Tales from the Inbox: A Gossamer Guardian

2947-01-07 - Tales from the Inbox: A Gossamer Guardian

All colony worlds have their legends. The dark, towering stalkers of twilight that haunt the dreams of Heraklean children and the jovial, rotund tricksters said to dance among the cyclopean stones of Planet at Centauri’s Makismov Barrens are famous throughout explored space, but the new worlds, too, have their mythical denizens.

Håkøya, a Coreward Frontier world very close to Maribel, has a legend which seems far older than its short colonial history. Atte U. claims to have experienced these legends as reality, and though he has no footage or witnesses to support his story and his claims seem more the product of hallucination than reality, we have seen stories cross this space far more outlandish than his. Personally, I am not convinced; I suspect he encountered something or someone out there, but stunned and possibly concussed by his hard landing, Atte's account is likely not reliable.

After his encounter, he claims to have wandered in the forest for a week before being rescued. His rescue and weak condition (most Håkøyan plants are edible to humans, but he evidently managed to eat one that isn't) when found can be corroborated by a local news report, but none of what is reproduced below could be verified, save that the tale he sent to this publication is consistent with his original retelling post-rescue.

Atte found Håkøyan legend to be good idle reading, so he sought out all the dubious but thrilling accounts he could find on the system datasphere. He didn't take the tales told by the second- and third-generation colonists any more seriously than the vivid folklore of Hercules, his home-world - every world humanity had settled collected legends of that sort.

Atte had come to Håkøya for its idyllic equatorial climates, rugged natural beauty, and lack of dangerous native fauna. The world seemed perfectly suited for a spacer's sabbatical or retirement, and he knew many older spacers chose to live out their sunset decades the world if they could afford it. Atte himself didn't plan on retiring just yet - he was a bit past his prime, perhaps, but the stars still called his name. A few months of laid-back frontier life was all he wanted from Håkøya.

Reading the myths of the Håkøyan colonists proved a welcome addition to his season of rest. Many of the tales hinted at fell beauty seen at a distance among the trees in the highlands, and whispered of broad, enticing paths sweeping through cursed woodlands where human feet had never fallen. Those who followed such paths, it was said, were swallowed up forever. Such elflike legends seemed only to be a retelling of the legends of old Earth, bred anew in the minds of the over-imaginative and under-stimulated colonists. Still, there seemed to be many locals who believed them.

To be sure, the world had much yet untouched by human hands. There were wonders yet to be seen, but they were natural ones, rather than supernatural – Håkøya had earned with ease its reputation as the Confederacy’s best Frontier getaway from the bustle of Core Worlds life by being lush, pleasant to human sensibilities, and most of all, unusually safe. Its life teemed everywhere, but it was the life of a tended garden, harmless to the human form. 

At first, Atte scoffed at the locals’ superstitions. In the controlled environment of the planet’s spaceport city and resorts, it was easy to think the frontier yokels merely foolish. Only when he staggered free of the twisted remains of a rented air-lighter deep in the forested hills, did he wonder whether that doubt was misplaced.

Still dazed by the force of his aircraft’s spectacular wreck and thankful that the crash harness had worked as intended, he paused at edge of a pool of still, clear water to splash his face clear of the chemical residue of burning circuity clinging to his skin. When he looked up, he knew instantly why those legends were taken seriously by the colonists. Swallowed up in trackless forests as he suddenly was, Håkøya’s beauty had morphed from pleasant to oppressive, and even judgmental; Atte couldn't shake the thought that a singed and ugly thing like himself was an intruder barely tolerated by the primeval wilderness. He wanted nothing more than to flee back to his resort lodgings, where legends of strange things wandering the alien woods had been easy to dismiss as a silly local myth.

