Beyond the Sun

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  But he didn’t. He liked to say he kept his opinions to himself, but he didn’t do that either. He shared them with like-minded folk, which was why he was here right now. With like-minded folk, letting the door ease shut, and then heading down the narrow corridors to the back of the ship.

  Docking was such a complicated procedure. Lots of locks and clamps and requirements. Some connection between the port and the ship. In the larger ports, like Latica itself, some decontamination procedures, and a few laws that allowed a shipboard search without a warrant.

  And on the dry run for this part of this trip three months ago, he’d convinced all of the port workers that the informal rules in Pavonne had changed. Now Pavonne inspected vehicles that arrived from other places.

  No one questioned it, especially visitors from Latica. Latica types expected rules. He suspected the judge expected rules as well.

  Particularly since she was here to enforce them.

  He nodded at his colleagues as they walked quickly toward the only dock in use.

  This part of the mission had a timetable, which he established.

  It was now up to him to make sure the timetable got met.

  *

  The smile Leidinger had pasted on her face was a sham, but she had no idea how to make it real or even realistic. She smiled, but she felt like some feral creature baring its teeth, instead of someone happy to be doing her job.

  As the judge approached, Leidinger took a silent deep breath and braced herself. Part of her didn’t believe that the judge would follow protocol. Because if the judge didn’t follow it right here and now, the entire plan would go awry.

  Then the judge stepped in front of her group of bodyguards. She didn’t bother to paste a smile of any kind on her own face. She just grimly came forward, hand extended, as if she were about to touch something unclean.

  Maybe she was.

  “Judge Morell,” Leidinger said in her warmest voice, “welcome to Pavonne.”

  The judge moved her tiny hand forward, about to brush fingertips as she had done a thousand times in other greets. But Leidinger didn’t let her. Leidinger grabbed the judge’s hand tightly, and pulled her close, just as she had practiced.

  And, as she had practiced, the little laser pistol slid from its pocket into her right hand. She raised the pistol to the judge’s ear, and stuck the edge inside. She’d learned, through all her practice, all her study, that the pistol was almost impossible to forcibly remove from this position, without it going off.

  One bodyguard hurried forward.

  “Don’t even try it,” Leidinger said. “You attack me, the judge dies. You will all stay back and let me take her out of here.”

  The bodyguard glanced down at the judge. Leidinger could see the judge’s face reflected in the clear wall ahead of her. The judge didn’t look frightened, which was too bad. Leidinger wanted her to be scared.

  Leidinger still was.

  “We’ve been through this before, Raul,” the judge said to her guard. “Don’t worry.”

  The guard nodded, and Leidinger tried not to smile. She had thought the judge might say something like that. The judge had been taken hostage three times before. All three times had been in a makeshift courtroom after or before a verdict, when the judge seemed vulnerable.

  All three times had been attacks of the moment, impulsive and out of control. Leidinger had seen vids of all of them, and in every case, the hostage-taker was panicked long before grabbing the judge.

  Leidinger wasn’t panicked. Even though she still felt terrified, the terror was one of meeting expectations now, not of dying or of losing or even of failing.

  This terror was a familiar one, the one she’d had before exams, on the first day of school, on her interview for this very job.

  The judge smelled of lavender and sweat. She didn’t move, but remained clasped in Leidinger’s arms, not fighting. The bodyguard backed off.

  “You’re coming with me,” Leidinger said to the judge. “And I’m not going to drag you. I’ll shoot you first. So make sure your legs cooperate.”

  Leidinger moved backwards for just a moment, then her own team flanked her and hurried with her toward the exit near the back. When they’d reached it, she removed the laser pistol from the judge’s ear, and shoved the judge at Barry Culver. Culver grabbed the judge, slung her over his shoulder, and ran down the hall with her so fast that no one else could keep up.

  Behind Leidinger, screams, shouts, and threats. Then they muted as the doors slid shut.

  Almost done, Leidinger thought, then checked the laser pistol to make sure it wouldn’t go off accidentally, and slipped it back in her sleeve. Then she took off after her group, hoping she could catch them.

  The last thing she wanted was to get left behind when the ship took off. She didn’t want to imagine what would happen to her then.

  *

  One by one, the security feeds winked out. Governor David Chamberlain stood up from his desk and stared at the blank walls in front of him.

  The judge arrived, tried to fake a handshake, and then got taken captive. He didn’t recognize the woman who had captured her. He did recognize—even from that brief instant he saw on the feeds—how well planned this attack was.

  He tapped the security console on the left side of his desk. “You got all that right?” he asked his security chief.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “We’re doing what we can. The feeds got cut at the port.”

  As if it were a real port, with real security. It was no more secure than the local hotel was. Latica collected taxes from Pavonne, but didn’t grant any of the colony’s requests for improvement. The main reason so few ships even came here was the size of that damn port. It couldn’t accommodate most vessels that traveled between Anzler and its moons. Even the judge had to take a smaller ship just to come here, and she always protested.

