Vigilant by Michele Hart

“You! You’re an I-Marshal! I know you are! Stand up, cop!”

The man holding the dark-haired girl hostage moved his laser from her chin and pointed it at Weber. The gun shook from his fury.

The gunman’s name was Jurgen Omar, known to his gang as “J.” He was a killer, his aura dark and cloudy, and he led these hijackings and abductions. His buddy swept his ray gun over the crowd as he went through purses. The passengers of the interplanetary shuttle nervously shifted.

Weber’s sight roved over the small shuttle cabin. All eyes were on him. A hundred citizens held their breaths, probably wondering if they’d live through this. Beside him sat a teenaged girl, the exact prescription J sought. His gang didn’t know the blond-haired, blue-eyed teen was a hologram. Sadly, not everyone in the shuttle was a computer program. Weber had to fill the shuttle with real people. Teleports detected real heartbeats in a room, and he knew this kidnapping team planned to teleport from the shuttle. It was how they’d exited two previous shuttle hijackings.

J had before targeted blond-haired, blue-eyed teens, abducting them for sale on the black market. Now, Weber targeted J and his team. And he was going to kill them to stop the abductions. The I-Marshal wanted the dark-haired girl in J’s arms. She was the bait he was after.

J moved the gun from Weber back to the chin of the dark-haired girl he clutched roughly in his arms. Weber could tell from the shade of her aura she wasn’t even scared, but she was a little nervous, probably because J was going off-script in the commission of their crime.

“Stand up, Marshal!” he ordered again. “Or I’m going to blow this girl’s head off!”

J wasn’t going to hurt the girl. He hadn’t hurt her in the two previous hijackings he’d pulled. She was a part of his process. With her, the hijackers controlled the passengers in case someone brought a weapon or a law enforcement officer was aboard. They planned to take the blond girl from Weber and teleport away. But J’s friend was greedy. He was robbing the passengers even before they got what they came for.

J’s buddy looked up from a passenger’s purse in surprise of J’s announcement, and then he set his gun’s sights on Weber. Wary, he joined his two friends. “Are you serious, J? H–How do you know he’s an I-Marshal?”

Weber watched their every move. The girl struggled a little, made a few weepy noises, for authenticity’s sake.

“Look at him! He’s too damned big to be anything else! And I can smell a badge from a hundred meters away!”

His buddy’s eyes shifted. He clutched the ray gun in his black-gloved hand, apparently unsure he wished to kill an interplanetary cop today. “A lot of men are that big. You’re nearly that big! You light up an I-Marshal, and they’ll descend on us like a swarm of locusts.”

More like a Category 6 hurricane. With nowhere to run, no feet on the ground, no shelter for protection from the storm.

The money-grubbing little worm was right about that. But if he’d thought the assassination of a cop was the only reason the Imperial Marshals of the Draco Alliance would come for them, he was wrong. This gang had kidnapped young women in space and had used an illegal teleport to do it, and the I-Marshals were descending upon them for that.

J pushed the girl from his hold and stepped closer to Weber, aiming his laser at his chest. Weber was close enough to see the man’s guilt in his aura from three meters away. He was very guilty. And he clearly wished to become a cop killer today. Weber wasn’t worried about J’s buddy’s ray gun. A stray strike from the ray gun would be absorbed by the shuttle’s flectsteel, but stray laser beams from J’s gun could bounce around and fatally wound a lot of people.

“Stand up, Marshal! Or I’ll start killing everyone here!”

Weber stood for the safety of the passengers before the kidnapper started throwing beams all over the shuttle.

“God, I’d love to kill an I-Marshal!”

J’s friend wasn’t as crazed as he was, but he looked spooked at the thought of a space cop present for their interstellar crimes. No longer caring what little money he could steal from the passengers, he looked down at the teen seated beside Weber, and the girl looked pretty terrified. The technician running the hologram a few light-years away was pretty good at his job.

“J,” his compatriot muttered low, almost in warning, “just take the girl, and let’s get out of here.”

Weber looked over to the dark-haired girl J had just pushed away, the one who played his human shield. The look on her face turned from uninspired acting to genuine fear for what would come. Her aura showed the change in her thought and mood. J shooting a cop wasn’t part of the plan.

J didn’t have sense. He jeopardized their mission, freaking out over someone who looked like he might have passed the I-Marshal height requirement. J might’ve had it out for cops.

