Qarotti, Eron 14, 5531 – Second Shift

Laycia observed Sinner’s Landing from high above, on the back of her hover speeder. From her perspective, the colony seemed like a living thing laid bare. Traffic behaved like sluggish blood pumped through tired veins built from industrial alloys.

The wide lanes referred to as main-ways connected the inner core-rings to the outer rim of the colony. Down on one of the main-ways, small figures maneuvered around large snow-covered vehicles hovering on mag-lev coils. The people were obliged to trudge through the snow, shoulders hunched against the wind and the dust-like frost it kicked up. The vehicles were trailed by thin trails of exhaust and clouds of steam from flash-boiled snow as they hovered along.

Colonists left their ring’s footpaths, hurrying for the nearest hopper station along one of the main-ways. They were often nudged aside by those returning from shifts of their own. Interactions that repeated shift after shift, solar after solar. People living as part of a system they were too enmeshed in to get a clear view of.

Laycia marveled at the beauty in the interconnectivity on display and how much of it went completely unnoticed. The chem-worker that crawled up from the Pits beneath the colony didn’t care that her work in fertilizers meant that hydroponics in another colony would see a significant increase to their yields. She cared that she would earn enough rations to live to see the next span.

All eight hours of Laycia’s shift settled about her mind, her thoughts growing unwieldy and indistinct. What about herself? What purpose did she serve for the great industrial beast?

She laughed as she gripped the hover-bike’s handles and spurred it onwards towards HQ. Since she’d managed to get herself assigned to a purification colony, she served whatever function Knight-Captain Silvane demanded. The engine purred, the hum vibrating up through Laycia’s body until her teeth chattered pleasantly behind her helmet. The rings blurred past as her speed increased.

The skies above Sinner’s Landing were relatively empty, only a handful of vehicles ever needing the airspace at once, and most of them intended for shipping purposes. The solars spent cruising above the Silver City flashed through her mind—dodging transports and personal crafts, her targets blissfully unaware of her approach, the wind clawing at her armored coat as the city gleamed far below.

Through Lustrathīr’s atmosphere, the sun blazed with violet fire as it rose, banishing the last of the night’s shadows from the colony. The sky had lightened from a violent, deep magenta, towards the gentle lavender of early morning. The Core drew closer rapidly, bringing with it visions of Laycia’s quarters and the beckoning confines of her bed. She had just begun to imagine the feel of her heavy blankets closing around her when she was rudely snatched back to reality.

“Alert, Knight Verdaris.” The dispatch operator’s voice was seasoned liberally with annoyance when it emerged from Laycia’s comm. It sat in its socket near the steering handles, and its holo-field filled with the Knighthood’s symbol, a longsword contained within a ring of silver. Laycia throttled down fully, and the speeder cruised to a softly undulating hover. The thrusters sizzled in the frozen morning air.

Laycia sighed. “This is Knight Verdaris. Ready to receive, dispatch.”

“We have received multiple anonymous reports of a possible incident in a residential complex near the outer edge of the colony, in your sextant. Details suggest traces of blood and evidence of violence.”

Laycia counted to five before responding. Her shift was over, technically. This should be Bori Unit’s call, not Avo’s. “Understood, dispatch. However, I’m nearly—”

“The details and address have been sent to your comm, Knight Verdaris. Good luck on your investigation.”

The connection broke, and Laycia was left staring at her comm, its holo-field now crisply projecting the details. Her vision of bed faded to nothingness, and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to keep a lid on her fury. She called her Silver and the lines of cold beneath her skin pulsed with calming energy. The roaring in her ears dropped in volume.

Retaliation. There was no doubt in her mind. Two spans ago Laycia had discovered an odd anomaly between the production reports of the colony’s Industrial Plants, and the shipping manifests of outgoing shuttles. The Pit wasn’t in her jurisdiction, technically, but she had been assigned some menial tasks, which included shipping security. The Knight on duty, Adamir Khatila, had gotten a reprimand for his negligence. That hadn’t won Laycia any friends.

