by Joel Babbitt
The eons of genetic manipulation that the Master Race had put Ju Evorik’s people through in their evolution from human to solkin had given the solkin judge one other feature that Jim Ryker had no experience dealing with; Ju Evorik could read the energy a person put off. Though the various subject races in the Rae Liam Dominion whispered in secret about how their Solkin Overlords could read their minds, the truth was more that they could read their moods. Psychic attunement served the Solkin more like a combination lie detector-mood controller rather than anything so inefficient or time consuming as thought reading.
“But you would not have turned her over to us,” the judge stated simply.
Ryker was taken aback. The judge was right, of course, but that was beside the point.
“Your Honor,” he said as he put the most earnest look on his face that he could, “Rianna Firstwave is a wanted criminal on three planets. I’m sure in sorting out who should have had what custody it would have become obvious that Marik has the greater claim.”
“You don’t even believe what you’re saying,” Ju Evorik said, then leaning forward he started to press his points home. “You came to Camallay under an alias. You did not make contact with the local law enforcement agencies to help you in your apprehension attempts, in fact by your actions one could clearly see you were trying to avoid local law enforcement.”
“Your Honor, if I had stopped to explain what I was doing, I would have lost the suspect,” Ryker countered. Ju Evorik’s stern look did not deter Ryker. “As it is, when your officers stopped me, that provided the diversion the suspect needed to escape.”
“Mister Ryker!” the judge interrupted. “You clearly came here on your own agenda, with no intention to follow Rae Liam Dominion standard protocol. You have not acted as a legitimate representative of your chartered corporation. Or perhaps… yes, I think you are under instructions to act in this way, that your corporation is not following the chartering laws as they should naturally integrate with civil government where such government exists. As such I see no reason why I shouldn’t have Marik’s charter revoked on Camallay and seize all corporate assets on planet.”
Ryker wasn’t an unnecessarily violent man, but his temper had gotten him in trouble in the past. And with the lower gravity on this planet, he was pretty certain he could jump up on the stand and take out the judge in one quick strike, but to either side of him just out of reach a pair of guards stood stonily. They were paradroids and he knew their reactions would be much faster than normal human guards. Looking from one side to the other, Ryker reconfirmed that the two stocky metal guards were indeed holding their sonic carbines at the ready.
Ryker looked at the judge as humbly as he could… though he came off looking more like a caged lion, all spirit and pacing inside. He wasn’t folding to the obvious strong arm tactics. No, he knew he just had to figure out what the judge wanted. He had not dealt with solkin directly before, but he’d heard plenty about their abilities—and their shortcomings. Every solkin he had ever seen in the news, or much more rarely in person, was consumed with their own superiority and had no respect for what others thought were their rights, property, money, or accomplishments.
“My apologies. You’re right, of course, I didn’t follow protocol,” Ryker conceded, though in his eyes there was no deference only the silent tallying of the cost of what he was about to offer the judge. “That is how I found and apprehended the criminal before your law enforcement officers intervened, allowing her to escape. However, if I put you as the beneficiary of Marik Corp’s bounty for her pending capture, perhaps you would overlook this indiscretion.”
The Solkin judge sat back and smiled a contented smile. “Wise. Very wise.” He thought for a moment then, seeing no reason to continue the discussion further, he bent down to select the option he liked best from the holodisplay and to enter an account number. “Stamp here, then.”
Ryker put his thumb into the virtual slot on the holodisplay. A green light soon blinked acceptance.
“And when you find this Rianna Firstwave, my people would like to have a little chat with her before you take her off planet,” Travik Ju Evorik smiled a perfect smile as he nodded to the two paradroid guards.
Ryker tensed as if to spring, his fists clenching… but he breathed deeply and smiled a forced smile at the solkin judge, nodding slightly before turning and walking out of the farce that was a solkin courtroom.
