by Joshua James
“Hello. Welcome to Waterman-Lau’s Naval Docks location. How may I help you?” An interactive holographic projection of an attractive young woman appeared before the closed and locked steel doors to Waterman-Lau’s docks.
Sydal threw his empty coffee cup into the nearby trash incinerator. He took the badge off the chain on his neck and showed it to the holographic projection.
“Welcome, Detective Rowan Sydal. You are expected.” The doors to the Waterman-Lau docks opened up. “Please proceed to the tram that will take you to number twenty-three. And have a fantastic day!”
“Too late for that,” mumbled Sydal as he entered.
Waterman-Lau’s section of the Naval Docks was completely cut off from the rest of the facilities. That was the kind of privacy that having an exclusive deal with the government to build ships could afford a company.
“Welcome to Waterman-Lau, Detective Sydal,” an actual real-life attractive young woman greeted him as soon as he got out of the company’s lobby. She was in a red dress, with smart glasses and high heels. “I’m Tiffany Lau, your liaison today.” She held out one hand small for him to shake. Her grip was deceptively strong.
“Hello, Tiffany. You gonna take me to the scene of the crime?”
“Gruesome business.” Tiffany feigned disgust; Sydal could tell. If nothing else, his years on the force had helped him pick up keen eyes and ears for lies.
“Sounds like it. We gonna go?” All Sydal wanted was to finish up quickly so he could return home and maybe have lunch, perhaps late lunch, with his family. The slim possibility of salvaging his Saturday was all that fueled him at this point, along with cheap coffee.
“Of course. This way.” Tiffany led Sydal to a fancy-looking, shiny red chrome-plated tram on hover rails. It went along the edges of Waterman-Lau’s section of the dome.
As he traveled to Dock 23 and the crime scene, Sydal looked out on the much better-lit, livelier section of the lunar surface. He watched as ships moved out from various docks: some hauling cargo; others fighter ships just off the line and ready for duty; and lastly, looming over the others, was a half-built battleship hovering over everything else, sparks flying.
“This is kind of strange, isn’t it?” he said as he kept his eyes on the battleship being built outside.
“What would that be, sir?” Tiffany asked.
“Having a Lunar cop come in to investigate. I thought you guys had your own police force. Some kind of deal with the head honchos here to take care of problems behind closed doors.”
Like every other member of the Lunar police, Sydal had heard the stories about Waterman-Lau. And they’d all found themselves on cases that stopped at the dead end of this gigantic, extremely influential, government- and military-connected company. Naturally, no one on the force trusted them.
“We do have an internal security force. But in this case, a homicide, it’s UEF law that the police force representing the government on any given colony is the authority. We’ll gladly cooperate and provide any assistance you need.”
Sydal smiled after hearing Tiffany’s clearly rehearsed response. He knew damn well that they didn’t report all the deaths in their docks. Something must’ve been different about this case he was about to walk into. And to tell the truth, he was a little intrigued.
The small tram stopped just below a sign for Waterman-Lau Lunar Dock 23. Tiffany got off, and Sydal followed.
First thing that he noticed was the crowd of workers, in their yellow uniforms, standing around listlessly. None of them had anywhere to go or anything to do. “What’s all this?” asked Sydal.
“We asked the foreman to tell his workers that they can’t leave until they’ve been questioned or the authorities—yourself—tell them they can leave. Come this way.” Tiffany led the way through the crowd of workers. Plenty had dirty looks for Sydal, which he offered back in spades.
Tiffany took the detective to a cordoned-off section of the docks. There were stacks and stacks of airtight boxes and crates. A couple of Waterman-Lau security officers stood guard. Even from a distance, Sydal could see the plastic-sheet-covered bodies.
“Detective, this is our head of security, James Renault. Mr. Renault, this is Detective Rowan Sydal.”
