You Have Been Judged: A Space Opera Adventure Legal Thriller (Judge, Jury, & Executioner Book 1)

by Craig Martelle

  “Okay, maybe I do, but it’s in the sense of putting a puzzle together so that there are no holes. You will be able to defend your bar before the Queen and the universe! No one can take it away from you, except for AGB Enterprises if you violate the branding or fail to make your purchases from them or fail to pay them, although you’ve made that payment automatic by agreeing to use AGB Enterprises’ Accounting and Banking system as declared on this form.” Rivka dug halfway through the stack and pointed to a page.

  Terry didn’t bother to look at the document. He was amazed by the victorious look on her face.

  “I feel like there should be a fist-pump or something.”

  Her smile evaporated, and she repeated, “You are an angry man.”

  A drunk patron pounded on the bar, demanding service. The bartender waved him off, refusing to serve him. The drunk man slid close to Rivka.

  “Whatcha got there?” he asked as he pushed Rivka and reached a dirty hand toward the pile of papers. Rivka caught him by the wrist.

  “Don’t touch the contract,” she told him, her voice low and steady.

  “Don’t touch me!” he replied and grabbed for her. She let go, caught an ear in each hand, and pulled his head downward. She drove her leg upward. His face met her knee, and that was the end of the confrontation.

  “Assault, battery, and interference in a confidential attorney-client conversation.” He moaned and held his face. She kicked him in the ribs. “Justice is served.”

  “Holy crap!” Terry looked at her with newfound respect. “You can do that? Judge, jury, and executioner?”

  She looked at the man rolling around on the floor. “No one was executed, but yes I can. We are authorized to mete out Justice when the cases are clear-cut, like this one. There’s video. He’s guilty, so fuck that guy.”

  “If someone messes with our bar, are you going to fuck them up, too?” Terry asked with a big smile.

  “Not if you don’t sign those contracts,” she countered.

  TH turned to Char. “I love my lawyer.”

  “Of course, you do, now keep signing.”

  Terry Henry’s contract was the last legal matter she completed as an intern. In the eyes of the Queen, she had never been just an intern. Rivka Anoa had always been the Queen’s Barrister, a gifted champion for Justice...

  1

  The Judge flowed through the door to loom over the court. The trial had come to a close, and it was the moment of truth, or maybe the moment of Justice. Barrister Anoa had built a sound case and argued well.

  The jury would have to put him away. She nodded politely to the defense. Atticus “Custer” Tikabow, her old friend, had been her opponent, although the lawyers themselves didn’t look at things that way. They argued different points of law. The jury decided, and the counsels wiped their hands of it all and went back to their offices. Or the golf course. The Judges had to mete out punishment. In cases without a jury, they heard the evidence, ruled, and ordered the punishment carried out instantly.

  Punishment up to and including death. Custer’s client was slimy and came across as a weasel. He sat closest to the jury, so they had to see it. His mere presence had been enough for them to decide. Her brilliant arguments had been frosting on the cake.

  She remained standing, confident and proud.

  “Would the jury read the verdict?” the Judge ordered. The courtroom remained standing while the Judge leaned back in his recliner.

  “The jury finds the defendant not guilty.”

  “What?” Rivka blurted as her eyes shot to the defendant.

  Custer and the man were hugging. He winked at her over his counsel’s shoulder. She was furious, and her head started to swim. She leaned on the table to keep from falling over.

  “My appreciation goes to the jury for your work in this case. You are released from your duties.” The Judge intoned the words as he did at the end of every jury trial. “Defendant is free to go.”

  A phrase rarely heard, since the evidence was usually clear by the time it went to court. People pled to lesser crimes to avoid the harshness of a trial sentence.

  The Judge stood and walked out.

  Rivka looked frantically around the courtroom. A din of voices filled the air and visitors were filing out the back. The jury was leaving by a side door. The defendant and Custer were arm in arm, chatting like old friends.

