Date Point: 3Y 4M BV
Trading Station Daze of Days, Dominion space
Station Security Incident Log
[1830 hours] – Officer received a report of a damaged stasis container left, unsecured, in loading dock 11, berth 38 following unscheduled departure of Corti independent vessel Evaluation Derivative. Officer was unable to contact departed vessel, and no copy of the ship manifest remains – security sweep of container GG18992730 and analysis finds trace unknown inert organic compounds, no reference record on file. Container was breached and stasis deactivated/damaged, but was found otherwise empty. No bio-hazard threat determined present, container swept with bio-field and rendered inert, provided as salvage to reclamation contractor.
Date Point: 3Y 1M BV
Vz’ktk Security Officer Pz’trrk
Station Security Incident Log
[0230 hours] – Dispatch received contact from a concerned citizen, requesting an officer respond to take a report of theft.
Pz’trrk ambled easily to the address his implants displayed as the origin of the call. At the door was an irritated-appearing Rauwhyr, short fur fluffed out in distress and obviously awaiting him impatiently. Pz’trrk chewed placidly on a Cqcq leaf, and leaned down to talk to the shorter shop keeper. There was no sense in getting all upset about things…these kinds of theft reports in his experience never amounted to much – some property damage, some missing things which got paid for by insurance…nobody hurt, not a big deal.
His ocular implant auto-loaded a brief summary of notable information, which was blessedly short; the citizen was a shopkeeper that owned an establishment catering to the few species in the Domain that were meat-eaters, and had moderately good sales for such a niche market. He had been in business for 2 standard [months], was current on his fees and tax assessments, and had universally positive reviews on the local net from customers.
“Officer! Thank you for coming…I hope you can do something about this. If this keeps up, I’m going to be ruined,” the Rauwhyr burst out as Pz’trrk leaned down.
“Okay, now, Mr…,” Pz’trrk consulted his implant for the name, “…Relth. Walk me through what happened.”
“It’s my breeding stock of Dizi rats…it’s my primary source of meat for the shop. This is twice now somebody has raided it. Last time I lost about five or six of them, and this time it was the whole colony full! Thirty of them, nineteen females and eleven males. I’m going to have to buy a whole shipment of them now and have it rushed here, while I stay closed for the next week, because otherwise I’ll run out of meat entirely.”
“You say twice now. Did you report the last time?” Pz’trrk asked.
“No, I’m afraid last time I thought I’d just miscounted or something. I opened for business, this was several weeks ago, and there were some missing out of their container in the back. I didn’t think much of it – nothing else was missing, and there wasn’t any sign of forced entry or whatever. It wasn’t until I got here today and saw that they were all gone that I realized it wasn’t the first time.”
“And nothing else is missing?” Pz’trrk said dubiously. Who steals Dizi rats ?
“Not at all. The first thing I did this morning when I realized what had happened was to do a quick inventory and download the usage history from the door.” The Rauwhyr tapped on a tablet, and Pz’trrk’s implants registered several security files and a video transferred to him. “As you can see, there is literally nothing there. Last night, I had a full stable, and this morning, there is nothing in there at all but blood everywhere and a little fur.”
“Well, let’s take a look,” Pz’trrk said, intrigued a little despite himself. This was actually turning out to be …interesting, of all things. He set his ocular implant to ‘record’ with the streaming upload to the police data storage, and went in. The interior of the shop was oddly anticlimactic; very clean, neat, ordered, with nothing out of place, and he could quickly see why the proprietor was insistent that nothing else was gone. It would clearly have been immediately apparent. A quick once-over of the doors and the front, public area, and he went with Relth into the back, where there was an assortment of grills, cooking equipment, and so on, with two doors to the cooler and to the habitat area.
The latter was where he opted to look first, as the scene of the crime, if crime it was. On opening the door, his nose was assaulted by a wash of warm air and unfamiliar scents; some musky animal-scents, scent of greens used for Dizi rat food, the ozone of electricity running through power cables, the pungent scent of the hydroponic connector, oily grease from a machine of some kind standing in the corner, and overlaid on top of and permeating everything else was the nauseating metallic scent of blood. The source for this was obvious; Pz’trrk was familiar in an academic sense with Dizi rats and how fragile they could be, since it was a primary feature in their breeding as meat animals to begin with, but this…. This looked like someone had exploded an ancient and putrescent Zrrk all over the inside of the habitat, only orangish instead of a dark black/green sludge, with a shallow layer of water covering the very bottom of the container, most likely from the overturned water bottle.