He had no intention of turning Rianna over to Solkin Dominion authorities, of course. He’d spent his entire life covering for her, and today was just another instance of that. He had had to let her escape when the local authorities intervened; he knew what they would do to her. That was something he just couldn’t allow.
After all, Rianna was his sister.
Still fuming from the judge’s blatant extortion, Ryker didn’t even notice the microtracker one of the paradroids carefully shot onto his backpack. He was too busy thinking of how for eons the Solkin Overlords had treated their human subjects as little better than chattel, and how today was just another instance of that.
Once outside, Ryker put on his situence glasses, or situational enhancement glasses, the common tool of the lesser races in this day and age, and scrolled through local transportation options that appeared to scroll a few feet in front of his eyes with a few winks and squints, finally settling on a reputable taxi service that his glasses’ bot recommended.
Taking a repulsor bot lift to the impound lot, a look of frustration played across his face. As though losing Rianna, then signing over a bounty his employer hadn’t yet agreed to pay wasn’t bad enough, as he arrived at his rental skimmer he couldn’t help but see a large gash cut into the red plasteel siding down the entire length of the vehicle, the gash carefully outlined in a subtle yellow glow by his situence glasses as his in-glass bot unhelpfully suggested possible causes for the gash, assuming Ryker was investigating it.
Bowing his head in utter frustration, Ryker tugged the last remnants of the dangling side-sensor off the vehicle, put his foot against the rear door and pulled open the driver’s door, threw his backpack onto the passenger seat, and jumped behind the control grips. With a press of his thumb the skimmer’s navigation displays lit up the lower third of the window, except for the left quadrant of course, and its repulsors began to spin up, lifting it off the ground by its simple steam-based nano-strips.
Soon Ryker was on his way.
* * *
The news that Port Operations on Taysom Island had been bombed, likely by some corporate competitor or perhaps the local separatists, came out of the blue for Jim Ryker. He was the type of man to get absolutely focused on his mission, without letting anything distract him from his goal, so he hadn’t even bothered to check in with Marik’s operations on planet and honestly hadn’t even thought about them.
That very same singular focus was how he had become a rather successful investigator. He had a reputation for resolving problems others couldn’t, for resolving cases while others were caught up in the red tape, for closing cases. Unfortunately, that usually meant skirting the rules—or just plain ignoring them—something which had gotten him into no end of problems over the years.
Fortunately for Ryker he was Marik’s nephew, a fact that wasn’t apparent in the way the Solkin Dominion kept its records but which had given him second chance after second chance. If Ryker didn’t produce the results that he did, however, he very much doubted his rich uncle would continue to be so patient with him; Marik was nothing if not pragmatic.
His singular determination and tenacity were how he, a simple cop, had successfully courted Maria back when she was a young doctor just out of medical school. Their three children were a clear testament to his determination. His stress was over the top at the moment, and the thought of tender moments with his wife, of how she looked waiting there in the door as he grabbed a lift to the spaceport, helped take his mind off his immediate problems—until a message beamed in.
Pulling over to the side of
the track, Ryker winked to activate the play button again and watched the grainy satellite video holoprojected a few feet in front of him, courtesy of his situence glasses, of the four vehicles exploding, one after another, on the long, stringy island where his uncle had established his most daring and aggressive bid on Camallay to date. The voice track that the operations guys back on Prexlar had put with the video footage specifically for him was clear; Marik wanted Ryker to drop the search for Rianna for now and find out who had sunk the MCS Venture—and now who had bombed Port Operations.
Marik needed results. The local authorities hadn’t provided them in the week or so since the MCS Venture was sunk, and now that his base on Taysom Island had been attacked Marik had no confidence that the local authorities would do any better with that problem. Family or not, his uncle’s handlers made it abundantly clear that now was the time for Ryker to drop the search for Rianna and get on the case.
So Ryker did what his uncle wanted—or at least he would as soon as he got his network back in action.
“Barabas,” he said as the blinking yellow light on the linker he’d pulled out of his pack went solid green. “Rianna got away. Can you find her for me again?”