“Step away from the girl!” the gang leader ordered Weber through locked teeth. “Give her to me!”

Weber stepped from the seat into the aisle. “Take her yourself.”

J’s greedy flunky shook his head. “An I-Marshal would never give up a citizen.”

J growled. “He would if I had a laser pointed to his chest, you damned idiot. Grab the girl!”

His comrade was uncertain and possessed good instincts. The dark-haired girl J used to control the passengers did not rush to move from trouble like an innocent victim would have done. Her eyes shifted over the scene. Neither she nor J’s buddy appeared to know what to do. They hadn’t factored into their plan the possibility J would lose his mind. But the second gunman did what he was told.

His ray gun aimed in Weber’s general direction, the damned idiot reached over the I-Marshal’s empty seat to take a hold of the girl’s arm and drag her from her seat. His gloved hand passed through the hologram in plain sight of all of them.

The second gunman rose to apply a punch, but Weber beat him to it, grabbing his shirt and punching his lights out. Weber jerked J’s friend up by his clothes before he dropped, giving the second gunman the light beam J fired from his weapon to kill him. Then Weber seized the dying man’s ray gun from his hand and fired, disrupting J’s nervous system and shocking him dead.

Gasps filled the cabin at the swift and deadly gun work done before their eyes.

When J’s body hit the floor, a tiny, round disk flew from his pocket and skidded across the shuttle deck. Weber instantly recognized a black market video cam, and he stepped on it, crushing it into pieces.

Stunned for the first few seconds, the dark-haired girl screamed and, breaking her role as a hostage, scrambled to J’s side, only to hear the man’s last breath. She pulled him into her arms and began to shriek hysterically, “No! No!”

Weber took a few steps toward her, grasped her by her arms, and hauled her into his custody. She tried to shake from his grip, but he was too strong for her. When that didn’t work, she began to beat his chest with her little, ineffectual fists.

She was less guilty, even barely guilty. He could feel that this close to her. He could see it, a lighter glow emanating from her than from the two men. Her aura was less muddled with bad intentions and deeds. Her heart held more fear than evil. He would take advantage of that.

“You killed him, you bastard cop! You killed J!”

Calm, Weber said into her red, tearing face, “Mourn your lover another time.”

Then he placed both of her small wrists into one big hand, controlling her completely despite her best fight. He reached into his jacket for his palm computer and recited the Go code for his destination.

Weber and his suspect appeared five light-years away on planet Draco Reigna, the seat of the Alliance, within the plain walls of an interrogation room.

He drilled a stone-cold stare into her frightened hazel sight. “I arrest you in the name of the Draco Alliance.”

When he released her, she collapsed on the tiled floor, a mass of hair, legs, and tears. She bawled like a baby for the man Weber had killed to keep himself alive and stop the abductions. The I-Marshal removed the Gemini tick, the 3-D holographic magic mask that had lent him a whole new face for the mission, and his sudden change of appearance startled her. His arms spanning his chest, he watched her for a few seconds without thought. Her wet, red-streaked eyes shot up to him, and she crawled away, terrified and weeping unceasingly. The fear in her aura blotted out other impressions.

How could a woman involved in the trafficking of slaves not be very guilty? But she wasn’t. She’d be the weak link in this criminal conspiracy. He’d use her to get to the shot caller.

For an hour, he sat in the room next door, watching her on video while he leaned back in his chair. She didn’t demand an attorney as an experienced criminal would do. She didn’t scream her head off or harm herself, like a psychotic would do. She didn’t pace like a caged animal. She only sat in the corner of the room and wept for J, muttering his name between tears. He must have meant a lot to her. Clearly, she didn’t mean much to J for him to have taken her on a crime run.

Georgia walked into the room and dropped the thick case file on the table before him. “Did the hijackers say they had a bomb onboard?”

Weber was just happy to see Georgia acting like a professional after a week of after-hours fighting between them. He sent his sight to her in truce, but he experienced a dreadful moment of premonition that they could not come back to peace.

“Yes. But the kidnappers always say that, and we’ve never found a bomb aboard the shuttles.”

She ran her hand over her shortly cropped brown head. That look in her amber eyes meant nothing good. “Well, they put a bomb on this one. Minutes after you left, the shuttle exploded into slivers.”

