Rage War Incursion 6

It was the older sightings she enjoyed researching
most. She had one scanned photograph, several
questionable testimonies, and a doctor's written report with much of its detail redacted. The photograph was black-and-white, out of focus, and hazed by battlefield smoke and chaos. The testimonies had been translated from their original Russian by a German soldier, and in turn translated again by an American academic several years after the end of World War Two. It had been a place of terror, a confused and hellish landscape, hardly the scene for trusted eyewitness accounts. Finally, the doctor's report had been hacked to pieces by his superiors. It was this more than anything else that convinced Svenlap that she might have something.

She stared at the photo on the holo frame before her. After putting it through every focusing, adjustment, and clarification process she could think of-and allowing her computer to assess it with several approaches that hadn't even crossed her mind-she had returned the image to its
original, seven-hundred-year-old form. The shadow of a blasted building on the left. A street, piled with rubble and corpses and the blazing remains
of a military vehicle of some kind. On the right, another ruined building, and framed in an open doorway, a figure. Too tall for the doorway, it seemed to be standing back and observing the chaos. Wide chest. Jutting jaw. The silhouette of a hairstyle quite unlike any worn by people of the time, men or women. In its lowered right hand, something that might have been a spear.

"Gotta be," she muttered for the dozenth time.

Even though accounts provided hints, it was the photograph that gave her most faith. She had come to know the Yautja well, and was determined that this shadow would not haunt her. It was time to close the case.

"Confirmed Yautja sighting," she dictated, the
computer recording every word.

"Case study number three-three-nine. Location and time-Stalingrad, January 7th to the 11th, 1943. Number of kills..." She trailed off, thinking of those questionably translated accounts again, the heavily censored doctor's report.

"Number of confirmed kills, twenty-eight, with more than a hundred more possibles." She paused again, then nodded.-pg.63-64 chpt.3