Second Sun

SpoilerShow

Gore warning for this update.

Get to the agent in charge and figure out why they want you, in particular, on the case. Get what they have on the primary.

You roll down your window and show your ID.

"What is that?" the officer asks.

"Canadian Forces National Investigation Service," you say, long since used to explaining your agency's initialism. "I'm a fed. Looking for the agent in charge."

"I think he's inside," the officer says, angling his head towards the house with a haunted look.

"How bad is it in there?" you ask.

"My partner was in there earlier and told me this is the worst he's ever seen, just the goddamned worst," he says, stale coffee on his breath. "Not much left of them, he says."

"Any reporters been around?"

"Not yet," he says. "We heard some news trucks were on their way up from Toronto. I don't think they know anything. Otherwise, pretty quiet. Come on through."

You drive up. A lace of police tape cordons off the lawn and driveway, stretching from a lamppost and looping around the iron-wrought railing on the porch. Some of the forensic techs huddle over by the garage, on a smoke break. They watch you approach without the casual chauvinism or stares you sometimes get at scenes - their eyes are hollow tonight, glancing your way like that pity you for what you're about to go through.

>Standard quarantine procedure, don't contaminate the crime scene

You pull out a pair of plastic booties and slip them over your shoes. The doorway is draped with a plastic tarp, and the smell inside assaults you as soon as you duck through, the tang of blood and rot and shit intermingling with the chemical stench of whatever the techs' collection kits and ethanol. The odors feel like they seep into you, your saliva instantly coppery like you're sucking on pennies. Criminal analysts in Tyvek suits crowd the entryway, preserving evidence, taking photos. A nervous anticipation rolls over you, as it typically does in the moments before you witness a new crime scene for the first time; but once you turn the corner and see what you're dealing with, it dissipates, replaced with urgency and sorrow and a compulsion to put the broken pieces together as fast as possible.

A woman and a boy lie on the floor, their faces smeared away in a mince of blood and bone and brain. Cotton pants on the boy, a jersey for a pajama top - maybe ten or eleven years old, you're guessing. The woman's nightgown is dark with blood, her bare legs a gradient from flesh to plum where the fluids have discolored her. Both have voided their bowels, the floor so soaked that shit and standing blood are pooling in the uneven parts of the carpeting. You struggle not to gag. The smells degrade the boy and his mother, you think, their humanity debased by the sewage and formlessness.

Long ago, you learned how to dissociate yourself when viewing bodies by looking at them through different lenses, divorcing their mutilation as much as possible from the people they once were. Your colleagues around you, you view through the lens of humanity, and the bodies, you view through the lens of forensics. You objectify the corpses. The killing blow for the woman was one of two blows to the side of the head, either her left parietal or zygomatic. Her left pupil had dilated to a black saucer. You also note that every one of the boy's fingernails had been removed. His toenails too, it looks like. After checking the woman, you see the same has been done to her. Someone - likely a man - killed these people, then knelt in the gore and plucked their nails from them. Or was it before he killed them? Why?

One of the techs runs thread from the blood spatter on the ceiling and walls, creating a web that delineates an area of convergence - it looks like the victims were on their knees when they were killed. An execution.

You look around, the agent in charge momentarily forgotten. The room they died in is bland - nothing like the room you once knew, the comfortable, dim-lit rec room that your best friend's family lived in. Now it has oatmeal tones and track lighting. The walls are empty, no artwork, no photos. The room doesn't look like it's been lived in; it looks like it's been staged for resale.

"Jeanette Newmann?" One of the men in Tyvek has paused his work. Bloodshot eyes, dark skin ashen, Vicks dabbed under his nostrils in twin streaks.

"CFNIS," you say.

He crosses the living room on metal risers the investigators use like stepping stones to avoid disturbing the blood. Chewing gum, he says, "Rick Mason, Agent in Charge. Let's talk."

Mason leads you through the narrow kitchen, the few people gathered there no longer in Tyvek, shirts and ties wrinkled from hours of work, their faces gaunt with exhaustion. Mason, though, seems energized - like he's going to charge ahead until this killer is caught. He looks angry, almost scowling as he leads you, as if he's personally offended by the goings-on here. His voice is a resonant baritone in a room of quiet murmuring.

"Right through here, in this little den," he says, pulling aside a flimsy accordion door that separates a room that branches off from the kitchen.

As with the rec room, the rest of the house has been similarly soullessly updated over the years, but the den is seemingly untouched since you last saw it. It's unnerving - like this little patch has remained static while the rest of time has moved on. Fake wood paneling, a gaudy light that casts the room in amber. Even the particle-board desk and metal filing cabinets - if they're not the same pieces as before, they're very similar. Nancy once found a stash of letters in one of those cabinets that her parents wrote during their divorce. You and she had sat on the front porch and read them out loud to each other, and you remember being struck by how earnest, almost childish, an adult man's letters to his wife could be. No different than high school breakup letters, you had thought, no difference at all. Nothing changes. People's hearts stay the same.

