Alternatively, I could just shoot everyone and make sure Diane got killed in the crossfire so no one would be able to say what happened. She had been useful so far and perhaps would still be in the future, so I was labeling that “Plan B.”
We entered the store. The human female clerk watched us and I saw three others—two human males and one other species—pretending to shop. I’ve pretended to shop before, and they were doing it poorly. The non-human was a Ramber—a big gray-skinned being I didn’t know much about, other than that they bled green. Since this was supposed to be a store devoted to Islam, which had few non-human adherents, his presence alone raised suspicion. Plus, I could see by the non-casual hand placements of the two human males that they were armed and ready to fight.
I just needed them to make my day.
“We saw someone run in here,” the detective said, using a cordial tone that wasn’t going to exacerbate things quickly enough for my taste. “He’s a suspect in a crime.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The clerk was going for angry, but only managed to sound scared. “If you’re just here to harass us, get out!”
Diane said, “Ma’am, we just need to look around. We have reason to believe there might be some terrorists hiding out here. Is that something you would know about?”
“You are not allowed to look around here!” one of the men yelled, getting right in Diane’s face. “We know our rights, and you have no cause to be here!”
I shoved him away from Diane. “Back off of her, buddy.” This was hard to balance, angering these people into attacking me without making it obvious.
He looked angry but not angry enough to draw a gun. That made me angry.
“I can tell from the sounds I’m picking up that your luggage is below you,” Dip told me. “I also am hearing chatter about possible measures to blow up the building you are in…so you might want to be concerned about that.”
Just what I needed. Plan B was coming up soon.
“That was understatement, by the way,” Dip added. “That’s a type of humor, though I’m not quite sure how appropriate humor is in this situation.”
“Please leave now,” the clerk said firmly.
“Let’s all calm down,” Diane said. “We just want to have a look around. What could it hurt if there’s nothing to hide?”
At the back of the store I noticed a door that I assumed led to the basement. I could just barge in and take on whoever was down there, but I wouldn’t want to leave three or four armed people behind me and have to count on the detective to handle them. I decided to just head for that door, and if one of the terrorists made a move, I’d shoot him proper. If I reached the door and none of them made a move, I’d shoot them improper and probably have to deal with the detective. It would be a small mess, and I was already vowing I’d never try to work with law enforcement again. Too asinine and complicated.
“I’m going downstairs,” I said. “If there are any terrorists down there you care about, you’d better tell me now, because I shoot unclaimed terrorists.” I headed for the door, turning my back to most of the people there. This was their last opportunity to die fighting, and I sincerely hoped they’d take it and make things easier for everyone. A framed poster of some Arabic saying hung by the door, and in its reflection I could see one of the humans reach for a gun.
Now I was free to be me.
But there was a gunshot before I could draw, and for a moment I thought my arrogance had finally caught up with me. I spun around and saw that my target was already dead. It took me another moment to process that before I zeroed in on another target and shot the Ramber in the face and chest before he had fully drawn his gun.
Gunpowder-based firearms are very loud, which can be a little disconcerting. More so for the enemy, at least.
I very nearly shot the blonde woman who had a gun in her hand but stopped that instinct just in time and aimed at the other human male—but he was already dead. The clerk made an odd movement, and I shot her twice to be on the safe side—though maybe I jumped the gun on that one out of annoyance that I’d only gotten to shoot one person so far. I quickly realized that shooting the woman could have been a huge miscalculation if I were wrong about her going for a gun, but there was no time to worry about it at the moment.
I didn’t usually shoot up a group like this while abiding by so many rules—or with someone else hitting my targets and messing up my rhythm. It was quite frustrating—which at least meant that I didn’t have to worry about accidentally wearing the creepy smile I sometimes wore when shooting people.
Diane was shouting something at me, but my ears were ringing from the gunshots. It didn’t matter what she was saying, anyway, since my next action was clear. Downstairs were several more armed people, perhaps about to blow up the whole building in some sort of selfless sacrifice nonsense. They had just heard the gunshots above them, and in a second more they’d have their full wits about them and perhaps be the ignominious end of me.
I had six shots left in each gun. I had to keep track of that.
I kicked open the door to the basement and charged down the stairs, bowling over one of the terrorists as he ran up. I leapt the last few steps, slammed into the floor and started firing rapidly into a group of seven people—mostly human, a few other species, all armed. There were too many for me to reliably take down quickly, and I realized I might have made a miscalculation. Still, four of them fell before any could get off a shot—even though I had only fired on three. Diane was once again backing me up from the top of the stairs, and I really didn’t know how to factor that into a shootout.
One terrorist finally fired at me, and the shot struck the ground near my face—luckily I was dealing with amateurs. But he jerked back as Diane shot him, so I quickly rolled to my feet and put three shots into another as he fired past me. That left one—Skippy—who dashed for a switch on the wall. I put a bullet in his leg, and he fell to the ground. I walked over to Skippy while looking around—he was the only one still moving—and he was just crying and clutching his leg. The visible wiring from the switch he had been going for led to explosives placed about the room. That would have been bad.