To his apparent good fortune, when Atte turned away from the pond, he spotted a trail where he hadn’t noticed one before, broader than an animal track and beaten down from regular use. The Håkøyan wilderness was home to thousands of far-scattered hermits, most of them retired spacers, and it seemed a stroke of luck to have crashed in the domain of one such recluse. Following the path, he guessed, would lead to someone who could radio back to town and secure him a return to civilization. He had no idea if the wrecked lighter had gotten off an automated distress signal before augering into the canopy.

The trail proved so twisted and switchbacked that Atte soon lost all sense of direction. There seemed no reason for this meandering, as if the path had been laid down at random. It remained strong and easy to follow, so he stayed with it. Local wildlife darted away into the undergrowth at his passing, and vegetation gravid with brilliantly-colored local fruit peeked out from behind the trees. It would be easy, he thought, for a hermit live off the land without ever returning to civilization - Håkøyan biomass was generally edible to humans.

At last, he came to the path’s terminus, but it was not a recluse's cabin as he had expected - the path terminated at the bole of a tree-like growth. The great, stately thing with a gnarled trunk sat across the path as if the path had come first rather than the ancient tree, though the path did not continue its winding course beyond.

Atte approached, wondering if perhaps a hermit had carved his home into the broad trunk. There was no doorway in the lee of the arching roots - instead, he saw that what had appeared at a distance to be a single trunk was in fact two entwined, one growing from each side of the path and woven together tightly all the way to the ground.

“Wait, intruder.”

The voice was barely a whisper, but it startled him all the same. He looked all around for the source, and was just beginning to assume his imagination had overreacted to the sound of a local avian when he spotted a wispy, feminine figure slouched on a knot of the tree’s tangled roots. She was not clothed, but neither was she naked – a misty substance clung to her like a fine lace gown, and covered her face like a veil. Through this veil, he could tell she was not looking at him, but upward, face inclined to the sun peeking through the branches.

“Strange creature.” The apparition spoke again, still imperiously refusing to even glance in the marooned spacer’s direction. “Ahead lies such glorious peril that you must be allowed to know it.”

Atte opened his mouth, but found that he could not speak. Even if he had found something to say, the thought of using his rough, foreign voice to address such a being filled him with shame. The slim figure’s veiled but obvious beauty, though blatantly not human, also not entirely unfamiliar, and Atte couldn't shake the sense that he was not seeing this creature for the first time. She was as at home in the Håkøyan wilderness all around as a diamond set in a crown, perfectly and obviously kin to the glorious desolation – or perhaps, as if it was a part of her.

The figure stood languidly, her face still tilted toward the sun, and glided across the root-choked soil toward the offworlder. “Your warning has been given. Tread this path at your own peril, or return to your stars and forever wonder what lies beyond this warning. Once chosen, your path will be set.”

As she spoke, Atte heard a groaning, creaking noise behind him. He turned to see that a narrow archway had opened between the twin entertwined boles of the great tree - an archway through which the path continued its meandering course on the far side. Without doing so, he guessed that if he walked around the tree's far-flung roots, he would see what he saw before - that the path ended where he stood.

Atte returned his attention to the veiled apparition and nodded his comprehension, swallowing and utterly failing to voice many questions. 

The moment stretched on, and the figure seemed content to give him all the time he needed to consider the choice. As his thoughts whirled, she wandered seemingly without direction, face always upturned, and never venturing far from the great tree. Her footfalls were utterly silent, and Atte watched her helplessly. She was, he concluded, as wild as the rest of Håkøya – wild, but as pleasing to the eye as all the world’s sights. 

In the strange logic of the moment, he had no doubt her warning was genuine. Håkøya's biosphere contained nothing known that could threaten humans, but if this gossamer-clad being could exist, that knowledge was perilously incomplete. He feared what lay beyond, but all the undiscovered perils of whatever lay through the arched gateway in the tree almost seemed worth braving, in the hopes that the veiled visage of this beautiful guardian might, if only for an instant, turn his way.