"Have you had a chance to see the entire scene?" Mason asks you. "Upstairs?"

"Not yet," you say. "I'm curious, though - why exactly have I been brought in on this? I have some idea, but I'd like to hear it from you."

Mason folds the accordion door closed and takes a seat behind the particle-board desk. "The Deputy Commissioner of the RCMP called me in the middle of the night, pulled me out of bed. I don't get calls from him on a regular basis. He told me there's a federal crime scene in Beaverton, and told me to lock it down."

"But that's not all he told you," you say.

Mason bares his teeth - meant to be a smile, you think, an easing of the situation, but it looks pained. He wads his gum up into a silvery wrapper and replaces it with a fresh black stick. Licorice-smelling. You note tooth marks on his pencil - maybe he quit smoking, or is trying to. He's early forties, maybe mid, muscular - probably a regular at the gym.

"I'm struggling to understand what the deputy commissioner told me," says Mason. "To sort of wrap my head around what we've got here. He briefed me on a secret program called 'Distant Shores'." He speaks the words like a spell, a shade of fear moving over his eyes. "A naval program - black ops. He said our primary, a JTF2 sailor named Rodney Keating, is connected with the Distant Shores program, part of Naval Space Command. He said to include Jeanette Newmann in the investigation."

This man's idea of the world just exploded a few hours ago, you realize, seeing Mason struggle to believe the unbelievable. He'd been brought into the secrets of Distant Shores - but how far in? You remember your first dreamlike glimpse of dunlight glaring off the hulls of the NSC fleet in orbit, like diamonds spilling over black velvet - something few others have ever witnessed. You imagine Mason taking the phone call at home, sitting on the edge of his bed listening to his superior describe things that must have sounded like miracles.

"Keating was... some sort of astronaut," Mason says, his jaw grinding the licorice. "Sidereal Space - I understand space, but I had to look up "sidereal". I can understand that we've been further out into the solar system, had more activities in space than is public knowledge, but I don't get how. Quantum foam-"

So he knows about Sidereal Space but not Ulterior Time. Naval Space Command does have a public face, though most of its real contributions are under the guise of the American wing. Nobody really expects Canada to have much of an active space program, and the NSC likes it that way. You've traveled to Sidereal Space, but you've also traveled to Ulterior Time - time-traveled to versions of the future, not just to see the Demarcation but for criminal investigations as well. FPT's, these futures were called - fluctuating prospective timelines. "Fluctuating" because the future can cahnge - the futures that NSC travels to are only possibilities branching off the conditions of the present. Any evidenced gathered from a future is inadmissible in court in the present, because the future being observed might not ever occur.

"I see," you say. "Think of me like a resource. That's why I'm here, that's why you were asked to call me. My division in CFNIS investigates crimes relating to the Distant Shores program."

"I don't know what to think," says Mason. "I don't know what to believe about Keating, about a black-ops Canadian space program - it all sounds... I don't know how much of this I'm even getting."

Get to the agent in charge and figure out why they want you, in particular, on the case. Get what they have on the primary.

"There's a missing girl," you say. "She's the top priority."

The reminder of the missing girl focuses him, something actionable. "Nicole Keating," he says. "Seventeen..."

>Is the sailor responsible in custody yet? Leads?

"Nicole," you say. "We'll track her down. To do that, though, we need to start with tonight. I need details. Tell me what we know about Rodney Keating."

"Locals were first on the scene," says Mason, his fog of bewilderment dissipated now. "They called out our person of interest immediately as Rodney Keating - figured he killed his own family. He's not here, of course - likely fled the scene. Once the police found paperwork suggesting he was a sailor, they called the Naval Reserve, to keep them in the loop. They found his records - he was on the Kootenay, back in '69... that ship that exploded? He must have been just a kid."

"What else have you learned?"

"Your supervisor faxed me some more records on him," says Mason. "Broad strokes. A lot of redactions. Special Forces in the late seventies. Served with Naval Space Command since the early eighties. Petty officer first class, but his records stop in 1983. Turns out, Keating's been living off the grid, everything under his wife's name. His official status is 'missing in action'."

A sailor living off the grid - an NSC sailor missing in action, no less. A sailor lost to Distant Shores is a tragedy, but a sailor presumed lost suddenly showing up like this, living in secret off the grid... that's a national security threat.

Any further lines of inquiry you'd like to pursue?

Any more information you'd like to gather?

How would you like to proceed?