Space Rodeo

by Jenny Schwartz

  Max flicked a glance at Harry, careful to hide any sign of apology that he’d be discussing him as a soulless object.

  Not that Carl was in any state to notice a tiny tell. The Covert Ops agent had forgotten Harry’s presence, and jolted at the reminder in Max’s next suggestion.

  “The mech can duplicate the Lonesome’s signal. We could send it.”

  Carl made a point of keeping his gaze centered on Max. The big bad cyborg wasn’t scared of a mech, that would be embarrassing. “It’s a substantial risk, depending on how carefully the assassin has things set up to track you. And you need two independent groups capable of taking the initiative. Once Sargus’s team captures Bernard Chen and deactivates his remote control of the asteroid worms, someone still has to disable their three day countdown.”

  “The mech can trigger the override switches on the worms,” Lon said.

  “In a fight, I imagine the mech is invaluable,” Carl said earnestly. “But this isn’t a straight up fight. We have to be in reach of the Deadstar Diner as soon as Sargus signals that Chen is contained.”

  Max sighed. “So, trust Sargus?”

  Carl nodded, once. “This is more than an attempt to murder you, Max. It’s a counter-terrorism operation. You need to involve Sargus. We can never control every variable, but refusing to involve allies…that’s stupid.”

  Lon gave a crack of laughter.

  “All right.” Max accepted the inevitable. “If you have the code for the twenty four hours comms lockdown, transmit it to the Anubis, and we’ll get the mission underway.”

  Chapter 12

  “Target secured. Remote detonation capability destroyed. Over to you.”

  The Anubis’s report at ten hours before the deadline for Max to present himself at the fake cache site was his and Carl’s signal to go, go, go.

  Harry was already in position on the asteroid. Lon forwarded the news to him, and Harry ripped out the trigger attached to the remote detonation switch. As he said, it was better to be safe than sorry. Then he headed for the nearest of the three asteroid worms, having already identified their locations.

  Lacking any understanding of who Harry was, Carl wasn’t happy about leaving responsibility for disabling the explosives to a mech. However, he and Max had a different job.

  Two days ago, Lon had asked a very important question. “If you were an evil person obliterating over eighty spaceships and a refueling station, why wouldn’t you take the opportunity to dispose of other problems?” As a result of his suspicions, he’d analyzed the data on the ships at the Deadstar Diner, and marked three for physical investigation.

  Carl had recommended that Max delay the investigation; that they launch the mech in a shuttle to deactivate the asteroid worms, and turn the Lonesome around and head back into space. Just in case.

  The cut of disappointment Max felt at Carl’s suggestion to run rather than stand fast in solidarity with the people they hoped to save, surprised him. When had he come to respect the cyborg? Forcing aside his disappointment, Max had to admit that, viewed objectively, Carl’s suggestion was a rational one. As sheriff, Max had a duty to keep a deputy out of undue danger.

  He managed a neutral voice. “Lon, do you mind retreating to a safe distance? I’ll take the shuttle—”

  “Never mind,” Carl cut in, and the man grinned. “As your bodyguard, where you go, I go.”

  “Not if…” Mentally, Max replayed the conversation and realized he’d been had. “You—”

  Carl flung his arms up in surrender. “Covert Ops agent. I had to know. So how does your mech operate? Autonomous mechs have limits. Trusting one to disable three asteroid worms would typically be a huge risk.”

  By manipulating Max into offering to have Lon pilot the Lonesome with Carl aboard out of the danger zone, the distance involved had revealed that Lon wasn’t remotely riding the mech body. Fractional seconds of delay were too much to risk in bomb disposal.

  “None of your business,” Max said rudely.

  Lon intervened. “I wouldn’t have gone, anyway.” Which added a smidgen of doubt to Carl’s smug smirk. “However, I will add that there is a Customs cutter on patrol nearby and capable of reaching the diner in four days.” Customs were trained to board suspect vessels.

  “Four days is too long to wait.” Plus, rightly or wrongly, Max believed that he and Carl were the better choice for boarding vessels with unknown contents and defenses. Bernard Chen wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of arranging the obliteration of anything normal like drug shipments (such as Customs searched for), but he could be disposing of more aggressive evidence of crime.

