Lawmen- Rook and Berenger Read online

  “You mind opening this up?” Berenger asked.

  Moreland hit a button on it, and the tube’s covering slid open. Berenger’s bionic eye glowed red as he scanned the body.

  “The report here says that you’ve been unable to make an identification,” noted Deckland.

  “That’s correct,” Moreland responded. “There are no matching DNA records in the colony databanks.”

  “Surely her parents would have reported her missing by now,” Deckland said. “In a colony this small it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out her identity.”

  “You’d think so,” Moreland agreed. “But here’s a strange thing in a long list regarding this case… she’s not from the colony.”

  Berenger and Deckland both exchanged a curious glance. “How do you mean?” Berenger asked.

  “There are no missing children in Skinny Plains,” Moreland replied. “When I made the announcement about the discovery of the body, all the children here were accounted for. No one’s reported anyone missing, and as I said, the victim’s DNA is not in our records anywhere.”

  “What about the central DNA database? Have you checked there?” asked Deckland.

  “Man, you really are a core worlder, aren’t ya?” Moreland replied. “We don’t have access to that type of thing out here in the Frontier. Not in Alpha Renway, anyway. And even if we did, there’s little likelihood she’d be in there since folks this side of the Great Expanse aren’t automatically included in it.”

  “Okay,” reasoned Deckland. “Is she from a neighboring outpost somewhere on the planet?”

  “There ain’t no neighboring anything around here, Ranger,” Moreland said. “Aside from Skinny Plains, there is no other settlement on Sarjana.”

  “Then, where could she have come from?”

  “I was hoping you two could tell me that!”

  “The only other option left would be that her body was dumped from a vehicle or starship,” said Berenger.

  “I already checked. There were no vehicle tracks other than the survey Roamer which discovered the body, and the colony’s sensor scans picked up no starships flying over or around the discovery scene at any point within the last two weeks.”

  “Could her body have been dumped from the survey Roamer?” asked Deckland as he glanced back at the casefile on his datapad. “The supervisor who leads the team – Gariff Loksyn – could he have killed her and staged discovering her body?”

  Moreland shook his head. “I highly doubt it,” he said. “Gariff doesn’t strike me as a child killer. Besides, the records from his Roamer and survey-bots confirm his story of how he happened upon the body. She was there before he was, that much is for certain.”

  “Even if she weren’t, it still doesn’t explain where she may have come from,” said Berenger.

  “Now do you see why I’m in over my head?”

  “You said there was a long list of strange things regarding this case,” Deckland said. “What else is there?”

  “Well, the cause of death for one,” Moreland replied. “When I first saw her, I figured it must have been exposure that killed her, what with how hot it gets on this rock. But once we started examining her, it became obvious that any damage from the sun happened mostly after she’d been dead.”

  “So, what killed her?” asked Berenger.

  “Organ failure.”

  Berenger raised his eyebrow in curiosity. “Organ failure? In a ten-year-old?”

  “Not just any organ failure, neither,” Moreland continued. “Catastrophic organ failure. Everything inside this poor girl was liquified.”

  “Liquified in what way?” Berenger asked.

  “As in her internal organs had entirely broken apart and turned to goo,” Moreland said. “Everything else was intact, though. Her bones, her muscle, her skin… it wasn’t until we opened her up that we saw what had happened. Poor thing. I can’t imagine the type of pain she was in before the end.”

  Berenger frowned. “That’s a mighty odd thing to happen,” he muttered. “Did the autopsy find out what caused her insides to melt?”

  “We ran every test in the book and came up empty,” Moreland said. “I’m not going to lie… part of me is relieved it wasn’t some strange alien virus or something that could affect others here in town. The other part of me is very well annoyed that we haven’t been able to figure out what caused this.”

  Deckland looked up from the autopsy report on his datapad. “It says here that the cause of death was ‘undetermined’,” he said. “I understand you don’t know what caused the liquification, but if she died from organ failure, why isn’t that listed in the autopsy?”

  “Because the med-bot that performed the examination couldn’t conclusively determine if the organ failure could have occurred before the exposure might have killed her,” grumbled Moreland. “You know how bots are. They can’t really do things outside the bounds of their programming, so it was forced to list the cause of death as undetermined, even though I’m fairly certain organ failure is what did it.”

  “Why didn’t the colony’s doctor do the autopsy?” asked Berenger. “Or at least give you a second opinion?”

  Moreland frowned. “He was ordered not to involve himself.”

  “Ordered? Not to help in the investigation of a dead child?” asked Deckland in disbelief.

  “When Stygaard discovered the girl wasn’t from the colony, he refused to allocate resources to my investigation,” Moreland explained. “He said he didn’t want Skinny Plain’s only doctor taken away from his duties caring for the living to do something a med-bot was perfectly capable of.”

  “Has Governor Stygaard impeded your investigation in any other way?” Berenger asked.

  “No,” Moreland replied. “He’s actually been very supportive of my efforts. He’s just a little stingy when it comes to colony resources. The guy’s a credit-pincher, you know? It’s in his nature to be tight with things, especially around here on a planet with so few resources to support a colony. The most valuable things in this town are the miners, and Stygaard needs to keep them healthy and injury free so that they can continue to work and help make this place viable.”

