by T Q Chant
“You beauty,” she grinned when she saw both were still closed and locked. A locked safe was probably a full one and she knew she could crack both of those security systems.
She’d need the pad for the weapons locker – she knew people who could crack something like that on spec, but she’d never been overly interested in learning that side of grifting. Just enough to get by. The chief’s personal safe was an older pattern Chub Callor Locktite, though, a model those in the trade called an ‘anything but’. Her utilikit and a couple of stuncaps slipped from the mag of her Enforcer were all she needed to get it open.
“Holy fuck. How the hell did you get permission to bring that?” she asked the absent security chief as she swung the door open and her eyes fell on the relic within the safe. She pulled the pistol out to examine it, squinting at the lettering on the barrel. “Glock point four-oh. Must be at least a century old.”
She put the pistol on top of the safe. It weighed a ton and she wasn’t a guns person, her Army stint notwithstanding. “That’s more like it,” she noted, pulling out the small supply of hard currency, mostly sterlars, and universal barter goods. It was tradition in these places – money in case an independent trader came through, and barter goods in case of some sort of peaceful contact with non-humans. She didn’t know when she’d be able to use the loot, didn’t know if she’d manage to get it off-world, but there was no harm in tucking it away somewhere and then blaming the looting on... anyone else, really.
No sign of a personal log, though. Standard procedure was to keep one on a standalone datastack not hooked into any of the systems, but if the Marshal had, she’d not stashed it in the safe.
This seam was played out, she reckoned. She could come back for the weapons locker if she needed it. Probably time to sweep the rest of the town.
She stopped in the doorway, eyeing the old automatic lying on top of the plundered safe. She didn’t know what was going on here, but packing something other than a load of stuncaps suddenly seemed more reassuring. She scooped up the pistol and the stack of its ammo clips and stuffed them in a pocket.
**********
Two hours and sixteen minutes after she had set her armoury of cracking software loose on the comms system, it pinged a successful penetration. Within a minute of that, it had bust the whole thing wide open.
She hurried back to the admin building and took the stairs two at a time to the comms room. No mean feat for her.
Calling up the status display, she was relieved to see there were still four pods on the rack and functional – under normal circumstances, the next supply run would have lingered long enough to restock the sat in orbit.
She hammered out a quick message – basically all gone, fucked, come and get me – and loaded it to three of the pods, along with a squirt of her running commentary on the site. “Where to send it?” she muttered. “Ascension’s Grace for sure, IGC one-eight-eight as that’s the lugger’s next stop. And fuck it, Polaris just to be on the safe side.”
She hit send and sat back. She knew that hundreds of miles over her head in geosync orbit, the first of the little jSpace-capable capsules would be sliding onto its launchrail while her message was squirted into its datastack. After a few moments, the rail launcher would hurl it into the great lonely darkness at a phenomenal velocity, faster than any ship could go. It wouldn’t take it long to reach safe jump range and its one-shot drive would hurl it into the weird subdimension that allowed effective interstellar travel. It wouldn’t have the advantage of a live jSpace astrogator – no-one had yet to manufacture a computer system that could cope with jSpace in the way human brains could – which would lengthen its journey. But it would get there. All things being equal.
“Assuming the fucking thing actually launches.”
After a few minutes the status display showed her green.
Now all she had to do was stay alive until a rescue ship arrived. And maybe work out what the hell had happened here.
**********
“Rule number six, I think,” Sam said to herself, standing in front of the homemade shack and psyching herself to go in. “If you don’t know it and you need to, find out about it. Otherwise it could kill you.”
Lifting a couple of bits of kit from the pack, she pushed into the shack and forced herself to stand and look down on the corpse in the middle of the room.
She knew what that odd smell was now, the after-reek of death, the slight sickliness of rotten flesh. It was now just an unpleasant oily aftertaste on the air that suggested the body had been here a while.
She keyed a command into the pad to bring up data on forensic examination of a body, decay rates, other information that hadn’t been useful to her until this moment. She just regretted not having any forensic procedure software that could have done the whole examination for her – preferably while she sat outside having a beer. “No reason I’d ever think I’d need it though.”
While the pad started throwing open work cells at convenient points in the air, she went about setting up the holopixer on its pole.
“Start recording. Security Specialist Cane Kokhani, ICG one-eight-seven, main colony site. It’s zero nine hundred local time, standard calendar date is third day fifth month one-fifty AY. Initial investigation of crime scene located approximately fifty metres from main colony site in a locally constructed building. May be some significance in the choice of venue. Victim is an unknown...female. Yes. Female.” She swallowed. She’d been taught basic police procedure in her month-long induction course, but nothing to prepare her for this. Established wisdom went that a good security chief with a population around a thousand to look after would probably know everyone well enough to spot a murderer without needing to go full Sherlock on it.
She fought to stay professional, stay clinical. She knew she had to face what was here or it would just lurk out here waiting for her. She had to start working out what had happened.
