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The air in the mortuary of Northside General Hospital at uptown Carlon was cold, and Greene shivered in spite of the thick insulating fabric of his uniform. Tiny condensation clouds puffed out of AC vents in the ceiling and floors, some even fogging up the surfaces of the morgue refrigerator doors and metal tables.
He hated having to come here, even if he knew how often he would have to visit the place given the nature of his occupation.
The judges, after filing the necessary case reports, were called in to view the autopsy results following the retrieval of the bodies at the quarry dig site. Preliminary findings looked promising, especially for the one corpse with the damning evidence of deliberate ID cut-out marks on her wrist.
Six dead girls all laid out on metal beds with nothing but sheets to cover their cold forms. In total, there were twenty unidentified bodies connected to a single case. The connection between the incident concerning the week's latest victims and previous civvie reports pertaining to missing non-citizens was strong as they both involved the MO of human traffickers.
Some noticeable signs like people disappearing from the streets or entertainment hubs such as drinking dens, night clubs or brothels, only to turn up some time later dumped in a mass grave just like the one they found at the quarry. Their bodies showed signs of repeated abuse, drugged up systems clogged thicker than a flooded sewage pipe. Med-x, a little dose of psycho to amp up their heartrate, but curiously enough some traces of the latest drug to hit the black market- Psyren.
"Okay." Dr. Mercer, the chief medical examiner at Northside, tightened his gloves and adjusted his glasses as he faced the two judges. "Let's get started."
His aides retrieved the girl in question from her storage compartment and wheeled her in on an examination table. Two white cloth strips were draped over her unmentionables to give her corpse a decent amount of dignity even in death, leaving the rest of her body clear enough for the judges to see.
"Andrea Esperanza." The doctor flipped through the pages of her file pulled out of the archives of the Dominion's citizen database. "Age 19. Single, unemployed...surprisingly."
Mercer peered over his glasses at the corpse. Dominion citizens, upon reaching maturity, were usually employed in some way or other. If not for the civilian life, she should have wounded up in the military. Should have.
Minimal callouses, no preexisting scars, a well-maintained body. Hallmarks of a citizen of Elysion, especially the horrid flayed flesh on her wrist where the tattoo used to be. Perhaps one of the elitists in the big city, or some runaway teen looking to get a taste of the outside world. The story wasn't new, but there weren't a lot that ended as badly as this one.
Greene muttered, "What the hell's a girl like her doing this far away from home?"
Diaz shot him a sidewards glance but said nothing. Sometimes her partner asked questions he already knew the answer to, sometimes she'd just enough patience not to call him out on it. There was always something outside of the domed city that kids like the dead girl on the table couldn't get from within. A rush of violence, decadence in booze, sex and drugs. It wasn't that Elysion did not offer those same things under a different brand, but Carlon had a certain visceral feel to everything no matter how gritty it seemed on the outside.
A big and beautiful predator lurking behind a steel cage with some pretty damn wide bars. Everyone knew the dangers of getting close to it, but there were always those happy-go-fucking-lucky few who just had to stick their hand in through the bars, all to get a brush of that silky furry mane. Sometimes, somehow, the danger was well worth the rush.
This was Carlon City, liable to bite one's hand right off one's wrist.
But that's where the judges came in. Can't kill the cat, but they could keep it on a tight leash- perhaps an even tighter one on the kids.
Dr. Mercer gently pushed up the dead girl's upper lip to show a dried yellow fungus-like substance over her front teeth and gums. Cold-burn from a Psyren inhaler. Psyren was a party drug, effects were quick to disperse within two hours of inhalation. Highly-addictive, although any forms of overdose were yet to be documented.
This got both Greene and Diaz thinking.
Ms. Esperanza was highly likely to have been abducted shortly after her night-out with her friends. Oral manifestations tended to disappear quickly the longer the subject was alive, her being dead allowed the cold-burn to remain more or less intact, which meant that the time between the girl's last intake of Psyren and her expiration was short.
Best guess was that as soon as she'd been forcefully 'acclimated', she'd been pumped up full of med-x like the others, complications followed and she flat-lined not long after.
Later, after the examination was concluded, the body was returned to its place in the fridge. Protocol dictated that any bodies identified to have a next-of-kin would require a claim, then an honorary cremation. Dominion customs largely did not favor sentimentality, such as burying the dead. Citizens were usually cremated, as the state preferred to use what fertile land they had left for purposes other than graveyards, while non-citizens were reduced to serial numbers and subjected to resyk.
There was a certain window of time for a claim for a body, and if it closed the state would assume responsibility by cremating the body without a funeral service. The ashes would be stored in brass urns, then locked away at the Elysion memorial crypts located at the Mourning Gardens.