She was primarily disappointed by the lack of foresight by her fellow Knights. Didn’t they understand how things could cascade out of control if left to their own devices?

If no one had looked into the discrepancy between the weapons shipment inventory and the manufacturing statement, they would have never found out about a dozen missing plasma rifles. Ones intended for miliskaria peace-keepers in Maqalbus. How many lives would that have cost, in the long run?

She turned the speeder around and headed towards the address dispatch had provided. She had been to the location on a few occasions, unfortunately. The first time had been to pick up a woman who had been accused of openly blaspheming the Circle. The report had been filed with HQ by the occupants of three separate units in the building. They’d each given their accounts to Confessors from the Circle, and they’d been found to be Truthful. The executors from the Circle of Judgement and the Authority of Justice had decided her punishment in less than an hour of her arriving at Central Admin. The extra rations-allotments for the reporters had been issued a solar later.

The next few times she’d visited the building had been to oversee the disposal teams from Central Medical as they collected the complainant’s bodies.

The woman’s Mark had been heavy, costing much of both her speech and sight, leaving her unable to care for her daughter or provide rations for them. With no other choice, she surrendered her daughter to the Circle and the Father’s care, and herself to the snow a few solars later. Unfortunately for the opportunistic reporters, she had been well-liked. Unsurprisingly, there had been no witnesses.

The residential complex came into view: Utilitarian in design, a three-level monument of bare or minimally painted metal, consisting of two symmetrical wings interrupted by a recessed central section that created a shallow notch in the building’s face. The building sat on top of a short hill just off the main-way, accompanied by three small sheds. She brought her speeder down, hovering a mitra above solid ground. She pressed down on her comm’s face, causing it to pop out of the socket with a satisfying click. She slotted it into place in a similar socket on her gauntlet. Data from the report that had been sent to the comm was added to the display in Laycia’s helmet.

Snow rose around her as she landed. She climbed the quick-stone stair-case carved in the hill leading up to the building’s face, forced to concentrate on her footing due to the layer of snow that had built up on them. It didn’t appear as if they were used very often, given the lack of other footsteps.

The quick-stone landing at the top of the stairs led directly to the main entrance. It was a double set of two-mitra tall doors that creaked when they opened, rusted hinges protesting apparent disuse. She ducked through them and into a decently sized and well-kept lobby.

Four hallways branched off from the lobby, two on her left and two on her right, and between both sets were a set of doors. One set sat open, and she could see a common area used for cooking through it. To her left, a single manual door labeled stairwell sat between two bathroom doors. Behind her on either side unit mailboxes equipped with bio-locks had been built into the wall framing the main entrance.

On the other end of the lobby, a smaller entranceway faced toward the outer edge of the colony. Curiously, she approached it. She only made it as far as the stairway door before she—or rather the cameras in her helmet’s sensor array—picked up on some faint bloodstains. They led directly to the stairway door.

That eliminated an entire floor for investigation. She pushed the door open, revealing a dim stairwell with an impressively low grime content.

Laycia’s luck continued as she entered the stairway; the display on her helmet showed small specks of blood despite the flickering and dim lighting in the stairwell. The trail continued past the second-level landing, where an boot-print had left a smeared brownish stain, and onto the third level landing, where it thinned. It led unmistakably through the manual door that opened onto the left-wing of the building.

The passage the door opened onto was narrow, with the facing wall festooned with more bio-locked mail slots, and the floor…completely spotless in both directions.

The blood stopped quite literally at the threshold. Past that point, the floor had been scrubbed so thoroughly it actually gleamed. A hallway stood to both her left and right. What now?

With no more trail to follow, she’d be reduced to going door to door and conducting interviews. She recalled the building’s layout from her previous visits. The hallways were connected, forming a loop that made up that wing. Either direction would bring her right back to where she stood. She reluctantly turned her eye to the left hall. She sighed. Might as well get started.

