by T Q Chant
The only way to tackle it was to take it head on. She knew she had to face it down and see it through to take the fear out of it; just like watching the trashy slashvids her mothers had disapproved of.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood outside the freezer, enjoying the coolness wafting from the door she’d left standing partially open (or at least, that’s what she told herself). “Start recording. Samrit Cane, continuing investigations on IGC one-eight-seven. Day two.”
She forced a deep breath, stepped through the door. “First observation – there are only heads here.”
They were arrayed in neat rows on the metal counters that filled the space, sightless gazes turned on the open doorway. The lights in the locker were off, the tables furthest from her in the cavernous space barely visible as she shone the torch around, but each one appeared to have around ten heads on it. Each one had been branded on the forehead with a weird symbol – she shot a pix of it and set a search running through the datastacks. “Guessing this was done before they were killed. Whoever did this wants people to suffer.” She called up an image of the murdered woman and child. “Same symbol cut into their skin.” She swallowed bile. “No children here, seems to be an even split of male and female adults.”
She couldn’t bring herself to count the gruesome contents of each counter, but something the precision of the arrangement told her there would be the same number on each table. If that was the case, there were two hundred people here. That was a fifth of the population of this colony world, give or take – plus the two in the shack.
“Wonder why they got special treatment?” She shook herself, realising she was whispering for no reason beyond some vestige of superstition. “Probably something personal,” she continued out loud.
She looked around at the massacred colonists, and realised there was nothing more she could do here – nothing more she could face doing. “I will find out who did this, and I will make the fuckers pay,” she told them. They didn’t care, so she backed out of the locker and swung the door closed.
She’d begun to find out what had happened to the colonists, but the same question remained – where were the bodies?
*********
She couldn’t face the cold locker again to do any more amateur sleuthing; her resolve to see this through to the end had been broken by the empty eyes. The decomposed bodies in the supply shack were somehow less horrific, but only to the extent that she could face transferring them into a single vacuum-seal bodybag – the security office’s supply had unsurprisingly not been looted – before using the pack as an improvised gurney to deliver them to cold storage. She couldn’t bring herself to carry them in, just unsealing the door far enough to slide them in with the other colonists and then locking them all in together.
“When the rescue ship arrives, then you’ll get proper treatment,” she said, pressing her hand to the cool composite door. Not that she really believed that what she said or did now really mattered to anyone but her.
Her work in the warehouse completed, she sealed it and hurried back to the safety of the security office, the flesh between her shoulders tightening as she cut across the open space at a pace just short of a jog. It was swelteringly hot, far worse than the previous day, and the winds that howled overhead sounded like a banshee wail in the masts of the admin building.
She knew almost at once that someone had been at her stash, despite the fact that she’d left it locked up. The cell door was still sealed, or rather had been re-sealed, and whoever it was had been careful to only take a few items, never too much from any one pile. “Shouldn’t have tried that with an ex-supply clerk. We’re the experts at stealing.”
She cracked open a beer to wash away the taste of death in the back of her throat. “At least they stayed away from this. I’d have killed them if they’d got to my beer.”
A quick inventory confirmed her impressions. They’d only been after food, and not much of it. It must have been a fine balancing act, trying to work out how much to take to avoid notice, without going hungry.
In her thoroughness, Sam realised, she’d gathered up everything this – this what, survivor? Psycho? – needed to stay alive. And she could use that.
“Pad command – link me in to the admin broadcast system. Stand by for a live broadcast.”
She gathered up some of the better ration bars – if such a thing existed – and walked back out into the main plaza. Instead of skirting the edge, she walked right to the middle where a small stage and awning, now ragged in the wind, had been set up. As she trudged across, hands shoved firmly into the pockets of her jumpsuit, she wondered about the last days of the colonists.
Had they been terrorised, worked on, before the final blow? Had they gathered here at the centre of the colony to talk about what was happening, make plans, take comfort in the company of their friends and family, the security personnel charged with their safety?
Or had it come suddenly, in the night perhaps, as such things usually did? A few minutes of struggle, of terror, and then the torture and beheadings. A night straight out of the history books. “Pretty old school for the second century after Ascension, though.”
But how come nobody had even got a radio distress call off?
She stood on the stage and showed the stack of ration bars to the four corners of the plaza before tapping herself into the announcer system. “Alright, listen up,” her voice boomed from the speakers around the colony, making her wince. At least she sounded confident. “I have no idea who you are, and you have no idea who I am. I’d like to change that. My name is Sam Cane.
“I know you need food. I’m leaving these here as a gesture of goodwill. I promise I’m not going to interfere with you if you come for them. I mean you no ill will. I’m an InterGlobe Security Specialist and I'm here to help.” Sam winced again, this time at how pompous she sounded. “And I could do with the company.
“Oh, and if you’re one of the psychos who did the whole heads in the freezer thing – you need help. Why don’t you just turn yourself in and when the response ships arrive you can get the support you need?”
