Free Freedom Incorporated by Peter Tylee Page A

else to do it, I’m too busy.”
    “ So are the
others.”
    “ What about
Anders? He didn’t look busy, or Kim?”
    “ No, it’s your
turn. Nobody likes them. Today it’s yours.” With a note of
finality, Steward stood and straitened his trousers and necktie.
“Make it quick. Don’t let it get in the way of real
work.”
    “ Great,” Simon
mumbled when his Superintendent was gone. “Another
bullshit case.” He didn’t really have any pressing work, but the
thought of paper shuffling a designation-52 made the curly hairs on
the back of his neck stand straight. 52 was the code the force used
to identify an ‘explainable, unsolvable’. That usually meant
UniForce was involved and there was a WEF sanction on the killing.
Ergo, he couldn’t do anything about it.
    “ Okay, so…
what’ve we got?” he said to nobody in particular. “Another dead
dude. What a surprise.” The words were stale; he uttered them at
the beginning of every case.
    Adam
Oaten. Simon ran his finger across the page,
reading the description of the incident. It’s already old. The crime had
happened on Monday. Must’ve bounced around
before finally landing in Parramatta. Those cocksuckers in
Strathfield wouldn’t have the balls… His
animosity rose above typical precinct rivalry; he truly believed
the officers in Strathfield were worse than useless. Simon had
spent his orientation in Strathfield after leaving the academy, but
he’d been so revolted by their standards and ethics that he’d
requested a transfer six months later. He’d been working in
Parramatta ever since.
    He turned the
page.
    Someone had
done the preliminary work. He wondered who, and why he or she
hadn’t taken the case themselves. He read the dry description of
the scene and his imagination coloured in
the details. But the unemotional
description of the cadaver made him squirm. He’d seen what
nanotoxin could do to a body and it wasn’t a pretty. Comes with the job I guess . He swallowed hard and poured a cup of
office-coffee , which looked more like muddy water. It was lukewarm and bitter, and
made his stomach cramp, but it diluted the ghastly images in his
mind.
    So, someone
shot him with nanotoxin and took his fifth
thoracic vertebrae. Simon skimmed the remainder of the autopsy report and keyed
the case number into his computer, trying hard not to let his
frustration boil over at the busted spacebar.
    The
Department’s database had more information than Superintendent
Vincent had handed him, but it still wasn’t much and probably
wouldn’t be in Simon’s final report. There was a list of names and
destinations corresponding to the portal activity in the
surrounding suburbs for two hours before and three hours after the
murder. In total, it was nearly 85,000 entries. No wonder he didn’t bother printing
it. The period of interest coincided with
the homeward rush of commuters. Simon entered a few search terms to
refine the list by ruling out private portals and eliminating all
portal activity after seventeen-hundred hours. The list shortened
to just over seven-hundred entries. On a whim, he decided to
eliminate everything but the portals in Meadowbank. He honestly
doubted that anybody woul d be stupid enough to kill a man in the Meadowbank reserve and
flee using a portal in the
same suburb.

Twenty-six
entries. He briefly scanned the
list , but the seventh entry caught his
breath.
    What? Simon sat straight in his chair
and arched an eyebrow. Dan?
    He
double-clicked the applicable entry and squinted at the details.
Dan Sutherland had portaled out of Meadowbank station to his home
address in Andamooka at 16:18. What were
you doing there buddy? Simon rocked back in
his chair and stroked his neat goatee, lost in thought. It’d been a
long time; it felt like years since he’d last seen Dan. Time was
funny that way; it was really only a few months. Five? Six months? He
couldn’t be certain.
    “ But… he
couldn’t have…” Chief
Inspector West entered his