Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  But she’d been here too long to trust a sweet deal.

  “What the hell’s wrong with it?” she asked.

  “It’s work,” Maise said.

  “They’re all work,” Kerrie said, taking the shoes and locking them into the bottom desk drawer. She’d actually written them off more than a year ago. She had forgotten that she had loaned them to Maise for some ritzy Bar Association dinner.

  “Work you should do,” Maise said. “This is your acquittal.”

  Kerrie froze, mid lock. She stood up slowly and even—for a half second—stopped multitasking her schedule. She shut down all but her emergency links, leaving only the appointment clock running along the bottom of the vision in her right eye.

  “How come you don’t want it?” Kerrie asked. “You’ve never had an acquittal.”

  “How do you know?” Maise asked, without a smile. Her dark eyes were so serious that Kerrie tilted her head.

  “You have?”

  “Not all of us talk about our successes.” Maise’s tone held bitterness, and Kerrie understood. Successes here weren’t always one-hundred-percent positive. Most of them were bittersweet. “So why not have another one?” Kerrie asked.

  “I told you. It’s work. Real work. Research work.”

  Kerrie hadn’t done research work since she got here. She hadn’t had time.

  “They’re all research work and none of it gets done,” she said, realizing as she spoke she sounded like a lifer. “What makes this one different?” “The client is pregnant.”

  Kerrie closed her eyes. She hated pregnancy cases. She had one a month, maybe more, and they were all heartbreaking and sad and horrible. One client asked if she should abort the fetus rather than lose the court case; another wanted to find out if Kerrie would adopt the baby herself so that the child wouldn’t be considered a firstborn.

  “No,” Kerrie said. “No pregnancy cases.”

  “And the client says she’s a member of the Black Fleet.”

  That sent a wave of interest through Kerrie, so intense it felt like a live thing. She hadn’t had a feeling like that since law school. “She’s willing to admit that she’s part of a criminal organization to get out of an InterSpecies case?”

  “Yep,” Maise said. “You want it?”

  “I still don’t know why you’re not taking it.”

  Maise crossed her arms. “She has her own lawyer. Peyti.”

  She spit the word. The Peyti had the best legal minds in the Earth Alliance, but they could be difficult to work with. It wasn’t just their appearance, which was sticklike and gray. Their breathing masks made conversation difficult, and their insistence on following procedure to the letter usually offended the judges in the InterSpecies Courts.

  The judges here had to get through as many cases as possible on a single day or backlog would overwhelm everything. And preventing backlog was as important—maybe more important—than delivering justice.

  There was only so much room in the starbase’s jails and prisons, there were only so many courts, and there was only so much time. Everyone in the First District who ran afoul with the laws of another culture brought the cases here to the special courts set up to reconcile one species’ law with another.

  Technically, the cases were supposed to go through the offended culture’s courts, but everyone waived that part of the procedure so that the case could be tried in the InterSpecies courts. It wasn’t an appeals court— that was on a different starbase in a different part of the First District— but it might as well have been, given the nature of the arguments here. They were always based on procedure and technicalities, not on the facts of the case or the finer points of the law.

  There was no way Kerrie could learn the case law from twenty-five different cultures for her twenty-five different cases that she had today alone. She had to wing it, and the judges knew she was winging it, and the prosecutors knew she was winging it. The formalities helped, and the commonalities helped as well. And she did try to bone up. Most of the cases involved familiar cultures—Disty, Wygnin, Rev—although occasionally she got something weird like the Gyonnese or the Ssachuss.

  “Now the truth will out,” Kerrie said. “Your Peyti prejudice could get you in trouble, you know.”

  “It’s not a prejudice. I just don’t have the patience to deal with them,”

  Maise said.

  Which was as good an excuse as any, Kerrie thought but did not say. “When’s it on the docket?” Kerrie asked.

  “Noon.”

  “Noon?” Kerrie’s eyebrows went up. “Whose court?”

  “Judge Langer.”

  Kerrie rolled her eyes. “Not the easiest judge in the universe.”

  “But one who will listen.”

  Kerrie knew that to be true. “I take this, you take all of my cases for today.”

  “No can do,” Maise said. “I have seven I can’t rearrange.”

  “All right; twenty cases, my choosing.”

  “I said ten.”

  “I was going to say no. I still can,” Kerrie said.

  “You’re intrigued.”

  “Not enough to handle a tough case at noon and keep everything on my docket. Twenty cases, my choosing.”

  “Fifteen,” Maise said.

  “Done,” Kerrie said, and proceeded to shuffle through files. Four this morning that she hadn’t even looked at, keeping one. Three in the afternoon, and all of her evening docket—which was five. Plus three Please-God-Nevers that no one had been willing to take off her desk in more than two months.

  She removed her own name as defense counsel and added Maise’s before she sent the files to Maise, just so that there was no screw-up in the court listings.

  Maise sent one file so fat through Kerrie’s links that she actually got an overload warning. She had to switch the file to a different node, something she hadn’t had to do since law school.

  “You didn’t tell me she was a convicted felon,” Kerrie said.

