Citadels of Darkover

by Deborah J. Ross

  “I have a feeling. Don’t let him see you,” North said, and accepted the call. Lawton appeared on the little screen. He was a red-headed man whose mother hailed from Darkover, and his strong features would have fit in at any Comyn Council meeting. He’d been offered a seat on the Council, North happened to know, but Lawton had turned it down.

  “Dan!” North breezed. “What’s hanging?”

  “You use his first name?” Loret mouthed at him, and North stepped on her foot.

  “Dave,” Lawton said from the screen. “Enjoying the fall weather in Thendara today?”

  “Wet and cold is wild and crisp,” North replied amiably, but Lawton had made his point—he knew North had been in Thendara. Not that visiting Thendara was illegal or even vaguely frowned upon. But when the Legate bothered to know something about you, it was time for you to be bothered. “What’s going on?”

  “Loret Ridenow-Castamir roped you into checking out that girl’s death,” Lawton said. “I want you to drop it.”

  Loret’s mouth fell open. North drew on his poker face. “That so?”

  “Things between the Empire and Thendara are delicate—”

  “When are they not?” North drawled.

  “—and I don’t need a Terran messing with a purely Darkovan matter just now,” Lawton finished.

  “The killer was probably Terran,” North said.

  “Do you have evidence of that?”

  “I will soon.”

  “Meaning you don’t.” Lawton cracked his knuckles, which told North he was uneasy. “Leave it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m the Legate and I damn well told you to.”

  North’s ire rose. “You don’t have the authority to—”

  “Actually, I do. As the Legate, I’m in charge of everyone and everything at this spaceport. To be blunt, I’m king around here.” Lawton leaned forward, and his nose ballooned into ugly prominence on the screen. “Let me make myself clear, Mr. North. Continue this investigation, and I’ll have you shipped back to Terra in shackles. Got that?”

  The ire tightened North’s jaw. “This is about the research, isn’t it? You’re worried I’m going to turn up something that’ll hurt your pet pollen project.”

  The Legate’s voice turned to icy sandpaper. “Walk away, Mr. North.”

  “Mr. North? What happened to Dave, Dan?”

  “Right now I’m not your good friend Dan. I’m the asshole Legate Lawton, and I’m ordering you to end your investigation.”

  North stared at him for a long time, then finally said, “Fine. I’ll drop it.”

  “Thank you.” Lawton’s tone softened. “Look, Dave, I know how hard it is for you to—”

  “Save it for the Council. Mr. Lawton.” North snapped off the communicator.

  “Zandru!” Loret swore. “I can’t believe the Legate is interfering with this.”

  “Believe it.” North sucked at his teeth. “He’s getting pissed on from a higher pay grade, and rather than push back, he’s pissing on me. The Empire wants that kireseth stuff.”

  Loret shook her head and turned to walk away. North stopped her. “Where are you going?”

  “Downstairs. Without you on the case, I’ll have to hunt the killer on my own.”

  He sighed. “I’m not dropping the case, Loret.”

  “You’re not?” she asked in genuine surprise. “I don’t understand. You received a direct order.”

  North leaned insouciantly against the wall. “That’s partly why I’m not dropping it.”

  “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all,” Loret said with kind exasperation. “You fight for the law, but you break it for justice.”

  “Law and justice aren’t the same thing.”

  “We’re being pulled in two directions,” Loret observed. “A killer or a cure. Law or chaos. Orders or choice.”

  “Darkover or Terra,” North added with a rare smile.

  “Which would you want?” she asked pointedly. “Darkover or Terra?”

  The question caught him off-guard. For a moment he saw himself dressed in a cloak and tunic with a sword at his belt. He snorted. “I don’t have to make that choice.”

  “You will one day,” Loret predicted. “Choices have a way of coming for us all. But what about the other part?”

  “Other part?”

  “You said you’re still hunting the killer in part because Legate Lawson told you not to. What’s the other part? It wouldn’t be that finding the killer might wreck the research into kireseth, would it?”

