Cosmosis

Interlude-Detective

(Starspeak)

Leaving the homeworld had been the most controversial decision of Mackli Tursov's life. He only wrangled it by enthusiastically promising to exchange correspondence frequently. When they did so, every one of his family back on Nakrumum always asked him the same blithely insulting questions when they talked.

'What's it like living with rak?'

'How often do they get violent around you?'

'Is it hard?'

Out of all the casually racist and otherwise presumptive idiocy they saw fit to ask, that last one chafed him the most because it forced him to, in the strictest technical sense, lie.

It was hard living on a Vorak as a Casti. But not because of the rak, but everything else!

The colony grocers were always helpful and earnest, but it was still difficult to find a good variety of Casti-edible food, and it was expensive too. Tursov's combination apartment-office was needing to be renovated due to metal decay being uncovered in the girders. Rava was a small moon too, and its orbit relative to the other moons above Firgid hadn't been in a good cycle for the last few months—that and frequent meteoroid warnings had delayed several dozen bulk cargo shipments. So the whole moon was experiencing something of an economic slump.

But most of all, it was hard to live on Rava because he was a detective.

'Fleshers'. 'Scrapes'. 'Clutchers'.

Casti stereotypes of Vorak loved painting them as violent brutes, but it loved casting them in the role of criminal even more. Casti fables so often drew clear distinctions between the virtuous and pure Casti and their historic feral megafauna predators. 'Monster slaying' was something of a niche genre compared to 'monster evading' or 'monster outwitting'. And it just so happened that those fables' morals sometimes resembled the odd Vorak municipal statute, like a quirky town up the coast somewhere having a law against harvesting eggs before sunrise.

Some of the most energetic gossip Tursov had ever laid ears on was a handful of his grandparents' friends getting a hold of a book titled 'Vorak Breaking Their Own Laws'. It had been chock full of minutiae like the egg harvesting or cruel fishing practices, blown out of proportion, and ascribed to the entire species.

The most reassuring experience of his entire life was learning that the Casti who actually bothered to know Vorak were the Casti who didn't buy into the nonsense. It had actually been a physical relief hearing his old detective partner laugh at the idea.

'Oh, you'll learn all right…' she'd said.

And he had. As a detective, he'd certainly found plenty of Vorak criminals. He was good at his job after all.

But he knew better than almost anyone that 'criminal Vorak' stereotype was inane…because it was the one stereotype that Tursov actually wished was more accurate.

Because he was a detective, and there was just so, so little crime on the stupid little moon.

There was enough to get by, certainly. Enough that his colony municipality had an investigator's salary worth held in reserve in their line-item budget for when they needed to hire him. He had a standing offer to accept the position full-time, but Tursov kept a close eye on his own finances. Thanks to corporate clients often needing work done out-of-house, it was more worthwhile for him to stay a private investigator. Barely.

That might change if he kept getting cases like this one.

It started with a kid coming into his office.

If Tursov had ever met a Terran or knew even a little about some of Earth's own notions of detective work, it might have struck him as all the more absurd.

But he only had the opportunity to appreciate the absurdity plainly in front of him.

"It's a worm?" he asked for the fourth time.

"Yes senior," the Vorak kid chirped. They even used the Casti formal word, punctuating exactly how polite they were aiming to be.

"A worm…yea long?"

"Yes senior, about this long," the kid said, helpfully gesturing a length of a couple dozen centimeters.

This had to be a prank, surely? But Tursov was just morbidly curious enough to sketch a note in his psionics.

"And you last saw it…where?"

"Lorbin dockyard," the kid chirped. "My folks both work there, and I was visiting the day I lost her."

Tursov clicked his throat in confirmation, only for the young rak not to continue.

He slowly shifted his gaze from his psionics. The kid was waiting for…some kind of prompting.

"…What's her name?" Tursov asked, oh-so reluctantly.

"Biro," the kid said proudly.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏ·

Just a few years ago, a dockyard would have been a classic dark pit. Things would go in and mysteriously become untraceable, never to be seen again. Smuggling was endemic in space, surviving in legal gray areas revolving around how specific and descriptive certain labels might be.

Just because something was labeled 'hazardous material' didn't actually mean the contents matched. A container goes missing here, a small payout there. No, not that long ago, this case would have been hopeless.

But a few years ago, some new aliens swung into the scene with new computer technology, and Detective Tursov had not missed out on the most relevant advancement for his field: photography and video.

