Blood
Rachel had calmed down over the ride. Her fury at dealing with utterly incompetent morons, and then the adrenaline from a sudden encounter with her attempted murderer fighting her prime suspect, had faded. And now she just felt numb. She absently spent the next few hours rearranging her case board in the departments holoroom. It took a few minutes to add the Astarte/Assassin connection to the digital display of her case. Then she just sort of wasted time while mulling over the facts to give the CSI’s time to analyze the evidence.
Her assassin, who was the most likely suspect for several scenes of slaughter around Unity, had tried to kill Astarte after the pirate slipped past the containment. Astarte was then missing for a little under five hours before being ambushed.
Presumably the assassin didn’t carry any long-range weaponry since she hadn’t displayed any yet. So that meant the assassin had to attack on foot. Astarte likely survived the first encounter with the prodigious skill she had displayed and then proceeded to counterattack.
Those all made sense.
What made less sense was how the two were linked.
They obviously had a past. And judging by their interaction, a very antagonistic past that left one presumably dead while the other went on with her life. How did that relate to the current case?
At a first glance it appeared that Astarte and her demon ship had been drawn to Unity because of their stolen equipment. Stolen equipment that they had paid a lot for. But now it seemed like a personal attack if this Zera was involved.
Or was it coincidence?
Then there was the attack on Rachel herself. The assassin presumably targeted her because she had a tenuous link to Astarte. But that seemed a bit too convenient. She had no doubts that Zera would target people tangentially related to Astarte just for revenge. Their brief interaction was enough to show her instability. But was that really the only reason? Rachel and Astarte had barely any relation to speak of, but the Arbiter was thoroughly invested in this case.
And then there were the other mysteries to ponder. Was Astarte and her crew really pirates? Rachel kept referring to Astarte as a pirate in her head, but that was just to keep her at a mental distance. During their conversation at her parents party Astarte had opened up about her business model and it had shifted Rachel’s opinion about the pirate angle. But with Zera in the picture, and them both presumably sharing an acquaintance of Byron Greyson, the pirate angle was looking a little more likely.
And if she was a pirate then what was a pirate doing pretending to be an industrial mogul? Or was she pretending? And what the hell did a pirate need terraforming equipment for?
Judge often said that the more questions an investigation turned up the more likely it was that there was something much bigger going on. Rachel barely had a grasp on Astarte’s side of things, and she still had way too many questions about the supposed thieves and the assassin. Maybe she needed to expand the scope of the investigation and involve her fellow officers of the Anti-Deathworld crime unit.
The only reason she hadn’t yet involved them was because of Judge and his own investigation into his brother. There still wasn’t a direct connection between the two investigations, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be in the future. And that sort of thing getting out could be career suicide for Judge.
It was a great relief when a message from the crime lab analysts came in. They had finished their preliminary investigation and wanted to show her what they got.
She turned off her digital display and the holo-projector flicked off. Rachel flicked up her hood, and the Arbiter strode out of the ADCU to speak with the crime lab.
No one had decided to join the Arbiter on the elevator. Everyone had chosen to wait for a different elevator to take them to the next level. The privacy of the ride was part of the reason the Arbiter always wore their hood outside of the ADCU. The press of bodies got very tiresome after a while.
The elevator descended into the basement level and deposited them into a long blank hall. The sharp clicks of their boots echoed off the metal walls as they passed by several labs dedicated to different departments, until they stood in front of a bland doors labeled ADCU crime lab. A quick swipe of the card and the door buzzed as the Arbiter was let through.
The moment the door closed The Arbiter flicked the hood down and Rachel took in a breath of the sharp, antiseptic smell of the lab. On a typical day the lab could have eight to ten different analysts working away. But two were out on vacation, one had retired early, another two were out on maternity leave, and the latest hire transferred into a different crime lab so that he didn’t have to work with deathworlders. That left four people to cover three different shifts across the standard week. Which meant that at the moment the lab had only one occupant. A reptilian-like male from a species famed for their color changing abilities, the Neeka.