  I can’t take as many prisoners back, she would say before her visits here. As if she ever took prisoners anyway. The cases she heard that ended in a guilty verdict almost always ended in death rather than lifetime imprisonment in the facility near Latica.

  Chamberlain tried to shake nasty thoughts of the woman out of his head. He had to respond like he would to the kidnapping of any other citizen. Only he wasn’t going to. Because he didn’t want word out that the hanging judge could be kidnapped—that anyone could be kidnapped in Pavonne’s port.

  He did his job. He let security know they had his fullest authority to do what they needed to end this crisis. He also let the Government of the Anzler Colonies in Latica know that the judge was in trouble.

  Then he dithered for just one moment. Personal dithering. Petty dithering.

  In the end, he decided to keep the reservation at Pavonne’s best restaurant. No sense tipping off anyone that the judge wouldn’t make it.

  Besides, he needed to eat. No matter what.

  *

  Morell’s teeth rattled as the big buffoon carried her through the narrow back corridors of the port. His sharp muscular shoulder dug into her stomach and his hands had a disturbingly impersonal grip on her thighs. For the first time since she’d become a judge, she regretted her small size. If she’d been as big as this idiot was, no one could have slung her over his shoulder like so much dirty laundry. Her legs were so short that she couldn’t even kick him in an effective part of his anatomy.

  She knew better than to beg him to put her down. Begging automatically placed her at a disadvantage. So she just bounced along, trying to remain as silent as possible, although the jostling occasionally made her grunt involuntarily.

  She had no idea where this crew of ruffians was taking her, but it probably wasn’t anywhere she wanted to go.

  She went over scenarios in her mind—these were probably friends of the accused who wanted something from her. Or people related to others she’d condemned. Violent types who should be stopped and whose gene pools should dead-end.

  Of course, she hadn’t gotten that dead-end gene pool i
dea approved in Latica either. They kept calling her radical there.

  She wondered if they would call her radical now.

  Not that it mattered. What mattered were the next few hours. She had to decide if she was going to try to negotiate with these idiots, lie to these idiots, or suffer these idiots silently.

  Right now, they hadn’t done much more than make her teeth hurt, cause all the blood to rush to her head, and embarrass her in front of half of this backwater colony.

  As long as they didn’t really harm her, she might actually survive.

  *

  Timing was just about spot on. Keegan opened the prisoner exchange door on the judge’s ship. He could see the exfiltration group bringing the judge now. She was draped over Culver’s shoulder, her short hair pointing downward. Surprisingly, she wasn’t fighting.

  Keegan was vaguely disappointed; he’d expected a fighter.

  He held the door open, somewhat amazed at how smoothly the plan was going. He’d put on an environmental mask before boarding the ship, put an airborne sedative into the environmental controls from the cargo bay, and had knocked out what crew there were within seconds.

  He’d locked the crew in the prisoner wing, and upped the oxygen levels everywhere. The crew would wake up slowly, but they wouldn’t be able to stop him.

  Then he put his pilot on the bridge, let his experts take a peek at the controls, and waited.

  Smooth, smooth, smooth.

  Something had to go wrong soon. Law of averages.

  Then Culver arrived with Judge Morell.

  She was awake, her head rising in surprise as she realized where she was.

  “Where do you want her?” Culver asked.

  They hadn’t decided this part. Did Keegan want her near the bridge? Or in the prisoner wing?

  It would be much more interesting if she were on the bridge, but then she’d need to be trussed up. Still, they had the equipment here. He could bring her up there.

  “So you’re the idiot in charge,” she snapped. “You do realize you won’t get very far in my ship.”

  Her voice grated already. Keegan hadn’t expected that.

  Decision made.

  “Put her in the cell next to the execution chamber,” he said.

  It was in the prison wing, but not part of the prison wing. From what he’d seen of the specs, it could be used as solitary if need be.

  “You’ll never get away with this,” she said, not bothering to ask what he was trying to get away with.

  He patted her face just a little harder than he should have. “The melodrama doesn’t suit you, Judge,” he said, then nodded at Carver to lock her away.

  “Governor,” his assistant Teresa Spencer said, “Latica wants you to make sure this group doesn’t leave Pavonne. They’ll send you some assistance.”

  Chamberlain rubbed two fingers along his forehead, almost wishing for a headache to begin. He deserved a headache. The situation called for a headache.

  “Do they want to tell me how I’m going to prevent them from leaving, since I never got the funding for the security fleet that I asked for?” he said.

  “I—um—asked, sir,” she said, “a bit more politely, but I did ask. They want you to shut down the port, make sure nothing takes off.”

  He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. The officials from Latica had clearly never come here. The port was a small-scale version of Latica’s port from seventy-five years ago. No security upgrades, no staff to speak of besides maintenance, and certainly no one monitoring the space traffic.