“So…,” Pz’trrk started, then paused. “Yeah. It looks more like something exploded your Dizi rats, not took them.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. None of the containers were used to take anything away. There’s no sign of any of the meat anywhere outside of the habitat, and the meat of the actual animals is just …gone.”
It was true. Other than the smears…on the inside of the habitat and nowhere else…there was no sign of any of the little derpy creatures anywhere. No blood, almost no fur at all, no bones, no flesh, meat, or whatever else you wanted to call it…they were just gone. He took his forensic kit out, enabling the uplink from his own implants and the data already connected to a fresh case file almost on autopilot. He took another Cqcq leaf out and began chewing on it. It helped him think.
Several disbelieving scans later, he was forced to conclude that there was really no evidence to go on. No evidence of entry, no video from outside, no indication of how whoever had taken the rats had gotten in, or out for that matter…just…nothing.
“I’ll go ahead and file this. I’m afraid that there isn’t going to be much to go on, though, and I don’t think we’re going to have a resolution for you,” Pz’trrk finally told him. “We’ll keep it open, and if anything else comes up that looks related, we’ll take it into consideration…but I have no idea who could have done this, or how it happened. It’s possible something else may come up that will make this more clear, but I wouldn’t count on it happening.”
Relth made a curious gesture with his wings that Pz’trrk’s translator interpreted as resignation. “Very well, officer. Thank you for coming, at least.”
Pz’trrk filed the report on his way out the front door and went off to his next dispatched call. By the end of his shift, he had forgotten all about it.
Date Point: 2Y 1M 4D BV
Hydroponic engineer Lolwut
“That’s odd,” the big Locayl muttered to himself, giving the diagnostic tool in his hand a thump with another hand. It didn’t change the reading at all; there was definitely a sizeable clog in the junction he’d been dispatched to check out, found an hour earlier by an automated water-flow monitor.
This shouldn’t even be possible, he thought. How did that saying go? “Anything that can go wrong, will….?” He put the sensor away and pulled a hefty pipe wrench out of a tool bag. A few quick turns later, the water flow was diverted out of the section he was in, leaving only whatever it was that was stuck, stuck. He found the closest connector and began to uncouple it, resigning himself to the fact that this was probably not going to smell terribly good. Long experience had taught him that much – despite the fact that this was supposed to be an outflow from the initial water treatment stage to the primary stage, something obviously could and had gone wrong, allowing this clog to occ…
The seal on the pipe popped, and the mildly pressurized contents came spraying out, in a foul greenish-black goop with an unbelievable stench that made him gag. Fortunately, Lolwut had also encountered such things before and was prepared with protective equipment in the form of a body shield that prevented the worst of it from getting on him. It wasn’t a protective shield against any kind of weapon, but more of a “let’s not get whatever that is on me” barrier that was helpful for all manner of common hazards. Eventually, most of the pressure had been bled off, and he was able to peer in and see what exactly it was that had gotten in there, holding his nose with one hand and trying to breathe shallowly.
As he expected, the internal screen filter had done what it was intended to do and had caught the majority of whatever this was, preventing it from going further. He popped the thing out and stuck it in a bio-hazard container, grumbling about how disgusting people could be, when something shiny fell out of the glop onto the floor with a metallic clink. He reached down and picked it up, examining what was unmistakably a high-end cranial implant of some kind. It looked almost …melted… around the edges. What the hell? Not even a trip through the treatment plant would do that. It was also, apparently, totally inert, since it didn’t respond at all to an experimental query of who it had been attached to or where it had come from.
