“Excerpt from Colliding Galaxies”

In mid-May, my short fiction collection Colliding Galaxies will be coming out, available at smashwords.com and fine ebook retailers everywhere.

Herewith, an excerpt from one of the stories:

The Cold, Hard Facts

Introduction

All Detective Lieutenant Stan Benecky ever wanted to be was a street cop. But time and technology have begun to pass him by and like a dinosaur in a land of unicorns, he stumbles around, hanging on for dear life, trying to make some sense of what has happened to his job.  He can’t resign: there’s pride, a messy and probably expensive divorce, a reputation to protect.  When a high profile athlete is murdered before the Big Game, Benecky tries to put up a brave front, but he’s like an ant trying to understand calculus.  But Benecky does have one thing in his favor—he’s resourceful, even a little cunning.  He knows how to use the latest forensic tech to invade police work—sniffing out dead victim’s dying memories—to re-live his greatest moments as a beat cop.  It seems like a vicarious, even harmless addiction for an aging troglodyte, until one day, he finds the scrolling memories of a vic a little too realistic for comfort….

***

Forensic Nanopathology –the practice of using nanoscale mechanisms and techniques in postmortem investigations of sudden, unexpected death.

--excerpt from The Law Officer’s Professional Compendium of Standards and Definitions, United States Department of Justice and Rehabilitation, October 2048

“Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.”

Aldous Huxley

1.

 

“The Scene of the Crime”

It was hard to drop into Tootsie’s Bar after a long day watch in Forensics and have a beer and swap lies with your partner, when your partner was all of eighty-four nanometers tall.  That was the problem Detective Lieutenant Stan Benecky, of Greater Atlanta PD’s ANAD Squad, had with the whole deal.  In the good old days, when Benecky was a street cop working Robbery or Vice or Counter-Twist, even when he had been detailed to Cyber Crimes back in ’46, you could still hold your head up at Tootsie’s, catch some of the ribbing of the regulars and give it back just as well.

Now Stan Benecky was just a lonesome washed-up gumshoe, talking to himself over beer and peanuts, while the rest of the Department went head over heels about autonomous nanoscale assemblers and containment systems and quantum strategies.  Benecky liked to get his hands on stuff—how the hell could you get your hands on a device…an organism…a mechanism…thingy that was smaller than a virus and million times more powerful?

Benecky had spent a lot of time at Tootsie’s lately, thinking.  Dreaming, really. Retirement.  Some rustic cottage on the beach, a nice fast boat twenty feet off the back porch, a well-stocked fridge and a few full immersion flim fantasies to plug into, when he wanted to.  See, that was the problem, and Cooter, the bartender, wasn’t the only one that saw it.  Stan Benecky wasn’t cut out for the new stuff.  ANAD or not, quantum processors be damned, and hang all the fullerene effectors and electron bond disrupters.  Benecky wanted to see the blood and feel the corpse and cuff the perps just like cops had always done.

Then came the day Rafeeq Khan died and Lieutenant Stan Benecky thought this might well be his last chance.

The call came in when Benecky was knocking down a few “walking dogs” and sodas at the Varsity.  He swallowed what he could and answered the call.  It was Captain Sheffield, Violent Crimes, and Captain Emmitt, Forensic Services.

Get your squad together and get up North.  The Rafeeq Khan mansion in Roswell.  The kid’s deader than dirt, shot up with some kind of automatic weapon, and there’s going to be a hell of a stink when the Chief and the Mayor hear this.

Rafeeq Khan, you see, was the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since Clark Gable.

Khan was a native son, born right in the projects Eastside, who’d made good in the megaball wars and become the highest paid professional athlete in the history of the universe.  With megaball’s World Bowl less than two days away, and Khan the prime-time prince of the playing field for the favored L.A. Barons, about a billion fans and sports press and hangers-on had their eyes on the “Flash’ day and night, scrutinizing every little nose pick the kid attempted.

Now Rafeeq was dead, murdered the Captain said, and the Department wanted Benecky and his ANAD team on the scene immediately.

The squad had been formed a couple of years ago, long before Benecky was exiled to the unit.  It ran like a machine, just fine without him.  By just about anybody’s reckoning, Forensics-ANAD had worked several hundred cases by the time the Lieutenant had showed up.