The first three doors she tried, there was no response, most likely the occupants—if there were any—had already left for the shift. She recorded messages on their holo-receivers, so if she didn’t find something in the other units maybe they could get back to her later. It wasn’t terribly likely, given how unpopular Silver Knights were in the colony, but better to try all the same.

At the fourth door, she was greeted by a man of slightly below-average height and enormous girth. He craned his neck and squinted up at her. When he registered her armor and the grinning skull of her helmet his eyes grew round as dishes. His dark skin grew ashen, and he brushed imaginary dust from the front of his skin-tight and sleeveless undershirt.

“Sīdu-, I mean, Equifār, what may I do to satisfy you?” The breathy, almost musical edge to his Germaine marked him as Saturnalian.

“You may refer to me as Equifār Verdaris. Were you in your quarters last night?” Laycia’s voice was distorted to her own ears as it passed through her helmet’s speakers, giving it an inhuman, artificial quality.

He paused for the briefest of moments. His answer came out in a rush. “Of course, of course, straight back here after my shift ended. I have a double-shift today, in fact. Not that I mind, of course. As my umma said, ‘the Beast preys upon the fingers of the idle, so keep him hungry.’ A wise woman, she did not allow the spirit of Laziness even a cem by which to invade her house!” He laughed, a rich sound that seemed to catch even him off-guard. He quickly sobered. “Oh, my name’s Wema Hadduma, in case there’s some sort of record. I want it known I did not attempt any obfuscation or some such.”

“So noted, Sīdus Hadduma,” Laycia replied. “Were you home before the start of first shift?”

He started to rub his hands together, one hand taking turns to massage the other, as he answered. “Nnnnot exactly, I work on the lower levels of the Pit, and decon from the toxic chem residue takes a little time with so many people having to be processed and declared safe by inspection scans. When I got home it was probably closer to 0100h than not.”

She nodded, though she doubted it was the entire truth. More than likely he’d stopped off at a local rec-hall for some home-brewed and blood-laced alcohol and had gotten home around 0300h. His face bore the half-stuffed look of a long-time and habitual bloodhound. “And on your return to the building, did you notice any blood on the floor, or going up the stairway?”

“Blood? Human blood?” From the shock injected into his voice, Laycia might have thought he had never heard of the substance, let alone seen it. “Can’t say as I did, though I did see a maintenance worker cleaning…something. That could have been blood, sure, but I can’t confirm that. ‘Don’t mind any business that does not fill your belly,’ that was another one of my Umma’s. You know, most people just keep themselves to themselves.”

Unless you get together and decide someone has earned an urgent audience with the Father. Then you can pry, and chop, and burn to your heart’s content, it seems. “We received a report of a blood trail leading through the lobby and up the stairs. We’ve already reviewed the surveillance footage and confirmed the presence of the blood, I am trying to determine if anyone saw the potential victim.” He didn’t need to know that the building’s surveillance system hadn’t worked for multiple cycles according to the reports Laycia had found.

The man hesitated. He struggled with a decision for a few seconds before finally speaking. “Alright. So, Truth in my heart, It was a little after 0230h when I got back. I didn’t see nothing, just like I’ve said. But,” he chewed his dry and peeling bottom lip, “I did hear something. I was still unlocking my door—the scanners in the building are notoriously slow to confirm your biometrics, so it takes a while to actually decide you are who you say you are and go green—when I heard a woman squawkin’ after someone, really pissed off, like. Next thing I know, the door to this side of the level bursts open and then someone started running through the hall. I didn’t stay to see who was running or why, because thankfully my door opened before whoever it was could come around the corner.”

“You didn’t check on the woman who cried out?” That was probably who called in the report in the first place. “What if she had been hurt?”

