Your Life Is Forfeit: A Space Opera Adventure Legal Thriller (Judge, Jury, & Executioner Book 4)

by Craig Martelle

  “What would it take for you to call?”

  “Maybe a dozen. Ten tops, if they were big.” Lindy smiled. Red had no comeback.

  “We could go with her,” Jay offered.

  Tired, a small voice said.

  Rivka put a gentle hand on the young woman’s shoulder. “Floyd is an absolute delight, but she is comparable to a four-year-old, maybe?” Jay nodded. “You need to keep her out of harm’s way. You two go back to the ship. Lindy, set up camp at the office. Red and I will continue to the recording and documentation office.”

  “Driver, can you get them a ride?” Red asked.

  Without answering, he accessed a digital radio. In a few moments, he pointed. A patrol car waited for them up ahead. Before the van stopped, Rivka had the door open. Jay still carried the wombat, while Lindy was fully armed. They made an eclectic pair on the sidewalk.

  “We want him alive,” Rivka reiterated.

  “Good luck,” Jay replied as the Magistrate shut the door and the van rolled away. Out the back window, Rivka saw the doors pop open on the patrol car and her people climb in. “Fate has smiled on us, Red. Let’s not dick this up. Fate makes second chances costly.”

  Red’s knuckles were white from how tightly he gripped his railgun.

  The driver made short work of the route to the office building. Red led the way inside with Rivka close behind. Once out of the open she looked for a person to talk to, seeing a sign for the manager aside a corner office. Someone tried to stop them, but the Magistrate waved them away.

  She knocked on the doorframe before entering the office. Besides the female Capstanian behind the desk, a visitor occupied the sole chair in front.

  “I’m sorry, we’ll be a little while. You’ll have to wait outside,” the manager said.

  “I can’t wait.” Rivka showed her credentials. Red stepped close enough to get the visitor’s attention and pointed toward the door.

  “Please wait outside. We won’t be long.” The tone of his voice suggested that it wasn’t a negotiation or conversation, or anything other than a direct order. She didn’t bother to argue, rising and leaving the office. Red closed the door behind her.

  “An Aborginian is in charge of a mining operation. We need to know the details.”

  The manager accessed the files on her computer. “Permits have been applied for and preliminary work done, but I can assure you, there is no mining ongoing. Name on the permit is for an Aborginian company called Key To Will Is Life.”

  “K’Twillis.” Rivka leaned forward. “I can assure you that mining is ongoing. I am seeking this individual as part of the intergalactic illegal exotic minerals trade. The Aborginian is to be held for questioning.”

  The manager pressed Print. “Here are the addresses for the mine, the business, the safety officer, and the equipment rental company.”

  Rivka used her datapad to send the information to Ankh. It only took him seconds to reply.

  The business address is fake. The imagery suggests that the mine address is fake. The safety officer is real but is retired and lives alone. The equipment rental company is real, but all their people are on vacation because they have no equipment left to rent.

  The manager vigorously shook her head. “We vet all these applications. The information can’t be fake!”

  “Once again, I assure you that it is. Let’s focus on what is real. The mining equipment is rented. Where has it gone?”

  The manager held her face in her hands with her elbows on the desk.

  There appears to a major surface mine three kilometers from the fake address.

  Rivka shared the address with the Capstanian. The Magistrate had to reach across the desk and shake her. “Check this address. Is anyone licensed to mine in that area?”

  A couple of taps later. “There shouldn’t be anything there. It is part of a nature preserve.”

  Rivka turned her datapad around and showed the overhead image.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Standard procedure. My ship maps the planet’s surface whenever we descend for times like this.”

  “Shall we?” Rivka turned to Red.

  “I’m ready,” he replied, first out the door.

  “She’s all yours,” Rivka told the Capstanian they had kicked out of the manager’s office. “My apologies for the interruption.”