Neeka had long and slinky bodies, the reptilian answer to ferrets and minks. Their early ancestors mostly lived in burrows and only occasionally traveled along the surface. No venom or poison like the Egh’ahds supposedly had, but they did have hands just as dexterous as any humans which aided in the development of tools. The Neeka in question was hard to spot at first as their bodies unconsciously blended in with their surroundings. But once Rachel saw a bit of movement she was able to better make out Blik’s shape.
She strode over and approached Blik from the side and observed the disassembled arm of the assassin. “What do you have for me Blik?”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
The Reptile didn’t jump like most did when a deathworlder snuck up on them. He had begun his career working in the ADCU and had gotten used to their presence. “You were right to be worried about traps, there were small explosives that would have been easy to trigger without forewarning. And that blank screen over there is the result of me trying to tap into its OS and user data. Unraveling all that malware is going to be a headache.”
Rachel felt burst of gratitude in her chest for Astarte’s warning, but quickly smothered it. the woman had said its what she would have done, which meant anything they seized from her would also be trapped.
“And the arm itself. Is there anything you can tell me about its make. Maybe a manufacturer to check in on?”
Blik turned a nuclear shade of green before relaxing “That’s a little more difficult. Best as I can tell all the materials used are completely custom. There’s only a few common standard parts. Even the metal casing is some sort of new titanium/aluminium blend that isn’t available to the open market. No oxides so I can safely say they’re either very finely refined, or nonterrestrial in origin. But asteroid mining is common across the whole Union. The silicon used for transistors is also extraterrestrial in origin, with little traceable impurities to trace which specific mine. I can tell you that the arm appears to be experimental, or a prototype. It was too easy to open up and had a lot of room for adjustment to be a finished product.”
“Who could have the resources to produce something like this?”
“Lots of people. Any company working in prosthetics or mechs. And even amateur engineers, though I doubt that’s the case here. While the alloys are custom they aren’t difficult to make, they just don’t have a mass market application yet.”
“What do you mean any amateur could do this?”
“Not any, but some. I’ve heard rumors about some unrecognized inventors making strides in the art of prosthetics. There’s been a few big advancements trickling out of your own homeworld, things that really show the depths of human neuroplasticity.”
“I don’t have a homeworld.” Rachel said flatly. “I was born and raised here. Never even been to Earth.”
“Your species homeworld then, doesn’t matter. A decade ago the word of an all mechanical human cyborg would have been ludicrous, but now it seems like a logical extension of emerging discoveries. There’s an anonymous paper out of New Mombasa of a man who claims to have reprogramed his finger nerves to control whole separate limbs. He had pictures of some sort of pseudopod thing in the paper.”
Rachel ignored that horrifying image and focused on the important part. “So a human can just replace their whole body? I thought that violated some sort of principles of consciousness.”
“Not exactly principles of consciousness and more mechanical limitations.” Blik said after shifting yellow with black stripes, his natural appearance.
“Explain.”
“Well for one the nerves attached to a brain only send signals so fast. And electrical wires send signals faster than that. So its not really possible to attach the brain to a bunch of wire because they would overload the grey matter with too much info. And slowing things down is difficult. So unless you figure out how to replicate nerves artificially its not typically possible to replicate that in artificial limbs. And you can’t just add more RAM to a brain because of how delicate it is. Or that’s what we thought. Recently humanity has presented some new opportunities to try things that are traditionally impossible.”
“How so?”
His conical focused on Rachel, his body language pensive as he thought through things. “Insanity is nothing knew to biology. Every species experiences it. but sometimes humans can be born, uh, I hate to say broken, but that’s basically what it is. Their brains are capable of letting them survive and interact with people, but there’s always a disconnect. Most humans have a sense for how people should react or how they should think.”
“Your talking about neurodiversity, how people brains can be differently wired.” Rachel guessed. She had learned the term during her studies into humanity and had thought little of it. she hadn’t ever thought of it as being inherently broken.
“Yes. Your kind think of it as just a strange thing that happens. But for most species its not possible to survive having the wrong connections in our neural pathways. But your brains, while still being characteristically delicate, are also frighteningly adaptable. According to new findings humans with an atypical brains are more capable of surviving body modifications without completely losing their sense of self or overwhelming their brains. Even normal humans adapt to mechanical limbs remarkably well. Adapting within days or weeks where it would take a normal person months to years.”
