Planet of the Damned
by HD Weikle

Gardner sat silently for a moment reflecting on the call he had just received from ArkCorp officially amending his assignment. It was damned odd, he thought. Why would the Corporation single him out for this, he was just a low level cop assigned to a backwater moon in a forgotten sector of the solar system and it rained incessantly. 

“Orders were coming through by week’s end,” the caller had said, “you'll be advised transport and details over secure comm. Until then this transfer is to remain top secret.” Damn funny as well Gardner thought. Well, for now he still had a job to finish. There had been no further attacks since the last standard walker model synth they had found beheaded more than two weeks ago. Calhoun, the coroner — he had taken to calling her by her last name rather than her official title, a sign of affection he probably didn’t realize himself — Calhoun had ruled the incident felony property destruction but secretly she agreed with Gardner it was calculated, someone or something had been systematically removing heads from synths on Earth and now an outpost colony.

Although it had been two weeks since the last attack here on Europa Gardner had been busy following up on Calhoun’s lead that there were two other attacks with similar circumstances. Then he had found three further incidents that had been underreported, all had been on Earth and each one manifested a similar modus operandi, the synth had been working alone at night, accosted, overpowered and it’s head was either mutilated or missing. There had been no investigation reports filed. For Gardner, an old school cop, that added up to a serial conspiracy. There was something about the Corporation’s synths that was being harvested and it wasn’t trophy heads.

Ever since the last colonial war a decade ago, Earth’s government had been run by a conglomerate of corporate CEO’s and oligarchs brought together by the collapse of western style democracy. ArkCorp or just the Corporation as it was called ran everything on a sound economic basis that included expansion of the colonial network to the inner planets and some of the outer planet’s satellites like Europa where he was currently assigned. Europa, a terraforming colony, is marginally livable at this point. Other colonies were far different like the mining outposts which were more like factories rather than family centered terraforming, family communities and then there were penal colonies, the most extreme environments but still run as commercial enterprises. He had toured one but thankfully had not been posted to any, probably because there was very little crime among the inmates that needed the attention of a detective.

Gardner’s orders arrived a week later:

The orders continued with instructions to find a second by the name of Dobrow, a Russian with a limp resulting from his own birth defect which had never been corrected. Dobrow had volunteered for service on Enceladus when the colony had been initially established. It was reported that he was intelligent, unusually perceptive and a loner, all of which made him interesting to a detective like Gardner as perhaps a suspect rather than a CI. At least he should be easy to find, the report also stated that Dobrow was despised and feared among the rest of the colonists — it failed to reveal why. 

So, he was about to be assigned that other type of outpost, the one that is generally not well known in the system and one he had until now been able to avoid, a colony of deportees, people judged genetically unfit, too damaged at birth to be corrected by technological reconstruction, prosthetics or implants. Adults from before the Corporation had taken over, men, women and sometimes children and their parents, if they elected, to accompany their child. The colony was supplied regularly with all the physical requirements of marginal life on a small moon in the Saturn system. 

Enceladus had been physically altered to house a population in relative comfort with a steady energy supply from it’s deep subsurface salt water ocean in 3D printed habitats using a form of frozen surface sulphur snow called thioconcrete or sulphur concrete, light weight malleable but as strong as concrete.This and a regular scheduled transport of supplies including new deportees kept the colony viable if not always survivable. 

Gardner was to be the new ArkCorp Chief of Police on a colony of misfits. Life was just getting better and better. Well, he thought, he may be going to that particular hell hole… But he wasn’t going alone.