As he scooped out the rest of the muck, resorting to a set of hand tools rather than using his own hands, he began running across larger chunks of something unidentifiable that had a sort of…meaty texture to it. He schlorped it all into the hazard container along with the filter, rinsed everything out, and then put a new filter in. At long last, he was able to seal the bio-hazard container and sanitize the outside of it. Hopefully, whatever this had been was sufficiently sterilized by the treatment system, but he wasn’t going to bet on it. The smell certainly lingered. He activated the hover unit under the hazard container and pushed it ahead of himself to the nearest comm point, where he alerted the lab – like most large communities housed in the hard vacuum of space, being self-contained meant needing things like a full diagnostic suite in the event of something going haywire with the oxygen-, food-, and water-providing hydroponic system. After letting them know he was coming in with something to take a look at, he thought for the moment and made another call to the security office. The implant he’d found had come from somewhere, and how it had ended up where he’d found it was a very, very good question.
As he was arriving at the lab, he was greeted by a Vz’ktk officer placidly chewing something and obviously in no hurry to do anything, ever. He kept the container of Maker-only-knew-what moving with two hands, and extended the implant in a bag as he walked slowly.
“Hi, officer. I sent the details on where I found this along with the report. Here it is.” The taller officer took it with one hand.
“Thank you. I’ll see if I can track down whose this was, and maybe figure out how it got there,” he said. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
“Sounds good. I’ll let you know if I find anything in all of this,” Lolwut replied, gesturing at the container. “I have no idea what this is, or how it got there.” The security officer acknowledged his statement, and plodded off to the next call. Lolwut slid the hovering container though the large lab doors and into a diagnostic cell, where the automated systems promptly made a series of bloop noises. That, he had expected.
What he hadn’t expected, though, was the immediate bath of violet light and the alarm that indicated a biological contagion inside the container. A maximum-strength quarantine field popped into existence around the diagnostic cell, and Lolwut himself was suddenly immobilized as well, as a Corti-made sterilization field played up and down him several times. A second, weaker quarantine field for good measure blocked off the still-open door, and he was able to look beyond to see the security officer (actually moving quickly for once) hustling back with a look of obvious alarm.
“What’s going on?” the officer asked through the opening, as though it weren’t relatively obvious.
“I’m not sure. I guess whatever this stuff was, was dangerous in some way. I feel okay, but…” Lolwut trailed off. Outside, the officer had held up a blue hand as both text and an audible voice began listing off results via the interface just outside the room.
Scan result: contents of container, 76% match with Corti genome. 24% unknown foreign biological material. Warning: inert but dangerous sporocysts and bacterial samples found, unknown origin. Precautionary stasis field active. Purge? (Y) (N)
The interface blinked insistently, demanding an answer of some kid and repeating the question. Lolwut, all too aware of what a “purge” protocol entailed, waved urgently.
“No!!!! I’m in here too, if you purge the contents of this room, I’ll go with it!” he yelled in a bass squeal of panic. The look of comprehension on the security officer’s face was as welcome as it was slow to arrive. He pulled a hand back from the display interface, just as it greyed out, the secondary quarantine field deactivated, and Lolwut was released. From behind the security officer came the knee-level small piping voice that had the distinctive tones of a displeased Corti.
“Thank you officer, I will take it from here.” Scurrying past the much taller Vz’ktk came a diminutive gray figure, who favored both of the taller aliens with a displeased sort of noncommittal annoyance. When he didn’t move, the new arrival gave him a level look. “Officer, unless you plan to stay and assist me, which would be both very brave and utterly foolish, I am quite capable of dealing with a simple biological contagion in my own lab.”
“Yes ma’am. I will be going to file my report,” said the hapless security officer, intimidated despite himself at the sudden appearance of competent authority.
“I’ll take that as well, please,” she said, holding out a hand. “It would be unfair to place the complex task of tracking down the last owner when the security force has so many…other… important things to be doing.” Wordlessly, the officer gave her the implant and beat a hasty retreat. “Now,” she said, “What to do with you?”
Lolwut, still shaking a little from the close encounter with whatever it was that he’d pulled out of the hydroponic system, stood very still, perfectly aware that Netri, as the chief engineer for habitat operations, was well within her rights to fire him on the spot. Belatedly, he recalled that there was a protocol for active dangerous biological contagions, and if he had followed that protocol, he probably wouldn’t currently be between an angry administrator and a bucket full of something that could potentially kill everything on the station. She sighed a moment later.
