Do No Harm

by Chris Kennedy

  “Mmm, not exactly,” replied Ray. “She was teaching countermeasures. Demonstrating the technique and then showing how to counter it. Safecracking, second story work, alarm spoofing, sleight-of-hand; she was pretty good at it. She just decided to go legit before her past caught up with her.”

  “Ah. So, criminal…what? Families?”

  “Syndicates. Some of them are families; the big one was supposed to be. Her father had been one of the Don’s lieutenants, and the Don himself was a distant cousin.”

  “What do we know about the one running…what’s the name of the station?” The sound of bone crunching could be heard over the comm.

  “To’Os. The sun is named To’Os, the planet is named To’Os, the city is called To’Os, and the lawless part of the capital city is called The To’Os.” Ray paused as the crunching got louder. “Are you…eating?”

  “Mmmph. Yeth.” Lucky mumbled and belched loudly. “Science Guild often haf to hire mercth, tho there’f a Befquitch bar an’ mmmm-grill.”

  “Shit. So glad I am not there. Well, enjoy yourself and leave the entrails over there. I do not want them messing up my ship.”

  “Your ship!” Lucky growled. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Your mama, apparently, since you cannot seem to clean up after yourself.”

  “You leave my alpha out of this!”

  “It is way too easy to wind you up,” Ray said and made a click and hiss sound indicating laughter. “Anyway, you were about to ask about the syndicate running To’Os City. Well, there has been a recent shake-up at the top, and the old Don, a Tosser by the name of Torol, has gone missing. A little sweetheart by the name of Toweena is handling business in his absence.”

  “Missing, you say? How would your documentaries put it? Concrete overshoes?”

  “Most likely. Toweena probably made getting rid of her competition…” Ray paused while a piece of additional information scrolled through his pinplant-augmented vision. “Don Torol would have been her great-uncle, apparently. Anyway, she probably made his demise her price for cooperation. It says here the planetary charter specifies only the Dons can hire and deploy top-tier mercs on the planet. Lumar, Oogar, and Blevin-only for the riff-raff and general security. The fact the target used MinSha meant the Don had already been compromised.”

  “Mmmm,” came over the comm. Either Lucky was thinking, or contemplating dessert. It could go either way. Or both. In either case, Ray knew he would need to keep digging. If left up to Lucky, they would be…lucky…to figure this case out before his next budding, eight years from now.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Three

  “You look ridiculous.”

  “I need protection.”

  “It’s a dim red star, there’s hardly any sunlight.”

  “It is not just sunburn. There’s the dryness of the air and…other matters. No one goes into the To’Os without protection.”

  “You make it sound like a hot date.”

  “Maybe your kind of date. Wrogul do not reproduce that way.”

  “It still looks ridiculous.”

  “It is tradition.”

  Lucky snorted. They had this argument every time Ray put on his “business suit” as he called it. Wrogul could spend an hour or two out of the water as long as they did not dry out. That was a conservative estimate, because a thin layer of slime on their skin maintained moisture and facilitated absorption of oxygen. In an emergency, they could survive longer, but it would be a painful recovery.

  One of the other Wrogul on Azure had created a protective rubber and Kevlar suit to allow him to work in hot, dry, even electrically active environments, but it just did not suit the look Ray was after. Verne had also created his own custom CASPer combat mecha, so designing a walking frame for Ray had been quite simple.

  In order to “walk” on the ground, Wrogul could pull themselves along with one or more arms, or bunch them underneath their body and push. It was much easier to stay upright with a frame that looked like two legs ending in shoes, and a hinged cross-piece forming a saddle. Ray placed his body in the saddle and wrapped two arms around each leg. To firmly anchor himself, about thirty centimeters of each arm wove through the supports in the “shoes.” A moisture-conserving outer garment covered his body and legs, and a sunshade covered his head. To fit the private detective image, Ray had insisted that the shoes appear to be Human, in a design called wing-tips. The over-garment also looked like a trench coat, and the sunshade looked like a fedora. He was the perfect image of a PI…except for the fact he stood just over one meter tall.

