Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  By choice or by force, it always remembers. Then the knives come out. If you’re wise, you’ll start running—and keep going until you’re far, far away.

  * * *

  We kept a low profile until the trial. Changed hotels, identification. Fay kept tabs on the news feeds for developments in the murder investigation of Taylen Haug, 34, former AID detective turned independent contractor, no wife, one kid. Baxter plugged the holes in his body with putty and slathered makeup over the plugs. We made covert arrangements with an indie pilot to take us up to orbit at a moment’s notice.

  It wasn’t just the cops we were hiding from. Haug’s surveillance files, once Fay decrypted them, were filled with our faces. Vids of us going in and out of our hotel. Exiting the Mariner. Chatting outside the prison after our talk with Shelby. There were no tapes of the conversation itself, but we assumed she must have been bugged ever since. As sneaky as Baxter and Fay thought we were being, HemiCo had watched us since the day we touched down.

  They had vids of us watching them from the cafe, too, reverse-angle shots taken from their own apartment. Clips of us hiring the homeless scouts. We’d walked into a trap. Yet they hadn’t picked up Baxter was AI, and that slip had saved our lives. They had all the evidence they needed to unleash the AID on us, but they’d held back. Maybe they’d been afraid of the public relations blowback if their part was exposed. More disturbingly, maybe they’d wanted to take care of business on their own terms.

  Discovering this, I no longer felt guilt for Haug’s death or dismissive toward Baxter’s long-simmering rage for the company that had built him to be their slave. HemiCo had tried to kill us. Somehow they were linked up with Olympian Atomics, owners of Titan. Helping out the Titanian colonists was all lofty and warm, but that, at last, had nothing to do with my conversion to true believer.

  I wanted to take them down.

  Cooped in our hotel room, I read up on Shelby’s trial. I had assumed Martian law was more or less the same as English-speaking countries on Earth (except, perhaps, with harsher punishments for knocking a baseball through your neighbor’s dome). I was wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong.

  Shortly after I’d returned to Earth, Mars began its grand experiment in privatized law. A public court analogous to the ones across democratic nations existed as a backup for parties who couldn’t agree on an arbitrator. In many ways, however, this “backup” was more of a threat,, considering a) talented judges were hired away by private arbitrators, and b) the chronic underfunding of the system in general.

  Instead, most people preferred to settle inside one of the 23 separate sets of civil laws competing for customers under the domes of New Houston. Though most courts had plenty of common ground (there was no court where murder was legal, for instance; no plaintiff in a murder case would ever agree to a trial run by that law-set), each legal system differed in subtle and complex ways from its competitors. One might emphasize property rights with longer jail terms for thieves or vandals, say, while another might minimize petty assaults like spitting on someone, allowing a plaintiff to pursue a lesser sentence for his assailant if he wanted the attacker slapped on the wrist instead of imprisoned.

  On the surface, it looked ripe for abuse, but in practice it worked just well enough to keep the Martians from rising up in bloody revolt. Courts with reputations for fairness thrived while the dodgy ones folded immediately or mended their ways. Lawyers sprouted like mushrooms, forming collectives of specialists in one or several of the different systems. Before trial, opposing sides haggled like horse traders over which court to patronize. In exchange for accepting the risk of less favorable legal settings, the defense might accept cash to cover expenses, or the use of a lenient judge, or cover their ass by demanding the choice, if convicted, of which security corporation the defendant would serve time with.

  In other words, Martian law was baroque, complicated, and subject to manipulation by clever, high-priced minds, but with the public option to fall back on in the face of an impasse, and a bevy of proven choices to negotiate over, it mostly held up. True, anyone without cash got shoddy representation in a neutral court or armtwisted into opposition-subsidized expert representation in a hostile court. But it’s not like Earthside courts were that much different. Celebrities, CEOs, and congressmen have never faced the same legal system a petty drug dealer gets chewed up by.

  As one of those clever and high-priced legal minds, Shelby Mayes had the funds and contacts to stand toe-to-toe with political scion Clifton Prelutsky. Fay’s summary: under normal circumstances, given the evidence mounted against her, Mayes would have pled for house arrest or some other probationary model that certainly would have restricted her to New Houston.