  “The other part,” North said firmly, “is to catch the slime who seduced and killed a teenage girl. It’ll take time for word to get around that Dan kicked me off the case. Let’s talk to Sammy.”

  They entered the office. Sammy Baxter was a short, round man who looked exactly like the bureaucrat he was. North had actually gone to school with Sammy on Terra and had been surprised at running into him here. With a cop’s instinct, North had cultivated their thin acquaintance into an actual friendship just for moments like this.

  “Sammy!” North said with forced cheer. “You’re here late!”

  Sammy gave him the usual working hard/hardly working response, and North made the rest of the required small talk while Loret waited.

  “So what brings you?” Sammy asked at last.

  North set the blaster on Lenny’s desk. “Someone used this to kill a girl in Thendara. I’m unofficially helping the Comyn look into it. Can you run the registration?”

  “Sure. Two seconds.” Sammy leaned over to read the number inscribed on the blaster’s barrel, then poked at his computer. North held his breath. There was a chance Lawton would have sent a message around already.

  Sammy’s computer pinged. “Got it. The blaster belongs to a guy named Benton Messer.”

  Loret made a small sound, which she turned into a cough. North cut his eyes to her, then back to Sammy. “You got an address?”

  ~o0o~

  North waited until they were in the relative privacy of the stairwell before turning on Loret. “What’s up? I saw your reaction to the name.”

  Loret exhaled hard. “Dr. Benton Messer. He’s the one who’s experimenting on kireseth.”

  “Jesus.” North ran a hand through his ash-blond hair and wondered if it was thinning. One more stupid thing to worry about. “Okay, we gotta get over there. Now. Before he gets wind of this and rabbits.”

  “The Legate must have known,” Loret mused as they hustled out of the building. “It’s why he ordered you off the case. He chose research over justice.”

  “Maybe,” North said. “Or maybe he’s getting orders from someone else who chose research over justice. Let’s talk to Messer.”

  Still in the shadow of the spaceport citadel, they trotted across the port to the ring of efficient homes and apartments. North found them flat and dull as old beer compared to the quirky, hand-built homes in Thendara. Those houses had character. They expressed the person inside. In Thendara, you could tell something about a house’s owner at a glance, by the colors they chose, by the flowers they planted, by the repairs they made or ignored. Even the spindly Castamir house told its own story. These Terran houses were as functional as a stack of shipping containers, and only half as interesting.

  Benton Messer’s building was a set of row houses crushed tightly together to save space and maximize efficiency. Before North could ring the bell, Loret took his elbow again.

  “Maybe you should wait outside,” she said. “I can talk to Dr. Messer alone, and we can tell the Legate that Sammy gave us the information before he kicked you off the case. We can get a Keeper to look at your estres, and—”

  “No.” North worked his jaw. “I’m going to see this through. Lawton can shove it up his ass. It’s about justice.”

  “The fact that justice might also kill the kireseth research has nothing to do with it?” Loret asked.

  “You keep asking that. What are you thinking? Back in Thendara, you wanted to fin
d the killer, too. Now you’re hesitating.”

  Loret set her mouth hard. “Threshold sickness took two of my cousins and one of my brothers. More will die in the decades—centuries—to come. We have a chance to stop that if we let Jaelle’s death go. Jaelle is already dead, and arresting Benton Messer won’t change that.”

  “Another way to look at it is that Benton Messer can screw around with a teenage girl, kill her, and walk away just because he might have a cure for threshold sickness.”

  “Yes,” she said tightly. “I don’t know the answer, North. I truly have no idea what the right thing to do is.”

  “I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you say that.”

  Loret shook her head hard. “Should we drop this or not? The killer is your countryman. North. I’ll...let you decide.”

  North hesitated. Hundreds or thousands of future lives could be saved if he walked away, let Jaelle be a sacrifice on an altar of science. Then his resolve hardened. No one should be allowed to commit murder; no one should be allowed to get away with it. He tapped Messer’s door chime, and Loret’s face fell.

