“Is there a point to this little chat, Chief?” asked Deckland, not in the mood to hear yet another lecture on how things are done differently in this area of the galaxy.
“The point is, if you want a name on this job, you gotta earn it,” Moreland said. “People gotta see what you’re made of, and the only way to do that is to make your life hard until you prove yourself worthy of your badge. ‘Til then, own the name they give you. Show you got what it takes to hang with the big boys… Rook.”
With that, Moreland turned and climbed into his Roamer before looking back down at Deckland.
“I’ll be monitoring the ultrawave if you guys should need me,” he continued. “Until then, good luck, and try not to die from heatstroke. I’ve already got a dead child on my hands. Last thing I need are two dead Rangers.”
“Don’t worry. We’re tougher than we look,” replied Deckland. “Well… I am, anyway. I suppose Berenger already looks pretty tough.”
“Hope that’s true. Happy trails, Ranger,” said Moreland while closing the Roamer door.
As the vehicle rumbled away, kicking up more dust in its wake, Deckland looked down at the hat the Chief had given him and put it on. He was surprised that it fit, and it did indeed immediately make a difference. Not only did his head feel cooler, but the glare from the sun was no longer as bad.
Deckland returned to Berenger, who had made himself at home, lying on the ground under his longcoat, his hat over his eyes with his head resting against his rucksack. The man was already snoring, though how Berenger could possibly sleep in the blistering heat of the plains was beyond Deckland. However, he’d learned not to disturb his partner’s rest, so he took off his uniform jacket and draped it over a nearby boulder that had been baking in the sun, sitting down on it while fishing out his datapad.
Might as well go over the casefile again, he thought. It’s not like I have much else to do.
Deckland began combing through the file on his datapad, reviewing the investigation as thoroughly as he could. He read through Moreland’s reports, the witness statement from Gariff Loksyn, the medical examination notes, and the survey data of the crime scene, all the while trying to put together the pieces of the rather strange case that had become his first official investigation.
A myriad of questions ran through Deckland’s mind. Where had this girl come from? Why was she so far away from the colony when she’d died? What was it, exactly, that had killed her? And what could have motivated someone to have inflicted such harm to her?
Deckland scrolled back through the autopsy report. The med-bot that had examined the victim had done a pretty thorough job. It had analyzed the girl’s blood, hair, and skin cells and had run every test in the book on them. There was no indication of a viral infection, which could have accounted for what happened to her insides, so that ruled out any type of infectious agent as the culprit behind her demise. Aside from severe solar radiation burns from Sarjana’s sun, there was no indication she’d suffered from any type of trauma such as stab wounds or blaster wounds. In fact, her outsides were pretty much intact despite what had happened to her insides. Her musculature was weaker than normal, and the medical analysis reported she suffered from a vitamin D deficiency, but that wasn’t too uncommon, especially on such a hot planet like Sarjana where individuals spend their time trying to stay out of the sun.
Deckland flipped to the DNA report. The results didn’t shed light on anything the autopsy hadn’t already revealed. The tests confirmed the girl was a Regal. There were no matches to any of her genetic markers in the Skinny Plains personnel database. However, Deckland did notice there were some small anomalies among the results but nothing so glaring that couldn’t be accounted for. The medical-bot recorded a few instances of 0.0023% genetic mutation but attributed such outliers to either flaws in the DNA testing or natural deviations resulting from contact with alien worlds – something fairly common among settlers of new planets. Certainly nothing that would cause someone’s insides to melt.
Deckland sighed and looked up at the sky. The sun was still hanging over the mountains to the west. He was a hot and sweaty mess but was grateful Moreland had given him his hat, otherwise, he’d probably be in a great deal of pain after spending hours out in the wilderness reviewing casefiles on his datapad while his partner napped. He sighed and ran his hand over his forehead and neck to wipe away the sweat that continued to accumulate there.