In the end, though, Atte knew he couldn’t go through. He was a spacer, not a frontier rambler, out of his element and out of his league. What could he do but turn away? Not without second thoughts, he set his face to the direction from which he had come, noticing for he first time that the pall of smoke from his crashed aircraft was no longer visible over the trees.

“As you wish, child of the stars.” The figure’s voice was solemn, even disappointed, as Atte took the first step away. 

Once he had set his course, he found it impossible to stop – it was as if his feet had determined to flee even if their owner had second thoughts.

When at last he got control of himself and turned to look, Atte found that the path petered out into the underbrush just behind his heels. The great, gnarled tree and its veiled attendant had vanished as totally as if they had never been.

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Tales from the Inbox: Paulian Caesar

2947-01-01 - Tales from the Inbox: Caesar Paulius

A tall man in a purple robe swept through the agora of Cesarea Paulis as if immune to the chaos and bustle of the town, and it seemed that the crowd was only too happy to act as if he was. Performers, tourists, and local shoppers alike shied out of his way, and hundreds of eyes followed him and his small retinue. The man paid none of the onlookers any mind; his head was bowed as if in deep thought as he spoke quietly with a chubby, white-haired assistant.

“Who’s he?” Maxine whispered to the vendor whose inventory of bangles she had just been browsing.

“That is his lordship Augustus.” The man replied reverently. “Our emperor and protector.”

“You Paulians and your pageantry.” Maxine rolled her eyes. Paulius, with its heavily Latin population and architecture, was a wealthy world, its inhabitants grown rich on the sale of valuable crops which could grow nowhere else in human space. That it turned this wealth to re-creating the appearance of an ancient Earth culture was a choice Maxine couldn’t fault – to agricultural wealth, it had added the money of hundreds of thousands of tourists, and grown all the wealthier for its efforts. Respecting the model, however, was not the same thing as humoring the theme-park atmosphere the locals offered to their visitors.

“It is no pageant.” The shopkeeper insisted. “Augustus is the emperor of all human civilization.”

“The Hegemon and the Confederated parliament surely have something to say about that.”

“He issued a writ dissolving both governments five T-years ago, miss.”

The baffling reply stunned Maxine into several seconds of silence. She had left Hegemony space only two months before, and the Hegemon was still very much in power there. The Confederated government was still in charge of its space, including Paulius itself. Not knowing what else to say to the shopkeeper, she left his cart and, dodging a street acrobat, followed the tall man in purple. She knew he was not a ruler, but she wanted to find out if he was an actor or merely a madman the locals cruelly humored.

The so-called emperor stopped in front of a cart covered in decorative hand-crafted pottery, and a trio of tourists in off-world smart-fabric sheepishly got out of his way as he strode forward. “My good man, it fills me with sorrow to see you rely for your livelihood on such barbarians.” He intoned dramatically, and Maxine concluded that he was indeed an actor. “Your wares seem good and wholesome; surely some true Romans would be only too happy to buy them.”

“Y-yes, your grace, thank you.” The shopkeeper stammered as Augustus swept away as quickly as he had come. To Maxine’s astonishment, dozens of robed locals swarmed the cart, where none had been before, and within a minute, every item on the cart had been purchased. None of the wares had cost more than six denarii – local credit-coins which were permanently stamped to ten credits each – but it seemed that they were only too happy to jump at the emperor’s whims and purchase tourist-souvenirs they had no use for, as if he were truly a ruler.

Scowling, Maxine continued to follow Emperor Augustus through the market, watching citizen after citizen – and even some of the tourists – treat him like a real emperor. It was, she concluded, some sort of collective joke, on which nobody had bothered to fill her in when she arrived.

Without warning, Augustus whirled in place and pointed to Maxine. “The barbarian girl there. Bring her here.” Instantly, two of the local constables – their body armor polished with a tinted metallic substance to look like bronze – seized her by the arms and dragged her forward.

“Let go of me! I’m a citizen of the Hegemony! Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Despite her shouting and the risk of an interplanetary incident, the constables didn’t release their grip, and nobody in the crowd moved to come to her aid.