Old security systems were rigid, obvious, and little more than performative. Cameras had been low resolution, obtrusive and easy to spot, with storage options for footage being severely limited by both size and capacity.

Most places hadn't kept footage longer than a week. Two at the most.

But now?

New systems were lethal and evolved. Smaller cameras that produced clearer images that captured wider and further areas. Great leaps forward in storage media meant a dockyard like Lorbin could store more than six months of footage.

It was a detectives dream.

Tursov prided himself on the fact that he'd recognized the direction things were headed before they did. When he'd first come to Rava, half his work on the moon had been security consultant gigs where he pushed facilities and institutions toward the new upgrades in surveillance security.

This was no the first time his work then had allowed him certain privileges now.

It took a phone call for Tursov to be sitting in the dockyard security office, thumbing through footage on a screen. The dockyard contracted their security to a local firm, and that firm owed Tursov more than a few favors.

'Biro the worm' was rather easy to find.

The kid—client had given exact dates and times of their visit.

The worm was carried onto the premises in a backpack-carrier. Strange to bring a worm on a tour of your parents work, but if the kid was willing to go through the process of tracking hiring him, the worm might just be that important to them.

The day seemed to unfold very normally.

Tours weren't something that a dockyard would do often, but kids were endearing, and almost everyone liked impressing them. The young Vorak got to see some of the heavy lifting cranes, the sorting system, the crash yard, and more.

Tursov was speeding through the footage, percolating questions in his mind, when an obvious one jumped out at him.

Why couldn't the parents do this?

They ostensibly worked at the yard. Even if they didn't normally have privileges to review security footage, surely they could have at least asked?

As he scrolled through more and more footage, he concluded that they must have. Which meant there was probably nothing obvious on the tapes.

The client had said they'd last seen the worm at lunchtime.

That tracked with what Tursov found on the footage. Rava spun slowly, so its day-night cycle was almost entirely artificial. That meant regular meals. Around local-midday, several mobile food vendors dragged and motored their carts through the dockyard gates.

Outside the administrative building there were several outdoor tables, and they were the popular choice for lunch.

The young Vorak followed their parents, purchasing a meal from one of the carts, and they sat down at one of the tables—there.

It was the first time all day that the worm's backpack-carrier had left the young rak's shoulders.

Still, it wasn't exactly going anywhere. It was impossible to see the worm inside the carrier with any clarity, but by Torli worms reputation, it was surely just sleeping.

The kid even poked their head over, peering down inside every few minutes.

Tursov needed to speed up the search, increasing the pace of the footage's fast-replay.

And yet that must have been the exact moment something happened, because instead of the same mostly still image continuing for the next half-an-hour of footage, there was a burst of activity.

Tursov scowled at the coincidence, rewinding.

Playing at normal speed, the incident was routine, completely easy to decipher.

A heavy vehicle approached the gate, and the food carts were forced to move. Then, as the vehicle drew closer, it was apparent that even several of the tables would need to move too.

Something interrupted them—Tursov couldn't see exactly what—but a slow-speed collision occured and the heavy vehicle spilled a number of clamshell boxes across the yard.

A dozen rak sprang into action, diligently cleaning up the spill and loading the crates back into vehicle, and everything proceeded mostly civilly.

One of the food vendors was very irate—it'd been their cart that the vehicle clipped—and the loud noise had sent his young client scampering out of frame, presumably retreating to their parent for safety.

The heavy vehicle blocked the camera's view of where the backpack-carrier had been set down.

The containers tumbled everywhere. Everyone quickly loaded them back up. The truck started moving again. And oh-so-coincidentally, there was no more backpack-carrier on the ground.

Tursov frowned.

It shouldn't have been this obvious.

The parents, or someone acting on their request, would have seen exactly this.

So the worm had been accidentally loaded up with the rest of the containers. So then it was just a matter of identifying the vehicle.

But if it was delivering to the dockyard, it probably carried cargo being fired into orbit. If this stupid worm had gotten itself launched to another planet…

Even if she'd only been flung to another of Firgid's moons, it would still be a tall order.

As Tursov wound through the footage, looking for an identifying mark on the vehicle, the 'why' question kept bothering him.

Why had the parents not handled this?

He was braced for some piece of new information to throw a twist in the whole affair.

Identfying the vehicle could have probably been done just by leaving the security footage room and talking to someone in records, but Tursov's gut instincts were beginning to whisper to him.

He had a hunch that he wouldn't be allowed to review this footage in the future.

