by Lee Bond
Richie realized he’d made a huge mistake but there wasn’t anything he could do about it now; with Markase out of the room, he was stuck until someone returned. “G-go on.”
“Yeah, they tried once upon a long time ago to just kill me outright but that totally, totally failed. Cost them more than the original Debt I ‘owed’ them only this time they couldn’t sling the damages back so they just sort of gave up.” Garth shuddered for a long moment. He did his best not to think about Gorensworld at all, but it cropped up at the oddest and most inopportune moments. “Anyways, yeah, I was totally thinking it was them until I remembered this whole system is a Voss_Uderhell enterprise. Except it can’t be them.”
“Why … why not?” Tynedale/Fujihara was so much bigger than Voss_Uderhell it wasn’t even funny. The EuroJapanese Conglomerate was easily three times as big as the IndoRussian one. If they wanted to, they could easily crush any company ships in the system. Richie could barely wrap his head around Garth’s easy admittance of a Debt Accrual reaching ‘several hundred million dollars’ or his apparent victory in paying them back and his reported ability to survive their direct efforts at killing him.
“They’re really not allowed to try and kill me anymore. After I beat them like a red-headed stepchild around ten years ago, Trinity told them to lay off.” Garth laughed every time he thought of Tynedale/Fujihara being smacked around so hard by The Trinity AI. Though he hated the machine mind quite a bit, he nevertheless found massive amusement at a systemic Conglomerate being treated like an unruly child.
“So if it isn’t Tynedale/Fujihara that arranged all this, who did?” There was nothing new in Conglomerates like TF or Voss_Uderhell using their nearly limitless power to arrange something like an arrest. Conglomerates often did things like that, especially if they lacked assets in the area to do the job properly. It didn’t happen too often on Tenerek because VU had a comprehensive grip on the upper echelons of the criminal element in the system.
Garth shot Richie a sideways squint. “Are you sure you want to know the answer to that? If I tell you and I’m right, there’s a really good chance you’re going to wind up in a room just like this one, only the person on the other side of the mirrored glass won’t be asking you any nice questions, Richie.”
The truth was, Richie knew he shouldn’t ask. There were very few things in Trinityspace that were worse than a Conglomerate like Tynedale/Fujihara looking to get payback or revenge. One, obviously, were Trinity Enforcers. Two was BishopCo, the biggest Conglomerate in all of Trinityspace. After that, there were entities like the Yellow Dogs and anyone involved in anything revolving around the Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles. “I … I do want to know.”
Garth gave Richie a ‘you’ll be sorry’ look and opened his mouth.
The door to the interrogation room slammed open. Three bright purple officers hustled in and grabbed Richie by the shoulders. They dragged him right off the chair and out before the man could say anything. Mark walked in, righted the chair and waited until Head Chief Marius Drove entered. When the older police officer sat down, he saluted, then left.
Marius Drove removed his hat and placed it on the table next to him, batting one of the fronds away from his eye. The things always seemed to want to poke his eyes out. He smoothed the sleeves of his uniform and eyeballed the young man who’d led dozens of policemen on a chase through Downtown before giving up.
He could scarcely credit the whippersnapper in front of him with the military jacket attached to his name; mercenaries and soldiers with the kind of blacked-out service record he possessed either were dead or had more scars than brain cells. According to the dossier, Garth Nickels wasn’t yet thirty. He barely looked out of his twenties.
Of course, his seeming innocence and youth were at complete odds with the damages done to the city and the tension in the air. It was thick, an almost living force. Marius knew he’d do well not to frustrate the blue-eyed devil more than necessary.
“You, sir, were significantly difficult to identify.” Marius said this reprovingly, as if the man were a child.
“The whole point of today was to be in and out real quiet-like, Chief.” Garth sighed and slumped a bit. “That totally failed.” He closed his eyes. He wasn’t ‘pretty sure’ he knew who’d gone to these great lengths to have him detained. He knew.