  Berenger nodded before bending over the body again, examining it closely with his bionic eye. Deckland stepped to his side, also giving the body a thorough look for the first time.

  The girl’s skin was tan and leathery, with mismatched coloring resulting from a combination of sun exposure and lividity. However, there were areas of light, pale skin where apparently the girl’s clothes had shielded parts of her body from the sun. She had long, dark, matted hair and the pointed ears that indicated she was a Regal. A Y-shaped scar ran down her torso where the med-bot had opened her up for the autopsy examination. Deckland frowned sadly as he looked at her. Despite all the damage that had been done, she still looked like a child who had suffered far more than she should have in her short time within the universe. He couldn’t help but feel a tinge of sorrow for what had happened to her.

  “She was tall for a ten-year-old,” Deckland observed, gesturing to her legs, which were long and lanky.

  “Mm-hmmm,” replied Berenger as he gently lifted her arm and moved its muscle tissue slightly with his fingers while examining it with his bionic eye. “Where was she found, again?”

  “About thirty miles outside of the colony,” Moreland replied, “on the plain, not quite at the mountains.”

  “But close?”

  “To the mountains? A little,” said Moreland. “About ten miles from where the plain ends and it starts to get rocky.”

  Berenger moved down to continue his examination, his bionic eye glowing as he inspected a number of cuts and bruises on the bottom of the girl’s feet. While he did that, Deckland called up the images of the crime scene on his datapad, looking at the area where the body was found. “Wow,” he said. “You really covered the discovery location. This is a very detailed casefile.”

  “One of the benefits of having a full team of 3D mapping
survey-bots discovering your crime scene,” Moreland said. “They did every scan in the book and then some.”

  “Any of those scans pick up tracks from the girl that might indicate the direction from which she had come?” asked Berenger.

  “Unfortunately, no,” Moreland replied. “There’s a lot of desertscrub grass out on the plain, enough to disrupt any trail of tracks we might have found. That, and without trees or anything to break the wind, the breezes out on the plain erased any footprints that might have been in the dirt.”

  “Well, one thing is for sure,” said Deckland. “We certainly have a lot of data to comb through.”

  Berenger stood upright and hit the button to close the preservation tube, sealing away the body once more. “If’n you wouldn’t mind, Chief, I’d like to take a look at the area where you discovered the body.”

  “I figured you might,” Moreland said. “The colony has a holo-projection room they use to assemble survey data into holographic replicas. I got clearance to have the discovery scene reconstructed there for you to take a look at.”

  “Excellent,” said Deckland.

  “If it’s all the same to you,” said Berenger, “I’d prefer to go to the actual scene.”

  Both Moreland and Deckland gave Berenger a curious look.

  “But... there’s nothing there that wouldn’t be in the reconstruction,” said Moreland. “And it’s a bit of a drive, especially in the heat.”

  “That’s okay,” replied Berenger. “I don’t mind either.”

  “Excuse us for a second,” Deckland said as he turned his back to Moreland and sidled up to his partner. “Berenger, have you seen all the data they collected?” Deckland whispered, showing Berenger his datapad’s screen. “Any holographic reconstruction they make would be just as good as actually being there. Better, actually, since the scene has no doubt been disturbed from the elements by now.”

  “But it wouldn’t actually be the real scene, would it?” Berenger whispered back.

  Deckland grimaced. “Let me guess,” he muttered. “You want to make the long trek out into the blisteringly hot desert because you don’t trust holograms.”

  Berenger pointed his finger at Deckland like a gun and fired it off with a smile. “You’re catching on quick, Rook,” he said before turning his attention back to Moreland. “Now if you wouldn’t mind, Chief… please take us to where you found the dead little girl.”

  Chapter 7

  The air outside the Skinny Plains Medical Center was hot but dry, as the men emerged from the building. Even in the shade of the coverings over the roads, it was still extremely warm, enough to make Deckland start sweating almost immediately.

  “My Roamer is back at my offices,” Moreland said. “Don’t worry. It’s air conditioned. The Roamer, and the office.”

  “Thank the Great Observer,” muttered Deckland. The climate control in the pod buildings made him forget how uncomfortable it was outside. He could tell Moreland didn’t care for the heat either as the man pulled out a handkerchief to wipe beads of sweat from his face and neck. Berenger, on the other hand, seemed completely unaffected.

  “Y’all didn’t happen to leave any portable shielding equipment out at the crime scene in order to preserve it, did ya?” asked Berenger as they walked.

  “Afraid not,” Moreland admitted. “My office doesn’t have such equipment yet, and Stygaard refused my request to allocate a shield unit from the mining operation, since I couldn’t tell him how long I’d need it for. But, frankly, the survey-bots did such a thorough job of recording the scene I didn’t feel it was really necessary.”

  “Ah! Master Berenger!” came Wadsworth’s voice.

  The men turned to see Wadsworth hovering toward them with a faded and aged backpack in his possession. Moreland gave the robot a curious stare as it approached the group.