  Weapons, poison, …bodies.

  Standing in a trampship’s passage, one devoid of gravity and atmosphere, Carl looked over Max’s shoulder and swore.

  The first spaceship Lon had marked as a target had bodies floating in the rear cargo hold. The slight displacement of air from the hatch opening was enough to set them moving. Not major movements, just a hint, and that was almost worse. It was eerie.

  “He stored them as far away from him as he could,” Max said.

  Carl cursed, again. “He just shoved them in. Didn’t tie them down.” The lack of respect for the dead angered him.

  The “he” they referred to was the spaceship’s sole former occupant, its captain. When they’d forced entry into the ship, they’d gone first to the bridge. It was at the front of the trampship. There they’d found the decapitated saurelle pilot, the lizardman’s tail still curled in fear. Dead pilots told no tales, and Bernard Chen hadn’t taken any chances. Clearing their way along the spine of the trampship, there’d been no sign that any other personnel had been onboard.

  “A damn ghost ship,” Carl said.

  He was wrong.

  “Not a ghost ship,” Max said. “A hearse. The Navy’s activity around the Space Rodeo and Lon’s predictive algorithms must have made it hard for corpse dumpers to reach a GD.” Small, stable black holes were labelled GDs—garbage disposals. There was a superstition among spacers that a body in space could come back to haunt you. A criminal subnetwork ran a system of disposing of corpses in GDs. Nothing, not even spirits, could escape a black hole. “It seems even assassins fear being haunted by those they’ve killed. Obliteration via explosion must have struck Chen as being as effective as a black hole.”

  Carl was pragmatic. “It would prevent their identification just as effectively.”

  It would. Which meant that the corpses in the cargo hold had value beyond giving closure to family or friends who might be missing them. The bodies could reveal more about the Cadre and the nature of the jobs the assassin group took.

  Max retreated into the passage and closed the hatch. “We’ll seal the ship, and call in Galactic Justice. This needs a forensic team.”

  Lon’s voice came over their helmet comms. “In better news, the asteroid worms have been disabled, and they and the retina scan ID box are on their way to the Lonesome.” Which meant that the Deadstar Diner and surrounds were truly safe.

  Thank the stars for Harry.

  “Good news.” Relief flooded Max’s body and, despite being on an active mission, he slumped in his combat suit. He straightened immediately. “Thanks, Lon.”

  The other two ships proved to be normal, or as normal as low-level smuggling vessels could be. Carl cited their captains for infractions of Saloon Sector consumable items duties law, while Max flagged them for ongoing scrutiny by Customs.

  Job complete, the diner was right there, promising food and company. Max wasn’t tempted in the slightest. On the Lonesome, reports and the request for a forensic team would require his attention, even if Lon did most of the work—which he would. AIs mightn’t be organic sentients, but they still felt stress and accumulated nervous energy that had to be burned off by doing something, anything.

  “Grab a meal,” Max suggested to Carl, with a nod in the direction of the diner’s door.

  The cyborg hesitated. “You’re going to comm Thelma?”
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br />   “Yes.” It was the first thing Max intended to do when they reached the Lonesome. Hearing her voice, seeing her onscreen, and reassuring her that he was alive had priority over everything else.

  The helmet of his combat suit hid Carl’s face. Unlike Max, he hadn’t retracted it as they walked along the dock between ships. He spoke through an external speaker. “Yeah, I’ll stay in my quarters. I’m not up to socializing.” Perhaps in his mind he saw the corpses floating in the hold, over twenty of them. Or perhaps it was the adrenaline crash after they’d survived the three day countdown.

  Or perhaps it was simply that Max had someone who cared if he lived or died, and Carl didn’t.

  Lon seemed to sympathize, and offered comfort food. “The diner does takeout. Burger, fries and an ice cream sundae?”

  Max gave Carl a sheriff to deputy command. “Order it for an hour from now and I’ll join you.” Without waiting for a response, he crouched and extended a gloved hand to the two fluffy, round urself children who watched them with big eyes. Community engagement was part of an Interstellar Sheriff’s job, and given how scary combat suits looked to civilians, Max recognized that interaction with children was the best method of reassuring everyone that all was well. “High five?” He held up a hand.

