Wonderful.
“We’re not going to fit through the doors in the suits,” I told Vicky, yanking my ‘face cables and popping the chest plastron. “I’m getting out. Stay buttoned up and cover me.”
Light flooded the suit as the chest plate swung open and I squinted against the glare, letting my eyes adjust for a second before I twisted out of the suit. Reaching back inside, I pulled out the pulse carbine from its niche in a recess on the side and extended the stock.
“Be ready to bust through the wall if I scream for help,” I added.
“You know I’d walk through walls for you, Cam,” she said, only half kidding.
Before deciding on a direction, I stopped and took a deep breath through my nose. No smell of rot. That was a good sign, at least in the sense that it meant I wasn’t going to walk into one of the buildings and stumble on a half-eaten corpse. Bad in the sense that it meant whatever had happened here had happened a long time ago.
The one-story office the coyote had run out of looked official despite its lack of signage, and I decided to start there. I stopped a few meters away and knelt beside the femur. I wasn’t an expert on forensic archaeology, but the bone looked at least a year or two old, and it did not look as if it had been dug up from a grave. Someone had died and been left where they fell.
Male, Jim informed me. Adult. A centimeter or two taller than you, probably.
I didn’t bother asking how he knew. It was likely in among the data he’d downloaded from the Orion’s systems, and even a truncated version of the AI that was able to squeeze itself into my implant computer could still analyze the length and shape of the bone and compare it to the samples in its memory.
Rising from the coyote chew toy, I brought the carbine to my shoulder and ducked inside the one-story structure. The door lay on the floor just inside, the lock blasted off with an energy weapon, I judged, but the hinges ripped apart with brute force. Maybe a battlesuit could do that, but I didn’t know what else could have managed it.
It was a government office. Local government, because I doubted the Commonwealth would have bothered with the place. There was nothing worth having in this system other than the minerals in the asteroid belt and the atmosphere of the gas giants, but even those weren’t worth the investment because of shipping times… and because of the reality that nearly every system had their own asteroid belt and at least one gas giant. They were only worth mining if the system supported the infrastructure, like 82 Eridani with two habitables, one of them being the Commonwealth military headquarters.
Places like Plateau only existed because some group of misfits had managed to cobble together the money to fund a single run out to the edges of the Commonwealth with a couple fabricators, frozen cattle embryos, and a load of genetically engineered seed. It was a rough life, even rougher than the one Vicky and I had tried on Hausos, but some people just wanted not to be bothered. I didn’t begrudge them that, but it also meant they had no protection other than whatever they could kludge together with their fabricators and black-market patterns.
The theory was that they wouldn’t have anything worth stealing, which wasn’t exactly true. To some of the lowest, bottom-of-the-barrel elements among the raiders of the Pirate Worlds, humans were always worth stealing, particularly when they couldn’t fight back.
That hadn’t happened here. Someone had put up a fight, or else the dismembered bodies scattered across the floor of the government office had all died of natural causes and been ripped apart by scavengers. There were at least half a dozen bodies, or at least that was the best estimate I could make counting arms and legs.
Six, Jim confirmed. And from the damage to the ones and the clothes, I would say they weren’t killed by energy or projectile weapons.
Then what? I wondered.
Unknown. The bodies have been stripped of flesh, or I might be able to discern cause of death.
I touched my earbud.
“We got bodies in here,” I told Vicky. “Six of them. Bones.”
“Copy. No current threats?”
“Not yet.” An intact data terminal caught my eye. “Hold on, I’m going to see if I can access their records.”
Picking my way through the field of bones should have been creepy, should have sent the hackles rising on my neck, but unfortunately this wasn’t even in the top ten of grisly scenes of death and destruction I’d experienced in my short life. I brushed the bones aside with the toe of my boot, their rattle dry and mocking. Beneath one of the bodies was a gun. I paused and picked it up.