  “But he did it!” she blurted.

  “Nope,” Custer replied. Her colleague was easy on the eyes. He’d won, and she’d lost. She shook his hand as decorum dictated, but she wanted to crush it.

  And him.

  The defendant leaned past his lawyer to grab Rivka by the arm and yanked her toward him. Emotions and images flooded her mind. Overwhelming joy at being set free. Disdain for the system that couldn’t find him guilty, when he had done it! She saw the murder clearly in his mind, and she knew he was just getting started.

  He had hissed something at her, but she didn’t hear it since the images were so overwhelming. The Queen had known of her gift, but Rivka generally kept her hands to herself. She considered it an invasion of others’ privacy to see their random thoughts—but sometimes the thoughts weren’t so random.

  “Murderer!” she snarled. The defendant started to laugh and winked again before thanking his lawyer one last time and walking away.

  Custer looked at her, but her expression told him to hold his tongue. He nodded curtly and followed his client out.

  What the hell just happened? Rivka wondered. A fucking murderer walks free? “No!”

  The courtroom’s paneled walls absorbed the sound of her anguish. Sometimes the law doesn’t always do what we want. Better that nine guilty men walk free than one innocent man goes to jail.

  She recalled that from her law-school lectures, as well as the old adage, “You can’t win ‘em all.”

  It didn’t make her feel any better.

  “I deserve a drink!” she declared to the empty court. “If it would please Your Honor, I’m outta here. Maybe through the dull pounding of a hangover, I can figure out what the fuck went wrong. If nothing else, tonight I’m going to drown that shit.”

  Rivka blinked the fog away. A bloody knife was in her hand, and she looked at it stupidly. “Where’d you come from?” she asked the blade. It didn’t answer.

  The blood was fresh; still crimson, not yet starting to darken. She shook the knife, and a couple of drops flew off.

  “Damn!” she exclaimed when one hit her pants. She shook her leg, but there it was —a stain she’d have to wash out. When she put her foot down, she saw the body. She’d almost stepped on it. “Where’d you come from?”

  She crouched near it and checked his neck for a pulse with her left hand. Still warm. No rigor mortis.

  And no pulse. She looked at the knife still clutched in her hand. She tossed it away and looked closer at the victim. “Oh no,” she moaned when she saw who it was. “You deserve to die for what you did, but not here. Not like this.”

  Her boots were in the growing puddle of blood, and her fingers were stained. Her prints were on the knife. “Oh no,” she moaned again, ramming her eyes shut as she forced her mind to tell her what happened.

  Booze. Rage. The murderer!

  She saw herself follow him. He’d led her into an alley where he’d confronted her; asked her if she knew what it was like to make love to a winner. The rage had taken over. The knife was his. He had tried to defend himself with it.

  And failed.

  Her mind raced. Actus reus, the act of committing the crime, had been completed. Mens rea, her mental state, was irrelevant. Prima facie, “on the face of it,” as the Latin would describe, she was guilty as sin.

  “Fuck this,” she told the corpse. “See you in court, bitch.”

  She stood and started to walk away, but her knees were weak. She wasn’t like him, okay with killing in cold blood. He had pulled the knife, but she had already attacked him. Would she lie to protect herself? No—but she wouldn’t incr
iminate herself either. When the authorities came, she’d stay silent. The burden of proof was on them.

  It wouldn’t take much.

  “You fucker,” she growled. “Not happy with taking one life, you have to take two.” She wanted to spit on him, but didn’t want to leave her DNA. She picked up the knife and wiped off the handle, then dropped it back on the ground.

  She sneered as she walked past the corpse.

  I could use a cup of coffee, she thought with false bravado. Her head started to swim. Guilt. Pain. His emotional cry of victory still ringing in her mind. She staggered as if drunk, although since the effects of the booze had already dissipated, she shouldn’t have been. She raged against it, stopping to collect herself.

