October 10, 2552: TAYLA
Chief Investigator Tayla Iyala hadn't seen that much blood in a very long time.
She swallowed hard, and entered the room.
The body was female. Pale and almost blue-gray. It was splayed out on the floor of the shabby, small room; arms akimbo.
There wasn't a head. Above the chin, what was the head had been reduced to a pulp that was scattered across the floor and the far wall, making a macabre red and pink splatter.
“What do we have, Jim” Iyala asked the young man photographing the body.
“Not much. She took it in the face, probably. High velocity flechette gun. Highly illegal here on Krugman but easy to get in any number of colonies,” said Jim Forina and the two of them grimaced. Being shot with a flechette was a painful, gruesome way to die, which was why Krugman’s planetary government had banned the weaponry a decade before.
“No ID Chip. This building was unoccupied due to be torn down for the spaceport expansion. Demolition crew found her.” He shrugged. “I do have one thing: the unusual pallor and her thinness. I bet she's not Krugmanian. I already sent a DNA sample to the lab so we'll know in a few minutes.”
“She's also too tall to be one of us,” said Iyala, out loud to no one in particular.
Forina's pad beeped. He glanced briefly at the screen before reattaching it to his belt. “Figured. She was Sarossan.”
Iyala blinked. “That's a long way away from here. What's she doing on Krugman?” It looked like a new mystery had arisen, and she directed a handful of techs to begin processing the room alongside Jim Forina.
“We’ve got something else in the next room,” said another tech. Iyala followed him.
The room was full of large, metallic shipping crates. The crates were unlabeled—no telling where they’d come from on visual inspection. Some were half-open and Iyala pried a few open, revealing their terrifying contents. Contained within the crates were the parts to build several, remote controlled neutron bombs. Iyala had seen these before, once, when she was in the Federated Bureau of Internal Security. Gideonite terrorists had launched a series of attacks on Soror and had almost acquired a shipment bought on one of the independent Trader Clan colonies, either Theyuma Free Station or someplace more distant. FBIS had never determined the origin point. Still, it was a lucky break. The neutron bombs were low yield but were perfect for ensuing terror and panic on humanity’s oldest colonial world and beyond.
Arresting those fools and sending them to Xilbaba was a pleasure.
She stepped back, shaken. “My God,” Iyala said after a moment, and Forina entered and echoed her. “What was going on here?”
“I don’t know but perhaps we should call Planetary Defense,” said Forina.
October 10, 2552 TYELL
