by Blaze Ward
“The alternative is jail?” Talyarkinash asked.
“The alternative is Maximus finds out you’ve been helping me and the brothers, and kills you,” Gareth said simply. “I’m trying to prevent that right now. Later, I need your help to save the galaxy.”
The terror was still there in those ocean-deep eyes, like icebergs floating on a storm-tossed, angry sea. But something else appeared.
He might have been bold enough to call it hope, if he wanted to push his luck.
“You’ll protect me?” she asked quietly.
“I promise,” Gareth stated.
Before he could react, she lunged forward and kissed him, one arm around his neck and whiskers tickling his face. She felt ice-cold initially, but warmed in the second he held her.
“Go,” she ordered, tossing her bag further down the alley and stretching herself out, just as he had explained it.
Gareth loped over to one of the dumpsters and crawled into a shadow cast by the delivery truck, face all a-blush. Now all he had to do was hope that the driver was too busy having a smoke to come out in the next thirty seconds.
“Come back here, you bastard,” Talyarkinash suddenly yelled at the top of her lungs. “You can’t leave me.”
Gareth nearly surged out of his hiding place, then stopped himself. He peeked anyway.
Talyarkinash honestly looked like she was watching him run away from where she had fallen, as a cowardly Gareth had panicked and fled.
Like he had done the absolutely unthinkable and left one of his own behind.
But humans had no reputation for honor here, either.
“Gareth,” Talyarkinash yelled. “Come back.”
“Freeze,” an angry woman called.
Gareth recognized the voice from the building.
Constable Baker, right on time. Hopefully alone.
Talyarkinash stopped yelling. Glanced back and moaned wretchedly.
“Oh, you bastards,” she cried. “All of you.”
“Where is he?” Baker yelled.
From the volume, she had entered the mouth of the alley. Probably in a two-handed stance, one hand cupped under the other to steady her pistol, since she didn’t have the walkie-talkie with her. Most likely turned thinways to her target to reduce her silhouette.
Gareth held his breath.
“Where is he?” Baker repeated.
“Bastard abandoned me,” Talyarkinash replied angrily. “I fell down and couldn’t get up, so he just ran.”
“Show me your hands,” Baker ordered.
Gareth couldn’t see the Constable when he slid an eye even with the edge of the dumpster, but Talyarkinash was in clear sight, ignoring him as she faked a bum leg and held her hands up.
“Roll over on your stomach, hands behind your back,” Baker called.
She had to be walking slowly closer, as the echoes softened. Gareth might have done the same thing, approaching carefully and by the book.
Knowing who he was dealing with, Gareth might also have just shot the criminal on the ground with the stunner, to be sure. Talyarkinash had a dangerous edge underneath that scholarly brain.
But the Nari woman complied. Laid out flat with her hands behind her.
Trusting Gareth to save her life.
The surge of pride made him feel ten feet tall.
Shadows on the pavement as Baker got close. Gareth could track her now, with enough sun behind her.
He would be reaching for handcuffs about now. Moving towards his weak hand side so he could hold the pistol while snapping a cuff over a wrist.
Baker was left-handed, she would be shifting towards him, and turning her back on his hiding place.
He hoped.
There.
Now or never.
Gareth rose on silent feet and exploded out of his hiding place.
He had to pretend Baker wasn’t a girl as he was about to tackle her. All of his soul cried out in shame at hitting a woman, and doing it from behind as well.
Her being half a head taller, and almost as broad in the shoulders helped. He was back on the muddy turf, bringing down a burly tight-end short of the goal line to save the play, the game, and the season.
Slamming into her felt like that tackle had been. Damn, she must outweigh him, too.
The woman must have had a sixth sense. Something warned her and she glanced back at the last instant, tangled up with gun, cuffs, prisoner, and rampaging human.
They ended up in a jumble of bodies, but Gareth used all his training to force his way on top. She was muscled like a tight-end as well, so he didn’t have time to wrestle with her. Not if he wanted to survive.
God only knows what kinds of martial arts Accord cops were taught.
Instead, he broke every rule his mother had hammered into him as a child. He had hit a girl. Knocked her down and pinned her to ground.
Gareth punched her in the middle of the forehead, as hard as he could. It was like trying to open a coconut with a fist.
But it worked. Her head bounced off the hard pavement almost as hard as it had his fist and her eyes lost focus.
He punched her a second time, wailing inside at the thought of his father finding out when he came home. Another bounce.
This time she stayed down.
He checked her eyes. They were half rolled back, unfocused, but symmetric, so he had just knocked her out cold and into a mild concussion.
Still, he climbed up and rolled her onto her side so she wouldn’t somehow choke. The handcuffs had fallen just about with them, which was fortuitous.
Gareth grabbed Agent Baker and lifted her enough to shift her over to the dumpster he had used as cover. A quick snap and the handcuffs latched her to a ton of steel. He had no idea what a key might look like, but hopefully this would be enough of a peace offering.
He was a human. He was supposed to be a mindless, killing machine threatening all civilization with bloodshed.
Maybe, just maybe he could communicate with them by not using violence.
“Not bad, buddy,” another voice said. High tenor, nasty tones.