“Be still.” Augustus ordered. The crowd surrounding the altercation grew quiet, and Maxine, despite her defiance, found herself suddenly unwilling to continue to shout when she saw the solemn, hard look in his eyes. “Why do you haunt my steps?”

“I…” Maxine shook her head, trying to clear her head from the spell of false authority that surrounded the man. “I was curious what you’re doing. You’re not the emperor.” 

Though the crowd muttered angrily, the purple-robed man seemed only amused. “An interesting claim.” Augustus gestured broadly. “Present the rightful heir to the throne of the empire of my namesake, and if his claims are stronger than mine, I will abdicate in his favor.”

Maxine gritted her teeth and said nothing as the crowd jeered. She wondered how many recording devices were capturing the moment of her humiliation at the hands of a glorified jester.

“Now, now.” Augustus calmed the crowd with a wave of his hand. “She may be wrong, but we expect that of barbarians. Release her.”

The two constables vanished and the crowd began to disperse as Augustus turned to continue on his way. Maxine, trembling, slunk back towards her hotel, wondering how quickly she could change her travel plans and depart the mad planet.

Paulius is unique among worlds in Confederated space for its dedication to an illusion of antiquity, though its colonial history dates back a bare 240 years. Its architecture and culture, patterned off a particular Earthly Italian culture which existed 3,000 years ago, is deservedly a magnet for tourists, and the planet's location on the primary route from Hegemony space to the Confederated Core Worlds ensures a steady stream of travelers through its spaceport. Both Ashton and myself have on separate occasions visited Paulius, and I personally find its faux old-world grandeur to be quite endearing.

Though in my visit I saw nothing of the so-called Emperor, I have recently received several reports related to this strange person. Most of the submissions are accounts of him from a distance, not worth publishing in this space, but Maxine's report of a brief personal encounter with him - in which he is reportedly lucid and commanding - is a very interesting data point. As she feared, I was able to locate an audiovisual recording of the incident with a quick datasphere query, to verify the important details of her story.

Despite the population's apparently eager support of his position, the presence of an emperor is not recognized in the Paulian governmental constitution, last updated in 2914. I can find no evidence that his decrees bear the force of law, suggesting that he is, if not an actor, at least a part of the facade of vanished empire which the planet affects. Augustus may be similar to that of a famously tragic historical figure from another period of pre-Space-Age history, the so-called "Emperor" Maximilian I of the city of San Fransisco.

I would be interested in any other reports of encounters with this person. His claim to empire when confronted by Maxine M. was cleverly ambiguous to be sure. If the citizens of that world wish to elect an emperor and dissolve their senate, they are of course free to do so (though that emperor's toothless decree to dissolve the Confederated government would certainly cause tension between his representatives and those of other worlds in Yaxkin City).

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Tales from the Inbox: A Smuggler At Ansaldi

2946-12-25: Tales from the Inbox: A Smuggler At Ansaldi

Elijah R. is a mercenary, as many of you are. He claims to be good at his job, and I have no reason to doubt this assertion. He is a stable, reasonable, prudent operator known for keeping a level head in a tough spot, and he works with others known for the same.

Even a veteran mercenary pilot like Elijah has moments where he loses his head, however. In a recent assignment working with the authorities of Ansaldi, he encountered a foolhardy smuggler who tried to scare off his squadron with attempts to ram their ships, hoping that, being mercenaries, they would back off, valuing their lives over the capture of one small-time smuggler. Perhaps, on another day, it might have worked.

The day this item will enter the feed stream is December 25. Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate this ancient holiday. The Cosmic Background office is, as you may already know from the vidcast schedule, closed this week as usual; Christmas is an official holiday here in Centauri, as it is on many worlds. All content we send out to the audience was prepared last week.

