by M H Questus
Morcos’s stunner was in her hand instantly, but the roar of terror that erupted from the crowd made her pause. All the men had thrown themselves onto the floor, hands held over their heads.
Zousizhe remained standing. “How good of a shot are you, marshal?”
Morcos’s view wandered for a moment over their surroundings.
“One stray shot and you’re going to ignite the entire warehouse.” Zousizhe still refused to look at her. “One shot, one bolt that misses by just a hair, and the explosion will not only kill everyone here, but will probably knock Scorpii out of orbit and may end up killing everyone on the station. So, I ask again: how good of a shot are you?”
Morcos felt the truth to her words, the crates of weaponry suddenly seeming to close in. She stood and slowly holstered her pistol.
“Grab her.” Rackham’s voice came from above, and suddenly two thugs materialized and walked towards Morcos.
Her fist intersected with the first thug five times before he realized he had been knocked unconscious. The second one, blinking in confusion, took a spinning kick to his head before he could raise his arms in defense.
Morcos breathed out slowly, keeping her fists raised and crouched in a combat stance.
Zousizhe took two steps back, now keeping her eyes on Morcos, but the marshal’s attention was devoted to her surroundings.
Morcos said nothing, watching as another two thugs approached. Both were walking forward with their fists raised, which almost saved the first from the uppercut Morcos planted on his chin, launching herself upwards with her coiled legs and knocking the man to the ground heavily.
The fourth thug swung at Morcos with a heavy punch that she ducked, planting a savage kick to his right knee. The man grunted as he fell, and Morcos jumped forward as she pirouetted, smashing her foot into the side of his head.
“Gentlemen!” Rackham’s voice boomed from overhead. “I must retire for the night. If anyone happens to bring me an unconscious marshal to my office, I assure them that their request for armaments will be filled at a 75% reduction in cost. Good day, Zousizhe, Ms. Morcos.”
Morcos’s eyes went wide for a moment, and she turned to see the arms dealer removing his ridiculous hat, bowing to Morcos as he stood.
“Wai…” Morcos took one step towards him as she heard the sound of the mass of people standing up. She turned to face them, over a hundred men, all suddenly staring at her with far darker intentions than a moment ago.
Zousizhe had disappeared.
Morcos inhaled a long, slow breath.
“Well.” She pulled down the brim of her cap, rotated her shoulders once, and raised her fists. “Bring it on.”
The crowd surged forward. Some were screaming, some merely charged in silently, all with their hands raised.
Morcos watched them approach, their outstretched hands reaching for her.
She ducked under the first, planting a rising kick under his chin. The second lunged at her as she leapt backwards onto the dais. She grunted as she spun through a twirling kick that landed on the assailant’s shoulder, knocking him backwards. She jumped forwards and landed with both feet on the head of a third, and bounced off as the inertia drove him back into the crowd.
She was breathing deeply. Her muscles were already screaming and both her hands were completely numb and covered in blood, most of which she was pretty sure wasn’t hers. She let out a quick yelp of pain as a punch impacted poorly against the side of her head. She ducked and lashed back with her left, feeling a satisfying crunch as she did so. She dove between two attackers, the men smashing into each other in their rush.
If there was some way she could take them on one at a time, Morcos was pretty confident that she’d have been able to handle the crowd. These were businessmen and negotiators, not warriors. But the sheer volume of them was getting to her. For every one she dropped with a perfectly timed uppercut or spinning kick, there were four more clamouring forwards with grasping hands and crudely thrown punches.
Morcos’s heart hammered in her ears. There was no ebb and flow to the battle. There was just the constant press, the unending crowd of attackers. She spun, ducked, dodged and parried, her body constantly in movement, the grunts of effort and the impact of foot, elbow, knee, and fist against flesh punctuating each moment.
But it was a losing battle. She ran to the top of the throne, taking a moment of respite as the horde scrambled up the stacks of ammunition after her.
“Still fighting, Marshal?”
