Inktober18 13 Guarded (continued from Inktober 10-12)
a/n: Lila worked security on the Whale and saw a lot of ugly. She never expected to have to share it with all of NLA.
Full spoilers and so much unsupported head canon. My XCX runs a little AU.
All the good things belong to Monolith Soft and I am so so so grateful, okay? Lila, Gino, and her station are mine.
The file included in "re: Neesae" wasn't the one that Lila had expected. That could have been ugly enough, if the sender chose to select only the worst parts. Lila should know. She'd had to include both the good and the bad in enough reviews. In addition to her official job running a power relay switching station, one of the things Lila had done to earn her keep on the voyage was to clear up disciplinary concerns. Sometimes she was sent to interview people, unofficially and casually, but more often she got information indirectly. People didn't realize that the oddball engineer who dropped by with day-old baked goods from the commissary was doing anything but redistributing extra snacks. Lila would hit a team with a basket of stale chocolate chip cookies while a certain someone was absent and see what happened. She'd shoot the breeze, share a pastry, and leave with a better idea of how a target was settling in. Rule of thumb: if a team saved a cookie for the absent teammate, they probably were doing okay. Neesae's team had put aside a lemon bar for her. As far as Lila was concerned, a commendation was probably in the woman's future.
No one really could complain about someone who lost it during the first weeks on the Whale, as long as they managed to find a way back to helpful citizenship. Neesae's original posting had required listening to the distress calls of their sister ships, initially frantic as they dropped out of the sky, then dwindling into silence. No one would suffered that trauma untouched, and Neesae had broken early. Lila had gathered from Neesae's team that her distress at the possibility of having to return to her initial post was genuine. So a transfer to the small arms depot, by way of the laundry, was a mercy. If it looked like a temporary demotion, even better. Less for certain people to fuss about.
But the email held a different report. Lila tried not to waste brain cells (or whatever it was she had) figuring out how they had gotten their hands on it. Those files were supposed to be more than well-guarded; they weren't merely part of the most secure records, they were part of the unacknowledged files that Lila had clumsily called the doppelganger lists. People who weren't who they were. People who had travelled on the ship with an assumed identity. Some had been crafted a new persona, and Lila was usually pulled off those examples fast. The ECP had shuffled placements throughout the staffing process, and this was another thing Lila did her best not to think about. But there had been worse. There were several criminal rings that had hijacked the spots of legitimate crewmates. Same name as an approved passenger, same artificial face and voice, but a different stored body controlling the robot puppet.
Back when she believed there were bodies stored in the Lifehold, this meant murder. No one would sell or donate their chance to avoid the end of the world. (Her brain whispered a list of some who did precisely that. She ignored it.) She wasn't sure how it had worked with the real system. Were the scans swapped? Or only the mental patterns? Or had both been tucked away in the banks of the quantum computers? What had happened to the bodies of the murderers on Earth? What had happened to any of their real bodies? The list of things that Lila tried not to consider needed its own list at this point.
None of that mattered. Point was, Neesae had been one of those. Her name had been linked with a minor operation that was probably to blame for only a handful of swaps. The exact scope was hard to track down, because the replacements came in small, tight groups, five individuals at most. Each set was able to support and control its own members, but none had any knowledge of other groups. Neesae's pod had managed to avoid notice until one of them was taken off-line when a hangar door blew open. The victim/culprit was lost to space, and when they tried to restore him, the Mimeosome Maintenance Center was surprised to find whatever discrepancy showed itself. Lila had found the next one contact fairly quickly, a provisions officer seemingly a few years younger than herself. She guessed he was the leader. He'd felt safe after so many light-years of travel, and he was rattled at the loss of his lackey, and so he'd responded well to the alcohol and flattery that a friendly engineer had poured out. Lila could be very naive and admiring when called upon, as well as other things. He hadn't told her everything, naturally, but by the end he'd gifted her enough hints that, when combined with a thorough search of his rooms and an even more thorough search of his comm device, she'd been able to link Neesae plus hints of a fourth member. They never did track that last man down.
She'd been pulled off the active case shortly before she started to focus on Neesae. The swelling list of things Lila didn't think about was making it hard for her to focus. She'd suffered a shock round about then, it didn't matter what, but she'd lost her footing for months. It was only shortly before the crash that they'd given her small tasks again, like writing up closed cases, including Neesae's.
Maybe she would have gotten the real facts if she hadn't wrecked herself on a dumb stunt. Maybe the poison email writer would have spared Neesae if the file had been more accurate. Maybe Lila wouldn't be frantically punching the number for every Mediator she knew, hoping to pull them into intervening, if she had just done her job on the Whale.
Better to wish for something that was still possible. Maybe Gino, a true insomniac and usually venting into the wee hours, hadn't read his email yet.
a/n: My XCX kept the whole project secret until the launch, unlike the canon version (which I read about too late to shift my story world). Please understand.
Back story exists: You need to know about the fourth member? Inktober 2017/31/Mask. You need to know about the time Lila lost it? Twitchy Tales of the Whale/3/Broken. You need more explanations for the time Lila lost it? Uh, well, it's hidden deeply within fluff but The Lily and the Blade/19/This changes things.
Next up: Clock. Lila finally is on the move. Short.