She stalked back to the security office, forcing herself to walk slowly and show no apprehension. She was fairly certain that she meant what she’d said, that she wanted to get help for whoever had gone off the deep end like this. The butchered bodies she’d just interred in the cold locker, the lines of severed heads, flashed into her mind; she wasn’t sure getting psych support for them was really going to do the job.
**********
Sam knew that the key to staying sane and staying alive was to keep busy. By day five, she was beginning to struggle with that. She’d rigged proximity and heat sensors around her basecamp in the Marshal’s office and adjusted the pack’s systems to give her eyes in the back of her head – she never went anywhere in the deserted colony without the whirring disk for company.
She’d target-shot with the Enforcer and the Glock, with predictably poor results, but didn’t have enough ammunition for either to work on her aim. She hadn’t cracked into the weapons locker; the methods she’d have to use would leave it inoperable and she was happier with the heavy hardware being behind ten centimetres of titanium-reinforced plas for now.
She became aware that she was talking to herself a lot. It helped hearing a human voice, even if it was in her own weird accent.
Sometime in her fourth night on-planet, the ration bars had disappeared from the stage, wrappers and all, which told her that some scavenging night animal hadn’t got at them. She’d hacked the colony’s fixed autopixers – like everything else, they had been carefully shut down but remained fully operational – and put a few of the cams on the bars. She’d still barely got a look at her neighbour. “Is that a woman?” she muttered, squinting at the best image she'd captured. The pixers weren’t top of the line and the girl – she was pretty sure it was a girl – had managed to sneak up fairly close without being holo’d and then taken the bars at a fast sprint.
&
nbsp; “First contact.” She sat with her feet up on the security console – definitely against regs but the edge of the desk was well scuffed by bootheels already. Time to get active. “Time to release the drones.”
She called up a set of search patterns, picked the one that looked most likely and hit the go command. She actually heard a clunk from somewhere as the solar-powered drones were released from their storage/charging blister on top of the building and whirred off to do their job. A few moments later, one of the screens on the security console lit up and started to show high-res imagery of the city scrolling past. From the way the images dipped and shuddered, they were having to work hard to cope with the wind.
Sam got up, stretching, and turned to fetch her remaining beer – this seemed like enough of a victory to warrant it. Something caught the corner of her eye and she spun back to the screens.
“Fuck. Yes.” The composite picture being generated showed three people walking slowly – cautiously, even – into town from the west. They were all armed, and two appeared to be in standard ICG security jumpsuits (or at least of the style that had been regulation five years ago). The obvious leader was a tall, wide-shouldered woman with Asiatic features; the other one in a security jumpsuit was a lean, nasty-looking streak of piss. Those had to be Cho, the chief, and Fassetti, the specialist who hadn’t retired. The third was a slim, dark-skinned youth, painfully beautiful; he packed an old-style slug rifle while the other two carried Enforcers.
“Fuck. Fuckity fuck!” She dashed out of the main office. “Pack, sync to my biomet and arrive best possible speed.”
Security staff – anyone really – was good news. Even if it wasn’t a rescue, the knowledge that she wasn’t the only person left on this rock sent a surge of relief through her. On balance, though, she’d have preferred almost anyone else, as a living security chief would pretty quickly find out Sam had cracked her safe and looted it. Certainly if the chief was halfway competent.
She reckoned she had about ten minutes before she would be formally reporting to her boss. She skidded into the chief’s private office just as the pack whirred up to her. She closed her eyes, taking a few deep breaths as she visualised how the safe had been set up, and then started hurriedly but calmly refilling it. She’d already fired a few rounds from the Glock, but hopefully that would go unnoticed.
She swung the Anythingbut closed, resealing it just as she heard the front door of the building being opened.
“Hello?” a voice called out, and she almost laughed, almost cried on hearing it.
She hurried down the stairs and towards the reception area, but made sure to stop by the inner door, back to the wall and the Enforcer in her hands. “Mind identifying yourself?” she called out, heart crashing in her chest (Rule #2, always at the forefront of her mind).
“Security Chief Cho here. Mind returning the favour?”
Her breathing slowed. Sounded normal enough. She didn’t take her finger off the firing stud of her pistol. “Specialist Samrit Cane-Kokhani, ICG Security Service. Can you confirm my handover keyword please, sir?”
“Keyword is Albatross, Specialist. Response?”
“Bulldog.” She paused, realised she only had two options here and stepped out into the door. Holstered her sidearm before she did. “Good to see someone alive, Chief.”
Sam's first impression of Cho was confirmed – there wasn’t a gram of spare flesh on her but she almost filled the doorway. “Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you when you arrived. Must’ve been a hell of a thing, finding this place deserted.”
“Umm, bit more than deserted, Chief.”
“Folks around here refer to me as Marshal,” Cho said with an easy smile as she dropped into a chair. “Best make your report, Deputy.”
The smile disappeared as Sam told her about what she’d found – the hundred and more heads in the freezer, the two mutilated bodies in the shack, the fact that someone was at large in the colony.
Cho scowled at her, something...ugly in her eyes when she mentioned the other apparent survivor. “You manage to get eyes on? Saw you’d got access to the drones.”
