by Maren Smith
Rowth handed the gag to the guard behind her, and then turned his attention to the metal mask. “Mind your teeth,” he said, holding the mask steady while he worked the straps loose. “Careful.”
She groaned as she eased her jaws open far enough for him to get the metal bit out from between her teeth. Her face was flushed, shiny from the moisture of her own breath blowing back on her in the ill-fitting device. Her lips, chin, and jaw were smeared with what saliva she hadn’t successfully managed to suck back far enough to swallow. He passed the mask back to the other guard. The escape artist was as unbound as he intended to let her get; he told her so with little more than a look.
Get fucked, hers replied.
Oh, yes, someone somewhere was going to have a marvelous time teaching that one respect.
And, sadly, it still would not be him because he still had a job to do. Tsking at his own loss, he got up far enough to snag his tablet from where he’d left it on the table, just out of reach.
He called up a picture out of the file that for the last four days had been innocuously named Case #23-G563-11, but which, as of about an hour ago, had been renamed Case #23-G563-11 Briny Lawson. He wasn’t at all sure about the spelling. Although generally considered quite good with languages, having learned to read and write all eleven of Pra’kir’s major dialects, the finer points of “Drugged Out Human Slur” continued to elude him.
Expanding the picture until it filled the tablet’s frame, he turned it around on his lap and showed it to the women. Their reaction was instantaneous. The three littler ones screamed; the taller gaped. All of their eyes grew horrified and huge. It was enough to make him rethink the possibility of familial ties.
In the next breath, all four began shouting at once. He tapped his language translator, doing his best to keep up until he realized they weren’t sharing information, or even expressing concern for their bed-ridden companion, so much as they were hurling insults.
“When I get my hands on you—”
“What have you done—”
“You sick, mother fu—”
“Go fuck yourself, you—”
He stood up, the sheer height of him sending all shrinking back in their chairs. Their mouths snapped shut; the horror and fury remained, however, very much alive and unforgiving in their stares. Though all had fallen into silence, he held up both the tablet and his empty hand before addressing each in turn, starting with the curvy female: “You won’t, I promise.” Then the taller: “We pulled her from the water where she crashed and are now trying to save her life.” Then the biter: “That is both illegal and intellectually repugnant. Also, I was not yet of a sexual age when my mother died.” And finally, the escape artist: “That is a physical impossibility. I can’t possibly bend that way, nor am I long enough to reach my own ass.
“Now.” He drew himself stiffly upright, his patience thinning. “I realize the shock of seeing her like this must be terrible, your poor dear… sister, co-worker, fellow soldier… subordinate, superior…?” He let the sentence hang, waiting for someone to take the initiative. When none did, he said, “That would be one of the questions I said I was going to ask. Do I need to hit somebody? And yes, for the sake of clarification, that last one was rhetorical.”
They looked at one another, frowns deepened. Reluctantly, it was the biter who said, “We’re not related. We just work together.”
“Doing what?” he countered.
“We’re scientists,” the taller spat, as if cooperating even just this little bit left a foul taste in her mouth.
He tapped the tablet again, drawing their attention back to it though none seemed able to look at it for very long. “What is her name?”
They looked at one another again, mouths flattening in unspoken reluctance.
“Lawson,” the taller finally said. “Brinley Lawson.”
Definitely still eluded him. He corrected his file name, keeping his tone painstakingly neutral as he asked, “What kind of scientist is she?”
“Bio-engineer,” the escape artist supplied.
Rowth made a note in his file and only when he was sure no over-eagerness might betray him, he said, “Are you all, bio-engineers?”
“No,” the taller said, both shrugging and shaking her head. “We’re all terraformers, but we hold degrees in slightly different areas.”
“Such as?”
“I’m an engineer,” the taller finally said, once they’d all exchanged looks again. “I was supposed to maintain the computers and equipment on Zeta-12.”
“I’m an anthropologist,” the biter told him, with a toss of her head. “I was responsible for the bringing the plans for Phase Two—the expanding of the station to support the colonist families that are scheduled to be launched within two years of our arrival on Zeta-12.”
“What is Zeta-12?” Rowth asked her.
The women looked at one another, but when the taller shrugged her eyebrows, the biter sighed and said, “Our destination. Before we crashed here.”
Ah. Rowth processed that a moment before turning to the next female. “Continue.”
“I was the science officer,” the curvy one said, still sulking. Very slow to forgive, that one. Someone was going to have his work cut out for him with her.
He looked to the fourth, who stubbornly looked away.
“It doesn’t matter,” the taller one told her.
A conclusion the escape artist seemed to be forming all on her own, much to her own obvious frustration. “Communications specialist,” she finally muttered.
He made another note in the file. “Communications?”
“E.T. phone home,” she sniped. “I build telephones in outer space. We’re all engineers of one form or another, as were half the people who died on our ship. What about them? What kind of charges are you going to slap on their charred remains?”
“None. It’s a grisly enough business whipping a living being.” He finished making his notes, before meeting her gaze directly. “No one, not even our most judicially enthusiastic executioner wants to whip a corpse.”