“We’ve got another runner, folks. He’s going low!” Elijah hauled on the controls of his light, nimble ship to stay behind the equally nimble smuggler who’d run the Ansaldi orbital checkpoint. “Sujay, give me overwatch, I’m staying with him.”

“I’ll keep eyes on him.” Sujay’s voice was calm, but they all knew the deadly game they were playing. Most customs-runners were unarmed, but juking among the rugged, forested mountains and crags of the planet’s wilderness was as perilous as any incoming fire. The trio of mercenaries were heavily armed, but as usual on constabulary contracts, they couldn’t fire unless fired upon; instead, their role was only to stay behind the target and force it to the ground in the open, or to track it back to its roost on the planet’s surface and lead the local authorities to the place.

Fortunately, Elijah’s military-surplus Raven interceptor was almost as agile in atmospheric flight as its prey. He didn’t recognize the make, but it was some sort of civilian racer, not a combat ship; its ephemerally thin and fragile airfoils were proof enough of that. It might still be lightly armed, but in a firefight, Elijah knew he would have the upper hand.

“I’m on your six. Be careful, Eli.” Anna’s cautionary tone was, as usual, not backed up by her actions. Her ship was just as agile as Elijah’s, and he could see her plummeting after him on the rear-mounted camera feed.

The smuggler dove into a dramatically narrow valley, local tree-analogues marching almost up to the ridges on both sides. The quick, fragile ship hugged the treetops at the bottom of this narrow gorge, weaving wildly around the few branches which reached their claws above the canopy. Elijah, though he stayed slightly higher and farther from the danger of clipping the trees and making a spectacular crater in the hills, followed closely.  

On straight, level flight, his military-grade ship could maintain a higher speed without being shaken to pieces by its own sonic shockwaves, and the smuggler would know that; the only hope the criminal had was losing his pursuers with wild, tight maneuvers, which the thin adaptive airfoils of his own craft would permit. Even then, Sujay’s high-flying eyes could easily vector Elijah and Anna back onto his tail. He and his cargo were, barring a miracle or a tragic accident, doomed to fall into the hands of the system authority.

At the bottom of the gorge, where it opened up onto a wider, flat-bottomed valley, the smuggler suddenly pulled up, his ship’s nose pointing directly up into the sky. At first, Elijah thought he was making a run back to space to try to make for the jump limit, but that was evidently not his aim. “Sujay, watch it!” Redlining his drive, he struggled to follow the ascending racer, but his heavier ship was slower in the climb.

“That’s a bold move.” Sujay replied absently, as the larger ship rolled out of the way just in time to avoid a collision. The smuggler couldn’t hope to survive a collisison with Sujay’s support ship; Elijah concluded the maneuver was meant to try to scare the pursuers into backing off or making a mistake. “Does that count? Can we shoot?”

“No.” The frustration in Anna’s voice was only too clear. “Unless he actually hits you.” The penalty fees for unlawful fire were prohibitively high, and even one incident would rob the mercenaries of most of their profit margin.

Elijah watched as the nimble smuggler cut his drive and, with a deft two-axis flip, pointed his nose back down toward the ground, and toward Elijah, who was directly below. “That’s a game two can play.” The mercenary pressed on, setting a collision course. “I don’t flinch.”

“Eli, don’t you dare.”

Elijah didn’t alter his course as the two ships sped toward each other, and Anna’s injunction went completely unheeded. At the last second, the smuggler flinched, his starboard airfoil flashing past only a few meters from Elijah’s canopy. The thunderous sound of the other ship’s drive passing at supersonic speed rocked the mercenary in his restraints, but his durable Raven was undamaged.

The smuggler, however, was not. As Elijah looped around to resume the pursuit, he saw that the buffeting shockwaves of the near-miss had been worse for the fragile, spindly racer than for his own ship. With one airfoil bent awkwardly and the other now missing several meters of its tip, the smuggler’s ship now wobbled in the air, unstable and shaking violently. 

