by Tom Shepherd
“Why not engage loyal Meklavites to expose the conspiracy?” Suzie said.
“At this juncture, I do not trust my own people,” she admitted. “Not even the Coven Assembly, May the Great Mother protect us.” Serilda held the silver staff aloft.
“If we accept this assignment, will the Coven Assembly arrange to drop all charges against Charles Matthews?”
Serilda stood. “Your future uncle is a scoundrel, but no enemy of the state. Bring me the evidence and names of the traitors. I will do all in my power to grant him clemency.”
High Priestess Serilda Jakeem cast a blessing spell upon the Star Lawyers firm and all its personnel. Then she nodded slightly and glided out the office door with her women bodyguards in the lead.
J.B. reclaimed his chair and everyone sat. “Charlie better play it straight with us, or I’ll turn him over to the Witches of Farroleok.”
As if on cue, Ulrika signaled the arrival of Charles Matthews. He was standing in the reception area when Serilda passed, and he bobbed into J.B.’s office with a hesitant smile on his face.
“Was that who I thought it was?” he asked.
“Sit down,” J.B. ordered.
When confronted with the new developments, Charlie at first played dumb. Then he refused to confirm Company involvement in the arms trade, but J.B. didn’t let him get away that easily. Twice he tried to leave the room, but Rosalie blocked the door, blaster in hand.
“Are you going to shoot me, like the thugs who attacked Heirzos?”
She waved the weapon at his nose. “I couldn’t kill a Family member, but the stun setting hurts like a molten bee sting.”
He returned to his seat and they battered him relentlessly for over an hour. Finally, he suggested J.B. should talk with his father directly. When J.B. snapped that he couldn’t phone home from sixty thousand light years away, Charlie told him about the new Apexcom, just delivered to Rodney Rooney aboard the Legal Beagle.
“Good! I’ll talk to Father tonight,” J.B. said. “Now tell me about the Lerrotica Weapons Tradeshow.”
“What more do you want from me?”
“The truth,” Suzie demanded. “Are we in the bloody weapons trade?”
J.B. pointed to Tyler’s Fiancé. “That woman is marrying into the Family. She needs to know whether we are merchants or mafia.”
“Your father specifically asked me to keep you out of this business.”
“So help me, Uncle Charlie, if you don’t answer our questions truthfully, I’ll leave you here on F-7 to defend yourself.”
Charlie sighed. “What do you know so far?”
“M-double-I has a ‘purchasing agent’ at this year’s Tradeshow. It’s none of my people. Who then?”
“Noah’s Chief Financial Officer.”
J.B. shook his head. “Lulu Treymore is your gun runner? That beanpole bean-counter. Are you on space dust?”
Parvati said, “Why did Mr. Noah Matthews send someone so prestigious to an obscure weapons market?”
“What the hell? Noah already hates me.” Charlie took a deep breath. “A faction within the Quirt-Thyme ruling family wants to return to their old code, to strike out and begin a new round of empire-building. They have been secretly working with the Meklavite Colonists of F-7 to purchase weapons, ships, and technologies that could outfit a renewed, expanded Quirt fighting force. The Tradeshow is cover for their program to funnel weapons to the royal family on Annistyn.”
“Is that why the Blue King was murdered?” Suzie asked.
Charlie shrugged. “On that, I have no information. Sorry.”
“Does Father know about this neo-imperialist scheme of the Quirts?” J.B. rephrased his question. “Well, of course he knows. What’s his part in your game?”
“It’s Noah’s game, but I’m on the team.”
J.B. pressed him. “With what goal?”
“We’re trying to stop Quirt expansion by purchasing the most lethal offerings each year through alien surrogates.”
“To keep them out of the hands of the imperialists,” Suzie said. “Brilliant.”
J.B. grunted. “And to re-sell at a tidy profit, if I know my father.”
Charlie put a hand on J.B.’s shoulder. “He’s scattering the weapons among wealthy, third-rate star nations. Races with no territorial ambitions and not enough population to go Alexander the Great on anybody. And yes, we’re making a little cash in the bargain.”
“I’ll be damned,” J.B. said. “My father has become a peacemaker.”
“Well, more pacemaker than peacemaker,” Charlie said with a laugh. “He’s no Thomas Merton.”