The man laughed, a single sharp bark. “If you’d heard the pair of lungs on her, you wouldn’t be worrying. No one could scream an obscenity that loud if anything was wrong with them. Maybe something very, very right, more like.”

Though he couldn’t see it, Laycia frowned. Openly bragging about extramarital sex? To a Silver Knight’s face? “And what experience is that?”

The man had the good sense to look mortified. Stammering, he answered, “Merely what I’ve been told over the cycles. By way of my friends married under the blessed Silver light of the Father.”

Laycia shifted her weight, the metal plates and synth-leather armor creaking as joints flexed with the movement. Laycia let the ensuing silence sit, fat and pregnant, until finally she said, “You should be careful that no one has cause to recommend you for an investigation, Sīdus Hadduma.”

Any remaining cheer fled his face. He bowed in a poor approximation of pious deference, his body hinging at the waist. When he did, Laycia noticed an empty bio-plastic bottle covered in grimy fingerprints lying on a table visible over his shoulder. It looked like hundreds she had seen tossed and scattered in various corners of the colony, hastily made by one of the plants in the Pit and filled with something foul fermented in someone’s toilet reservoir. It took very little imagination to speculate on what had been in that bottle. “Thank you, lord Knight, for your wisdom and grace in this matter, and for the opportunity to seek the highest Truth.”

She closed her eyes, counting slowly. Unlike the surveillance or the missing weapons, alcohol was a personal vice, at least when not taken to excess. He would hurt himself, and his own chances of being deemed potentially worthy of reintegration sponsorship, but no one else. She thought of the cursed mother.

The punishment of a Sinner’s Mark and loss of ration earnings for a span at the very least for indulging in blood-laced ‘wine’ would be far beyond the weight of the crime. The lessons of her childhood echoed in her mind. ‘Order must always be imposed in service to compassion, never in its absence.’

Fine. She turned away and started towards the next apartment. “See that you do. We will all be judged against the Father’s Truth eventually. Live accordingly.”

The investigation continued much as it had thus far. As did further pressures testing her uncle’s lessons. A couple living together—purely in platonic accordance with doctrine, they claimed—reported that they too had heard shouting and running, but not seen anything; A girl of nineteen cycles, a full two cycles shy of the age of responsibility, provided new evidence. She swore that she’d heard screaming around the start of first shift, and then much later, she’d heard growling echoing through the hallway in the middle of the night. She had been far too terrified to actually go look around the complex for its source. In addition to the growling, Laycia started to get off-hand mentions of power flickering or dying for short periods, and heating coils suddenly dropping in output or even cutting off entirely.

As Laycia progressed, so too did her mental model. At first she’d been thinking that someone had been hurt or killed, and the person responsible had slunk into the building, whether that was because they were a resident, or had a friend that was. The blood in that model was proof that they had just been careless with the evidence. Then she began to suspect that with so much blood spilled over such a long distance, she was looking for someone hurt, maybe someone that had escaped such an attack.

The growling and power issues seemed unrelated, but not unexplainable. She’d seen dozens of scavenged holo-projectors wired into power grids with no thought of personal or community safety. They could produce the same effects and could produce the same sounds. Especially if they were showing the right kinds of holos. Horror holos were especially popular due to their enhanced prohibition, after all.

Where the left hall ended, instead of more apartments, there was a bank of windows showing the tops of buildings curving away into the distance along the colony ring. This close to the edge of the colony, Laycia could see one of the tall repulsor towers. Its peak rose far higher than the building in which she stood. Her gaze was drawn upwards to the needle-like structure’s summit, glowing with bluish-white light. She imagined she could feel the calming waves of Truth from there. Smiling to herself, she turned to the right hall to finish up the rounds of questioning.

Coming around the corner, she was confronted with a strange sight: people, milling about in the hall, wrapped in heavy blankets and non-powered thermal gear. When they saw her, all of the residents stood up straight, eyes fixed on her armored form as she approached. Some people ushered their blanket-cocooned children into their units. The parents slid the depowered apartment doors nearly closed, leaving only a small strip of darkness beyond. Just wide enough for curious eyes to observe everything that happened, no doubt.