That hunch increased when he finally found a camera angle of the vehicle that let him inspect some of the crates that had spilled.

Each one was marked in fading stenciled letters equating to 'ICB'.

Tursov's frown deepened.

Government agencies loved using acronyms and initialisms, but, realistically speaking, it was impossible to know them all. Identifying an agency or business from just those three characters would be all but impossible.

This system had four populated planets, not to mention how many more moons.

Most people would look at the acronym and be completely stuck looking between system-based agencies—assuming it was an agency at all and not corporate branding.

Except Tursov recognized those letters. Not just their arrangement, but the font of the stencil specifically.

That was the marking of the Interstellar Colonization Bureau.

Not a system-based agency, but full blown interstellar, throughout the Assembly.

He knew because Mackli's grandfather had been a clerk in the bureau for almost ten years. Once upon a time, he'd even visited his grandfather's work not unlike his Vorak client in the footage.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

If these were from that ICB, then it only made things all the stranger. Because the ICB had been a defunct agency for forty years now, long since replaced by the Colonial Pacing Commission.

Tursov mulled the possibilities.

It was probably just a similar stencil.

The worm was probably just accidentally shipped to M'Lan.

This whole thing was probably just the parents being lazy or inattentive in their efforts to rescue their child's very beloved pet…

Yeah…

That was unlikely.

It was that moment that Tursov's brain switched gears. It was a mostly unconscious shift, but it was time to start thinking of the parents more suspiciously.

It had taken barely any work to review the footage to find a lead on the worm's whereabouts, and yet the parents either hadn't done that much themselves, or they had and decided not to tell their child.

The latter was more likely, Tursov decided.

Which implied some level of guilt.

If there was some kind of illegal operation going on that involved the ICB-stenciled crates, and if one or both of the parents were aware of or involved in that operation…

Then depending on the circumstances, they might not be able to pursue their child's worm without implicating themselves or raising the risk profile of the illegal operation in some way.

Those possibilities would require more evidence, but they felt viable in the meantime. Neither, however, explained the possible involvement of a decades old defunct Congressional agency.

It was going to be tricky no matter how it unfolded.

Tursov watched the day's footage, taking note of as many timestamps as possible to compare with shipping numbers. But there was only so much he could find out looking over the footage.

He'd only gained access to the footage as a favor. Finding out more about the ICB crates would involve talking to dockyard employees—potentially involved employees.

Duplicity would likely be necessary.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

"Hello mother. Again, I did get your message about the tenement complex, but I can't do anything from here, and I don't have the opportunity to come visit for at least the next six months. I miss you and dad, Auntie too, but not Uncle—he'll think that's funny. Thank you for sending me the photo album and the food staples.

…

"…And if it isn't too much bother, could you send me Grandfather Orsummi's box of old work files? I'll pay for the shipping. There's a case I'm working on, and I could use some of the old family insight, yeah? Double, double thank you. Love you."

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

The one drawback of being a Casti detective on a Vorak moon was incognito work.

Blending in just wasn't an option for an alien.

For such cases, Tursov had a trusted employee and protégé.

Zunshi was a young Adept who'd washed out of military basic training and tried transitioning toward law enforcement. The same disciplinary problems had given them trouble there too. They were a young kid with a lot to prove but not enough maturity to make it happen.

That was changing though.

<I see it,> Zunshi sent.

Tursov didn't reply verbally, but kept watching through his eyepiece.

<…I'm having trouble with this lock,> the young rak admitted. <How much time do I have?>

<Thirty, maybe forty second,> Tursov said, beaming them a timing tool.

The trail of Biro the worm had been difficult to follow, yet relatively simple. As expected, the dockyard had not cooperated with Tursov's attempts to look at more paperwork, and there'd been little option but for Zunshi to break in—a relatively doable task with Tursov having had access to the security arrangements the day prior.

Shipping manifests and tracking numbers had confirmed that the crates he'd seen in the security footage were in fact old colonial bureau boxes—ostensibly being repurposed by a private shipping firm with a contract for the regular supply deliveries to a handful of Beacon operator colonies.

Tursov wanted nothing more than to dig more into that mystery, but he was a professional. Tracking down the worm for the client came first.

Following the shipping information had led them to another of the dozens of moons orbiting Firgid. According to that same shipping information, the collection of packages the worm had been accidentally included in was still a few hours from departing.

Tursov had psionically captured some images of this new dockyard's employee uniforms for Zunshi to replicate with their Adeptry.

