Thelma sat silent and staring at a moonglow petunia for long enough that she grew cold. She didn’t return to the party, but left by a side gate.
“Good party?” Lon asked as she boarded the Lonesome.
“Yeah.”
“You sound doubtful. Max is in the lounge.” There was more than a hint there of where Lon thought she should go.
Thelma disagreed. She’d overdosed on people over the last few days. She headed for her cabin. “Lon, Agent Aubree Tennyson mentioned a diplomatic vessel setting out from Alpha Hub in two weeks to arrive at some undisclosed location within the Saloon Sector. It will have Senator Gua, among others, onboard. Since Aubree sought me out and made a point of telling me, I presume she wanted Max to know about it through informal channels.”
“And why do you think it’s important? You sound stressed.”
“Personal issues. Goodnight, Lon.” Thelma closed the door to her cabin. She undressed slowly and showered, washing away some of the perfumes and funk of the party, but not managing to wash away her doubts. If she could overlook the impact of her dealings with Rudy on her career, what sort of head-in-the-sand information broker was she?
And what if Rudy had been genuine in wanting a relationship with her?
She’d assumed that his indication of interest in her in the second half of their first year at the academy had been a ploy to demean her. Workplace relationships never worked, and usually it was the woman who was pushed to move on when they ended. She’d thought he’d been attempting something similar: maneuver her into falling in love with him, and then, destroy both her self-respect and her professional standing when he dumped her.
If she’d thought he was genuine, would she have said yes?
She curled up tight in her bunk. She’d been so lonely at the academy. In his own way, perhaps Rudy had been just as lonely, the anointed son of his famous mother. Had her rejection, coming from her own insecurity, transformed his feelings into the insolence he subjected her to?
It was better to think that his asking her out had been a ploy. It was safer to concentrate on Aubree’s suggestion that Thelma’s exile to the Saloon Sector was the Gua family’s personal vindictiveness.
Still, when she finally fell asleep, Thelma remained haunted by the thought that if she’d been mistaken once, and overlooked a chance at love, she could do so again. It wasn’t that she regretted Rudy, but she would like to love someone who loved her.
Chapter 11
It wasn’t as if Thelma could see firsthand the black hole from where she sat in the Lonesome’s bridge, but she imagined that she could sense its presence. Viewing images of it, obtained via Lon’s complicated array of scanners, felt weird when you lurked at the safety perimeter of its pull.
Small, stable black holes like Zeph Omega 3 were labelled GDs—garbage disposals. Black Fury Industries had claimed this one, and had its heavy pollution factoroids built just beyond the GD’s siphon. A robo-tug shunted the slag and other dangerous byproducts to the edge of the black hole, which sucked them in and swallowed them. It was a neat, efficient, and profit-making venture.
“No bodies,” Max muttered.
Thelma swiveled in the navigator’s chair to give him a wide-eyed stare. “I thought that was a myth. Why would people go to all the trouble of transporting a body out here when there’s all of space to dump it in?”
“A body in space can come back to haunt you,” Lon said. “Whereas a black hole consumes a person body and soul.”
“You don’t really believe that?”
Max frowned over rows of data on his screen. “What I believe doesn’t matter. It’s what people out here believe that counts, and a fair few do believe that the spirits of people they’ve killed will haunt them unless they’re obliterated in a black hole. Some criminal gangs have arrangements with particular black hole industries to destroy corpses. Black Fury seems to be running a clean operation. I include them on my patrols to make sure it stays that way.”
He glanced up. “And if it doesn’t stay that way, then I can track back from the corpse to find their murderer and the criminal gang involved.”
“Ugh.”
As their patrol drew closer to the Ammo Belt and the edge of Max’s territory as sheriff, things got less creepy and more exciting. While the patrol had given every indication of being a regular one, in fact, Max had been sneaky. A joint exercise with the sheriff of the adjacent territory was planned.