  But for Shelby and the colonists on Titan, it was walk or bust. She was ready to put her liberty on the line to ensure the freedom of humanity’s first extrasolar settlement. That meant a trial. The two sides settled on Parson Legal Enterprises, which turned a softer eye on non-aggravated assaults and first-time criminals in general but which contractually bound its defendants to use it again if they were ever charged with a second crime, at which point PLE got bone-eatingly ogreish. A good gamble for Shelby, who wasn’t likely to ever crack a stranger’s jaw again. Even so, none of us knew how to account for the shadowy variable of HemiCo/Olympian Atomic.

  “We should be there for her,” I said, pocketing my omni.

  Baxter nodded. “The judge will surely be swayed by the moral support of three offworld murderers.”

  “I’m not letting Baxter out of my sight,” Fay said.

  “So have him point his omni in his face while we’re there.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m going,” I said. “I want to watch them lose.”

  Baxter nodded again, but this time approval gleamed in his eyes. “Let me know how it feels.”

  Buying my ticket and clearing Parson Legal Enterprises’ bodyscanning security made me ten minutes late for the opening hearing. The courtroom was a mishmash of a traditional hall of justice, a glossy office suite, and an opera house. Stadium-style seating surrounded a faux-wood trial floor. Two broad conference tables docked Team Prelutsky and the opposing Shelby and Co. At a podium opposite, a woman in an elegant suit jacket jotted notes as Shelby’s lead counsel argued the intoxicated state of everyone involved, including the three witnesses and Prelutsky himself, threw doubt over every aspect of the case. A clean-cut usher in a PLE uniform leaned over my armrest and whispered if I would like a drink.

  “Yet despite the drunkenness of everyone involved,” Shelby’s attorney concluded in disapproving tones, “the witnesses’ testimony correlates precisely with each other and with Clifton Prelutsky’s.” He cleared his throat, frowning down at his table. “I mean, that much consistency is pretty amazing. Even if the witnesses were teetotalling stenographers, you’d expect to see some inconsistency. What does this miraculous cohesion prove? Nothing. What it suggests is deliberate and wrongful coordination against Ms. Mayes.”

  “Strong accusations.” Prelutsky’s lead rose, smoothing her short black dress over her thighs. Her eyes drifted pointedly toward Prelutsky’s chin, still bruised from surgery. “Almost as strong as Ms. Mayes’ right hook.”

  A few of the crowd laughed while the arbiter-judge stayed stony. The prosecutor gave it a moment.

  “Since my colleague across the floor jumped the gun on our witnesses, I guess I will too. The testimonials you’ll hear two days from now are, most likely, going to match up to a T. Could be coincidence. Could be conspiracy. But it could be they’ve all got the same story because they all saw the same attack—the exact same attack you’ll see, recorded on video, with your own two eyes.”

  She sat down. My heart followed her descent, splashing over my guts. They had video. The bartender had sold us out. Shelby was doomed.

  They left the hotel and joined the surging foot traffic in the dusty orange streets of New Houston. Baxter had read a lot about the place. Mars’ first and only no
n-corporate settlement, close to eighty years old and home to some 300,000 humans. Despite that, the company had tracked them down in less than three days.

  “Earth’s the only place they can’t reach us,” Arthur said. “Even then, we’ll have to throw ourselves on the mercy of local do-gooders.” He sighed. Not that he breathed, but he found adopting obviously biological gestures funny. “We’re going to have to go through the spaceport.”

  “What?” Baxter stopped short, was jostled from behind. He tried to glare at Arthur, nestled in his pocket. “They’re going to know!”

  “You’re too sensitive. Have you ever compared clips of your facial gestures to theirs?”

  “You have?”

  “Jesus tapdancing Christ. The articulation is almost identical. That’s the whole point. Look around, nobody’s even giving you a second glance.” He raised the lines of his brows. “We must find a criminal.”