  “There you are, sir,” Wadsworth said. “I came as soon as I received your message that you were going out into the field. Here is your rucksack, as requested.”

  “Much obliged,” Berenger said as he took the rucksack from his robo-butler.

  “What do you have there, Ranger Berenger?” asked Moreland.

  “Just my field kit,” Berenger said as he slung one of the rucksack’s straps over his shoulder before turning back to Wadsworth. “Head on back to the ship and do that other stuff I tasked you with, if’n you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all, sir,” replied the robot as he turned and began hovering away.

  Moreland gave Berenger an amused look. “Well now, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a robot like that before.”

  “That’s because I built him,” Berenger replied.

  “Really? You gave him the metal moustache and everything?”

  Berenger shrugged. “He’s modeled after someone I used to know,” he said. “I think it gives him some personality.”

  “Don’t misunderstand, I like the idea,” said Moreland. “More bots should have moustaches if you ask me. Like they always say, never trust a man without facial hair. No offense, Ranger Rook.”

  Deckland rolled his eyes at the comment, not regretting his choice to be clean shaven in the least. “When did you message your butler?” he asked Berenger. “I didn’t see you call him.”

  Berenger gave a tap behind his right ear. “Got a subdermal communicator implant that’s linked right to him,” he said. “Y’all didn’t hear me talking as we left the med center?”

  “I did, but I just thought you were mumbling to yourself,” Deckland replied.

  “Do I honestly look like some crazy person who’d just walk around mumblin’ to himself?”

  “Kinda.”

  Berenger scowled at Deckland before tightening the rucksack strap around his shoulder. “C’mon, let’s be on our way,” he said. “Daylight’s a-burnin’.”

  Moreland led the Rangers to the colony’s municipal building, which appeared to be wider and taller than all the other pod units in the settlement. Once inside, Deckland could breathe easier again thanks to the cooled air of the building’s climate control.

  They were greeted by a large holo-sign in the building’s lobby that had the shape of a shooting star partially encircled by a laurel wreath beneath it and the words Stygaard Industries encircling its top. Berenger eyed the insignia with a modicum of disapproval.

  “Shouldn’t that be an Imperial insignia, seeing as how this is an official colony now?” he asked.

  Moreland shrugged. “I’m sure updating the building’s seal is on the list of things to do,” he replied. “Right now, Stygaard Industries is the thing keeping this colony afloat far more than the Empire is. Stygaard has hitched his wagon to the mission of ensuring this colony succeeds. His company is gearing up to start an expansion of the system’s mining operation, which is where all the focus is at the moment. Their offices monopolize most of the building. The actual governmental offices take up hardly any room at all. I’m sure that’ll change eventually, but right now Stygaard Industries runs this town, not the Empire.”

  “You make it sound as though your governor cares more about his business than his colony,” noted Deckland.

  “From what I hear, Stygaard’s whole fortune has been invested in this endeavor,” Moreland said. “So, I guess it’s understandable if he’s focused on recouping some of that. If Skinny Plains fails, so does Stygaard Industries, and vice versa.”

  “Sounds like he’s taken a big risk.”

  “Maybe,” agreed Moreland. “Then again, what would you risk for the chance to be granted a Legacy?”

  Chief Moreland led Deckland and Berenger through more drab hallways to the structure’s large garage, which housed several vehicles, most of which looked like they were for the mining operation with a few that appeared to be for personal use. Moreland’s Roamer was parked in an area cordoned off specifically for the Peacekeeper Department. The group had almost made it to the vehicle when a nearby elevator opened and a tall man emerged, flanked by two other men in black uniforms with a pink
sun insignia on their shoulders. The new arrivals immediately began walking to intercept the lawmen, and Moreland stopped the moment he saw them.

  “Governor?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Came to greet our guests, James,” replied Sylas Stygaard as he approached. He was clad in a tan suit and a high-collared, light-blue shirt. His wavy dust-colored hair was combed back on his head, and he had a pencil-thin moustache over his upper lip. His long face was lined and weathered, and his hard, gray eyes were in direct contrast to his welcoming smile. “Dulph informed me he saw you in the building from the security feed. You two must be the Rangers I’ve been hearing about,” he said as he shook the hands of Deckland and Berenger.

  “And you must be Sylas Stygaard,” Berenger replied.

  “That would indeed be I,” Stygaard said. “Your presence in Skinny Plains is most welcome, gentlemen. Nothing against my Chief Peacekeeper here, but it’s comforting to know the Empire has sent some of their best men to investigate this tragedy.”

  “Why are you here in the vehicle bay?” asked the man to Stygaard’s right – the one with broad shoulders, close-cropped blonde hair, and cold, steely eyes.

  “And who might you be?” asked Berenger.

  “Allow me to introduce you to the chief of my personal security detail Dulph Krytaar and his associate Rykar Stiles,” said Stygaard. “Forgive Dulph. He can be rather blunt at times. We were all simply curious when we saw Chief Moreland escorting you here to the municipal vehicle bay. Are you planning on going somewhere?”

  “We’re heading out to the scene where the body was discovered,” Deckland said.