“But isn’t this something Customs should handle?” Thelma asked as she walked with Max to the Lonesome’s training ring. The question was her attempt to tone down her eagerness. The mission would be dangerous; her first real world, live-fire exercise. She couldn’t wait. Max wasn’t leaving her behind in the safety of the Lonesome, although he insisted she had to practice her hostile spaceship boarding skills with him first. Since he walked a bit behind her, she could conceal her quick pinch of her wrist. Ouch! Nope. Not dreaming. She grinned.
Max sounded unaffected by the upcoming mission as he answered her question. “Customs is responsible for halting drug smugglers. This is about drug manufacturing. The freighter is an illegal drug lab, and it’s in interstellar space. That makes it interstellar sheriff business. Sheriff Pang and I have done this before. We have to act before the mercenary companies on Tornado get wind of the source of the Aksu. They’d go vigilante. Aksu messes up a person’s impulse control, and the effects can recur long after the drug was originally taken for its high.” Which was incredibly dangerous in a mercenary’s line of work. “The mercenary companies would go in not only to shut down the operation, but to send a message, and as much as I loathe drug dealers, neither Pang nor I want a bloodbath.”
Sheriff Pang’s territory included the planets of Tornado and Moonshine, as well as most of the asteroid belt rich with mining claims that was colloquially known as the Ammo Belt from its history of conflict and never-found bodies. He had two deputy-sheriffs working under him and over a dozen full-time deputies.
Max had Thelma. And Harry. But the AI wasn’t going on this mission, and Thelma suspected that Max’s decision not to include him had less to do with the other deputies’ discomfort in fighting alongside a mech, and more with a melancholy lurking in Harry. The AI feared being defined by his current body. He was more, so much more, than a killing machine.
For instance, he was an incredible inventor and manufacturer, as Thelma discovered.
Harry waited in the training ring for her and Max, and he had a combat suit for her.
“You made it?” She stroked the armored chest plate as she gazed at Harry. “You made me a combat suit?” Combat suits were expensive. Galactic Justice had made her pay for her utility suits. There was no way they’d have sprung for a combat suit. She’d expected to board the drug manufacturer’s freighter wearing the lifesuit Max had previously lent her.
“Only thing worse than taking a knife to a gun fight is going in underdressed,” Harry said. He rocked backwards as Thelma abandoned petting the combat suit and jumped at him to hug him.
She hadn’t known that the AI mech could be unbalanced, so she figured it was the surprise of her hug—of the physical expression of positive emotion—that shocked him.
Then he chuckled and hugged her back.
“All right. Mushy time’s over,” Max said, amused. “Suit up and we’ll get you familiar with fighting in a Harry-designed combat suit.”
The suit’s existence suggested that the time Harry spent shut away in his private quarters was productive in ways Thelma hadn’t dreamed of. AIs didn’t sleep. They didn’t slow down due to biological failings, like disease. They were “on” twenty four hours a day. Apparently, Harry spent some of that time on design ideas.
“I’ve put in a few additional features.” He watched her climb into the suit.
She struggled.
“You’ll get faster with practice,” Lon said.
Meantime, Max had donned his combat suit and when she was finally sealed into hers, he walked h
er through a range of exercises, gradually increasing the speed and complexity of what was asked of her.
“Enough for now,” Harry called a halt to the training.
Thelma climbed laboriously out of the suit and dropped, sweating, to the floor.
Max hooked his suit on to the extended arm of a waiting robot. “The drug lab freighter will be a good practice run for you.”
She panted in response.
Grinning, he grabbed her arm and hauled her up. “You need to rehydrate. Eat.”
Despite her usually effective deodorant, she could smell her sweat. “Shower first.”
“That would be good.”
She glowered, both because he was laughing at her and because he wasn’t sweating despite equal time in a combat suit.
However, when they boarded the drug manufacturers’ freighter four days later, she understood why he’d called the mission a practice run for her. The freighter’s crew and lab technicians behaved like mice frightened by a cat when Sheriff Pang’s ex-Navy cutter hove into view. It had been stealthed until it was close to the freighter. Its stealth technology didn’t rival the Lonesome’s, but was more than the drug manufacturers could detect.