You are,” Marius read from the report he held in his hands, “the Mercenary Captain Garth N’Cha…N’Chla…”
“N’Chalez.” Garth said testily. Thirty thousand years into the goddamn future and no one had futuristic names. They were all Bob Smiths and Eddy Jones. Disgusting. “But you can say ‘Nickels’ if your stupid tongue can’t handle a proper name.”
Drove looked up from the report, then bent back down to the papers. It’d taken considerable doing to locate them. “Nickels … of the Zanzibar Cat, a military ship from 9-Nova-12?”
“Formerly.” Garth corrected.
“Sorry?” Marius read over his notes. There was no mention of resignation or court-marshal. Of course, the pertinent part could very well be buried under a ton of blacked out paragraphs. This whole situation was … awful. Yes, that was the word. It was awful. No one could find any wrongdoing on Garth’s behalf. They couldn’t even find the officer who’d originally approached Garth Nickels, thereby inciting the near-riot resulting in fifteen destroyed police cruisers and of course, one detonated city bus.
“Formerly.” Garth nodded, sighing. “My tour of duty ended. The other day. I’m on vacation. Permanently.”
The whole thing had Special Services written all over it. That the Police Chief had any documents at all concerning anything involving the Zanzibar Cat or his ‘official’ Mercenary Captain title screamed Commander Aleksander Politoyov’s involvement from something like sixteen hundred trillion lightyears away.
Garth realized he felt bad for the entire planet. He supposed it was his fault; if he hadn’t been so … distracted … by what he was planning, he might’ve realized much sooner on that he’d been snared in a Special Services operation.
Marius looked over the documents in his possession for anything that might relate to the man’s status. Of course, there was nothing. The only readable entries were the man’s name, the ship, his rank in an unnamed military organization and the phrase ‘extremely dangerous’.
That last one was on every page. Sometimes it was underlined. Still, they had to do something. They couldn’t very well ignore the fact that he’d run away from an officer, or all the damages done.
“You were seen,” Marius persisted, “in the Ship District, in the company of one Garigtch Porfol, a noted criminal.” The Police Chief tried to gauge Garth’s reactions and failed.
“Gary?” Garth chuckled. “Gary Badchicken might be a criminal, but he’s lousy at it. I was buying a ship. Totally legitimate and everything.”
“Destination?” Marius knew it was a desperate gambit. ‘Gary’ had indeed registered a valid sale of a spaceship to Garth Nickels hours ago. The more he tried to figure out what was going on, the more he realized he understood nothing. It was obvious –transparently so- that the whole day’s events, from the destruction of government property to the kidnapping- was a direct result of a now-missing and unidentifiable police officer who’d originally tried to arrest Garth Nickels.
The whole situation stank. Voss_Uderhell wasn’t involved; Marius had been on the phone with various reps from the local branch for over an hour trying to find out if anyone there wanted Nickels for any reason.
Garth was about to tell the old Peacock to go screw when another, younger cop hustled in, cradling a bulky Q-Comm screen in his hands like it was going to explode. He leaned in to whisper to the Police Chief, who looked really pissed at having his Q&A time cut short before paling considerably. The two exchanged hoarse whispers for another minute or so before the second cop deposited the Q-Comm on the table.
Garth waved goodbye to the departing cop, then smiled at Marius. “Yeah. This is … uh … yeah. Sucks
, doesn’t it? The guy on that dealie is, uh, my ex-boss.”
“I’m sorry?” Marius asked, still trying to calm down. He’d never felt so … used in his life. All of it … everything … orchestrated … just so someone could talk to this man? “What … sucks?”
Garth nodded at the Q-Comm. The flashing green light on the top showed that whoever was on the other line was waiting. Old Man Politoyov could wait. Conversation across galactic distances in real-time wasn’t cheap, and if the Commander of SpecSer felt he could not only waste someone’s personal time but coordinate things so that that same someone had a bus blown up on top of them, it was going to be ‘please insert eighty thousand credits into the slot’. “Being suckered.”
Marius stomached the response he wanted to blurt out and simply nodded. It was one thing to be manipulated by your politicians or by your Conglomerate sponsors; there really wasn’t anything you could do about the first group and if you wanted things like power and food, you lived with the second group’s occasional nefarious plot.