What killed you and where did you come from? Deckland wondered as he turned his attention back to the picture of their victim on his datapad. There’s no sign you were dumped from altitude, otherwise you’d have been complete mush after you hit the ground. No tracks that indicate a vehicle brought you out here. And there is no other place on the planet you could have originated from.
Deckland grimaced as he ran different theories through his mind. What other options were left? Did she come from underground? Had she been hidden at the colony? Was she from an unknown settlement elsewhere on the planet? The more he thought about it, the more frustrated he became. There just wasn’t enough evidence to support any of his theories, leaving him back at square one.
Around hour four, Deckland was starting to get restless as the fatigue from thinking so hard about the vexing case began to wear on him. He was flushed and thirsty and wanted nothing more than to go back to the colony, shower, and sleep in a nice, climate-controlled room. He almost wished he could nap like Berenger, but he knew he’d never fall asleep on the rough ground in this type of heat. Thus, he was doomed to simply wallow in boredom and misery until he figured out the reason as to why Berenger had wanted to stay out there.
A loud, rumbling snore escaped from Berenger before he smacked his lips and went back to snoring softly. Deckland frowned and side-eyed his sleeping companion, suspiciously.
“I know you’re awake,” Deckland said.
“And how would you know that?” asked Berenger without moving a muscle.
“That loud snore and lip-smacking thing you do. It’s the same thing you did before you shot me.”
Berenger chuckled. “Well, well, well. Someone’s observant.”
“Do you have an alarm in that bionic eye of yours or something?”
“Matter of fact, I do,” Berenger replied. “Also have a motion sensor that’ll wake me if any unauthorized movement is detected in my vicinity while I’m asleep.”
“Must make it hard to get a decent nap.”
“And now you know why I’m not a morning person. Speaking of… what time is it?”
Deckland glanced at the clock on his datapad. “Local time? A quarter to six.”
“Sun setting?”
“Soon,” Deckland replied, glancing up at the mountains in the distance as the top half of Sarjana’s sun lingered over them. “Not that it’s making things any cooler. I feel like I’ve been baking in an oven for hours.”
“Yep. It ain’t no fun being a sweaty mess,” said Berenger. “Bet you’re glad Chief Moreland left ya that hat, or you’d be in some real pain presently.”
Deckland frowned and looked over at Berenger, who was still lying under his longcoat like it was a blanket. “How are you not melted by now?” he asked. “You’ve been in the heat just as long as I have!”
Berenger smiled, not even bothering to tilt up his hat to look at his partner. “You ever hear of self-regulating thermal phasing microfibers?” he asked.
“No,” admitted Deckland.
“They’re a special fabric that maintain a consistent temperature in any type of weather,” Berenger said. “They keep you cool in the heat and warm in the cold. My longcoat and hat are made of them.”
Deckland blinked at Berenger in disbelief. “You have to be making that up,” he said.
“Why?” asked Berenger. “Am I too slovenly and backwoods to have such a thing?”
“Nobody has such a thing,” Deckland objected. “I’ve never heard of that type of technology before.”
“Guess I’m just yanking yer chain, the
n.”
Deckland wanted to agree with that, but Berenger’s lack of discomfort in the heat made him believe he was telling the truth. “Um… how do I get something like those?” he asked.
“You can’t,” Berenger replied. “These here are one-of-a-kind prototypes, gifted to me by a fine fellow at the Maguffyn Corporation who owes me a few solids. Until they perfect the technology, they won’t be publicly available for at least another hundred years or so, according to him. Besides, you wouldn’t want them, anyway.”
“And why is that?”
Berenger smiled and tipped his hat up so he could peek at Deckland. “Because they ain’t regulation attire, Mr. By-The-Book.”
Deckland couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Well, if every planet we visit is as hot as this one, I might just have to add a footnote or two to the book.”
“You’d do that?”
“I have nothing against adapting to one’s reality, Ranger Berenger,” Deckland said. “It’s completely disregarding everything we’re meant to do and stand for with which I take issue.”