They all three held his stare. The biter was least able to hide how rattled such a veiled threat made her, but all were visibly affected by it. Tiny breasts rose and fell more quickly. The escape artist paled, making the thin smattering of tiny dots across the bridge of her nose that much more noticeable.
Trusting that he’d finally got the seriousness of his point across, Rowth started a new line of questioning. “Were we to make the resources available to you, and were you able to manufacture a device capable of communicating with your planet, how long would it take your people to come collect you? Would they come and collect you? And, perhaps most importantly, would they do so peacefully?”
By the way they were staring at him, Rowth was starting to wonder if he’d said something that might have clashed with their language devices when the escape artist finally said, “Depending on your technology, I might be able to rig something, but I don’t know where we are. Our ship was so badly damaged by the time it launched us out of our cryo-sleepers, nothing was working. No navigation. Mapping was down. We couldn’t even manage an S.O.S. We’re alive, in part, because Brinley risked her life to get the power back on and provide enough oxygen so we didn’t suffocate before we hit the ground.”
“We’re sorry we damaged property when we crashed,” the taller woman added. “We’re sorry we scared people, and we’re really, truly sorry if our being here is some great and overwhelming inconvenience for you. Believe me, if we could call home, we would. But the sad fact is, even if we could build a device capable of transmitting off your world, out of your solar system and all the way back to our own…” She broke off, shaking her head once as if she could throw off the sheen of moisture building along her lashes. She looked away, blinking hard, and when she finally turned back to him again, that moisture was gone and her expression was admirably cool. “Without our star charts and a recognizable point of reference, I don’t know what direction to aim our transmission becaus
e I don’t know where we are.” Her back stiffened and her chin lifted. “We are never going home. No one will ever come for us. It takes ten years for communication to bounce from Zeta-12 to Earth. They have no idea we never made it to our destination and they have no way to track us. No matter how much I wish we weren’t, we are stuck here until we die.”
CHAPTER THREE
The courtroom was empty when Rowth entered it, but then, that was part of the show. Tradition dictated he take his place within the defendants’ box and wait until the judges filled in to court. The level of guilt was up to him as Magistrate to decide. Sentencing was merely a formality and one that, by law, was presided over by the Lesser Court for miner matters, the medial State for those more serious, and for the most severe criminal cases, the Superior Court, commonly called the Council of Nine. It was to that Council that Rowth owed his loyalty and service. And it was to that Council that today, Rowth was about to do something he’d never in the whole of his career ever done before: He was about to manipulate their decision for his own benefit.
Although it wasn’t uncommon for only four or five judges to preside over a sentencing, today all Nine filed into the courtroom. They didn’t even wait for him to take his proper place before the door to their private chambers opened and in they came, all gray hair and wizened faces and long flowing gray robes of state. To a man, they were Pra’kir’s most revered elders, with careers longer than Rowth was old. Someday, he would take his place among them at that giant U-shaped table that dominated the relatively small room. For now, however, he drew a deep breath to steady himself for the legal battle ahead, gathered his tablet and his thoughts, and stepped into the defendants’ box from which he was expected to argue the proper level of guilt for his alien clients. From the frowning expressions worn by each of the Nine, he knew none of them expected much of an argument.
The last judge had only just seated himself when the leader among them opened the proceedings.
“We have assembled today to consider the fate of the criminal…” Councilman Breen paused as he adjusted the tablet he was reading from, bringing it first closer to his face, then slightly further away. He squinted over the top of his glasses. “What is that name… Blythe?”
“That is correct.” Rowth inclined his head.
“How do you find her?” He turned to consult the judge to his immediate right. “They are all female, is that not true?”
“According to the reports of the case, yes,” Councilman Ymarl replied.
“All four aliens are female,” Rowth confirmed before submitting his ritualized answer to the original question. “I find Blythe to be guilty of all charges.”
Breen nodded. “Splendid. Let’s go on, then. We have assembled today to consider the fate of the criminal, Mira. How have you found her?”
“Guilty of all charges.”
All nine judges marked their files and Councilman Breen continued to the next prisoner.
“Guilty,” Rowth answered once the Councilman had twisted his mouth around Sarai’s unfamiliar grouping of consonants and syllables, and then Lily, and finally one last time when Brinley Lawson’s name was read. In spite of himself and all his years of experience, his body still tensed when he heard it. His hands were clasped behind his back. His head was high. He doubted any of the Nine would have noticed so imperceptible a reaction, but it irritated him. A magistrate of the courts was impartial, professional, and above all, emotionless. A General Magistrate was a thousand times more so. He was stone and steel, the face and voice of the Law, and the rod of justice by which the guilty felt the full measure of their sins before being allowed to venture back into society.
And right now, he was the man who needed Brinley, or rather, he needed the skills she might possess. Whether she could do what he needed had yet to be determined, but the potential was there and for the promise of that potential, he was prepared to do something every bit as unprecedented as five humans crashing off the coast of Endermere, in broad daylight, during the morning work rush, and right in the middle of the busiest tourist month of the year.