The overwhelming first impression Sydal got of Renault was that he was a veteran. Small but noticeable scars on his face looked like the kind a soldier might’ve received from shrapnel. His eyes, dark and distrustful, had the forlorn look of a man who’d seen too much. His bushy goatee was the sign of a serious man not concerned with fashion.
A real throwback, then. And probably a bastard, too.
“Detective,” Renault politely but gruffly responded with a slight French accent. When he shook Sydal’s hand, Sydal noticed it was clammy. That struck him as strange.
Is he nervous?
“Good to meet you, Mr. Renault. Wanna show me what you got?” Sydal had had enough of introductions and traveling. He wanted to get down to business, see what he was working with.
“I’ll leave you two to it. Please, ring me on your HUD if you need anything, Detective.” Tiffany excused herself.
Sydal was sure she had a lot to do. Bringing in a cop to investigate a murder on their grounds, words must’ve started to spread throughout the dome. He figured she had a lot of public relations damage control to do. Before leaving, he’d call in a tail on her.
“The victims, Jay Norris and Henry Thompson,” said Renault as he walked Sydal over to the plastic-covered bodies.
“On duty?”
Renault nodded. “They were both logging these crates before they went into storage or assigned them to a ship.”
“What’s in these crates?” asked Sydal as he turned on his HUD’s recorder. It would record everything he heard and saw.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. Machine parts, some ammunition from the front lines. The kind of freight we deal with every day.”
“Where from?” Sydal knelt down by the first body. He lifted up the plastic sheet. Before he took a look, he figured he’d see damage from a blunt object, maybe a falling crate or someone trying to make it look that way, or perhaps a fatal gunshot wound.
“Well, shit,” he said. In Sydal’s experience, murderers tended to kill their victims in the easiest way available to them. Most didn’t go for brutal; instead they went for effective. Few he’d ever encountered had chopped their victims to pieces while they were still alive, but that was confronted Sydal on Waterman-Lau’s Dock 23.
“Who or what can do that to a guy?” asked Renault as he stood over Sydal. “I’ve seen more than my fair share in the war, but this…I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
I bet you have seen a lot of horrific things. Did that change you into the kind of man who could do this? It does some.
Sydal had a hard time reading Renault. Maybe it was the monotone voice, or maybe it was just difficult to focus with the butchered meat bag in front of him.
The strangest part of the chopped-up dock worker was that it didn’t look like the pieces of him were pulled together and placed to make the coherent shape of a person. It appeared that whoever’d killed him had cut him so fast and so suddenly that all the pieces naturally fell to the floor, already close to the original form.
“That’s Jay Norris. Poor bastard. Looks like he got thrown in a woodchipper and then put back together by whatever sick bastard did this.”
Normally when a civilian found a scene like that, a horrendous murder, they were sickened by it. At the very least, they’d do their best to look away, even a cop. Sydal thought it was a bit odd that Renault just stared blankly at his slain co-worker. He didn’t even flinch.
Don’t jump to conclusions, Rowan. He could just be numbed by war. Does that to a lot of guys. Not you, but it did that to your brother, your sister. Before they…
For a brief moment—brief, only a second—Rowan saw his sister as he’d found her just two years earlier. She’d waved at him before opening the airlock to the lunar su
rface. She’d smiled before her face and body caught up to the realization of what she was doing.
“I said, have you ever seen anything like this before, Detective?” asked Renault.
Sydal realized that he must have zoned out for a second. Maybe it was more like a handful or two. That had been happening a lot lately. Maria had tried to get him to go to a neurologist, but he refused.
“No. Where did these crates come from? Their point of origin?” Sydal shifted his focus away from Norris’ body and towards the open crate that stood between the two bodies.
“That’s the strange part. See, most of these on this dock came from Earth. Hell, pretty much all of them.”
“Is that normal? Each dock only having shipments from the same planet?” Sydal looked at the crate. It was too small to hold a person. It was barely big enough to fit a damn dog. He looked inside, but it was empty.
“Sometimes, yeah. It really just depends.”