“Well,” said Berenger as he shrugged off his longcoat and got to his feet, “sometimes adapting means disregarding everything, anyway. Reality, after all, has a funny way of changing the rules on us.”
“According to Paragons, we’re the ones who shape our own reality,” Deckland replied. “The whole basis of the Regalus Empire is the idea that we can manifest the type of universe in which we want to live.”
“Mm-hmmm,” said Berenger as he cracked his back. “If that’s the case, why don’t you turn down the temp on this planet a tad, eh?”
“I was speaking in the philosophical sense,” Deckland muttered.
“And that’s your problem, Rook. You’re an idealist. If’n you want to make it in this job, you gotta learn to be a bit more pragmatic.”
“You mean more cynical, like you? Where the only thing I believe in is that my way is the right way and everyone else is just a naïve idiot?”
“Everyone else is just a naïve idiot,” said Berenger with a smile. “But you’re wrong about me. I ain’t no cynic. And I do believe in a great deal of things, the biggest of which is justice. This universe is a great, big, complicated mess. But justice? Justice is simple. It’s black and white. Makes figuring things out easy.”
“Wish that outlook of yours applied to this case,” Deckland said as he tapped his datapad on the palm of his hand. “Nothing about it is very easy to figure out, so far.”
“I take it you were reviewing the casefile while I had me my beauty sleep?”
“I was, for all the good it did.”
“Come up with any ideas? Like where our victim came from?”
Deckland grimaced, standing up and retrieving his jacket from the rock he’d been sitting on. “Been giving it a lot of thought, but haven’t come up with anything I like,” he said. “None of it makes sense, you know? We have a ten-year-old girl who’s not from the colony, not from any surrounding settlements, and no vehicles that could have dumped her out here were recorded in the vicinity before she was discovered. Sarjana has no indigenous people, and the fact that she’s a Regal already precludes that theory.” Deckland turned and looked at Berenger. “What about you? You have any ideas?”
“Of course, I do,” Berenger drawled. “I’m a highly trained investigator, remember?”
“Right, I forgot. You’re the legendary Braxxon Berenger,” muttered Deckland. “I’ll bite. What did you come up with?”
“The solution’s obvious, ain’t it?”
“Is it? Because I’ve done nothing but think about it for the past four hours, and I haven’t come up with squick.”
“Well, if’n our victim ain’t from the colony, and there’s no other place on Sarjana she coulda come from… then it stands to reason she ain’t from the planet.”
Deckland blinked his eyes as though his brain were trying to process what Berenger had just said. “But… if she’s not from here, then where would she be from?” he asked.
“Space,” Berenger said, simply.
“I don’t follow. Are you implying she fell from space to the planet’s surface?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Berenger replied. “I’m implying she’s from space originally. Probably born and raised on some starship or space station somewhere.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Her body,” explained Berenger. “Her skin was ravaged from the exposure to the sun – far too much based on the amount of time she was out here. That says she didn’t have regular exposure to stellar radiation. If you noticed, the parts of her skin that were protected by her clothing were extremely pale, which means she probably grew up in artificial light. She also had a vitamin D deficiency, based on her weak and underdeveloped muscles and confirmed in the autopsy’s lab results. And the fact that she was taller and skinnier than your average ten-your-old implies she grew up in space, since the bones of kids who grow up in lighter-than-average artificial gravity tend to be longer. All common traits among dedicated spacers.”
“Okay,” said Deckland as he processed Berenger’s theory. “So, for the moment, let’s say you’re correct, and she’s from space. How’d she wind up on Sarjana? There were no starships recorded in this area.”
“None that were recorded, no,” Berenger agreed. “But a colony like Skinny Plains needs regular supply deliveries. It has starship traffic coming and going all the time. It ain’t so far-fetched to think one may have gone unnoticed, particularly out of sensor range up in them mountains, yonder.”
Deckland’s eyes followed as Berenger jerked his head to the mountains in the distance. “But she wasn’t found in the mountains,” he said.
