Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3307-01-31 04:57
Detective Imelda Geldof leaned back in her chair and stretched. She was sitting in the department ops room with her entire set of case notes on the murder of Mary Jane Hamillton on the holo table. This was an infuriating case. The perpetrator had exploited a fault in the security cameras to evade all surveillance. They had no idea what the murderer was like, other than an approximate height, that they were very strong, and that they had likely suffered serious burns when the victim discharged a Nadion Laser Shield PPW. She had made one big breakthough in the case early on: she had discovered how the cameras were disabled and found the identity of another person exploiting the same flaw, a young grey market hacker by the name of Tarik Kolow. However, the seventeen year old had disappeared into thin air, in a way that the behavioural models developed by the boffins at the Stable Cryptographic Analysis installation said was supposed to be impossible. He hadn't left the station, she was pretty sure of that, but she couldn't rule out that he had been murder and disposed of in one of the industrial factories of the station. If she could find that kid alive though, then she was sure she could crack the case. Tarik was station rat, a clever kid that had a marginal existence on the station when it was under the control of Official Tewanta Order, and who hadn't quite got around to trusting the new government yet. He was definitely the type to sell a nifty hack for a few hundred credits, no questions asked.
Imelda focused the table on her notes relating to Tarik. Once they had identified him from footage taken at Armstrong Square, they had quickly started a search for him. His quarters had been cleaned out and carefully cleaned. The last time he accessed his credit balance was to clean out his account and buy a mix of long lasting rations and small tradeable goods. These were the actions of someone who was very deliberately deciding to disappear. Given his knowledge of the grey market, she believed that he could probably stay off grid for a few months. If he had any contacts in the old resistance that owed him favours, then he could hide for even longer. The boffins were miffed when she pointed out that scenario: it was not one their models had accounted for. This wasn't the only person she'd upset with this case. Finding the second camera in Armstrong Square had embarrassed Station Maintenance and BPIA were all over that event. It was scrubbed from official reports and she was given a stern warning to not continue her investigation in that direction. BPIA had full jurisdiction over the investigation of the camera. She'd also been forbidden from questioning the gang members that Tarik hung around with at Armstrong Square. A lot of them were children of corporate executives and after her and her partner's last questioning sessions, an army of lawyers had descended on the department. Until she had more concrete evidence connecting those kids to the murder case, then they were off limits. The captain was hinting that she was over invested in the case and that she should take a holiday. Frak her! Of course she was invested in the case: it was a frakking unsolved murder! Someone had to care. So, Imelda continued to review the data that she had gathered, willing some new insight into existence. She was getting tired. She'd been at this for sixteen hours, almost. She'd need to get some sleep soon.
The door to the operations room opened and Imelda's partner, Detective Brendan Freamon, walked in.
"Found him!", he said, making a flicking motion on the screen of his hand terminal. A new file appeared above the holo table.
"What? How? What the frak did you do?"
"So, I was thinking. There are some systems for dealing with juvenile citizens that aren't fully integrated with our case systems, for various reasons: privacy, lack of budget, and stuff like that. I went to talk with a bunch of people that look after those systems: the Education Board, Homeless Outreach, Youth Addiction Services, ..."
"We checked those!"
"Yeah, but we missed one, the Apprentice Program Regulator. Turns out that our friend Tarik signed up for an apprenticeship at Butler Robotics. It didn't get flagged for a few reasons: it wasn't referred via the Education Board for one, and he had used his mother's maiden name to register. But my contact at the Apprentice Program Regulator, Mary, found it late yesterday and sent the file over."
Imelda opened the new file over the holo table. It was their guy alright.
"Are they open?"
"They run a 24 hour shift based operation. Are you awake enough to do this?"
"Abso-frakking-lutely! I just need to pick up my coat and bag from my desk."
Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3307-01-31 05:58
The distance between their station house and Butler Robotics was about four kilometers and required climbing a few levels up towards the station axis. The detectives decided to make use of the station transit system. It comprised of a series of depressurized tunnels that wove through the structure of the station. Inside these tunnels transit pods, capable of holding about twenty people, were accelerated and decelerated using magnetic impellers set into the tunnel walls. The detectives almost had a pod to themselves: it was still too early for the transit system to be heavily used. Besides them, two tired early shift workers were in the pod. This tunnel traversed multiple station levels. As a result, there were some sharp changes in velocity involved in the journey. The pod was seating only and the seats had harnesses that secured their occupants. All four passengers were securely strapped in. Imelda's terminal let out a chime. She removed it from her bag and read the notification message.
"Ah bollix! Just got an alert about a series of security camera failures", she said.
"Where?", Brendan asked.
"Have a frakking guess!"
Detective Freamon removed a slug thrower pistol from his bag and loaded it with a ten round clip. He clipped a small leatherette pouch, containing three more similar clips, to his belt for easy access. The shift workers shifted uneasily in their seats opposite. Detective Freamon flashed his badge and glared at them, and they relaxed a bit, but not completely.
"Could be a coincidence.", he said.
"Not frakking likely. My guess is that a software alert triggered when we added the file to the case. I told System IT that that our software needed to be audited and refreshed: far too likely that OTO left some spyware in there.",
"Frak!"
"Yeah! On the plus side, if we get there quick enough we may catch up with our killer."
