Hard Luck Hermit

Corey had the knife out of his boot. There was no violence yet, but he needed something to do with his hands. He turned the handle over and over between his fingers, trying to emulate a knife trick he had seen Farsus do once. He tried to keep it slow enough that he didn’t cut himself, and ended up cutting himself anyway when his datapad buzzed and he dropped the knife out of surprise. The blade clattered to the ground, alerting everyone else in the cockpit to the message.

“To Vo?”

“Yeah,” Corey said, as he opened his comms. “Just a text.”

He read it and shook his head.

“They swept the guild hall. No sign of anything.”

The tension dropped out of the cockpit as everyone sighed and leaned back in their seats once again. They had contacted To Vo about Quid’s potential abduction right away, and she had led the police on a hunt for him in turn. They had searched his office and then his apartment, finding nothing but a few signs of struggle and an unfed Beed-Cat in his home. After that, nothing. Not so much as a drop of blood.

It had been three swaps now, and the Wild Card Wanderer was still stuck en route to Centerpoint. Bang Gate queues alone had made up half that time. Tooley muttered a silent curse to the difficulties of inter-universal transit. A man could be dying and they still had to wait in line behind tourists and freeze-dried fruit shipments.

“To Vo will handle it,” Doprel said, for what felt like the millionth time. After a million more times he might even believe it. Even though Doprel had a lot more faith in To Vo than most people, right now even that faith wasn’t quite enough. But it was all he had.

Tooley flew into the docking bay at a speed that would’ve been disastrous for anyone else. She managed to hard-brake the Wanderer into a lurching stop, and come to a safe, if abrupt, landing. The engines were still shutting down when Kamak stormed off the ship. To Vo met him coming the other way, and got right to business.

“We have security footage showing Quid and his abductor moving through an industrial district. That’s all we have to go on so far.”

“Tell me where to go and let me do my thing,” Kamak said. To Vo gave him directions and put him and his crew on a shuttle to the industrial district. It was a short ride, but Kamak found every tick nearly unbearable. He’d spent too much time in transit already.

Though he kept the thought to himself, Kamak wondered what they were even doing, acting like they were in a hurry. They had heard Quid’s call for help a full seven swaps ago now, and they could only assume he’d spent all that time in the custody of a homicidal maniac. Odds were he was already dead, and if Quid was still alive…

Kamak tried not to shudder in his seat. He hadn’t seen the photos that had shaken Farsus so badly, but seeing someone disemboweled was bad enough, and his imagination could fill in the gaps. After seven swaps, Kamak wasn’t entirely sure Quid would want to be alive.

Dead or alive, he would have to be found, and when the shuttle landed, Kamak stepped right off and examined their surroundings. A few uniformed police officers were standing around Quid’s last known location, chatting and checking the net. Kamak didn’t even bother talking to them before storming off, following the last direction Quid’s captor had been seen moving. Corey was a little more charitable to the officers.

“We’re here to look for Quid, you guys know anything?”

“Nah, we just got here. Shift change.”

“Did you ask the last shift for any information?”

“We did.”

“And?”

“They didn’t know anything.”

Corey threw up his hands in defeat and walked away. He’d been spending too much time with To Vo, and had forgotten that most cops were utterly useless. He returned to his teammates and examined the labyrinth of facilities around them. There was a complicated tangle of alleyways, interconnected piping, and small isolated chambers in every direction that would make it difficult to navigate. The air here was also thick with the smell of chemicals, and a constant layer of background noise made it hard to hear anything. Any form of conventional tracking methods would be unlikely to work here: even complex scans would be thwarted by the abundance of chemical reactions, thermal signatures, and electronic devices.

“Kamak followed that trail, the rest of us should split up and fan out,” Corey said. “It looks like this is going to be a manual search.”

“You want us to split up to chase the psychotic killer who offs people one by one?”

“You should stick with one of us, obviously,” Corey said. Tooley didn’t protest. Her ego had many sticking points, but her inability to fight was not one of them. “We can handle ourselves better than the victims could. We’ll be fine.”

“Given the killer’s past methods, it is unlikely they still linger here,” Farsus said. “We should remain on guard, but finding Quid must be our first priority.”

Farsus headed down a path adjacent to Kamak’s route, while Doprel walked down a wide alley on the other side. Corey headed the opposite direction, to make sure they covered as much territory as possible, and Tooley followed in his footsteps. He walked along the path of a rumbling pipeline that occasionally dripped a foul-smelling fluid, into the depths of the industrial district. Imports could only go so far, and Centerpoint had to manufacture at least some products locally to keep itself afloat -in a literal sense. Most of the factories here created replacement parts for the Centerpoint station itself, to make sure it always had a stockpile for repairs. The manufacturing process created a lot of pollutants, which were helpfully vented out of the station and into the sun through a series of pipelines. In spite of that atmospheric venting, there was still a powerful stench permeating the entire district,

“Not exactly the most romantic walk,” Corey said, just to fill the air with something other than the low, ominous rumble of machinery.

“Corey, I like you, but flirting is the last thing on my mind right now,” Tooley mumbled.

“I know, I’m trying to keep those things off my mind,” Corey said. He looked around at the bare metal walls of some kind of factory. He could hear machinery grinding inside, and the turning gears created a low vibration that permeated the walls.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” Tooley said. “I barely knew the guy, I can’t fight, I’m no good at tracking…”

“Not like there’s anything to fucking track here,” Corey said. “It’s all metal and chemicals. There’s no footprints, no debris, barely any cameras, hiding places everywhere...I could search this place for the rest of my life and not find a damn thing.”

“Well, this fucking freak seems to want us to find their victims,” Tooley said. They were assuming the killer was the one who’d triggered the alarm for the last victim, at least, and Loben’s corpse had been found easily. “Especially now that we’re here.”

Tooley’s concerns proved eerily prescient. A few drops laters, Doprel put out a call to all of his crewmates.

“Guys. There’s an arrow made of blood on the wall.”

“Bastard isn’t exactly subtle, is he? Give us your location and hold down the fort.”

“Already done,” Doprel said. “Please hurry.”

They could hear Doprel’s mandibles clicking through the call.

“The blood’s still wet.”

Corey was already running, but he started to run a little faster.