  8

  Against the collective advice of Baxter, Fay, and Pete, I went to every one of Shelby’s hearings. I knew the gesture was an empty one. For all the legwork we’d done to build the conspiracy angle for her team, once that video played, we may as well have spent every minute on Mars whacking off in our hotel rooms. Even so, if an empty gesture was the best we could do, I thought we owed her. She’d gambled her freedom for us and the cards had turned against her. On top of that, I wanted any HemiCo goons watching from the seats to know we weren’t going to be scared off just because a) the case was hopeless, b) we’d wasted weeks and would have to scramble for a replacement labor negotiator before the meetings on Titan, and c) they could have me arrested as an accomplice to Haug’s murder the moment I stirred up enough trouble to make it worth the risk of exposing their role in this shadow war.

  Because fuck them. We’d shown the Persians what happens when you get drunk on the hubris of power.

  “Guess I’m going to miss out on the big showdown,” Shelby said after the arbitrator sentenced her to six non-negotiable months in a low-security labor center with eighteen months negotiable parole after that. The Frontier Assessment was scheduled to take our team to Titan in three months. Shelby’s team had contacted Olympian Atomics about an extension, but predictably, they’d turned us down. Shelby smiled with half her mouth. “Thanks for being here.”

  I shrugged. “We did all we could.”

  “I know. The Titanians are lucky to have you.”

  Prelutsky strolled past lawyers chatting on their omnis. “Was it worth it?”

  Shelby extended her middle finger. “Think I could break your jaw with this?”

  He leaned in so close I thought his bladelike nose would slash her cheek. “Half a year in prison. I hope you spend it thinking about all the people you’ve let down.”

  She geared back for another swing. I grabbed her cocked fist, forced it open, and threaded my fingers through hers like a despairing lover. To complete the scene for any watching bailiffs, I kissed her furious lips.

  “I’ll miss you, sweetie,” I said.

  “Get your spit out of my mouth.”

  “Grab a little more while you’re at it,” Prelutsky said. “Last chance.”

  I reached out, pinched his nipple, and twisted until something tore. He gasped, collapsing away from me. Two PLE guards materialized out of the crowd.

  “He was overcome with remorse,” I explained as they helped Prelutsky to his feet. They cuffed Shelby, stared me down, and led her out a side door. Six months in prison. It didn’t sound long, but it would change her.

  After Artemisium, the Persians kept me for over a year. I was made to watch from the rear the morning Xerxes spattered his helpless conscripts on the shield wall of the Spartans, Thebans, and Thespians holding fast to the pass at Thermopylae. For a solid hour they screamed and died. Cheers and hollers gargled, at last, from the Persian soldiers’ throats; Leonidas had died. I found myself, proud Athenian, crying over a Spartan.

  More cheers as, through the dust and gore-slick melee, the jeweled spears of the Immortals gleamed from the hidden trail through the mountains. From behind their scaled mail, chromatic robes, and wicker shields, they marched on the surviving Greeks, who withdrew behind the walls across the pass. By noon, Xerxes stood on their corpses. To the south, all Greece lay open to his teeming armies.

  My captors beat me each time I refused their questions about my people. I held out three days, then fed them tidbits on our habits, our superstitions and traditions, deceiving myself into believing I could still be useful to our doomed resistance by misleading them. I told them the Spartan Carneia—the holy games of peace that presently kept the bulk of the Spartan hoplites off the battlefield—would end when the full moon rose over the August nigh. It actually lasted a full week after that! I would lead the Persians into a lethal trap.

  They beat me for that, too. So I told the truth instead. Just enough to save my skin, to go on hoping I could escape and reunite with Demostrate in Athens.

  My hopes waned each mile we marched into Attica. Xerxes’ mobile polyglot nation burned our fields, stripped our crops, and flooded into Athens, which had been evacuated except for a skeleton force to defend the Acropolis. An empty gesture. Its walls went up in flames.

  Was Demostrate there? Somehow cut off from wherever the rest of Athens had run off to? If she’d made the trip, had she survived it? Or been raped and butchered by Persian scouts? Caught, even, by her own countrymen, starving Greeks displaced by the invading swarm? I had no way to know. If she lived, sooner or later she’d hear I hadn’t—that I’d fallen into the straits, where my armor had, no doubt, taken me to the ocean’s black floor. Each day I spent in chains was one more day for her to mourn me. To forget me. To replace me.