Benecky wiped his mouth free of mustard and hand waved his two human assistants to the van.  His mind was reeling with imaginary headlines.  With Khan dead and the big game less than forty-eight hours away, everything he did was going to be under the biggest microscope the world had even seen.  Microscope, hell, he muttered to himself.  More like a quantum flux imager.

For the next few days, Stan Benecky figured he’d know all too well what it was like for ANAD…living life in the glare of something that could see right down into the blurry guts of atoms themselves.

For once, he might have something to share with his infinitesimal partner.

 

Khan’s place was a veritable Babylon of ostentation, with fountains and turrets and columns.  The place was surrounded by cops, and the ever-present fans, sniffing something was up, had already begun to clot the driveway and roads around the mansion.

Benecky pulled into the circular drive.  With him came Sergeant Marianne “Deeno” D’Nunzio, the squad’s interface controller and Sergeant Hoyt Wade, the CQE.  That stood for containment and quantum engineering, sort of a glorified valet and butler to the ANAD device.  Benecky was OIC, Officer in Charge.  The trio went in, Sergeant Wade wheeling the mobile containment device.  TinyTown, they called it.

Sheffield and Emmitt were in the media room on the top floor of Babylon. There sprawled on the tile floor in a spreading pool of blood lay the Flash himself, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, gaping chest and stomach wounds still oozing red.  A dull black TEK-12 lay next to his feet.

Crime scenes talked, if you knew how to listen, and this one screamed Violent Demise, loud and clear.  The ANAD squad had shelves and shelves of records, detailing the minutiae of death in all its gruesome glory.  Ever since he had come to the squad, Benecky had found a strange kind of fascination with all the ways people thought up to dismember and dispatch themselves.  

Benecky watched for a moment as the forensic bots scuttled around the crime scene, documenting everything, photographing samples, measuring ballistic angles.  A lattice of laser light marked off the crime scene.  Data poured into Emmitt’s eyepiece, scrolling down the lens over her right eye.

She indicated the TEK-12.  “Bots detected something weird.  According to the first path reports, Fareeq Khan died at or around 1:00 this morning, give or take a few dozen minutes.”  She tapped her eyepiece.  “I’ve got hypostasis starting about that time—normal discoloration, along with normal desiccation of tissue.”

Benecky bent down to examine the corpse.  A stitch of bullet wounds stretched in a line across his chest and rib cage.  Rigor mortis was still evident, though Khan’s arms had begun to loosen as muscle decomposition set in.  “Appears to be a distance wound, Captain.  Clean margins, no fouling or stippling.  I’d say an entrance wound, from the abrasion around the holes.”

“Bots agree,” said Emmitt.  “But there’s a problem…with the time of death.  Ballistics bots say the TEK 12 wasn’t discharged until around 3:00 this morning.  Easily an hour or two after the time of death.”

Benecky looked up, nearly backing into one of the mechs as it scanned the marble floor for fiber and trace evidence, crunching its DNA matching routines on the fly.

“You’re saying he wasn’t killed by the weapon.”

“Exactly.”  Emmitt indicated the ANAD squad.  “Something or someone else killed Rafeeq Khan.  Something that hasn’t turned up yet.  That’s why you’re here.  We have to do an ANAD insertion.  These bots can’t find anything outside.”

Benecky nodded.  “Sure thing, Captain.  Sergeant—“ he called to Wade.  “Prep for deploy right away.”  Wade wrestled the TinyTown cylinder through the herd of bots and parked next to Khan’s head.  Benecky helped D’Nunzio set up the Interface Control panel, wondering for the hundredth time about this business of in situ autopsy.  The Department’s lawyers had yet to agree on the legal niceties of invading the dead with a trillion programmable replicants.  Somehow, it seemed a bit improper, but that was for the big guys to sort out.  Benecky had a job to do and he buckled down to it.

If Emmitt wanted a nanographic probe of Rafeeq Khan’s private parts, who was he to say no?

“While you’re prepping, here’s the case details,” said Captain Sheffield.  ‘Shef’ was a dinosaur out of Violent Crimes, nearly thirty years with the force.  Hibernating bears had nicer personalities.