The pod slowed in preparation for the next stop. It was their stop. They got to their feet and waited impatiently at the pod's door. The station extended a vacuum seal to the door frame and the pod and station doors opened. The two detectives strode out, their weapons put away, but close at hand. They wound their way through a maze of corridors to cover the last few hundred meters to Butler Robotics. The door was open with its key pad ripped out and dangling by wires from the wall beside the door. Detective Freamon drew his weapon. Detective Geldof typed a request for backup into her hand terminal and did the same. They approached the door. Imelda peeked in. The door way opened out onto a large factory floor. In front of her she could see four assembly lines, their robots stopped. A body was slumped over the nearest console, a burst of bullet wounds in their back. There was no sign of anyone else. In the wall to her right were a series of doors. The nearest was open. At the other side of the factory floor, were a set of double doors, and she could hear machinery working behind them. She gave a hand signal to her partner, who quietly stepped through the door and took cover behind machinery. Imelda followed. They made their way towards the open door on the right. On their way the discovered another body, near the end of the third production line, again with multiple bullet wounds in the back. The reached the door way without seeing anyone else.
The doorway opened into a small office, which was another scene of carnage. Slumped in a seat behind a desk was the corpse of a middle aged woman with dark skin, bullet wounds in her chest leaving no doubt as to how she died. On the floor in front of the desk a middle aged red haired man lay in a pool of his own blood. One of his arms was bent into an unnatural position and he had bullet wounds running from knee, up his torso, to his neck. Imelda stepped around the desk, her weapon held in front of her to ensure there was nobody else there. It was clear. However, the screen on the desk had windows showing security camera footage. She stepped closer to check the timestamps: it was live footage. Detective Freamon had dropped back from the doorway to see what she was looking at. He mouthed the word "live". She nodded. She started typing on the keyboard and windows started cycling through the available camera feeds. She stopped when she had two covering the section of the factory beyond the double doors. They showed a hunting scene. One person, in a HE suit, was visible in one feed. Crouched down behind machinery, they were staring intently at their hand terminal. Meanwhile the other feed showed a large man toting a submachine gun, walking down an aisle towards where the first figure was hiding, methodically looking in every nook and hiding place as they did so. Suddenly a robotic arm swung at the hunter's head. He brought his left arm up to cover his head with superhuman speed as he attempted to dodge the robot. The robotic arm struck the hunter with a loud metallic clang that the detectives could hear from where they were, and the hunter was sent sprawling. The person in the HE suit took this opportunity to make a dash for the double doors. The hunter recovered quickly though, retrieved their weapon and ran in pursuit. The action shifted into the main factory floor. Imelda switched feeds. Detective Freamon dashed to the office door. The person in the HE suit was sprinting the length of the factory and was half way towards the factory exit, when the hunter reached the double doors. He levelled the submachine gun, fired a burst at his prey, who fell with ragged wounds in their back, twitched and laid still. Detective Freamon return fire, hitting the hunter in the chest, to no effect. He was rewarded with a burst of submachine gun fire, which he narrowly avoided by ducking back into the office.
"Where the frak is our backup!", he snarled.
Imelda ignored him. On the feeds she could see the hunter reload from behind cover. Then he vaulted over the furthest production line conveyor and use the next as cover. Short bursts of fire kept Brendan pinned, though he returned fire as best he could. A round had grazed his shoulder and he was bleeding. As things stood, the hunter was likely to reach their position and he them seriously outgunned. Unless Imelda did something they were in serious trouble. She had an idea. She pulled out her own hand terminal and got it to scan for local access points. There were a few. She quickly scrolled down through list and found the SCADA networks for the production lines. She launched some custom software on her terminal and hoped that the SCADA software had not been updated recently. An ok prompt greeted her. She smiled. In the meantime, the hunter had climbed over the next conveyor belt. Imelda queued up commands to start all the production lines on their full diagnostic routines, which would exercise the robot arms through their full range of motion. She waited. The hunter vaulted up on to the next conveyor belt and was about to let off a burst of submachine gun fire as cover, when Imelda started the production lines. It caught the hunter off guard, and between the moving conveyor belt and the flailing arms he was knocked off his feet, his burst of weapons fire going wildly off target. Detective Freamon fired back at the hunter and bullets hit the hunter's left arm, drawing blood and causing him to drop his weapon. The hunter rolled back off conveyor and back into cover. A skimmer frame passed by on the conveyor and hunter threw a small device on to it. A few seconds later it exploded. The battery cells in the skimmer frame exploded and the conveyor caught fire. Alarms blared, fire suppression systems kicked in, and visibility on the factory floor dropped dramatically. More explosions happened. They were spreading to the other production lines. An alert popped up on Imelda's terminal: the factory's power system draw was spiking: there was a short circuit on the factory floor. The hunter was doing as much damage as he could to cover his escape attempt. Then the power shut down. The cameras shut off. Dim emergency lighting kicked in.
"I can't see him! Frak!", said Detective Freamon, "Any other ways out of here?"
"Delivery bays for materials. It'll be hard track him if he got into those, which he probably did! And it'll be too dangerous to go after him until backup arrives. On the plus side we know a bit more about him. We have video of his face and we know that he's a cyborg. That's new data for the case file. We'll get the frakker, assuming that BPIA don't steal our case, now that a cyborg is involved."
They stood near the factory entrance, weapons drawn, vigilant, until their backup finally arrived.