Aftermath

     Shit, Lau thought as he took a long drag from his cigarette. Poor guy pretty much woke up to the shittiest of existence and had to live through a shit-storm for the next three hours, Lau continued to ponder while squatting over the half-zipped-up body-bag of a deceased Anda Rin.

Lau blew the smoke into the night sky out of respect for the dead and the sight of the aftermath got him in a cynical mood. Remains of  the 10-unit, 5-storey building emanated rot and Lau's fabricated success that may get himself pardoned from his sentence.

The sight of the human sheep amassed around the cordoned area reminded Lau maybe it's better off he's locked away from this artificial freedom. Look at them, he thought before more words of malice polluted his mind with grime:

Either juiced up with synthetic happiness or depressed by choice as a fad until their chemical compounds ran its course. Pathetic, he added. Their punchable perfect faces lit by the flashes of the monolithic screens promoting the latest petty self-gratifying augmentations.

Fuck, these screens are taller than this ancient ruin. How anti-Biblical can these life sucking lights be, Lau ended his spite-bent meditation. He gazed at the ruins again, the once pristine structure is now just skeletal walls. Overshadowed by abstract glass towers that oozed neon and capitalist sentiments.

     "I feel ya, chief", Lau said to the unresponsive corpse in front of him. "If these suckers knew what a sorry mock-up merry-go-round 'life' they've lived, I bet ya they would've wanted a wiped memory too", Lau continued as he reached in his coat pocket to roll another cigarette.

"I truly apologize if I'm boring you to death, I'm a deep-rooted anarchist myself. I can only imagine that's why of all the two-hundred million wackos, I was the one assigned to this case; our psychological profiles was a match," Lau chuckled to himself with an unlit cigarette stuck on his lip.

"Maybe if a Goody two shoe had my spot, you'd slit your own throat. But instead, another 7 dead and a historic building demolished," he concluded before he lit his cigarette.

     "Boss man!", a thick Rastafarian accent hailed Lau. Snapped out of a his trance Lau hung his head irritated by the vexing accent of his most loyal cronies. "Yah?", Lau said half-mockingly with his irked face still hidden. "They found his boom-boom. We be tagging it and we be set northbound, boss man", the words bounced musically.

"Aye! Bag it, mhan!" Lau was disappointed with himself for being fully committed to the other man's accent. Lau stood up and marched orders at his unit, "make sure every inch of his mech is accounted for and get this body on the carrier." His unit responded, unmotivated.

Lau got out of the way so Anda's body bag could get zipped up and stored in a self-guided cryo tube that preserved corpses. His cigarette smoked all the way to its filter is flicked onto the mound of cigarette butts accumulated from the extraction team's lengthy retrieval mission of the anti aircraft rifle Anda had in his possession. Its materials avoided any detection and remained unscathed despite the two-ton jet that leveled a city-block.

The building used to stick out like a sore thumb in a bucket of overcompensating sore thumbs. Lau reflected, reports say it was bought by the top brass of a Mega corporation who grew up there. He kept it as a testament of his 'humble' beginnings, what a load of P.R bullsh-... it's the perfect "up-yours" to his competition just across the street.

     The detective supervised the loading of the corpse and all the evidence onto a heavy-winged carrier decked with obscene decals. "Qion!" Lau bellowed over the deafening engines to a mercury eyed, disturbingly pale-skinned sharpshooter clad in the tactical stealth-suit issued for the mission. "Ya, boss man?"

Lau scanned the twenty-four man crew strapped in across each other in the cargo bay. In a corner, a man and a woman who seemed out of place struggled to put their harness on. Lau gave a signal to Qion and a neural connection links the two of them. "Keep an eye on those two Mase-sists" Lau's message transmitted to Qion without any words leaving his lips. "Aye aye, second lieutenant! Best be speaking to the Cust— ah, he's in a bad mood, big time. I'll take care of those two, boss man" 

"Lay back on the psycho-babble sermon, Lau." The low and raspy menacingly calm voice of Custo Haris has never failed to put Lau back in his place. "I asked for a report, not a manifesto. 'Juiced'. 'Punchable-perfect faces'. 'Anarchist'. Cut-it-out. Treat those two representatives like Jesus and Mary. The agreement is that we observe and Tavo controls them remotely to perform the postmortem on our grounds. Copy?"