There was a grumble on the other end of the line before Barabas finally spoke. “That was no an easy find, you know. How she get away? She fly?” The accent was guttural Stig, from the inner markets of North Point City.
“Little run in with the locals. They made me, Barabas,” Ryker said. “I had to let her go, elsewise they would have locked her up for a very long time.”
“Maybe she need lock up. You know she is no very good for you. Why you chase her so, because she so pretty?”
Ryker just smiled and shook his head. “Don’t worry about why, my friend. Just find her. She’s in trouble as long as she’s on Camallay.”
“She no in trouble—she is trouble!” Barabas snorted with laughter at his own poor joke. When he recovered, his voice took a serious tone. “Hey, if locals make you, they no take all you money, yes?”
Ryker shook his head at the Camallayan’s exceptionally poor grasp of Standard, the language spoken wherever the Solkin Overlords enforced the Master Race’s control of the galaxy. “You worry about finding Rianna, you scoundrel. I’ll worry about getting you the money. You know I’m good for it.”
“Yes, yes. No problems. Barabas find beautiful woman for you.”
“That’s great, Barabas. I’ll be on this linker,” Ryker said as his eyes scanned the road, catching sight of an old, physical sign that read First Landing City – 373 kilometers.
It was already late afternoon. The investigation would have to wait until tomorrow.
Colonel Alexander
Chapter Two
Colonel Marshal Alexander had no appetite for incompetence. He’d not survived fifty standard cycles in the Dominion Military and almost ten cycles as the leader of Marik’s Marauders, and as Marik’s personal ‘senior troubleshooter,’ by encouraging a culture of incompetence. After countless operations on numerous worlds throughout the Rae Liam Dominion and its neighbors, as a lackey for the Solkin Overlords in his younger days of innocence and later as a mole intelligence operative for the Human Resistance, Alexander had the sharpened glare of a professional soldier, yet the calm demeanor of one who is in charge and fully comfortable with that fact. So when Specialist Chewontonpipat appeared fidgeting at the landing to Alexander’s makeshift planning center—dancing about like he needed to relieve himself—Alexander grimaced.
He’d been looking over the large display that Weapons Sergeant Thompson had rolled out on the round central table in the lower staterooms of the class seven space freighter, the MSS Danzigger. Thompson’s thick black fingers were tracing the explosion that sunk the MCS Venture from what appeared to him to be the point of impact on the grainy, choppy satellite video that captured the before and after impact moments. Frustratingly, it did not capture the moment of impact and so made it impossible to determine which direction the impact had originated from.
Finally noticing the boss’s silence, Thompson’s thick bald head looked up to notice the specialist’s discomfort. The slight human specialist saw the annoyed look in Thompson’s deep brown eyes, which only increased his discomfort.
“What is it, Alphabet?” Thompson used the name everyone except the colonel called Specialist Krangkrai Chewontonpipat, because no one but the colonel had ever figured out how to say his name.
Alphabet looked uncomfortable, as though he thought they might yell at him for the news he was about to bring. His eyes wandered to the little sweeperbot that weaved around the floor executing its single purpose.
“Well, specialist?” Colonel Alexander prompted calmly, his sun-weathered face taking a more neutral expression. Piercing blue eyes set between a full head and neatly trimmed beard of salt-and-pepper hair relaxed in an attempt to help reduce Alphabet’s anxiety. “Go ahead, now. What do you have to report?”
Straightening up and summoning his courage, Alphabet looked straight ahead. “Sir and Weapons Sergeant Thompson…”
Colonel Alexander rolled his finger to prompt him to hurry up and get his news out.
“Sir, Captain Oo-Nu-Ado reports that Port Operations on Taysom Island has been attacked by four vehicle bombs. Casualties appear to be significant: five guards, two of the yazri they hired to provide security for our team, and seventeen civilian staff members.”
