by Troy Osgood
Torsi was close to the hovercar and ducked behind the front, just ahead of the door, while the driver took too long to come to a decision. I saw him reach behind the seat and pull out a weapon. He stepped out of the hovercar, eyes scanning everywhere, and took a shot from Dresla in the chest. Different angle, she had moved closer to where I was. Almost directly under me. If Torsi had been crouching higher, it would have hit her and I had to wonder if the shot had been aimed for Torsi and Dresla had missed.
The guard now tracked Dresla, whose position was exposed, firing rapidly in that direction, but leaving himself open for me. I caught him in the shoulder and he dropped, his weapon flying from his hands. The leader lay still, smoke coming from the wound on his leg. Couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead, but either way the Herfto was effectively out of the fight for now.
That left just Torsi.
She was sliding along the hovercar, moving towards the driver’s compartment. She crouched low. I couldn’t get a good shot at her and doubted Dresla could either. Instead I took the shot I could make.
The plasma bolt slammed into the polycarbonite window of the hovercar. The material cracked and splintered, not breaking. The stuff is tough, but it did what I wanted.
Torsi stopped and stepped away from the hovercar, hands in the air.
I adjusted and leveled my weapon at her, head centered in my targeting sight. But I didn’t pull.
Dresla walked out of the treeline, her borrowed weapon pointed at Torsi. She stepped around the fallen Herfto, giving the ones still alive a wide berth, glancing at them quickly.
“You’re under arrest,” Dresla said loudly, speaking Tradelan, probably for my benefit.
Torsi ignored Dresla and started scanning the trees, along with the tops of the trees.
“Captain Lancer,” she said, her voice carrying. “Is that you out there with the rifle?”
I pulled the trigger.
Torsi jumped and yelled. The bolt had hit the ground a good two feet away, maybe a little closer. Purposefully missing. Dirt and grass shot up, falling all around, leaving a nice crater in the ground.
The shot had been to keep her honest and to give me enough time to scramble down the tree.
Which I did, quickly slinging the rifle and retracing my path back down.
Not my fastest or smoothest, but considering I hadn’t done anything like this in awhile, I did good.
Landing on the ground I quickly made my way through the short distance of trees to the clearing, stepping out and walking casually towards the two Storwo women. I kept some distance between Dresla and me, stopping equal distance from Torsi. This made her have to turn slightly to keep an eye on both of us. She eyed the rifle hanging loosely from my shoulder, slung so the barrel was pointing down and an easy swing to being in hand. I left my blaster holstered, but my hand hovering over it.
“Sorry about the pod,” Torsi said, smiling. “They were going to pay me extra for it,” she continued indicating the Herftos. “A good chunk of credit. That’s why it took so long for them to get here. Had to find a hovercar that could take it.”
I ignored her.
She shrugged.
“What now?”, she asked looking at Dresla.
“You’re under arrest.”
Torsi laughed.
To be honest, I almost did too. It was a stupid statement from Dresla.
Once a cop, always a cop.
“The Storwo government is reconvening on Hoin. I will turn you over to them for justice,” Dresla said. It came out like she was reciting it. I wondered how long she had practiced the speech. “You will be tried for crimes against the people of Storw.”
Torsi shook her head, disbelieving.
“What justice?”
“Storw is no more,” she continued without a hint of remorse or sadness. “We’re just a bunch of homeless beings spread out across the galaxy.”
She paused and for the first time there was a hint of sadness in her voice.
“Those of us that got off anyways.”
Was that also a trace of guilt? She had taken a pass meant for another and left the person behind. On purpose. She had no way of knowing that I was going to show up and save the guy.
Even if there was a trace of guilt, it was too little and too late.
“So I took an artifact. So what.”
“The Daelot is a piece of our cultural history,” Dresla replied, angry, no longer on script. “To sell it,” she paused, unable to find the words. “Yuintol, hui ta yuo,” she finally said.
Something in Storwoi. Whatever it meant, it made Torsi take a step back, shocked. Had to be a pretty bad insult.
“How dare you,” Torsi said in Tradelan, clenching her fists and taking a step forward. She seemed to have forgotten that Dresla had a blaster pointed at her. She also didn’t see me draw mine. “You judge me? You have no idea who I am or the life I’ve led. Storw is not the paradise you think it is. It’s all lies.”
She started to turn towards me as she talked. Was she trying to convince me? To sway me to her side?
I sighed and pulled the trigger.
*****
The pulse blast hit Torsi square in her chest. The green lines of energy wrapped around her, sparking and flaring. Her body jerked and spasmed before she fell to the ground in a heap.
Dresla looked over at me, shocked and surprised.
“Stun bolt,” I said walking over to Torsi. “I was tired of her talking.”
I knelt down and felt for a pulse, hoping it was in the same general spot on a Storw that it was on a human. It was. Faint but there. Torsi was still alive.
One of the benefits of the galaxy being made up of humanoids that are basically the same.
