Carnifex
Posted on Fri Apr 17th, 2015 @ 4:59pm by Commander Ashley Kennedy
Mission:
The Night Cries
Location: Police Headquarters, Fraser Road, Pike City
Timeline: 2278.46: 0805hrs
The Colonial Police didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat when Ash arrived at the Headquarters on Fraser Road, just down from Starfleet’s building. Quite to the contrary, she felt like she’d wandered into the enemy camp. News that Starfleet had taken over the investigation into Captain Gunning’s murder had filtered all the way down to the lowliest flat foot and so everyone in a dark blue police uniform was casting suspicious eyes in her direction.
The desk sergeant had been short, dismissive and down right rude to her.
“You’ll have to wait, missy,” he drawled, then proceeded to not go and fetch the officer in charge like she’d politely asked.
No, she thought as her eyes narrowed. I won’t be waiting.
She leaned forward, lifted herself up on the balls of her feet to create the illusion of towering over the middle-aged desk sergeant and gritted her teeth. Her lip curled into a snarl as she shouted down at him, “Now, Mister!” The sergeant almost fell off his chair and scrambled away with Ash shouting after him, “Get your officer in charge right this second and tell him that Commander Kennedy from Starfleet needs to have a word with him!”
The suspicious eyes stopped at that point. In fact, they made a point of avoiding eye contact with the brooding furie waiting impatiently at the front desk.
The officer in charge was a chief inspector named Novikov, who apologised profusely for the sergeant’s behaviour and pledged - many times - the full support of the Pike City Police for Starfleet’s investigation. After Ash impatiently told him that she was there to inspect the murder weapon, he led her to one of their forensic labs.
This lab seemed to have inherited the job of evidence examination. It was unnecessarily spacious, had three stainless steel benches, a wall of cupboards, a refrigeration unit and three computer terminals. Three chairs on wheels were scattered around the place, only one of which was occupied. About half the lights in the lab were on, which left the room with a gloomy feel that perfectly matched Ash’s mood.
She spotted the gun on the bench against the left hand wall, sealed in a plastic bag and laying out for anybody to see or steal. On the other side of the room was the lab’s only occupant, a grey-haired human in a lab coat who was diligently scrolling through a news feed on one of the computer terminals. It looked like he hadn’t noticed that Ash was there.
“Are you in charge here?” she snapped, her voice echoing around the largely empty lab and startling the man in the coat, who quickly flicked the terminal screen off and swivelled his chair around to face her. On any other day, Ash might have chuckled at his reaction. But not today.
“Um,” he said, standing up and walking over to her. “Y-yes. Yes, I’m Maximilian Lamaison.” As he approached, he seemed to recognise the uniform Ashley wore and his demeanour changed. “I suppose you’re here for that,” he said sharply, gesturing toward the gun.
Ash eyed him, sizing him up. He had grey hair that was turning from blonde and wore it short with a ridiculous-looking cowlick that rolled from his widows peak almost to the corner of his right eye. His blue eyes were framed by black-rimmed, rectangular eyeglasses that rested above prominent cheekbones, giving his face a seriously gaunt look. The fact that he didn’t like Ash and the uniform she wore was manifest in every part of his face, but particularly the thin, pursed lips that seemed to be struggling to hold back a string of bitter verbiage.
“I’m not here to take evidence from you, Mr Lamaison -”
“Doctor!” he snapped with a temper to rival her own. “If you please.”
She bowed her head slightly but stopped short of apologising. “Doctor,” she said. “I have no interest in taking the evidence,” she continued. “I merely wanted to learn what you’ve found out from your examination.”
He regarded her for a moment, his jaw moving slowly up and down as though he was chewing on something, but wasn’t. “Nothing,” he said at last.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I found nothing,” he elaborated as he crossed over to the gun and picked it up, resting it in both hands. “No fingerprints. No hair follicles. No fibres. No skin cells. No fluids. Nothing.”
Ash looked at the weapon through the plastic. It was a slugthrower, but not ancient. This was a modern weapon. Although militaries had long since converted to energy-based weapons, there was still a market for the old-fashioned slugthrower in some quarters of the galaxy. “What can you tell me about the weapon itself?” she asked as she peered at its dull black material.
“It’s a gun,” Lamaison replied with a shrug.