Someone armed came down the stairs, and once again I nearly shot the detective. Working with a partner would take some getting used to.
Her expression was pretty hard to read at this point. She just quietly looked around—still hyper-alert—and carefully took the gun from the unconscious terrorist at the bottom of the stairs.
“They were going to blow up the building,” I said, motioning to the different sets of explosives around the room. Skippy moaned, which reminded me: I needed to get the bug off of him before someone else spotted it. “Heard their voices down here and figured we didn’t have time to wait.”
“There will be a lot of paperwork for this.” It sounded like a joke, but her expression was still pretty blank.
I noticed some computer equipment and papers down there, which I assumed would be useful in the terrorist-hunting effort and hopefully put the whole matter to bed. Plus, it looked like we had two terrorists still alive.
I wasn’t sure what to say next. Killing people is supposed to be very grave, but Diane had killed people, too, so I was hoping to follow her lead. Then I thought of a really good thing to say. “Are you okay?”
She smiled weakly. “Peachy. And how did diving head first into a group of armed men work for you?”
I let myself smile slightly too. “They missed me. That was pretty stupid, huh?”
“We’ll leave that for history to decide.” She looked around again. “It was really messy, but I guess we had to do it. You’d better put down your gun before backup arrives. Thanks for your help. That’s not how we do things here…but it worked.” She smiled more convincingly now.
I smiled back. I was a hero once again, though that wasn’t what the syndicate usually paid me to be. “Hopefully these guys were it for the Calabrai.”
“Maybe we’ll find en
ough information here to figure that out, even if what’s left of them doesn’t talk.”
“I will tell you this: You haven’t stopped us!” Skippy yelled at Diane. “You can never stop us, because we are all willing martyrs! Those we killed yesterday were only the beginning! By the will of Calab, you will see all your friends and family burn, you whore!”
Diane stepped on his wounded leg, causing him to scream.
When she let up, he yelled, “This is police abuse! I will—”
She stepped on his leg again.
This time Skippy remained silent (after he was done screaming).
Diane then noticed me again—it was like she had forgotten I was there. “Um…I probably shouldn’t have done that.”
“I didn’t see anything.” I really did like her—she was a fascinating woman—but our little partnership was certainly not destined to end well.
CHAPTER 15
I spent another few hours at the station. The police really didn’t seem like a threat to me, though. I often find myself around armed people, but their actions aren’t usually hampered by the law. The police are more of a nuisance in comparison.
I was tiring of being around people, though, and was happy when I could relax a bit in a small break room alone. Well…nearly alone.
“You really know how to handle yourself in combat, don’t you?” Diane was sitting in a chair next to me and hadn’t been too much of a pest so far. “You almost seemed unfazed by the whole thing.”
I couldn’t tell if she was still probing me out of suspicion. I was now twice the hero but probably a little more kill-happy than people tend to like their heroes. At least the woman I’d shot had a gun; I’d have hated having to feign feeling bad about killing an unarmed civilian. “It’s all autopilot in a situation like that—but it has to be. Hesitation is death. Once your course of action is clear, you don’t think. You do.” I decided to turn it back on her as a distraction. “I wasn’t the first one to fire, though. You’re pretty comfortable with a gun yourself.”
She really was. There’s a big difference between someone who carries a gun on the job for the rare occasion he may need to use it and someone like me who shoots people for a living. Normal people hesitate to kill—but she had jumped right in there as soon as the first gun was drawn. I wouldn’t expect that sort of competency from someone unless he had been in the military and actually seen combat.
She looked embarrassed again. I thought that was a silly reaction. “I just do what needs to be done. I wish there were a less violent way to resolve that situation, but it’s hard to imagine one. Anyway, thank you for your help. I feel bad bringing you into something like that, but I really don’t know how we would have stopped them without you.”
They probably couldn’t have, but I played modest. “I think you would have come up with something, Detective. It was great working with you, though brief…but I guess it was brief just because we were so effective.” We actually were a decent team: the rogue detective and the murderous psychopath. Teaming up certainly was a different experience for me, and not completely unenjoyable, even with the extra annoyance of having to make sure I didn’t kill or horrify my partner.
She chuckled. “I’m guessing we were a little too ‘effective.’ I’ll bet what awaits me is some time off and counseling.”
Counseling—what a strange idea. I shot a bunch of people that pretty much everyone agreed the worlds would be better off without. I wasn’t sure why that was supposed to weigh on my psyche. Of course, I didn’t understand why anything was supposed to weigh on my psyche. “Do you really think you’ll need that?”
“What?”
“Counseling.”
“My religion helps me better than counseling does. I’m a Christian…when I’m not shooting people.”
She hadn’t struck me as the religious type so the revelation made me curious. This was good for my social skills. “You feel bad about shooting those people?”
