Jump Gate Omega

by Tom Shepherd

  “Why don’t we exhume the body and see? Oh, I forgot. We can’t exhume the body, can we?” J.B. turned to the Coroner. “You were in such a hurry to get back to the gaming tables that you pronounced him dead, called your technicians to transport the body to the morgue, and released Epond for cremation the following day.”

  “I didn’t know—he looked like a human corpse!” Dewire was sweating visibly.

  “Did you run a bio-molecular scan of the victim, at the scene or later?”

  “No, but—”

  “You scanned for life signs only,” J.B. said. “You never considered identifying the victim’s species, because you assumed he was a non-augmented humanoid.”

  “He looked human!”

  “You never checked. That, sir, is malpractice.”

  “Sedalia is a frontier world. Medicine is messy out here.”

  “You’re a coroner. Your job is to get messy. To find the messy truth.”

  “But—”

  “Your honor, Paco León didn’t kill Captain Epond. He stabbed him in self-defense. The Captain would have survived if Safe Harbor’s Coroner hadn’t cremated him.” J.B. pointed at Dewire. “There sits the real killer.”

  The courtroom exploded. Judge Wildermuth gaveled them silent.

  “Well done, Mr. Matthews. The prisoner is released.” He glared at the Prosecutor. “Lieutenant Frost, please determine if any other charges are appropriate. If so, we’ll need a new coroner. Court’s adjourned.”

  Tyler approached J.B., grinning. “Damn, Bro. You totally had a Perry Mason moment. And you worried about us corporate pukes self-destructing in criminal court.”

  “Dumb luck.”

  Tyler shook his head. “Smart skill.”

  Dorla pushed through the crowd to wait by the side door. In a moment, the bailiffs brought Paco León back to the courtroom where he embraced his wife and shook hands with J.B., Tyler, and Mr. Blue.

  “Chief, we have a job for you,” Tyler said. “Ready to work?”

  “Yes, sir. I owe you that. One last job. Then we’re leaving this rat-hole colony for good.”

  “Get our new ship spaceworthy, and we’ll transport you off planet to whatever destination you choose.” Tyler’s comm unit pulsed. He tapped the wrist band. “Tyler, go ahead.”

  It was Suzie. “Tyler—”

  “Tell me your repairs are complete.”

  “Don’t bloody interrupt me! My repairs are complete. But your sister is missing after an attack by a slaver gang. Esteban is in pursuit. I have notified the Harbor Police. Now, go find where the bastards took Rosalie. I like her.”

  “Send her coordinates to the cops and guide me to her wrist band!”

  “She’s not wearing it. I’ll guide you to Esteban.”

  J.B. caught Tyler’s arm. “What’s going on?”

  “Rosalie’s been kidnaped by Slavers.”

  “Dear, God!” J.B. told Paco to prepare the smuggler’s ship for departure and hurried after Tyler. Rosalie’s kidnapping made Jump Gates to another galaxy a secondary priority. But still, the clock was ticking. Twenty-three days left, and every moment they lingered on Sedalia moved the Matthews Corporation closer to ruin.

  Ten

  Esteban awoke with burning hands from bare skin contact with a gritty pavement which the sun had turned into a frying pan. Blood caked his upper lip from smashed nostrils; he groggily realized he must’ve hit the sandstone wall face-on when felled by the stun rod. Sitting up on the hot sidewalk, he carefully checked his mouth for missing teeth but found no gaps. He tried to estimate how long he was unconscious. His wrist band showed 2:04 p.m., and he guessed they’d left the Police HQ about an hour earlier. With travel time, that meant he was out less than half an hour.

  His head and face ached, but he pulled himself upright and leaned against the sandstone wall until his world stopped teeter-tottering. Images of snarling, dog-like faces flashed in Esteban’s mind as he searched his pockets and found the palm-sized blaster. A moment later, he located the spot where they grabbed Rosalie—marked by the wrist communicator ripped from her arm and crushed on the street.

  Esteban bent to gather the pieces and nearly lost his balance as his head reeled from the exertion. Probably a concussion. He needed to move slower or risk another blackout. The wristband was shattered, but he sensed her presence strongly, and it gave him the psionic scent he needed. They had taken her up the street, away from the oceanfront and in the general direction of the spaceport shipyards. Esteban called Inspector Demarcus Platte while following the trail.