“Maintain the peace by selling weapons of war,” J.B. said. “Nobody but The Old Man would recreate the fantasies of the twentieth century.”
“So far, it’s working,” Charlie said. “But now we have this screen-buster problem.”
J.B. held up a hand—indicating stop—and paged Ulrika. “Bring us tea and coffee. This could be a long afternoon.”
“I could use a belt of whiskey,” Charlie said.
“Just tea and coffee, Ulrika.”
“Do you want sugar cookies?” she asked innocently.
“Yes! Cookies will be nice.” Charlie said. “I like cookies.”
J.B. glared at him. “What screen-buster problem? And for that matter, what the hell is a screen-buster?”
“When your dad learns I told you all this, you gotta say I had no choice.”
“The screen-buster, Uncle Charlie?” Rosalie said with an uncharacteristically menacing tone.
“Yeah… okay.” Charlie described an X-ray cannon that pierced every known defensive shielding like a shotgun blasting a screen door. It supposedly fired with great accuracy over thousands of kilometers, especially when slaved to enhanced target painting modules. The weapon’s destructive power threatened to end most space battles before they began.
“We know something about the deadly nature of X-rays,” J.B. said. “Who developed this screen-buster?”
“Same race who produced all the advanced weapons and support modules we snapped up,” Charlie said. “The Dengathi Stellar Lagoon.”
“The Frogs again?” Rosalie said. “They’re swamp lumps, couple of hops from the lily pad.”
Charlie nodded. “We’re working on a theory that Dengathi explorers discovered a trove of advanced technology from the former Galactic Empire. Maybe an ancient derelict or an archaeological site. No hard evidence yet.”
“And you’re sure it’s the Dengathi?” J.B. said.
“Your father thinks so.”
“Dad’s usually right about things like this,” Rosalie said.
“He missed Hideki Tsuchiya’s treachery,” J.B. reminded her. “And his old buddy, Flávio Tavares, turned out to be the Pirate King.”
“I still can’t believe Flávio is a pirate,” Rosalie said.
“He is, luv,” Suzie said. “Ruddy bastard nearly got us all killed.”
Ulrika arrived with hot tea, coffee and sugar-dotted biscuits. When she leaned over to place the tray on J.B.’s desk, Charlie patted her ass. The tall blonde swung around and smacked his cheek. Not hard. Just a warning. Suzie and Rosalie chortled like amused Jabberwocks.
J.B. shook a finger at his uncle as Ulrika strutted from his office. “All right, Uncle Charlie. Now that the temptation to sin boldly has gone back to her desk, what do you need from us?”
“Get me acquitted,” Charlie said, “so I can continue working with your father to obstruct the Quirt’s neo-imperialism.”
“Do you think the Mek government brought those charges to knock you out of the gun game?” J.B. said.
“Again, that’s what your father believes.” Charlie poured himself a cup of coffee. “If the Quirt expansionist party comes to power and has a big enough stockpile of weapons and ships, they’ll strike their nearest neighbors to re-start their empire-building program.”
Suzie said. “That means attacking—Crikey!”
“Vassal states of the Parvi
an Republic,” Charlie finished her thought.
Parvati’s soft voice furnished the details. “This is very bad, Mr. Charlie. The Parvian Republic was a predatory star nation until several centuries ago, when they entered a consolidation phase after conquering and annexing all their neighbors. The Republic commands over 1,800 light years of space in every direction from their homeworld in the Luyaden system of the Orion Ring. They share a lengthy frontier with the Quirt-Thyme Empire.”
“Parvians look like us,” Rosalie said. “Not as close as Meks, but still very close. Their evolutionary history conforms to Ziegler’s theory of Humanoid Efficiency.”
“One-to-one, Parvians are very polite, occasionally charming,” Charlie said. “But they keep the peace by bringing utter, total, kill-you-and-burn-your-cities-to-radioactive-ash-heaps, mean, nasty annihilation upon any and all perceived threats.”
Suzie paraphrased the aphorism. “You don’t fuck with the bloody Parves.”
Charlie put down the tea cup. “Noah thinks Quirt-Thymean aggression will lead to centuries of warfare, especially if battle hawks in the Parvian camp decide to revive their golden age of conquest. We’ve got to crash that program before it launches.”