“You have no idea what is going on here, really, do you?” she finally asked him. Numbly, he shook his head in an almost universal gesture for ‘no’. “I suppose I can enlighten you, inasmuch as I am able….Suffice to say, I have been looking for this implant, or more to the point, its owner, for a while now. He owed me a great deal and disappeared on board about three weeks ago.” Her long grey fingers played idly over the terminal display, and abruptly within the quarantine field, a blazing orange light played over and both container and its contents were vaporized in a hellish bath of energy. “However it happened, this is obviously what is left of him.”
“One final note. If you encounter anything further in the hydroponic system, I expect to be notified about it prior to you doing anything else at all. Is that understood?” Her tone made it abundantly clear that any other response would be met with swift disciplinary action. He nodded. “Good. Back to work…and Lolwut? Not a word to anyone.”
continued
Date Point: 1Y 10M 15D BV
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…
“Come on, Kitro. Answer the door, we’re gonna be late,” clacked Tri’ttktt at the closed door to her friend’s apartment. Kitro was always a little late, but he usually answered the door chime at least. Their first day of work at the station’s Service Help for IT Solutions (a name that would have wildly amused any human putting the obvious acronym together in English) was due to start in about an [hour], and she didn’t want to be late. She looked surreptitiously right and left, and slid a hand-sized device out of one pocket, pressed it to the door-chime pad, and the door abruptly whooshed open. She practically leaped inside, shutting the door behind her lest anyone see her hack the door controls.
“Kitro….come on, where are you?” she called. Her heels clacked across the hard floor as she hurriedly checked his bedroom…nope. Primary living space…no….she went reluctantly towards the bathing and personal waste room. Nothing there either, or at least no sign of her friend. The floor was wet, and she felt her breakfast about to come back up when she realized that while most of it was water, some was most definitely not and had the sharp nasal tang of blood. Her friend’s clothes were strewn everywhere, which wasn’t like him at all. The air was moist from recent bathing, carrying with it an odd musky scent that was utterly unfamiliar.
Puzzled and not a little alarmed, she called a report to station security and to her new supervisor, and once security had arrived, hustled to work. She spent her first entire day trying hard to focus on learning her job and reviewing everything put in front of her without getting sidetracked in wondering what had happened.
Kitro was never seen again.
Date Point: 1Y 5M 27D BV
Trading Station Daze of Days Security meeting
The buzz, clacking, and murmuring of the security force filled the room in an expectant soft cacophony as the various attendees spoke with one another. None of them knew what the subject of the meeting was, and it was highly unusual to have this many off-duty officers present. In fact, no-one could remember the last time it had happened, and it wasn’t time for their quarterly staff review.
The chatter died away abruptly as tall door at the front of the room entered, and a dignified Rrrrtktktkp’ch entered, ambling slowly to the podium at the front. To an attendant room, he looked around and made the peculiar rumbling gurgle that was the Rrrrtktktkp’ch equivalent of clearing the throat.
“Good morning. The reason for this meeting is to discuss a pattern of incidents, or potential crimes, that are emerging stationwide.” The room’s lights dimmed abruptly, and a hologram of the station came up as a softly glowing blue wireframe and rotating slowly.
“We have identified a trend in residents and transient workers disappearing; when this trend was identified, we did a comparison of similar incidents and found…well, this. Each red dot represents a disappearance.” On the model hovering mid-room, a scattering of dots appeared, crawling from one side of the station to the other in a steady progression. “This is over the last two years. At first, nothing, and then with a striking regularity, every few [cycles], one after another. Something is happening, and the only anomaly we can find that immediately predates the beginning of this pattern, is this.” The display of the station’s layout dissolved and reformed into a security video of an abandoned stasis container in a loading dock.
“Something or someone was in this container. We are certain of it. What that something or someone was, or where it came from, we do not know at this point.” The security administrator’s gaze swept the room as the lights came back up. “We know that the vessel that held this container left it here and departed without filing a flight plan or giving any indication of where they had come from or were departing to. What records there are reflect only that the ship was flying under a false registration. Beyond that we simply do not know. These disappearances take place almost universally in a specific set of circumstances; low light or darkness, and the person that disappears is alone. It has happened in private quarters, in maintenance hallways, in the waste-water treatment facility, and in the outer docking ring. There is no evidence of how entry or egress is being made, and there is never much beyond trace evidence left behind to indicate that anything has happened. We suspect that the hydroponic or other water treatment systems are involved in some way, because we have, several times, encountered scenes from where someone went missing, where the floor was still wet.”