Colonel Alexander’s eyebrows raised in surprise. Even Thompson’s completely hairless brow raised in surprise, the glare of the display reflecting off his deep black forehead as it wrinkled.
“Seventeen civilians?” Colonel Alexander looked incredulously at the young specialist, turning away and shaking his head as he tried to absorb the news. “And five guards and two yazri…” his voice trailed off as he shook his head.
Thompson was speechless, but after a few moments he started flexing his considerable muscles as determination began to well up in him. He could feel action getting ready to happen; situations like this were why people thought the human sergeant had paid a lot for a muscle genetic modification, or genmod, but his intimidating frame and heaps of toned muscle came the old-fashioned way, from hours at a time spent in the gym.
Behind Specialist Chewontonpipat, legs appeared coming down the ladder. Captain Shannon Washington jumped the last couple of steps to the deck.
“What buildings were destroyed?” Alexander asked, his eyes piercing the young specialist.
“Sir,” Washington interjected, seeing that Alphabet didn’t have a good answer for the boss, “I was just up with Captain Oo-Nu-Ado. Port Operations was flattened, three warehouses on the north side of the space port were set on fire and burned to the ground, some transient quarters near the bridge were destroyed, and the bridge gate was blown to bits,” she finished.
Colonel Alexander shook his head. “We just built those warehouses too…” he muttered. “Port Operations of all places!” he shook his head in disbelief. “I bet you Bill Manahan was caught up in that mess,” he said, looking at Shannon.
Captain Washington’s grim nod was enough confirmation, her long black ponytail masked some of the sorrow in her eyes as she looked away. “And that kiz’zit engineering crew that we sent from Prexlar to survey for the new gun-in-a-box perimeter defense system,” she said, referring to the three ant-like kiz’zit engineers they had hired for the job. “All three of them are on the casualty list too, sir.”
Specialist Chewontonpipat looked uncomfortably at Captain Washington, then slowly withdrew, making his way back up the ladder.
“Any word on how many dead and how many are only wounded?” Alexander asked.
Washington nodded. “All five guards are dead or missing. They were apparently too close to the blasts. One of the yazri is probably dead by now, though the other is only lightly wounded. Twelve of the seventeen civilians were killed, and three of the other five likely won’t survive.”
Alexander was still shaking his head in disbeli
ef. “Well, we thought that whoever had sunk the Venture had thrown down the gauntlet, but this is starting to look more like total war. I don’t suppose we have any indication as to who did this yet?”
“No, sir,” Washington nodded, haunted eyes in a pale face hardening as she straightened up. Reaching up, she squinted behind her situence glasses to acknowledge something the rest of them couldn’t see. “Sir, Captain Oo-Nu-Ado reports we’re about two hours out.”
Colonel Alexander nodded. “Very well. Get us ready to disembark.”
With a knowing glance to the captain, Weapons Sergeant Thompson stood and motioned to a pair of aliens who were sitting at the back of the room. Specialist Krrrz was a kiz’zit, an ant-centaur-like being like the three weapons engineers who were on the casualty list. The other specialist was a very unique being—or perhaps three beings—for Specialist Ya-da-na was a trillo; a being composed of three small almost identical bodies that shared one collective mind. Each of Ya-da-na’s three aspects, as each body was called, looked like something of a mix between a red panda and an armadillo. Individually, each aspect was small and incapable, but together, collectively, the three trillo aspects acted as a perfectly coordinated team, always working on one task at a time, for they shared one consciousness.
“Come on you… two,” Thompson said, looking first at Specialist Krrrz, who was meticulously reviewing the equipment logs, then at the three trillo aspects all stacked on top of another like a totem-pole. “Time to load up. Looks like this little camping trip just got interesting.”
Ya-da-na’s three aspects all looked up in perfect synchronicity at Sergeant Thompson before quickly unstacking themselves and moving to follow the large, bald human and their bug-like kiz’zit companion.