  “A cup of coffee will be good,” she said aloud as if trying to convince herself. With a calmer spirit she walked from the alley, stopping when a police unit pulled up. An officer jumped out and fixed her with a stare. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Yes, by getting on your knees and putting your hands on top of your head.”

  “Well, that’s not how I expected this night to end,” she remarked weakly.

  Rivka knew where she was the instant she awoke. She didn’t remember them stunning her, or the chase which had quite likely preceded it, but she did know where she was.

  A Federation holding cell, gray and cramped and silent. She had seen them often enough, but never from the inside.

  It was a tiny windowless thing, and the metal of the walls was unadorned save for a small digital screen to her left, momentarily blank. It was protected by a shield of shatter-proof glass.

  Below it was a single line of script: Etheric Federation Intergalactic. She frowned.

  She was in a holding cell in the intergalactic quarter, which meant they were taking her into space—which was well outside the norm for an open-and-shut case. She tried to think through the implications, but the cell felt like it was closing in. She needed her office. Her datapad. Access to the legal database. She needed freedom and information, neither of which were available.

  She was left with speculation, which was the worst way to think.

  Rivka saw two possibilities.

  One, they were sending her to Jhiordaan, the penal planet of the Federation, and––if the stories were true––a living nightmare.

  That option seemed unlikely. Her killing of the man had not only been unjustified, it would leave a deep scar on the reputation of the Federation. Lawyers weren’t supposed to kill defendants who had been found not guilty.

  Not ever. Although not guilty was a far cry from innocent.

  Two, public execution. She had thought they would be as eager as possible to punish her, to dispel any doubt as to their integrity.

  Option two seemed most likely, yet she was in an intergalactic holding cell. She needed more information.

  The door to her cell hissed open and she greeted the sound like a breath of fresh air. She stood with her hands behind her back, ready to interrogate whoever entered to get the information she needed to better understand her situation and better plan her future.

  “What the hell?”

  Custer.

  “You!” She spat the word with all the hatred she could summon, lips twisting in a vicious snarl. “That man was guilty, damn you! How dare you come here? You, who defended a murderer and let him––”

  “I came to say goodbye.” His voice was barely above a whisper, yet it sliced somehow through the fury of her words. “You’re going to see the High Chancellor, Rivka. I don’t know why, but I know that much. It could be good for you. I figured you’d like to know.”

  How she hated him for this compassion when he should be the one to hang.

  He sighed and shook his head. “Perhaps they will let you live. I cannot say, but we can hope––”

  “I don’t want your hope!” she yelled. A volcano of inner rage threatened to erupt. “You defended a murderer, Custer! You helped him beat the system!”

  “I was doing my job, just like you,” he countered. Anger flashed across his face before his expression softened. “I thought it was a losing case, too. I don’t know what happened.”

  “One day the truth will come out!” she yelled. “One day they’ll know. They’ll see what you defended! One damned day, the world––”

  He shook his head and turned away, slamming the door in her face.

  I need information and what do I do? All the talking. I’m a dumbass. I could have asked why I’m in an Intergalactic cell. Who is hearing the case? What does the public know? So many questions and I squander them on a self-righteous “fuck you.” So, I’ve got that going for me, she thought.

  The High Chancellor? What could he possibly want? But only silence answered her. She did a set of pushups, then sit-ups, then more pushups. Don’t want to be all flabby when I say goodbye in the sparky chair.

  2

  Why would Custer stop by? It wasn’t to taunt her. They’d been friends, of a sort. Maybe colleague was a better term, but they had been that before becoming two people who could enjoy each other’s company over a beer.

  That was before he had defended a murderer. Could she separate the person from the act? Maybe someday, but not today. As a lawyer, he was well-versed in massaging the truth. Some would say “lie,” but not Rivka. She knew how to see through that. She had been trained for it, but she was gifted in it, too.

  “I love the law,” she told her cell. And it was that very same law that was going to condemn her. She embraced the title of Barrister. It made her sound stately.