  “Stay where you are,” Demarcus said. “I’ll have a squad at your location in five minutes.”

  “I cannot wait. God knows what they will do to Rosalie.”

  “Señor Solorio, please stay put. We’ll be right there.”

  “Follow my datacom. I’m tracking them.”

  Esteban shut down the voice function but kept the device online as a homing beacon for the Shore Patrol. Rosalie’s residual energy lingered in the air and he followed the scent like a bloodhound with a fresh trail.

  Sedalia’s flaming, yellow sun drove living things to shelter. Even Safe Harbor’s ubiquitous finger lizards abandoned the empty thoroughfares. Esteban trudged on, drawn by an image of multi-fiber storage barrels stacked beside a large iron gate.

  In a half hour, he found the warehouse on a dead-end street near the spaceport. Shadows from unpainted, four-story buildings cooled the pavement somewhat, so the bricks no longer scorched his feet with every step. Psionic senses told him Rosalie waited inside, but he could not summon an image beyond the iron door, firmly locked.

  With great effort, he climbed a stack of multi-fiber barrels and pulled himself to the sill of an open window. Below, he discovered a cement floor stacked with crates. A rusty metal cage sat halfway to the back wall. Not a stationary cell but a traveling coop for living cargo. At the Solorio Estancias in Argentina, Esteban had seen better pens for animals.

  He counted at least twenty humanoid females inside the steel stockade, either sitting on the floor or leaning against the bars. Most were attractive and physically robust, although their clothes suffered from various states of disarray. No skinny frames or overweight bodies. All young women; the oldest could not have passed her thirtieth birthday.

  When he did not see Rosalie among them, a cold chill swept through him. This scum might have already sold his cousin to middlemen as a perfect ransom hostage, or traded her to a highly selective customer who paid in advance, or simply decided she was too well known to get away with the kidnaping and killed her to avoid the nuisance.

  Then he found her—thank God—parked on an unfinished wooden chair against the wall with three armed guards standing over her. Rosalie’s auburn hair was disheveled, but she appeared otherwise unharmed. He could not hear what she said, but one of the Slavers didn’t like her answer and slapped hard across her face, knocking Rosalie from the chair. She stayed on the floor, head down, catching her breath after the blow.

  Esteban could take no more. He stumbled off the plastic barrels, regained his footing in the hot, empty alley, and charged the locked door like a bull after its tormenting Picadores.

  He pulled out the pocket weapon and pounded hard with his free hand. Behind the barred gate, men shouted and women screamed, punctuated by rapid, repeated, heavy blaster fire. Terrified the Slavers might be killing their captives, Esteban fired at the heavy door. When his first attempt to destroy the barrier failed, he adjusted to a superheated particle beam to burn the lock away. More blaster shots snapped somewhere inside the warehouse. It took him over a minute to cut through the reinforced alloy with a hand weapon not designed for that function.

  Finally, amid flying sparks and oozing, glowing red steel, the melted lock fell away and Esteban kicked the door ajar. He was not prepared for what he found inside.

  The women huddled together in the cage, hugging each other and weeping. Beside them, left and right of Esteban’s position, bodies of various humanoid sp
ecies littered the dirty floor, dead from pinpoint shots to the head or chest by a kinetic blaster. Four or five had drawn their weapons, but there was no evidence anyone got off a defensive shot at whomever, or whatever, laid them out like scythe-cut wheat.

  He counted thirteen dead thugs—mostly humans, plus a few Zenji dog-men, two barrel-chested Durijest pirates, and a richly clothed Mindorian. Esteban guessed the affluent victim was a purchasing agent for off world customers, but he met the same fate as the slave catchers providing his cargo.

  Esteban found Rosalie cringing on the floor by the wooden chair, head buried in her arms, sobbing hysterically. He rushed to hug her, but she screamed and clawed at him. Finally recognizing her cousin, she cried and flung herself into his arms.

  “You are safe now. I have you, Prima. Rest safe now.” Despite her ordeal, Esteban felt the strength Rosalie’s aura radiated. He could look into her mind and see what she had suffered, but that would be an unconscionable intrusion. He blocked the jarring images and sent her waves of peace instead.

