Judge, Jury, & Executioner Boxed Set

by Craig Martelle

  Rivka’s diatribe trailed off, jaw tightening as she realized how absurd she sounded. She didn’t have the slightest chance. “He was guilty, High Chancellor!” she blurted desperately. So much for protocol. “He was guilty, and I felt it. I knew it, though I can’t explain why.”

  The High Chancellor frowned, a grave but mild twisting of the lips which morphed gradually to a deeper scowl. He shifted in his chair, and one slender-fingered hand rose above the surface of his desk. In it he clutched a graceful jeweled dagger, double-edged, which he twirled lightly. He seemed not to notice in the slightest, but Rivka found herself transfixed, staring at the weapon. Did he mean to frighten her?

  I’m about to die, she lamented bitterly. Am I not frightened enough already?

  “You knew he was guilty, but you cannot explain why. Unfortunate. If you killed a man without explanation, how can Justice save you? If you killed a man with legal justification, however...” He shrugged with theatrical vagueness.

  What? Rivka stared at him in mounting bewilderment. Justice wasn’t supposed to save her, not her specifically. It was supposed to save society; ensure that rightness prevailed. “If I killed a man without legal justification, High Chancellor?”

  “Laws can be adjusted. Hearts, some say, cannot.” He grinned. She wasn’t sure if she had seen vampire’s fangs. “If you killed a man and had any sort of explanation, lawful or unlawful, then I would hear it, Barrister.” The dagger spun in his ancient fingers, blade glinting yellow in the gentle lamplight.

  “It was like I…” She stumbled for a moment, grasping for words which would not make her sound insane. “Like I fell into his mind and brushed against his thoughts. I couldn’t hear them, not really, but I could feel them…” She shook her head helplessly.

  “I don’t know what it was like!” she conceded before boldly meeting his crimson eyes. “I felt his emotions, his joy at having gotten away with murder, his arrogance that he was above the law, and I knew that he was guilty. I also knew he would do it again, so if he walked away, more innocents would lose their lives.”

  She waited for a chain of straining heartbeats, confident in her conviction but afraid it would not sway him. He seemed to be staring into and through her, and yet at the same time had forgotten she was there. The knife spun between his fingers, utterly silent and never slowing.

  “High Chancellor?” she began tenuously. “I felt his guilt, but…” She tried not to sound like an idiot. “I still don’t know why I killed him, not really. I was shocked after the trial. I needed some time to get away, to walk, to have a drink. I have no idea what compelled me to confront him or why I decided to kill him, but I did. I remember it clearly enough. I expect I’m supposed to feel bad about it, but I don’t. Does that make me a psychopath?”

  The High Chancellor finally looked away. “It makes you something,” he said vaguely before leaning forward to fix her with his piercing gaze again. “You hear things in your mind, you say? Feelings and thoughts?”

  “No. I mean, yes, High Chancellor. It hasn’t happened before, at least not as intensely as this. And not proper thoughts, in the sense of words and sentences. More like random emotions and images.” She struggled to find the words. “I can feel each distinct individual and sense their emotions, but it all blurs together. It’s such a storm I can hardly tell one person from the next, let alone pick out what they are actually thinking. It’s more of just a––”

  He interrupted her by coughing once and raising a hand for silence. With ease he stopped spinning the dagger, although he still grasped it by its glittering hilt. In the space of a breath, it vanished somewhere into his robes.

  She couldn’t feel anything from the High Chancellor; no emotion, no random thoughts. It was as if she were standing by herself in an empty room.

  The High Chancellor stood and rolled back his billowy sleeves with businesslike resolve, snatching a quill and paper from his desk. Rivka stifled a flutter of surprise, realizing he had been slouching the entire time, his figure hidden by his robes. And those forearms! She had thought him as an old creature, still sharp of mind but fading beyond his physical prime. All worn and ragged corners and angles, like a desk with years of varnish rubbed away.

