On the management of priorities

I've always been relatively good at multi-tasking. There are quite a number of tricks you can use to divide your attention into manageable increments and then distribute them across the tasks you need to accomplish. The main trick, after identifying all the tasks on your plate, is prioritizing them so the right ones get done in the right order. Usually a fairly straightforward task.

My personal world was really divided between three main sets of priorities that more or less matched my roles in life. Family, which included 'Brina and Lily and AuroraBlue and a few select individuals I'd be willing to take a bullet for. A few years ago, it wouldn't have been very high on my list. I didn't have that kind of family a few years back. Considering there was a time folk didn't think I even had a soul, having a family to care about was a bit of a change.

Then there was my duty as a soldier: the career that never really lets go. Very few people knew what I'd done during my military career, and fewer still knew that I'd returned to it. Voluntarily? Not entirely. But I still felt the same sense of duty that drew me to the service in the first place and, in truth, I could do the 'Verse more good on the inside than out.

There were times when those first two divisions clashed. Usually something involving my little girls. No real surprise there. Especially considering their relationship with Blue Sun and how deeply embedded Blue Sun is with the Alliance power structure.

The last priority, though not the lowest, is my duty to the townsfolk on Hale's Moon. They probably had no idea what they were getting when they elected me Mayor. The joke's always been they thought I'd do the best job at dodging bullets. But it turns out I've done OK as their duly elected leader. Being groomed for an executive position when I was a kind, and a subsequent military career, probably had something to do with that. But the fact was I'd taken a shine to the folk here. Yes, I'd had more folk reporting to me when I was in the service. And if I'd gone into the family business, I'd have a departmental budget that could more or less buy Hale's Moon. Point was, I took my role here very seriously. I tried to do what I thought was best for the people here, rather than myself.

While Lily's involvement with the Ardra AI had been taking a lot of my focus of late, there were other issues that were climbing up the priority scale.

We'd had our fair share of dead bodies crop up over the years. Between mining accidents, raids, Reaver attacks, Alliance assaults, and rampant killing machines, most of the folk here had gotten so the sight of a dead body was only a might disturbing and not something to cry home to Momma about. More than a little sad if it was someone you knew, but it'd been a fact of life.

But this last series was different. These weren't combat casualties or accident victims. These weren't the bodies of folks we knew. These were, near as we could tell, complete strangers.

They weren't Reavers. The bodies didn't have any of the usual signs of self mutilation, radiation damage, or anything else characteristic of a Reaver. The bodies, before and now, had been butchered and, in this case, skinned. More macabre than we were used to. It was the sort of thing Reavers would do to their victims. Except there was no sign these bodies had been, well, cannibalized.

The Shepherd had buried the first victims while Gallagher had taken samples off world to try and get some kind of identification. Same would probably happen with this second lot.

Problem was, the townsfolk were starting to get a bit spooked. I was still letting Gallagher as Sheriff and Cody as his Deputy handle it, but if they didn't start to see results soon I'd have to do something. Given the history we had here, we could be looking at anything from a serial killer snatching victims off passing boats, to some rogue research lab dumping off failed experiments. Either way, people were getting a might uncomfortable.

I'd already had Cody step up observation of folk visiting town off passing boats. We had a fair bit of traffic these days, and it wasn't uncommon for 15 to 20 percent of the population to be transients at any given time. Made things a bit more difficult to track.

Of course, we had the security feeds in all the usual places, and I'd had General lay in a few more in places folks wouldn't expect or think to look. Might not be entirely fair to our Sheriff's Office to keep them secret, but we needed results.

If they couldn't get them, I'd only have two choices. Either bring in someone who could, or deal with it myself.

Didn't really fancy either choice, actually.