“Witnesses say Khan came by the mansion a little after ten o’clock last night.  You know how it goes…a small harem of female admirers along with him.  Big game’s two days away and the Flash can’t afford to miss curfew tonight.  So he’s out stirring up the honey pot, hitting every disco and club in town and decides to head home with his catch.  Timeline is important here.”

“Witnesses deposed already?”

“Most of them.  We got several on tape, bots did the genetics already, and they’re being treated as suspects too.  Carl Cutler, for one.  Agent for the Flash.  He’s the one that reported the incident.  Lisa LaVelle, principal squeeze for the man.  She came by later, but before twelve midnight.  That’s important.”

“Hell hath no fury, Captain—“

“Yeah, we thought of that.  But she’s not the only suspect.  Turns out the Flash also spent some time last evening with—get this: Rupert Jones.”

Benecky blinked.  “Rupert Jones?  The Seagulls’ coach?”

“The one.  Think that might jazz up a few sports reporters tomorrow morning?  Once they find out the Barons’ ace megaballer spent a few hours with the opposition coach.”

Benecky helped Wade initialize the IC panel.  “Mr. Khan keeps interesting company.”

“They’re all witnesses and suspects, until we can prove otherwise.  This case is deader than that corpse, until we definitively establish the cause of death.”

“ANAD’s ready in all respects, Lieutenant,” Wade said.

Benecky glanced inquiringly over at Emmitt.  The Forensic Services chief nodded.  “Secure all forensics for the time being,” she called to the SI techs running the scan.  Then she turned back to Benecky:  “Permission to launch.”

It was a whole new way of case investigation and it gave Benecky the willies, he didn’t mind telling you.  They were making up tactics as they went along.  Somewhere miles behind them, the Department lawyers and the DA were huffing and puffing to keep up.

It was enough to give any normal cop the creeps.

“Okay, Sergeant,” he said.  Benecky patted down the incision D’Nunzio had just made in the corpse’s chest.  “Subject’s prepped and ready.”

Wade handed him the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment cylinder.  Inside, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler ticked over, ready to be released.

“Steady even suction, Lieutenant,” Wade told him.  He knew Benecky often got a case of the shakes about now.  Why don’t you just let the pros handle this?  “ANAD’s ready to fly.”

“Vascular grid?”

“Tracking now, sir.  We’ll be able to follow the master just fine.  I’ll replicate once we’re through the capillary walls.”

“Watch for capillary flow,” D’Nunzio warned.  “When the capillaries narrow, your speed will increase.  And viscosity will stay up.”

“Yeah, like slogging through molasses. ANAD’s inerted and stable…ready for insertion.”

Benecky held the injector as steady as he could.  When it was done, he would be more than happy to back out and let the techs handle the matter.  D’Nunzio and Wade ate this stuff up.  Benecky would have been happier writing parking tickets, or maybe collaring rapists.

The insert went smoothly enough.  A slug of plasma forced the replicant into Khan’s capillary network as high pressure.  Deeno got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system.  A few minutes’ run on its propulsors brought ANAD to a dense mat of capillary tissue.  The sounder image settled down on the IC display.

“Ready for transit, Lieutenant.  Cytometric probing now.  I can force those cell membranes any time.”

Benecky used ANAD’s acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam, probing for weak spots.  “There, Deeno…right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that’s a lipid duct, I’d bet a hundred bucks.  Try there.”

She stole a glance at Wade.  The man’s learning, keep your shirt on.  Deeno steered ANAD into the vascular cleft in the membrane.  She twisted her right hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot herself forward.  Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance.  She tweaked the picowatt propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid.

“Aortic cavity, Lieutenant.  Just past the Islet of Duchin, I’d say.  Looks like we’re in.  Where are we going today?”

***

So that’s the excerpt.  Colliding Galaxies should out and available around Memorial Day, 2017.  There are nine separate stories, all unrelated short science fiction, with an author’s intro to each and an overall introduction to the whole collection, which was previously posted to The Word Shed a few months ago.

I hope you enjoy it.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 22.

See you then.

Phil B.