  Benton Messer opened the door. Messer was a balding man of average height. Brown eyes, hooked nose, thin lips, five o’clock shadow. North’s first thought was that he didn’t look like a killer, though few killers did. He was buttoning up his shirt, and North guessed he’d been getting undressed for bed when Loret rang.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. North noted the unease in his voice, but that could have been because of the late hour.

  North gave his and Loret’s names. “If you’re Benton Messer, we need to ask you some questions.”

  “What about?” he asked, still uneasy.

  “It might be better if we had more privacy,” Loret interjected. “May we?”

  Messer grudgingly ushered them into the living room, a plain, uninteresting room, sparsely furnished. North took a stiff seat. This man had seduced a fifteen-year-old and killed her.

  “Can I get you tea or coffee?” Messer offered.

  “Let’s get right to it.” North reached for his pocket. “Do you recognize—”

  “Dad?” A hallway led away from the living room, and a kid was standing at the threshold. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen, not bad-looking, still in his day clothes. “Who’s here?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about, Rick,” Messer said. “Go get ready for bed.”

  North flicked a glance at Rick Messer, then back at Benton Messer. He looked down at the man’s feet. At that moment, North’s communicator buzzed with a text message. It was from the Legate.

  I told you to drop it, the message read. Stay where you are until security arrives.

  North put his poker face back on.

  “This is your son?” Loret asked, not noticing the message.

  “He is,” Messer confirmed shortly. “Rick—bed.”

  Rick slowly turned away and slunk down the hall. North listened hard for the sounds of running feet or maybe even a siren, but he only heard a door shut a little too hard.

  “Now,” Messer said, “what’s this about?”

  “I like your shoes,” North said abruptly. “They’re old, but clean. You’re careful with them. Don’t see that much these days.”

  “Oh?” Messer extended a foot in confusion. “They’re good leather, and expensive. I take care of all my things.”

  “All?” North produced the blaster. “What about this, sir?”

  Messer paled. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “It was found at the site of a murder this afternoon in Thendara,” Loret said. “It’s registered to you.”

  There was a brief pause. Messer glanced at the hallway, then broke. “All right. Yes. It was me.”

  “So you seduced Jaelle Castamir,” North said. “Then you killed her.”

  “I...I...did.” Messer licked his lips. “God help me, I did. We had a fight, and I lost my temper.”

  Loret shot North a look. North ignored her. “Funny thing about this murder,” he said. “The killer shot Jaelle three times. Obliterated her head and chest, even part of her arm.”

  “Yeah. I said I lost my temper.” Messer held out his hands. “You can arrest me now.”

  Loret caught what had just happened, what was wrong with Messer’s confession. She looked toward North, who studiously ignored her.

  “No, Mr. Messer,” North said. “It’s not you.”

  “But it is!” A frantic look came over his face. “It was! I did it! I confessed.”

  North raised his voice. “Come on out, kid.”

  From hallway crept Rick Messer, his face a white mask of terror. “I’m sorry!” he said in a broken voice. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Shut up, Rick!” Messer dashed over to his son and grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t say a word.”

  “You still have mud on your shoes from the alley, Rick,” North said quietly. “And I can see at a glance that your dad’s feet are way smaller than yours. What’s your size, son? Forty-one centimeters?”

  “It’s not true,” Messer blustered. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “You can’t take the blame for him,” Loret said to Messer, also quietly. “As much you wish to.”

  “Don’t hurt my dad!” Rick cried. He was trembling all over. “I did it! It was me.”

  The fight seemed to go out of Messer then, and he slumped into a chair, head down. Rick remained in the hallway entrance. “Tell us what happened,” Loret said.

  “We met in Thendara,” Rick choked out. “Jaelle was fascinated with Terra and our technology. She called me her space man. I was a little older than her, but only a year and a half. Her parents are really strict, and it was hard for us to meet. She invented errands so we could see each other.”

  “How did it happen?” North asked.