She waited until the pixer had finished its initial capture, a line of light sweeping across the space to capture everything. Pulling on gloves, she gingerly pulled away the tarp that covered some of the body ordered another pixer scan. She reached out to beckon a holographic cell to her, expanded it to read the data. “Hmm. Estimated time since death, based on humidity and average temperature, is three weeks.”
Looking back, her eyes widened. Without the ragged cloth covering, she could see the level of devastation inflicted on the colonist. “Hang on, too many legs involved here.”
She choked back a sob as that implication sank in. “Correction to my earlier statements. Two unidentified victims. One female, I’m guessing adult. One male, probably adolescent. Early teens. Bodies are severely decomposed.” Mercifully, she added to herself. “Both appear to have been stripped of clothing and partially dismembered.” Disturbed by her removing their last modesty, the bodies shifted slightly, air-cured skin and sinew settling slightly. The woman's head rolled free. “Decapitated. Look like clean cuts.”
She got a close-up of some of the wounds, set a search running. “This wasn’t the work of animals. How could it be? The bodies were secured, definitely some sort of tool used. I'm seeing...fuck... I'm seeing symbols cut – branded? – into what’s left of the skin. Are those...? Not sure, going to have to do a datastack search.”
She rocked back on her haunches, wiped her hand across her face without thinking, gagged as she tasted the slime that had come off on her gloves.
“Pausing the examination,” she gasped, staggering outside. She was technically on duty, but with no sign of a relief shift or a supervisor she didn’t mind cracking open one of her precious beers. At least it cleaned her mouth.
She started the recording again. “Initial thoughts – definite death by violence. I’m going to call it murder. No way to know if those symbols were... applied pre-death. Have to say possibility of torture.
“No immediate suspects. No immediate sign of anyone on this rock. Possibilities – number one –
non-humans. When was the last time we had any contact with intelligent life? Not since the Solar War and that was over a century ago. Number two – raiders. More likely. Why would they hit this dump though? No sign of any ships or recent setdowns. Going to have to sweep the area tomorrow.”
She sighed, staring at the drab collection of prefabs again. “Third option is most likely – someone went cabin crazy. More than just one. The whole colony? Certainly enough to chase off everyone here. Or kill them all.”
Which means I'm alone on-planet with at least one total psycho.
“But if that’s the case, where are the bodies?”
**********
In the end, she decided to bunk in the security headquarters. It had thicker walls than anything else, fewer entrances and a bolt hole in the shape of the chief’s private office. She sat out on its porch on a moulded plas chair as the sun dropped towards the horizon, munching on a protein block she’d cut up into planetside water – that at least seemed to be in reasonable supply – and boiled into a thick gruel. It tasted like shit and she didn’t have much of an appetite after playing detective earlier.
She looked at the remnants of the ‘meal’ in the bottom of the bowl. “Long day tomorrow,” she told herself, and necked the last of it down.
The shack and its grisly contents waited for her. She knew she couldn’t leave the bodies there, degraded as they were. Somehow it didn’t feel respectful leaving them at the site of their butchery, but she couldn’t bury them either as there could still be useful evidence.
“Cold storage in the colony supply building,” she decided. She’d briefly glanced into the first of the freezers when scouting earlier and had seen it had been emptied out. She made a note on her to-do list, permanently open in a corner of the pad display, and decided to turn in.
**********
It was summer in the northern hemisphere of 187 and the nights were hot and dry. She stll slept fully clothed on a cot in the rearmost cell, having made damn sure the door was on the 'locked open' position. Or rather, she lay on the cot staring at the ceiling, sweating and thinking.
“Fuck it.” She sat up, swung her legs over the edge of the cot, and fired up her pad. She was afraid of the corpses invading her sleep, so much so that she hadn’t been able to drop off, so she may as well face that fear. She opened a cell and flicked her recording of the investigation into it, set it running.
It wouldn’t win any police awards or film-making prizes, wasn’t even her own best work. It took her a moment to recognise herself in the footage, a scrawny too-short figure looking like a little girl playing dress-up soldier, until she glanced towards camera and Sam could see how pale her skin was, how haunted her slightly olive-shaped brown eyes were. “Looking properly high caste, Mama Anja would say.”
The holo didn't yield any more clues after a second viewing, and the activity just chased away any lingering vestiges of sleep. She got up, stretched, eyed the armour arranged on top of the pack. “Too hot.” She wasn't dumb enough not to grab the Enforcer before she went out.
It was a bit cooler once she was out of the security building, just enough of a breeze to cool her and dry the sweat in her fuzz of black hair.
If the colony site had been eerie in daylight, though, it was downright creepy now the sun was down. The sky was clear overhead, the primary moon and tiny dot of the secondary star casting everything into an eerie, grainy half-light. She shivered despite the warmth, suddenly wary of things watching her from the darkness.
“Toughen up, Cane,” she muttered, and set out to walk the perimeter, on the basis that she may as well treat this as a military operation. She was pretty sure that there was a hostile presence on the planet even if it wasn’t in the immediate area, which probably made this the closest she’d ever been to a proper military operation.