She looked very serious. “No…That’s the problem.”
Maybe we were somewhat alike—except that I was fine with who I was. And faith has always been a hard thing for me to wrap my brain around; anyone can just decide to have faith in any nonsense. “You want to feel bad you killed some violent idiots who were trying to kill you?”
“It’s easy to be dismissive of their lives—that’s how I used to be. But there is value in all life.”
“You believe that?”
“Very much so.” No hesitation this time. “It’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment, though. When you have people like the Calabrai to deal with, it’s natural to be happy that they’re dead. That doesn’t make it right to kill them.”
“I just see it as a necessity. If people go around blowing other people up, it’s better when they’re gone. I don’t know how it benefits society to have people like that around, even if they’re neutralized as a threat.”
“Screw society. I care about individuals. Everyone deserves a chance to change. So what about you? What do you believe in?”
“I just deal with what’s in front of me,” I said.
“And you’re okay with how things turned out?”
These were not questions with easy, socially acceptable answers. Besides, filtering everything I said was starting to exhaust me. I decided to be a bit more honest—partly because I was curious to see how she would handle it. “I would rather not be shot at so much, but we dealt with the problem, and those terrorists won’t bother anyone else. Seems like a good outcome. I did what needed to be done. What am I supposed to do? Toss and turn in my sleep seeing their faces and think of all the things I’ve now prevented them from doing, like accidentally blowing themselves up with poorly made explosives? I know that’s kind of cold, but I’ve been through this sort of thing too many times.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “I won’t presume to tell you how to feel. I’m just…thankful you were there.”
I wasn’t sure what to do about her touching me. I smiled back at her, which is always a friendly move. “Glad I could help. So what about that Talbrook leader, Nakhai?” I asked. I don’t know why I cared about him. I guess I was actually curious about Diane’s views. “Any outcome where he doesn’t end up dead or in prison just tells me you all want to get attacked again.”
“Hopefully we can find a connection between him and the terrorists and do something about him.”
“Hopefully?” I scoffed. “You know he’s dirty and is going to be involved in future deadly plots.”
“The police can’t just imprison people we feel are guilty,” she said.
“Yes, but this isn’t some abstract principle of justice. This is a man you know—know—is going to cause more death and destruction. You’re willing to let that go based on the rules of your society?”
She was silent a moment. “We do have our rules—and some may be counterproductive. That’s pretty much inevitable when the rules are made by man. But I also know that making up your own rules based on what you feel is right at any given moment is a bad path to go down. So I won’t…” She smiled. “…probably won’t go out and shoot Nakhai in the face, even though that would be the smart thing to do.”
“I guess you have a point…but your society has too many damn rules.” I myself follow the rules of the syndicate without much question, but they have a lot fewer rules about not killing people.
She laughed. “You just don’t like that they took your guns again.”
“No, I don’t.” We smiled at each other silently for a moment. I was almost—almost—starting to prefer her company to being alone.
There was a commotion outside the room. We stood up and looked out the window of the break room and saw a number of people standing in the main hallway. What looked to be federal officials were escorting a few beings with ruddy green skin. They had intelligent-looking eyes that warily scanned the people around them, but they appeared to have greater concerns on their minds.
I looked at Diane who stared at
the beings with a sad expression. “Refugees from Zaldia,” she explained before I could ask. “A group of journalists were able to get onto Zaldia, and they rescued a few of them when they left. They brought them here because of the conference. This is their people’s first time off planet. These Zaldians, they…” She took a moment to compose herself. “…lost their children. The syndicate that besieged their planet gassed a classroom…to make an example or something…I can’t even comprehend it.”
It did seem rather excessive, but a number of things about Zaldia seemed rather odd for the syndicate. For one thing, if they were taking over a planet, it was hard to believe they’d be so sloppy as to let an unauthorized ship sneak on and off. It made me wonder whether what was happening on Zaldia was some sort of breakdown of their authority—some of Nystrom’s own people going rogue.
“We can stop some evil people, like the Calabrai,” Diane said. “But there’s still so much suffering in the universe that I sometimes wonder what the point is.”
I was pretty sure there wasn’t one, but didn’t say so.
Diane closed her eyes for a few moments, bowing her head slightly. I knew what she was doing, as I’d seen it a few times before. I had sometimes caused people to pray, but in my experience it wasn’t very effective.
Chief Rudle entered the room. “Come on, you two. We still have your matter to sort out.”
We followed him back to his office, and his expression was much like the human one for frustration. “So, Rico, how many guns did you illegally bring on this trip?”
“That would be it.” Until I could get back to my ship.
“Is that really important?” Diane demanded. “We needed to find any terrorists still hiding out, planning to attack again, and we got it done. Are you going to arrest Rico for anything?”
He sighed. “No. He’s only killed a dozen people since he got here. It’s hardly a matter worth pursuing.”
“He’s a hero.” She looked ready to hit the chief. That would have been entertaining. “Are you going to punish me?”
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