A heavy-framed man stood at the center of the crowd, and seemed to be addressing them. His arms were spread wide and he gestured placatingly with surprisingly large hands. His thick hair had been pulled back and tied with a simple string of some kind, left to spill down his back in voluminous ebony curls. The flashing of golden charms woven into his beard and hair drew Laycia’s eye as he moved.

One of the residents tapped his shoulder and pointed towards Laycia. He turned with a searching expression that shifted to relief upon seeing her. Well, that’s pleasantly odd. How often has anyone been relieved to see me?

Tapping forehead and heart by way of salute, the man—who Laycia noted didn’t have any kind of protection against the cold beyond a thick, long-sleeved shirt and similarly made pants—approached her from the tangle of people. The crowd parted for him with grateful looks cast at his back. As he walked, the golden charms clinked together musically. When he was within touching distance, she realized he was shorter even than Sīdus Hadduma had been but significantly wider at the shoulder. With the charms and his height, she suspected he was one of the Moon-folk.

The man offered his hand, must have realized his error, and dropped it, smiling nervously. He scratched at his beard absentmindedly with the other hand. Laycia was, despite herself, fascinated. She’d had many reactions to meeting her for the first time—respect, terror, hatred, and more recently since arriving on Lustrathīr, disgust—but she couldn’t recall anyone so…relaxed. Steady.

Shrugging, he decided to plow ahead. “What a blessing! I did not think they would get a Silver Knight out to us this quickly after the power and heat failed,” He said. His accent was surprisingly familiar, Baytusian, but with something else flowery tossed in. “I had just finished looking in on my neighbors to make sure no one was suffering any ill effects from the cold so far.”

She cocked an eyebrow, not that he could appreciate it. “That’s quite…altruistic of you, Sīdus…”

He started, eyes going wide with surprise. “Oh! Of course, my name is Tendakeo. Tendakeo Moyonao. As far as altruism, that is just professional instinct, as a doctor, I mean.” Something dark passed over his face, gone in a blink. “I work at Central Medical, assisting the…other doctors with whatever they need. I would not be very good at my job if I needed to wait for someone to ask for help in order for me to offer it.”

Moyonao? Now Laycia had an entirely different set of questions. The Moyonao family were the system’s most prominent family of medical experts and life-science researchers. Their reputations as doctors meant they were known across all Elysannati worlds. Tarnished Silver, how did one of them end up here?

Schooling her voice, Laycia responded. “Well, Dotakīm Moyonao, I appreciate the quick thinking. You may refer to me as Equifār Verdaris. If more people were aware of the suffering of their fellow souls, Sinner’s Landing would be a better place to live.”

A murmured response in the crowd was followed by a sharp inhalation. Angry grumbling followed from that direction. Tendakeo looked over his shoulder briefly before returning his gaze to Laycia’s helmeted visage. The skull with burning pinpricks of light in its sockets did not, on the surface, appear to unnerve him nearly as much as it had Laycia when she’d first seen it as a Knight-Cadet long ago.

“Do you have any idea when the repair crew is going to come out?”

The Doctor’s response shifted her thoughts abruptly. She blinked rapidly as her mind recovered. Repair crew? Did he expect someone to come out and fix things like they would back in Baytūs? Why did he think the windows that got broken, stayed broken? Repairs cost resources, usually resources that the building’s residents, not the colony administration, are responsible for. The only exceptions to that were during the repair cycles set by the government. If he didn’t know that, then he couldn’t have been in the colony very long.

“When I’ve finished my investigation, I’ll file a notice with Infrastructure and Admin. Now, who—”

“And that will start the process to get the crew out?” He paused, confusion crossing his face. “I’m sorry, your investigation?”