And with any luck, the young Vorak could slip in, find the worm, and glean some additional information from either the manifest or directly inspecting the contents of the other packages.

<…Got the door,> Zunshi mumbled, slightly embarrassed.

<Remember to just look confused if someone finds you,> Tursov said. <You're not trespassing, you're just very lost looking for the shift manager.>

<Whose name is Nongwe,> Zunshi nodded. <I got it, I got it.>

Name tags were an exceedingly useful piece of information to pay attention to in the course of infiltration. Total strangers who could drop the name of at least someone involved were slightly better poised to withstand scrutiny than those who couldn't.

Doubly so if the name you dropped belonged to someone you knew wouldn't be present.

Tursov had set up a camera or three atop the buildings surrounding the shipping hub, and they'd used their information to scout the place for several hours before trying to actually penetrate security.

Zunshi was taking advantage of the meal break to delve inside the main holding warehouse. They would surely be seen, both by the remaining employees and on camera. But in uniform and looking busy, nobody should have noticed anything strange about them.

Now that they were past the perimeter security measures, there was little Tursov could do but wait.

It was a long ten minutes of silent searching, but soon enough…

<Found it,> Zunshi announced.

<0114673561-Wo?>

<Number checks out,> Zunshi said. <It's big. Industrial shipping container, looks like.>

The young rak beamed a psionic image of a metal capsule bigger than a bus—one rated for hard vacuum.

<It's pressurized,> Tursov noted. <Think the worm is alive?>

<Torli worms are popular because you almost don't have to feed them, right?> Zunshi asked. <If little Biro had even a little air, she probably slept through the whole thing.>

<Can you get it open?>

<I don't know…> the rak muttered. <Tides, I think someone's coming.>

<Keep your audio open,> Tursov said. <Repeat after me.>

"What do you think you're doing, scrape?" a harsh voice barked.

<'Recall,'> Tursov prompted his protégé. <'This container got loaded with something not on the manifest. I'm supposed to retrieve it.'>

When committing a crime in the name of justice, it always paid to have some paperwork that got you what you wanted even it would never withstand scrutiny in the long run.

Zunshi repeated the words Tursov fed him, and produced a convincing document with the containers shipping and serial numbers along with a noted weight discrepancy.

"This says the weight is off by…five kilograms? Seriously? That's like a rounding error!"

"My paperwork actually says six kg…" Zunshi said.

"Are you trying to be funny?"

"No. Wait, really? You thought that was funny? Thank you! No one ever tells me I'm funny…" Zunshi said, getting slightly ahead of Tursov's script, but he didn't snap at them. Their instincts were good, and they could play the part correctly.

"Can you help me out?" the young rak continued. "Nongwe handed me this order, and this isn't usually my shift. I don't have the code on this container, but I do know what I'm looking for inside."

Tursov could almost hear the other rak's eyes narrow in suspicion. Or maybe that was just his own imagination.

<Focus them on the manifest,> Tursov said. <You're here correcting something wrong. Gotta show him that wrong exists.>

"Look—look, if you think it's a big deal, I won't even go in the container," Zunshi said. "Just, look at this way: the container is marked machinery, right?"

It was.

"The recall I've got is for an animal that was loaded on to this thing by mistake. A live animal," Zunshi emphasized. "Meaning that if this container goes out 'as is', then we run into Org biological transport ordinances. And just look on the manifest. Nowhere in those crate descriptions is anything like a Torli worm."

"…Seriously? A worm?"

"Hey, pop the container. If there's not a worm in there, I'll…well, I don't know what, but I'll do something intensely humiliating."

Listening through Zunshi's psionics, Tursov held his breath until he heard the beep of a keypad and a pressurized pop from the container door.

"You stand back."

"Look for a backpack," Zunshi advised. "Softshell deal, small straps. Almost like for a kid."

"…Wow," the other rak sounded. They'd evidently found the worm.

"Wait," Zunshi said, approaching. "I need a photo for documentation purposes."

<Too far,> Tursov warned them.

Zunshi was undaunted though, and they materialized a simple camera. From the other rak's perspective, there was only one flash to mark one photo, very clearly indicating where the worm was found near the front of the container.

But more than fifty photos were taken without the flash—completely silently with no one the wiser.

The photos beamed to Tursov's psinoics in real time for storage, and every one of them looked blank with darkness. Individually, they were little more. But all together, they could be composited and their contrast adjusted to reveal information that the naked eye missed.

