by Jean Johnson
“Someone get Dr. de la Santoya on her way to the infirmary! I will be going with the Ambassador, every step of her treatment. I suggest you give her the best of care, as well as your full respect.” Carefully, he helped her onto the padded bed that served as the hovercart’s gurney.
“I’ll go with you, too, Highness,” Paea asserted. “A Squad Beta and Gamma, form up! Our Ambassador gets an honor guard wherever she goes . . . and for your information, meioas, that outfit she is wearing is called a sari, and it has been in fashion for over five and a half thousand years. That is a thousand years longer than your Empire has been around.”
“You’re an ignorant child! The V’Dan Empire has existed for nearly ten thousand years!” someone called back.
Jackie bristled again. Li’eth had to push her back down onto the pad. (Lie still!)
“Wrong, meioa!” Paea called back. “Your Empire started this nonsense of jungen-marks-means-adulthood with your War King during the so-called Reformation. According to your own history texts, the original Eternal Empress always stressed that the unmarked were just as mature as the marked. No insult to His Highness, who is mature enough to realize this, but most of the rest of you are the only immature idiots I see here. Now clean up this corridor and track down the attempted murderers responsible for this attack!”
Closing her eyes—once again feeling dizzy, thirsty, and hungry as her anger-fueled adrenaline spike fell and crashed—Jackie let Li’eth and the lieutenant take charge. She had been speed-healed before, but never by this much, and could only guess that she’d be bedridden and confined to very light duties for the next few weeks while her body caught up with all the biokinetic hurrying their combined efforts had just put it through.
. . . She was not, however, going to forget that medic’s remarks. Or that Elite Guardsman’s. Or any of the other remarks and acts from which she and her fellow Terrans were still suffering, despite their many, many attempts at pointing out how insulting and disrespectful such attitudes were.
CHAPTER 18
AUGUST 8, 2287 C.E.
AVRA 1, 9508 V.D.S.
There were just enough fully trained biokinetics on hand now to get Jackie on her feet and free to resume her duties far swifter than even the best combination of Terran and V’Dan medicine. Or rather, in conjunction with them. It required days of bed rest and gentle exercise, multiple psychic-healing sessions, and stuffing herself on carefully balanced meals practically every two hours, plus nutrient drips, and special creams rubbed into her healing skin at intervals. The massages felt a bit hedonistic but were actually important to prevent any lingering scar tissues from hardening.
It was just as well that she was on her feet, eyeing the new wardrobe the local V’Dan tailors had crafted for her to replace all her ruined clothes, when one of the embassy aides poked her head inside, calling out, “They caught ’em! Al-Fulan’s hauling ’em downstairs for an interrogation right now!”
Confused, Jackie asked, “They caught who?”
“The ones who organized the attack on you! I don’t know who it is, but it’s one of us, and one of them,” she reported to Jackie and her guests. “Sammy told me they just walked past the third-lift security checkpoint. I’m heading to second lift to see if they’re still there!”
Pulling back quickly, the woman bustled down the hall. Jackie looked at the trio of clothing designers, the garments spread around her office, and grimaced. She gestured at the door, tired of wearing military fatigues since those were one of the few sets of garments that had been brought in enough quantities to share. “Excuse me—I have to go see who it is, too. I cannot let you stay in my office while I’m gone, but I shouldn’t be gone long, so the clothes can stay here.”
“We’re coming with you, if that’s alright, Ambassador,” the eldest of the three stated. The other man and the woman nodded, quickly rising and joining him in following Jackie to the door.
“I want to see the idiots who think they can attempt to slaughter the Ambassador of our greatest ally,” the woman added grimly.
The second-lift sector was crowded, but only with gawkers and the normal Marines who stood watch over everyone’s comings and goings. Not with the captain or any prisoners. Seeing their Ambassador coming, the others quickly made way, letting her get into the lift the moment it arrived. Knowing the embassy detention area and its interrogation room were on a subfloor below the main level, Jackie pushed that button. Each of the four times the doors slid open on the way down, the Humans who peered inside quickly checked themselves and backed off, gesturing for her to continue down.
