The Mind Under Earth (The Last Road 4)

The electric light was a cold and pale blue, making the room look like a freezer. The holo units displayed layer after layer of information on so many topics that they were nearly impossible to track. Papers, yes old fashioned papers, were splashed all across the place, over the metalic table and the electronic elements on it. Pens, pencils, wordcutters, all were sprayed around like if a maddened hurricane had wrecked havok in the place. The green screens of computers flickered and changed, showing eternal lists of names and status reports from all over the Empire. The only movement in the room was that of a small hamster, running in circles in his cage near the naked cement walls.

And, in the middle of such informational chaos, a man stood still, reading calmly. He seemed somewhat out of place there, his clothes neat and clean, somewhat even elegant and certainly formal. He seemed so still, in a room that somehow seemed in motion, that he stood out. He wasn't old, but certainly wasn't young anymore, instead he was in that grey area where no amarrian receives any extra respect due to age but is already starting to lose the physical impulse of youth. Maybe he was slender, maybe he wasn't strong, but the power that lured behind his eyes made him seem mighty. He seemed capable of controlling the universe with a single whim. The badges on his jacket showed some military ranks, but he didn't seem like a fighter, neither had the implants for a pod pilot.
He was a mind. And a burning one.
That mind had been occupied for years with a puzzle to which he couldn't find the last piece. Three years looking for a ship that had vanished. Three years looking for a ghost. Derne Metris, Lord of House Metris, who had dissapeared without a trace, leaving his House in turmoil. They couldn't move forward and let a new Holder take his place, but lacked a proper Holder's guidance. And neither Lord Sarum nor the Emperor had any interest in taking actions in the situation, allowing the House to fall deeper into turmoil.
But this night... or was it morning already?... finally he had found the last piece. A hint. A detail. Something everyone had overlooked. A belt fight. Some blood raider scavengers who had destroyed a small miner ship, in one of the multiple asteroid belts of a safe system. Something rare, but not unknown, and CONCORD was too busy to start investigating such small matters. But it was the only option in a universe where all doors had been closed up to now.
It was the last possible road.
And so he left, eager to abandon the underground bunker and go meet that woman. Latna had been the dead pilot's fiance back then, though she had married another man just a few months ago. She had moved on, as was expected of every person to do. But he prayed to God that she kept the possessions of her fiance, even, if possible, the ship wreck. There had to be some clue there, Blood Raiders didn't go so deep into Empire space only to hunt a poor miner who was so full in debts he had no real future. One prey wouldn't justify for them such a long and dangerous voyage.

The door of the room was metallic, old but well kept. 045-BE. Just a number, an ID, somewhere in the lower levels of the station. The poor sectors. But it was his destination. People around the place looked at him once, without noticing that underneath the old black robe of a Theladrien Priest was a man more driven than any of the members of that Order. He knocked firmly twice in the door, rejecting the use of the automatic call button, and yet he was heard and a small viewing panel opened in the door.
Convincing the woman to open the door to an itinerant priest in need of some rest was easy. It was surprising how those who had less were often the ones willing to share what little they had with those in need. Latna was not a beautiful woman, and the last years had been hard on her, so briefly he felt sorry for having to ask. To reopen the wound. To throw salt into it. But it had to be done, it was his duty, something he could not turn his back to.
He left the room embraced by the soft cries of the woman, and the yelling of a small girl, not older than a couple years. The last of the dead pilot's gifts to her. But he knew where he was going, for she had kept the wreck with all of her fiance's possesions in a small warehouse near the docks, for which she paid a small monthly fee. She couldn't draw herslef to leave her past fully behind, and carried it with her in her new life, like a shipwrecked person hanging to his last fragment of wood in an endless sea. A last hope, a ghost from the past you really can't seem to able to leave. So human, so vulnerable, so imperfect... and, this time, so important for all.
Sometimes God works in mysterious ways.