Longshot Hypothesis

by Blaze Ward

  She would be a hero.

  And Nash would get away with whatever evil he had planned for Valentinian and Cleray.

  Kyriaki really didn’t understand her emotional reaction to Tarasicodissa. The way he smelled different, when she had gotten too close to the man. The urge to rescue him now, when she could just call the authorities and let them deal with the situation in their own way.

  Bad boys were not her thing.

  And yet, nobody had ever been able to make anything stick on Tarasicodissa. Even getting kicked out of the Gymnasia Dominia had all the hallmarks of a cover-up by others.

  “I only ask you this,” Hall continued as he watched her, a mongoose eyeing a cobra. “Let me rescue Valentinian. Then you can take me in.”

  She teetered. Watched the man open the driver’s door to the car and reset the seat all the way back before he tried to get in.

  Could not make up her mind.

  Kyriaki sprinted to the far side of the car and pulled the door open, throwing herself into the passenger seat before she had a chance to change her mind.

  “We’ll talk,” she said.

  27

  Dave

  He had enjoyed being Dave Hall. That man had none of the issues facing him that a long-time Dominator had faced. He could simply travel the galaxy and see new things, learning how to be a spacer from a man with his own skeletons and issues to deal with.

  Dave glanced over at the woman beside him. She reminded him of Euphrosyne, his daughter back home on Dominion Prime.

  Or wherever she would end up in the aftermath of a new Tournament of Domination.

  Dave tried to feel some level of guilt at just chucking his life out the window and walking into the night, but it was like a missing tooth in his mouth.

  Hollow.

  Euphrosyne would land on her feet. Just as her mother would. Praetextatus was already making his way as a young Caelon officer, following in his father’s footprints rather than joining the Armada.

  It tickled Dave that his son and Valentinian might have met and possibly been friends, had the boy sought a naval career.

  The car was over-powered for its weight. Electric motors in all four wheels delivered enough power to make driving at this speed a hazardous undertaking, but Dave was in a hurry and let his anger steer his reflexes.

  The White Hat beside him had buckled herself in tight and still had a foot braced on the dash and a hand on the ceiling. But then, it wasn’t like Dave cared what state he left the man’s car when he was done.

  Hell, if it was possible, he would have rammed Nash’s van and taken his chances in the fracas immediately afterward, but too much time had probably passed, even for a Thursday night.

  A red light stopped him long enough to check the map on his card-reader against his memory. Six blocks up and three over. Corporate tower district.

  “Why are you doing this?” Inspector Kyriaki Apokapes asked quietly from the seat.

  “This?” Dave answered in that distant, lethal voice. “Because I warned Nash the first time. He didn’t listen.”

  “No, I meant the disguise,” she pursued the topic. “Why the elaborate charade and staging your own death?”

  “You cannot retire from that job, Inspector,” Dave said simply. “You die in office. Either by your own hand, or when a challenger convinces the Solar Party that you need to be deposed and a new Tournament of Domination is called. I would have changed that, if I could. But it was bigger than me.”

  “And Valentinian?” she faced him as he waited for the light.

  “All my research suggested he would be the perfect tool to confuse any investigation, Inspector. A man with a shadowy past that would distract you from looking at anything else,” Dave glanced over and grinned at her. “Worked, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she conceded in a voice that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be triumphant or angry. “But why not let Nash keep him? You could have gotten completely away and nobody would have been the wiser.”

  “Valentinian is in danger because I put him there,” Dave growled as the light turned green.

  The car leapt like a panther on fresh spoor. The girl fell silent as the car raced silently through the darkness.

  Dave found the building. A low rise in a seedier part of downtown, butting up against a series of warehouses.

  Rather than scream into an ambush, Dave circled the block.

  There were lights on in a single office on the fourth floor, and most of the seventh.

  Dave found an alley and parked the car in a no parking zone, hoping it at least got ticketed, if not towed. He would never set foot in that bar again to properly discuss the owner’s participation in all this, so he settled for pettiness.

  If it wouldn’t have caused so much noise, he would have shattered the windshield with his sword. That sort of thing wasn’t supposed to be possible, but Dave was willing to experiment, right now.

  He exited. The girl joined him.

  “I could call the authorities,” she suggested weakly.

  “This is Tartarus City, Inspector,” Dave laughed at her. “Chances are we get arrested for stealing the car before they ever get around to investigating a kidnapping report. Nash would have set things up ahead of time.”

  She grunted rather than reply.

  Dave moved instead.

  “So how do we approach this?” she finally asked as they jogged quickly along the alley and crossed the street to stand next to their target. It was obvious the young woman viewed herselr as his partner, and not his parole officer.

  “You’re going in the front door,” Dave said. “Fourth floor. Suite six. Your job will be to arrest all of them.”

  “Just like that?” she turned angry eyes on him. “What will you be doing?”

  “Coming in the window and killing everything that moves,” Dave said simply, letting is anger talk now.

  “How?” she demanded in an angry whisper.

  “Watch me, Inspector,” Dave said implacably.