“That was insane.” Anna scolded halfheartedly as the smuggler cut his speed and wobbled down toward the meadows of the broad valley below, beaten. Anna dropped in on his tail to follow him down, and Elijah maneuvered to do the same.

Elijah knew it was, but he wasn’t about to admit it, or to acknowledge the severe trembling in his hands that forced him to switch to an automatic course. 

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Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Second Beginning

2946-12-11 - Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Second Beginning

In last week's Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Stray, we first encountered Hugh A., a local constable on Maribel, and Varinia V., a woman who survived he horrors of the Silver Strand pleasure-slave market, and did not emerge from this den of degeneracy unaffected. Somehow, she made her way across hundreds of light-years from the Strand to Maribel, largely on her own. On Maribel, she found a few people who saw through her horrific alterations and helped out a person in need - the chief law officer of Temerity District, and Hugh himself.

Hugh and Varinia are now crew-members on an interstellar hauler whose captain, a native of the Strand himself, is very sympathetic to Varinia's situation. Though the stigma against human use of  skinsculpting found on most populated worlds is difficult to dismiss as illegitimate, but it should come as no surprise to this audience that the interstellar community has been far more accepting of her situation than the population of even the wildest of the Frontier worlds would have been.

I would hope that members of this audience try to keep an open mind with persons whose humanity has been lost to some degree - there are many out there who did not come to such a situation by choice, and would, if they could, undo what has been done to them. Be it the torture inflicted by slavers in the backwater Strand or the hideous effects of poorly-understood xeno-contagions, we should always keep in mind that those who are fighting to get their humanity back in the face of great personal tragedy are often among the most human of us all.

Cringing at the idea of releasing the unwillingly-altered Varinia Villa with the usual riffraff, and knowing what the outcome of such a blunder would be, Hugh switched comm lines and called up to the Chief’s office. When someone finally connected the call, it was not Chief Sterling; he had most likely clocked out at the same time as Arif. Instead, the sharp, nasal voice of Lieutenant Porcher answered. “What do you need, Apperlo?”

“Sorry to bother you, Ma’am.” Hugh didn’t like Porcher; she was senior on duty for the quiet morning shift, and she was something of a tyrant when she could get away with it. “There’s a woman here called Villa the Chief hauled in last night. Are we releasing her this morning?”

“We are.” Porcher replied smugly. “The Chief has no right to use our solitary cells as a halfway house. We don’t have the budget for it. She’s not charged with anything, so she’s free to go when you release the rest.”

“Understood, Ma’am.” Hugh ended the call quickly, then shook his head. Releasing such a distinctively fleshsculpted individual among the territorial and often violent petty criminals of the district would be a mess – there would be violence on the very steps of the precinct station, and Porcher knew it. She was marking her territory; the Chief ruled the night, but she intended to undo anything of his that didn’t suit her own management of the morning. She probably also hoped to get some of the regular weekend “visitors” on more serious crimes, that would justify sending them away to the regional penitentiary. Porcher had never liked the awkward rapport many of the district’s petty criminals had with local law enforcement, after all. She thought it unbecoming, and perhaps it was.

“I’ve got your records now, Varinia.” Hugh didn’t catch himself using her first name until it was too late. “The Lieutenant says with no crime on file, we can’t legally keep you.”

There was no answer from inside the cell, and Hugh didn’t need to look at the video feed to know that Varinia Villa was aware of the danger a release in broad daylight would put her in.

“I’m going to make sure we process all the others out first, then we’ll see about your case.” Hugh offered.

“Don’t risk your job on my account. It’s not worth it.” Her tone was light, but she seemed to have grasped the situation from what little she’d been told.

Hugh didn’t think that delay would earn him any reproach, but with Lieutenant Porcher, anything was possible. He would, of course, have to risk it.

