Equally stoic, Harvey was typing something into a little terminal. Without looking up, he said disapprovingly, “You didn’t have to do that, Marshal. Brennan was a good officer, and those were good people.” Once he finished typing, he poured himself a drink and asked, “You want one?” The Marshal drew up close to the bar and nodded. He sat hers down, but without waiting for her to take it, he said, “Cheers to the last man standing.”
For a few long minutes of silence, the Marshal thought about how she had just been called a man, then raised her glass back at the bartender and said, “You weren’t worried I was going to kill you?”
Harvey eyed her for a moment before replying. “I’ve died plenty of times. Lots of bad folks come through Buena Vista.” Gesturing towards Brennan’s body on the floor, he said, “I get respawned even faster than him.”
With mock surprise, she said, “Bartending sounds like a pretty good job.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied with an unforgiving wink, “Been here since the place opened. Kind of surprised I’m not in your records.”
The Marshal laughed. “Yeah, me too. Who do your reports go to? And how much detail did you go into about the Marshal and Mister Morton?”
“New York City,” he replied, his tone warming a little. “They go through Mechanicsburg first and there are a few other pickups on the way, but everything ends up in New York. And I include as much as I have time to type up. No reason for me to leave anything out. ”
The Marshal sighed and stared down into her glass. “They didn’t tell me jack diddly. Not even your name. As far as my records show, this place is just a dot on the map. Someone is working really hard to keep me in the dark. Sorry I shot up your place.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” Harvey said with a huff, glancing at the people lying dead on the ground. “Although, if you’re really sorry, you can help drag all those bodies into the freezer.”
The Marshal gave the first real belly laugh of her life. “Yeah... I can do that.” She took another huge gulp of her drink before sitting in silence some more. “So, why didn’t you tell me the Marshal accused Brennan of setting her up?”
“What?!” Harvey asked in earnest. But then he realized what she was talking about. “Oh. I do remember that actually. I don’t know, Marshal, you said a lot of crazy things that night. That was probably the most intelligible part of your ramblings, but no one took you seriously. Brennan was sitting right there at the bar the whole time...”
The Marshal bristled. “You calling me crazy?”
Harvey shook his head. “No, not at all! Well… Kind of. When you lost your arm… You were pretty out of it, that’s all I’m trying to say.”
“And you never saw me again?” she asked suspiciously.
“Nope,” he confirmed without hesitating.
“Because there was a video of me, without my arm, stored in that arcade.”
Harvey answered with a shrug. They both sat there in silence for another moment before he said, “Brennan really was excited to see you. There’s no way he was in on it.”
After a while, the Marshal said, “I like you, Harvey. Maybe the drink is playing into it a bit, but I like you.” She didn’t even know what kind of reaction she was expecting, but she was a little hurt when he didn’t immediately reciprocate.
After a few more minutes, Harvey put down a glass he had been polishing and said, “I’m glad to have you back, Marshal, but I’m a little worried about what you’re going to do next. I haven’t seen that message, and I don’t know how it got there, and I don’t want to guess what it said. But I want you to think about this... Whatever happened to you—the old you, that is, the first Marshal—required a lot of planning. And whatever games they’re playing, and whoever is playing them... I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you’re probably more of a pawn in all of this than you realize. Killing Brennan might have made sense considering the information you were given, but think about how you got that information. It might have had more strings attached than you thought.”
Knowing he was right, she said remorsefully, “Another drink please.”
Harvey filled her glass and handed it back. “Please, Marshal, don’t develop a habit of killing hard-working civilians just because they’re breaking the law. They’re just doing their jobs.”
Thinking about the implications of what she had done, the Marshal wondered how much it would cost the city folk who bankrolled this town to replace their illegal employees. After a few minutes, she asked, “Why do you think they brought the Marshal program to Earth?”
“Great damned question. I’ve thought about it a lot and really can’t say. I’ll tell you this though, nothing down here gets fixed just because it’s broken. The embargo has tons of holes. Crime is everywhere and the Board of Trustees knows all about it. They don’t give a damn about what happens unless it has an impact on what’s going on out there.” He pointed straight up into outer space. “All that mumbo-jumbo about pursuing Natural Order? It’s hooey.”
Harvey finished his drink, and the Marshal thought his rant was over, but he started in again with even more passion. “Did you know that manimals are for sale right here on Earth? Sorry, I shouldn’t call them that, it’s derogatory. A lot of people think poachers only catch animals to sell offworld, but in megacities like New York, they’re luxury items. People keep them as pets! Those fat cat city dwellers want to live in their shining white castles because it’s the birthplace of humanity, but they don’t want to follow any of the rules! And we’re out here working our tails off in the desert to support that bullshit. There’s no balance in the planetary ecosystem anymore. It’s all gone to shit. Imagine what it’s like out there in space! And you know the reason it’s shit? It’s because they don’t care.”
