A Justice Provider's Tale 05

Chapter 5

I was over the ledge pulling her with me and we fell towards a grizzly death. At least that how it must have appeared to these goons.

I was human as I told you for the most part, and that I did have some cybernetic implants. Nothing flashy or illegal, but having a personal gravo adjuster implanted, made it easy to adjust to the many different gravitational conditions and also equalize the strength and agility advantage so many beings had over us humans.

I turned the Gravo adjuster with a mental command, to five percent negative, and instead of falling we were slowly rising. In all this, she hasn’t screamed.

My grip on her wrist must have to hurt her bad because my muscles were bionic enhanced and I was basically three times as strong as a standard human, but I dared not to soften my grip. A crushed hand could be fixed. There was nothing left to be fixed after a fall from this height. Dangling from my left arm I still felt the weight of a grown woman, no matter how slender she was.

My right hand brushed over the auto release of my holster and the TKU jumped into my gloved hand. Nothing could have felt better. The TKU dialed to the Max, I fired. Four gram of Uranium heated to ten thousand degrees plasma state slammed through the floor of the Taxicab at near light speed. The TKU was one of the few weapons that still had recoil, and it drove me against the upward drift. Whoever sat on that Taxi’s driver’s seat had himself a new bumhole that reached all the way through his cranium and the roof of the taxi.

I increased the up-drift as fast as I could to kill the other two. But both of them were gone.

Meanwhile, the damaged taxi was drifting upwards and would soon hit the zenith of the dome. The gravo adjuster was not a flight belt, that would give us lift and directional maneuver capability. It only adjusted the effect of gravitation on my body. The wind while not terribly strong had moved us too far from the ledge to reach it.

I pulled her up to get a better hold and said.” Sorry, but the only directions I can do is up and down.”

“Down we go then. I am a good telepath but not a telekinet.” She said wrapping her arms around my neck. We didn’t have to go down far, two police flyer arrived, One hovered directly beneath us and the other went for the out of control Taxi.

Sitting on the roof of the flyer, we were safe and in no time back on solid ground.

The massive Pertharian Captain himself climbed out and stemmed all four of his arms into his sides.”You should be glad we Pertharians don’t scare as humans do. Seeing you both jump and fall like that!”

She brushed the windswept hair out of her face.”They got the Nituzzuzh.”

The Captain looked up and grunted.”What I can’t understand, is why the safety fields have not engaged. Kids and old beings are using that Taxi port.”

She said.”I think the Taxi doors only open when a Taxi or flyer is present and”

She then looked at me.”I guess this Angel really can fly.”

I found myself a little later, back in the police precinct and sitting in the spacious office of Captain Pulzier. Because he was a Pertharian, it was most likely necessary to accommodate the BaPhy Two giant with a larger room.

While the visitor chairs were Variform, the rest was quite obviously designed with Basic Physical two in mind.

He had more or less deposited me in his office and asked me to wait a moment or two, promising that he and Leeza would be back shortly.

Holding a disposable cup of coffee in my right, I looked around and recollected the recent events in my mind. His desk was untidy and had several damaged PDDs, bits and pieces of writing utensils. stacks of pseudo paper and several cups, mugs and similar containers of coffee and Pertharian food.

There were pictures of Pertharians in Marine Uniforms and pictures of Marines in Destroyer suits on the walls. A Union Marines flag on one side of the office. It came to no surprise to me, Pertharians most likely every single one of them had either served the Union as a Marine or relations to one. To them, being a Marine was a religion and not just a branch of the services.

He had a framed picture of Admiral Stahl behind his desk, wearing a battered destroyer suit, holding a tattered Union flag in one hand, a smoking TKU in the other, while standing on a mount made of twisted war machines and resting a food on a dead ugly looking alien. A reddish sun was rising behind the man who was looking with raised chin into the distance. Quite obviously an idealized, image of materialistic patriotism. To find this particular image of patriotic kitsch here was actually to be expected. I would have been surprised to not to see it somewhere in the Pertharian’s immediate environment. To them, the eternal Warrior was more than a mere human being. I knew for a fact that the immortal Admiral had on numerous occasions railed and adamantly spoken against this over the top hero worship, but all it ever did was cement the Pertharian’s believe that he was Narr, the incarnation of the Universes Warrior spirit.

I knew this only because the Saurians were almost as nuts about Stahl as the Pertharians.

While the image made me associate things and bring up fond memories of my best friend and mentor Brux. My mind was trying to find an explanation, some kind of connector.

I went on the Andorian’s trail like I started any other hunt, by finding the Bounty on the JPA list. His last confirmed whereabouts were Maritime planet. Made wiser by experience I studied the target in great detail.

Sodiban Renow, Raw Mineral trader for Sunders & Brown Mineral and Ore Dealers Inc. had fallen in love with Meria Kulow.

Unfortunately, his brother also had fallen for the same woman. That she was working as the executive assistant of old Carl Sunders, the XIIth and managed to get Marigor Renow, his brother promoted to Vice president, called off the already proposed wedding and moved in with Marigor blew a gasket in Sodiban’s mind. He killed his brother, tried to frame him with the theft of a freighter load of Boron but he wasn’t the criminal he thought he was. Marigor of all people discovered his frame job and the murder.