Gareth looked up at a Warreth male, standing in the mouth of the alley, holding a gun on him.
This one didn’t look like a cop. Too slovenly, compared to Agent Baker and her partner.
Gareth was willing to gamble that he had just found one of Sarzynski’s men.
“Stand up slowly, human,” the birdman said, confirming the first estimation.
Only one of Maximus’s men would know him by species on sight.
Gareth complied, hands out but not overhead. His mind was racing with options, but the birdman was far enough away that he could probably shoot Gareth without a problem.
He needed to get out of this alley, and quickly.
And he really needed to be away from all of this before somebody’s backup arrived.
“You work for Maximus?” Gareth asked carefully.
“That’s right,” the Warreth gunman said with a sneer. “Told us to watch the cops. Follow them around, in case they led us to you. And lookie what we have here.”
“I’d rather not,” Talyarkinash said.
She shot the man with Baker’s gun, both of them forgotten in all this excitement.
Gareth realized just how lucky he could be.
“Thank you,” Gareth told her as she emerged from behind the delivery truck, pistol in hand pointed at the thug.
“I did owe you one,” she smiled up at him. “What do we do with them?”
“Is that a stunner?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Hers.”
“Can you adjust the stun?”
“Sure.”
“Put it on the highest setting and shoot him again,” Gareth said. “How long will he be out?”
“Probably hours,” she replied, adjusting something with her other hand and then shooting the birdman again. “Now what?”
“Now I would like you to put the gun back in Agent Baker’s holster,” Gareth said. “And then
we’re going to run like hell.”
“You just knocked her out,” Talyarkinash said. “She’ll be awake long before he is.”
“And she’ll have her handcuffs, badge, and gun,” Gareth agreed. “I’m trying to send them a message.”
“What message?”
“That we’re on the same side,” Gareth said.
Rescued
“I don’t care,” Eveth growled, holding an icepack to her face and forehead. “He’s mocking us.”
“And he could have killed you, Baker,” Grodray replied mildly.
It didn’t help that her partner was probably right. She had come to, handcuffed to the dumpster with her own manacles. Badge and gun were tucked into their spots. Unconscious thug with a rap sheet a mile long stunned and laid out at her feet.
She had just managed to free herself when Grodray arrived with half a dozen uniforms holding weapons out.
Now, they were all back up on the forty-seventh floor, taking Talyarkinash Liamssen’s life apart. No reason to waste a perfectly good warrant. And she had found an icepack in a personal refrigerator, down a set of steps concealed by a bookcase and hiding a medium-sized apartment.
Grodray had taken charge of things at that point, setting her down in that sterile conference room upstairs with instructions not to move while forensics teams went to work.
“What do we know?” Eveth asked, raging inside but controlling it.
She couldn’t believe she had fallen for something so obvious. The human was dangerous, that much she knew. Half a foot shorter, but roughly the same mass, and extremely strong. And he had a punch like a wallop. Her head was still ringing.
“The two Yuudixtl were probably here with them,” Grodray said, reading off his notes. “We’ve found indications four people were staying downstairs, and at least one was the right size. They had been here three days, from the trash in the can and the food missing.”
“Missing?” Eveth asked, still a little fuzzy.
“Count slices of bread missing from a loaf, divide by two, and you have meals served,” Grodray smiled. “Things like that. Crude but effective.”
“Right.”
“The Yuudixtl obviously disappeared when you went after the others, and we have no witnesses,” Grodray continued. “Cameras probably caught something, but it will take time to track that down. I’m sure they made it outside the lock-down zone and called a cab with a new credit account they had stolen.”
“Sirs, you might want to see this,” one of the cops, a young Grace officer with good instincts, had appeared in the door and motioned them to join in.
“What have you got?” Grodray was first, only because Eveth had to stand up, wobble the tiniest amount, and then follow.
“Not sure,” the male cop said. “We think she was in a hurry to destroy things, but missed this.”
They followed him out into the main room, down the stairs, and into a small work area off the main control room with the worthless music studio deck. Liamssen had done something to the computer controlling it all, and none of the knobs or sliders did anything now, as far as anybody could tell.
Another officer was standing there, holding a piece of paper that had been crumpled up at some point, now flattened out on the desktop.
Eveth leaned over the Grace cop’s shoulder to look. The tentacles were almost painful on her head and neck, but she could deal with that. Except that everywhere those tentacles touched, the pain receded.
She glanced down at the officer in surprise. He smiled sheepishly and blushed.
“Thought it might help,” he offered.
“It does,” Eveth replied. “Thank you.”
He leaned closer. She leaned closer. It was almost like they were kissing, except both were faced to the side. It was still a bizarre experience, one that should have been erotic, under almost any other circumstances.
The paper was a sketch, drawn freehand but by an extremely skilled hand. It showed a wing, such as an Elohynn might have, coming out from the back and down to a central elbow joint, before running up to a rough point overhead.
But the scale was all wrong, if the lengths on the side were any indication.
An Elohynn male, roughly six feet tall on average, had wings that were roughly nine feet long, with a twenty-foot wingspan on a mature adult.