During the day, the area had seemed relatively lifeless; just that flock of birds and that bastarding... whatever it had been that had stranded her here. (She made a mental note to check if local fauna were edible). She didn’t see anything else as she took a turn around the security office, but she certainly heard things moving round in the night, odd scrabblings and the occasional alien call that sent a trickle of cold water down her spine. Growing up in the urban sprawls of Mumbai and Newcastle and having done her probation posting on InterGlobe’s oldest colony world, she had never really experienced a night quite like it.
“No wonder the people out here went nuts.”
From the sounds, the night creatures didn’t seem to have come into the colony site. Yet. There may not have been anything for them, or they were still wary of a place humans had been. A flicker of movement in the corner of her eye put the lie to what her ears were telling her; she spun round with her weapon coming up, heart crashing in her chest. Nothing. The door to the colony supply building was slightly ajar though – she couldn't remember if she’d left it that way.
Trying to walk as softly as possible, she skirted the edge of the buildings to the warehouse. If she had closed it, it meant whatever had opened it had hands, which meant another person was here.
Cursing the fact that she hadn’t brought her helmet and its built-in lolight system, she nudged the door of the warehouse open and slipped through, jerking the muzzle of the Enforcer around to try to cover everything at once.
The only sound was her own breathing, loud in her ears.
“Hello?” she whispered, the word swallowed by the darkness inside. She waited for her eyes to adapt and stole across the reception area. If there was someone here, they were probably foraging for food in much the same way she had, and that meant they’d be somewhere deeper in the warehouse.
There was a faint smell on the still, hot air that she hadn’t noticed before. Something acrid but sweet at the same time, slightly rank.
She had no choice but to click on the tiny point torch built into the pistol when she got through into the windowless depths of the building, running the disk of pale light along the rows of looted shelves and prised-open lockers. “Is there anyone here?” she called out, realising how ridiculous that must sound.
Good job there was no one there to hear it.
She swallowed, hard. The torch provided a pitiful light in the cavernous space. A derelict hoverlift, stripped for parts, was a menacing silhouette until she put the light on it; boxes that had been ripped open and looted cluttered the aisles.
A sudden clatter at the back of the warehouse almost made her drop the pistol. In here it was cooler, but sweat still stuck her tunic down her skin and beaded on her forehead.
Slowly, unwillingly, she inched her way further into the darkness, one shoulder pressed to the wall as she came up to the cold storage corridor. She swung the heavy door open and had to shield her eyes – someone had switched on the light panels in the ceiling; dim though they were, after the darkness they almost dazzled her.
She let the implication sink in – she wasn’t alone here.
“Hello?” she whispered again, her voice trembling.
Four of the five cold storage lockers were standing open, letting out a steady stream of chilly air.
No other exits. Whoever it was would be hiding in the last locker.
She still made sure to check each of them, confirming that they had been emptied by the colonists when they had fled – and she had become convinced that the former inhabitants of this ghost town had fled – sealing them after she’d swept them.
She took deep breaths to calm herself, one hand on the cold metal of the final door. “They’ll be slow because they’re cold.”
She swung the door open with a sudden wrench, turned into the space, crouched low, her whole being concentrated behind the slim composite and chrome weapon in her hands.
She staggered back, her fragile confidence shredded. Her back hit the wall and she slid down on her haunches. Framed by the open door, the colonists stared back at her with frozen glassy eyes.
CHAPTER THREE – NO SHELTER HER
E
It was late morning before Sam managed to emerge from the cell that had become her shelter. She'd spent the rest of the night sat with her back wedged into the corner, clutching the Enforcer. She wasn’t ashamed of the fact that she’d cried some, and started at every noise from the threatening darkness beyond.
Thankfully, the nights were short at this time of year.
Eventually, she stirred enough to grab her pad and flick a holocell into existence, showing a slowly rotating pict album, just a handful of images, all of the same little boy who had her raven-black hair but one of his father’s startling blue eyes.
She told herself that she wasn’t a hypocrite, crying over a child who’d basically only come into existence for a con, who she’d handed off to his fathers before he’d even been technically born.
“Whoever these bastards are, they are not adding me to their collection.” She rose, strapped on her armour and helmet. After a bit of fiddling and consulting the pad’s datastacks, she worked out how to operate the Glock – simple point and click interface – and hooked its holster onto her belt. The Enforcer snapped onto the front plate of the vest.
“Pack command – slave to my biomet.” She’d offloaded most of her supplies into neat stacks, knowing she couldn’t haul them around with her, but there wasn’t any harm in making sure she had emergency stuff with her at all times. Couldn’t be too careful, particularly when you appeared to be stuck on an all-but-deserted planet, probably with a raging psycho or two for your only company.
'Can’t be too careful' was Rule #2, though some argued that it should really be numero uno.
Physically, the colony township was unchanged from yesterday. To her mind, knowing what she now did, it had taken on a sinister aspect. Its abandonment was clearly due to some great tragedy that had befallen its inhabitants, of that there could be no doubt. Each and every one of those buildings could be hiding some new gory vignette to tear at her sanity.