  He knew better, though, than to try to tell a bunch of bureaucrats—who couldn’t be bothered with much more than a “verbal understanding” mixed with an “oh, yeah, pay your taxes” —that some of the tax money had to actually return to a colony for that colony to thrive.

  There was only so much a place could do on its own, especially after all of its resources went into the Clearwater barrier, patrolling the borders, and making sure that some of the food in the hydroponics bays actually made it into the colony proper.

  But that was an argument for another day. Side issues, those horrid bureaucrats would tell him. They’d command him to fix this problem.

  “Inform them we’re doing our very best,” Chamberlain said.

  “Sir?” she said. “We’re not doing anything right now.”

  He raised his head and looked at her. He had forgotten how young she really was—unlined skin, wide brown eyes.

  “What do you suggest we do, Spencer?”

  She took a deep breath, then let it out. “I can order port security to take the conspirators into custody.”

  And put them where? He almost asked. The jail we have is full of murderers, awaiting the judge’s final decision.

  But he didn’t ask. Instead, he smiled. “Good thinking,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

  *

  The ship lifted out of the port with surprising ease. Keegan stood on the bridge, watching as the ship headed to a point just outside of the range of Latica’s fleet of ships.

  Then he contacted the Government of the Anzler Colonies:

  “I have Judge Morell,” he said. “I will negotiate for her release.”

  “Or what?” the Assistant to the Chief Executive said.

  The response startled him. He’d expected someone to ask him what he wanted.

  “Or we will execute her,” he said.

  “Hm,” the Assistant to the Chief Executive said. “Give me a minute.”

  Too easy. It was starting to bother Keegan. He had his crew search for fleet ships, search to make sure that Latica’s meager defense weapons weren’t trained on the ship, search to make sure they hadn’t been followed off Pavonne.

  They hadn’t. They were alone out here.

  The communications array chirruped. Keegan nodded at his navigator, who opened communications.

  “Sorry to take so long,” the Assistant said. “The Council says you should go about your business.”

  “Excuse me?” Keegan asked.

  “Execute her, keep her, steal the ship, we don’t care,” the Assistant said.

  “You—what?” Keegan asked. “You haven’t even asked who I am. What I want.”

  “As I said,” the Assistant spoke firmly. “We really don’t care.”

  Then he shut off communications, and try as Keegan and his people might, no one would respond to his hails. No one. Not on Latica, not on Pavonne.

  “What the hell is this?” Keegan asked.

  “Wish I knew,” his navigator said.

  *

  Every conspirator they could find—all three of them—got rounded up and placed in Pavonne’s overcrowded jail. Chamberlain wished he could be more excited about that, or the fact that seventeen people had escaped on the judge’s ship.

  Orders came from Latica: Don’t let the ship land on Pavonne again. Not that the ship was trying. It remained a blip out in space, hovering there, probably as confused as everyone else was.

  Chamberlain wasn’t confused, not really. He finally had an order he could follow. He could keep people out of Pavonne. Every colony in the system got a defense grid when the colony reached a certain size. It hadn’t been upgraded in forty years, but he’d consider its use against the judge’s ship a test, if he had to.

  Although he doubted he’d have to.

  What kind of kidnapper slinked back to the port he’d left from? If anything, those bad guys would wait until they got what they wanted or some other place took them in.

  Which meant they weren’t his problem anymore.

  *

  Judge Morell finally had a reaction. Pure, unadulterated fury.

  “What do you mean they aren’t going to negotiate for me?” she asked the twerp who had kidnapped her.

  He stood outside the execution cell, looking smaller and less powerful than he had when he stood in the doorway. She could attribute this to the fact she no longer had to raise her head at an odd angle to see him, but she doubted that was w
hat was really going on. He seemed smaller, because he was smaller.

  He was too dumb to realize this had to be a ploy.

  “Let me on the comm,” she said. “I have an emergency code. Once they understand that you’re not kidding, they will resolve this.”

  Maybe Government were already planning a raid. Maybe they had a team that was going to rescue her. But if they did, wouldn’t they be a little more careful about telling the twerp they didn’t care? After all, that could mean he might kill her.

  He reached around to the control panel near the door to the execution area. “Give me the information.”

  Maybe that was what this was all about: her code. They could use it to—what? Get into judicial files? Pretend to be her? That seemed to minor and too subtle for a crew this unsophisticated.

  She gave him the codes, then waited. It took longer than she expected, but finally the Chief Executive’s voice echoed in the relatively small space.

  “Esmé?” he said. “Did they release you?’

  “Why would they do that?” she snapped. “You won’t negotiate with them.”

  There was a long silence, and then the Chief said, “You’re still a hostage?”

  “Yes,” she said tightly. “Of course.”

  He made a grunting acknowledgement. “Did they force you to contact us?”