by Blaze Ward
“Seatbelts?” Gareth prompted.
“Seriously?” Xiomber glanced up, but he huffed and pulled the straps on. A moment later, Morty did the same. “Morty, we gotta talk about this guy.”
“Dead or Jail, Xiomber,” Morty reminded his brother. “Those are your other choices.”
Gareth discovered that a Yuudixtl could roll his eyes, just like a human. With the same level of apparent teen angst and ennui.
Some things were apparently universal.
The car leapt into the air, driving Gareth back into the seat and reminding him why the seatbelts were such a good idea. A moment later, the car banked hard and shot off horizontally. Gareth probably would have ended up on top of Xiomber if he hadn’t been already strapped down.
Xiomber looked up and came to the same conclusion. The grumbling under his breath ceased.
Outside, an exotic wonderland of a magical city swept by. Towers and sky bridges and flying cars.
And an angel.
Gareth found himself with his nose pressed against the glass of the window and his hands up, like a six-year-old on a long drive.
Maybe an angel. Human-looking, with wings that looked twenty feet wide as it flapped, holding a pocketcomm in his hands and watching something.
“Wazzat?” he almost drooled on the glass.
Morty leaned over and peeked.
“Elohynn,” he said. “One of the Accord Species. Empaths. Damned good counselors. Right bastards as bankers, though.
“How many species are there?” Gareth asked, watching the man fade into the distance as the taxi sped away and then slipped around a corner.
“Seventeen,” Xiomber asked. “Three others are candidates, in another few thousand years. Humans are not, however. Too freaking dangerous.”
“You keep saying that,” Gareth turned to the scientist. “Why?”
“The Accord of Souls didn’t have a word for murder, Gareth,” he replied flatly. “We had to use yours. Same goes for all the different levels of killing you crazy barbarians to do each other. Some people might pass out, just hearing the word xenocide. If the Chaa were still around, they might have either fixed you, like they did the other uplifted species, or just wiped you out. The betting’s about even right now, but it’s going to tilt pretty heavy if the galaxy ever finds out about Maximus and his gang.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Gareth asked. “Don’t human’s stand out?”
“We were successful in turning him into a Vanir,” Morty said. “Those Left Behind are what’s left of the Chaa. When they evolved beyond material forms, only a few really wanted to go, so they took it upon themselves to become gods. Transformed the rest of their kin into the current form. But to keep them from getting lonely, so the story goes, they uplifted all the other species at the same time.”
“And inhibited them from violence?” Gareth asked, making sure he had understood all the previous explanations.
“For the most part,” Xiomber chimed in. “We’re all bound up into a single, psionic entity. That’s what the Accord of Souls is all about. Empathy. But some folks feel it more and some less. Those individuals who are at the low end tend to become criminals, like us.”
“And we’re completely outside of your empathy, so Cinnra wanted a human as an assassin,” Gareth completed the thought. “Except I’m a police officer. A Field Agent with Earth Force Sky Patrol. The good guys. Shouldn’t we be contacting a Vanir Constable to help them?”
“Pal, if they could stop Maximus Sarzynski, we already would have turned ourselves in and turned state’s evidence. They got no chance in hell of stopping that guy. That’s why we needed you.”
“So now I’m a hunted criminal,” Gareth observed. “And I’m supposed to help two other wanted criminals stop an entire gang of wanted criminals from taking over the galaxy?”
“You got it, pal,” Xiomber cracked wise, leaning back into his seat.
“Who the hell do you think I am?” Gareth rasped.
“A hero,” Morty replied in deadly seriousness.
Gareth slammed his mouth shut when it fell open. Scowled hard, but the Yuudixtl scientist was immune to his look.
And the little lizardman was right. That was all he had ever wanted to be.
A hero.
The Arsenal
Professor Loughty made sure everyone else stayed at the door, including his daughter Philippa. Given his druthers, she wouldn’t even be here, but his headstrong, only, daughter was not one to be easily thwarted. Especially not when her beau was the one that had disappeared.
Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, already thought of Gareth as his son-in-law. The young man had pressed his case early on, and then spent several years reminding Royston and Philippa of his love. But nobody and nothing could crack that man’s hard head that he had to be promoted to the rank of Field Agent before he would formally propose. And Royston had tried every trick he could think of over the years.
Worse, he had known that Gareth was all prepared to finally propose, but Royston couldn’t tell Pip that. She was already on the verge of tears, standing in the doorway with a fist to her mouth, the short, red shirt and tunic of a Sky Patrol Auxiliary reminding everyone how tough she was.
Royston smiled at his daughter as his portable scanner went to work. She had her mother’s red hair and green eyes, rather than his own darker complexion, but Pippa had gotten her height from him, as well as his bones, in comparison to his dear-departed Elizabeth.
However, Pip had had gotten Elizabeth’s strength, and her force of will, which served the young woman well, both in dealing with Gareth and her father, and also with society in general. The world frowned on a woman of science, such as Pip had become. She had earned her university degree, but no college would admit her to higher studies, so he had brought her with him to Earth Force’s Headquarters in orbit where she had met and fallen madly in love with a rising agent.