Less than a minute later, the Lieutenant came down to collect the prisoners for release, with two fully-armored constables in tow to wrangle the occasionally-disruptive prisoners. Hugh stood to salut,e, then triggered the cell-release controls for the other prisoners to be released one by one, letting the other officers escort them out of the cell block one by one, as usual. The lieutenant watched with a withering stare until all the prisoners except Villa were mustered along the wall, kept there by two armed officers, though Hugh could tell they weren’t interested in trouble inside the annex.

“Well, Mr. Apperlo?” Porcher looked at him with one icily arched eyebrow. “I thought there was one more.” She knew full well there was, of course.

“Go ahead with these, Ma’am. I’ll handle the special prisoner myself.” He did his best to sound confident with this assertion, hoping to remind her that she was still Chief Sterling’s subordinate.”

The other prisoners muttered amongst themselves at this choice of words, knowing the situation was unusual. Hugh paid them no mind; he met his superior’s eyes and didn’t look away. At first, Lieutenant Porcher looked ready to make an issue of this change of plans, but as if remembering the Chief’s involvement in Varinia Villa’s case, she suddenly backed down after several tense seconds. “Process these ones out. Apperlo and I will see to the last one.” A wave directed the other two constables to escort the prisoner train upstairs.

Hugh let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, then turned away to do as he had said. Varinia Villa would still have to fare in the open, the Lieutenant was allowing her to escape outside the notice of the petty criminals. He had to hope it was enough to let her get out of Temerity in one piece, though the neighboring districts wouldn’t be much more hospitable for an unwilling skinsculpt.

“Guard Apperlo.” The Lieutenant’s sharp voice stopped Hugh short just as his hand rested on the cell-door release control for the final cell. “Bring that degenerate up here.”

Hugh winced at the epithet, but did as he was ordered, releasing the door lock and then trudging down the silent cell block to number three. Varinia was seated calmly on the cot, and when the door opened, the light drew back the shadowed curtain over her disfigured nature. Trying not to shudder, he held out a hand. “Come on.”

With a curt nod, the skinsculpted woman stood fluidly and walked past Hugh into the hall, ignoring his outstretched hand. She stopped as soon as she saw Lieutenant Porcher standing at Hugh’s guard desk at the end of the block, halted as if by the force the officer’s unconcealed antipathy. Closing the cell door behind the woman, Hugh urged her onward after only the briefest hesitation. Porcher was a firebrand, but she probably wouldn’t risk her own rise to Temerity’s highest-ranking law enforcement position over one of the Sterling’s mercy projects.

“I don’t know how a freak like you sweet-talked the Chief into getting a warm bed for the night, but we’re not a charity.” The Lieutenant stood in the way, preventing Varinia and Hugh from leaving the jail.

Varinia kept her gaze studiously on the floor. Hugh focused on her, rather than on the Lieutenant, because it was his duty to keep her from causing trouble, even if his superior was more likely to instigate something. In the much better light near his desk, he saw what he could only suspect from the camera feed – the skinsculpt job that had been inflicted on the woman was more extensive than it had first seemed, with tiny crystalline patterns, seemed to radiate across her body, starting at the arm and shoulder covered in crystalline spikes. The whole effect was one of incompletion, as if the effort to strip her of her humanity had been interrupted.

When it was clear that there would be no response to her invective, the Lieutenant, flying into a sudden fury, backhanded Varinia viciously, sending her reeling back against Hugh. “Listen to me when I’m talking to you, wretch!”

Hugh caught the prisoner to keep her on her feet, ignoring the unpleasant feeling of the geometrically-sculpted arm and shoulder under his hand, and the macabre, chime-like sound of the crystalline extrusions rattling against each other. “Lieutenant.” There was no hiding the disgust and anger in his voice. “Get ahold of yourself.”

Porcher’s furious glare met Hugh’s, and once again, he struggled not to look away, even though he knew what he was doing. She would be Chief soon, and when she was, he would be out of his job. Once again, the Lieutenant backed down, though she abandoned none of her irrational fury as she whirled on one booted heel and stalked away. “Get her out of my precinct.” The barked order came only as she was halfway up the stairs to the main floor. “Then make sure that cell is well cleaned.”