  “Aren’t you a little short for a gumshoe?” Lucky asked.

  “You have no idea,” Ray replied. “Just wait until you meet a Tosser.”

  Starports, and the startowns that grow up immediately around them, were considered Galactic Union territory, and not subject to local laws and regulations. That didn’t mean the locals didn’t try to impose their will, or ensure their bars, lodging, and brothels got the business instead of those located within the startown. To’Os was an exception, and the capitol city ran right up to the perimeter of the ’port in order to capture as many credits as possible from the mercs and spacers. That meant the Port Authority office served multiple duty as ground traffic control, berthing, customs, immigration, and tax collection. It also came entirely under the jurisdiction of the Sphen-Eudy Port Manager. With the information regarding the recent…rearrangement at the top of the local syndicate, Ray figured it was as good a place to start as any.

  “Harryhausen and Lujkhas. Peacemaker Guild.” Ray flashed a custom leather wallet with a holographic blue tree on the outside and duraplas ident card inside. It also had a small metallic shield on the inside of the cover.

  “Name…Ship…Reason for visiting To’Os…” The bored looking Veech desk clerk didn’t seem to be paying attention. Known throughout the Union for their ability to perform two simultaneous, boring clerical tasks at once, this one appeared to be watching a Tri-V and playing solitaire at the same time.

  Ray reached out one arm and slapped it on the counter. His “business suit” kept his skin moist, so the wet slap echoed in the small office. “Listen, birdbrain, I said Peacemaker Guild. We ask the questions. You provide the answers!” Both of the Veech’s eyes swiveled to look straight ahead—then down—at Ray. It wasn’t possible for its avian eyes to open any wider, but they would have if they could. “Tell the Port Manager the Peacemakers are here to talk to her.”

  The Veech swiveled its eyes back to each side in an unfocused look that indicated it was communicating over a pinplant. After a moment, it looked back at Ray, waved in the direction of a door on the side wall, and said simply. “Go there. Wait. The Manager will talk to you shortly.” It went back to its vid and card game, but Ray noticed the hand holding the cards was shaking.

  The indicated door said Holding. Ray knew the bureaucrat would try to save face and avoid direct confrontation by conducting video surveillance while Ray and Lucky were stuck in a room normally secured from the outside. He slapped the counter again, turned his translator to maximum volume and said in a voice the entire building could hear. “No. Not on vid, in person. Now. We are seeing the Manager in person, right now, right here, with no delay!” The Veech dropped its cards and looked nervous but got on the pinplant circuit again and commed the administrator. After a moment, it refocused and turned its Tri-V in their direction so they could see the screen.

  There was the image of an avian with slick black-and-white feathers and prominent yellow eyebrows. The image was a close-up, head-only, but the scale of several desk and office-supply items in the background made the Sphen-Eudy look taller than Lucky’s two meters. Fortunately, Ray knew a thing or two about Tossers, and recognized the background items as undersized props to create the illusion of height on vid. Before the administrator could speak, Ray interrupted with another outburst: “In person, administrator, or my associate will level this building.”

  There was a growl from
Lucky, and the Besquith pulled out a laser rifle in one hand and a MAC—magnetic accelerator cannon—in the other. Being a gamma, Lucky was a bit small for Besquith, but she was strong. She wielded both heavy weapons one-handed, and there was no doubt she was capable of using them that way as well.

  There was a squawk from the vid, and the pickup was knocked aside as the Tosser jumped down off a stool, revealing it to be quite small in comparison to the desk. The new angle also allowed them to see the administrator heading for an armored door. Fortunately, Ray’s own pinplants had been busy with the local comm system.

  “Fifty degrees up, seventy degrees right.” Ray told Lucky, and the MAC zinged as it accelerated a heavy metal penetrator round toward the ceiling. From their perspective, they could see a large hole in the ceiling, and on the vid the armored door disappeared as the round transferred momentum and propelled it through the second story roof.

  A half-meter tall black-and-white shape fell through the hole in the office ceiling and lay stunned on the floor just outside the room marked Holding.