All one hundred passengers dead. The thud in Weber’s chest was the most pain he’d felt in his life, all in a second, then quickly gone. What could he have done to prevent it?

His eyes went back to the video screen where the lone surviving hijacker lay crumpled on the tiles of the interrogation room, sniffling.

“Then it’s a bigger deal going on than we thought. The shot caller had been monitoring the hijacking with that camera, and when J’s team didn’t return with the girl, he teleported a bomb aboard.”

“That’s what we’re thinking. Did you have her IDed?”

Weber passed the ID report to Georgia. “There’s a birth declaration on record from Beta Draconis, childhood health records, institution and foster home records. Only one deceased parent listed, no siblings. No citizen work ID. She’d spent her youth in orphanages and foster homes until she ran away at age sixteen. Possible murder case involved on that one, the disappearance of her foster father around the same time she left home, but she’d been cleared of wrongdoing. Been on the streets since or somewhere she couldn’t be found, living under the government radar. Someone must have helped her No known mob connections, not much of a record for convictions. A single misdemeanor charge for underage stripping months ago. Nothing big time. She’s just a pawn in the abduction scheme.”

“Well, she’s hit the big time now with the very provable murders of a hundred people. Why would the shot caller on the other end of the video cam bother to bomb the shuttle, if the kidnapping failed and most of his people died?”

“Maybe terrorism, to inflict fear upon travelers.” He watched on video the girl curled into a corner on the floor. She hadn’t moved. “Someone has a lust for murder in big numbers. You know these guys keep a running body count. That’s how they rank one another in the thug world.”

“Perhaps,” Georgia suggested, “it was anger and spite for the I-Marshals having interfered with the abduction.”

Weber raised an eyebrow in consideration of that. “Maybe the shot caller wished to kill the last remaining hijacker. I’d crushed the cam as soon as I spotted it. He couldn’t have realized I’d taken her from the shuttle. A bad camera angle at that moment might have prevented him from realizing I’d killed J and his friend.”

“One hundred counts of murder to silence a single street soldier, or even a few, is a hardcore trade-off, and really doesn’t make sense There’s a lot we don’t know. We really need this woman’s story. Make her talk, Weber.”

He slowly rose to his feet, his attention fixed upon the girl on the video screen. One hundred innocent Alliance citizens dead because he’d done his job in stopping an abduction and killing the abductors. He’d saved this girl’s life by taking her, and she was about to dig deep into her pockets to pay that rescue bill.

“I’ll make her talk.”

* * * *

In the next few hours, Weber had the lone hijacker drug-tested, brain-tapped, and body-scanned. The drug screen came back clean, showing no signs of having lately taken Sharpenal, a common street drug that blocked the mind-reading capabilities of the forensic MRI brain-tap. The substance upped the nervous activity of the brainwave pattern, often making the tap a wash. Luckily, the drug was detectable in a blood test. There were other ways to beat the machine. Sometimes the brain-tap was worthless because the technician didn’t ask the right questions. Or, rarely and always with RICO crimes, the tech had been bought out.

Which was why the I-Marshals hadn’t bothered planning the arrest of J and his buddy. Professionals would have taken Sharpenal before the hijacking, in case they’d been caught. The I-Marshals had immortalized them on video committing capital felonies aplenty, their guilt documented. Arresting them would have been useless for anything but taking up space behind bars and clogging the justice system.

Better to bury the high felons than to see them walk…and disappear into the vast galaxy to continue their crime careers, unchecked and endlessly profitable. The I-Marshals were pretty black-and-white on the issue. Crimes in space earned one a lifetime sentence on Null. Caught in the act by an I-Marshal drew an immediate execution. Period, end of present and future crime sprees.

Even without the presence of Sharpenal in her blood, the last hijacker still gave up little evidence under the brain-tap machine’s psychological assault. She knew nothing substantial about the people who paid her to do what she’d done, only nicknames meant to conceal real identities, and those probably changed with every new crime wave. Nicknames were the norm for crime gangs. J might have run the plan and kept her uninformed on who paid them to snatch pretty young women on their family vacations, their school field trips.

But J hadn’t been the shot caller. The bomb proved that.

