Officer Vai, of the Golgotha police force, headed down the long hall with pride. One hell of a successful raid. Looking at her, people would have seen a middle-rank local officer, with only a small rank badge pinned to the lapel of her coat. She was average height, muscular and blocky, with a face like an eager bulldog and a flamethrower scar burnt deep into her left cheek. A fall of bright red hair swept back from her face, drawn into a short plait.

Her sergeant updated her on the details in the other location. They'd collared all the head men on their list, with most of their henchmen to boot. Only a few small guppies escaped the net, and Vai fully intended to catch those. She listened to a quick message that one of Mr Melmotte's thugs had a particularly distinct deformity.

Her beat was theft and drugs, in one of the working-class districts in Golgotha. A lot of factory workers who mostly just wanted to feed their families, and an underclass who grifted and stole to survive. Vai couldn't stand people who stole from those who had hardly more than they did: reminded her of crabs in a bucket, pulling down the weakest links just because they could. Vai also couldn't stand drug peddlers. She hated the fact that aristocrats from the wealthy districts could take anything they liked and snort it where the sun don't shine and get away with it, but there was nothing she liked better than a day where she and her team got to arrest the sort of street scum who sold slocca to schoolchildren.

One of Vai's team had a lucky break. Browsing a pawnshop in plain clothing, he discovered an engraved item stolen from a recent burglary. The pawnshop owner was a fence. Vai and her team investigated further, and found the pawnshop was one of a chain owned by the same man, all making stolen goods disappear.

They raided the pawnshops, closed them down, impounded the stock, and searched for the rightful owners. But when Vai and her team were done, they'd a lot of leftover goods. Vai was proud that her group had the lowest rates of evidence theft and bribery in the sector.

Among the unclaimed goods were a lot of personal jewellery and small objects d'art, many of them more valuable than you'd expect. Owners not possible to find. Nineteen cases where a name engraved on some object could be traced back to a person, and where that person was no longer available on Golgotha.

Vai sent her beat cops out for gossip and rumours, and they came back with the info that the pawnbroker was all but in bed with Tiberius Melmotte, a big criminal fish rich enough to seem beyond the law. He liked to recruit plenty of staff to do his dirty work. The guy had a certain charisma; his men tended to be loyal under interrogation. Probably paid the gofer who made his coffee more than twice her salary.

Melmotte was involved, police gossip said, in the emigration game. Plenty of politically suspect people found Golgotha wasn't the right climate for their health lately. Vai was loyal to the Empire because she'd sworn an oath, but you would have to be stone blind, deaf as a post, and a total idiot if you didn't notice that plenty of ordinary people were feeling the strain. As far as Jessa Vai was concerned, if harmless sorts whose main crime was a bit of sympathy for espers and clones wanted to leave, stopping them was a low priority.

Not that there weren't esper and clone terrorists, of course. Like that esper monster who reanimated dead children as his puppets, in the news about a month ago. The Empire needed to stay strong to go after that kind.

Nineteen names. At least seventeen out of nineteen cases where the person was on a list for suspicious behaviour. Not that Vai was supposed to have clearance for that, but her cyber specialist Jehoshaphat Jansen could sweet-talk any AI into opening up all its best codes and thanking him for the privilege. Implication: they'd left Golgotha and some very personal objects in a hurry, and Melmotte was the link.

"Boss," she heard her sergeant say over the line. The tone of Kumar's voice told her that everything she'd suspected, and hoped against, was real. "You need to see this."

Nigel Kumar was a good officer, a veteran cop who'd been in longer than Vai. He'd seen more than his share of tough situations. He sounded disturbed. Vai stilled her face and kept walking, slowly and evenly.

Melmotte's business was near the starport. A deceptively short and widely sprawling building, kept clean and modern. Tunnels underneath it could have been used to smuggle people to a starship. Vai walked below a gleaming metal ceiling, in a large room with seamless fittings, and tried not to feel trapped. Ornamental floral designs were carved into the walls at very regular intervals.

She took in the details of the fittings, and noticed the holes concealed in the petals.

Two of her men held open thick steel doors. Vai took in the strength of the lock and the way that when fit together they would completely seal the room. She walked all the way down a cool, odourless hall, large enough to hold hundreds of people. The floral designs stared impassively down at her. There was only one entrance and exit; two more of her team waited for her at the end in the same way, with the same seamless heavy steel doors. The air was even colder here.

Vai purposely stopped herself from shivering. She trod down a set of plasteel steps, grimy and not cleaned so well this time, and came to the mortuary.

It should have been too cold for there to be a smell. Steel and chrome lined the icy room, colder than a witch's tit. But, rancid and thick and coppery, the stench of old blood pervaded the air.