One, more senior, officer raised his hand, to the murmuring encouragement of the others in his immediate vicinity. “Sir? Do we have a plan for approaching this yet? I don’t think the public has yet caught on, but that can’t be too far away, or we wouldn’t be having this meeting.”
“Indeed. The more we can do now to forestall a public panic, the more effective it will be when the news does break.” The Chief of Security turned back to the holo in the middle of the room, which again changed back to a display of the station, with a particular section outlined in a brighter blue.
“Most of the disappearances are here, in this general area. This is where we will begin our search, starting with maintenance accessways and the hydroponics and other water system main lines. You will work in pairs, and each of you will have scanning tools for anyone there that shouldn’t be, or anomalies. Be wary – if you find anything out of place or out of the ordinary, you will withdraw, contact central dispatch immediately, and let the response team handle whatever you find. If you are asked questions by the media, you will refer them to my office. We are announcing a security drill to the public today, so you should not get too many questions.”
The main lighting for the briefing room came back up as the mid-room holo vanished. “Pair up, and get to work. Dismissed.”
continued
Several hours later
“Nonono, rookie. We work out here. You two get to go in there.” The speaker was the senior section officer, an older Vz’ktk that had obviously had enough personal resources to replace the usual Dominion-issue standard security equipment with much higher grade stuff that fell just short of military-grade hardware. He hefted a pulsegun with both hands, gesturing with the business end towards the open, dark, passageway into the bowels of the station. The two junior officers traded a look, and then followed orders, accompanied by the snickering of the two senior.
Inside, their security harness lighting played around the tangled walls of conduits for the various station necessities, which lay exposed like some kind of grotesque metallic innards. The ambient moisture in the air was considerably higher in here, at times even coalescing into wisps of vapor that played tricks on the eye. As they went, both nervously activated their scanner suite and video recording devices, intent on seeing anything and everything. Both were on edge, and knew it.
“Did…did you hear about that alien a couple of years ago that beat Hunters to death with its bare hands?” asked one. Ptk’kk was the more senior by about a month, and assiduously watched news vids of anything unusual he could find.
“No. Probably Alliance propaganda,” returned Kptkt, his partner. “You shouldn’t believe most of that crap you find…that was probably all done in a studio or something, if there was even video. It’s all just for ratings anyway. Somebody’s making money off whatever it was you were reading about.”
“Seriously. I saw the secure-cam video footage of it. It ripped a leg off one of them and beat the others to death. What if something like that is, you know, here?” insisted Ptk’kk. In front of him, Kptkt paused, then swiveled his head on its long blue neck to regard him with one eye.
“If there is such a something, and it can beat a Hunter to death with one of its own legs, and it is loose on this station, it isn’t going to be lurking around in the utility sections of a trader station in the middle of nowhere for months on end, making lone citizens disappear. It would be doing whatever it wanted, and we couldn’t do a thing to stop it.” Kptkt said. “Let’s just clear this section and get out of here, okay? Besides, like I said, I doubt anything like that actually exists anyway.”
“Something is going on, though. They wouldn’t have us out here doing this if there wasn’t anything at all, you know,” persisted Ptk’kk. He scanned around at the walls vaguely. “I don’t know whether I’m hoping for something to happen or not.” Kptkt continued in front of him, studiously looking at the scanner screen as he swept left and right.
“Hold on. There’s an anomaly just around this corner,” Kptkt said, pausing. He scanned upwards, then around in a circle. “It appears to be something on the ground that isn’t supposed to be there…but in here, that could be anything.” He put the scanner down, hanging by a strap, and raised his rifle. Behind him, Ptk’kk adjusted slightly, and they peeked around the corner. Approximately three meters further was a shadow illuminated slightly by one flickering light, lying still on the floor. Kptkt pulled a security light from his harness and trained it forward, the light playing across what appeared to be an unmoving mound of fabric.