  “I...I was showing off. Being her space man. Jaelle wanted to see a real Terran weapon, so I stole Dad’s and met her in the alley.” Tears were running down his face now. “I must have been holding it wrong, because the next thing I knew...”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” Loret said in North’s memory. “We’re looking for something nefarious, when it might be just an innocent mistake.” North’s heart twisted in his chest, and he felt a grim nausea. It was a stupid accident, nothing more. It had already wrecked Jaelle’s life and ripped up her family. Now it was going to destroy this one. How much justice was there to find here?

  “I panicked and ran,” Rick finished in a choked voice. “I didn’t notice I’d dropped the blaster until I got home. But I killed her. It was me.”

  “Zandru.” Loret put a hand to her mouth. “It was an accident.”

  “How do you know for sure?” North asked sharply.

  She tapped the matrix on its chain around her neck. “I can feel it. He’s telling the truth. The guilt is crushing him.”

  “I’m seeing it over and over.” Rick slumped into a chair, his head in his hands. “I loved her, and she’s dead because of me.”

  “What’ll happen now?” Messer asked.

  “By our laws, your son is an adult,” Loret said. “He’ll be tried for murder. Even if the Council lets him live, Jaelle’s brother Dorn will demand the right to hunt Rick until one of them kills the other.”

  Rick went pale. Messer clenched his fists. “No! We’ll leave the planet. Go somewhere else. Hang the pollen research.”

  “If the Comyn Council demands blood, the Legate won’t let you leave,” Loret said. “The Empire’s treaty with Darkover—”

  Someone pounded at the door. Rick jumped, and Benton bolted to his feet. “They’re going to arrest Rick!” he said. “Please! It was an accident. Tell them it was me!”

  “I get it,” North said. “A father will sacrifice anything for his son.”

  More pounding.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.” Rick was in tears now. “I’m so sorry. I’d do anything to—”

  “Quiet,” North said, and handed the blaster to a confused Loret. Th
en he opened the door. Four black-clad TE security officers boiled into the room. Loret stuffed the pistol into her dress pocket. Rick shrank away.

  “David North,” said one of the officers, “you’re under arrest for violating a directive from the Legate,” said one of the officers.

  In seconds, North was cuffed and hustled out the door, leaving the others behind.

  ~o0o~

  Justice at the spaceport was swift. No judge, no jury. Just Lawton in his office with Loret pale behind him.

  “I told you to drop it, and you didn’t,” Lawton said. North didn’t bother asking how Lawton had found out so fast. There were any number of ways. “Do you have anything to say before sentencing?”

  North glanced at Loret. Her mouth was set hard. The choices pulled North in opposite and unpleasant directions. Law against justice. Fair against unfair. Darkover against Terra. The words I know who the killer is formed in his throat. Then he looked at Loret again, her face filled with hope and sorrow.

  North kept his expression flat. Lawton would almost certainly have learned from Sammy that Benton Messer owned the blaster that had killed Jaelle, and Lawton would almost certainly have come to the understandable, but false, conclusion that his little research scientist was the killer. If this “fact” got out, the Comyn would certainly call for Benton’s head, and Dorn would file his Declaration. No more research. No more drugs.

  North could also tell Lawton that the killer was actually Benton’s son, Rick. North couldn’t see Benton Messer wanting to stay on Darkover after his son was executed—or on the receiving end of a Declaration. Either way, the project would be over.

  And a whole mess of Darkovan teenagers would die of threshold sickness.

  Jaelle had died in an accident. There was no justice to be had in an accident, and trying Rick Messer for murder would condemn some of Loret’s future family to death.

  And Loret would be hurt. His best friend. She would undergo fear and pain every bit as bad as he had with the kireseth. His gut and his heart tightened. That was really the center of it all, the reason he did anything. Unexpected emotion swelled in him and thickened his throat. Loret had saved him from Ferrick Alton, had found a way for him to stay on Darkover, had given him a family. She had helped him. She had spoken for him. And now he had to help her, even if it meant losing her.