“I s’pose you’re going to have to stay here to make sure I don’t do anything to your comm, huh?” Garth leaned forward and started poking at the buttons that would complete the call when Marius nodded unhappily.
The ex-SpecSer understood the Tenerekian’s complete disgust with the situation. He wondered, though, if the brilliantly purple-clad police officer realized the depth of the situation he was in; chances were high that when this ‘meeting’ with Commander Politoyov -leader of Special Services and notorious hard-ass- was over, the Offworlder was going to debrief the entire goddamn planet. It was going to be … unpleasant.
Doubly so for Marius, who was likely to hear things uttered that no mortal should ever hear.
The moment the call went through and the Commander’s face flickered into resolution on the screen it was obvious he was pissed. Pissed he’d had to put out an arrest warrant on the best soldier he’d ever seen, pissed he’d already spent a half an hour’s worth of Q-Comm time listening to bad music. Most importantly, Politoyov was pissed that he was pissed. He was the sort of guy who prided himself on never losing his temper and he’d once been the highest of the high in Trinity’s official Army.
Baleful yellow eyes stared across Lord knew how many millions of light-years away. “Captain Nickels.” Politoyov was a whisper away from shouting. “How is Tenerek this time of year?”
“Not bad, all things considered. The sunrise over their Dome of Worship really is pretty, just like they say in the brochure. Not a big fan of organized religion and these guys take their hourly prayers super serious.” Garth stretched his back out. The chair really was the Devil’s Own creation. “Looks to me like they just went through some kind of major hassle for no reason I can see. Weirdest thing.”
Politoyov saw the direction Garth felt like taking and didn’t want any of it. Rather than put up with the Captain’s notorious line of bullshit, he cut to the chase. “You are in dereliction of duty, Captain Nickels. I advise you to surrender yourself to the Special Services representatives when they arrive.”
Garth raised a finger. Technically, Politoyov’s response was warranted; paperwork traveled at the speed of bureaucracy, and barely even then. Unless he’d gone specifically out of his way to find the documents pertaining to one Garth Nickels’ freedom, SpecSer servers would’ve updated him in a week or so. And that wasn’t something Politoyov would do. Even after ten years of relatively solid work on behalf of Trinity and Special Services, Politoyov would still automatically consider a missing Captain as an AWOL captain and proceed with harassing field-promoted Captain Eddy and the rest of Armageddon Troop One.
The timeline for debriefing Armageddon Troop One and gently questioning them about the sudden disappearance of their Captain and the SpecSer op depositing him in this Tenerekian interrogation room was a near-perfect match.
Garth realized that he should’ve maybe said something to Eddy and the others about him not actually being a part of Special Services anymore. He stifled a grimace. There was the smallest possibility that he was, in fact, responsible for the day’s events. Well, sort of. Secretly conscripting an entire police force to arrest one guy was a little heavy-handed.
Still, the damage was done, so Garth responded, ignoring Politoyov’s murderous yellow-eyed glare. “I would be derelict if I was a member of Special Services, Commander. But I’m not, not anymore. The entire rigmarole you put yourself and the members of Tenerek’s police force through was a huge waste of time and resources. I’m actually considering pressing charges and suing the pants off everyone who’s even looked at me funny today. Some guy with a machine gun blew a bus up around my ears. A bus, Politoyov. A big one. And they blew up my jacket! No one’s said anything about getting me a new one. I loved that thing.”
Marius swallowed nervously, eyes flicking to this Offworld Commander Politoyov. Marius knew only a little about Special Services, and had always thought most of that was probably lies. Looking at the inhuman being, Marius figured that maybe some of them weren’t falsehoods. “You were stealing the bus at the time.” The tension in the room was thickening. He continued, uncertain if he was losing his mind. “And we aren’t a tailor shop. We won’t be replacing any jackets for kidnappers and bus thieves.”
Garth flicked a glance at the Police Chief, who flinched a bit. “You will so get me a new jacket. Do you have any idea how long I’ve had that thing? Where it came from?”
