lucky shot, it wouldn’t slow this beast down.

  He spun on his size sixteen heel and darted out the kitchen door, Great. I wouldn’t have to kill him—but he was taking all his answers with him.

  I jumped to my feet and staggered after him—and tripped over Risk. Dammit! I stumbled out of the kitchen just in time to see him charging out of the front door, which I had considerately left open.

  When I reached the stoop, he
was nowhere to be seen. You wouldn’t think a guy that size could successfully blend with the tourists, hustlers, and teenagers ambling along the sidewalk, but he had. With his speed and skill—he was obviously trained—he was the least thug-like thug I’d met. That didn’t bode well for Risk, and whatever trouble he’d gotten into.

  I cursed some more while I caught my breath, and then went back inside. To satisfy my bruised pride, I cleared the rest of the apartment in tactically correct style, gun first, exposing as little of my body as possible to potential enemy fire. I never thought I’d end up putting these muscle memories to good use in Shiftertown, in my employee’s apartment. There were only two other rooms: his bedroom and the living-room, which currently served as a warehouse for Risk’s inventory. I checked under the bed. I even checked inside a few of the larger boxes.

  I really was alone in the apartment now.

  With a man encased in cryonite.

  Well, a fox.

  Same difference.

  Nothing moved in the kitchen except flies crawling over a cereal bowl on the draining board. I smelled sour milk. I smelled cryonite. The fact that I could smell it meant it wasn’t dry yet. Cryonite takes hours to set fully. Whoever did this must have finished the job early this morning, then left Thuggy McThug to watch the stuff set—a job slightly more exciting than watching paint dry. Lucky that I’d come along to give him a workout, not that he needed one.

  My shoulder still hurt. And my face. And my chest.

  I stared at Risk. Bubbles frosted the tip of his tail. His eyes were half open. He seemed to be staring accusingly at me, although I knew he was suspended in a cryogenic coma. The way cryonite worked, unless it was keyed to a nanonic defroster, Risk would remain encased like that, potentially until the heat death of the universe.

  I should’ve fired him ages ago. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with this.

  But one of the reasons I hadn’t fired him was that he was a good guy, as well as a good weapons officer. Yes, he mixed with some dodgy types, but I could not imagine who would have gone to these lengths to ruin his life. Bullets are cheaper. Actually, one blow from McThuggy’s fist would have done the job, if they—whoever they were—wanted to kill him. But instead, they’d turned him into a giant paperweight.

  When I started to run through species of aliens large enough to use him as a bookshelf ornament, I had to admit I was stumped.

  I righted the kitchen table and found Risk’s jacket on the floor. There was nothing in its pockets except a hundred, some change, and a receipt from Wally’s, a local seafood joint, dated three days ago. The refrigerator was full of dodgy herbal beer which Risk must have been hoping to sell. I checked all the windows. They were painted shut and clearly had not been opened in years.

  I went back outside, closed the door behind me, and moved my crate of Barbies in front of it. “Ow! Please be careful!” said a chorus of teeny tiny robotic voices from within. Ignoring the dolls, I sat on the stoop and opened one of the coffees I’d brought. Although it felt like a lifetime had passed since I entered the apartment, the coffee was still hot.

  I’d brought the coffees from Kitty’s, the tourist-trap café on the corner of 90th and Shoreside, because I wanted Risk alert for the serious chat I’d planned. Now it would take more than Kitty’s coffee to wake him up. Maybe the caffeine would help me think.

  You may be wondering why I didn’t call the emergency services. Surely that’s what any normal person would do after finding one of his employees frozen in cryonite?

  Not in Shiftertown. Risk was a Shifter, like me. We are alt-humans, and we aren’t wildly popular on Ponce de Leon. Any publicity is bad publicity. As a result, we tend to clean up our own messes.

  I drank the first coffee, then took out my phone and called Dolph, my pilot and business partner. He was at our office near Mag-Ingat Harbor, clearly working through his own hangover.

  “What happened to good old carbonite?” he said, after I ran down the situation for him.

  “You need supervillain-level infrastructure for that,” I said. “Cryonite is stupid easy. Just mix and pour.”

  “Plus, transparent is cooler than gunmetal gray,” he observed. “If you’re going for a conversation piece.”

  “Or individual fox-flavored ice cubes.”

  Dolph made a noise halfway between a laugh and a cough of disgust. It was no joke, though. I had heard of exactly this happening in the Ponce de Leon underworld, which lies as close to Shiftertown as a shadow to the sunlight. It got worse the more I considered it. The illicit organ trade, indentured workers, even simple gang mob hits : freeze the victim and drop him in the ocean. Honestly, once you start freezing people in cryonite, there are no ‘good’ explanations.

  “Did you get any pictures of Thug Life?” Dolph said.