Sure enough though, atop the closest stack of crates inside the container was a child's backpack slowly rising and falling, like tiny breathing.

"Thank you," Zunshi said. "Now the container actually matches its manifest. Here, sign this for me?...Thank you. You've been a big help. This copy is for you, but I've got to get going. Thanks again!"

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

The warehouse employee looked down at the copy of the recall form they'd been handed and frowned.

Something was off. It wasn't a typical format, but margins and font sizes mattered a lot less than serial numbers and codes. The numbers on the page appeared to be in order at a glance, but…

As the young rak in the ill-fitting uniform lurched away with the backpack and worm, something bothered the warehouse worker.

<Hey, boss,> they called out. <There was someone from receiving in the warehouse with a recall order just now. The paper work looked like it checked out, but…I don't know.>

<Well who was it?>

<Err…>

Ah, that was the bothersome part.

They hadn't shown any ID.

<Trespass!> the worker called out.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

Tursov's gut seized in awful knot when he saw the security start to scramble.

The next moment Zunshi cut their psionics, and everything was silent.

<Kid, come in,> Tursov called.

He didn't say more.

He had to trust that radio silence was necessary and the best option for Zunshi to escape.

…

Ten minutes later, a loud scrape made Tursov jump.

"Got her," Zunshi breathed heavily. They hefted down a backpack, tilting it to show the still slumbering worm inside.

Tursov breathed a sigh of relief.

"Let's not wait then," he said.

"You got any of that paste?"

"Hmm? Oh, yeah."

Tursov reached inside his 'breaking/entering/surveillance' toolkit and withdrew a small tube of nutrient goo. Zunshi took it and squeezed out a dollop into their finger. Biro the worm gave a stir at the smell and immediately lurched more upright.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

"You found her!"

Tursov's young client was ecstatic.

How could they not be?

Tursov smiled, but didn't share their enthusiasm.

He declined his fee from the child, partially to be nice, but also because he didn't want any kind of trail relating any of this to him.

Because he'd developed the photos Zunshi took and subjected them to high contrast analysis.

He'd gathered a number of serial numbers from crates visible inside, but also detailed images of the figures deeper within the container. The ones that even Zunshi had been unable to see.

In the clearest composite, two humanoid figures stood at the back of the container, clearly holding weapons of some kind pointing right at Zunshi and the warehouse employee. Not living figures though. Their limbs were visibly steel. Hydraulics and magnetic servos linked to their joints and skeletons.

Machines.

Of some kind.

But incredibly, they weren't the most disturbing piece of information in the clearest photo.

One of the serial numbers on the crates distinguished its destination from the others in the container: a Beacon.

Tursov's mother had come through and delivered all his grandfather's old records, including paper copies of some of the earliest Beacon-scouting ever done.

It was common knowledge that there were more functional Beacons than got used, but most people didn't quite grasp the implications of that.

Tursov had needed to do some reading to brush up.

Back when the idea of interstellar colonization really started, it was just four planets starting out. The three homeworlds plus the Vorak colony in Sinnesana founded by a generation ship.

Beacon technology being scalable enough to be traversable was an immense breakthrough for the actual travel, but not scouting-wise. Linking those four systems to be traversable had been priority one, but what about after that?

You still had to decide where you were actually going to send new Beacons, and there was only so much you could find out from telescopes.

Sooner or later, you had to launch a Beacon and just hope you found some planets worth getting to.

More accurately, you had to launch hundreds of Beacons, and hope a few of them found planets worth the cost of accessing them. It had taken decades and centuries to actually launch that many and wait for them to arrive, but they had done it eventually. Still, seven eighths of those Beacons went nowhere useful.

The remaining eighth were the inhabited systems of today.

The twelve Casti systems, nine Vorak, and formerly seven Farnata systems—now scaled back to five.

Early on in the process, there'd been a startling discovery: emigration could be lethal. Not just in terms of the risk, but for the planet people left behind.

Entire new star systems of real estate opened up overnight, and suddenly there was a very real risk of so many people leaving a planet at once that it equated to a mass-extinction event. That was what the ICB had been for for. They regulated the pace that new colonies could be established so civilization on the homeworlds wouldn't catastrophically destabilize.

The same job was now performed by the Colonial Pacing Commission, but a lot of their data was assembled back in the ICB days. A lot of the same architecture and organization was still around, and it was those records of his grandfather's that Tursov used to educate himself now.