  “I did too,” Maise said. “Black Fleet, remember? It’ll work out.”

  “It better,” Kerrie said, but Maise had already left.

  Kerrie had to mentally shuffle files and rearrange her entire schedule. It now seemed deceptively simple: one case at nine a.m. in Courtroom 61 and another at noon in Courtroom 495. Never mind that Courtroom 495 was about as far from the public defender’s office as possible. Never mind that Courtroom 61 was close.

  Kerrie had to review the new file—she couldn’t scan this one nor could she trust the Peyti lawyer who might have more years of experience, but who had probably never ever appeared in InterSpecies Court.

  And that was always a recipe for disaster.

  Not to mention the client. A pregnant felon, willing to move to criminal court rather than face whatever the hell she did somewhere inside the Earth Alliance.

  But Kerrie was intrigued. She wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

  Intrigued meant she’d pay attention, but intrigued also meant she could get emotionally involved.

  And emotionally involved here meant heartbreak of the worst kind.

  She set the thick file on AutoLearn, which would send the information directly to her brain. She hated AutoLearn, but she used it almost every day. AutoLearn didn’t give her any real understanding of the file. It didn’t even give her a good grasp of the facts. What it did was give her a sense of the file, a cursory knowledge of all of the details, which she would be able to find if she needed them during court.

  The biggest problem with AutoLearn, however, was that the learning was actually time-stamped, and it would expire in two weeks if not reinforced. She usually didn’t reinforce what she AutoLearned with real learning—the cases vanished that fast—but she had a hunch she might have to do so here.

  While that program fed information to her brain, she headed to holding for a moment with her other client. She let his file run in front of her left eye: Fabian Fiske, which had to be some kind of made-up name. If she had time, she’d
search the file to see if he legally changed his name somewhere along the way. But she didn’t have time.

  She barely had time to glance at the facts:

  Fabian Fiske worked for Efierno Corporation as a construction day worker. That fact alone made her cringe. Most of the defendants she got here were construction day workers. They signed up because they needed the work and waived the right to company protection should anything go wrong.

  Since construction workers usually went into strange areas before the bulk of the business itself, construction workers were more likely to break intercultural laws. And the least likely to have a good lawyer to defend them or have access to the corporation’s Disappearance services.

  Here was the problem, the fact of Kerrie’s everyday life since she graduated from law school and ended up in this godforsaken place: Everyone believed that someone accused of breaking the law of another culture ended up in front of one of thirty Multicultural Tribunals—and technically that was true. Technically, Earth Alliance InterSpecies Court was a branch of the Multicultural Tribunal for the First District. In practice, there was nothing multicultural about the courts Kerrie stood before. No panel of judges from different cultures heard these cases. It wasn’t practical.

  Instead, a single judge from a rotating group of judges from different Earth Alliance cultures handled cases like Fiske’s, usually with two or three questions, and a pound of the gavel. If a judge didn’t act quickly, the court system would get jammed, because contrary to popular belief, people got accused of breaking other culture’s laws all the time.

  That wouldn’t be a problem if the cultures weren’t so vastly different. Over its history, the Earth Alliance made treaties with a wide variety of alien cultures. Those treaties facilitated trade within the sector, making the Earth Alliance the most powerful governing body in the known universe.

  But the price of those treaties was steep—at least from the human perspective. The treaties all stated that the violator of a law got punished by the culture whose law was broken. It sounded straightforward, but the differences in cultures made for punishments humans—and many aliens—did not like.

  The most famous early case, and one every law school student studied, was of a man who accidentally stepped on a flower—a crime in the community where he was temporarily assigned for work—and he was sentenced to death.

  That sentence was carried out.

  As were thousands—millions—of others. Humans didn’t like that and refused over time to work for the large corporations. So the corporations developed a way of skirting the law; first by hiring the best lawyers for their people, and then when that didn’t work, by setting up Disappearance services, allowing the employees accused of the most egregious crimes to get a new identity, leave their lives, and slip away.

  Of course, those employees either paid for the service themselves or were high up enough in the corporate structure to qualify for a free Disappearance.

  Independent Disappearance services also existed, but they were so expensive that someone who worked as a construction day worker couldn’t afford the consultation fee, let alone the price of a full Disappearance.

  On her way to the holding section of the courthouse, Kerrie had to go through security—a small machine that scanned her entire body. Then she had to go through another scan as she walked through the double doors.

  The scans disrupted her file review, and she had to scan backward, missing—of course—the most important part: what, exactly, Fiske was accused of.

  She didn’t have trouble finding him. He was older than the image in his file by at least two decades, but he looked like a dried-out version of the man pictured. His hair was gray, his face lined, and his hands gnarled. The poorest of the poor. He couldn’t even get his hands enhanced so that he could do his job properly.

  “Fabian?” she asked.

  He stood, politely, and nodded at her. A man who followed rules. He wore a rumpled blue work shirt and muddy pants that he brushed off as she walked toward him.

  A trickle of compassion washed through her and she tamped it down. She couldn’t afford it any more than he could afford to have a real defense.