  As the Persians marched on, their victory as unstoppable as their masked Immortals, I began to forget my own life, to accept my place as a prisoner and slave. I learned their language. Played games with the cooks and wagoneers and logisticians, who found it hilarious that a mongrel like me could beat their friends at knucklebones and the athletic contests they held with strange, tapered pins. It was a laugh riot for us all.

  I had been captured in August of 480 BC. So what if the Greeks won some battles? So what if they fought and fought and fought until my chef friends began to mutter that maybe Xerxes had strayed too far from home? By June the next year, with the Allied troops breaking Persia’s back at Plataea, I no longer cared. They would kill me rather than feed me all the way back to Susa. Demostrate, if she lived, wouldn’t know I pictured her face every night. It was a stupid world, cruel and uncaring. When the Persians carried me back across the Hellespont to sell me into slavery, I’d grown to reflect the world’s disinterest.

  Some part of me laughed when I was taken to my new master in rebellious Babylon. Had the homeland of my birth demanded me back? Then let it have me.

  If I’d found Demostrate at that point, I doubt she would have recognized me. The Greek victory meant nothing to me. I couldn’t laugh unless I saw someone else get hurt. I was property, a useful dog.

  Shelby was being taken off to a labor camp of her own. By the time she got out, New Houston and its people would look as cold as the winds beyond the domes.

  * * *

  “I’m going to get drunk,” I told the others, which was a bit of a trick, since I already was. “Then I’m going to go crack that old bartender’s face like the Liberty Bell.”

  “That won’t be popular among his regulars,” Pete said.

  “He sold us that video, then turned around and peddled it to the other team too. Only they left out the part where HemiCo’s goons rolled in to straighten up the witnesses’ stories.”

  “We need to work on bringing Ms. Mayes’ replacement up to speed,” Baxter said. “Not get lynched by a drunken mob.”

  “You guys are like earlobes. Pretty but useless. HemiCo needs to know they can’t run us over.”

  Baxter shook his head. “The only thing they’re likely to learn is your blood is so flooded with alcohol they could use
you as a Molotov cocktail.”

  “Not true.” Dismissively, I waved a bottle of deimos, the local Martian liquor named not for the moon but for the dog of war, at his fakey human face. Murky green, the liquor tasted like the algal compost it was fermented from. “Well, I’ll see you guys in hell.”

  Pete tried to clinch me on my way out the door. I wrestled him off, picked up the bottle he’d made me drop, and hired a minicab to the Old Outer Ring. The Mariner’s iron anchor hung dumbly over the open mouth of its door. I threw some bills at the cabbie and strolled in.

  The old man behind the bar nodded at the bottle of deimos in my hand. “Can’t bring that in here.”

  “For three thousand ares I can do whatever the Christ I want.”

  He stiffened, recognition blooming over his face, which to my impaired eye didn’t look entirely right. “You. You get out of my place.”

  “Not before I kick your head off,” I said, unwinding a giant crescent kick that nearly toppled me. “Hyoo! I will chop your neck so that it bends around my hand.”

  He laughed and swung his bandage-bloated right arm onto the bar. “Once again, they beat you to it.”

  I goggled at his arm. Other than a trip through rural China, I hadn’t seen a cast in a century. Then again, an uninsured Martian probably couldn’t afford bone glue.

  “What happened to you?”

  “You care why?”

  “Lately, I’ve been getting kicked around, too,” I said. “Maybe by the same people.”

  “Came upstairs right after you all left. Two bruisers. Asked what you’d wanted.” The old man’s mouth twitched. I realized why his face looked funny: mottled bruises painted the skin beneath his beard. “When I told them to blow, they broke my arm. I handed over the tape while I still could.”

  “You had another copy?”

  He smiled with one corner of his mouth. “Had to cover my ass.”

  “Don’t we all.” The meaning of all this hadn’t quite penetrated the layer of deimos buffering my brain. I held out the bottle. “I bet you could use some of this.”