J.B. leaned back in his chair. “Well, I guess we’ll have to help you save the galaxy.”
Charlie laughed. “That’s what I told your father six years ago!”
“The best way to do that,” J.B. continued, “is to prove the Mek Colony’s charges against you are part of a plot to protect their deal to supply arms to the Quirts.”
“Tough legal argument to make,” Charlie said. “Both the F-7 Meks and Quirt neo-imperialists will deny it.”
“One way to prove it,” J.B. said thoughtfully. “Get Heirzos to tell the truth at your trial.”
Charlie snorted. “Good luck with that. Got another lottery card?”
“We’ll see.” J.B. clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Trial starts in three days. Let’s go over our witness list. Suzie?”
“Shall we begin with Uncle Charlie’s ladies—I mean, wives?”
“Good opening,” J.B. said. “I’ll ask Ulrika to contact T’paeken Heirzos and make sure he’s available at a moment’s notice.”
“Security measures required,” Rosalie said. “We can house him in a suite here at the Darling Cozy.”
They drank tea and coffee and nibbled cookies for the rest of the afternoon, but before sunset J.B. thought they had a working plan. He gave everybody pretrial homework, then decided to return to the Legal Beagle and try his new Apexcom. Tyler or Dad? He laughed. Tyler, definitely.
J.B. found Lt. Rooney on the Beagle’s bridge. He was connecting the Apexcom to a communications console. With Rodney’s adaptations, shipwide Apexcom was now available. After a few minutes tinkering with the instrumentation, Rodney contacted the Patrick Henry at its parking spot on the Quirt-Thymean Orbital Hub, halfway across the galaxy. Chief Paco Léon greeted J.B. cheerfully, but reported his brother had gone to Annistyn to begin Mr. Blue’s murder trial.
“Tyler wasn’t supposed to go to the surface. They didn’t arrest him?” J.B. said.
“Oh, yes, sir,” Paco said. “Jailed him real promptly. Lovey Frost and Julieta worked out a deal to bail him out. He’ll tell you all the details. You want me to forward this call to his datacom?”
“You can do that?” J.B. said.
“I think so,” Paco said. “Here we go—you’re on with your brother. Take care. See you when you get back.”
“Thanks, Chief.”
“J.B., is it really you?” Tyler said.
“Good to hear your voice again, Ty. How’s the case progressing?”
“Shitty as usual,” Tyler grumbled. “I see Mom sent you an Apexcom for Toorlabamba.”
“Very funny,” J.B. said sourly. “Actually, it’s from Dad. Do you have a few minutes? I need to update you about new information involving both our cases.”
“We’ve broken for First Lunch. About an hour left before court reconvenes,” Tyler said. “Give me a second. I was napping in a window ledge. Okay, here’s an empty client conference room. We can talk freely.”
J.B. briefed him on the Lerrotica Tradeshow, the mounting evidence for a Quirt expansionist faction stockpiling weapons to revive old dreams of regional dominance, and the possibility of advanced technology entering the equation, siphoned to the Quirts by the Mek colonial government on Farroleok-7 through the Lerrotica venue.
“What’s Charlie’s part in this game?” Tyler said. “Can’t be a coincidence that he’s at ground zero for a Quirt weapons program.”
“Okay, this is the part where you need to be sitting down,” J.B. said.
“Dad, right?” Tyler guessed. “You’re about to tell me that Dad and Charlie are working together to arm the Quirts. Jesus Christ! I can’t believe my own father—”
“No, Ty. You’ve got it backwards.”
“Say again, over?”
“According to Charlie, Dad has been secretly buying up weaponry and dispersing it among far-flung, minor star nations. Domains with no aggressive tendencies.”
“You’re shitting me. Dad, spending cash to keep the fucking peace? His own money?”
“Well, he isn’t giving the weapons to those far-flung races. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t turn a tidy profit.” J.B. paused, considering his words carefully. “And there’s more. Charlie believes the Dengathi have been begun marketing advanced, reverse-engineered weapons they found in a high tech cache from the old Galactic Empire.”
“Any evidence to confirm that?”
