[Earth] The Moment (One Shot)

"That's quite a drop." Homicide Division Sergeant Craig Masterson said as he looked down the cliff to the waters below. They'd been called in by an old hobbyist fisher who'd found a body at a point a few meters away from directly below them. It had a noose with a broken lead around its neck and several third-degree burns in addition to the usual damage seen from a fall like that into the water. The path leading up to the point they were now observing the scene from was littered with empty liquor bottles and the stains of a red liquid, apparently from said bottles. If this one person had really consumed the contents of all of them, they'd probably taken in enough for a lethal level of alcohol poisoning. The sergeant looked over at his partner, some kid recently transferred over from Execution. Little bastard must have gotten his blood replaced with ice over there, because even with a scene like this he looked about as upset as if he'd just heard it was going to rain tomorrow. "So then... Axe, was it?"

"Specialist Lereau, Sarn't." Jeremy displayed that he was capable of showing emotion with a 'please don't try to be funny now' expression. He was following the victim's footprints with his eyes. As drunk as the person had to have been (it was either a man or a rather large woman, the tracks were left by shoes bigger than his 12s) they seemed to have gone in a remarkable semblance of a straight line.

"Lereau then." Craig adjusted as he looked at his new partner with irritation. The only thing worse than an arrogant adolescent was one who was also competent. They were a lot harder to put in their place. To force Jeremy out of his comfort zone, he started walking back down to where the body was, meaning the kid would have to get up and follow him to maintain the conversation. For his part, he was still trying to figure out who knew how to tie a noose in this day and age, let alone drunk. "As I was about to say, which one do you think finally got him? The poisoning, attempted hanging, burns, shot, fall, or drowning?"

Jeremy was silent for a fair amount of time as he stared at the shotgun that had embedded itself halfway into the rock a short distance from the body, grip end sticking straight up. He thought he'd seen some kind of engraving on its side, almost like letters, but when he realized he couldn't read it, he shook his head and returned his thoughts to the questions his sergeant asked. Were they rhetorical? He looked over and saw in the older man's face that there was indeed an expectation of an answer there.

"Hypothermia."

"What?"

"I believe he died of hypothermia."

"Why would you even think that? That wasn't even an option!"

"This suicide shows signs of inspiration coming from a really old, cringe-worthy joke."

"Define 'old' and in any case, would you mind sharing?"

"Centuries old, and with all due respect, can it wait until we're allowed to leave the scene? It's already in bad taste, and here it's an order of magnitude worse."

"...fine."

SAMCIS finally showed up a half hour later, took the holos taken by the two Homicide Investigators and added them to the large quantity of data they collected over the next few hours. Then the scene was cleaned up, all but the shotgun which couldn't be removed from the rock it'd embedded itself into. The words on the side though, when translated from Old Greek letters, read 'THE MOMENT'. The victim's omnitool was broken, but there was enough left for transmission tracing, and the last one seemed to have been sent off in the direction of a forum run by a now-defunct terrorist organization.

"Tell you what." Masterson said as Lereau parked the aircar in the MP headquarters' hangar after a silent drive ate away the last couple hours. "If you're right about that hypothermia thing, I'll see about sending a recommendation up the line to get you transferred to C-Sec."

"But I just got here."

"All the more reason to leave while you can. You aren't too attached yet, and Homicide's a black hole for your career."