Fu Leng was the last planet to be discovered, and farthest from Amaterasu, placing it deep into the void. Surprisingly small for an outer planet, Fu Leng has only 20% the mass of Hantei. With such a small gravitational pull, it was unable to hold together an atmosphere during the birth of the Solar System and is now a barren lifeless rock. Fu Leng is considered neutral jurisdiction, and is home to the Isawa.Kaiu.Asahina Deep Space Observation Complex. There is little else of interest here.Population: 1 Million Imports: Food, energy, raw materials, water, personnelExports: None
Moto Tatake crumpled the readout into a ball and tried to get it into the Waste Recycling Management System bin across the cabin - no mean feat at constantly increasing G forces. Of course he missed; Moto Tatake had been the single worst athlete in the recorded history of Shinjo Police Academy. Still, perhaps if he put a little more arc into… his thoughts were interrupted by loud roar of retro rockets, bringing the transport down onto the landing pad. In a few moments he would be on the coldest, poorest excuse for a planet that the had been seen fit to place in the sky: Fu Leng.
God, they'd even named it after the fallen Kami, how'sthat for a hint?
Customs was relatively uneventful. The same, "have you brought any livestock?" yadda yadda yadda. It was a show anyway; the Bayushi had taken the security contract for the DSOC some time ago. Everything found its way onto the planet. Tatake actually didn't mind it so much. After all, the Scorpion did a fairly efficient job of keeping any illegitimate business that wasn't theirs down. Besides, you couldn't really blame people for wanting some of the more illegal substances the Empire had to offer; outside the media range of the Clan planets, there wasn't much else to do here.
Finally, after the teeming throng of humanity - well teeming for Fu Leng, which meant he had seen about two other people, maybe three if you counted the skycap - Tatake got into a cab and ordered the driver to his hotel near the DSOC. He was going to get some sleep before he started the investigation. They didn't have cable this far out but … maybe the local access was interesting. He doubted it but it was either that or the complimentary copy of the Tao of Shinsei that would no doubt be waiting next to his phone directory.
Hey wait, phone directory…
The cab drove off. Twenty minutes later, when Tatake was somewhere between "Asahina" and "Ashigaru," he felt a thump. When he went to the window, he saw a mess of particles drifting slowly to the ground off to one side. Nothing much to worry about.
Later, when he finally put down his book after "Doji, Kakita, Iuchi, and Taft - see also: Yellow Pages, Attorneys," and resorted to watching local news, Tateka learned that the spaceport had been destroyed by an as yet unknown explosion. Half the city,which locals referred to as the 'Festering Pit' for some obscure reason, had been depressurised before the failsafes had kicked in and as a result most of the city's government and infrastructure personnel, who had been working in the part of town that had lost itsatmosphere, were now dead.
So here he was. On assignment from the Shinjo Magistrates HQ to solve a string of murders on this backwater planet. The local police dispatch had been destroyed.There was no way to get back home. The murderer he was supposed to catch may well be a frozen corpse and even if he wasn't, what were a fewmore deaths anyway? Through some morbid urge, Tatake pulled the Technical Readout out of his pocket (he had picked it up before he left the shuttle; interplanetary stewardesses were very picky about floating trash), crossing out the "1 Million" following population, and wrote in, "around500,000, give or take."
It was going to be a long week.