"Why Didn’t We See an Attempt at Fight or Flight?"

A GANG WAR is about to erupt on one of Saturn's moons, forcing detectives to search for someone known only as . . .

"The Bloody Dentist."

By Jacob Holo (Homepage HERE; ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Free Stories (2022) at the Baen Free Library.

Short story (15 pages).

Online at the Baen Free Library (HERE).

(Parental caution: Strong language.)

   "Sometimes I hate being right."

SITTING on a powder keg has never been a recommended posture to take, but that's where Detectives Cho and Raviv of the Consolidated System Police find themselves. In their westside story, Tony and Maria had the Jets and the Sharks to contend with; here it's the Frost Jackals and the Numbers—and love has nothing to do with it . . .

Main characters:

~ Lorenz Napello (deceased), Acting Deputy Detective Isaac Cho ("Isaac had been mentoring under the senior detective for roughly two years now"), Senior Detective Omar Raviv ("nowadays Raviv let—indeed encouraged—Isaac to take the lead, only taking charge when he felt it absolutely necessary"), Cephalie (Encephalon) ("He’s missing five teeth. Or four and three quarters, depending on how picky you want to get about counting the pieces"), Bartholomew Kozlowski ("What is a weapon, but a tool used for destruction rather than creation?"), Pamela Mathey ("managed to contradict herself four times in the span of the first few minutes alone. I don’t know if we can trust a single word out of her mouth"), Lieutenant Alfons Garnier ("my hands are tied"), Deacon Morrisette ("What a pleasure it is to have not one but two members of the illustrious System Police in our presence"), Dario Vogl ("that mouthy punk mocked your good name"), a teenage girl ("The Bloody Dentist claims another one"), and the lit fuse ("It was almost funny when he thought about it, how these stupid degenerates would soon aid him so unwittingly").

Here's "the moment" again:

     The pieces finally came together in Isaac’s mind, and he snapped his fingers.

     Raviv glanced his way. “Found something?”

     “You could say that.” He gave the senior detective a savage grin. “I know who 

     the killer is.”

Typo: "in actually".

References and resources:

- "the gangs have flooded what’s here with viruses":

  "A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "Titan, the largest and most populous of Saturn’s moons":

  "Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second-largest in the Solar System. It is the only moon known to have an atmosphere denser than the Earth's and is the only known object in space—other than Earth—on which there is clear evidence that stable bodies of liquid exist. . ."

  "the Ice Grotto"; "the ice-sheathed corridors"; "walls a mixture of rock and ice":

  "Titan is primarily composed of ice and rocky material, with a rocky core surrounded by various layers of ice, including a crust of ice and a subsurface layer of ammonia-rich liquid water. Much as with Venus before the Space Age, the dense opaque atmosphere prevented understanding of Titan's surface until the Cassini–Huygens mission in 2004 provided new information, including the discovery of liquid hydrocarbon lakes in Titan's polar regions and the discovery of its atmospheric super-rotation. The geologically young surface is generally smooth, with few impact craters, although mountains and several possible cryovolcanoes have been found."

  "Titan's gravity":

  It's only about 14 percent that of Earth, so that someone weighing 200 pounds on Terra would weigh 28 pounds on Titan. (Wikipedia HERE.)

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Titan compared to the Earth and the Moon.

- "Data passed between the LENS and his wetware":

  "Wetware is a term drawn from the computer-related idea of hardware or software, but applied to biological life forms. The prefix 'wet' is a reference to the water found in living creatures. Wetware is used to describe the elements equivalent to hardware and software found in a person, especially the central nervous system (CNS) and the human mind. The term wetware finds use in works of fiction, in scholarly publications and in popularizations." (Wikipedia HERE.)

  "A wetware computer is an organic computer (which can also be known as an artificial organic brain or a neurocomputer) composed of organic material 'wetware' such as 'living' neurons. Wetware computers composed of neurons are different than conventional computers because they use biological materials, and offer the possibility of substantially more energy-efficient computing. While a wetware computer is still largely conceptual, there has been limited success with construction and prototyping, which has acted as a proof of the concept's realistic application to computing in the future." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "the size of a vibro-blade":

  "A futuristic bladed weapon that has Absurd Cutting Power because it vibrates. The idea is that high-frequency vibrations in the blade allow the weapon to cut through nearly anything, essentially making it an extreme version of an electric turkey carver." (TV Tropes HERE.)

(Image via Fringes of Space.)

 It seems that Robert Heinlein came up with it first; consult Technovelgy (HERE).

(Artwork by Donato.)

- Real-life dentists, and not just fictional ones, can also be deadly; see John Baer's "Murder in Haste" (HERE). However, an exception should be made for Peter Clancy (HERE).

The bottom line:

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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