  Dave had the sword stowed already in the thigh holster. He took three fast steps and leapt up against the building, planting his right foot against the stone and thrusting upwards until he caught the bottom of a fire escape, nearly five meters off the ground.

  Below him, Inspector Kyriaki Apokapes watched with her mouth open, until she remembered to close it and turned to find the front of the building.

  Dave smiled and pulled himself up onto the first level.

  Only the very best are ever allowed wear the Caelon armor.

  Of those, Dave Hall had been the greatest.

  28

  Kyriaki

  Blood and Martyrs. The man had pogoed himself off the building and caught the bottom of the metal rack overhead. Kyriaki had never heard of someone with that sort of agility. And worse, the man was old enough to be her father.

  What must he have been like as a young Dominator?

  No wonder so many of their galactic neighbors slept uneasily.

  Kyriaki caught her breath and drew her stun pistol, holding it close to her side as she approached the front of the building. It was late in the day, but the season was still summer, so the sun had only just set.

  There were four doors across the front of the building. A security guard was in the process of locking the middle one when she approached and pulled one he hadn’t gotten to.

  “Building’s closed, ma’am,” he said politely.

  She pulled her card-reader and showed him her identcard. Watched him blanch in shock and catch his breath.

  If Dave Hall could be her father, this man could be her grandsire, seven or eight decades old and built like a bean pole. Kyriaki thought she might outweigh the man, in spite of him being nearly Dave’s height.

  “Official investigation,” Kyriaki said as firmly as she could.

  White Hats scared everyone. It was a hammer in her hands as often as it was a dirk, but it worked in her favor right now.

  “What can I do?” the man asked in a fright
ened voice.

  “Nothing,” Kyriaki informed him sternly. “Lock these doors and you can continue your rounds, but stay out of my way. Or better, do you have a place you can hide?”

  “Hide, ma’am?” he was scared now.

  “It’s going to get ugly,” Kyriaki replied. “Find a quiet place and lock yourself in for the next hour. You’ll know when it is safe to emerge.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the man fled, leaving her in charge of the lobby.

  She considered the elevators, but wanted to sneak up on Nash. Walking into a trap if the man had left someone to watch on the fourth floor wouldn’t help.

  Kyriaki found the front stairwell and marked the location in her mind. Then she went and found the rear one, cracking the door and ascending in as much silence as she could manage in the harsh whiteness.

  Nobody was in the shaft as she got to the fourth floor, so she cracked the door and peaked out into a carpeted hallway. Nobody in sight.

  Kyriaki slipped out of the stairwell behind her pistol and looked for a nearby door.

  Number eleven. Down the hallway, closer to the turn, number ten.

  She moved like a ghost, thinking about all the times she had found it necessary to just kick in a door at the head of a column of armed troops.

  Tonight, she would need subtle. She slithered up to the corner and moved like a glacier as she peeked.

  Nobody in sight.

  Stupid.

  Nash should have left at least one man in the hallway, to guard against someone doing exactly what she was up to.

  But Nash was a punk, and had hired more punks. She was a cop. Dave Hall was a renegade Caelon, a killer.

  And quite possibly her sovereign lord in hiding.

  Still, if these people wanted to make mistakes, who was she to correct them before it became time? Just in case, she checked for cameras, but nothing was evident.

  Good enough.

  She moved around the corner, ready to shoot anything that moved. That was the advantage of a stunner over anything more dangerous. You had the chance to apologize later if you made a mistake.

  Not that she was expecting anything tonight, but some accountant might have chosen to work late, and then suddenly walked into a firefight.

  Number six. Simple internal door. Probably pseudo-wood grain over a plascore.

  Whoops.

  Kyriaki started to brace her weight for a kick, and then stopped and wondered.

  How stupid might these people really be?

  Carefully, she rested her hand on the brass handle. Maybe she imagined it, but the metal felt warm, like maybe it hadn’t been opened all that long ago.

  She gripped it and put just enough pressure on the metal to see that it would turn.

  Really, you didn’t even lock it?

  Or was that the trap? Open the door and step in, as the man on the other side shot you in the chest?

  That sounded more like Axarnashalic Bogomelous.

  Still, two can play.

  Kyriaki turned the handle completely and shoved the door hard, stepping back out of the way to hide behind the frame.

  Beam fire blistered the far wall and threatened to light small fires across from her.

  Bastards weren’t even using shock pistols, but had brought out flamers. Shortly, the fire alarms would probably start to douse the floor in water, if the wallpaper caught, but she didn’t feel like giving them a chance.

  Kyriaki reached around the doorframe with her stunner and fired it as fast as she could pull the trigger. Snap. Snap. Snap.

  Withdraw as a beam licked at the frame, just missing her arm.

  She squatted and did the same thing from knee height, chancing a glance around the corner.

  One man already falling, a flamer dropping from his hands. Two more bouncers suddenly scrambling for cover. Kyriaki managed to wing one as he got behind an unused desk. It wouldn’t be enough to take him down, from the cursing as his arm went numb, but it would help.

  She jumped back behind the door frame, wishing she had a stun grenade right now. And that they didn’t.