  The Magistrate walked briskly after Red. He was almost running, but she remembered a lesson that Grainger had shared. When the boss is running, the rest of the people lose confidence. Whenever she ran, she felt less confident, like events were spiraling out of control. The adrenaline warmed her chest.

  A fight was coming.

  Red held the door to the van. Rivka maintained her pace, smoothly flowing inside the van and taking her seat. Red sat beside her and urged the driver to greatest possible speed to the mine outside the mine.

  “I want to come with you,” Jay pleaded.

  Lindy sighed. “When everything goes to hell, who are we going to call if you’re with me?”

  Jay hung her head and noticed the single black hair sticking out of her shirt. She tucked it away, annoyed, hoping no one else had seen it hanging out. “You can call me. Thanks to Ankh, I have a gift. I can race in and trip the bad guy. He won’t know that I’ve been there.”

  “You had a gift before Ankh did anything. Your gift is peace. You bring a sense of that to all of us. We need that more than I need you sitting in a chair trying to stay awake. I will move depending on that office. I’ll be there as long as people are there. Who knows when Mackestray could next show up?”

  “I’ll be waiting for your call.”

  “Make sure Ankh eats,” Lindy said softly.

  Jay chuckled. “I always do. I swear, he would never eat if someone didn’t remind him and badger him about it.”

  The patrol car used its lights and siren to quickly navigate the major thoroughfares. Jay hopped out at the spaceport and let Floyd run around in nearby grass before going inside Peacekeeper.

  The car sped away with Lindy waving from the rear window.

  Jay decided to sit in the grass and relax. Floyd leaned against her.

  Jay sad? Floyd asked.

  “Kind of. I’m not sure how I feel. I think they need me with them, but I told the Magistrate that I wouldn’t kill anyone. They are protecting me because they’re going into danger, but now there are three of them against two people who put contracts out on Red, plus whatever minions they have. They need me.”

  Kill or be killed, Floyd said slowly.

  “That’s very philosophical. You are the smartest wombat I have ever met!”

  Jay! Floyd cried happily.

  “Can I kill someone to save my friends? I know I can. Rivka is a Magistrate. She has executed people on behalf of the Federation. She said that some people just need to be killed. In my mind, I know that, but in my heart, I don’t think I’m the right one to judge whether someone should live or die.”

  I help Jay. Sleep now? Decide later.

  Jayita picked up the wombat before she could snuggle in somewhere other than the ship. Open the door, Chaz. Floyd and I are coming in.

  “K’Twillis will have security?”

  “I would expect that he replaced me with someone just like me.”

  “And more?”

  “Probably. K’Twillis doesn’t like to get his leaves dirty. From what I’ve heard, Aborginians are exceptionally strong, able to tap into the energy pulsing through the ground from other plants. I never saw him raise a branch against anyone. He had me and the boys to do that kind of stuff.”

  “So we can expect to go up against a small army?”

  “Probably, Magistrate.”

  “I could simply ask him to come quietly. Can we cuff him?”

  “I don’t know,” Red replied mimicking with his arms how he thought K’Twillis’ branches might bend and twist. “Maybe.”

  “What do you think he’ll do?”

  “He’s going to send whatever
security he has after us. If we run, they’ll chase us. If we stand our ground, they’ll fire everything they have, including mining explosives. I don’t think there is anything he wouldn’t do to get away. He’ll survive to fight another day.”

  “How would he get away? He is going to stand out.” Rivka accessed pictures of Aborginians to prepare herself. “How would we tell him from another Aborginian?”

  “I can’t answer that. I’ve only seen the one, but this is the only one who does what he does. Aborginians like the greenery, and they love the swamp. Water and rotting earth. They thrive in the swamp. But K’Twillis likes tearing planets apart for the minerals. He takes a perverse pleasure in the destruction.”

  “Let’s not drive up to the front door. Take the next road beyond the mine entrance, please,” Rivka requested. The driver nodded, drove past the unmarked road, and eased the police van onto a rough dirt road. He took it to the end and stopped.