Morcos looked over to see Zousizhe, lazily examining her fingernails while leaning against a crate at the side of the crowd. Morcos bit back a snarl, turning to kick at an outstretched hand.
“You can’t win, you know.”
“Since when…” Morcos gasped for air between words, performing a low sweep-kick to dislodge three of the attackers. “… was that… an excuse… not to try?”
One of the men at her feet snarled and kicked at the crates that made up the throne.
The structure groaned for a moment, and Morcos had visions of some weapon spilling out or exploding, killing everyone along with the rest of the station. More immediately, however, it threw off her balance. She desperately waved her arms around, trying to maintain her position, but it was too late.
She jumped forwards, tucking as she went airborne, and landed on one of her assailants with crushing force. She rolled and leapt again, clearing the majority of the crowd and landing only a few dozen meters from Zousizhe.
She looked up at the smuggler. Zousizhe looked back out of the corner of her eye, still pretending to examine her fingernails.
Morcos lunged forward a moment too late, a grasping hand seizing her ankle and pulling her back towards the crowd. She squirmed, but whoever held her was strong and didn’t budge.
Zousizhe slowly walked forward. An arm, thick as a tree branch, wrapped itself around Morcos’s neck.
Morcos flailed her feet, punching at the arm holding her. She could see the smuggler, her confident, swaying stride, during her leisurely approaching.
“You know what this is, Marshal?” Zousizhe held in each hand a long black rod, easily a meter from hilt to tip. The top portion had a corona of short arcs of green energy that crackled as they danced along the surface of the device.
Morcos gasped for air. She could feel the warm, snarling breath of the man holding her by her neck.
“Stunblade. This one manufactured in Alpha, if you believe the sticker.”
Morcos could feel consciousness leaving her body. Her vision became rimmed by black fields that rapidly tried to cut off her sight entirely.
Zousizhe threw the stunblade like one might throw a javelin. Morcos watched it approach in her narrowing vision, the flickering green energy field growing large. It missed her head by the tiniest margin.
The arm around her throat suddenly went slack, and Morcos tumbled to the floor.
She gasped in lungfuls of air, her vision returning to normal. Her head throbbed painfully as she focused on the long black handle of the stunblade, now on the ground next to her.
“Well? You just going to lie there?” Zousizhe looked down at Morcos, another of the stunblades in her hand. Morcos swallowed painfully.
Zousizhe strode towards the crowd of attackers. Morcos reached out and wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the stunblade. It was cool, but comforting, the hilt solid and reassuring. She took in one more deep breath and looked over her shoulder.
Zousizhe was a whirling dervish of movement, the blade lashing out to tap each attacker in a flash of green light. The blade jabbed, swung down from overhead, spun at knees, flashed against ears, shoulders, hands, elbows. Stacy’s gossamer coat glittered as she spun between, over, and under the grasping hands.
Morcos drew her mouth into a thin line, pushing herself to her feet and rushing to Zousizhe’s side.
The two of them parted through the crowd, the blades lashing out. A tap on a hand would be merely painful, but the person would then draw the hand back instinct
ively, giving Morcos an opening to smack them upside the head.
“You know,” Zousizhe gasped as she swung at another attacker, sending him sprawling. “You don’t have to hit them hard for the blade to trigger!” She ducked and lashed out, planting the blade against her attacker’s stomach, who gasped in pain and lurched to the side. She stood and gently tapped his head, sending the man spiralling into unconsciousness. “See?”
“Yeah, I know.” Morcos switched hands to smack a reaching arm with the blade, and spun the blade back into her right as she whirled it from overhead to smash down on the man. He grunted and crumpled. “More satisfying this way.”
Zousizhe laughed as she danced between two more attackers.
In moments it was over. The crowd, still as many conscious as were now lying on the floor, decided that it had enough. They ran, dispersing out between the aisles as the two women took swings at their departing backs.
Zousizhe stretched, laughing. “Quite a workout!”
Morcos, still gasping, rubbed her throat with her free hand. “Yeah. It was at that.” Morcos nodded back towards the throne, now just a collapsed pile of crates. “I honestly didn’t expect Rackham would stick around for the whole show, though.”