Politoyov’s wintry smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I would say that jacket is the least of your worries at the moment, Captain. The particulars of your assignation to Special Services are precise. You are to work your Debt Accrual to Tynedale/Fujihara off through our offices. Independent repayment is not an option.”
Garth leaned back. Over the last decade, he’d read the legal documents pertaining to his virtual imprisonment in a madhouse so many times he could write them out backwards and upside down. He’d tried hundreds of different ways to get out of being in Special Services, but between Tynedale/Fujihara’s ass-bastard lawyers and The Trinity AI, they’d covered all the bases. Except one.
“Close but no cigar.” Politoyov opened his thin mouth to start shouting, so Garth hurried; when the Old Man got rolling, it took days for the man to simmer down. “The rules specified a dollar amount and a term of a ‘minimum ten years’ during which to repay the damages. Minimum ten years, sir. That’s the key. The gizmo made me serious money, Commander. Once you guys started paying me, it was a simple matter to invest the money until I got enough to fix my problem. Technically speaking, I coulda left part way through the ninth year, but since that would have violated the terms of my servitude, I waited. That last mission Armageddon Troop One took brought me close to Tenerek, so I asked Eddy to drop me off. None of my old team knew I was bailing, so don’t be a dick. I sent the last chunk of money to T/F five minutes after I hit dirt. Then I filed the ‘I quit’ papers and forwarded them to all the right people. You can check. I’ll wait. Mary and I are going to talk jackets.” He waggled his handcuffed hands meaningfully.
“Hold.” Politoyov’s face disappeared off screen.
“I don’t think your commanding officer likes you very much.” Marius remarked dryly.
“Actually, he has a man-crush on me. He’s unhappy I left. He had plans for me, plans which aren’t going to happen anymore.” Garth felt a little bad and a little sad about leaving Special Services; once he’d gotten into the groove, the madhouse of criminals and murderers had begun feeling … homey. He knew that the organization had experienced a massive surge of legitimacy thanks in no small parts to his efforts across The Cordon, but that was behind him.
There were more important things out there. Things that might explain who he was; following his last horrible mission as a Deep Strike Elite and his subsequent marooning on a hostile planet with no one but himself to talk to, he’d been visited by someone who the entire Universe believed was dead.
Garth believed that that person, Lisa Laughlin, w
as directly responsible for the dreams plaguing him since his rescue. After all, she was the one who’d teleported away from Tynedale/Fujihara’s increasingly hostile automated response machines and the one who’d been visiting him in his dreams since then.
The world-weary ex-SpecSer shoved Lisa out of his mind. The awesome scope of her power was such that she could hear him thinking about her wherever in space she was hiding, and the last thing he wanted was to see that glowing blue woman ever again. She’d tried manipulating him throughout his career in Special Services, tried to stop him from accepting the mantle of Heavy Elite, a ‘promotion’ that’d been extremely crucial in getting him out of service after a paltry decade instead of the seventy or eighty years he’d been looking at.
Their last moments together on that unnamed and ridiculously hostile planet hadn’t been … good. Following that meeting, though, dreams of a ship similar to the one they’d all been found in percolated in around the usual gamut of replayed television shows and horrific nightmares about Gorensworld.
The dream was simple, unadorned, and always the same.
Somewhere out there in the depth of the Universe there existed a second ship. This ship, it seemed, contained answers. Explanations about why he and fourteen other men and women had jumped into stasis for thirty thousand years, why he was now capable of the impossible things he could do, why the ship itself and the tech inside was lightyears ahead of anything currently possible.
Most importantly, the unshakeable and unswerving belief that this sister ship housed his actual memories was firmly rooted in his mind.
Garth couldn’t ignore that. Everywhere he turned, he was doing things that made no sense. He hated feeling like he was a prisoner inside his own mind, and every time he created some new piece of tech or discovered some new ability or did something that was allegedly impossible, that was exactly how he felt. He couldn’t continue on like that.
And so, he was on a quest spawned by a dream planted by a woman with the power to read the thoughts and feelings of every sentient being in the Universe from any other spot across the depths of Creation.