"Loud and clear, Custo, sir", Lau acknowledged subordinately. "Has Lady Mau… Did he just hang up on me?" Lau directed his message to Qion who avoided eye contact with the detective. "Talk to Lady M…" Qion faked realizing Lau's attempts to communicate and motioned Lau's message wasn't coming through. Fucking good for nothing sergeant, I'll tell the Lady once we're airborne, Detective Lau taught.

"Captain Nemo, get us the hell out of here." The carrier's thrusters slowly lifted the heavily armored aircraft off the ground. It climbed slowly, gaining altitude until it was high enough to clear some of the towers. The cargo bay light pulsed to a countdown. A handful of Lau's Platoon slept through the lift-off while the two corporate pencil-pushers waited nervously for it to go super-sonic. The pulsing light stopped, turned red and the carrier propelled forward with breakneck speed.

     The detective returned to his duty to coordinate the remainder of his investigation as his men reviewed the dramatic shootout for their own reports. Lau groaned and established a communications line with Lady Maut. 

"What do you want?", a haunting voice crept directly to the detective. The little amount of words transmitted was enough to send a chill down his bionic spine. The detective paused to carefully select his next words as if speaking wrongfully would get him hexed, "Tavo is handling the postmortem—". Lady Maut's shrill scream of anguish hijacked the carrier's PA system.

Lau's men snapped out of their deep thought by the intense sound while the two VIPs shook to the core. "ANDA IS MINE!!!" We had a deal!" Her voice grumbled like thunder within the ship's hull. Lau unfastened his harness and stood steadily against the turbulent motions of the carrier to reason with the wrathful being: "My words still stand but he's dead now and the situation's complicated."

Silence filled the air, nothing but the groans and moans of the speeding carrier's hull. Lau looked at Qion who signalled 'connection lost'. They noticed the two corporate goonies still quivering, talking amongst themselves in fear as if they took the prized cadaver from a high priestess of the underworld. Lau approached Qion to speak directly.

"Qion, get me a sit-down with Fathi Jaq", the detective said directly to his second-in-command. "You got it, boss man! Best you be heading down to Nero, give him da comforts of a home advantage, yah," Qion said musically. "Got it, you stay close to these two and I'll head to Nero district after seeing The Custo," the detective replied.

The lights inside the carrier turned blue marking their approach to their destination. The detective headed towards the cockpit to check up on the pilot.

     The hull groaned until the pilot backed the throttle to cruising speed. The carrier has entered the Northern Quadrant, away from the remaining super continent that's been reclaimed and terra formed after the major ice caps melted over a century ago. The carrier approached the airspace of Aquaneo City, a fully-submerged mega-prison, with half-a-billion inhabitants.

The darkened night sky gave way for the underwater city's lights to reach the surface of the North Pacific ocean. The light blue tint stretched across the peripheral view of the panoramic window of the cockpit. The moment they entered the airspace, Captain Nemo gave the carrier's call sign and clearance codes. Runway lights illuminated a path that led to the mouth of a tunnel.

The tunnel was large enough for any herculean freighter to come through. Its walls were lit panels that guided pilots on the banked and declined entry towards the city. Occasionally a manned turret that guarded the entry would appear. It could be read on the cockpit's altimeter that the dials went past the sea level. The steady bank went on-and-on while the measurements reached -1,200 metres until finally the bank leveled up on to a large runway where Captain Nemo touched down the carrier and taxied towards the assigned hangar.

     Three-fifths of the Mega-prison's population were made up of petty augmented criminals who abandoned any desire to the reforms of being a cog in the well-oiled capitalist machine on the mainland. Most of which have served more than sixty-years and some who have been in the underwater fortress since its completion twenty years after The Terminal War. The inmates have a self-built ecosystem that sustained a way of life with its own economical structure and occupations which resembled the older regimes of a pre-augmented world.

The rest of the population are led by Custo Haris Hendricks, an enigmatic former war titan of the mech side with as much power as the Zenith of the East and Prime Monarch of the South. Aquaneo is policed by the Custo and his private army of war criminals turned Wardens. These Wardens who bear the only rights across all quadrants to wield firearms would be handpicked by the Custo to subdue any unrest below the surface and on the surface reported by Zenith Mase.

Lau and his platoon of Wardens were the first unit in over sixty years to be called upon for a major incident as Anda's case. The detective gazed at his men whose body language spelled an unsatisfied resolve of not being the men who apprehended the suspect whose actions would haunt the century alive. Instead their freedom hung on the mundane task of escorting the deceased suspect and precious cargo to their respective destinations.