When they slid open on the right floor, Jackie didn’t even have to ask. Every single person she passed pointed down the corridors toward the detention area, and the two Marines on guard came to attention. One of them opened the interrogation door for her. Not the observation door. Jackie made a mental note to praise him for his correct guesswork. She also made a mental note to praise the two guards for stopping the tailors trailing in her wake. This wasn’t their business, even if they were interested in it for gossip’s sake.
The two figures seated inside, their hands locked in cuffs, checked her stride. While Countess Shi’ol Nanu’oc sat in grim-faced silence, Captain al-Fulan argued with Lieutenant Colvers.
“—but I didn’t intend to kill her!” Brad was saying. “I swear I didn’t!”
“Camel shit!” Hamza snapped back. “You deliberately arranged to have those killer robots smuggled into your own quarters. You arranged to slip them from your ventilation duct to hers. That is Grand High Treason, soldier, and you’re going to hang for it!”
“They were only supposed to humiliate her! That was the plan! I didn’t mean to kill her! I didn’t—” Finally spotting Jackie, Brad choked on his words. He paled, flushed, paled again, and looked between her and Shi’ol, then held up his bound hands toward the Ambassador. “I didn’t intend to kill you, I swear it! It was only supposed to be your clothes, and maybe your bed! I didn’t mean it!”
His aura . . . was swirling too much in agitation for her to read it. Maybe Imperial Consort Te-los could—it turned out that His Highness could teach her people a trick or two about auramancy, particularly once he had a solid grounding in their precise training techniques—but Jackie could not read it. She folded her arms over her green-mottled chest. Green, because there were only a couple women her exact size in the Terran embassy zone, and the blue and the gray were in her laundry hamper today.
Seeing her skeptical pose, her scornfully arched brow, Colvers did something she did not expect. He begged. “Read my mind! Read it! Read the truth in my thoughts—I’m giving you permission, Jackie! Read me!”
She almost refused. Almost, because the moment she realized he was involved, she knew exactly how those robots had found her. Traces of her DNA, as sampled from the hairs he had plucked from her clothes. Not once, but several times over the intervening weeks they had been here on V’Dan. And all for . . . what? The love of Shi’ol?
“Read me,” Brad begged, dropping his bound hands back onto the table, tears spilling onto his cheeks. “Please . . .”
She hated him so much . . . but he asked. He asked her to read his thoughts. Her. Dragging in a deep breath, she nodded sharply. Dragged in another. It took her five breaths, after she closed her eyes, to calm herself, center her mind and spirit, shield herself against negativity . . . She did not have to touch him to reach into his mind. If he had any natural shields, if they had been real walls, he would have detonated them with dynamite, his mind was so wide open to her.
Opening her eyes, Jackie spoke the truth. “Lieutenant Colvers hates my guts. He deliberately chose to interact with Countess Nanu’oc to plot against me, using the excuse of a spurious relationship to cloak how often they got together to try to come up with some suitable ideas . . . but he only wanted to humiliate me. He did not want me directly harmed. And he did not intend to attempt to m
urder me. I do wonder, however; if I read your mind, Countess, what would I find?”
That provoked words out of the silently fuming woman. “I am a citizen of the Empire, and a Countess of the Second Tier! You have no right to hold me here, and no authority to accuse me!”
“Wrong. When we established this embassy, the V’Dan government granted us all Terran rights within its walls,” al-Fulan told her coldly. “You broke the law within these walls. You’re not going anywhere.”
“What evidence do you have, Captain?” Jackie asked. She could feel Li’eth reaching out to her and linked with him, letting her hear Hamza’s report the moment she herself heard each word.
“We found squalene and its DNA on some of the robots, some of it from some of their hairs, both of the prisoners,” he told Jackie. He did so without turning his head, still glaring at Shi’ol. “On a hunch, I coordinated with Grand Captain Tes’rin. We got the local equivalent of a warrant and sent a team of Peacekeepers, Marines, and Elite to her quarters here in the city this morning, as soon as she had gone out. They found programming equipment and two small stray parts from the kits she had used to construct the spider-bot things. They also found a V’Dan DNA sequencer, with a translation script for programming it into those robots . . . and your DNA sequence in its coding.