The angrier Harvey got, the more the Marshal liked him. She was about to tell him as much when he backtracked to answer her earlier question. “You wanna know why they brought you here? Why they sank all that money into designing the Athena-class Marshal? Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d bet my bottom dollar it’s nothing more than a vanity project for the military industrial complex. You’re a shiny brass button pinned to a pile of shit.” The bartender finished his drink and went back to cleaning glasses.
The Marshal laughed and took another sip of hers. “I like you, Harvey, but I don’t know about that. With the other me getting killed and then having to wait half a year for the replacement? Seems like there’s more to it.”
Harvey cocked his head, considering the Marshal’s point for a moment, but didn’t say anything.
After a few more minutes the Marshal slapped the counter, stood up and said, “Well my good man, how much do I owe you?”
“Already told you, Marshal. It’s on the house. This time and every time.” Harvey smiled, stuck out his hand again and this time she shook it. “But remember, you said you’d help me pick up those bodies before you left.”
Chapter Thirteen
￢Brennan
Despite having sent someone to physically check the computer terminals in Buena Vista, the Matron had not known about the first Athena-class Marshal’s hidden message. Unbeknownst to either Marshal, or the Board of Trustees for that matter, the LGO was sending intermittent updates directly to her office. The device could send simple things, like locations with timestamps, but nothing as complex as what had transpired inside the arcade’s local area network. When it told her that the Marshal’s vitals were spiking, the Matron thought she was somehow misinterpreting the data because it seemed too good to be true. When the municipal bartender reported that not only had the Peacekeeper been killed, but dozens of civilians as well, the Matron jumped out of her chair and sang praise to a god in whom she did not believe.
Considering what the first Marshal must have said to the second, it sounded like the setup for a corny joke; but whatever the punchline was, it had condemned Officer Brennan to death, which was ironic because it was the first Marshal’s implicit trust in t
he Peacekeeper that made the counterfeit version of him so effective last time. Despite her access to the Peacekeeper program being only marginally better than it was with the Marshals, updating the embargo’s permitting procedures so both programs could run concurrently had afforded the Matron an opportunity to duplicate a few key clearances, and she could now create replicas of the infamous Officer Brennan that were completely off the books.
Only one could be spawned at a time, and there were certain places they couldn’t go without drawing libelous attention, but the knockoff version of the universally renowned Peacekeeper walked, talked, and fought just like the genuine article. They were equipped with Longcoats, given access to secure USi channels, and they were just as loyal as their legal counterparts, but alterations to their pre-education and memories gave them a much more cynical outlook on life. The Matron called them ￢Brennan, pronounced Not-Brennan, to avoid confusion, but if the real and false Peacekeepers ever ran into each other on the street, they would have had a hard time proving who was who. Fortunately that hadn’t happened yet, but it would be a liability during the upcoming months.
Poor Mister Morton hadn’t been able to spot the difference, and the Matron cackled as she remembered how delighted he had been when she “reintroduced” them. Disguised as a rich socialite from New York, she had introduced the smuggler kingpin to the real Officer Brennan at a gala event decades ago. The two of them had talked at length about their respective professions, and apparently Morton considered meeting the infamous Peacekeeper a great honor. After the event, the Matron had all memories of the evening stricken from the Peacekeeper’s records, which meant no subsequent Brennan or ￢Brennan incarnations could remember it. Nevertheless, when Morton met ￢Brennan for the first time, he greeted the imposter like an old friend. As not to blow his cover, the phony Peacekeeper politely played along, and the outlaws ended up working well together. Despite a few bumps in the road, the mission to assassinate the first Athena-class Marshal had been a smashing success, and to this day, Morton hadn’t seemed to realize the deception.
The Matron would have liked to believe that ￢Brennan had sacrificed himself at the crater in order to save Morton, but she assumed that the truth was less romantic. USi investigators had found the smuggler inside his half melted vehicle on the outermost edge of the survivable radius, so it was possible that the corrupt law-dog waited for him to get clear. Unfortunately, the dastardly duo would not be working together this time around. There could be damaging repercussions if the new Marshal caught up with ￢Brennan as quickly as she had his legitimate incarnation, so the Matron had decided it was time to let Morton go. A wave of melancholy washed over her, for the old man really had done some fantastic work, and it would be hard to finally say goodbye.
When the Matron had first found him, Morton was a two-bit manufacturer running sweatshops out in the desert, but after decades of grooming, he had become one of her most well-positioned pawns. His planetside operations had been instrumental in getting poaching numbers high enough to greenlight the Marshal program, so it was no surprise that the world’s first Athena-class law-dog had caught onto his scent so quickly. He had been lucky to survive any of his encounters with the supercop, and without the Matron’s help, his chances of a repeat were dismal. For old times’ sake, she had let the new Marshal believe that the notorious Mister Morton was dead, but with Officer Brennan out of the picture, it was only a matter of time until she caught on.