  When Rosalie finally calmed down, Esteban spotted a Slaver with a bleeding hole in the chest. The wounded Durijest pirate’s mouth twitched, and he moved his fingers.

  “Prima, I must speak to that Slaver before he dies.”

  “Don’t leave me!” She clung to him, harder. “No me dejes!”

  “Sí, sí, sí, pero—Rosalie, escúchame—forget the bad man. But we need to release these women from their cage, muy pronto. There may be other Slavers. They may come back.”

  She nodded.

  Esteban found the portable cell’s keypad, but the cage had a heavy lock, too thick for his pocket weapon. With no access code and no time for subtlety, he grabbed a thermal blaster from the stone floor beside a dead slaver and melted the lock with a quick shot. The door popped open and the women inside wept and called to him in multiple languages.

  Esteban put the weapon away and shouted, “Freedom!” in Terran.

  Rosalie repeated the word in a dozen alien and human tongues. The crying intensified for a moment as they spilled from the cage. Terran, Mindorian, Parvian, and Meklavite females surrounded and embraced Rosalie, chattering in a babble of languages. Several of them kissed her hands and face. One woman, a forest green Kolovite priestess in tattered ceremonial robes, fell to Rosalie’s feet, embraced and kissed her ankles, and murmured incessantly in her native tongue. A ritual of salvation?

  Esteban hadn’t a clue what they were saying, but no one could mistake the sentiment. Since he was her rescuer, Rosalie must have brought their deliverance by her mere presence. A tall, blonde human female chattered in some Scandinavian dialect, grabbed Esteban, and kissed him hard and deeply. It was inappropriate, of course, but he reminded himself that honoring the diversity of cultures was important to a spacefaring businessman.

  At that moment, Inspector Demarcus Platte and a squad of white uniformed, heavily armed men and women of the Shore Patrol poured through the open street door. A few police checked the bodies while others spread out and moved through the building to clear any lingering threats.

  “Señor Solorio, Miss Matthews, are you all right?” Demarcus said.

  “Yes, Inspector,” Esteban said. “My cousin needs rest and rehydration.”

  Platte called for assistance, and in a moment, the rescuers handed them purified bulbs of water.

  “Did you do all this?” Demarcus asked Esteban.

  “No, Señor . I heard firing from the alley. By the time I burned away the gate lock, it was over.”

  “Jesus Christ. Looks like a Special Ops squad hit the place,” Platte said. “Precise kill shots. No prisoners. Very professional. And you saw no signs of the crew who did this?”

  “None, Señor .”

  Platte walked around the bodies, poking one here and there with his shoe. “Too bad we arrived late. We might have rescued these assholes for a proper hanging.”

  “Inspector!” Officer Yumiko Matsuda squatted beside a body. “This man still lives.”

  Platte and Esteban went to the victim, the same Durijest pirate that Esteban wanted to question. His thick torso took a center-chest hit that would have finished a human being. A colleague from the same species caught a fatal headshot and dropped a few steps away. Pirate number one regained consciousness, struggled to breathe. Blood pooled beneath him, despite pressure-point first aid dressings and injections of emergency bio-repair nanites by Shore Patrol medics.

  Demarcus squatted beside him. “Who did this to you?”

  The Slaver grasped Platte’s white Navy blouse with a blood-wet hand. He gurgled in Terran, barely audible, spitting blood with each word.

  “The Terran woman… dispatcher…” He coughed, went into a spasm, and died.

  The African-Caribbean Inspector stood, shaking his head. “This pack of rodents, offed by a single shooter? Not likely.”

  “I saw her,” Rosalie said.

  Platte pivoted to the auburn-haired human. “You saw the woman? What species?”

  Rosalie trembled; Esteban put a hand on her shoulder. “She was… she was a Terran human. Killed them, went out… out the back door.”

  “You’re serious—one woman did this?” Platte pointed to the rear exit, and a team of Shore Police took up pursuit. “Can you describe her?”

  Rosalie nodded, closing her eyes. “Dark as the night. Black hair, tight gloves. Her bodysuit, also black.”

  “Was she of African descent, like me?”

  “No, sir. Caucasian, or perhaps mixed.”

  “And you actually witnessed this dark-haired, mystery woman blast all these bad guys?”

  “The first shots, yes, sir.”