This wing would be almost three times that.
“Any ideas?” Grodray asked.
Eveth pulled clear of the forest of helpful kelp and stood fully upright with a nod of thanks to the cop.
Grodray was deduction writ large. Eveth had always suspected the reason she was paired with him, once the bosses realized that they wouldn’t hate each other, was that she brought induction to the equation.
Leaps of intuition that the evidence just wouldn’t cover.
“Ornithopter?” she tossed out.
It was utterly inefficient, since something like an auto-car rode powered lifters and could also maneuver in low planetary orbit once a transport tube had lifted you. But the Elohynn preferred personal flying to anything else, including walking.
But why would a human want to build an Ornithopter?
She shrugged after a moment.
“Where did you find this?” Grodray pointed at the page.
“Crumpled up and behind the waste drop, sir,” the Grace cop said. “Looks like someone didn’t like the design, but missed the incinerator bucket, and were either too lazy to get up, or didn’t see it fall long.”
“Tag it and scan it into the files,” Grodray instructed the man.
Eveth followed her partner into the main common room where obviously the criminals had been waiting. There were remains of a sandwich on a low table, a pocketcomm that one of the Yuudixtl had been using to access a stole credit account on the bar, and a reading tablet on the end table next to the sofa.
“Three of them in here, watching us upstairs?” Eveth asked, taking it all in at a glance.
“That’s my theory, Eve,” Grodray said. “Given the timelines, Liamssen came down stairs as soon as we left, everyone panics. They run, taking the time to grab go-bags from that cabinet over there, and to tell the computers to kill themselves.”
“So we’ve found them, and lost them,” Eveth said. “Now what?”
“Now we turn up the heat,” Grodray smiled with a cruel mouth and lips pressed thin. “Assault on a Constable. Flight From Justice. And we have Dr. Liamssen’s full bio signature, plus a good description of the other three.”
“Do we lock the city down?” Eveth asked.
“Had you been hurt, or killed, I would have gotten nasty, Eve,” Grodray said in a voice that managed to make even a hardened cop like Eveth shiver. “The perp did the absolute minimum necessary to escape you, plus he left us a prize, like a cat bringing home a mouse. I want to sweat that Warreth hard and open up a second avenue of the investigation, but we’re going to hand the punk off to another team so we can focus on the perp.”
“Can you do that?” she asked, suddenly breathless with anticipation. This was up there with Level-7 Security.
“I talked to the Planetary Inspector while the medics were checking you out,” Grodray stated. “She’s cleared us to act like free agents here.”
Free agents. Just a tiny step short of Prime Inspector, the dream of every cop, to be able to pursue any crime they thought warranted their attention, on any planet of the Accord of Souls, and demand the full cooperation of the local authorities.
Not request. Demand.
Jackeith Grodray had said he never wanted to get to that level. Hell, he had never gone farther than Senior Constable, but that was a personal choice that Eveth would never settle for.
But Grodray had a Level-7 Security Authorization. Had they offered him Prime Inspector at some point and he refused?
Eveth made a note to learn as much as she possibly could from the man while they were partnered. Jackeith Grodray had always been exceptional, spoken of in the department in reverential tones. Was he even b
etter than that?
“Step one?” Eveth asked after she got her thoughts under control.
“Dinner,” Grodray said. “I know a good take-out joint not far from here, so we can move quickly if we get a hit on an All-Points Bulletin in the next hour. Then I’m going to turn up the heat and see what boils.”
Again, Eveth felt a shiver at the tone. She wasn’t sure she had ever seen Grodray lose his temper, but that was what this felt like.
Which was good, because she was well past that point with the damnable human running loose in her city.
Escaped
Morty breathed a sigh of relief as the maître d’ settled them in a semi-private room just outside the kitchen and left menus.
“Shouldn’t we be making our way to Talyarkinash’s backup place?” Xiomber asked soberly before taking a long drink of water.
“Yes and no,” Morty replied, studying his brother for signs of wear or fear. “The lab’s been burned now. And we know the other two got away, or the cops would have made a much bigger stink about catching a human. Somebody would have leaked that to a news crew, regardless of the situation.”
“Okay, so we all got away,” Xiomber agreed. “And?”
“So now we have a secondary duty to look after ourselves, egg-brother,” Morty said. “Like Gareth said, if he gets taken, it will be up to us to build a new generator array and kidnap another cop from Earth, if we want to stop Maximus. We can’t do that from inside a jail cell.”
“You think Talyarkinash’s other place will get raided?” Xiomber asked.
“I don’t know,” Morty admitted. “But we’re hiding from the cops, the Constables, and Maximus now. That doesn’t leave us a lot of places to go, because Talyarkinash would have needed underworld help to set up her bolthole in the first place. Somebody knows. The question is how quickly they’ll talk, and that hinges on either fear of Maximus or a good enough reward from the cops.”
Xiomber followed Morty’s logic as he emptied his water glass. It had been a nerve-wracking couple of hours. He was a scientist, not a bank robber. A good salad and a pasta right now would help calm him, because they needed to find a way to set up their own bolthole on this planet. One where they could hide from agents of Maximus and the law at the same time.