  But beneath the thickness of his robes, High Chancellor Wyatt was huge, a looming specimen of a man with a trim waist and a chest as broad as twice her shoulders. Even performing such a simple task as lifting the pen his forearms rippled with muscle, traced by a network of veins so prominent she was surprised they did not burst from his skin.

  Rivka wondered distantly what he did in his free time to maintain such a body which so perfectly reflected physical power.

  “Rivka Anoa,” he began mildly, the words incongruously gentle for a vampire. The rumors… But then again, what if the rumors weren’t true? “Are you aware that the Queen’s Rangers have been disbanded?”

  What? “I am,” she stated simply. What does that have to do with anything?

  “Yes, indeed.” The High Chancellor nodded. “The Queen’s Rangers were deemed a hazard and a liability to Federation integrity. They were too obvious a violation of the universal accountability we hope to maintain over our constituency. There were numerous complaints. Talk of convictions made without the law, of action without oversight and nonexistent consequences. The title ‘Rangers,’ it seems, spoke far too much of vigilantes in the night.”

  Rivka nodded, and her mind raced in a new direction.

  As the man said, the Queen’s Rangers had acted completely without oversight and left in their wake both chaos and peace, a storm of bureaucratic destruction which had been torturous for Rivka’s branch to remedy. She had always entertained the private fancy that if she ever met a Ranger, she’d punch him squarely in the face and then ask him if that helped him see the need for lawyers.

  High Chancellor Wyatt smiled at her confusion, fangs bright white against the ruby hardness of his lips. “Complaints, yes. Some claimed they enacted violence without the clarity of law.’ ”

  Just as they had done, so had she. “And the Rangers were punished accordingly, High Chancellor?” Of course. She should have seen it coming.

  “No.” He smiled unnervingly. “The Rangers themselves claimed they enacted ‘Justice without the twisting of the law,’ so we changed their names. We formally disbanded them, retrained them, and reassigned those people. They are now called ‘Magistrates.’”

  Rivka blinked. “You took Rangers and made them lawyers?” She had always thought of Rangers as a horde of trigger-happy cowboys set loose upon the universe.

  “Meting out Justice is not for the faint of heart.”

  The High Chancellor studied her intently, and she grunted uncertainly. “I guess I never…” she started to say, but stopped when he shook his head.

  “I have business to attend to!” He smiled brightly. “You have given me much to think about. Guards!”

  The door opened and the guards filed in, surrounded her, and led her away.

  She replayed the conversation in her head start to finish, and then again. By the time they showed her into a cell, she realized that she was in a different place. She had been so absorbed, she didn’t remember which way they’d come.

  “Dammit!” she exclaimed.

  “There she is,” the first guard said, giving her a hearty push and closing the door behind her. It whooshed shut with a certain finality. Gone were days of a large deadbolt slammed into the frame with the forlorn click of a heavy lock.

  “Fine!” she yelled after them, shaking her head at her failure to gather information. She chided herself, “You might be a good barrister, but you suck as an investigator.”

  She made a face and stuck out her tongue at the closed door.

  “You suck, too,” she told no one in particular.

  She sat on the floor of the barren cell and began to explore her mind, looking for hidden answers to her questions. The High Chancellor’s words played over and over. He had told her everything and nothing at the s
ame time.

  The epitome of a barrister’s conversation.

  When she finally fell asleep, it was to the constant thrum of Rangers stealing through the night wearing the robes of a Magistrate.

  Chapter Three

  Rivka awoke with a start. “Son of a bitch,” she grumbled when she realized that she was still in her cell.

  The door was open and light flooded in.

  “What now, butt stains?” she asked when a pair of guards entered.

  “Let’s go,” one of them ordered, and they led her into the corridor. Silently one of the guards grasped her by the elbow, helping guide her down the corridor.

  She felt no anger or subterfuge from him. She wanted that to calm her, but it didn’t. The only sound was the echo of their boots on the metal floor. A forlorn noise, harbinger of a one-way trip.

