7171-1-30

Lucas Tarson found himself in the house of the first known disappeared person. It had not been difficult to enter, considering the door was broken in half, but that itself was strange. Or maybe not, this area was not particularly affluent, so a break-in after the prior inhabitants had disappeared was not too inconceivable.

The fact that nothing but the inhabitants were missing was, however, a bit strange. He sighed and murmured to himself: “Well, maybe the neighbours can explain this to me. And no, I am not happy that I need to rely on an translator to do it. Yes, they are good, but I have no idea how good it is with the dialects that I am likely to encounter. Now, I should stop procrastinating. In fact. Who am I kidding. I like procrastinating. But I have work to do.” He spoke the last sentence at a normal, conversational volume.

And, after another five minutes of pacing walked across the street and knocked at the door.

Nobody opened. Of course, nobody opened. He was not one of them, and even normal investigators would have issues here. One of the species that nearly brought by their extinction?

Not a chance in hell.

But he needed to try. It was his duty. And, depending on what was going on, this could be really bad. Well, almost any imaginable scenario was bad, but this could be really, really bad. So he knocked again. When that did not help, he tried the same thing at the next house.

And again. He went ten houses up and down both sides of the street. Then he went back to where he started and tried again. After that all had not helped, Lucas visited the broken-in house again, looking for anything he missed the first time around.

“While my technical equipment is excellent, it is not optimised for investigative work. And I cannot even attempt to make up for the shortfalls of the system, because I am certainly not trained for this mess. They sent me down here to look for obvious signs of people attempting to break the quarantine, and not to try and solve a crime scene. Admittedly, it was a bit naive to think that I would not need any skills in investigation to pull this off, but I am so far outside my comfort zone and skill that it is not even funny anymore. Who could help me? Well, they cannot send anyone with useful skills. The other tourists are even less trained in the highly specialised skillset an UE investigator requires. One of those would be overkill, most likely, but nice to have. I need help. Where can I get it. I can communicate, but the bandwidth is not great. Voice only, and this is only because of highly advanced AI transcribing my voice in real time and it coming out as text on the other side. Wait, not important.”

He waited for a moment and then continued: “I really should have called for help, at the latest before I did my second round of knocking on doors, right?”

He sighed and called the doctor, asking for help in investigative matters. He was connected to one of the police officers of Kad’Nagarth who had experience in operating in the area he was in. But sadly, that talk did not amount to much.

Lucas Tarson was simply incapable of sending enough data, which was made worse by the fact that he did not know which data to send.

This entire operation had taken most of the day, so he lied down in the bed, being careful to scan literally everything in and around it and went to sleep. It was not good form to do it, and bad for the evidence, but it was his only option, unless he wanted to spent three hours trekking back to base, just to need those same three hours to get back to his current position the next morning.

The next day was similar to the last, but he got more done. Although he was not left with more information than he had before. He had visited the homes of 23 known disappeared people. He even had talked too neighbours on two different occasions. Sadly, they did not know much. It made, however, certain that the disappeared did not want to disappear. They were kidnapped.

Which was interesting, but made his job even more difficult, because now he needed to find the kidnappers, who seemed to be good at their job.

For the next day, he got a list with more houses to check, maybe there was a lucky break somewhere along the line. He was almost certain that, if the residents were talking to him, that he would have more information about what was going on.

This resulted, of course, in more of the same, but he was gathering data. Data he could slowly share overnight. In fact, he could transfer all the data gathered about one house in roughly 8 hours. And hopefully the professionals could tell him simple criteria with which he could specialise what data to send. Which in turn would speed that up, and hopefully he could be led to somewhere interesting. But again, not much had happened.

The day after that was more of the same. With one key difference. They had managed to get hold of an UE investigator, which helped. She was not necessarily more skilled than her Kar’Netra counterparts, and she was, for certain, not as knowledgeable about the local situation, but she was far better equipped, and had a lot more computing power on her side. She also had access to advanced AIs, which were specialised in the sort of pattern recognition useful for crime investigations.

And while she could not perform any wonders, especially without being there herself and setting up equipement, she did manage to predict a house to be attacked next.

Lucas sadly came roughly an hour to late to prevent another kidnapping. But this was good news.

Now the hope was that she could do it again, and hopefully in time to prevent the kidnapping, or at least being there to track them down.

The day after that was spent mostly by getting closer and closer to the kidnappers. One thing that was not clear at all was the motive. Breaking the quarantine could not be it, there was no evidence of that. There was nothing stolen but the people, and they were to poor to do it for ransom.

On 7171-2-4, Thursday, at 16:28 o’clock, Lucas Tarson finally saw a kidnapping in progress. Three people in dark armor were forcing a family of three, including a 7 year old child, at gunpoint into the sewers. He was too far away to take the shot without risking the victims, so he decided to follow them, informing the base as he went. While there were calls for him to stop, he reduced those calls by stating that he only wanted to find out more and would not do anything stupid. Like shooting at the kidnappers in the hopes that he alone could win.

After shadowing the kidnappers for roughly one hour, he finally saw them entering a building. In addition to the 3 new people, there were 5 already sitting in chains in a side room. Another kidnapper was sitting there, without the armour, which solved a lot of mysteries and brought up more. The kidnappers were human. Which, almost certainly meant UE.

He thought a bit about the situation and then grinned. The military always wanted an excuse for a life exercise…

It took a bit more convincing than that, and it was not possible immediately. Well, a hundred meters around the target would have been possible immediately, but in the room itself? Not a chance.

But at 17:57 a Gate opened. The UE sent in 8 men. The four criminals were woefully under equipped against the UE army and fell quickly. But sadly, one of the victims died in the fighting. It had been an older adult man, who tried to shield the others with his body, successfully.

Right as the shooting had started, Lucas managed to get one of the kidnappers in a side room alone, capturing him.

With the help of the UE military, advice from the investigator and more than a bit of luck, it did not take long for the captured criminal to talk. The ineffective method of torture was suggested by one of the freed victims, but had not even been necessary to allude to.

At 23 o’clock, the UE published its findings:

1. The virus was a bioweapon, developed by an private UE citizen.

2. The kidnappings were a side show, a hope to at least offset some of the cost of this petty, disgusting operation.

3. To date, roughly 200 people had been enslaved, because that was the goal of the kidnappings.

Suffice to say, the UE was enraged.