“On?” Sydal made a point of constantly asking questions. It kept most people off kilter, and sometimes reaped rewards.
Renault seemed unbothered. “There’s a lot of factors, but mostly it depends on what’s in them and where they’re going from here. This whole moon is nothing but a damn weigh station.”
Sydal stood up and stretched his back. “You said there was a strange part—other than your workers being sliced and diced.”
“Yes, sir. This particular crate, the one they opened? It wasn’t from Earth. At least, not originally.”
“That so? Where’d it come from?”
“It was an emergency re-route.” Renault paused. “From Vassar-1.”
“Vassar-1!” That got Sydal’s attention. “You mean like the capital planet of the AIC, the people we’ve been fighting for two decades now?”
“The same,” Renault said.
“And that didn’t strike you people as something to be wary of? What if it had been a chemical weapon or something worse?”
“We followed protocols. We always do,” Renault said, shrugging. He was still looking at his diced-up colleague. “I mean, we get shipments from all over the known universe, from enemies and allies. We aren’t government-owned, and do business with whomever we choose.”
“Neutral, huh?” Sydal stood. “How’s that working out for you?”
“We do fine.”
“Once we get all the pieces of you friends together, we can ask them.”
“Detective, please don’t overreact. This isn’t the only crate from Vassar-1 we’ll move this week.” Renault paused. “Or this day.”
Call it in. What if this is just the beginning of something much worse? Play it safe.
“Excuse me for a second,” Sydal said as he stepped away from Renault and the bodies. “I need to go overreact.”
Renault shook his head.
“HUD, call Chief Inzagi.”
One
Aftermath
It was hard to keep track of time on Vassar-1. The day and night cycles were linked inexorably to the Earth, as all the colonies were. Ada never understood why the colonies, for all their hatred of Earth, kept to the universal standard time.
On Vassar-1, twenty-four hours barely covered an afternoon. The biggest star, Alda, was an ever-present sun god, and Ada had long ago grown to hate it.
For over a week, Ada had called a bombed-out apartment in Vassar-1’s market district home, but she knew she couldn’t stay there much longer. The damned Oblivion were closing in. She could feel the noose tightening.
Ada hobbled over to the remains of what once had been a child’s bedroom window. She knew it was a child’s because of all the toys and stuffed animals strewn about the rubble-covered floor, and the body she’d covered with a unicorn-patterned sheet had also clued her in.
Since she’d crashed her fighter, she’d been completely separated from her group. She’d looked in vain for Ben or Tomas or hell, even Ace. So far, she’d spotted none of them. She knew nothing about Vassar-1’s layout, and with no HUD and no working equipment, she couldn’t find her way back to the bunker. It was way too unsafe out there to walk blindly for too long, so the apartment was it.
But too many of the units were like this one. She could find food and supplies, but she inevitably found bodies too. So many bodies.
She felt the pain in her knee and worked it out. She’d landed badly jumping from a roof two days ago. For a little while, she thought it was funny that she’d suffered more injuries from a twelve-foot fall than one of several hundred feet, but the joke was getting old.
At least she was alive. She was thankful for that as she looked out on the wreckage of a ship whose pilot hadn’t been so lucky. Even from her distant perch, she could see a gnarled, burnt arm sticking out of twisted metal.
It won’t be for nothing. It won’t be for nothing. It won’t be for nothing.
Ada repeated the mantra in her head whenever she came across the dead. She had to remind herself that despite appearances, all hope wasn’t lost. And all those people that died in the attacks, died in the battle, their sacrifice wouldn’t be allowed to be for nothing.
A large, churning liquid-metal sphere hovered in the sky above Vassar-1. She’d watched it form days, maybe a week before. Moments before the Atlas had crashed, two dreadnought-shaped forms had detached from the ship; then they had literally merged together to form the sphere.
It looked like the one that had been outside the Sanctuary Station, but it was larger. Maybe it was the fact that it was inside the atmosphere here, but it seemed to churn more violently than the one she’d seen before.