Sodiban managed to escape the authorities. He had a substantial amount of credits in an untraceable independent Credit Cube. A Connector most likely got him a fake identity and a trip off-planet.

I got on his trail at Maritime, a popular vacation planet where he used a little self-defense laser to seriously hurt a dealer at the Golden Dreams Casino. There he managed to escape again, just ahead of the authorities. Since he was a wanted person at that time he could no longer travel, even with a fake CITI, as his Biometrics were now spread across all Union planet checkpoints. Leaving a world was easy, as most planets spaceports did not check CITI data.

Landing and getting past Spaceport controls was considerably more difficult. So he had to rely on Connector arranged travel and see out small Class E or lesser classed ports with lax, little or virtually no CITI controls.

To an experienced hunter, it was not hard to find out where he might have gone. Thanks to the wonders of Instant GalNet communication, I was able to eliminate a few places and picked up his trail thirty light-years from Maritime at a little known red star system, with not much else, but mining operations on several of its rock core planets. He hitched a ride on an ore freighter and so I kept tracking him until he somehow acquired the D20 and I followed him to U-56730. You know what happened from there on out. Yeah, he was a Data Head, and maybe he saw something or knew corporate secrets Carl Sunders didn’t want to come to light. I had cases like this before. But none of Renow’s business associates, bosses, not his family or his former flame had any interest in his fate when he was alive and none when he was dead.

He had spent his last days on a remote fringe world and was shot by a local sheriff for trying to break into a Union school to use the CITI machine. There was nothing that would indicate this level of professional criminal interest in him or in extension in me. What bugged me was the Shiss PDD, why would a Data head use an inferior Shiss device and why was it so important to put that much effort in getting it back?

My thoughts were interrupted as Leeza and the Pertharian entered.

“I am sorry to have kept you waiting.” The Pertharian said.”We made sure the peeps can not leave the planet.”

She pulled a PDD out of the pocket of a light blue lab coat she was now wearing and said. “We also had to deal with the remains of that traitor, I considered a friend.” That the betrayal came to her out of the blue was obvious by her facial expression. “I trusted that Lorkni!”

“A Lorkni is something bad?”

“A filthy rat-like thing that poops in other nests. It...”

The Pertharian cleared his throat or something, it made a sound as if someone was throwing big rocks down a steel pipe.”Please, Lieutenant, get on with it. You can exchange cultural info another time.”

“Oh, sorry!” She tapped on her PDD. “The fingers you severed belonged to a human of Terran Asian descent. Further analysis points to someone growing up on Kyoto-Pol planet in the Pleiades cluster, also known as Terra’s backyard as the first colonies of Earth were established there.

The individual is male and fifty-six standard years of age. I found the man was a user of tobacco products and has been exposed to very bright sun for a very long time. The individual was treated for skin cancer about fifteen years ago. Said man had spent the last years on a very dry place and there were traces of a fine powdery substance under its fingernails. The substance identified as a mixture of silicates and other common minerals or in other words powdery soil dust.”

I gasped.”The sheriff. That rotten son of a bitch. Shin Tsuro right?”

She nodded.”Indeed, and he was one of the men who wanted to kill us.”

I knew I heard that voice before. “Rotten son of a Lorkni.”

She nodded approvingly and said. “The postmaster and apparently duly elected sheriff of Gullster’s Paradise. We checked his file. He is the Postmaster and that is the real shocking part of this. Postmasters are usually chosen because they are of good character and very dependable and trustworthy”

“Maybe Gullster star cooked his brain, or he took a sip of whatever they sell to the Takkians.”

“We checked into that, and they do sell between five hundred and thousand bottles, of Gullster’s Takkian Brew a month. Picked up by the monthly post ship slash frontier space bus.” The Pertharian said

“But why is he here, what has the Andorian or me to do with anything?” even though I was starting to guess the answer. I hoped the Union police officers had a better answer.

The Pertharian continued to speak.”We don’t know, but we should be able to speak to him soon. No passenger ship leaves without detailed passenger checks. This is Blisterbahl II and we know where to look.”

He got up, “Well I think we no longer need to keep you here, Mr. Marifou. The bad guys have what they wanted and we will have the bad guys soon.”

I got up. “That’s good news. Nothing against your lovely planet, but I had seen enough Warkh and fog to last for a while, besides I have a business to run.”

I got up and left. He was either just a dense cop with no real interest in the affair since it pointed to reasons beyond Blisterbahl and his precinct, or he was not willing to share whatever he uncovered or suspected. While I was not certain what was on that Shiss PDD or how the sibling murdering Boron trader fit into the story. I knew it was valuable enough for them to follow me, risk serious criminal charges and invest considerable resources to retain that thing. That the device was of Shiss origin and Gullster’s Paradise not far from Shiss space was no coincidence, I was willing to bet my last credit on.