  She tried to maintain her dignity as they walked, even though she was unsure the last time she’d had a shower. And she had to pee.

  “Potty break for the perp?” she asked. They stonewalled her and kept walking.

  As her eyes slowly adjusted, Rivka realized they were leading her to the transport hangar. If they had been moving her somewhere on the planet, they would have taken her a different way.

  They are sending me to space.

  She glanced sideways at her guards, knowing they wouldn’t tell her. Rumors of the penal planet Jhiordaan leapt into her mind. Speculation, the destroyer of all reason. “Fuck off,” she mumbled.

  Rivka also cursed within her mind, wishing she could have a few more moments with the High Chancellor. Just a few more…but it wasn’t to be. Lamenting the past was as useful as speculation. Like her impending trip to Jhiordaan.

  Not going to Jhiordaan, dumbass! she tried to tell herself. What’s your game, High Chancellor? Some of us don’t play as well as you.

  Some of us aren’t even in the same stadium. Or the city where the stadium is located, she corrected.

  Her guards were distinctly grim and silent—even more so than the last, if that were possible. Jhiordaan for sure, she thought with dread, studying their stony gazes. No execution for me, but I have been condemned to something worse than death as an act of mercy for the mad.

  But men did not become this hard from taking prisoners just anywhere. Men became this hard from taking prisoners to hell over and over and over again. It no longer bothered them, as she’d thought when earlier she had touched the guard.

  They were insulated from the pain. She fought to maintain a barrister’s dignity—do the crime, do the time—yet her knees grew weak.

  A guard grabbed her arm and half-carried her to a waiting motorized cart. He unceremoniously dumped her into a seat and slid in beside her, bumping her into the middle. The other guard climbed in the other side.

  “I’m not liking this man sandwich,” she remarked, looking at them. The guards refused to meet her gaze. “Can’t you fuckers talk? What the hell? I’m on my way to some shithole, and you give me the stone face.”

  “Stop that.” One of the guards shook her roughly, but she saw his eyes soften with compassion.

  So they weren’t completely devoid of feeling.

  The transport hangar was a colossal place, with a high vaulted ceiling reinforced by enormous ribs of steel. Beneath its spreading dome were dozens of varied spacecraft arrayed in harmonious chaos. Sleek and silvery fighters lined the flanks of the room, positioned for speedy departures. Hulking freighters towered above her in the very center, three of them with loading doors swung wide and a steady stream of hovercarts ferrying cargo to and from. Scattered around was a motley collection of lesser craft—transports and interplanetary cruisers. There were even a couple deep-space Seekers.

  Rivka remembered her childhood fascination with Seekers. That was the common term for the Empire’s exploration ships, the ones outfitted to venture into uncharted quadrants far beyond the range of standard intergalactic travel. She had always dreamed of joining a Seeker crew one day, and perhaps even piloting the ship herself.

  Her smile slipped, then broke. She didn’t think they recruited Seekers from Jhiordaan.

  Silently the cart wove through men bustling about with hovercarts or boxes or bundles of hoses. One company of blue-suited pilots trotted in formation across the cart’s path, straps flapping loosely from the white uniform helmets in their hands.

  They saluted her guards as they passed, but Rivka hardly noticed. It all became a soundless blur—colors without meaning—as she traveled closer to the next step in her incarceration.

  They took her to a tiny intraorbital shuttle, nothing more than a cockpit and a single passenger’s seat into which she was manacled, facing aft.

  One of the guards was apparently a pilot, because he buckled himself into the cockpit in front of her and dismissed his comrade with a wave. The ship’s thrusters engaged with a steady hum and the craft slid smoothly towards the vast open portal of the hangar.