Zousizhe recoiled as she spun. “What!? I don’t… oh…”
She crumpled as the green flash of light subsided. Morcos turned off her stunblade, kicked Zousizhe’s away, and sat down on a massive unconscious man next to the smuggler.
Chapter 20: Better Mornings
Zousizhe awoke with grunt. Her head started the upward swing off her pillow before stars and flashes of light swimming behind her eyes reached her brain and she realized, somewhat rapidly, that she was in a lot of pain.
“Good morning, sleepy-head.”
Zousizhe groaned as she gently laid her head back on the pillow. Not her pillow, as she had at first thought, but the pillow on a cot in, what she assumed, was the marshal’s starship.
“Hey. Strange way to thank somebody who saved your life.” Zousizhe placed a hand delicately over her eyes. “By the Nines, I feel like somebody kicked me in the head.”
“Huh. Weird.” Morcos, both hands wrapped in bandages as well as several smaller ones on her throat, head, and arms, leaned up against the glass that divided them. “I actually was kicked in the head before you saved me. That would be after you threw me to the wolves in the first place.” Morcos crossed her arms gingerly and looked at the ceiling. “Actually, can you save somebody who you originally try to kill? That’s sort of like hitting an asteroid with a mining ship, destroying both, and then claiming that you mined the ore that goes flying off into space.”
Zousizhe’s head throbbed painfully. “Sure. Whatever. Just a bit more quietly please.”
Morcos smiled coldly. “Well, you can understand how I might suspect that after we had fought clear of all those miscreants that you would just tap me on the head and truck me off to Rackham, since that is what you basically tried to do in the first place, after all.”
Zousizhe sighed. “Look, I’m sorry, okay?” She placed her entire arm in front of her face and sighed again. “I just want my ship back. But it’s too late for that now. Rackham was my last hope. In a few days the bank is going to come and reclaim it, and then I’m just going to be another out-of-work schlep skulking around Down-Below.”
Morcos shrugged. “Sorry to hear it, Stacy. I mighta been able to help you before. As it is, I think maybe this will be a lesson on the virtues of playing nicely with the authorities.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Zousizhe rolled onto her side with her back to Morcos. “I may have tried to use you to barter for my livelihood back, but in the end I saved your life rather than my ship. You got your life, and I got nothin’. So I figure we’re pretty much square.”
Morcos looked at Zousizhe’s back, her glittering coat torn and crumpled underneath her. She turned and strode out of the brig without another word.
“Any luck tracking down Rackham?” Morcos asked Kobayashi as he entered the briefing room. Her deputy shook his head sadly.
“Not only is there no sign of Rackham, his warehouse? Basically empty.” Kobayashi sat down with a grunt, his face creased with worry. “Over the last 5 hours, despite a strong presence from the constabulary, the entire stockpile of weapons has up and vanished. Lots of crates of mundane stuff. You want patio furniture? We just found fifty kilotons. But a single longarm?” Kobayashi shook his head. “I dropped by in the hopes that I could find somebody who knew where to find the boss, but I ended up in what is now a warehouse superstore for useless junk.”
Morcos let out a low whistle.
Di Mercurio nodded. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. These weapon merchants are fast. Rackham will probably lay low on Scorpii for a few months, or at least until you leave station, and then he’ll resurface. He’s going to be mad, though.”
Morcos nodded in agreement. “The amount of money he was probably poised to earn after the negotiations we interrupted, I can’t say I’m surprised. But that’s a secondary problem.” Morcos leaned forward. “He confirmed that we have a leak at HQ.”
“So, you have a name?” Chatterji asked, brow wrinkled.
Morcos sighed. “The information I have is all pointing at St. Clair himself.” She leaned back and shook her head as a ripple of gasps went around the table. “I don’t believe it either. The Vice-Senior Marshal has bent over backwards to get me and Kristen here.”
There was a long pause.
Chatterji coughed gently. “Since we’re forced to consider the possibility,” she began “we may as well run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.”