  * * *

  Right about here, you are probably thinking “Wait, Harryhausen is an investigator, Lucky is the Enforcer,” and you would be right. See, this is a little game I taught Lucky called “bad cop, worse cop,” and she likes to play along just fine. Perpetrators do not know how to wrap their tiny minds around the idea of a Wrogul Peacemaker, so we play it for maximum disruption. It is all good: I get to flash the badge, Lucky gets to shoot things up. She is a real sweetheart about it, but do not tell her I said that.

  Meanwhile, we had a perp to interrogate.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Four

  There was very little in the Port Manager’s story that was different from what the Peacemakers already knew about the situation. A Human named Ginzberg, NCO for a small German merc unit called the Rächer—or Revengers in English—was a repeat customer to a mostly-legal pinplant clinic a couple of klicks from the port. Off-planet Arrivals had him logged in as a private citizen, not a merc on active duty, a little over four Earth months ago. They never recorded his exit. Almost three months later he popped back up in the middle of a brothel deep in the To’Os, delirious and having received a very strange-looking brain implant. He was mostly incoherent, but repeatedly muttered something about torture and someone named “Mengele.” He also spent a lot of time humming the same song over and over.

  The same night Ginzberg disappeared, the clinic he was supposed to visit was destroyed by MinSha mercs, the local syndicate head disappeared, and there was an explosion at the port damaging some minor infrastructure. The investigators needed to see the clinic site, talk to the new head of the Syndicate, and question the locals who had found the injured Human. It would have been of greater value to interview the Human, but after a month under the care of local doctors who had no idea what had happened, let alone how to treat his species, the injured merc had been shipped back to Earth for care and treatment.

  The clinic site was pretty much a bust. The whole block had been leveled and rebuilt. The only evidence left to examine would have been video records if any existed…and of course there was no video record.

  Ray just could not accept that there were no surreptitious video from that night, so he started canvassing local private security companies. It didn’t take long to find the clinic had hired B’nb’n Security for standard protection services. This would take a slightly different approach than the port—or City Hall, so he sent Lucky off to intimidate the head Tosser at the city offices while he made an appointment to meet with Jessica, the head of B’nb’n.

  “Peacemaker Investigator Harryhausen to see Madam Jessica,” Ray announced to the Blevin at the front desk. “I have an appointment.” He was actually surprised the appointment cost only a deposit at what a standard time-and-expenses consult would have cost on any other planet. To’Os was notorious for graft and practiced “markup” at every step. To get an appointment without greasing at least four palms—or the same palm four times—was curious.

  “Da boss lady’s in’er orfice.” The lizard-headed, leathery skinned receptionist pronounced. He gestured to a door behind him. “She’s ’spectin’ ya, so gwon back.”

  Ray was expecting another Blevin, but as he waddled through the slightly open office door, he was surprised to see a XenSha sitting at a desk covered with slates and video screens.

  “Madame Jessica?” Ray began.

  “Miss.” The three-foot-tall rabbit-like creature corrected him without looking up from her screens.

  “Miss Jessica, then. I’m…”

  “Harryhausen. Peacemaker. You like to play on people’s misconceptions that you’re an Enforcer.” She finally looked up at him, and a couple of her multi-spectrum-sensitive tentacles focused in his direction as well. “I know all about you—Wrogul.”

  Ray was a little taken aback that this—person—knew so much about him, but continued, nonetheless. “Well, then you probably know why I’m here.”

  “Actually, no,” she said. She waved a hand in the direction of the tentacles emerging from her head. “These detect infrared, ultraviolet, and many other wavelengths. So, I can see your tentacles under the coat. Plus, you were scanned as you came in, including that little wallet with the Peacemaker Guild symbol.” She waved dismissively. “The rest was research after you made the appointment. You’re not a merc race, so you can’t be an enforcer, but the PM Guild does have you as an employee. You gave your name at the port, and that little show with the Manager was quite amusing.”

  “Actually, as you say, they are called arms, not tentacles, but you are pretty close.” Ray’s impression of the private contractor went up. If she had seen video from the Port, she might have what he needed.

