Via shuddered with cold and terror alike as she crept through spore towers and lace-vines toward the bodies scattered in a circle around a large glittering specimen terrarium. The containment windows on the hut-sized experimental unit lay wide open. The native flora in the terrarium were covered in frost, but--adapted as they were to Aquarius's frigid weather--the cyan plant-like lifeforms had survived.
The scientists hadn't been so fortunate.
Via stared down at the first body, an old woman. Like the other Ancients, her pale skin was flushed a livid cherry red.
Just like Ivan and probably Grand Ma.
Via's attempt to review the recorded footage yielded nothing useful. Unlike the arcology, the station lacked a true security system. Such surveillance wasn't necessary here; few people ever ventured to the day-side anymore.
The killers would have just erased everything anyway, Via reminded herself as frustrated disappointment pricked deep.
Swallowing, she summoned a swarm of nanites drifting aimlessly above her and set them to the task of recording the crime scene. She was no Lifesupporter and could not perform a full autopsy, but the nanites began dutifully collecting information for Mitis to assess later. In the meantime, as Via gazed sadly from one corpse to the next, the nanites supplied her with their preliminary findings as to the cause of death.
"Just hypothermia?" Via muttered as the knowledge filtered into her. Her teeth began chattering.
Ignoring the station's warning that she had fifteen minutes left before the killing cold added her to the pile of bodies, she accessed the Caeles. As the mists rose in her mind, she fed them her questions and received an immediate response.
Hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning could both turn a corpse's skin bright red.
"Nothing suspicious here," she muttered with an eye roll, then glanced around. "Let's see what they tried to blame it on this time."
She spotted the culprit immediately and frowned. The terrarium's nanite controls had been modified long ago to allow the Ancients to use them for their experiments. She squinted at the holographic display hovering in mid-air above the bodies.
On one side, English words scrolled downward in blue lettering like a glowing waterfall. It took Via a few moments and a slight neurological tweak by her internal nanites for her to translate her grandmater's mother tongue.
"P-procedure," she muttered in English, scanning the text and continuing to read from memory as she walked to the other side of the hologram and peered at several hovering control panels. "Examining the effects of p-predicted increased temperatures and blue-green light supplementation on the germination and development of s-select indigenous flora."
The Ancients had completed most of the tests in their planned sequence, subjecting the specimens in the terrarium to increasingly Earth-like temperatures and visible light frequencies. But the tests had halted with a sudden massive drop in temperature to -150 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the planned 150 degrees.
Via shook her head, shuddering with more than cold as she transferred the incomplete study to her case files. The Ancients had been some of the best scientists back on Earth, all experts in their fields. They might not have been sorcerers, but they had been working with nanite technologies for fifty years. She highly doubted that they would have made such a simple but deadly mistake while running a scientific experiment.
And why had they all been running the experiment together? Her grandmater and a few of Kaitlyn's colleagues had been life scientists, but the others had been physical scientists or even social scientists. Why were economists, psychologists, geographers, and physicists studying the impact of terraformation on native flora?
And why had anyone been running an experiment in the first place? The Ancients had only visited the Sunlit Station for their annual Landing Day celebration. It was supposed to be an evening of drunken trips down memory lane onboard the Sublime Light down in the lander bay, not scientific research.
She gritted her teeth as she brushed her will over the terrarium and commanded it to restore the default environmental controls. It's like Umbrata, Lucina, and Sententia don't care how suspicious all of this looks. They've slapped the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability on mass murder like they expect me to shrug and turn a blind eye.
The station pulsed knowledge through her again with a louder clamorous reverberation than before. She clasped numbing hands to numbing ears with a wince, but the sound wasn't truly audible, only mental. Dread and urgency poured into her, triggered by the station's direct neural link. If she did not retreat somewhere warmer in two minutes, she risked a rapid descent from hypothermia, to frostbite, and then death.
Via growled under her breath as much as her shaking body allowed. Then she raised the terrarium's temperature to 0 degrees Fahrenheit to preserve the bodies without compromising the station, retreated to the habitat wing to warm up, and contacted Mitis.
"Are you sick?" the Lifesupporter asked, his bushy brows drawing together in worry as his face took shape in the gray mists filling her mind's eye.
Via shook her head and snuggled lower into the blanket she'd wrapped around herself. "Just a bit cold." She sipped her mug of hot coffee from the station's cafeteria. "I need you to come to the day-side, and fast."
He frowned. "A little cold? Kid, I can feel the hypothermia from here. What's wrong? I can get there in maybe an hour if you need help."
"I'm fine. It's not for me." She swallowed. "I'm afraid I need you to perform some more autopsies."
After she slipped out of the Caeles a few minutes later, she sighed and, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, rose from the bed where she'd retreated. She had an hour or so before Mitis arrived, assuming he wasted no time hopping on a lander. Back to work.
