Planet Hephaestus. Badlands.

Lieutenant Nave Graham of the recently formed Hephaestus Counterintelligence Service was a bit anxious: this was his first case as a lead and like every rookie ever, he was afraid he would fail.

"A plasma grenade, was it?" He inquired of a sapper busy with examining what was left of the escape pod.

"Uh-huh," the man replied gruffly. "A primitive trap; they just set it to tripwire mode and when the soldier opened the hatch, it tripped."

He nodded towards the other pod, hidden beyond a veil of rain, where his colleague was puttering about.

"Crude, but effective," the sapper said, tossing a melted chunk of metal that used to be part of the pod's hull. "The explosion set off the remaining fuel in pod's tanks. Enough to blow the pod and everyone around it to smithereens."

"The deceased was a moron." Nave grimaced as he watched the customs officer's body packed into a bag. "Shouldn't have just barged in blind like that... Any ideas who could have done that?"

"I can't tell for sure," the sapper replied, "But I suspect whoever did it, had special training. Military likes traps like this. Terrorists and other criminals aren't above them, either, historically."

"Got it loud and clear," Graham said, even though nothing was clear at all.

Quite the contrary, the suspect list just expanded significantly to include a wide spectrum of all kinds of professions - from corporate armies, mercenaries and slave traders to run of the mill smugglers trying to cover their tracks.

"Ready," reported the other sapper. "Pod two is clear, you can inspect it."

Graham nodded, even though the other man couldn't see him. Struggling to pull his feet out of viscous sticky mud, the detective trudged to the pod. Two militiamen stood by the open hatch, holding their automatic rifles most menacingly. They scanned the surroundings warily, as if suspecting that the pod's owners would come back for their property. Nave threw back his raincoat's hood, scraped the mud off his shoes, pulled foot covers on and climbed into the pod, where the sapper was still working on something. Lieutenant's attention was immediately drawn to two shapeless piles of clothing on the floor.

"Interesting, isn't it?" the sapper inquired phlegmatically.

"Uh-huh," lieutenant agreed as he carefully unraveled the closest pile, which turned out to be a woman's dress. Nave looked it over and, for whatever reason, sniffed. It smelled faintly of perfume. The smell seemed like a man's cologne to Nave. Puzzled, he grunted, folded the dress and put it into an evidence bag.

"So what happened here?" he asked the sapper.

As an answer, he was shown a Consortium-made plasma grenade.

"Trip wire mode." the sapper explained.

"Just like in the other pod." Nave said thoughtfully.

He heard business like voices behind his back and then his crime scene experts climbed inside. The pod became very crowded. Nave got out to give his team a chance to search every inch of the pod's interior for clues. A smallest thing could lead them to the mysterious survivors of the ship that disintegrated in the atmosphere. Lieutenant headed for the investigative team's van where a couple of techs were messing about with smashed electronics.

"I think you might find this interesting," one of them said as soon as the lieutenant climbed into the van, leaving puddles everywhere.

Without waiting for an answer, the tech swiveled his monitor around and started explaining:

"This from the customer officer's tac block. He got the footage just a fraction of a second before the explosion, from the militiaman's body cam. You know, the one that opened the door. Curious, don't you think?"

Nave nodded silently as he stared at the image. Two male corpses with their heads caved in were strapped into cradles. Somebody really didn't want these bodies to end up with Hephaestus law enforcement. Curious...

Noting all this, the lieutenant moved to the comms officer's compartment and called Counterintelligence HQ.

"Get me the boss," he asked the officer on duty.

Three hours later Nave was sitting in his office and carefully studying the collected materials. It was all very curious... Two unknown persons changed into orange survival suits and moved in an unknown direction. Discovered hair samples showed that the unknown persons were in fact women of childbearing age, chemically blond. Most notably, the samples belonged to creatures practically identical genetically, which suggested replicants. Nave didn't know much about those - artificially bred creatures with altered human DNA. He's never heard of female replicants, but that didn't necessarily mean the greedy corporations hadn't mass produced several product lines for their army.

This theory was supported by the fact that the genome showed some unfamiliar mutations. It could mean either artificially created beings or one of Union races, with the same degree of probability.

Recon drones didn't find any suspicious movement within a fifty kilometer radius, which led Graham to a conclusion that the unknown persons took the shortest route to the highway and found transportation there. Junior officers were checking reports of stolen vehicles or missing drivers in the area.

It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that am accomplice with a car was waiting for these unknown persons in a previously agreed upon spot. That particular theory was not provable though: constant electrical interference in the atmosphere, caused by rain and thunderstorms, and thick cloud cover made orbital surveillance impossible.

Nave sent two junior officers to comb CCTV footage from Stratos City municipal security systems for a pair fitting the description. But were there just two unknowns? Judging by the data from the surviving pod's on board computer, life support systems load was twice the norm for two women of middle height. Even considering nervous stress and rapid breathing, it would still mean these women had twice the lung capacity of a normal human. So the only reasonable explanation was that there were at least two more people in the pod, but those left no trace other than the entry in a computer log.

Graham reread the report from the expert team, then studied data from space defense system and finally, for the fifth time in the last three hours, checked his inbox. It finally paid off. There was a message from Tiamat; a Bison class freighter, tail number 1560/4510, was attacked in orbit by a Union patrol. The ship managed to shake its pursuers despite being infected by a virus, change its recognition codes and jump through the Gate to Hephaestus system.

Graham poured more coffee, displayed the new data on his monitor and busied himself with reading the case file from Tiamat office. The more he read, the more he felt serious trouble approaching.

Tiamat Counterintelligence picked up a relay chasing a Consortium agent spying in Ferrum system. He managed to evade the arrest team by blasting through the perimeter and hid in the capital. Not for long though, since in about an hour his body was found in a private room at one of the fancier night clubs. The still warm trail led the agents to Bison freighter, but again, it managed to slip away. And now pieces of it, along with pilots' bodies, surfaced on Hephaestus.

Once again, Nave pored over all the available data while the computer searched for all known materials on Consortium Security Service operations. A phone call interrupted him.

"Sir," the duty officer reported, "A checkpoint was destroyed on highway E-11"

Nave glanced at the map, grabbed his hat and sprinted from the office.

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The rest of the book is now available for pre-order on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited, release date is February 14th. Also, for the Luddite in your life, there will be a paperback edition. Unfortunately, I can only leave 10% of the book on free platforms, so chapters have been removed.

Book Two is finished, and if this one does well, we can pay our translator to get the sequel to you.

Thank you all for reading and reviewing. Your interest is what gives us strength to keep writing.

Here's the link to Amazon