Who had just vanished.
Royston would have considered the entire thing to be an elaborate practical joke, even after listening to the audio tapes of Gareth’s last call, except that the portable scanner kept returning bizarre radiation signatures, no matter how he tuned it. Nothing dangerous or he would have never allowed his only daughter in here regardless of her impending engagement to the man in question.
No, just strange. Nothing he could explain, and he was Earth Force’s preeminent expert on stellar radiation.
Something must have shown on his face.
“What is it, Father?” Pippa asked in a serious voice that still could have filled opera halls with its musicality, had she been of the mind.
“Sir?” Sector Marshal Alvin Siddall asked from over Pippa’s shoulder from the hallway.
Royston found it amusing that the commander of The Arsenal itself was so deferential, but the situation was well outside anything Earth Force had ever encountered. That was why he had called in Royston. Plus, it had been Gareth. Everyone knew about that connection.
“There is something here,” Royston admitted. “I cannot explain it. However, I can see it, and thus, it must exist and be explainable. Seal the room off for now. I will need to return with better equipment.”
“Where is he?” Siddall asked. “Where could Gareth go?”
Royston drew himself up fully. Like the Sector Marshal, he was over six feet tall. Unlike the other man, Royston was only a little pudgy around middle and not turning fat like the man who spent too much time behind a desk.
“I don’t know, Marshal Siddell, Pippa,” he acknowledged them both, especially the depths of fear in Philippa’s eyes. “Nothing I know can explain a man just vanishing like that. But I will find out.”
Disguised
Gareth looked around the strange office where the flying taxi had deposited them. The room was large and airy, but mostly empty, except for a few racks of clothes near one gray wall and a couple of triple mirrors standing in the back corner on his right, plus a pair of blue couches in the middle.
&nb
sp; Still, Morty seemed at home, and Xiomber as well. Both took seats on the one couch and gestured Gareth to the other.
Outside, the taxi dove out of sight and the balcony door closed, sealing them off from the cotton-candy skies of Orgoth Vortai.
“Welcome,” a disembodied, male voice filled the oversized room. “What’ll it be, Morty, Xiomber? You two finally ready to dress better?”
Gareth had to agree with the voice. Both lizardmen were wearing something rough equivalent to common dungarees in blue, with pull-over T-shirts, Xiomber’s in black and Morty’s red with the strange design on the front. Gareth felt desperately overdressed in his Field Agent uniform. The two lizardmen dressed like a couple of machinists out for a beer after work.
“Nothing so grand, Jorghen,” Morty called back. “And I sure as hell wouldn’t have you do my wardrobe. Need to make the Vanir here look less memorable. His name’s Gareth.”
Vanir? Oh, right. Not human. Short Vanir. That’s the cover story. I can do that.
“Gareth?” the man asked. “Stand up and walk to the mirrors on your right.”
Gareth did, nervous, but not too much. Socially awkward, maybe.
His image came back in triplicate from the nine-foot-tall mirrors. A light flashed in his eyes, and the image in the reflection was suddenly wearing black pants, baggy enough that they covered his boots instead of tucking in. The Sky Patrol tunic was gone, as well. In its place, a plain, white t-shirt, underneath a button-down, button-up shirt in Sky Patrol plaid colors. A jacket appeared over top of that after a moment, blue denim like the Yuudixtl pair’s pants, with bronzed buttons and a small SP button stuck through the flap of the left breast pocket.
Hey, that wasn’t bad looking.
“Why not just take him to a department store?” Jorghen’s disembodied voice came from all around a moment later.
“He gets self-conscious, shopping in the kids section, Jorghen,” Morty fired back. “You, of all people, should appreciate that.”
Jorghen had a crude laugh. Ugly. The bully at school picking on the other kids, at least until Gareth put a stop to it. But discretion was still called for here.
“You like that, Gareth?” Jorghen asked. “The fashion’s a little offbeat, but that’s what your subconscious wanted.”
Gareth turned a nervous eye to the two Yuudixtl scientists. Morty nodded. So did Xiomber.
“Yeah,” Gareth admitted.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had dressed as a civilian. It had to be before he went off to school, ten years ago. The guy in the mirror looked like a cowboy, in the good ways. Like maybe if he added a hat, he could star in Westerns. Add a seven point star and he could be the town marshal.
“Okay,” Jorghen said. “Take me about thirty minutes to kick it out. You leaving the other outfit here?”
Gareth panicked. Give up my Field Agent uniform? Never.
“Uhm, no,” he settled for, rather than unleashing a blistering stream of the sorts of profanities he had first learned from the enlisted Chief on his first command.
“Put it on my account, Jorghen,” Morty said. “And spin him up a set of formal robes, as well. Something High Street, but without all the flash of an investment banker. Low profile, as it were. We need to be able to eat at a fancy restaurant with a dress code.”
“Add about ten minutes then,” the man said. “Coming right up. Have some tea while you wait.”
Gareth thought about it, but he really needed to pee. More tea would make it worse.
Instead, he leaned close the two criminals.
“Uhm, I need to use the facilities,” he whispered.
“Through there,” Xiomber pointed.