The body scan for an embedded conviction records file turned up empty, confirming she wasn’t a high felon, but the procedure had revealed a few recently healed bone breaks. Cracked ribs, a fractured arm. Either she’d been in an accident a couple of months ago, or someone had given her a brutal beating.

Most Alliance citizens carried a few records chips in their bodies. Credit, medical, employer ID. The body scan picked up none of those but did reveal an unidentifiable tracking microchip planted under her shoulder bone. It was likely the way her keepers kept her located and retrievable. They’d not find her here, in a teleport-restricted building.

Weber spent another few hours watching her by video. Something about her looks bothered him…but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Even though he searched for something false when he observed her moments of weeping and moments of calm, he found her sadness beautiful in its purity. His mixed readings of her when he’d been close to her, innocence and guilt both at once, confused his gift, which had always been dependable in the past. And women, with their complex emotional structure, were always more difficult to read than men.

An interstellar teleport, thoroughly illegal throughout the Alliance. Only the I-Marshals were allowed one, but that didn’t mean they were the only ones who had one. Someone had built one to commit crimes in space, and that made the villain nearly unstoppable, but not untraceable. Weber would find the machine and tear it apart. Then he would find the people using it and tear them apart.

The trail started with this woman.

His mind focused on seeking the roots of this evil, he entered the plain-looking interrogation room, closing the auto-lock door behind him, a special bottle of water in his hand. Only a table and chair stood in the room, a minimalist shower room with a holographic door for semi-privacy stood off to the side. Only a video screen dressed the bare walls. Below the screen, the lone surviving hijacker lay crumpled on the floor where the brain-tap technicians had left her. Her food sat on the table, uneaten. Her hair, some locks wet with new tears and some dried stiff from earlier sobbing, hung in her dazed face. She looked undernourished.

“Yadira Maxwell, you’re in a lot of trouble, and if you’re smart, you’ll give up the people you’re working for.”

She said nothing. She didn’t move, didn’t utter a sound. She gave no indication she’d heard him.

“Miss Maxwell… You don’t look like you can afford the kind of attorney that can turn this into small time for you. I’ve got you on video participating in three teleport abductions, and you’ll get no good deal for that if you don’t cooperate. Would you like me to show you all three videos to refresh your memory of your crimes?”

Nothing from her. He couldn’t see her eyes through her long, dull black hair to know if she were conscious. There was no reason she shouldn’t be. The MRI brain-tap was psychologically nosy, but not painful, nor did it leave lasting effects.

“I suggest you get beyond the loss of your lover and start saving what’s left of your life. People convicted of your crime spend the remainder of their lives on a hellhole prison-planet called Null. You’ll never breathe fresh air again.”

Her birth certificate said she’d recently turned twenty-one years old. He thought it tragic she’d already thrown her life away. Her file had listed no living family. There was no one to contact, no one to claim her. In what condition had her life been when she’d ended up in the hands of slavers?

Finally, with no other show of attention, she muttered, “I don’t care what you do to me.”

“You’d better start caring. I don’t see who’s going to save you.”

“No one will.”

His sight went to the bottle of water on her food tray. The cap seal hadn’t been broken. She hadn’t taken in a drop of water in six or seven hours, and with all the crying she’d done, she had to be parched. Good. The special water Weber offered would make her just radioactive enough to track by global satellite for about a few weeks’ time. He took his bottle to her and set it on the floor before her. When she did not respond, he knelt, picked the bottle up again, and held it out for her.

In her reach now, she leaped at him, knocking him off balance, and she dealt him a few weak punches to his body. He seized her wrists, put her on her back, and was over her, his great weight and size easily defeating her mobility, before she knew he moved. He had her hands pinned above her head in his big grip, his thighs straddled her hips, locking her to the floor. The size of her eyes revealed he’d surprised her in her sneak attack for him. He loomed over her, his emotionless face a hand’s length away from her angry vision. A slip of a girl wasn’t going to make him lose his temper.

She panted, her teeth locked. “You killed J, you bastard! Who do you think will care for me now?” Then she writhed and screamed beneath him.

His free hand grasped her jaw, stilling her and shutting her mouth. “You’d better find someone to protect you.”

She broke into tears, and Weber let her weep a bit without releasing her.

