Serial - Part 3 (OC)

Serial (Part 3 – The Law)

The world was black save for the red eyes of the console, blinking intermittently if just to remind the universe that they still lived. He was weightless, thoughtless, empty. Somewhere else in the ship he could hear a child crying, as always. When it started its bellows were loud, hammering his every thought until he was sure he would go mad from the sound of it but that had been days ago. The bellows had become screams which had become shouts which had become whispers and now he needed to strain his ears to identify its agonizing death over the gentle hum of the ship’s reactor. He let the sound slip away and let himself drift into sleep, where the hunger couldn’t reach him. Soon, he knew, they would be eating the dead.

Then, sound. Something heavy was slamming against the hull. He opened his eyes, looking out the view port for the source of the noise but saw nothing. Floating to the display screens he opened up an external camera. One the screen was the ruins of a face, flesh hanging from it in jagged strips, mouth open in a silent scream. A moment later, he realized the face was his own.

Jackson Lawrence woke to the sound of a heavy fist banging against his door. He was in his bed, the sheets sticky with sweat. He glanced at the window. It was dark outside, well, as dark as it got on Keleshia. Even in the dead of night the triple moons bathed everything in a silver. Another flurry of blows struck his door and he rose, half walking, half stumbling over discarded laundry to slam his palm to the access panel.

The door opened soundlessly to reveal Inquisitor Vigari. He was one of the Em. Half of Jackson’s height but broad of shoulder he had a shape which was almost human. Two arms, two legs and a head anyways but the comparison stopped there. The Em were a plant based species, their body seemingly woven from pale white vines which twisted around a basic endoskeleton. The eyes were shiny black orbs, inset into the foliage and peering dubiously up at Jackson.

“Do you always answer the door naked?” Vigari asked, letting himself in and kicking aside a discarded pair of jeans.

Jackson groaned and hit the access panel again to close the door. “It’s late Vigari. Very late. When the hell do you sleep?” He pressed his head against the cool wall and tried to force the last vestiges of his dream back down into his subconscious where they belonged.

“I enter hibernation once every twenty cycles. And, technically, it’s early. Dawn’s in twenty minutes,” Vigari said. The Em walked to Jackson’s dresser, threw open the bottom drawer and began to root around inside, tossing fistfuls of clothing out onto the floor.

Jackson turned to face him, rubbing his eyes and absently watching Vigari move up to the next drawer. “Alright,” he said, “It’s early. But why am I awake?”

Vigari turned and hurled a clean pair of pants at Jackson who slapped them away onto the floor. “Because, the order has requested you accompany me to a crime scene.”

Jackson blinked in confusion, “Am I a suspect?”

“No,” Vigari said, “You’re an investigator. At least I thought so. By all means, if your bed holds more interest for you I’ll deny your application now.”

Now Jackson was awake. He stood up straight, “I thought I was still unapproved.” Only licensed Inquisitors were permitted on an active crime scene. It had been six months already since he had applied and Jackson had all but given up hope that he would join the red coated Inquisitorial Order.

Vigari pulled a small tablet from his pocket and jabbed the screen a few times. In response Jackson’s own tablet, sitting on the bedside table, chimed that it had received a new message. Glancing between it and the Vigari he picked it up and read. His mouth went dry and the last memory of his dreams fled.

“That changed twenty minutes ago. Welcome to the order, Inquisitor Lawrence.” Vigari said, tossing a round bronzed badge onto the bed beside Jackson, “Now put some damn pants on.”

---

Ten minutes later Jackson, nursing a nasty headache and a cup of coffee, crawled into the passenger seat of Vigari’s red sky shuttle. Inquisitor shuttles were all red, the shade of which always reminded Lawrence of almost dried blood. The order had been founded shortly after the formation of the Consortium and acted as its internal peace keepers to manage crimes committed between species. In this way each member species maintained its own internal police force yet gave over jurisdiction to the inquisitors in situations where the criminal and offending party were from different worlds. It was a thankless job, as far as Jackson understood it. Most peace keepers resented the Inquisitors stepping on their toes and a great majority of the people didn’t like aliens coming in to enforce Consortium law. The hours were long, the pay shitty and the long term prospects less than stellar which had all been primary reasons Jackson had gone for it in the first place. As if father always said, in a world of strife good men don’t die old.

Jackson held his new badge in his hand, running his thumb over the sun burst insignia of the Consortium. His father had been a law man on earth and later the evacuation ships Sherriff during its long trip through interstellar space. When he had died, massive stroke at the age of sixty, Jackson had taken up his post and served until they made land fall on Keleshia. As soon as he had gotten his land legs under him and learned that the Inquisitorial Order was a thing he had sent in his application. He had passed the physical examinations and the lengthy examinations on the, admittedly overly complex, Consortium laws. The only hitch had come when it came time for his psychiatric evaluation. Vigari had been the one to visit him and conduct the battery of brain scans and interviews. The problem was that the test, developed to analyze the mental stability of the thousand sentient species of the Consortium, wasn’t made for humans. He never got a look at the official test results but Viagri had told him they were contradictory and negative. It was only by his insistence ambassador Miller and a character reference from Vigari that they hadn't denied him outright.