"Now then, Judge." Dr. Mercer said to Judge Greene, "Would you like to proceed with the subject of your other case?"
He referred to another murder case, one that Greene was confident in closing in the near future. He'd been working with Mercer for years now, along with many other judges. The bodies, even in an ordered society as theirs, never stopped coming. In old America, they flowed like rivers due to crime running rampant even under marshal law. Here, it slowed to a trickle due to the tight grip of the new world order, but it still flowed.
Greene was certain he could juggle both while not losing track of either goals, so he obliged. But before he had the next body wheeled in, he stopped to speak with his partner. "Gonna have to take a closer look on Ms. Esperanza's list of relations, see if she's got some friends who had any idea where she went exactly that night she went missing."
Diaz nodded, "I'll get right on that. Looking forward for a little shakedown when we show up at the place."
"We'll cross that bridge when we get there." Greene said, reminding her not to get ahead of herself. "Still need to get that solid lead."
Diaz stopped at the edge of the table and glanced at the closed mortuary door where the girl had been returned to. The white clouds seeped out of the gaps until the seal pressed tightly into place, the vacuum preventing any more from spilling out into the room. "You wanna handle telling her folks the news, or should I?"
Greene's chest heaved, he let out a sigh as he realized he'd been thinking about the same thing the whole day. "I'll do it, but not right now. Gotta work our way in a little further before I drop in for a visit. I'd prefer not to come to them empty handed."
A burst of light in the breach on the old and weathered rooftop of the town hall, followed by a loud rattle of machinegun fire, betrayed the enemy's position as the last vestige of Lexxer resistance to outsider occupation of the Blood Harbor faced off against the better equipped soldiers of the Dominion.
Tracers and rocket barrages filled the air as the slavers poured in a last ditch effort to choke the advance. But they could only do so much against tanks and soldiers in power-armor.
Two raiders on the roof, one manning a heavy 20mm anti-personnel cannon and the other to haul in the ammo boxes, covered the fleeing slavers beating a hasty retreat from the square. They managed to pin down a squad of rooks behind a brick wall that used to be the base of a flower bed that decorated the square. Slowly, the storm of high-caliber rounds chipped at the wall until it was only a foot and a half above the ground.
Then, as if on cue, one of the M2 Black Bears rolled into the fray and turned its gun on the raiders.
The thunder of its shot drowned out all the noise in the battlefield for a second, and the crack that followed signaled the total decimation of the enemy defense line. A great chunk of the top part of the town hall shattered like glass and scattered all over the street, bringing with it pieces of the raiders manning the cannon.
With a rallying cry, the rooks surged forward. All the pent-up hatred they've been gathering since the start of the purge they channeled into every shot, turning what should have been a reclamation operation into a bloodbath.
There was no way around it. Sometimes in a fight, heads just roll.
When the battle was over, there were some Lexxers who survived the onslaught, though rendered wounded or incapacitated. The rooks followed the examples of their officers, adhering to the standard Dominion protocol regarding raiders and slavers. Any they found along the way when they swept the harbor for survivors, they executed on the spot and left them for the pioneers to gather later for resyk or mass cremation.
In the end, the Blood Harbor was theirs.
Every building and potential hideout was thoroughly searched, any exploitable resource retrieved and dumped at the rendezvous point for pickup and sorting. Even if the Blood Harbor was the primary slave-trading hub of the Corpse Coast, there were many other resources to be found in their vast hoards sitting at ever stall and shop. Food, water, and most of all- guns. Texas, after all, was one of the most heavily armed states in all America before the Great War.
Then came the next dilemma, how they would handle the slaves.
Mostly spared from the carnage, the shackled folk numbered in the hundreds- if not thousands. They were people displaced from their lands, taken in raids or tribal disputes, sold from master to master until they wounded up there. Some of them have even spent their whole lives in chains, growing and raised up in the slavery pens. Even livestock were taken better care of than they, for as it turned out, they were provided with only slightly below average basic necessities.
The sight of them as they swarmed about their liberators, begging for release from their shackles or even for food and water...it was pitiful, heartbreaking beyond words. The rooks couldn't even wait for the technicians to arrive, as some immediately moved in to assist with removing their chains and explosive collars.
So long since they've last tasted freedom that when it was practically handed over to them by the Dominion, it all felt like a dream.
The collars and the shackles, by nightfall, had formed piles upon piles on the ground next to the gathering. And since reinforcements were set to arrive within the hour to distribute supplies to the slaves, but were somehow delayed, the rooks took whatever they had salvaged from the markets and distributed them to the hungry masses.