“Keep crying, Maxwell. You’ve a lot to cry over. You just earned an assault-against-an-I-Marshal charge. Let me tell you about Null. It’s a beast of a planet, hotter than you’ve ever felt before outside an oven. You’ll swear you’re on fire when you arrive. Your hair will burn you. You’ll gasp for air the first month you’re there until your lungs adjust to the thin oxygen. It’ll take a full three years for your body to tolerate the barely survivable heat, to no longer constantly need water to douse the inferno you’ll feel simmering in your body. Your skin will dry into leather.

“Riots kill thousands every year. Null has inmates who’d rather beat you to death than eat their lunch. You can be killed because some psychopath didn’t like the way the number of your cell was painted above the bars. If you live into your seventies, you’ll die of a lung infection from the noxious dust kicked up from the desert planet surface. If you think your life has been hard so far, Fate will slap your face.”

Stunned into silence, she stared up at him, probably trying to figure out if he bluffed.

“I’m. Not. Bluffing.”

Then, his senses broke discipline without his permission, control he’d thought strong, and he became sexually aware of her pressed so close to him. She was clearly dangerous, but her face was so soft and caressable beneath his fingertips. Sitting astride her hips, he noticed her slight panting, causing the rise and fall of her breasts to fill his eye. Instantly, he wished to feel her heaving breasts mashed to his chest. His thighs trapping her warming hips became too personal to ignore.

An unacceptable response, Weber brought himself back to perfect discipline before she used his notice of her beauty against him. Or before his awareness of her grew out of his control.

That’s when he spotted light roots at her hairline. Her dark hair was dyed.

He released her cheeks to rake his fingers roughly into her hair, revealing a slight hint of light roots and a cheap color job. His sight bore into her eyes to see the edges of hazel-tinted contact lenses. When she blinked, the contacts shifted, revealing fractions of light irises beneath. His report hadn’t mentioned she was a blonde with light-colored eyes. ID checks seldom revealed hair and eye color since hair could be dyed in an hour and eye color changed with certain medications, affecting iris checks. Even over a short amount of time, hair could naturally grow darker. Having expectations of what an offender looked like had gotten law enforcement officers killed. The only sure ways to ID were official microchips, fingerprints, and DNA, and that was only for those who’d been previously arrested. Luckily, she had been arrested, and they had her DNA profile on record.

The fear in her eyes triggered a fleeting moment of mercy.

Weber rose from his physical arrest of her, releasing her hands last. He was grateful to put distance between them. It was hard to keep his mind on his job straddling her hips and dominating her like that.

A pale-eyed blonde helping to abduct blond-haired, blue-eyed females. What had kept her crime gang from selling her? Someone had kept her value hidden while still using her for a flunky. Had it been the man he’d just killed?

She finally stopped her sobbing.

“You’re going to take me to your gang.”

She sat up and wiped her tears from her eyes. “I’m telling you nothing because I know little.”

He picked up the water bottle and offered it to her again, daring her with his eyes to make another violent move.

“You know more than you think. I’ve already learned you’re from Beta Draconis. That’s where your small criminal career has taken place. We’ll go there.”

She snatched the bottle from his hand, opened it, and took a long, thirsty draw of the water. Then she muttered, “I’m not going there. I’ll go anywhere but there. Send me to Null.”

Weber thought of the one hundred citizens who’d died on the shuttle, which was his fault. It made his temperature rise and his temper thin He would change her attitude, and he had no drive to do it softly.

He reached out to her and hauled her up by her clothes to his face. “You better believe you’re going back. The body scan revealed a tracking chip embedded deeply in your body. You’re shielded from a teleport as long as you’re here, but if I threw you in the street, your boss would find you quickly”

“He will find me quicker if you take me to Draconis!”

“Yes, but I’ll be there with you.”

“My boss had been monitoring the shuttle by video. He knows I was arrested.”

He could feel her shaking in his hands.

“Your boss knows J accused a passenger of being an I-Marshal, and he thinks it cost him three operatives. You’ll return to your boss and report to him you were taken from the shuttle by the I-Marshal as a witness before the explosion, then released. You’ll tell him you said nothing to the I-Marshals, which is a fact. If you have to lie, you’re going to do it, and you’ll do a better job of acting than you did on the shuttle. If need be, you’ll give an award-winning performance to keep your ass out of the worst prison you’ve ever imagined.”

She began to weep again, and Weber released her, feeling little compassion for her position. He had no heart for criminals. Even ones who weren’t very guilty.