Total real estate was the main distinguishing factor between the outdated ICB protocols and those of the CPC. The ICB had approved of launching Beacons almost indiscriminately, leading to the massive surplus in supply. By contrast, the CPC had slowed down the pace of Beacon production considerably. Enough that expansion would eventually catch up with the sheer amount of space they had access to…it would still take a century though. If not two.

But even with updated protocols, the CPC still used the old ICB labels and notations for the Beacons themselves.

So identifying the Beacon on the serial number should not have proven so difficult…

And yet, it was.

Beacons that linked inhabited systems were, themselves, also inhabited. Tiny little crossroad towns, just a few hundred people permanently installed while thru-traffic kept them supplied and thriving.

But what about the other Beacons? The ones that led to the empty systems?

Tursov didn't know off the top of his head.

But Tursov had checked every single Beacon that connected any inhabited systems, and not a single one of them matched the serial number designation visible in the photograph.

He was almost beginning to second-guess himself.

Maybe the number didn't actually correspond to a Beacon. Maybe it was just a coincidental resemblance to the format. Maybe the compositing of so many low-light images had eroded the quality and made some identifying character seem like a number instead, changing the whole way it would be interpreted.

It was almost a reasonable explanation. But then he found a piece of another serial number in the picture.

And this number did have a match. But it didn't lead to a Beacon for an inhabited system…not anymore.

One of the crates in the container had been bound for F6.

Do and Ake had been abandoned after the Razing. Farnata civilization had suddenly found itself without the food capacity to support all its systems, and the newest ones were the easiest to evacuate.

The entire place should have been empty.

Their Beacons weren't staffed, surely.

Digging into old records and researching the topic thoroughly, Tursov found that they were indeed uninhabited. Even more surprisingly, they were mostly inoperable.

If someone secured clearance for, say, a research project, then the Beacons would need to be boarded, and a days-long process of reinitializing the Beacon's systems would need to be carried out before it was traversable again.

In the meantime, the empty Beacons operated at ultra-minimum capacity, only needing to sustain overlapping wormholes a few microns wide. Just enough to keep the connection viable for later.

It would be one thing if the crates had been bound merely for a Beacon that led to F6. But no, Tursov double checked. The serial number marked it for the F6 half of the F6-V6 pair.

What had started as him going way too far to help some kid had evolved into an obsession. He had two serial numbers, both of which made no sense.

One led to a defunct Beacon in an abandoned system, and the other led absolutely nowhere in public record.

His grandfather's records, however, were not public.

They were old paper documents, taken home out of pride in a job well done when they'd been probably ordered to be shredded or burnt.

Weeks after stumbling across the mystery, Tursov was looking over his grandfather's antiquated files, and he found…a discrepancy.

The number didn't match.

Surely he'd imagined it, or miscounted.

But he checked again.

It had taken some wheedling, but he got a copy of the he modern CPC files that listed all Beacons, both those between habited systems and those that linked to the other seven-eighths of the empty systems.

The modern CPC registry listed seven hundred and forty-nine Beacon pairs in the cosmos, all launched over the course of two centuries.

But Tursov's grandfather's records had a different number.

Seven hundred fifty-one.

Two pairs of Beacons were on the old paper records that weren't on the new public files.

Tursov's gut went cold.

The next day, he put in a call—anonymously—to the largest Assembly office in Cavore (V5), asking for copies of the old records, from the now defunct ICB.

They were technically still public record. Accessible for a modest fee—for the trouble. They told him it would be weeks before they could be made available, if not months.

But he didn't mind.

He could wait, because he was certain what they'd say.

The ICB records on file would be missing the two Beacons. Just like the CPC ones were.

Someone had erased two Beacon pairs from living memory, and these paper files, from decades ago, might be the only evidence in the whole cosmos.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

More weeks later, the files had arrived and confirmed Tursov's suspicions.

But…what did he do with the information?

What information did he really have? His grandfather's paper records didn't actually include the tracking serial numbers of the missing Beacons, just their listings on a registry.

So he couldn't even confirm that the second unknown serial number actually corresponded to one of the missing Beacons.

And yet…how could they not?

Mentioning the paper files to the CPC hadn't gone anywhere. Paper files that, when verified, wouldn't match what was on file?

He didn't have a chain of evidence. The only real proof he had hinged upon his mother and grandmother's word that the paper files were his grandfather's original work and that no one had tampered with him in decades.

It was all just…strange.

Tursov's gaze went back to the composite photos, with the mechanical figure barely visible in the depths of the container.

Just what had he stumbled upon here?