  One kid, then the other, slapped at his palm before they ran giggling back to their family group: four generations of urselves straggling along the spacedock tunnel chatting with each other.

  “Thelma will want children,” Carl said. It was a personal comment.

  Max smiled. “I’ve no problem with that.”

  Reynard whined. “I could erase Agnes Kanu from existence. Manipulate the data here and there, like I did when I abducted you from the Zephyr spacedock, though on a larger scale.”

  “Absolutely not. I refuse to sink to her level. Nor are we judge and jury. We’re going to give her enough rope to hang herself.”

  “And you don’t think that’s even crueler?”

  Thelma looked up from the desk screen. She widened her eyes exaggeratedly, the picture of mock innocence. “Is it?”

  Reynard groaned. “You’re a vengeful woman.”

  All humor vanished from her face and voice. “I’m a woman who intends to send a clear message that no one messes with Max.”

  In Thelma’s mind, there was no doubt about Agnes Kanu’s guilt, and given that Reynard had promised to do something he really, really didn’t want to on the basis of the case Thelma had laid out against the woman, Agnes Kanu’s guilt was pretty much inarguable.

  “It’s Chief Kanu,” Thelma had said to Reynard. “The person choreographing the attack on Max. It’s all her. The hit, but also the destruction of his reputation.”

  “Agnes Kanu, the Chief of the Interstellar Sheriff Service for the Reclamation and Saloon Sectors?” Reynard clarified. Usually, a department only covered a single sector, but with the Saloon Sector being so small in terms of population, it had been added to the Reclamation Sector.

  Thelma swiped at the screen. “She’s a new political appointment, yet to reach her first year anniversary in the job.”

  Reynard propped a tentacle on the desk to study the screen. It was an affectation, a mimicry of organic embodied sentience, that he’d copied from Harry. The AI could just as readily have taken in the data direct from what Thelma called up.

  “Chief Kanu served as a lawyer, and then, as a judge in the core worlds.” Thelma was still skimming through layers of data. With Reynard and Thelma on comms lockdown, they couldn’t actively search for background on Chief Kanu, but they could study information on her that was already available in Reynard’s data map database, the one he’d copied from Lon, added to and retained after he’d handed back to Lon responsibility for Interstellar Sheriff trouble-nipping duties. “Theoretically, Chief of the Interstellar Sheriff Service is a career advancement, but in practice, taking up a position out here sidelined her. So why did she agree?”

  “Quality of life, personal issues, a desire to serve?”

  Thelma snorted. “Lon captured an image of Carl’s diagram linking players in the Reclamation Sector. All the links to her are dotted cobwebs, barely there. I know she’s new to the sector, here for less than a year, and maybe Carl hasn’t given her much attention in his intelligence gathering, but that’s too clean. I would have more links than that and stronger ties. She has deliberately isolated herself—or concealed her connections. She’s here for a reason.”

  Doubt wove through Reynard’s voice. “And you think it involves Max?”

  “People discount the Interstellar Sheriff service. In the core worlds, it’s mainly involved in supporting emergency response teams, paramedics and ship containment specialists, as well as dealing with the petty bureaucracy aspect of policing, such as people contesting automated speeding tickets. In the out-worlds, like the Rock Sector where I grew up, Interstellar Sheriff deputies spend most of their time dealing with mining claim jumpers, safety violations of load traffic, and the like. Max does some of that, though not as much as Sheriff Cayor. Life on the frontier, and even in the Reclamation Sector, is different.”

  She paused. “The crucial element with Chief Kanu is that she’s found a position of relative importance that people in Galactic Justice, which technically the Interstellar Sheriff Service belongs to, are accustomed to overlooking. The Navy is the same. If they operate out here long enough they change their mind. They see the value of sheriffs firsthand. Customs officers serve long stints here and they respect Max. The Navy respects him because he’s one of their own…no such thing as a former Star Marine. But from the core world, I’d put money that no one looks closely at the Chief of the Interstellar Sheriff Service for the Reclamation and Saloon Sectors. If she’s careful, Agnes Kanu can do what she wants.”