Ash looked up at him from under her brows in a way that clearly communicated that she wasn’t impressed.
He sighed and thrust the weapon into her hand before he walked back off to the computer terminal. “It’s a Solkar Fabrications N-Eight Carnifex semi-automatic pistol,” Lamaison said as he walked. “No serial numbers or identifying marks of any kind.”
“Carnifex?” Ash asked as she followed him to his terminal. “Latin for butcher?”
“And executioner,” he said as he sat down and swivelled back to his terminal. He activated the screen and it displayed an information file about the pistol.
Ash leaned forward and skimmed the words. “A semi-automatic coil gun that fires an eight milimetre projectile from an eight round cartridge.” She skimmed some more. “Manufactured by Solkar Fabrications on Nimbus Three - well that’s ironic. Favoured by some mercenary groups and private security organisations … optional accessories include silencer, smart rounds and opti-sight.” She exhaled through her nose as she read more of the technical data for the gun.
“There’s no silencer on this,” she noted. “Someone would have heard this thing firing.”
“You’d think so.”
She straightened up and absorbed the information from the screen as she looked down at the weapon still in her hands. The weapon that killed Elsa Gunning. She suddenly felt a darkness descend over her, a haunting feeling as she held the gun, the carnifex, the executioner. She imagined what the killer might have been thinking as he or she held this weapon, aimed it at the back of Elsa Gunning’s head and fired a round. How did they feel when the slug tore through her? How did they feel when the report of the shot echoed through the room? How did they feel when they saw their target, their victim, her mentor, fall to the floor in a pool of her own blood?
“Miss?” Lamaison said, probably for the second time judging by the expression on his face.
“Commander,” Ash corrected him and set the gun down on the bench next to the terminal.
She wiped her hands on the sides of her pants and turned her attention back to the case. She gestured to the terminal, “That report says some private security firms use this weapon. Are there any companies on Cestus that might use it?”
Lamaison shrugged and held his hands out plaintively. “I would not know.”
“Do you enjoy being like this, Doctor?” she asked, crossing her arms. “Because I could construe your attitude as something less than full cooperation and Chief Inspector Novikov promised me full cooperation.”
“Construe all you like, Commander, but I have told you what I have discovered about this weapon,” Lemaison said, gesturing contemptuously at the gun. “Now why don’t you and your other pompous Starfleet snobs get your noses out of our business?”
Ash was never one to walk away from a fight and on a day like this, she was itching to go. She reared up, straightened her back, and returned fire. “In this case, Doctor, our pompous noses are very much in our business. That weapon murdered Captain Elsa Gunning, my commanding officer. So you will understand that we are well within our rights to investigate this crime. This is our business.”
“You will find, Commander, that people on this colony came out here to get away from interfering do-gooders like you and your crewmates. I came out to the frontier to start a new life and get away from jackbooted Starfleet meddling and I will be happy when you and your damn ship are gone from here and out of our lives.” He turned back to the computer terminal as if to end the conversation.
Ash wasn’t about to let it end on that note, so she pressed on. “You should know, Doctor, that the Federation is expanding into the Galactic South,” she said, finding a perverse joy in putting him in his place. Where was this coming from? whispered a voice deep down inside her. “Before you know it, this won’t be the frontier anymore. You’ll have more buildings, more cities, more residents and, yeah, more maroon-coated Starfleet types to deal with. I hope you’ll remember me when you see them, and treat them with a little more respect than you’ve shown me today.”
He stared resolutely at the screen, refusing to acknowledge her.
The thought occurred to her that she may have gone too far with him, pressed too hard against his attitude. On another day she might have kept her cool and not let the opinions of a stranger rile her up like that. But today was different. Her captain, her mentor, murdered. Her mission, her career, in jeopardy. Everything was different now. And she hated it.
She looked down at the weapon one last time and slid it closer to the terminal. “Make sure you look after this,” she said, contempt dripping from her voice. “I may need to come back to take another look at it later.”
Without looking back, she stormed out of the lab, a scowl fixed across her face as she made her way back out of police headquarters. When she got out of there - and stopped feeling like the enemy inside the gates - she headed back for the Admin Centre. She wanted to follow-up with some private security firms and would need some local knowledge to help with that.
Lieutenant Commander Ashley Kennedy
Weapons Officer
USS Farragut