“She had tried to get rid of the evidence by dumping everything she could find in her suite’s trash incinerator, but as it’s been rather warm here these last few days, the thing never actually fired up to heat her place. On top of that, the analysis of the programming for the live ’bots we caged came back from the V’Dan computer-forensics teams assigned to study it. That happened midmorning, while we were still sifting through the incinerator. After that, the only thing we needed to do was to find the two of them. In his quarters.
“Shi’ol Nanu’oc has deliberately broken the V’Dan equivalent of the Three Laws of Robotics in those machines. That is a capital offense, back home. Capital means death penalty,” the captain added, glaring at the green-spotted woman.
“We’re not ‘back home’ on your squalid little planet,” Shi’ol retorted. “We are on V’Dan, and the members of the Second Tier are exempt from any death penalty.”
“Wrong.” It was Jackie’s turn to correct the arrogant, unrepentant woman. “There is one automatic death penalty. It applies even to the members of the Imperial Family themselves . . . and it is triggered whenever any attack threatens the life of a member of the Imperial Blood. Your robots moved to attack His Imperial Highness.”
“He wasn’t supposed to be with you!” Shi’ol snapped. “He was scheduled to be exercising!”
Jackie closed the meter or so between her and the table. She leaned on it, staring across the cold metal into Shi’ol’s eyes. “He was. But as we are a true holy pairing, he teleported instantly to my side when he felt my life-threatened distress. Considering I kissed and hugged him just before he left to go exercise . . . while I was not wearing anything . . . he had a lot of my dead skin cells rubbed over his clothes. He might have been only a secondary target, but V’Dan law does not differentiate. Any attack on the members of the Imperial Tier by someone who is not of that Tier, nor authorized by that Tier, is automatically assigned the death penalty.
“Since the only person I know who hates me even a quarter as much as you do might be Crown Princess Vi’alla, there is a tiny, marginal chance that she ordered such a thing . . . but she knows her mother would never permit it. And even if she didn’t care about that, she is far too enamored of her position as the Imperial Heir to commit political suicide by ordering such a thing.” Jackie stared down at the rosette-marked noblewoman. “Be glad I do not have permission to scan your mind.
“Captain al-Fulan, you will hold the prisoners until I have arranged how to deal with them according to both Terran and V’Dan laws,” she instructed al-Fulan. “This is our fourth major diplomatic incident.” At the captain’s frown, Jackie explained in an aside, “Li’eth prevented me from incinerating that idiot medic he ordered the Elite Guard to carry off; the other three were his trying to fry the prisoner in outrage, the prisoner exposing us to the K’Katta without mandatory psychological preparation, and Count Daachen’s idiocy over giving a hyperrelay to the Nephrit System.”
“Ah. In that case, sir, yes, sir. I’ll make sure the prisoners cannot escape, and will only hand them over with your personal authorization to any appropriate V’Dan authorities,” al-Fulan promised her.
“. . . I didn’t mean to kill you,” Brad murmured, his blue eyes stark with fear, horror, and regret. “I didn’t . . .”
Tightening her jaw, Jackie turned and strode out of the interrogation room. She barely even noticed the three tailors trailing in her wake until they reached her office. Only at the sight of the garments strewn across every available surface, awaiting her selection of what to wear until a new wardrobe could arrive from Earth, did she recall their presence.
Apologizing again, she had the trio wait in the reception room leading to her office while she made a few calls on her end. On his end, Li’eth murmured his excuses to the generals and admirals of the meeting he was attending, directed V’kol to take notes, and headed off to make some calls of his own. Shi’ol might not have meant to threaten his life, but Jackie could feel that her Gestalt partner was feeling about as forgiving over it as she did, right now.
Not in the least bit.
AUGUST 10, 2287 C.E.
AVRA 3, 9508 V.D.S.