“But…”
“Erect bipeds, Gareth,” Morty said. “Same design. Find the target at your height. Simple as that.”
Gareth blushed and nodded.
When he got up this morning, peeing in an alien toilet was not anywhere on his list of things to consider. Still, he was Sky Patrol. He could do this.
The door opened easy enough. A counter with a mirror and a sink on the left. Stalls and urinals on the right. A red light came on as he stepped close to one.
Motion sensor.
Still, he managed, even with all the extra publicity. It flushed itself as he backed up and looked around.
There were no handles on the faucet.
None.
He got lucky and it went off when he passed a hand underneath.
Huh.
That was smart.
Out in the main room, the boys were sipping more tea. Gareth passed, for now. There was enough caffeine in his system for one day. And it was close to midnight, back on Earth. He would need to sleep soon.
In fact, the couch looked comfortable. He sat down, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
“Wake up, sleepy head,” a merry voice intruded. “You need to change and put your stuff in the bag.”
Gareth climbed out of his bizarre dreams, into his bizarre reality. Hopefully this one was better.
He really didn’t want to see a tentacled cow again. Like, ever.
The outfit from the mirror was hanging on hooks next to the mirror itself. Quickly, Gareth transformed himself into an Undercover Agent working a deep mission. A cowboy, even. The boots were wrong, but hopefully none of the locals would notice.
The Field Agent uniform got folded up exactly to regulation and put away, atop a piece of fabric that appeared to be a thick, soft black silk, shot through with red and cream glitter. It was the most beautiful piece of fabric he had ever seen.
“Thank you, sir,” Secret Agent Gareth said to the room as he picked up and bag and slung the strap over his shoulder.
“Any time, Gareth,” Jorghen said. “It’s interesting, watching the machines locate the clothes you want to wear, as opposed to what society would inflict on a short Vanir.”
“Let’s go,” Morty groused. “Time’s wasting.”
Out the door and onto the balcony. Another taxi settled in and opened for them. Gareth followed the little men into the cabin and leaned back, seatbelts in place.
“Now what?” he asked sleepily.
“Now we’ve got a little bit of a jaunt,” Morty said. “Why don’t you sleep for now, and we’ll wake you up when we get there.”
“I could never…” Gareth began to say as the day caught up with him and darkness descended.
Constable Baker
“You have got to be kidding,” Constable Eveth Baker rasped into the telephonetics handset as she furiously wrote notes into an old-fashioned, leather-bound notebook with an even older-fashioned pencil.
The written word calmed her. Words on a page, rather than a screen, somehow rearranged themselves in her imagination to create new links between clues that she didn’t think about consciously.
“Fine,” she continued. “But you better be right, or the weekly stipend we pay you for these sorts of leads just might dry up.”
Eveth slammed the handset down angrily and looked around the police bullpen where she was working. The space always felt dingy in her memory, when she wasn’t here, but the room itself was clean and spacious. Well designed for calming psychology. It was just her that wanted it to reflect some of the squalor of the job.
Across the shared desk, her partner looked up from his reading with studied casualness. Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray was a by-the-book cop. The old man of the precinct they had paired her with in an effort to tone down some of the crazier things Eveth knew she did when pursuing the criminal element.
He was tall for a Vanir male, more than seven foot, two inches in stocking feet, but skinny. The man weighed barely three hundred pounds. Grodray was an intellectual cop. Divorced with two kids in school. Forty One Standard Cycles old, the light brown hair on his temples was turning gray now, and while he might have lost a step in a footrace, the Senior Constable had gotten that much better at outsmarting the bad guys so he never had to chase them down.
And he had Eveth, if it ca
me to that. She liked pursuing criminals who thought they could get away.
Even his uniform tunic somehow conveyed the image of a staid academic, well-tailored to his overall shape with the bright, cerulean-blue ring of the Accord of Souls over his heart. Hers were always wrinkly and dusty, but that was the time she spent crawling under desks and into dark corners looking for clues.
“Something interesting?” her partner asked in a quiet, droll voice.
The room was mostly empty this afternoon. Quiet, save for a drunk snoring loudly in a cage in one corner of the office. Everyone else was out doing things, so they had almost the entire floor almost to themselves right now.
“One of my secret informers,” Eveth shrugged and took a calming breath. Getting emotional with Grodray never did any good. The man was deduction, boiled down and decanted into a glass bottle. Emotions just washed off his narrow, sturdy chest like rain. “Usually, the man’s reliable. This time, he claims that they heard rumors of a human, of all things, running loose on Orgoth Vortai, right here in Punarvasu.”
“Again?” Grodray asked. “Haven’t we had enough of these wild goose chases?”
“Get this,” Eveth said. “Completely different description, this time. A pretty detailed one, at that.”
She relayed everything off of her notepad slowly, letting her partner digest the words. He was all about processing things like a prospector seeking gold flakes. Swirl the water slowly, let it settle, add some more water, swirl some more. Eventually, the good stuff would settle to the bottom of the pan, once all the dross was removed.
Something caught her eye as she repeated it. Intuition snuck in and bit her on the ear, like it did.
“What?” Grodray asked as he realized she had stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