“So,” he said, pinning the badge to the front of his father’s black woolen coat, “What happened?”

Vigari grunted, maneuvering the sky shuttle into an emergency lane and speeding ahead, “Murder,” he said, “In the Zerha residential zone.”

The mention of Zerha made Jackson’s heart jump a little. Outside of Jackson and a few other choice human envoys the great majority of the human race lived in Zerha. “Was it a human?” not sure if he wanted to hear the answer. “Is that why you brought me in?”

The Em eyed Jackson and licked the bottom of his lip with a pale white tongue, “No, it’s a Theolisian. A translator employed at the Monument. Some kids found his body about an hour ago, cut to pieces.”

Jackson’s brow furrowed in confusion, “So why bring me in?”

“Because,” Vigari said, “we are fairly sure the killer is a human.”

---

By the time Jackson and Vigari arrived in the cellar of the abandoned home the Keleshi peace keepers had already brought in light-disks, five spaced throughout the room, hovering close to the ceiling. The Theolisian was arranged in the middle of the room, his head mounted on the top. All those limbs, stacked so neatly reminded Jackson just a bit of Lincoln Logs, if Lincoln Logs leaks black, oily blood. He moved his eyes past the corpse.

“That’s the message?” Jackson asked when he saw it, pointing to the writing on the back wall.

“That’s it,” Vigari agreed, “Written in the Theolisian’s blood. It’s your tongue right?”

It was, Jackson agreed. On Keleshia they called it Humana but Jackson knew it as good old English. “Blood on the ground,” Jackson read, then gestured to the thick black splatter marks that lined the earthen floor and walls, “Well, they weren’t wrong about that.” He stood back, hands on his sides and his clenched jaw shifting from side to side. He could see why Vigari thought this was human work. There were only about five hundred humans on a planet with over ten billion lives of six hundred different species. He eyed the corpse again, noting that the cuts appeared to have shredded the flesh at the surface but clean through the bone beneath. “You sure it was a human who did this?”

“The message,” Vigari began but Jackson cut him off.

“Anyone could have written that. Humana isn’t the most common language but it’s in the Consortium data banks. Anyone could have looked it up.”

“It’s not just the message,” Vigari countered as Jackson moved closer to the butchered corpse and knelt, staring into the Theolisian’s lifeless eyes, “The Live Mind did an analysis of patterns in the dirt and concluded the presence of bare human feet in the areas surrounding the corpse. Chronological recreations of scene put the print here at the same time of the murder.”

Jackson knelt peered between the stacks of mottled gray flesh. “Did you check for toe prints?” he asked absently. When Vigari didn’t immediately respond he held his hand up, displaying the pads of his fingers to the Em. “Humans have unique skin patterns on their fingers and toes. No two are alike. Have the Live Mind check the foot prints.” To tell the truth, Jackson wasn’t actually sure if the Live Mind could do that but, judging by Vigari’s frantic tapping on his tablet he guessed it could.

The Live Mind was the backbone of the Inquisitorial Brotherhood. Calling it a super computer would be a bit simplistic. It was bioorganic, for one and almost sentient for another. Whenever an Inquisitor died, usually violently, their mind was uploaded into the Live Mind and their experiences and talents incorporated into its algorithms. It started slow but now, with two hundred years of genius intellects stored up inside it, the thing pretty much did the Inquisitors job for them, analyzing crime scenes, matching suspects and doing more analytical work in a fraction of a second than Jackson could do with the rest of his life. That was especially true as, when he shuffled off to that great refugee ship in the sky, his brain would not be incorporated into it as well. Still, he thought, following the sprayed lines of blood up the walls, there was something to be said for good old police work.

“Live Mind came back with none of these toe prints,” Vigari said, an edge of smugness in his voice. “Perhaps you are mistaken.”

Jackson thought on that for a moment, “No. He probably burned them off then.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Vigari demanded.

Jackson reached into his pocket and removed the stylus from his tablet, which he used to push up one of the severed arms in the pile, revealing the interior of the stack, “Call it a hunch. A guy crazy enough to butcher two people like this is crazy enough to set an hot iron to his foot.”

Vigari tittered, “Well, thankfully he’s only killed one so far.”

“Want to guess again?” Jackson asked, pivoted aside so Vigari could see the interior of the pile where a second Theolisian head was mounted, inverse of the one on top. They were connected at the neck with twine, sewed through their thick hides.

Vigari gaped and Jackson stood, letting the arm fall back down and conceal the second head. “Has anyone been to this guy’s house?” Jackson asked, gesturing to the corpse.

The smaller Em shook his head, “No,” he said, trying and failing to hide the thin shock in his voice, “Keleshi peace keepers set up a perimeter. We have priority.”

“Well let’s go exercise it then,” Jackson said, clasping a hand on his new partner’s shoulder. He was tired. His stomach was sick from the carnage and his head was throbbing but for the first time in the two years they had been on world, Jackson Lawrence felt alive again. He smiled, flashing enough teeth to make Vigari recoil, “Let’s see if we can figure out why someone would want to butcher a friendly dinosaur.”

---

Link to Part 2: Generation 1

Link to Part 4