I’d hit Torsi with a full charged stun bolt. My weapon was calibrated for an average height and weight human. Stunning a different species can be interesting. Each species has lots of variables that makes calibrating the right amount of power for stunning a nightmare. A weapon can really only be set to work perfectly on one species. Or near perfectly. Any other species is a crapshoot. It can work. It can not work. It can work too good. Lots of different effects.
Sometimes it can cause permanent brain damage.
I doubted that would be the case here. It just probably meant Torsi would be out for an extra hour or two.
Standing up, confident that Torsi would live, I casually moved around the clearing and shot each of the Herftos. The ones that weren’t dead anyways. I didn’t want any of them waking up.
Holstering my blaster I grabbed the closest Herfto by the shoulders and started dragging him. He was heavy. A lot heavier than I thought he would be.
As I piled the sleeping Herfto in a heap, I watched Dresla walk over to the escape pod. She reached down onto the last Herfto and picked up the Daelot. She flipped it around, examining all the surfaces, looking for damage. I got my first good look at it.
About a foot high, three inches wide, it was a tube with carvings along its surface. There were pieces attached at the top, an inch thick, that came out to the sides and curled back in. These were also covered in carvings. It looked to be some kind of metal as it caught bits of the sun. Didn’t look like it would be worth that much. Kind of ugly.
She was still standing there looking at it as I leaned down and grabbed the Herfto at her feet. I had to pull him to the side to get around her. So distracted she didn’t even move. This one I had by the feet and smiled as his head bounced over the rocks in the clearing. I laid him alongside the others.
I was nice enough to keep the ones alive out of the pool of blood that still flowed from the head wound I had made.
“Torsi’s right you know,” I said breaking Dresla from the trance she was in. Her hands had been roaming the surface of the Daelot, tracing all the carvings. “About there being no more justice, not for Storw. No one will care about that,” I finished pointing at the artifact.
Dresla sighed and lowered the Daelot.
“I know,” she replied walking
over to stand above Torsi. “On Hoin she would be tried and convicted and would be just another mouth to feed. One that couldn’t help us rebuild or do anything useful. She’d use up valuable resources guarding her. Take people away from other tasks.”
She looked up into the sky, staring off into space. The sky was blue, but I knew she was looking past and into the stars. Was she even looking in the right direction for Storw? Didn’t matter.
“All in the name of justice.”
“What she did wasn’t right,” I said coming to stand next to Dresla. I looked down at the unconscious Torsi. Looked peaceful.
“No it wasn’t and getting the Daelot back will be a boost for my people. It had to be done. But it will also be a reminder of what we have lost.”
She was silent for awhile, just staring down at her fellow Storwo.
“What do you want to do with her,” I finally asked.
CHAPTER TWELVE
We left Torsi lying alongside the Herfto.
They could all help each other get back to the city, leave each other or kill each other. It wasn’t our concern. Not anymore. She was resourceful, she’d find her way back. Or she wouldn’t. The Herfto would probably abandon her but again, not our concern.
Sure the Herftos would probably be pretty damn mad that they paid some money and didn’t get the item. Hopefully Torsi could reimburse them. If not, I didn’t like her chances.
But she brought this on herself.
The people of Storwo might not be able to bring her to justice but there were other ways to get it.
*****
I maneuvered the flat bed hovercar around so the bed was facing the pod. It had a winch mounted to the back and I was able to connect the cable to the front of the pod. The bed also inclined, which was a bonus.
In the end it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be to get the escape pod onto the flat bed.
The pod needed a lot of repairs. The underside was damaged and got more so when we dragged it across the ground to get onto the flat bed. I had to use the thrusters which caused more damage.
Only about an hour and we were done.
Plenty of time before the Herfto and Torsi woke up.
Checking the straps I climbed into the hovercar driver’s seat, Dresla already in the passenger side clutching the Daelot. She looked over at where Torsi was laying next to the Herfto. As I started the hovercar I wondered what she was thinking. As a cop, this wasn’t normal. But she really wasn’t a cop anymore. There was no Storw to police. Would she find a place in the refugee camp, doing the same thing? Was that why she was so focused on the artifact? It represented her old life, the one she was losing? Recovering it was doing the job she loved one last time?
But it didn’t end like most of her assignments. Leaving the thief behind at the mercy of criminals. That wasn’t what a cop did. I had no problem with it. I’d done worse in my time. How would she reconcile it? Would it change her? I knew how easy it was to step over the line again once you had done it the first time.
I turned the hovercar around, being careful not to get too close to the unconscious Torsi and Herftos. Their clothes and hair blew in the breeze generated by the hovercars thrusters against the ground, but that was it. Maybe they got pelted by some small rocks and sticks, got covered in leaves. Maybe I could have easily moved a couple of feet away so it wouldn’t have been a problem at all.
Maybe.
The hovercar moved sluggishly up the small slope. The controls were sticky, not smooth at all. But I managed.
Taking it slow I got into the trees, following what looked like a logging trail. I could see from the marks on the ground that the Herftos had come this way. It circled around, looping back the way we had come from.
Made sense, there was just the one city around here.
“Our hovercar,” Dresla asked.