“Dengathi sold us Apexcom,” J.B. said. “And they enabled Quirts to freeze the FTL drive on targeted ships. Mom’s After Action Report on the Alpha Gate battle says the blue fleet held that pirate armada in place while M-double-I took them out.”
“That’s way beyond the Frogs’ scientific capability,” Tyler said. “Their R&D program to date has consisted of ganking unarmed cargo ships and pirating the tech.”
“I’ve saved the bad news for last, Ty.”
Tyler sighed. “Oh, great. Let’s have it.” He listened quietly while J.B. described the screen-buster X-ray cannon, a weapon to alter the balance of power. They agreed it must not fall into the hands of an expansionist star nation or the neo-conquistadores faction of the Quirt-Thymean Empire.
“Trial prep or not,” Tyler said, “you gotta visit that Tradeshow. And don’t go alone.”
“Actually, I’m thinking of taking a full Recon Team,” J.B. said. “Rosalie to look at the weapons, Suzie the software, Rodney new tech modules.”
Tyler grunted approvingly. “Good choice. Arabella will keep Rodney on a short leash. Take Parvati, too. She’s so exotic, nobody will pay attention to you. In fact, she’d make a great Star Lawyer. If she’s on the defense bench, the opposition will be nicely distracted.”
The fantasy about Parvati naked in bed flashed again. “Yeah… I’ll think about it,” J.B. said. “You might ask Demarcus to find out who in the Quirt government is quietly preparing for war.”
Tyler snorted. “We’ve got several candidates for that office. The Inspector is canvasing for witnesses. I’ll get him re-tasked soon as he surfaces.”
“Be careful, Ty.”
“You, too, Bro. Serious predators are buzzing around both ends of this conversation.”
“Let’s keep in touch,” J.B. said.
“Tell Suzie I want to Apexcom with my honey ASAP. But for now, I need to mosey back to court. The Judge summarily dismissed Veraposta before I could cross. I need him to reconsider.”
“Well, good luck. And keep safe,” J.B. said.
“Love ya.”
“You, too.”
Eighteen
Judge Felizool reconvened the court and gestured for Zenna-Zenn’s counselors to call their first witness. Tyler stood and nodded politely as holographic cameras livestreamed his image across the planet and linked with other Quirt-Thymean worlds
. Some viewers were so distant they would not receive these broadcasts for several hours.
“The defense calls Queen Veraposta.”
Pandemonium broke our in the gallery. Angry blue citizens shouted, leapt to their feet, and waved fists. The Judge calmed the crowd with the kind of universal admonitions issued by presiding officials at legal proceedings everywhere. Quiet in the court. I will clear this chamber if you do not come to order. This is your final warning…blah, blah, blah. None of it worked. The citizens kept screaming.
Tyler sat on the edge of the defense table and waited to see what Felizool would actually do. The old purple Thymean jurist called his green Kolovite bailiff forward and spoke to him, but the citizenry still shouted and Tyler heard not a word of the judge-bailiff conversation.
Finally, the Imperial Adjudicator vacated his courtroom. At first, this seemed like a good thing. The machinery of Quirt-Thymean justice had coughed, sputtered and seized up. Indigo’s team stalled the proceedings, which might provide more time to work on a defense strategy. But Tyler considered two drawbacks to the Judge’s hasty retreat.
1) Without judicial approval of his trick to recall Veraposta to witness status, they had no defense strategy.
2) Without the Judge in the courtroom to maintain order, Tyler faced a thousand Quirt-Thymeans who screamed for his head while media broadcast the riotous scene far and wide.
The noise drowned out any vocal orders, so Tyler hand-motioned for the defense team—including Mr. Blue—to follow him out the side door, which he supposed would lead to Felizool’s chambers. The Chief Prosecutor and his crew scurried after them.
A wide, long corridor stretched both directions behind the courtroom, interrupted every few meters by doors to offices and workplaces. Just as Tyler suspected, they were greeted by a mob of uniformed Quirt officers. After some quick negotiation, translated by Mr. Blue, the senior court cop led both teams of counselors and the defendant to Judge Felizool’s domain. Tyler kept Zenna at his side to render instant, two-way translation, Terran Standard to High Caste Pharmaadoodil and vice-versa.