FSE

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Chapter 1 Airlock

The fox morph keyed the radio just after pulling her car up to the curb in front of where her call is. "861 code 6 at signal 6." Little did she know that a routine "disturbance" call would change her perspective for the rest of her life. She flicked her tail quickly, trying to get the fur back into place, as she stepped out of the squad car. Working as a police officer in Freedom City wasn't exactly how she envisioned her life after the war, yet it seemed to fit the former pleasure slave. The training and programming that went into her "marketability" to certain groups of humans seemed to fit quite nicely with some of the memorization, psychological profiling, and investigative requirements of being a cop, especially in a newly formed governmental body on a newly settled planet. She stood up, bracing herself as she approached the residence she was dispatched to. I wish that dispatch had more information on the call, she thought to herself as she cautiously approached the country home. At the door, she knocked hard on the door, calling out "Police." She kept her right paw on her sidearm and her evidence recorder going while she waited the four or five minutes for someone to come to the door.

An elderly human woman answered the door, swaying slightly as she stood there with a cane in one of her hands. "Yes?"

"We received several calls indicating a disturbance here. Is everything ok, ma'am?"

The woman glanced back nervously, and then nodded emphatically. "Y...yes. Everything is fine, dear." The fox cocked her head, uncertain of why she was skeptical. "I don't know what you were told."

"Not much, ma'am." The fox sighed. "It's generally protocol that, on a call like this, we take a look around the house and make sure everyone is okay. Would you be ok with this, ma'am?"

The woman glanced back again, looking more nervous. "I...umm....No, officer."

"Are you sure, ma'am?"

"Yes. I do not need police assistance. Please leave."

The fox nodded and smiled to the woman. "As you wish, ma'am. Have a nice day." And with that, she turned around, walking back to the car. She glanced back, something trying to pull her back to the house, but got into the squad car and kicked in the thrusters, taking to the sky once again and headed back toward Freedom city.

***

The fox morph jerked upright, her chest heaving as her brain raced to figure out where she was and what was real. Chirping. Not birds. Familiar sound. What is this? Suddenly her arm reached out seemingly of its own accord and grabbed the portable comm, flipping it open and setting it to audio only. "Whitetail," she rasped on autopilot, her brain kicking the last of the fog from her consciousness.

"Lieutenant, we have something you should look at." She recognized the voice on the other end of her comm as Officer Tristan Kay, a wolf morph originally designed to be disposable infantry for use by the humans, turned police dispatcher because of his pack mentality and natural aptitude for taking in information and redistributing assets quickly.

"Spit it out, Kay," she said with a bit of an annoyance.

"Well...ummm....Lieutenant, we got a floater."

Out of pure reflex, she stared at her phone. Did he get into something? He's got to be hallucinating. She brought the com back to her ear. "Officer Kay, we're on a space station. How in the heck do we get a drowning victim on a space station?"

"Umm... Maintenance found him on an exterior repair." The fox shuddered, knowing that one first hand. "We're fairly certain that he was dead before being kicked out the airlock, but whoever did it somehow cycled an airlock without triggering the alert in the control center."

"Location?"

"Airlock 42."

"On my way." Detective Lieutenant Victoria Whitetail disconnected her comm, stretched, got up, and walked to the closet. She selected a polo shirt with an embroidered station police badge on the left chest and a pair of cargo-style shorts, slipping quickly into them. She secured the belt around her waist, adding her weapon, cuffs pouch, and her tin badge. Within five minutes, she was walking out the door to the garage compartment. She reflected that she was rather lucky, being that most people didn't have the luxury of a car on the station, much less a garage. She kicked the electric vehicle in gear and flipped on the signals, the red and blue lights coming to life as she took off for the thirty kilometer drive toward the airlock, the sound of the siren accompanying her drive.

***

At the airlock, she cut the siren, put the car in park, and stepped into the corridor outside the airlock. Where most space stations have the typical, bland bulkheads around their corridors, the Whisper System government contracted out to artists to decorate the station and make it more welcoming. And they did through all of the living quarters of the station, some areas with a painted sky and others with a series of computer controlled curved screens that truly simulate day and night. At the airlock, however, the bland of the typical station tends to show, as the risk of compromising the whole station with a bit of scrap matter is significantly higher there. The bare metal walls with the distinct markings indicating the airlock location on the ship made an almost poetic backdrop to the horror that is formed when a living person meets the horrors of space. There are only a few people that have survived the harsh vacuum and near absolute zero temperatures that surround the typical station. Unfortunately for the poor human in front of her, Whitetail was not looking upon one of them. But there is that first case who would probably dispute this fact.

She nodded acknowledgement to the crime scene techs who started running laser scans of the scene and shooting photographs. My how technology progresses but we still use the same old investigative techniques, she thought wryly as she watched the techs get everything documented with near infinite detail. It only took about 30 minutes for the techs to have everything recorded and documented, attached to the case files, before she was able to start her own investigation. The first thing she did was look over the airlock and shuttered briefly before glancing over at the human over her shoulder. "Sarge, has anyone ran scans outside and gathered trace?"

Sargent Thomas Brine is a human, and a big one at that. Not big like he spent too much time on a couch, but big like he could bench press a cargo ship without breaking a sweat. He stands right at two meters tall, weighs about 110 kilograms, and he has sculpted muscles that would make a Greek god jealous. And, god, he wears it well with that dark chocolate skin, brown eyes, and a smile that could pacify the most enraged psychopath, she thought before giving herself a mental shake to bring her back to the scene. The scary part is that he's smart and one of the kindest men Whitetail knows, as long as you stay on the right side of the law. He gave a quick sigh. "Yeah, for what trace there is in microgravity."

"Shit. Are you telling me that he was out there long enough for the evidence to float out?"

"Looks that way, Lieutenant." He shook his head and pulled up his PDA. "Station Command reports that they haven't had any unauthorized lock openings. This means that it could be a dump from a ship."

"Or, he could have been in the black quite a while, considering that it's nearly impossible to find how long someone's been out there past an hour or two without alternative evidence."

"Yeah."

"Get the records for the past six standard months. I remember an alert about then but the cursory investigation didn't yield anything. Look at the report back then. I think a rookie did the paperwork. See if they missed anything."

"Yes, ma'am!" And, with that, Brine took off back toward the station command deck. Where most space stations have a command structure not unlike the military, the WSTP, or Whisper System Trading Post, uses a council type setup for the station governance and laws, station police, a station judicial system, and related civilian-run organizations to keep the station running efficiently. Station command is the organization that oversees station traffic and maintenance, and generally work very closely with station police.

And hopefully they will this time, too. She went back to looking at the scene, taking it all in. She sniffed the air as she looked around with the attention bred of years of working through difficult crime scenes born of a new society trying to find itself in the universe. Something does seem off, though. She mentally cataloged the scene and suddenly it flashed in her brain and she slipped on the nitrile exam gloves. After the nod from the medical examiner, she rotated his hands to find that his fingerprints were mutilated to the point of being useless. Then she flipped him over and looked at what used to be his face. To say that his face met with a hypersonic battering ram wouldn't come close the lacerations, exposed and pulverized bone, and completely demolished teeth. After really looking at it, she realized what was done and her stomach dropped out. No, no, no, no, no! No one would dare have one of those here! She retched involuntarily and looked away, thankful that her russet fur can hide the distinct shade of green her skin achieved.