Kobayashi shook his head. “Nothing I found in Haley’s message directly pointed at St. Clair. And, more importantly, there’s just no way. St. Clair’s primary concern has always been to bring safety and justice to the frontier. Delta is everything to him. He was ecstatic about getting two top-tier graduates. What could he possibly hope to gain by killing one of them?”
Chatterji’s smile was cold. “He would gain the fear and cooperation of a lot of the criminals.”
“What?” Di Mercurio shook her head this time. “That makes no sense. Wouldn’t they run rampant with a dead marshal?”
“Think about it. Every criminal in Scorpii, and probably a fair number in Delta, is waiting to see if the Service comes down on them for the attack.” Chatterji jabbed her finger at Kobayashi. “They’re all keeping their noses clean and their heads down, knowing that if they catch our attention, even a whiff of our attention, that we can bring such hell down on their them that they will never recover. For the next few weeks, or until somebody is actually arrested, organized crime is going to be running scared.”
“Okay, but…” Di Mercurio crossed her arms, obviously unconvinced.
“Hear me out.” Chatterji held up both hands. “Maybe St. Clair hoped that by planning this attack, he would make all the criminals watch their backs and give Caitlyn the time to make some serious headway.”
“If that were the case, why would he keep her here instead of out there bustin’ bad guys?” Di Mercurio argued.
Morcos cringed. “He did originally want us in space as quickly as possible and to not worry about this investigation.”
There was another brief moment of stunned silence.
“I convinced him that since we were stuck here at least long enough for the airlock to be repaired, that we might as well lead the case. He seemed supportive afterwards, though.”
The silence stretched on again.
Kobayashi finally broke it. “Okay, let’s assume that the old man did rig this whole thing. How would we prove it?”
Morcos chewed her lower lip. “We need to find evidence. We have a message sent to Haley on her datapad, but that’s pretty light for the gravity of the crime we’re thinking that St. Clair may have perpetrated.”
“Could we ask somebody?” Di Mercurio asked. “I mean, there must be someone at headquarters that would have an idea about wheth
er St. Clair did this. A paper trail or something.”
Kobayashi nodded. “Jules, his assistant. We should talk with him.”
Morcos nodded. “Smith seemed to like the guy. Can’t hurt to try. Okay, Di Mercurio, I think it’s your turn to risk your neck with me.”
Di Mercurio smiled her crooked smile. “Are you sure, boss? I was pretty sure it was Kobayashi’s turn again.”
Kobayashi laughed as he held up his hands. “Hey now, I picked her up when she first arrived. That means I’ve risked my life twice as much as the rest of you, thank you very much.”
Morcos half-smiled. “I get the impression that you three thought there would be less excitement as a frontier deputy at the edge of civilization. May I recommend a safer line of work?”
Di Mercurio cocked an eyebrow. “Shark-taming?”
Kobayashi raised a hand. “Testing handheld nuclear weapons?”
Chatterji, not to be left behind, smiled as she said “Running, covered in honey, through colonies of fire ants?”
Everyone shared a brief chuckle. Morcos could feel the tension in her crew, the air positively shimmering with their worry. Trying to find evidence of their own commander attempting to bomb another marshal was likely not a good way to have a long term, stable line of employment in the Service.
“Alright, alright, enough.” Morcos nodded at Di Mercurio. “You are with me, Di Mercurio. Kobayashi, you and Chatterji head down to the brig, talk with Haley again. See if she remembers anything else that might help us out figuring out how to prove St. Clair is actually behind all this.” She flexed her bandaged hands, wincing slightly at the pain. “Meet me in two hours by the airlock. I need a long shower followed by several icepacks. Dismissed.”
Chapter 21: Paper Trails
Morcos had swapped out the bandages on her hands for fresh ones, the scars across her knuckles and arms already beginning to fade under the constant efforts of the nanobots imbedded in the bandages. It would still be another few days before she could comfortably wave or shake hands, though.
She showed up at the airlock, Di Mercurio already waiting for her. “They hurt?”