Stamped metal, probably mined locally and fabricated here in town. Ejecting the pistol’s magazine showed me the truncated missile shapes of Gyroc rounds. Not guided, not slaved to a targeting system, no explosive or armor-piercing warheads, just the basic miniature rocket weapon available almost everywhere. It had only three rounds left in a magazine that could hold twenty, and I looked around the inside of the office for impact points.
There. Above a desk made from real wood, three craters blown in the adobe wall by the rocket projectiles. All three at least half a meter above where a human head would be. Nothing that tall could have fit in this room, but if the guy was shooting wildly, why were the impacts less than ten centimeters apart? He had to have been aiming up there.
Or something redirected the rounds in that direction, Jim suggested.
Whatever that meant. I ejected the live round from the gun’s chamber, then set the gun gently and respectfully back on the floor, tossing the ammunition aside. It clinked spitefully, a mocking sound, amused by my confusion. The data terminal should, I reckoned, be powered by the solar collectors I’d spotted from the air, out past the overhang. No one had bothered to destroy or steal them, which might mean no one had bothered to disconnect them either.
The screen of the terminal was old, cheap to replace and easy to fix, and the crack along the corner wouldn’t keep it from working. I tapped the surface of it with my bare fingertip and it snapped to life with an emblem that looked like a cross between a family crest and a corporate logo. I didn’t care what it meant, just cared about accessing the menu. It was filled with useless shit like cargo manifests from the few supply ships they were able to attract with the paltry income they’d managed from selling exotic meats to the rich. No more than one every six months, it looked like as I scrolled through. The last one had been over two years ago.
As I scrolled through the records, I noticed that a lot of the last things they’d inputted had happened two years ago. The last reports on the crops harvested, livestock born, slaughtered, processed, and packaged for shipment. Fabricator output, requests for spare parts, everything ended two years ago. None of that told me more than the bones though.
Why are you screwing around with a touchscreen when you have a computer inside your head? Jim asked petulantly.
I paused and looked up as if he were standing in front of me.
“How the hell would I give you access to it?” I demanded.
Plug your ‘link into the input jack, you technological infant. I can access it remotely.
“God, you’re such a bitch.” But I did as the AI instructed and pulled out my datalink, folding out the jack and plugging it into the side of the terminal.
The screen flickered, the menu scrolling so quickly I couldn’t follow it before ending on the logo again.
“Well?” I asked, shrugging. “What did you find out?”
Read it for yourself.
The terminal flashed through the menu again, but this time when it settled into a function, it wasn’t a mass of text but a video. Not one recorded by the colonists—who would they be recording a video for? These didn’t seem like the kind of people who liked hearing themselves talk. No, this was an official announcement from the Commonwealth government broadcast wide over every InStell ComSat through the wormhole jumpgates to every connected system and from there to every military ship, cargo ship, and registered passenger carrier not just in incorporated colonies but every unofficial settlement and even to the Pirate Worlds.
It wasn’t used too often, or at least it hadn’t been back when Vicky and I had been on Hausos, and I figured that was because even the officious idiots who ran the Commonwealth knew that crying wolf would make everyone ignore the warnings. Which was more of an indication this was serious than the grim look on the face of the too-pretty woman who made the announcement—she was likely a computer construct anyway, despite the Patrol uniform she wore. There was a date in the corner and, unless I and our suit and personal datalinks had lost count, it was almost exactly two years ago.
“This is an official announcement by the Commonwealth Patrol Service,” she said, enunciating each word as if to emphasize how important it was that everyone pay attention. “An extremely contagious virus has been spreading through the colonies via independent cargo vessels. This Transformation virus affects the human brain and nervous system, causing violent behavior and narcissistic delusions of grandeur. Infection is airborne, and those who’ve been influenced by the virus will do everything in their power to pass the virus on to others.”
“What?” I blurted, frowning in confusion. A virus? Viral infections could be dangerous for settlers out in the Pirate Worlds, where people hadn’t received the standard nanite treatments at birth that were given to all residents of the megacities and the larger colony worlds, but other than that… the notional Patrol officer interrupted my doubts, continuing her announcement.