She assumed it was the Shapeless’ home base now. That was where the thing pretending to be Commander Saito dwelt; she could feel it. Ada gritted her teeth at the thought. She was going to kill that damned thing if it was the last thing she did.
Once satisfied that the coast was clear, Ada sat down below the windowsill and took out her homemade map. She had to figure out some method to find her way through this strange, massive labyrinth of a city back to the Government District and the bunker under the Senate Circle, so she made sure to map every area that she explored on any given excursion out for supplies or possible survivors.
Ada looked over the map. According to her estimates, she’d covered about a dozen square miles from where her ship had crashed. Still, there was no sign of the Government District. There wasn’t even a street sign that could point her in the right direction. Everything was electronic, digital, and displayed via HUDs, even those street signs.
When she heard a whistle from downstairs, Ada neatly folded up her map. She stuffed it inside her jacket, a military-issue piece of attire she’d salvaged from a dead man. The pockets were full of all sorts of things, from medical supplies to more ammunition.
Ada looked over at the little body covered by bed sheets. She tried her best not to think of the little girl’s face underneath, but it was impossible to forget. So twisted in horror and shock, such confusion that her short life was about to end so abruptly. What did she feel when….no; Ada tried her best not think about it. All she wanted to think about was finally laying the child’s body to rest.
Two men, clad in hooded ponchos covered in dirt, dust, and grime, silently entered the bedroom. No one said a word. The men simply picked the deceased girl up off her bedroom floor and took her downstairs. Ada limped close behind.
“If only the sky could open up / And her dear little face I could see…” The first thing Ada heard when she’d come downstairs in the apartment she’d chosen to hide out in was the sound of a priest’s voice. His name was Father Eran, one of a dozen or so survivors she’d found and rescued. No one else was really qualified to say a few words for this child’s funeral.
Father Eran made sure to speak as quietly as he could, while still letting others hear him. The rest of the survivors gathered around, heads down, in an appropriately somber mood.
“Oh, what a wonderful feeling / I know would come over me. But she is with the Angels…”
“Wonderful feeling?” Is that what this is? Feels more like defeat, failure, and helplessness.
Ada wasn’t moved at all by Father Eran’s words. If anything, she found them hollow and meaningless, at least for her. But she didn’t oppose them being said. Maybe the other survivors got more out of it than she did. Anything to take their minds off the girl’s parents, who were splattered all over the master bedroom.
The group moved out towards the back of the apartment. There was a small backyard there. Really, it was just a patch of dirt, but that was all they needed to bury a body.
“Far from sin and pain. Jesus said / “Believe in Me; and thou shalt see her again,” ended Father Eran. “Would anyone else like to say a few words?” He opened it up for the other survivors.
“We need to move, Father,” Ada said. She knew her voice sounded cold, but there was nothing left to be done here. “Let’s get her buried and pack up.”
Ada limped over to a lawn chair. After adjusting the rifle slung around her shoulder, she plopped down. It felt good to take the weight off her ankle. God, she felt so old. Everything hurt or was tired, or both.
Ada’s mind wandered back to the kiss she’d had with Ben. It seemed so out of place, like it had happened in a parallel world where such things occurred, not in this dead place.
She touched her lips. She hoped the little know-it-all was still alive. Not for another awkward kiss, but just because he was the closest thing to family she had out here. And...maybe another kiss.
Ben, Ace, Tomas, Morgan—no, it was Clarissa, remember?—even LeFay. If she could just see their faces, one more time…
“Ada, Bishop is back.” Rashel, a young twenty-something former computer programmer, quietly informed Ada that one of their scouts had returned.
Soon as she’d found enough fellow survivors in the ruins of Vassar-1, Ada went about setting up a Marine-esque system. Everyone had roles meant to help the group as a whole. There were three people who volunteered as scouts. One of them was a teenage boy, Bishop Gossler, the son of a city sentinel.