“Yeah, new procedure Ch...I mean Marshal, just been introduced,” she lied smoothly. “They issued me with the codes just before landing me, in case anything had happened to you.”
“Surprisingly trusting of Corp HQ. Get anything yet?”
“No sir. Whoever it is, they're pretty tricky.” She paused, eyeing Cho. “Mind telling me what happened here, Marshal?”
Cho rose. “Pirates,” she said shortly. Guess Sam couldn’t blame her for the tone – couldn’t have been easy to see her beat get raided. “Hit us about four weeks ago. Got just about enough warning to get some folks out. Couldn’t get everyone out to the secondary site. Kind of hoped they’d just leave folks alone, or at worst take ’em as slaves. Didn’t think they’d...”
She shook her head. “C’mon. I’ll introduce you to the boys, then we’d best take a look at what you’ve found.”
**********
Fassetti she’d already guessed at; up close he looked even more weatherbeaten and sour, shortcropped black hair grizzled with grey at the edges and flat, hard eyes that didn’t miss much. The civvy was Okafor, barely over school age in rough and ready civvies who still handled his carbine with a certain amount of assurance and seemed to have a perpetual amused glint in his eyes. Nether spoke and only the kid smiled (maybe a little too warmly) when Marshal Cho introduced them in passing.
“Safe and main weapons locker are secure by the way, Marshal,” Sam mentioned as they walked towards the warehouse, mostly by way of distracting herself from what she knew was coming.
“Mmm? Good.”
“I imagine you’ll want to inspect the contents, make sure the raiders didn’t get in?”
“Not a priority.” There it was again, that odd note in her voice, just something off, more in the rhythm of her voice than the tone. Something uncomfortable about the set of her shoulders. All very subtle and controlled – Sam reckoned she only picked it up because cold reading a potential mark was one of the key skills of a grifter.
Cho shouldered the heavy door of the warehouse open, flicked on the lights and just strode right in like she owned the place. Maybe she did – security chiefs often doubled up as quartermasters. “Anything change since you sealed this place up?”
Sam glanced around, shrugged. “Can’t see anything different. Don’t think anything’s been taken.”
“Don’t think or you’re sure?”
“Don’t think. Marshal.” She tried to keep her tone level, knew she was failing when Cho shot her another dark look. She reminded herself that she needed to cut the Marshal some slack; her own nerves were jangling after only a week on-planet. She sighed. “Pretty certain. It’s Freezer Four.”
“After you. Fassetti, Okafor – inventory.”
The place was pretty much as she’d left it. If her mysterious neighbour had been in again, she’d left no trace of it.
She took a breath, opened the cold locker. She knew she couldn’t afford to show weakness – even if the circumstances weren’t so extreme, she wouldn’t want to appear squeamish in front of a woman who was, after all, her boss. And she really needed to make this job work.
Even after everything, she really needed this job.
“After you,” Cho said again, her voice flat. She clicked on her torch and stepped into the freezer, unable to escape the feeling that she’d hear the door slam shut behind her. Cho stepped in after her and stood just in the doorway, her face completely impassive as she stared around.
“Pretty nasty stuff,” she said eventually. “That writing on the wall last time you were in here?”
Sam started, shone her torch in the indicated direction. Someone had daubed ‘RUN’ in tall, crude red letters along one of the long walls.
“Ummm...no.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“This time I'm sure.” Feeling queasy, she
forced herself to traverse the room to examine the writing more closely, stepping as carefully as possible to avoid coming close to the severed heads that still stared at the door, their dead gazes seeming to converge on Cho. She told herself her care was so she didn’t disturb the scene. “Colour stick,” she said, relief evident in her voice after she’d examined it closely.
“What did you think it would be? Blood?”
“Given everything else I’ve found here?” she said, managing to keep it under her breath. Her eye had caught something else, scratched in small letters below the 'N'. Run Sam. Run.
“Got anything else?”
“No. No sir.”
CHAPTER FOUR – STANDARD SEARCH PATTERN
Early evening, the four of them sat in the Marshal’s private office, taking stock over a bottle of engine degreaser that Sam couldn’t believe she’d missed.
“How many people did you get to the secondary site?”
“Few hundred.”
Not very precise, Marshal. She had to fight not to say that out loud. There was a weird atmosphere in the room, and she didn’t want tempers to start fraying. “Where is the secondary site, anyway? There was nothing in the gazzetteer about it.”
“Research station the science team established a few hundred klicks to the West,” the kid said. He was definitely the friendliest of the trio, actually seemed like he wanted to make her welcome. Cho and Fassetti’s cold attitude was starting to bother her, despite her resolution to give them some space after what they must have experienced. Plus, as some old timers liked to point out, these early-stage colonies were often tight-knit places and they just took a while to accept an outsider.
“We’re just about managing to get by out there. We’ve got shelter and managed to take supplies – we had enough warning to fill the orbital hoppers and get some folks out that way. The rest of us went by vehicle.”
“That how you got back, sir?”
“Atvees. Took us a coupla days to get organised when we saw your pod come down. Must confess, I’d forgotten you were due.” A half-smile twisted the Marshal’s normally impassive features. “Sorry about that.”
