Omens

[EisenSeele]

A hundred thousand shards of glass and steel danced slowly through the air, followed by gore, cloth, and bone.
The old man stood, stone faced, in the path of the carnage, blood and debris floated sluggishly towards him - the explosion radiating glacially from what used to be a ground-shuttle, through a mass of broken flesh that had been nine people just moments before.

An omniscient voice boomed from everywhere at once.
"Fourteen fatalities. Nine died instantly during the initial blast, five more en route to the hospital. There are currently another nineteen being treated at Hamburg University Hospital, three for superficial lacerations and burns, the remaining sixteen in critical condition."

Siegfried walked around the destruction, his eyes narrowing to capture any details the initial forensics team had missed.
"What do we know about the methods that could tell us who did this?"

"The labs are still running for trace analysis for molecular fingerprints - but we are 80% confident that the payload was a delayed fuse airburst round with a radial shaped charge of DXT, made to look like a planted explosive."

"Made to look like?"

"Blast reconstruction shows that the distal side of the cabin suffered noticably less structural damage, and footage shows this-"

The old man walked to the far side of the shuttle - as the spray of glass and metal halted its advance, and slowly began to retreat. Before his eyes, the shuttle doors re-assembled out of the cloud of debris - stopping the instant before the explosion, revealing a hole the size of a large grape in the sheet metal chassis.

Siegfried reached out to trace the outline of the jagged tear with his finger.
"Solid canister ordinance. An antique."

"Fifteen different groups, a mixture of known Bundeschuh and Unioner cells, have come forward claiming responsibility. We are investigating all leads, but do not expect the true culprit has revealed themselves in this manner."

"Do we know who the intended target was?"

"The party consisted of Senator Scmhidt entertaining several prominent members of the committee on Weimar Security, as well as the chairman of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce. Three served in the Imperial Military, and four in the Federalist fleet during the war. All of them were points of interest to someone."

"I've seen enough. End program."

The world went white and faded into a fuzzy haze of static - as Siegfried unplugged the jack from the base of his skull.

Blinking several times as definition and color returned to his surroundings, he sat up and looked across the table to see a Angela, a rigid woman in her early thirties, gingerly rubbing the site of the port behind her ear as she continued to speak, in her normal voice.
"The four other attacks happened simultaneously and were similar to what you just witnessed."

The old man stood up.
"Prepare a list of the dead, with all possible connections between them. There must be a commonality that would indicate a motive."

The woman nodded, straightening her blouse as she rose up to give a salute.

Siegfried walked towards the back of his office, to the viewport that overlooked the AESIR facility dry-docks. Steady streams of ships, large and small, converged and departed like lines of ants from a hive.

He felt the all too familiar feeling something big had been set in motion - it was a race against time to find out what.

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