As quickly as it had come, the Matron’s moment of sadness was gone, and she readied herself to brief the Board of Trustees. Despite how smoothly all the pieces of her plan were coming together, she would act as though the sky were falling. As long as she started off strong and stuck to the talking points they were most afraid of, she knew the board members’ individual responses would be easy enough to control. With a deeply pensive look on her face, she began by reviewing the minutes from their last meeting and then launched into an animated retelling of the Peacekeeper’s assassination. Drawing attention to the Marshal’s lapses in protocol was a risky strategy because an independent investigation might expose the subtle alterations that had been snuck into the Athena-class pre-education and LGO programming. Fortunately, the board responded with their regular routine of circular denial and blame.
Minister Lewis, a compliance officer from one of the major tech conglomerates, asserted that the officer-on-officer violence confirmed their previous suspicions about corruption inside at least one of the two law enforcement programs.
The notoriously hot-blooded Minister Portsmith, one of many representatives from USi corporate, had been instrumental in fast-tracking key clearances for development of the Athena-class. Immediately on the defensive, he was adamant that the Marshal was only doing her job, reminding the other ministers that this was not the first time a Peacekeeper had gotten caught up in a smuggling ring, hoping to blame everything on Officer Brennan.
Minister Beverly, a prominent member of the Classical Humanist League, diplomatically reminded him that some of their mutual benefactors had made clear that they would no longer accept individual USi employees as scapegoats for administrative incompetence.
For liability reasons, Portsmith had to be careful about how he phrased his words, for there were a great many things that could not be said explicitly in general assemblies. After taking a deep breath to compose himself, the veteran minister went around the room making vague comments feel like vicious personal attacks on every single member. Each one of them was reminded of how much skin they collectively had in the game. By the time he was done, Portsmith was blue in the face, and they were all so desperate for resolution that they would have done anything to be a part of it.
Minister Jacoby suggested mobilizing a precautionary fleet in case things got really out of control.
The Matron was sure that if it were put to a vote, they would have approved the military dispatch, which was a requirement for one of the final phases of her master plan, but when asked what she thought about the matter, she diverted the question back to Minister Beverly, who promptly shut it down.
“Even if we left them in a distant orbit,” the staunch Naturalist had said with disdain, “beyond the dampeners or even in an adjacent system, someone would see it eventually. If the private sector senses a lack of confidence in the Marshal program, we run the risk of a full investigation, and we simply cannot afford that.”
Looking concerned, the Matron had to repress a smile as the board continued to do her job for her. As predicted, the Board of Trustees took the path of least resistance and elected to activate a series of protocols based on observation and containment, which happened to align perfectly with her personal agenda. Brennan would be respawned and reassigned to a special mission in a different jurisdiction. The Marshal would retain her operational discretion and receive no formal reprimand. Earth was nearly at the boiling point; putting troops on the ground would have added volatile fuel to that fire, and the planet’s steward was more than willing to let things continue to percolate.
Alone again in her starside stateroom, the Matron fell to her knees and lauded herself for having arranged everything so fortuitously. The heaviest pieces of her plan were now in motion, and once their orbits aligned, the shared momentum would be unstoppable. Soon, her own life would become unnecessary, and she wept with pure joy at the thought. Ripping off her habit, she plopped back into her chair, intent on staring out her heavenly window for the next several hours. She couldn’t see it from there, but down in the southlands below, she knew the beast must be grazing peacefully. “Goodnight, my sweet prince,” the Matron whispered. “I wish I could be down there with you, but tonight, I will dream of thee.”
Chapter Fourteen
Rumor Had It
More than enough people were being paid to keep an eye out for the Marshal, but Morton still wanted to keep a low profile while out on the town. Frank had designed some camouflaged armor plating that made the train look like a piece of heavy-duty ventilation e
quipment while parked on the roof of their bar. From there, they walked down a hidden staircase into their private office, where through mirrored glass and a wall of video monitors, they could see that both floors were fairly well-packed for an off-night. Back in the penthouse Morton had claimed that he did not want to deal with a crowd, but he doled out a number of personable greetings as soon as he stepped out onto the balcony.
Just a few months ago, such an intense social outing would have been too much for his master, and Frank was proud of him. Beefing up security had helped a lot, but there was only so much they could do without drawing attention to the fact that they were still alive. The patrons had all filled out forms to establish credible connections with an underworld market prior to admittance, so Frank had detailed files on all of them. Getting onto the balcony meant you were someone that Morton might actually have reason to talk to. Generic riff-raff only had access to the downstairs level, and delinquents, like the ones involved in the uprising, were no longer allowed inside.
Beyond all the necessary repairs, major remodeling had been done since the Marshal came and busted up the place, but it was still hard for Morton to be there without remembering how badly she had whooped them. After only a few minutes of sharing drinks with some new friends, he found himself telling the story of when he met the first Athena-class Marshal. With a broad smile, he said in a voice loud enough for everyone on the balcony to hear, “No, that’s what I’m saying! At that point neither of us knew who the other was! I mean, I’m sure she had at least heard of me, but honestly, I think she just came in here to see what kind of trouble she could stir up.”
Under the Shadow of the Plateau: Frontier Forever Page 14