With the freighter stationary, its inhabitants had powered down its engine. Unable to flee, the people onboard could only acknowledge that the sheriff had them cold—and try to hide, with an every person for themselves attitude.
When Sheriff Pang and his deputies locked to and boarded through the main hatch, and Max and Thelma locked to and boarded via the cargo hatch, the combined sheriff forces had to sweep the spaceship for the crew and illegal chemists who’d tucked themselves away in the most unlikely and awkward hiding places. There was no violent resistance, only passive, irritating, desperate attempts to evade the law.
Thelma hauled her final prisoner out from behind a false bulkhead in the head near the kitchen.
None of them struck her as criminal masterminds. Fortunately, their processing and interrogation fell to Sheriff Pang’s team since they’d been operating in his jurisdiction. Once the prisoners were secured in the freighter’s filthy recreation cabin and the drug lab dismantled sufficiently that nothing could explode, Thelma and Max returned to the Lonesome, but not to their original patrol route.
Sheriff Pang invited them to join his cutter in escorting the freighter to Tornado, the nearest planet and one with a permanent Deputy-Sheriff office. It was a friendly offer. “A Navy dreadnought is docked. I’ve heard rumors you served with some of the Star Marines aboard, Max. Grab some downtime.” It was good-natured advice from a man old enough to be Max’s father.
Max, in turn, invited Thelma. “A few of them will probably know your brother. But if you’d rather split off and not drink with your boss, that’s fine.”
“No. I’d like to hear some stories to blackmail Joe with.”
Rather than dress up, Thelma simply wore a utility suit; although thanks to Lon’s tailoring, that was way more dressed up than most utility suits.
Max also wore a utility suit, his being a dull blue. He wore a blaster on his belt, but left his hat on the Lonesome. They entered the mercenary planet of Tornado as ordinary citizens.
Drinking with Star Marines proved entertaining. Only a handful remembered her brother, but it wasn’t her brother the rest were interested in. The bar had a dance stage, and Thelma didn’t lack for willing partners. One sergeant, no taller than Thelma, threw her into lifts as easily as if she was made of feathers. She laughed and kissed his cheek before walking off the floor with him, hand in hand.
The kiss got catcalls. She glanced at Max and found him studying the remaining dancers.
A female corporal on his right watched Thelma. There was no animosity in her steady gaze, just challenge. Corporal Naomi Milligan had served with both Max and Joe. “Scuttlebutt says you claim to be tough, Bach.”
Max shifted his gaze from the dancers to Naomi.
The other eight Marines at the long table leaned in.
Like Naomi, Thelma had been pacing her drinks. She was sober and suddenly alert. “You willing to test me, corporal?” Win or lose—and she expected to lose—a fight against a Star Marine would only help her incipient reputation.
“Couldn’t do any less for Joe’s baby sister,” Naomi drawled. She was taller than Thelma, with muscles and reflexes honed through years of training and combat experience.
Thelma grinned. “When?”
“There’s a gym next door…”
Whispers around the table and spreading outward spoke of bets being placed.
Thelma didn’t as much as glance at Max. “Now works for me.”
The table stood as one. All the Marines and the same number of mercenaries headed for the gym.
“No words of warning?” Thelma muttered to Max as the cool air of Tornado hit them briefly before they entered the gym.
“Not my business what you do on your own time. I’ll record the fight for Harry’s viewing.” A smirk curved the corners of his mouth.
She groaned. Not only would she get her ass beat by a Star Marine corporal, Harry would pick apart her every failing—for her benefit.
Since Naomi wore the military equivalent of a utility suit, neither of them bothered changing for the fight. They merely took off their boots. If their audience would have preferred them to be wearing less clothing, well, that was their problem. For Thelma, at least, this was a serious fight.
The bell rang.