  “Do you have a suit?” she asked.

  “No, miss,” he said, inadvertently accenting their age difference and the fact that he had no idea who she was.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “My name is Kerrie Steinmetz. I’m your lawyer. In court, you have to call me Ms. Steinmetz.”

  If she let him speak at all, which she doubted she would.

  “All right,” he said softly, bowing his head.

  She sent a message across her links to Miguel, one of the paralegals. Need a suit from the closet, size—

  She glanced at him, unable to measure, visually. She wasn’t used to seeing men with such broad torsos and such slender legs. “What size do you wear?”

  “What?” Fiske blinked at her.

  “Suit. And shoes. What size do you wear?”

  He shrugged. He had never owned a suit.

  “Clothes, then,” she said. “Shirt, pants, shoes.”

  She repeated the shoes in case he was overwhelmed, and softly, he answered her, color rising in his cheeks. The kind of man who didn’t like revealing personal information. The kind of man who tried hard not to be noticed.

  What the hell had he done?

  She sent the information to the paralegal, then led Fiske to the chairs.

  “I need you to go over this with me,” she said. “Who is accusing you again?”

  “The Baharn,” he said.

  She actually felt a second of hope, and tamped that down. Unlike many of the cultures she dealt with, the Baharn accepted financial fines in lieu of an actual sentence.

  “And you . . . ?” She let her voice trail off.

  “Got drunk.” Fiske’s voice wobbled. “I don’t even remember it.”

  “But there’s a visual, right?” she asked, not because she knew, but because that was how these things worked.

  “I just passed out,” he said. “They said I touched one of their—I don’t know what they’re called. The kid of someone important.”

  “Kid?” Kerrie asked before going farther. There were no fines when someone tampered with a Baharn child, no matter what caste the child belonged to.

  “Teenager. Adult really, by our standards. Twenty-something. Full grown.”

  She nodded, feeling a bit of relief.

  “I brushed him when I passed out. What was some religious kid doing in a human bar?” His voice went up. “No one will tell me that.”

  The kid had been trolling for trouble. Or a percentage of a fine. But she wasn’t going to tell Fiske that, either.

  “Did someone ask your companions for money to make it all go away?” she asked.

  “They ran,” he said. “They left me.”

  Smart people. And he had passed out.

  The paralegal came in with a suit on a hanger, shoes dangling off it. “I need you to put this on for court,” Kerrie said to Fiske.

  He looked at it.

  “You have to dress properly for court or they won’t listen to you.”

  He took the clothes. “Where do I—?”

  There were no private areas. She nodded toward a back corner. “Over there,” she said. “We won’t look.”

  She thanked the paralegal and told him to wait for a second, then turned her back as Fiske changed, using that moment to review the visual. It went down exactly as he said, except that the “kid”—a long-horned ten-tacled creature so wide that he didn’t fit into a human chair—had hovered near the bar, clearly trolling.

  She couldn’t use that as an argument—that was an appeals argument or something that actually would have to go in front of a real Multicultural Tribunal with an expensive defense attorney arguing the case. Fiske didn’t have the money for that and she didn’t have the time.

  Then she looked at the fine and frowned.

  Fiske came back, shuffling in the shoes. They didn
’t quite fit him. He looked lost. He was lost, although not as lost as he had been before.

  “You need to pay the fine,” she said to him.

  He shook his head. “I can’t afford it.”

  She didn’t insult him by telling him it was a small fine. To her, it was a small fine. To him, it probably was a fortune.

  “You can’t afford not to,” she said. “If you go in front of the judge and you don’t pay the fine, he’ll send you to Baharn lock-up. Then someone will brush against you and the fine will go up. By the time you leave that place, you will have accidentally touched half a dozen Baharn, and each time, you’ll receive a brand new fine.”

  “They can’t do that,” he said.

  “Of course they can. You’re already considered guilty of the crime. You’ve just compounded it. You get five years for every unpaid fine. After two weeks, you’ll probably have forty years to serve. And after a month . . .” She shook her head, then softened her voice. “It’s a death sentence, Fabian. You have to pay the fine.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have work. I don’t have the money. My family will be destitute.”

  “What will happen to them if you are in prison for the rest of your life?” she asked.

  He lowered his head.

  In a gentler tone, she said, “The court will put you on a payment plan. You can pay as little as you like, and you can stretch the payments out for the rest of your life, but that’ll keep you out of a Baharn prison.”

  He raised his head, his eyes wide. “I thought you could get me out of this. I was drunk. Can’t we go to the judge and say it was an accident?”

  “We can,” she said. “He won’t listen. And honestly, can you prove it?”

  “What?” Fiske asked, clearly shocked.

  “Can you prove that you didn’t brush against that Baharn on purpose?”

  “I was drunk,” he said. “I passed out.”

  “Can you prove that?” she asked. “Were tests conducted at the scene?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But my friends—”

  “Ran. And they’re not on this starbase, and you don’t have the money to send for them. It’ll cost more to bring them here than the entire fine with penalties and interest. Pay the fine, Fabian.”