  “We’ll hoof it from here. Be ready to go when we return. You’ll probably know we’re on our way because of gunshots, yelling, and we’ll be running,” Red advised.

  “Or we could stroll back without any of that,” Rivka added. “Prepare for the worst, expect the best.”

  The trip through the woods was short. They stopped when they reached a leveled area on the precipice of a major excavation. Some vehicles were parked in the lot. A single shack stood near a haul road that led into the pit.

  “You think he’s in there?” Rivka asked, pointing with her chin toward the shack.

  “He’s big; almost too big to fit through that door. If he’s anywhere, he’s in the woods.” Red scanned the treeline in which they stood. “I don’t think he would go into the mine.”

  Rivka joined Red in looking. The Aborginian’s foliage was different from that of Capstan’s flora, especially in a forested and relatively dry area. He wasn’t going to blend in. They watched for a while, but no one came or went, and there were no signs of a sentient swamp being hiding in the trees.

  Machinery worked below. The whine of engines and the battle of steel against stone, humanoid against nature.

  “Let’s see if anyone’s home.” Rivka walked nonchalantly across the open area with Reaper, her small neutron pulse weapon, in her hand. Red followed at a distance, his railgun leveled as he watched over the barrel, aiming the weapon wherever his head turned.

  Rivka didn’t bother knocking. She opened the door and looked in, then stepped inside. Moments later she was back out, shaking her head.

  She started walking toward the edge of the pit, but Red stopped her. “Go behind the shack, so you aren’t skylined. We may not want to announce our presence,” Red suggested.

  The Magistrate did as he suggested. Behind the shack, she had a complete view of the surface mine. Equipment scraped and blasted rocks on one end, while loaders filled a constant stream of trucks that raced to the far end where the landscape tapered to a lake. They were dumping the tailings into the lake, muddying the water and changing the dynamic of the surrounding hills.

  “Now you see,” Red said softly as he joined Rivka, using the shack as a backdrop to hide their silhouettes. “If they took them over that hill, filling a valley would be less of an impact, but the easy way is to rip that hillside apart and dump it as close as possible to save time. There is the processing station.”

  Red pointed to an amalgamation of equipment to separate the ore by size, further crushing desirable stone before funneling it through a processor contained within an oversized trailer. Smaller, nondescript trucks waited beside the processor where a narrow conveyor loaded the vehicles.

  “I see why this industry might be heavily regulated.” Rivka didn’t pontificate further.

  “There we go,” Red said. “Look at those guys. They aren’t miners.”

  A group of dark-clad men wielding clubs was standing around while others dressed in orange and green worked.

  “The brute squad?”

  “Something like that. Make sure the miners keep working.” One of those with a club jumped from a ledge and ran to a couple of Capstanians working on a dead truck. He banged the fender loud enough that Red and Rivka could hear it at the top of the pit. He yelled something before turning his vitriol on one of the workers, beating the man unconscious.

  “Can you hit that man from here?” Rivka asked in a cold voice.

  Red took aim. “I might hit one of the miners. If he returns to where the others are standing, I can take out all three.”

  “I can’t condemn three men for the actions of one,” Rivka growled. “If I go down there, I’ll stop the whole operation, and K’Twillis will get away. If I don’t go down there, more people will get hurt. If K’Twillis gets away, more people and more planets will get hurt. We have some crappy choices, Red.”

  “I want K’Twillis,” he said.

  “And that’s what we’re here for. Let me get a couple of pictures to put in the evidence locker, and maybe the Chief Constable will take action when the time is right. Until then, the only thing K’Twillis wants is the ore that they’re dumping into the smaller trucks. If we follow one of those, where will it take us?”

  “To K’Twillis, is my guess. New plan: we follow those trucks unless we can hitch a ride.”

  Rivka didn’t want to contemplate that. “I’m pretty sure he’s not selling on-planet. Let me check with Ankh.”

  Rivka used her datapad to contact the Crenellian.