She returned to the lander bay, intending to visit the spherical Sublime Light. The cryo-ship had been equipped with excellent environmental sensors that were vastly different than the colony's nanite-based technology. The ship had been designed to not only transport its cryogenically-frozen passengers through the stars but help survey their new home. Its sensors may have detected what the station could not, and no sorcerer could disable or erase records that weren't nanite-based.
Maybe it picked up something useful.
Even with hope surging through her, she still gasped when she stepped onboard the ancient blue cryo-ship, which glowed like a moon in the black lander bay.
The modulated voice intoning on the circular bridge to twenty long-empty cryo tanks spoke in crisp English. "Warning: dangerous geological anomalies detected."
Via hurried to stand beneath the spiral-shaped speaker, though she knew the ship could sense her even from several miles away. "Computer," she said in her stilted English, excitement squeezing the air from her chest and making it hard to form words. "Tell me about the geological activity."
The ship could not initiate a neural link to show her its answer, so Via focused hard on understanding its foreign words as it gave her a purely verbal response. "Fifty hours and thirteen minutes ago, my sensors detected a sudden shift in the pressure and temperature of an underground coal seam in a cavern three miles from here. The resulting subterranean fire produced several toxic gasses, including carbon monoxide. Then I detected an anomalous fissure in the local bedrock that--"
"Anomalous how?"
"The fissure formed in the absence of seismic activity."
Via nodded grimly. The cryo-ship's AI had been built before nanites started being used for terraformation. It would not recognize sorcery. "Then what happened?"
"The fissure extended from the cavern and passed through three miles of bedrock to the Sunlit Station, then fully sealed later. My sensors no longer detect it."
Her heart began to race. "Was any of the carbon monoxide released into the station?"
"I am uncertain. My sensors detected carbon monoxide approaching the station via the fissure and micro-vibrations in the floor of the station that indicated that the fissure had breached the station's crystal lattice. However, my sensory capacities within the station are limited due to the unique structure of the lattice, and I am not equipped to perform accurate chemical analyses within its walls."
She wasn't surprised. The station's crystalline nanostructure was composed of exotic matter and generated a field that could disrupt some of the Ancients' more primitive devices. She was lucky the ship's sensors could pick up much of anything outside of the station.
"Were you able to detect which levels of the station the fissure breached?" she asked.
"My sensors detected a breach extending from level one through level three."
Three. Not the arboretum then, but the habitat deck.
Then they may have died there, and someone moved them to the arboretum afterward. The experiment was just to cover it up.
"Did you also detect a temperature change in the thirty-sixth level?"
"Yes."
"Was it before or after the breach?" She held her breath.
"It was two hours and seventeen minutes later."
Probably as soon as everyone passed away. The killer must have collected all the bodies and relocated them to the arboretum. "Was anyone here in the station or surrounding areas at that time?"
"Within the thirty-mile radius my sensors can detect, twenty-one humans and numerous indigenous flora and fauna have been present in the last week. Prior to that, no humans visited over the course of several weeks."
Twenty-one. Twenty if you exclude me. Two if you exclude the eighteen Ancients. People visiting for innocent reasons? Or...
"Can you identify who the visitors were?" she asked.
"Eighteen of the visitors were members of my original crew. One visitor of an unidentified human subtype was a second-generation descendant of a member of my original crew, and two visitors were strangers with identical DNA of an unidentified human subtype. I can only provide the names of my original crew, however."
Via's eyes narrowed. Identical DNA... Everyone in the Chief Terraformer bloodline is a monozygotic twin. That's twenty-two people in the colony.
"What were the gender and age of the two people with identical DNA?"
"I cannot determine gender based on biological markers alone. However, the individuals possessed a female genotype, and I estimated their biological age to be approximately two hundred years."
"Got you," Via growled. At two hundred ten years old, the Chief Terraformers were the only twins to have seen two centuries. They'd lived and worked on the Eternal Radiance during the last sixty years of the god-ship's long journey.
Via slid her awareness into the Caeles and yanked her reeling mind toward her mater's face.
As Patria manifested before her in her inner vision, Via clenched her hands at her sides. "I'm transferring data to you now. I'll be home in an hour. Please authorize a warrant for the Chief Terraformers' arrest. And if Mitis isn't already on his way to the Sunlit Station, please get him moving stat."
An hour later, Via leaped over her lander's unfolding ramp and all but ran through the Starlit Arcology's diamond-white halls to her mater's office.
Storming into the room the instant the ornate double doors slid open, she said, "Did you have time to review my findings? I need you to--"
She broke off, staring at the grim senior detective leaning, arms crossed, against the desk where her mater sat. Then her eyes slid past Ars and Patria, and ice filled her veins as her gaze settled on the two old women standing behind the Chief Navigator.
Patria's face was pained but hard as she glanced over her shoulder at the twin Chief Terraformers and then back at Via. She straightened her shoulders and drew a deep breath. "Via Astralis, you're under arrest for falsification of evidence." Via's mater swallowed, then nodded at Ars. "Take her away."
*~*~*
CHAPTER ARTWORK
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The arboretum
The USS Sublime Light cryo-ship