Later, Lt. Hope Weiss arrived at the helm of another Centaur convoy to inspect their newly claimed territory.
She carried a megaphone in one hand while the other rested on her sidearm hanging by her hip. Hope was well versed in Spanish and French, which proved to be two of the most spoken languages in the coastlands aside from English, albeit slightly weakened due to recent phonetic reforms. Nevertheless, anything closest to what they could understand had to suffice for the moment, as long as the Dominion was able to get its point across.
The lieutenant climbed atop one of the Centaurs and squeezed the button on the megaphone handle. "Attention!" Her voice, amplified by the device, carried over the masses and caused all heads to turn her way. "This harbor is now under Dominion control. Your masters are dead, and by our hand we give you back your freedom."
She pointed to the darkening horizon just as the wind whipped the sands into the beginnings of a sandstorm.
"You all have a choice now; you are free to depart, or you can stay and join us. We offer order, security, food and water- in return for obedience and absolute loyalty to the Dominion." Hope stopped to repeat the declaration in Spanish and French, then waited for her words to sink in.
Voices murmured in hushed tones from one mouth to the next, then someone boldly strode forward to speak to the lieutenant.
A heavily scarred man, a musclebound warrior of the desert with mixed ethnic backgrounds of white and black, pushed his way past the crush of bodies so that Hope would see him.
Brown eyes, that matched his sun-kissed skin, twinkled oddly like the sparkle of gold when struck by sunlight as they glared up at her. Several braided locks, tied together by copper strings, draped over his shoulders and below his nape until they touched the middle of his back. His voice was smooth for a waster, heavily influenced by the French accent at every roll of his tongue. Even the simplest hill tribes of the coastlands seemed to have gotten a bit of the finer things of the Old World.
"Obedience? You must think us too simple to see the meaning behind the word, non?" His tone was just shy of turning menacing as he accused the Dominion officer of being no better than their masters.
Hope lowered her megaphone. "Who are you sir?"
"I am Ramoné, of the Highlanders." The man said proudly, "You say we are free to leave, and yet where can we go? Out in the desert, out of the Blood Harbor, there is only death. Then you tell us if we stay, we must submit to you. This does not sound any better than our previous fate. I do not see freedom, I just see us trading in collars and chains of iron for debt- in exchange for this 'security' you so call."
Ramoné turned his head to declare to all his fellow freemen, "We leave, we die. We stay, we answer to new masters! This is the freedom this Dominion gives us?"
The people answered with angry mutters and carefully whispered exchanges of doubt, now spurred on by the dissenting words of the rabble-rousing tribal, while the rooks started to step back and point their weapons at the crowd should things turn ugly.
Tribals valued their individuality second to self-preservation above all else. Hope knew this, having been briefed by her superiors based on their encounters with other tribes living in Middle Texas. Calmly, she gave her answer, which surprised Ramoné. "Yes, that is exactly what we're offering you."
Her voice turned slightly to a mocking tone as she explained plainly what the terms were all about, having seen that her point was having difficulty getting itself across to these people. "You can't very well hope to receive something without working for it, now can you? Let me be clear about what the Dominion offers, Mr. Ramoné. Yes, you are free to leave this place and take your fate into your hands outside of the Blood Harbor. I don't speak empty words by saying so, and neither does my promise in giving anyone here who chooses to remain with us all the benefits of a...Dominion loyalist."
She paused and smiled, "If you fear becoming slaves again so much, I shall say this only once- we are not slavers. We simply ask that, in return for providing for your basic needs, you will cooperate with anything we require of you. And if at any time this does not suit your tastes, you can always leave. Making that choice shouldn't be so hard."
Ramoné could clearly see that she was sneering at him, but he also could see that there was a significant appeal to the Dominion's offer. Already, most of the slaves were stepping away from him, almost as if showing that they were not inclined to refuse the promises of the Dominion officer.
Again, the screech of the megaphone assaulted their ears as Lt. Hope announced to the freemen her final word. "Think on it tonight and give me your answer tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy a taste of the benefits we promised."
Good food and clean water, purified and cooked by their liberators' machines. Warm and soft blankets to sleep in for the night, with the former houses of their masters to stay in. A taste, a mere taste of what they offered. Basic necessities for some, often taken for granted, but not for the freed slaves. Almost all of them had already made up their minds.
Security and sustenance, would they even trade it up for their previous lives of living free but never knowing if they would see tomorrow? And the way the lieutenant spoke of the Dominion, they couldn't be any worse than their previous masters.
What could they lose by giving up a little of their freedom for the hope of seeing another day?
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