She had been so quiet that I’d almost forgotten she was there. She was looking through the forest, towards the edge of the valley or where she thought it would be. Dresla wasn’t any kind of a forest tracker or else she’d know we had passed it a couple minutes ago. For a guy that spent most of his time in space in a ship with a navcomputer, I had a very good sense of direction. I’d known when we had passed by our hovercar. It had been about a half mile into the forest, south of the logging trail we had been on.
I was a little annoyed. We had cut through the forest when this trail had been so close. It hadn’t appeared on the map I’d downloaded onto my wristcomm so I wondered if it was more of a smuggler’s trail. Either way, it would have been useful to know about earlier. Using the trail we could have gotten to Torsi before the Herftos.
Things could have been much different.
“Nothing we can do about it,” I said. “We’ll let the Tuis know where to find it.”
Dresla looked like she wanted to say something but changed her mind. She settled back in the seat, staring out at the forest without really seeing it.
I concentrated on driving. The road was rough, the hovercar weighted down. It wanted to swerve and caught all the bumps. The thruster’s compensators, designed to keep the hovercar level over any terrain, were having a hard time keeping up with the dips and rises. These things really weren’t made for overland travel, especially when the land was not flat, and with the load it was carrying. A lot of places still used wheels and suspension systems when out of the cities. And a lot of places couldn’t really afford the tech of hovercars.
The galaxy was not a fair place.
As Dresla was learning.
We passed the time in silence.
*****
The towers of Yorunital were visible long before we broke through the trees. The smuggler’s road snaked through the thick trunks, the branches overhanging and growing close. Through the gaps we could see the gleaming metal of the city’s skyscrapers. They dominated the sky.
It was an ugly sight.
We broke through the trees and the smuggler’s trail disappeared, fading into the grass of the plains. The wind pushed aside the tall grasses as did the hovercars thrusters and we were able to pick up some speed on the relatively flat ground. I looked back and couldn’t even see the trail. I’d have to remember that location, it could come in handy someday. Good smuggler’s drops were hard to come by as the various planetary law enforcement groups got better and better tech.
I adjusted the path and aimed for the landing dock to the side of the city. I knew there was no way we’d approach undetected and we didn’t have speed and surprise like we did when we left. There was going to be someone waiting for us.
The question was what story would we give them?
We sped across the plains, the sun setting behind the tall buildings casting shadows. We passed in and out of them, the temperature dropping each time with the strips of sun shrinking as the gaps between buildings shrunk. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for the people that lived in the city itself. Did the sun ever actually hit the streets?
Probably not.
Because of the angle, the entire landing dock was covered in shadow. I could make out the shape of the Wind along with a couple new ships and a couple that had been there before. The yacht still stood out from the rest. Still shiny, still fancy, still expensive looking.
And there was the welcoming committee.
Two armored hovercars with official looking markings, some kind of symbol that I didn’t recognize, patrolled the edge of the dock. There was a weapon mounted to the top with an armor wearing Tui manning it. Both vehicles turned towards me, heading at an intercept angle.
I slowed the hovercar and brought it to a stop. Dresla had been looking out to the side and now turned her attention to the two hovercars.
This was going to be fun.
*****
The hovercars stopped about twenty feet away, placing themselves in a way to block me from moving forward and able to give chase quickly if I moved any other direction. Of course the weapons pointing my way were a pretty effective roadblock. The vehicle
s were armored but still looked faster than what I was driving. The Tuis that I could see, pointing the weapons at us, were fully armored as well. Head to toe. Tall and skinny, not much could be seen of them beyond the fact they were humanoid.
I lifted my hands from the wheel, holding them up so the Tuis could see. Dresla copied my actions.
Armored doors on each hovercar popped open and uniformed Tuis stepped out. Nearly identical. Dark gray uniforms, weapons holstered at their waists. The Tuis were tall, skinny and green skinned. Each a different shade with black eyes and no hair that was visible. They looked emancipated, their skin pulled tight against their bones and muscles.
Another reason that Tui is not a popular planet. The natives aren’t that pleasant to look at.
The uniforms were trimmed in red and black, loose and not form fitting.
“Good thing the pod is registered,” I said with a sigh.
Dresla didn’t react.
The two Tuis walked closer, each coming to a different side of the hovercar. I noticed their hands resting on their blasters.
“Good evening,” the one on my side said in accented Tradelan.
Not a good start.
I’d never had a good interaction with law enforcement on any planet that started with ‘good evening’.
Both sets of eyes searched the inside of the hovercar. Noting both of our holstered blasters, the rifle on the seat behind us, the Daelot that Dresla was still holding and even giving the escape pod strapped to the back a glance.
I started to speak but Dresla was quicker.
“I am a duly appointed law officer of the planet Storw,” she said turning to look at the Tui on my side, the one that had spoken and had to be the one in charge. “This man was assisting me in finding and securing stolen Storwo property,” she held up the Daelot for emphasis.
The two Tuis stood up and exchanged glances, stepping back and coming together to confer. Not what they had expected. They talked quietly for a minute before returning and taking up the same positions except the leader was now on Dresla’s side.
“Identification,” he said holding out a hand, his other still resting on his blaster. “Slowly,” he added unnecessarily.