“What…is that?” Ptk’kk asked after a moment. “From here, I can’t tell.”
“I’m not sure. The scanner is picking up organic material,” Kptkt said, engrossed in the display and tapping at it absently. He walked forward and prodded the pile with one blue hoof, and the top of it shifted, then slid aside to reveal the source of the reading. It was an arm…or, leg, actually…a sizeable one, and Kwmbwrw by the look of it. The fabric appeared to be a utility harness, sturdy woven fabric and straps ripped in much the same way that the proximal end of the…limb… had apparently been ripped from its owner. Ptk’kk stifled a gag, turning away and, unfortunately, played his light further down the corridor. A soft thud sound echoed from further down the corridor.
A short distance away, a scene of utter bloody mayhem greeted the sweeping light. Another limb lay by itself, approximately four meters further in, and beyond that was a bloody wreck that could only be another. Splashes of blood spattered the walls, the ceiling, and pooled on the floor. Beyond the end of his light, Ptk’kk realized he was hearing….something….massive moving, rolling around in a solidly thumping rhythm that he could feel faintly through his hooves as whatever it was hit walls and the floor. Both officers as one looked at one another and bolted back the way they had come, gallop-flailing and bleating in terror. Neither even thought to key their communicators until they were well within the lighted main corridor, panting, panicked, and wide-eyed.
The reaction force was swift and immediate. Heavily armed security drones followed by four Vzk’tk officers in layers of shielding, with heavy security harnesses powering nigh-military grade kinetic pulse weapons, descended on the corridor, sweeping through with the best precision they could muster against an unknown and untested potential assailant. They quickly reached the point that Ptk’kk and Kptkt had turned around and fled from, finding the same remnants and bloody disembodied pieces. As they pressed on, several noted that their auditory sensors and their own hearing found nothing resembling the thumping sound reported. To their credit, they pressed on despite every sense in their basic, evolutionary impulses screaming at them to run, run the other way.
Finding what was left of the Kwmbwrw nearly broke even the bravest of them. Utterly crushed, the only recognizable part was the fur; the usual thick, barrel-shaped body, even separated from most of its legs, should have been much…bigger. Rounder. Instead, what they found was a torso that had been smashed, seemingly squeezed simultaneously from every direction, as though it had been put into a waste compactor somehow, and then dumped unceremoniously into this maintenance hallway for some undefinable reason. An unholy stench of blood, excrement, and viscerae, heavily overlaid with an odd musky odor, permeated everything.
“Whatever is responsible for this must be somewhere nearby,” ventured one, sweeping his lights around the corridor and into the maze of piping forming the ceiling. “The body hasn’t cooled yet, and from the report, however this happened, it was happening when we were summoned.” There were murmurs of agreement from the other three.
“You two, continue down the corridor and look for anything else, and be wary,” the squad leader ordered, pointing out two and indicating the direction with a wave of one blue hand. He transferred controls of two of the security drones to accompany them. “We will secure the scene here.” The two remaining drones spread to either side of the scene, deploying brilliant bluish-white lights to the walls and ceiling that banished shadows in every direction except for the knife-sharp shadows behind the two officers. Coherent energy beams lanced out, cataloguing everything about the scene in high definition imaging down to the screws holding the flooring together. Nothing, however, picked up the horror hiding above them, deep in the station’s bowels, as it silently moved away in a different direction, giving up on its intended meal in search of easier prey.
Outside, unfortunately, neither Ptk’kk or Kptkt had had the forethought to follow directives and keep what they had seen to themselves. The sight of them coming back out, panicked and breathing hard, followed by a heavily armed security team going back in, had drawn interest from passersby, some of whom knew the two officers and were naturally curious. A hastily told version of events was quickly relayed; Vzk’tk being a herd species, the news that the security force was chasing something that could rip citizens apart was told, retold, embellished, retold again, and exaggerated. In an unbelievably short amount of time, the station’s media picked it up – a human observer from the United States would have likened it to gossip tabloids and papparrazzi, only more so. Within less than a standard hour, there was an exclusive story on the main news channel about it, sensationalized with the more lurid theories bandied about by the public and leavened with what facts were being admitted to by the station’s security force.