Naomi let Thelma get in the first hit, a jab to her right shoulder, but then it was a relentless barrage of which Thelma evaded a few, absorbed what she couldn’t avoid, and landed a couple of strikes, none of them incapacitating. The corporal had a wicked right elbow. Thelma saw it coming, ducked out of the way, and into Naomi’s knee as it rose up and struck her in the solar plexus. Thelma curled up on the ground, tapping out as she gasped for air.
Two minutes later, she was able to acknowledge the roar of the crowd. No one had expected her to beat the Star Marine corporal, but by lasting seven minutes, she’d won a few people their optimistic bets and she’d earned some limited respect.
“Looks like you’ll have to defend the Sheriff Department’s honor, Smith,” a large sergeant drawled from across the ring as Naomi helped Thelma limp off.
Thelma’s ribs and guts ached, but it was her left knee that had taken the worst damage. She’d need a session with the Lonesome’s medbot, probably accompanied by Lon’s fussing. Fussing sounded okay, actually. Later.
Thelma and Naomi stayed ringside as Max acknowledged the good-natured taunt and climbed into the ring. Like the women, he was barefoot; although Naomi had sent a private to fetch her and Thelma’s boots.
“You’re not going to get that boot on, are you, girl?” Naomi crouched and fitted Thelma’s left boot, lacing it tightly as the bell rang.
Max and the sergeant launched into a violent, flowing dance, their music the drumbeat of flesh smacking flesh.
“You’re a better fighter than you think,” Naomi told Thelma as they watched the men. “The difference between Max, Sarge Kobayashi, me and you…we’re in the moment, fighting. You lose half a second observing. You need to shake that mentality. You’re past the student stage where you need to prioritize learning from your opponent. Take them down.” She winced. “Like that.”
Max’s kick knocked Kobayashi down and out.
Three quarters of the crowd cheered. Sergeant Kobayashi was enough of a hard ass that there were plenty present who were thrilled to witness his loss.
“I’d best see to him.” Naomi ducked into the ring. She said something to Max in passing.
His head turned, finding Thelma, before he strode to her. “Naomi says you’ve done your knee?”
Thelma blew out an exasperated breath. “It’s blowing up like a balloon. I need to buy, borrow or steal a crutch.”
Someone found her one. The walk back to the Lonesome still wasn’t fun. She leaned against the wall of the escalator as it whisked them up to the spa
cedock. There were other people in the escalator cabin with her and Max, but no Star Marines. The Marines used the military escalator.
“It hurts,” she confided to him.
He put an arm around her, helping to prop her up.
Onboard the Lonesome, Lon diagnosed ligament damage via the medbot. “I’m injecting pain relief and nanobots. Then we’ll put your knee in a brace so that you don’t make things worse overnight while it’s healing.” Lon did not approve of her fighting a Star Marine corporal.
Harry, studying the video of the fight, didn’t approve of how she’d fought Naomi. He’d been on Tornado about his own private business, but had returned to the Lonesome a few minutes after Thelma and Max.
“Damn it, Harry,” Lon swore. “Leave the instruction till she’s out of pain and able to remember your wisdom.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Max fitted the brace to Thelma’s left leg. She lay on her bunk, Lon having switched on sensors and speakers in her cabin so that he could treat her. “Comfortable?” Max asked.
She grimaced. “Yeah. The brace fits.” Comfortable beyond that was still a stretch, even with pain relief kicking in.
“I’m going to monitor you through the night,” Lon said.
Usually her cabin was her private space. Just now it felt really full with one man, one AI mech, and one spaceship-embodied AI. Their concern was more overwhelming than their presence. “Thanks, Lon.” She sniffed. “It’s the pain relief that makes me weepy.”
Max touched her hair before he straightened and stepped back. “Tears don’t scare us.”
“Speak for yourself,” Harry said. He smiled at her from the doorway. “Goodnight, honey. Let Lon know if you need anything.”
In the morning her knee was tender, but the swelling had gone down and she could put her weight on both legs.
Space Deputy (Interstellar Sheriff Book 1) Page 11