  Rivka wondered desperately how hard it would be to free herself. Perhaps she could feign unconsciousness, or wait until they landed and the man came back to free her. Maybe they would still be alone in the moments before he led her outside wherever they landed. Her hands would still be bound, of course, but perhaps she could lash out with a foot and kick his pistol away, leap across the gap between them and smash him in the––

  Idiot! He’s armed and trained to handle violent criminals. These men had her trussed, and she was as helpless as a kitten. She couldn’t try anything even if she wanted to.

  The pilot’s body blocked her forward view, but a tiny square window was set into the cargo door of the transport. Through it, she could make out the hangar’s organized chaos as they pulled away.

  The ship swept into the open sky and the city that had only recently become Rivka’s home dwindled away beneath her, a massive sprawl of stately domes and gleaming spires interwoven with hordes of lesser buildings, squat and tiny, clustered close together like so many child’s blocks.

  Rivka stared out the side window as the ship raced upward, marveling at the chaos and insignificance of it all. It was so small. And then it too was gone, melding into the tangled patchwork of hues and textures that defined the surface of her world. Shining cities and barren wilderness and scraps of drifting cloud obscured from Rivka’s eyes. Land stretched away in all directions, and the metal borders of her tiny window blocked the horizon from her view.

  Farther still, and she could see the globe itself. They drifted away from it with a smoothness and silence and finality that made her breath catch.

  She knew there were other things out there, of course. Countless things. Worlds and races and entire other galaxies.

  Rivka had known, all her life that it was the Queen’s vision to see them connected. She had heard the stories and watched the videos. She’d known, in a vague and detached way, that she was contributing to something larger; something which stretched beyond the narrow, winding streets where she pursued her work.

  But to see it all rush away beneath her?

  There was a sudden tiny click, barely perceptible, and Rivka realized that the ship had stopped moving. She waited, forcing her mind away from speculation of the next horrible thing, and then the next. Rivka collected data, the information she would use to shape her perception and make her case. That was what barristers did. It was her comfort zone.

  “Let’s go.” The pilot stood and approached her from the cockpit, grabbing her by the arm and unshackling her from the chair. He dragged her to her feet as if she weighed no more than a whisper. “Out.”

  “Where are we?” she managed to ask, but he didn’t answer. He led her to the hatch, and she clambered up the ladder at his direction. He followed her up, watching her warily. Her shackles weighed her down and she was unable to resist, although she wasn’t sure she even wanted to. Rivka had more data to collect before she could pass judgment. Speculation was the mind-killer, and her mind was fresh and vibrant. It was her strength.

  It wouldn’t fail he
r now.

  The ship quivered slightly from a force somewhere outside, and the chamber echoed with a series of metallic clicks. After a moment the hatch slid open to reveal a boarding corridor attached to the top of the shuttle.

  We didn’t land, she realized. We are outside of another ship or we—

  Two pairs of muscled arms hauled her out, setting her not ungently on her feet. “Where are we?” she asked in as firm a voice as she could muster while trying to peek out around the massive bodies of her two new guards. The broad windows of the corridor revealed nothing except the void of space and a scattering of feeble stars. Her stomach lurched.

  The hatch leading to the shuttle closed. Her previous guard would be returning home. Being handed over to the new guards felt like one more nail in her coffin. She sighed heavily and trundled along with her keepers, powerless to do anything besides wait and see what there was to see.

  Gentle as they might have been, they did not answer. Without so much as a nod for the pilot who had brought her here the two men marched her down another long metallic corridor and through a series of chambers.

  All around her people scurried or stood in earnest conversation, peering into monitors and chattering into headphones and gesturing toward an assortment of display screens on the wall. There were windows in several of the chambers, and through one she saw the tiny blue-green orb of the planet, swept by pale clouds which looked as solid as ice from such a distance.

  It’s so small! she marveled, and wondered at the countless millions that comprised just the known universe.

  Rivka’s curiosity spiked when they led her to a tiny white-walled chamber and left without a word. A long mirror lined one wall, and there was a single table in the center with two chairs, one on each side. There were no decorations on the walls. An interrogation room?