Trial 017 - 2019 Wattys Sci-Fi Winner

Rehema Neith

19.09.2722

It had been quite some time since Rehema Neith had graduated from the Cadmus Institute. She'd been with Judgement for forty-three years now, and had been a member of the Special Investigations department for forty-two. Still, it was easy for her to recall her days at the prestigious school, where she'd earned her degree in criminal justice all those years ago. At the time, the Institute had been lively and filled with activity. Even at night, the campus had been full of life, because the sheer size of the population meant that someone was always going to be awake somewhere.

Now, the school was silent. Running fountains, trains, transports, and vendors had been silenced or deactivated following the international incident. The dome sky, once constantly changing to reflect the time of day, was frozen in a view of the night sky: a sign of neglect. Investigators from every nation and ethnicity imaginable were present, poring over every square meter of the Institute's grounds.

But Rehema wasn't on the Institute's grounds. She was actually underneath them, just below the surface of the moon. The room she was in was a central control room, meant to monitor the day to day workings of the Institute. Things like ventilation, fire hazards, public safety, internet connections, and related problems. The walls were decorated with dozens upon dozens of monitors, displaying diagrams, diagnostics, camera feeds, power levels, and all sorts of useful information. Ideally, Rehema would have been here three days ago, but given the clearance sensitivity, only top investigators had been given full clearance. The regular workers returning to take up shifts were forced to go through an arduous screening process just to be approved for work. It had taken three whole days before they had finally had enough people on the scene to work the transports and monitor crucial stations.

At the moment, Rehema was investigating the control center, set on finding out the cause of the evacuation. The Institute dome had many exterior cameras, and although the feed from each camera was a different angle, they all told the same story. A fleet of evac shuttles launched from the dome, entering the moon's orbit and remaining in place. Tense moments passed, and suddenly, the space near the shuttles warped, creating a distortion not unlike heat shimmers on a hot day. Red light formed a rift in space, allowing a massive ship to slip through.

Rehema watched the ship release a swarm of smaller fighters, shooting down the shuttles. The massacre was horrible, but she forced herself to look on, taking note as the majority of the shuttles were blown apart in space. A small group of shuttles, all in a cluster, were seemingly boarded, and then the swarm of fighters returned to the warship, which retreated through another rift in space. The only thing left behind was the debris of broken shuttles and dead students in space.

"That's a Gholian warship," Rehema muttered. "They have tribal insignias on them."

She toggled the controls to replay the footage, reviewing the massacre. The swarm of fighters shot up almost all the evac shuttles, leaving only a handful intact. A few minutes passed as slightly larger vessels docked with the shuttles, then disconnected and returned to the warship. Interesting.

Rehema toggled the controls again, zooming in on the Gholian warship. This time, she scanned the hull, cursing the low resolution. It wasn't that the cameras were terrible quality, but because this had happened on the dark side of Terra's moon, and there wasn't enough light to see by.

Then, to a controller seated nearby, she said, "Run the video through your filters and get me a good close-up image of the warship's insignia."

"Right away," he said.

Rehema frowned, thinking furiously. Three days ago, somebody had launched a massive coordinated attack on the top ten schools of Kingsfield, the Career schools, famous for training the most powerful and most skilled Kinetics around. It was troubling to think that all ten schools known for training generations of Kingsfield's most powerful warriors had been defeated all at once, but while the nation of Kingsfield grieved for the loss, another more pressing attack had occurred on the same day.