“…That will let them know the incident happened, if you should make an effort to remedy the matter later—by pooling your rations to hire a crew to come out and fix it. Now, if you would allow me to continue, Dotakīm, yes, I am here to investigate a matter that has been brought to Headquarters’ attention.” Laycia gestured towards the Doctor. “Since you are in such a talkative mood, I nominate you as point of contact for this assemblage.”

He turned to look at the crowd, who all shook their heads and took partial steps back, eyes dropping to the floor plates. He turned back to Laycia and smiled weakly. “It appears to be unanimous.”

Stand out from the crowd, and get left in the cold, that’s the truth of Sinner’s Landing. Best you get used to that in a hurry. She cleared her throat. “Headquarters received a report about blood in the lobby and stairwell leading to this floor. I saw evidence of it myself, but it disappeared as soon as it crosses the threshold to this level. Do you know anything about that?”

His golden brown skin grew ashen. Before Laycia could come to a conclusion about what that might mean, Tendakeo spoke, words coming out in a rush. “That much blood-loss would be a serious wound. Have you found any more evidence? Has anyone had any wounds that they couldn’t explain? They would still be quite weak if they were walking around now.”

That was pretty much the conclusion Laycia had come to on her own. She thought back over her questioning of the tenants so far. No one had been suffering any wounds, and most of them had appeared to live alone. She had already scanned the other residents behind the Doctor for signs of distress or discomfort. However, as far as she could see, everyone was seemingly healthy.

A thought occurred to Laycia. What if the wounded victim were hiding in one of these powerless units? “Dotakīm, can I speak to you privately?” She inclined her head at a corner behind her.

After a moment of apparent thought, Tendakeo nodded. He looked over his shoulder at the crowd, who was still watching him intently. He raised a reassuring hand, and then followed Laycia around the corner. She turned and lowered herself until the skull of her helmet was within cems of brushing his nose. He eyed her curiously rather than pulling back.

“Did you actually go inside of these people’s quarters when you were checking on them?”

His neatly maintained eyebrows knitted together. Then understanding dawned. “Yes, I did. The vast majority, anyway. None of them were harboring anyone in need of anything more serious than disinfectants and minor bandaging from crashing into objects in the dark.”

Pitted, tarnished Silver. Laycia turned away in thought. Going back over her interviews, none of the people so far had seemed suspicious, or overly nervous. Well, no more than people usually were in her vicinity. Was the Doctor trustworthy? She almost laughed at the idea. Whatever he had done to get sent to the colony, he was still a doctor. If someone were hurt beyond his ability to treat, he wouldn’t hide them if their lives were at risk.

“If that will be all, Equifār?”

She looked over at the Doctor, and sighed. “Yes, I believe that will be all for now. I’ll return with further questions if I deem it necessary, but for now, get back to preparations for the cold. Father watch over you.”

He bowed his head slightly. “And you, Equifār Verdaris.” He returned to the crowd, who seemed happy enough to have him back. Well, of course. They’re probably pumping the poor fool for free medical advice and services. Hopefully he learns to protect himself before they eat him alive.

She made her way back to the stairwell entrance. The pristine floor plates taunted Laycia, their surfaces nearly polished in the spaces where the black paint had worn away. Someone had come in this building bleeding to death. That much was all but certainly established. Afterwards, they had managed to disappear into the void. That was all she had to put in the report so far, despite nearly an hour and a half’s worth of work.

She thought about conducting a door-to-door search. She shook her head. She’d already seen enough to know that if she were to go through the resident’s quarters she would find dozens of minor violations that would add up to severe, permanent consequences once she was forced to report them. She had spent twenty cycles rooting out real evil in the Silver City, she had learned to recognize it. These were just people. Scared, desperate, vulnerable people. There were others far more deserving of Marks within the colony, she knew.

She sighed as the third-level landing swung closed behind her. That doctor turned out to be a great help at least. He saved me a lot of time hunting in shadows for nothing.