  “I accept your assessment,” Reynard said. “I believe I understand your concern. Max respects the chain of command. He will follow Chief Kanu’s orders, as he did when she ordered him to accept agent Carl Jafarov as his deputy.”

  Thelma grimaced. “Actually, she had to twist Max’s arm on that point, but only because he was trying to protect the fact of Lon’s presence on the Lonesome…which brings up an important point. Even Covert Ops wasn’t convinced that Lon was on the Lonesome. If Lon had them fooled, then I bet Chief Kanu never imagined that a witness as impeccable as an AI could be on the Lonesome with Max.”

  “But even without Lon, you could have spoken for Max,” Reynard objected.

  She shook her head. “I’m not important. I haven’t even met his family in person. The Space Rodeo scuttled those plans.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no.” She waved her hands in a crisscrossing gesture of dismissal. “That wasn’t a blast at you and your comet helices. My point is that Chief Kanu has perfectly positioned herself so that no one closely monitors her orders to those under her command. Potentially, she can even lie and conceal her true orders. At the same time, she controls the flow of information up from below, from the sheriffs. So she can order Max around, but she can also define the story told about him—especially if he’s dead and can’t contest her version of events.”

  “What story do you think she would have told?”

  “Max wasn’t meant to discover the Xlokk base. Imagine what would have happened if the mech-mods with their mutilated and raving bunyaphi had been loaded onto the Ripping Claw, carried through the wormhole, and unleashed on an Ates or Toprak clan city?”

  Reynard’s tentacles retracted tight against his body in reflex horror.

  Thelma was relentless. She had to be. What Agnes Kanu had conceived of was the stuff of nightmares and would have spawned yet more. Fear bred more fear, and an escalation of tension spiraled into an arms race, that too often, exploded into war. “The Su clan would have been guilty of war crimes. The media would have been all over it. Illegal mech-mods. Thousands of lives lost. And then, the emergence of the fact that the mech-mods bore Hwicce labels. Chief Kanu and whoever is behind her wove their sto
ry to position Max at the heart of it. That was why the staging base was at Xlokk, in Max’s territory.”

  “Logistically,” Reynard began a counterargument. He shut up when Thelma snapped her hand down.

  “The strange thing is, that if I’m right, Agnes Kanu was setting Max up to be a dead hero.” She nearly choked on that word. Dead. “Not a villain. The Vici movement believes that society is wasting resources supporting its weaker members. That the strong have a duty to claim more and do more, and not squander their lives in dragging along the feeble—their words. Chief Kanu would have turned upside down the story of Max’s life, his commitment to justice, to serve and protect, and made it into a man issuing a wakeup call. A Star Marine’s call to arms.”

  Reynard objected. “You have taken a leap of reasoning that I do not comprehend.”

  His rebuke failed to faze Thelma. “Chief Kanu ordered the hit on Max. She intended to make his legacy that of a man who saw society weakened by ‘pandering to the feeble’, and so, employed a shocking method to alert people to the danger. The mech-mods were meant to demonstrate that the Federation cannot protect its citizens. That it has weakened itself by playing at peace negotiations.”

  “The Senate Worlds Development Committee.” Reynard followed her argument closely. “You are connecting disparate data points via the human intuition Lon speaks of. You could be wrong.”

  She had a single thread of proof. “I’ll admit that I’m guessing at the detail of Chief Kanu’s scheme. But that she wanted to hang this all on Max is something she admitted in her own words. The truth slips out, Reynard. Chief Kanu’s words wouldn’t convict her in a court of law, but after Max and I stood witness to the bunyaphi viewing the mech-mods, the Navy commander quoted Chief Kanu’s refusal to be there. The Navy invited her, but Chief Kanu said, ‘The mech-mods are all Sheriff Smith’s’.”

  Thelma’s hands shook and she curled them into fists. “Even then, after her scheme was falling apart with the Xlokk base discovered and news of Lon’s presence on the Lonesome coming out, Chief Kanu couldn’t let go of the story she’d spent so much effort in crafting. ‘The mech-mods are all Sheriff Smith’s.’ She wanted him to wear the responsibility for them.