  And old. She liked the impression that left with people. The Queen’s Barrister. People expected an old guy, but then she showed up—short, smiling, and young.

  Too young to be executed.

  The cell door hissed open. She waited with her hands behind her, thinking calm thoughts to help her keep from biting the next person’s head off. She hoped it was Custer. Not to apologize. Never that. But to ask the questions she wanted answers to.

  This time it was the guards she had expected last time, the ones who would take her to her fate. To her legally-delivered Justice.

  A hulking Federation guard leaned in, ready with a stun club. She tilted her head. The man was twice her size. She couldn’t try to run past him since he filled the doorway.

  “Really?” Rivka blurted before holding her hands in front of her so she could be cuffed.

  “Really?” he parroted as he flexed the muscles of one arm. He stepped aside and pointed to the doorway. She let her hands fall to her sides.

  “Am I supposed to run so you can shoot me while trying to escape?” she asked, backing deeper into the cell.

  “And I thought I hated fucking lawyers on the outside. The High Chancellor wants to see your dumb ass.”

  “You know what they say,” she started. He looked at her blankly. “Everybody likes a little ass, but nobody likes a smartass. I’m not sure about a dumbass, though.”

  The man shook his head as he chuckled. He jabbed a thumb toward the door after adopting an angry scowl.

  “What does the High Chancellor want with me?” she asked.

  The guard rolled his eyes, shook his head, and herded her toward the door. Three guards waited outside, each more massive than the one before. Resigned to her fate, she shuffled into the corridor and assumed her position in the middle of the man-box. Together they stepped off, the guards looking straight ahead.

  She studied them as if their demeanor would suggest what was coming. None of them gave anything away. Her mind was free from intruding thoughts. She brushed against one of the guards, hoping contact would help her see what he was thinking. He pushed her away from him, but not before she saw the image of someone in his mind. She checked his ring finger and saw the gold band. He was thinking of his wife.

  “Are you allowed to speak?” she persisted, wishing she were taller.

  “There’s nothing for us to talk about. Nothing that matters, anyway.” The man who flanked her on the r
ight sounded as if his mouth were full of gravel.

  Well, that’s cheerful. Rivka stopped trying. “I have plenty to talk about and lots of questions. Maybe you can answer some for me: why am I being held in the intergalactic section?”

  She had not worked on this side––the disciplinary side––of Justice; she had only helped determine who was guilty. She left sentencing to the Judges. Sometimes that meant capital crimes; crimes for which a person could be executed.

  She had never wondered what it was like for the men who executed prisoners; who saw the sentences carried out. The guards were only tools of Justice, just as she was. Knives to carve the cancers, as the legal system determined them to be, out of society. Cancers, as she told juries they were.

  She’d never imagined she might be the one cut by the very blade she had touted as sacrosanct.

  It was a short walk to the High Chancellor’s office, but her mind raced through a broad range of possibilities. None of them made any sense. All were bald-faced speculation, the type barristers despised because it served no purpose. Distill the evidence and present it to the jury, who determined what fact was and wasn’t. That was how it worked.

  “What kind of music do you listen to?” she asked to fill the void.

  “How about you shut the fuck up and hear the sound of silence?”

  “That’s a good one. How about we add a big bucket of blow me to the playlist?” Rivka wasn’t good at taking a miscarriage of Justice lying down. If she was going to be sent to Jhiordaan or executed, she had nothing to lose. “We could play Hall of the Mountain King.”

  “I do like that one,” one of the other guards agreed as he stepped aside to show her into the High Chancellor’s chambers.

  Rumor had it that High Chancellor Wyatt was a vampire. Rivka didn’t know. She had seen no evidence one way or another. In person, he seemed human. Some said that he did not drink blood. Others said he feasted on prisoners before they were executed, and that was why the execution count was so high in his jurisdiction. They were the High Chancellor’s buffet. Rivka doubted it.