“Nope,” agreed Berenger. “She was found here. But that don’t mean she didn’t come from the mountains. Remember the state her feet were in? They were slashed and bruised something fierce. You don’t get that cut up walking on desertscrub grass, Rook. That little girl walked from the rocks on those mountains to where she was found, out here on the plains.”
“That’s a mighty long walk,” noted Deckland. “Why would she do that?”
“You’re about to find out,” Berenger said.
The Ranger nodded toward the west where the sun was setting over the mountains, turning the sky dark. At first Deckland didn’t understand until he turned around and saw the lights from the colony of Skinny Plains glowing in the distance. That’s when it finally clicked.
“The colony,” Deckland said. “She could see its lights… she was trying to walk to the colony!”
Berenger nodded. “What makes a ten-year-old girl whose insides are slowly melting cut her feet by walking over stone and miles of empty plain?” he asked.
“Help,” Deckland replied. “She was looking for help.”
“And the only help on this rock was that beacon right there,” Berenger said, nodding toward the lights of the colony.
“That’s why you made a note of how the body was lying,” Deckland said. “She fell in the direction in which she was walking, giving you an idea of which direction she’d been coming from.”
“Yep.”
“That’s also why you wanted to come out to the actual scene,” Deckland continued. “You needed to verify something that wouldn’t be in the casefile and was beyond the range of the survey-bot scans… you needed to see what she was seeing.”
“Yep.”
Deckland nodded. “That’s good work, Ranger Berenger.”
“Yep,” Berenger replied once more. “The work ain’t over yet, though. Now that I’ve confirmed where our victim was going, time to figure out where, exactly, she done came from…”
Berenger unzipped his rucksack and dumped out three small devices onto the ground. Next, he opened a panel on the forearm of his bionic arm and began tapping at a touchscreen keyboard there. The devices immediately unfolded into small drones, which activated and slowly rose up into the air.
“Gonna have these contraptions perform a search
grid of the area based on some estimated routes our victim coulda taken to get here,” Berenger said. “It’s a large area to cover, so it’ll take some time to complete. But more likely than not, you and I are gonna be busy in the meantime, anyway.”
The drones rose up into the air and began heading toward the direction of the mountains, slowly spreading out at different trajectories as they went. Deckland gave Berenger a curious look.
“Busy doing what?” Deckland asked.
“Hopefully following a lead,” Berenger said before looking into the distance back toward the colony. “Ah! And here comes good ol’ Leadbelly. Right on time.”
Deckland turned and saw the lights from a starship in the sky, heading toward them from the colony. “Your ship is flying itself?” Deckland asked.
“Wadsworth pilots it when I ain’t around, if’n I need him to,” Berenger replied. “I gave him instructions earlier on when we’d be ready for pick-up. If that bot is anything, it’s punctual.”
The Leadbelly swooped down toward the Rangers, making an abrupt maneuver as it came closer to the ground, swinging around and setting down heavily as its rear bay door lowered. Deckland followed Berenger as he boarded the ship and began making his way to the bridge.
“So, back after we examined the body… you’d already figured out our victim was from space?” asked Deckland.
“Yep. While we were out here at the crime scene, I had Wadsworth access the Ranger Initiative’s database to search for cases involving missing children that met our victim’s profile in the quadrant’s space stations and registered space vessels.”
“Did he find anything?”
“We’re about to see,” Berenger said as he entered the bridge. “Tell me something good, Wadsworth.”
Wadsworth hovered over in greeting, taking Berenger’s hat and coat as he did so, a third arm extending from behind him and offering Deckland a bottle of water, which Deckland happily accepted. “The ship’s datacenter has been interfacing with the central servers of the Galactic Ranger Initiative for approximately five hours, Master Berenger,” he said. “I have conducted precisely 876,942 queries into open missing persons cases involving children from throughout the sector, starting in the vicinity of Sarjana and expanding the search outward. I have narrowed the results down to twenty potential matches, based on the criteria you provided.”
Lawmen- Rook and Berenger Page 9