  “So, what can I do for you…Peacemaker? The clock is running.”

  “Very well, Miss Jessica, I am looking for information regarding the Human who was subjected to illegal medical experiments.”

  “Squiddy didn’t do it,” she said.

  “Wait, what? Squiddy?” That name was familiar. He had heard it often enough as a derogatory nickname.

  “Yeah. Squiddy. Friend of yours? Relative, maybe?” She quirked an eyebrow at him, then pulled out a printed sheet of flexiplas with text and numbers on it. “Okay, here’s the plan. These are my rates for information services. I won’t reveal confidential information, but he was a good customer and those idiots tried to take him down that night. The Human was collateral damage. Meet my price, and I’ll tell you what happened. I won’t reveal how he got away or where he went, but Uncle Jack never got on the bad side of the Peacemakers, and I won’t either.” She smiled, and it was almost as frightening as Lucky’s. “It will cost, though.”

  Ray pulled his UAAC out of a pocket in his overcoat. It was the same pocket that held his brass knuckles and laser pistol and was the more…congenial tool for this situation. He looked at the list and then held out the yack. “Let’s go with one day of expenses with an option for one week, plus information gathering on retainer and database access services.”

  She smiled again as she held out her slate and completed the transaction. “Very reasonable, Mister Harryhausen, your cousin was as well.”

  “Call me Ray…” he began, before her words fully registered. “Huh? My cousin?”

  “I assumed you knew? Oh dear, that should be a slight surcharge, but I’ll let it go for now. I liked Squiddy and as I said, he was a good customer.” She turned a screen so Ray could see the display. It showed a Wrogul in a travel tank, accompanied by a Human male. “That’s Squiddy the Surgeon. Not his real name, of course. The Human is named Robar and while his travel papers were fakes—good fakes, not up to my standards, of course—they were fakes, nonetheless. His money on the other hand traced back to a Human named Roeder from the colony world name of Azure. Unless I am mistaken, you Mister Ray, are from Azure, is that correct?”

  Roeder? That made Squiddy…Molina? Oh hell. Things just got even more complicated.

&nb
sp; “Umm. Yes, but there are many Wrogul from Azure as well.” Ray hoped the lie-of-omission was not as blatant as it felt. “Still, very interesting. Yes, actually, worth a surcharge, so I will pay anyway.” He tapped the yack again. “However, what I was really hoping for was video of the attack on the clinic.”

  “Yes, that makes sense. The Tossers don’t like video evidence of anything but Squiddy had his clinic wired for sight and sound, inside and out. I won’t show you the inside, but here is an exterior view. You will want to pay close attention once the MinSha go through the hole in the wall.”

  Indeed, he paid very close attention.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Five

  Relationships among Wrogul are strange. We do not have male and female sexes, and we reproduce by budding. I am essentially identical to every other Wrogul that has ever existed…except I am not. For example, I have green eyes, like our progenitor Todd, yet several of Todd’s buds have blue eyes. We inherit the complete set of memories, but very quickly develop our own experiences and personalities. So, after a few months, we are completely unique individuals. We also do not form family groups.

  Except when we do. The entire Wrogul colony on my home world of Azure originated from a single individual with amnesia. None of us remembers anything prior to Todd’s rescue by the colonists seventy years ago. With budding across most of the Wrogul population approximately every ten years, the colony is probably over one hundred individuals by now. We “grew up” surrounded by Humans, and frankly, most of us think of ourselves as eight-limbed, wet Humans, as compared to the four-limbed dry ones.

  Todd never forced us to think of ourselves as a family, but when your schoolmates and playmates are Human…it happens. So Squiddy was the equivalent of an uncle. He budded directly from Nemo—Todd’s first budding at Azure—and was distinguished by his blue eyes. Strangely, the blue eyes did not bud true. My own direct progenitor was Wells, and he budded from Nemo. Wells reverted to Todd’s green eyes. I am third generation, and tracing all of the lineages and divergences over seven generations gives me a headache. Most of the time, cousin is as good a term as any.