Legal jurisdiction was a bit of a nightmare. Yes, the pair had begun their attack initially within the Terran zone of the North Embassy Wing. But the actual physical attack on both Jackie and Li’eth had taken place in the Guard Halls, a purely V’Dan location. The hyperrelays had been stress-tested by constant communications being sent between Earth and V’Dan. And those communications . . . had been hampered by the attitudes of the Imperial lawyers.
Their arguments had not just been over the fact that the actual blood-shedding had taken place in V’Dan territory, not Terran; they wanted to apply V’Dan laws and V’Dan punishments to the criminals who had bloodied an offspring of their beloved Empress. But that was understandable. It was the condescending dismissal of any Terran legal rights, like the comment about her “provocative” and “too-adult” style of clothing, that became not only the last straw on Jackie’s back, but the last straw on the entire Council’s back.
The decision that the Council made, crafted in private away from V’Dan eyes, and with Jackie firmly shielded against even her Gestalt partner, was not a pleasant one. A downright painful one, from her own personal perspective. Not in the sense of her wounds, either; she wouldn’t even scar, she had been speed-healed so carefully and so well by the psychics on her embassy staff. She still had a few faint pink lines here and there, but her own burgeoning biokinesis would get rid of that in a few more weeks even if she didn’t exert herself any further.
The V’Dan lawyers had insisted against it, but Jackie had eventually gone straight to Hana’ka to make a bargain. Under Terran law, and willingly scanned by Heracles and Darian as well as herself, Brad’s portion of the crime was not to be judged as attempted murder. Attempted manslaughter, perhaps, since he had tampered with equipment in ways that could put a person in danger, but not murder. His motive had been far more petty than that.
In the eyes of Terran law, that granted him more leniency, and so she had bartered with the Empress to have Lieutenant First Class Brad Colvers tried under Terran military law. The Empress, with some reluctance, had agreed to that, in exchange for trying Shi’ol Nanu’oc under Imperial law. She had even attended the solemn, grim ceremony in the Terran zone’s modest auditorium, where the black-and-white-clad members of the Peacekeepers arranged for an angled platform, a mouthguard for the lieutenant, and a grim-faced fellow who precisely measured out the punishments one blow at a time to the man strapped to that angled platform.
Corporal puni
shment regulation number one. Committing a civilian crime. For a felony-level crime, the punishment was four strokes of the cane. Regulation number fifteen. Colluding with an enemy. Two strokes of the cane. Attacking a superior, regulation twenty-two—and Jackie was still his superior in the chain of command, even if she was no longer a commissioned colonel, since she was authorized to fill in for the Premiere and Secondaire in terms of their being commander-in-chief and lieutenant-in-chief—was four strokes of the cane. And finally, treason, the second regulation. For not only nearly killing Jackie, but nearly killing the eldest son of the V’Dan Empress. Five strokes of the cane.
A total of fifteen blows. There were limits in the Peacekeeper rules and regulations on corporal punishment for how many were to be delivered at one time, gauged on the physical fitness of the accused, but fifteen was deemed a bearable number in this case. And because it was now military law that every soldier had to witness at least one disciplinary caning, every Terran ship currently out there in space was ordered to stand down and watch, and the entire military complement of the embassy zone was ordered to either attend in person alongside Jackie and the Empress, or watch from any duty stations they could not in good conscience leave unattended.
It was not pleasant to watch. Or to listen to. Or to contemplate ever happening to oneself. It also took about as long as the actual trial and was over within a quarter of an hour. When it ended, Admiral Nayak pronounced the rest of Colvers’ sentence: to be returned to Earth to be remanded into military custody for incarceration of no less than ten years even with parole for good behavior, and twenty years without it.
He would be attached to a particular gardening patch for those ten-to-twenty years, too, forced to slave away making food for the rest of the Terran population. Never again would Brad Colvers fly an OTL ship. He had achieved the fame of face that the precognitives back on Earth had predicted, and had associated with all those images of interacting with aliens . . . but not in any way Brad himself had predicted.