“Let the record show the aforementioned criminals have been found guilty in the eyes of our city-state’s first general magistrate, a law-abiding citizen who has proven his honor and loyalty to the State through his legal prowess and deeds, a man who is their superior in every way.”
“So noted,” the remaining eight Councilmen intoned.
“Let the sentencing now begin.” Breen dropped his tablet back on the table and looked at each of his fellow Councilmen in turn. “What the hell are we supposed to do with these creatures?”
“Where do we put them?” Ymarl countered back.
“In prison, of course,” Councilman Cancy replied from the far side of the U-shaped table. “Where else?”
Beside him, the perpetually disgruntled Amshal barked out a laugh. “They’ll be killed within the day. Have you seen the pictures yet? They are all of them stunted! For all the damage they caused, you could snap one in two.”
All the way on the other side of the table, Councilman Ecraf said, “We never should have interfered.” He turned to his neighbor, Unem who was already nodding in agreement. “It would have been better for all had we let the police shoot them when they ran into that mall.”
“That would have been a clear violation of the law,” Breen snapped, enunciating each word with a pointed jab of his finger. “And it would have been splashed across every newsfeed on the planet! Oh, no, no, no, I am not ending my career like that.” He chuckled without mirth and jabbed authoritatively at the table as he said, “We may not have invited them here, but here they are and here we must deal with them! Properly. As good hosts should.” He looked around the room, and when no one spoke up, shrugged and said, “No one has any suggestions?”
They looked at one another, their aged faces all lined by the same grim indecision.
This was such a bad career move; Rowth knew it. He could feel the certainty of it itching under his shirt and jacket and digging in between his shoulder blades. But this was his moment, and he’d been practicing the speech he’d prepared for it in his head for days. “I have.”
Every old man at that table looked at him in varying degrees of owlish surprise.
“You’re not a sentencing judge,” Breen declared, as if such an observation ever could have escaped him. “You are the General Magistrate. You brought the case; you found them guilty; you have done your job. Now it falls to us to determine the proper course of—what suggestion could you possibly have?”
“I would like to file a motion,” Rowth declared.
“Denied,” all nine replied at once, after which Breen’s curiosity immediately got the better of him, and he demanded, “Why? What motion?”
“I would call for leniency.”
“Denied,” all nine said again.
“What do you mean, leniency?” Breen exclaimed. “There’s no precedent for that here!”
Ymarl leaned back in his chair, groaning, “The Mekron.”
And that, whether any Councilman wanted it to be or not, was all the precedent Rowth needed to press his unusual case.
“I have interrogated all four felons, and I have found them guilty because, yes, they broke the law. However, not one did so knowingly.”
“Ignorance is no excuse,” Councilman Ferrar said from Breen’s left.
“No, it is not,” Rowth agreed. “But in certain circumstances, it can be forgiven when there is no malice or felonious intent, as was the case of Bejhan Cohr who stole from a fruit vendor in Market Square. Did he break the law? Yes. Why? Because he was hungry and neither he nor the two siblings he was attempting to feed had eaten that day, and he was nine. This was a case I tried two years ago. At that time, I stood in this box—before you, Councilman Breen, as I recall—and I pled for leniency.”
“And it was granted,” Breen said testily, “because they were all children, and they were all starving, and neither exception applies in this case.”
“But I argue that it does.”
Two of the Nine sat back in stunned disbelief. Another looked openly perplexed. Breen drummed his fingers once upon the table before he, too, settled back in his chair to listen. “Explain.”
“A child may declare his independence at the age of twenty, but is still legally answerable to his or her parents until they have completed their schooling or reached the age of emancipation, which is not generally granted until the age of conscription at thirty-five.” Rowth let that sink in a moment before announcing, “None of the Earth women have reached that age.”
Two of the nine Councilmen were visibly shocked. Ymarl was appalled. “The humans launched children into space?”
“So it would seem.” Rowth said nothing about his new-budding theory that the people of Earth might age differently than his own.
“They’re not starving, though,” Breen pointed out, drumming his fingers a second time. “And we are not sentencing them for the theft of fruit.”
“True. This is not a matter over fruit and they were not starving, but they were dying.”
“That is not our fault,” Amshal grumbled.
“But I argue that it is.” Rowth faced him. “In the last sixty years, we have launched 134 expeditions to explore our moon and installed more than seven hundred satellites and unmanned explorers in orbit about our planet. As is our right,” he added when Amshal opened his mouth to object. “After all, we live here. But with each expedition we send up there, we leave debris—nuts, bolts, broken or discarded bits of metal—all simply floating in orbit. Some of it falls back to Pra’kir and is burned up in our atmosphere. But I made a few discrete inquiries and what I have discovered leads me to understand that, in addition to our moon, a natural ring of particle dust, small rocks, asteroids, and a whole system array of communication satellites, we have, one launch at a time, created a veritable minefield of orbiting projectiles that our own astronauts have difficulty navigating. I believe it was our minefield that caused the damage to their ship when they unwittingly drifted too close. Our discarded garbage ultimately led to their crash.”