  I shook my head. “I was too busy dodging. He was good but he didn’t strike me as having the smarts for this. It looks like a professional job.” I watched the street as I talked, wondering if any of the people meandering past were actually McThuggy’s cronies, now watching me and cursing their luck. I doubted it. I haven’t yet met a bad guy who’d be caught dead in an I Heart Shiftertown baseball cap.

  “What did you go over there for, anyway?” Dolph said.

  I sighed. “I was going to have a serious chat with him about showing up for work. And about his side business.”

  “Follow the money,” Dolph said.

  “Yeah, could be related. He still seems like the last guy something like this would happen to.” In the background I could hear the professional voice of our receptionist, Mary, dealing with customers. Mary is a lovely lady and a mainstream human. In her world, people you know don’t get frozen in cryonite.

  “Well, at least now you won’t have to fire him.” Dolph got up and went outside. The background noise changed to the hum of a train rushing past below. “Didja go through his pockets?”

  “Only a hundred GCs and change.”

  “Can’t even buy lunch with that.”

  This reminded me that it was thirteen o’clock and I hadn’t eaten. “Pick up sandwiches at Haughey’s and get down here.”

  “Venison or gazelle?”

  “Venison.”

  “Beer?”

  “Nah, there’s plenty in the fridge here.”

  “Ole fox was hitting the sauce hard last night,” Dolph recalled.

  “It wasn’t the booze that encased him in cryonite,” I said, and rang off.

  As I drank the second coffee, I felt eyes on me. I looked up and saw Risk’s neighbor again. The young woman with the tight braid. She was watching from the landing above and she looked even more wary now, maybe because she’d heard fighting and yelling. She also looked a little stressed out, which comes with living in Shiftertown.

  Shiftertown hadn’t yet gotten to the little girl peeking around her legs. She was a cute little thing of three or four. Blonde, elfish, chipper.

  “Hello mister,” she called down. “Why is your box talking?”

  I glanced at the crate of Barbies and had a brainwave. If anybody had seen something, it would be the upstairs neighbor who came onto her balcony at the slightest noise.

  “Something for the guy who lives here. I’ll show you, if that’s OK with your mom.” I smiled up at them,

  Mom obviously thought I was skeevy as heck. But I was wearing a business suit, albeit somewhat rumpled now, and it was the middle of the day. The street was crowded with people. She didn’t know there was a Shifter-sized ice cube in the downstairs apartment.

  “All right,” she said grudgingly. She buzzed me in. I opened the door beside Risk’s and carried my crate up a flight of stairs. The Barbies exclaimed at each step, “Excuse me!” “No, excuse me!” The little girl burst out of a door at the top of the stairs and giggled.

  I followed her into a kitchen identical to the one below, except that there was no slab of cryonite in it. Also, it was sunlit, noisy with the combined wailing of a baby and a holovision, and smelled of dirty di
apers. The baby lay in a cot on the kitchen table, next to the characters from a popular kids’ show, who danced and sang, two foot high, with the characteristic too-sharp edges of holographs. Mia’s mom switched them off, uncovering the noise of a second holovision in the living-room. She picked up the baby—a protective move. “Have I seen you around before?”

  “I work with Risk,” I said, smiling but not trying for a handshake. “What’s your name?”

  “Irene.” She shifted her weight from foot to foot, attempting to calm the baby. “I’d better say up front, if you’re selling something, we’re not buying.”

  She probably assumed I was part of Risk’s dodgy consignment sales business. She might not even know he had a real job. He sure didn’t act like it a lot of the time.

  “Mister!” Mia tugged my sleeve. “Open the box!”

  This little one was fearless. My own daughter, Lucy, was the same age, but she tended to be quiet and watchful unless you had the honor of being on her OK list. That was partly my fault. I’m a wee bit paranoid. But not without reason. Some asshole or assholes unknown had just iced my weapons officer.

  I tried my damnedest to keep these thoughts off my face as I popped the crate open and revealed a mob of bubble-wrapped Barbies. All of them staring blankly up.

  Mia squealed ecstatically and snatched one.

  “Oh! Hello!” it squeaked.

  “Mia!” snapped her mother. “Did the man say you could touch that?”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “In fact, Mia can help me out. I’m conducting a market research survey.”

  This was actually true. I had received these Barbies from their manufacturer, a startup which wanted to try selling them in the Isaw Threnis system, one of my regular ports of call. Thing is, the company didn’t have any orders from Isaw Threnis yet. They wanted me to take a bunch of the dolls and try to sell them to local distributors, in exchange for a cut. I go where the money is, usually, but I’m in delivery, not sales. I couldn’t picture myself talking dollies with buyers. Risk, on the other hand, had no shame. I’d been going to run the idea past him, and then see how the Barbies went over with Lucy and her little friends in my apartment complex.