  If this went too long, they might flank her. Either a door might open into another office, or someone might remember that all walls in a tower like this were wood frames covered over with gypsum board.

  All you had to do was hammer on it with a chair, in a fire, and you could walk through walls.

  More fire bursting on the wall across from her. Angry yells back and forth, muffled by interior walls, furniture, and fright.

  Kyriaki stood and reached as high as she could to take another couple of potshots from overhead. She knew where they two men were, if they hadn’t moved.

  More cursing.

  My, such language.

  She smiled.

  Suddenly, cries of pain. And then silence.

  “Inspector, you can come out now.” Dave Hall said in a conversational voice. “The threat has been neutralized.”

  Neutralized? Just like that?

  “Inspector?” Hall repeated.

  “Yes,” she called back, glancing around the frame.

  One man down that she had shot. Two more had joined him. At least one of them was dead, from the amount of blood leaking from the man’s head.

  Kyriaki wasn’t squeamish, but she had never seen someone beaten to death with a length of steel tubing. Most deaths were either crimes to be solved well after the fact, and approached professionally, or taken down by a beam weapon. Flamers cauterized wounds.

  Hall wasn’t even splattered with the blood that covered half his sword.

  “All of them?” she was aghast.

  “There were only six,” Hall smiled at her like a big cat. “And you had them distracted.”

  She followed him into the inner office, trying to remember to close her suddenly-open mouth.

  Only six of them? And he had taken them all out before they even knew what happened?

  Two more bouncers were down. It was hard to tell if they were dead without checking vital signs, but they were no longer threats. Valentinian was groggily holding a stun pistol in the general direction of Axarnashalic Bogomelous.

  Nash was down on his bottom with his back against a wall, whimpering mindlessly. From the angle of his right leg, Hall had apparently attempted to sever it with his blunt sword in passing. Had he aimed for the shin instead of the knee, he might have succeeded but she didn’t think that the location was accidental. The con man’s eyes were all whites and pupils, but that was the pain starting to break through the adrenaline.

  Lianearia was unconscious on a sofa along the left hand wall, snoring peacefully.

  A window was open at the far end of the space.

  Kyriaki was amazed Valentinian was awake.

  “How?” she started, before finally running out of words.

  Hall grinned at her and triggered a button that collapsed the sword back into a baton barely thirty decimeters long.

  “We train for this sort of thing, Inspector,” he said simply.

  He held the baton out to her to take, apparently surrendering peacefully.

  It dawned on Kyriaki, that, as dangerous as she had thought the man was before, Dave Hall was at least an order of magnitude worse. And he was willing to walk to his death with nothing more than her word.

  She could arrest him. And be a hero when the man was executed as a traitor his own crown.

  And what justice would that serve?

  Worse, what did it say about her own oaths that she was even questioning herself or him right now. What had happened to her?

  No, that was the wrong question to ask. Why had arresting Hall been the wrong thing to do?

  Because evil would have triumphed.

  “Citizen Hall,” her words shocked her, but they felt right. “Thank you for your assistance in making this arrest. I think it would be best if you accompanied Captain Tarasicodissa to the hospital, once reinforcements arrive to take charge of the situation. I’ll be calling my own forces, and not the local gendarmes
.”

  Hall’s eyes held a question as he watched her, brows hooded.

  Nobody but her knew the truth, according the man. She could believe it. Nothing could stand against that man if he chose violence.

  “You’re sure?” he asked one last time, sword still hanging out there for her to take from him.

  Kyriaki had never been more sure of anything, including joining the White Hats in the first place.

  “I am.”

  Epilogue

  Valentinian

  “Why are we ending the contract?” Valentinian heard Dave ask as Longshot Hypothesis powered up.

  The cargo bay aft was empty, as the girls had weepily packed everything and moved it to shore storage while Lianearia Cleray worked to extend Solaria Femina’s run on Tartarus, at the same time looking for a new cargo transport to charter.

  “I had a chat with Inspector Apokapes,” Valentinian replied in a quiet voice as he touched the collective.

  “Kyriaki?” Dave asked in a tone that Valentinian had never heard from the man.

  Wistful? And calling her by her first name?

  “Kyriaki,” Valentinian agreed.

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about the woman. She had interviewed him in greater detail than even a business deal gone bad leading to a kidnapping warranted. Like she was checking his bonafides. Digging deep into his life.

  She had specifically told him to get as far away as he possibly could, as fast as a souped-up thing like Longshot Hypothesis could run.

  “And?” Dave prompted when Valentinian had apparently fallen into thought.

  “Nash won’t be a problem,” Valentinian finally said. “But I don’t think we’ll avoid serious scrutiny from Kyriaki’s friends if we stay.”

  “The White Hats?” Dave seemed surprised.

  “The Dominion,” Valentinian corrected him.

  “Meaning?”

  “I was coherent enough to see you come through that window, Dave,” Valentinian admitted. “To watch you take out all of them before they even knew what happened. Plus Kyriaki told me about how you got up onto the fire escape.”