This hall was a vault. This hall was a charnel-house. The refugees paying to leave Golgotha ended up here.

Kumar had his blue kerchief over his mouth. He took Vai to an open vault. The bodies were stacked like so many lumps of meat. They'd died curled up and contorted, and Vai understood how.

People would pay through the nose for Melmotte to take them away, because they were desperate. They'd be directed to the hall with steel walls, and told to wait to be taken to the starship about to leave the planet. Then, the concealed gas jets would open up inside the ornamental metal flowers. There would be screaming and scratching against the walls, but no one would hear.

When they were all dead, Melmotte's men would comb the bodies for the valuables they carried on them, and sell those off for a little extra profit. And then the bodies themselves wouldn't go to waste.

The Empire had a profession whose name was a curse, outlawed everywhere, and yet the members of it were paid richly to continue their work. Cloneleggers. Body thieves. Ony the aristocratic Families were allowed to own clones, which left a lot of demand from others for body parts. Cloneleggers stole the dead and sold their organs, and in most cases you really didn't want to know how they got their raw material.

But knowing happened to be Vai's job, and she would not shirk it.

"Melmotte's a clonelegger." Vai mentally counted the body vats. Some would be empty, the merchandise already transferred. "How many do we have?"

"Thirteen of the vaults have occupants," Kumar said. And, Vai calculated, even one could stock a hefty amount of the dead. The vault she was by was open. On the top of it she could see a small body, tightly packed against the other shapes, and revised the numbers inside her head. Every murder was one too many. And here, adults and children who'd only come to seek refuge were betrayed and murdered in mass.

"We need identification of the bodies yesterday," Vai said tightly. She paged in the request to the pathology team—consisting of her own overworked pathologist, who usually covered accidents, and three others lent to her. She'd officially liaised with two larger, higher-ranked police squads on this. But it was Vai's own operation, and she was in command.

Vai steeled herself, looking at the full detail of the open vault. A woman with black curly hair rimed with frost lay bowed over herself, her arms locked around a child. There was a pink ribbon tied on the little girl's head. Mother and daughter, probably, with the same dark ashen skin under ice crystals and the same fear etched permanently into their faces. It burnt police officers out to see the tragedies day in and day out, but Vai believed in reminding herself why the job needed to be done.

She turned back and opened her comm link to Jansen, her cyber specialist. His face was sullen on the feed.

"Boss," he said, "I started poking into their systems, but I received new orders from above. Internal dropped in and picked it clean." He spread his hands innocently. If Vai knew Jehoshaphat Jansen at all, he'd have already made backups, but knew better than to talk on an open comlink.

Vai understood. She opened up her personal channel to higher command anyway.

"We've found the clonelegger's victims, sir. This area is my beat. Our role on the street can help find the living relatives," Vai offered, knowing it was futile. She didn't even know the senior official: a gaunt man who seemed grey all over, from his skin to his hair and moustache. If he'd ever been active in the field, she had never heard of him.

"There are no victims. There are only petty criminals," he said. "Do you misunderstand your orders, officer?"

"Some of them were children," Vai responded, choking down her anger.

"Children of traitors. Let me repeat, officer. Do you misunderstand your orders?"

There was no choice. The clonelegger preyed on dissidents who wanted to leave the Empire, and for that crime their deaths were no longer murder. Even the deaths of their families. It was forbidden for the Empire's police force to inquire any further. Vai understood very well.

"Yes, sir."

"Your orders are to find the missing cloneleggers, whichever holes the rats may have crawled into. You are best suited for that task. Other aspects of the investigation are pushed to higher levels. Have we made ourselves clear?"

He meant that there was to be no investigation of the clonelegger's clients. Some of them might be prominent citizens, after all. It wouldn't be politic to upset them. Not now, when their support might be needed for all sorts of reasons. Just another day in the Empire.

"Hunt down the other crooks, officer. You'll be pleased to know that policy says making an example out of these dregs will be good for the lower orders."

The official signed off. Vai saluted, ignoring her angry bile. She knew she'd done a good job of leading the raid to catch Melmotte with his trousers down, but there were always a few left. A circus midget, for one. For reasons best known to himself, Melmotte had hired a genetically modified freak as one of his thugs. There weren't many four-foot men running around in the Empire.

Rounding cloneleggers up and delivering them to the law was more than within Vai's preferred job description. The rest of it would wait.

"Secure the evidence, Kumar," she said. The top of the vat was drawn back across, over the faces of the little girl and her mother. Vai fully intended to ask Jansen, in person, exactly how much of the clonelegger's data he had retained. Until then, she had to work on the duties assigned to her. She'd sworn an oath to do so.

A good officer, in a darkening Empire.

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