“So our assassin is some sort of freak.”
“Maybe, hard to say from an arm alone. However her psych profile from the Parox Terran Correctional facility corroborates that theory. The staff psychiatrist lists an abnormal lack of empathy, unhealthy sadism, unhealthy obsession, and a tendency to fly into a rage.”
“You looked up her prison records?”
“Yes, you gave me the name and place so it was easy to find a human who matched. The women in question was arrested for attempted murder and needed emergency surgery to save her. She was severely cut up.”
Rachel had an idea of who. “Anything else?”
“Yes, according to her file she suffered a heart attack after being tased by several guards after she killed several fellow inmates. There was no investigation since she was clearly recorded to be violent and unstable, her time of death was marked, and her body disposed of.”
“My informant was very convinced to the assassin’s identity. And I’m inclined to believe her.”
Blik’s colors shifted “by all records she should be dead. I don’t know what to tell you.”
Rachel sighed, “Alright, putting that aside what about the eye. What did you get out of that?”
Blik shifted back to a neutral beige “Not much to report there, even calling it an eye seems a stretch. Its more like a eye shaped camera.”
“Isn’t that what an eye is?”
“No, even the simplest eyes are far more complex than a camera. Besides that, this ‘eye’ is only part of our assassins ocular system. This is just the lens to a much larger and more complex system. The rest of our assassin’s head is likely occupied with more intricate circuitry”
“So cybernetic eyes are still very much impossible?” Rachel asked suspiciously. Not that she suspected Blik was lying to her, but she was sure she saw the pirates eye flash red. And thinking back to their first meeting there had also been a red flash.
“Not without replacing a noticeable portion of the persons head. unless someone made a stunning leap forward.”
“Okay, so if the eye is just a lens for the assassin’s vision, then how hard is it to replace?”
Blik thought for a moment, “Not hard. The thing looks like it was designed to burn out after a while and then get replaced. She likely has some replacements ready. Now the arm is a different matter. It can be maintained pretty easily, but creating a new one will require the aid of several nano factories. And there are only a few on Unity. We can’t trace what all those machines have made throughout their service life, but we’re watching all of them right now for irregularities.”
Rachel smiled for the first time since coming down “Good, I can arrange that. Anything else before I go.”
Blik turned purple “Yes, there is, but I’m not sure what it means.”
“What?”
“Well the officers collected several blood samples from the crime scenes. I had hoped that maybe I could find some DNA from our assassin. But all of the blood found was from the victim.”
That made sense. She had kept the details of the investigation into Astarte a secret, and only told Blik that she had been the target of the assassin. “Anything of note?”
“Depends on what you find note worthy. Many of her nutrient levels are fairly high, more consistent with what you’ll find in human body builders than a typical human female.”
“Makes sense, she was strong enough to match wits with our cyborg.”
Blik nodded slowly, still very nervous. “I also found some unusual traces of odd compounds. Not drugs, but also not the typical vitamin you would expect to see in human blood. And they seemed intentionally ingested and processed into an easy form for the human body to absorb. What I don’t understand is why. Her body shouldn’t be capable of absorbing them nor using them. And unless she has some sort of unique organs to process them they should be very harmful.”
“Okay, weird. Could I get a list of those, I can run it by some experts in Terran biology”
“Yes.” Blik said still a bright shade of purple “then there’s the results of the DNA test I did to see if there was any record of her in our system.”
“And was she?” Rachel asked.
“No” Blik said cautiously “But parts of her DNA was. The parts from her Japanese ancestry. It would appear her father is in our system.”
“And who is he?” Had crime been a family business and Astarte was just following in her father’s footsteps? Might explain the obviously fake names. Connections to convicted criminals would be suspicious.
Blik turned a screen and Rachel stared into the familiar image of a Japanese man whose DNA had a high match with Astarte’s.
“What the fuck!” Rachel cursed as she looked at her mentor’s profile pic.