The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T2.1 The Ëchüha Incident (Part 1)

Ngèza stretched one morbidly obese arm out and jabbed at her dataterminal with an index finger so swollen with fat it could have replaced Fhá's boyfriend.

"What does that say?" Ngèza asked in that classically managerial tone of condescending infantilisation.

"Priority one," Fhá almost groaned.

"Exactly," Ngèza said, so smugly her flopping jowls flecked saliva onto the side of Fhá's face.

"Working lunch it is," Fhá said, with jollity so fake and saccharine only management would buy it.

"That's what I like to hear," Ngèza replied, hoisting the half tonne of her mass off of Fhá's shoulder and out of the cubicle.

Small earthquakes slowly moved to the next cubicle over. Preemptively, Fhá tensed up, knowing what was about to happen.

"HVANG!" Ngèza shrieked loud enough to be heard by the His Majesty the Emperor two thousand parsecs away.

Five decades in the Ministry of Redundant Administration kicked in as Fhá's ears blissfully tuned out Ngèza's shrill voice tongue-lashing the face off of Fhá's most recent neighbour. There were those who would be completely unable to concentrate through the sound of bloody murder and banshees in heat, but not Fhá. She'd heard the same string of profanity and verbal abuse so many times it all just turned into white noise and party kazoos.

Gingerly, Fhà removed her blazer, doing her best to avoid touching the spot soaked with Ngèza's most proudly flaunted extracurricular activity. Once her now thoroughly ruined blazer was deposited in the bin, she opened the report, preparing herself mentally for a long, long day of shovelling feces on Ngèza's behalf. Not that she minded, of course. It was, after all, a senior bureaucrat's sacred responsibility to pawn their work off onto their underlings. Their underlings, being so graced as to have a job in the first place, and, yea, to be tolerated by their most benevolent of overlords, should accept such privileged opportunities with humility and gratitude. Even if it was a Priority One report. No, especially if it was a Priority One report.

P1's...they were everyone's favourite thing and always only ever one of three possible categories of delightful: a provincial governor upset that he'd not received his allotment of whores, drugs, and booze; some Bannerlord having a sook about the lack of cloaks to throw mindlessly at some enemy he was entirely responsible for having created in the first place; or a violent insurrection broke out for the third time this anno on the local penal world. Only the latter was ever a worthwhile concern, even if it meant creating another half dozen P1s a few Lunes down the line after the Bannerlord sent to go crush the uprising inevitably made the whole situation that much worse and started having a sook about the dearth of cloaks to mindlessly throw at the other cloaks who'd thrown in with the rioting prisoners. Incompetence and bureaucracy, Imperium Kaidan's two favourite things.

Then she saw the first document.

"What the fuck..." Fhá reacted, "Ngèza! Is this right?"

"Fhá! I'm busy!" Ngèza shrieked back.

"Apologies, ma'am," Fhá responded, reading the report more closely.

In fifty years, she'd never seen anything like this. DZ reports came along infrequently. That's just how the DZ was. Fresh colonies in unsecured space. Passages were dangerous. Transit lanes hadn't been mapped out yet and Colonial Charters were given high degrees of autonomy to get their operations up, running, and viable. A lot of them went dark, and the Imperial Administration of Colonial Charters would send a Charter Closure Report their way after the Imperial Ministry of Inquiries concluded their investigations.

Those were fairly dry and boring, describing one or more workaday reasons why the colony proved unviable. Dead and missing had to be logged into the census rolls, the world's status changed on the GMap, facts and figures input for use by the Ministry of the Imperial Treasury for taxes. Typical tedium.