The Divine Sedition [Complete]

Chapter 11 Chief Scientist Markus Bauer Gets Suspicious

Markus Bauer was lying in a hot bath trying to shake off the cold. He hated waking up from cryogenic sleep, but what he hated, even more, was to spend months wasting his life doing unqualified and simple diminutive tasks for the army. When Markus Bauer enrolled for the ship, Bjorn Muller had given him a choice that he could be cryogenically sleeping for most of his tenure. It had sounded great as it enabled him to get paid for 5 years, being able to afford a beautiful house when he got back to Earth while being cryogenically frozen in time and not aging for most of his tenure. The drawback was missing out on what happened with his parents back on Earth and the disconnect that caused. The worst drawback, however, was the cold when waking up after a session of cryogenic sleep, and Markus absolutely loathed waking up.

Eventually, Markus felt warm enough. He put away his tea, got up from the bath, and finally got dressed. He had a look at his briefing. His goal was to confirm the identity and the cause of death of Keila Eisenstein. His boss had already publicly stated that Keila had been killed. So, all that was expected of Markus was that he was to fall in line with his boss’ expectation and confirm Keila’s death. Markus scoffed at the notion that he would just be his manager’s lapdog. He had his professional principles and would do a thorough job at examining the case.

Markus entered the scientific morgue and realised that something was amiss. The official explanation to the many bullet holes penetrating the body had been that Keila was running away from her pursuers and they shot her from behind with an excessive number of bullets, to make sure she collapsed and died. Markus dismissed this claim. All the bullets had the same entry angle, and none of the wounds showed any signs of fibre from clothing or body armour. Hence, Markus concluded that Keila must have been shot while lying naked facing down, execution-style. But why had they acted this way? They should have known that Keila was more valuable to the Terran Council alive, for propaganda and public execution reasons, rather than being dead. Instead, her brain and nerve system were utterly wrecked by the abundance of bullets penetrating her body. Had the Edenites wanted to hide something, the possibility was there?

Another thing bothered Markus, how could he know that this, in fact, was the body of Keila and not some random corpse? He had a file on the system that supposedly was the DNA of Keila, and that DNA was matching the body, but the origin of that file was very mysterious. Usually, a record with the DNA of a suspect would come with reports stating how and when the DNA was collected and a detailed dossier on the suspect. Nothing of that was available, just a date stamp for the DNA file, 25 April 2868.

“25 April 2868” Markus thought about the date. He recalled something. That day, an escape pod had mysteriously disconnected from the ship and crashed on Mars, and a prisoner seemed to be missing and was on the run. When he had met with Bjorn to discuss the matter, Bjorn had screamed at him and told him that it was none of his business, and everything was under control. This could not be a coincidence.

Markus was thinking a bit longer. Bjorn was hiding something, but he could not be collaborating with the rebels. Bjorn had ordered the destruction of Keila’s ship, thus killing its crew only a week earlier. Markus could not contain himself any longer, and he walked to Bjorn’s quarters to confront him to find out the truth.