  The market on Capstan is limited, plus all sales have to include sourcing information. I have not been able to find a black market on Capstan.

  “No black market on Capstan. That tells me these trucks should take us to a freighter.”

  “That would be my guess.” Red wondered. “That might be why Ankh can’t track him. He might be riding freighters secretly, hiding in the hydroponics bay or something like that. He can stay with his product and disappear at the same time.”

  “Criminals will never learn that crime doesn’t pay.”

  “K’Twillis and Mackestray are both filthy rich.”

  Rivka thought for a moment. “Not for much longer. There’s a truck coming. What do you think?”

  “I think I can jump into the back of it from the pit wall over there, where the road passes beneath.”

  “I figured you’d say something like that. I’ll follow in the van at a discreet distance. Use your comm chip so Ankh can track you. Splitting up. Wasn’t it you who said we should never split up?”

  “I think that was you, but it looks like we never follow our own advice.” Red crouched as he ran from the edge toward the high wall. He crawled onto the wall and waited for the truck as it slowly made its way up the treacherous road.

  Rivka ran the other way, into the woods, and through them. She jumped into the van, and they headed to the road to wait.

  “I didn’t hear any gunfire, and where’s the big guy?”

  “He will have a different means of transportation, and trust me when I say that we wanted to shoot people, but they were too close to innocents.”

  “You were running, though, so he was half-right.”

  “I hope there is no shooting, but the people we go after? There is no compromise. They aren’t willing to be taken alive. We tend to accommodate their desire. Justice is served.” Rivka tapped her datapad, bringing up a map and seeing that Red’s dot was moving. “He’s on his way. An unmarked truck will be turning onto the main road momentarily.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lindy climbed out of the police vehicle and waved at the officer. She went straight into the candidate’s building, where the severe Capstanian continued to parade through the lobby. She held out a hand for Lindy to stop.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.

  “A Blokite was here, wasn’t he? That individual is extremely dangerous, and I’m here to protect Candidate Bandersnatch.”

  “I didn’t authorize such a thing. And your idea of dangerous is probably not the same as our idea of danger
ous. Armed as you are, you probably see everyone else as an enemy. Your solution is a hammer, and every problem is a nail. You will leave this building at once!”

  Lindy rolled her eyes as she kept herself from punching the Capstanian female.

  “You are correct in that I do see you as a nail that needs to get hammered. You should take the rest of the day off.” Lindy used her railgun to nudge the humanoid obstruction out of her way.

  “We’ll just see about that!” She turned and ran down the hallway toward the candidate’s office.

  Lindy walked deliberately, nodding to volunteers and staff throughout the area as she went. The female’s shrill screams echoed down the hallway.

  “I feel sorry for whoever is waiting for you at home,” Lindy mumbled to herself. When she reached the office, the scene before her wasn’t what she expected.

  Bandersnatch was shaking his fist at the Capstanian female and had called her a series of names that the translation chip couldn’t interpret. She was screaming back. Lindy crossed her arms over the top of her railgun and tried to follow along.

  The candidate was standing and stabbing his finger at her. Veins stood out on his forehead, and his face had turned purple. Finally, the female broke down and started crying. She flopped onto the couch and held her face in her hands as she bawled.

  He sat down in his chair and glared at her.

  “I’m here to wait for Mackestray,” Lindy interjected.

  “I don’t think he’ll be back.” Bandersnatch leaned forward, tearing his eyes away from the blubbering on the couch, and focusing on Lindy. “I get the impression there will be no more face-to-face meetings, only digital follow-ups. He said if I told anyone, he would see great harm come to me.”

  “Is your family safe?”

  “Single. I don’t have anyone. I’m not sure what he can do to me besides physical violence, but I refuse to wage the political war that he said would guarantee a win. He doesn’t know Capstanian politics very well.”

  Lindy shrugged. Neither did she, but that didn’t matter. What was important was how they would find Tod Mackestray.