  “Could there have been others, firing from cover?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I ducked as soon as the shooting started.”

  “Would you recognize her face?”

  “No, sir. I caught a glimpse of her profile, but her back was turned to me when the shooting started. I hit the floor and covered my head pretty quick.” Rosalie sniffled. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “No, no, child. You did what citizens need to do in a hostage situation,” Platte said. “You survived to return to your family.”

  As if on cue, Tyler and J.B. blew into the warehouse, breathing heavily. Finding everything under control, they holstered their sidearms and showered Rosalie with hugs and kisses and listened to Demarcus Platte recount the story thus far. When he concluded, Yumiko pulled out her police record datacom and approached the Inspector.

  “The Coroner will be here within the hour,” she said.

  “If he’s not in jail,” Tyler said quietly.

  “We have looked two years for this operation.” Detective Matsuda said. “How do you want to proceed, sir?”

  Inspector Platte shrugged. “I think we have everything we need here at the crime scene.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matsuda said. “Do you want to interview other witnesses? Continue the investigation?”

  Platte smirked. “For dead Slavers?” He looked at the crowd of women. “Can anyone identify the person or persons who allegedly killed the men that kidnapped you? Let me see a show of hands. We might have to hang her, so please speak up.”

  Utter silence. No hands went up. Platte shrugged. “No leads, Yumiko-san. Too bad.”

  “Yes, sir. How shall I enter this incident in the logs, sir?”

  Platte studied the body-strewn, blood wet floor. He shook his head. “Worst case of mass suicide I have ever seen.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Put that in your report. I will sign it.”

  “May we take our sister back to the Sioux City?” J.B. said.

  “Of course,” Platte said. “Officer Matsuda will accompany you for protection.”

  “Yes, yes. I will feel safer,” Rosalie said.

  Esteban eyed the diminutive Asian woman in white uniform shorts. She was trim as an Olympic sprinter but the smallest bodyguard he had ever seen. His smile became a labored grimace as psionic waves of discomfor
t rose from Yumiko and struck him by surprise.

  “She lives with pain.” Esteban cursed himself for saying it aloud. “I—uh—can see it in your eyes, Senorita.”

  “Is that true?” Rosalie said.

  Yumiko nodded slightly. “Hovercraft accident when baby. Mangled fingers. Medical science fix breaks, cannot fix pain.”

  “There are drugs—forgive me. That was presumptuous,” J.B. said.

  “Buddha is my refuge. Meditation is my medicine.”

  “Officer Matsuda is a certified martial arts instructor and kendo master,” Platte said. “Tenth degree black belt in multiple disciplines. Deadly with a sword.”

  “Daily, my hands overcome their affliction,” Yumiko said quietly. “It is an inconvenience, not an impediment.”

  “We accept your protection,” Esteban said.

  Inspector Platte received a call on his wrist comm, excused himself, and hurried away. The detachment of Shore Patrol officers remained to secure the crime scene until the coroner arrived.

  Tyler said, “Paco should have the other ship certified soon. I’m getting nervous about all the time we’re wasting on Sedalia when the legal action is still a ten-day flight away at the Rim.”

  Esteban nodded. His sister was still missing, probably somewhere in their ultimate destination, the Suryadivan Sacred Protectorate.

  “Follow me, please,” Yumiko said.

  Eleven

  After she delivered them safely to the Sioux City’s parking slot, Officer Matsuda bowed to each, bid a polite farewell, and reminded them to call police Headquarters if they had any further problems. Dorla León greeted the Family members at Suzie’s drop-down ramp. Mrs. León had discarded the peaked cap for a yellow headband that matched her Matthews Interstellar jumpsuit. She waved a data pad and called to them cheerily.

  “Dorla, we’ve got to get off this planet,” Tyler said. “Give me some good news.”

  “Paco just completed certification of the smuggler ship for deep space! He sent the paperwork to Harbor Master Zhao.”

  They clumped up the ramp to the small galley that doubled as ship’s meeting room. Mrs. León served cold bottles of augmented fruit juice to replenish fluids and nutriments lost to the hot environment. She also handed Rosalie a replacement for the wristband the slavers crushed in the blazing street. “I found this in the Shore Party supplies closet while cleaning up that disorganized mess.”