Hugh waited until Lieurenant Porcher was gone before moving or making a sound. “Sorry about the Lieutenant, miss. I can take down a statement if you want to file a complaint.”

The woman regained her footing and pushed Hugh’s hands away to stand on her own. Already, a red mark was forming on her cheek where she’d been struck, but the blow seem to have done any serious damage. “Would it do any good?” Hugh suppressed a shudder at the grotesque juxtaposition of her untouched, pretty face framed on one side by gaudy, dark crystalline spines sprouting from her shoulder, and on the other by her tangle of dark, unkempt hair, cropped asymmetrically to keep it away from the garish sculpting which would certainly trap it.

Hugh shook his head sadly, unable to voice the simple admission that the complaint would go nowhere. Porcher was not popular in the precinct, but she had earned the grudging respect of everyone, including the Chief, because she ran a tight shift. One minor incident of violence against such a disreputable prisoner might even aid her career prospects, in such a rough place as Temerity District. “Let’s go. Since you’re not charged with anything, I’ll take you out by the alley.”

Varinia followed Hugh upstairs down the hall between the two constabulary ready-stations, past the interrogation room, the mess, and the evidence vault. The alley door was intended for bringing in supplies; it was a loading dock rather than a public entrance, and it refused to open until Hugh tapped its status panel with a bypass chit.

After peeking cautiously out into the dingy alley, littered as it was with reusable crates waiting to be picked up by the reclamation service, Hugh led the skinsculpt out. “Do you have some place to go?”

“I’ll find somewhere.” The reply was optimistic, but Hugh knew she wouldn’t find anywhere in Temerity District that would welcome her, even if she had money to pay for lodging.

“Miss Villa-”

“I told you to call me Varinia.”

“Varinia.” Hugh grudgingly corrected himself. “Are you-”

“Stars around, what a freak.” In the mouth of the alley, a trio of slouching local troublemakers had taken notice of the pair at the loading dock. These were, Hugh recognized, some of the very people who’d just been released from his cell block. “Officer, we’ll make sure she gets out of the district.” His two friends chuckled unkindly.

“You tried, Hugh.” Varinia observed quietly. “I suppose not everyone here is as decent as you and the Chief.”

“Mr. Apperlo.” Lieutenant Porcher’s voice barked in Hugh’s ear, courtesy of his comms earpiece. He could hear the undisguised smug satisfaction in her voice, and knew that she had made sure somehow that the local miscreants had taken notice of Varinia’s departure. “Back to your post.”

Hugh looked at the three men, then at Varinia, then up at the surveillance camera perched above his head, watching the alley. Porcher could fire him without the Chief’s approval, and then he would be no better off than the very drunks he had spent several years guarding. Good employment in Temerity District was nearly impossible to find; the junior constable position he had was among the best available.

“If you lot don’t go home, I’ll have you back in the block in five minutes.” Hugh warned the men, but they only sneered at him. They knew how little Maribel authorities – especially in a place like Temerity – usually protected indigent off-worlders who washed up on the already thickly populated planet.

“Mr. Apperlo, back to your post. That was an order.”

Hugh looked up at the camera again, intending to make it only too clear that he had heard the order, then deliberately pulled out his earpiece, dropped it to the ground, and crushed it under one foot. “Come on.” He told Varinia, leading her toward the men. He had a side-arm and a shock baton, in addition to the protective body armor contained in his uniform; the trio quickly thought better of their approach and slunk away.

Varinia finally found her voice after they had gone. “What are you doing? Hugh, your job-”

“Chief will have my back.” Hugh didn’t have the confidence he placed into those words. Chief Sterling would do what he could, but disobeying a direct order to return to his post, then smashing his earpiece in a show of open defiance, was not recoverable.

Varinia threaded her unaltered arm through his and leaned her head on his shoulder gently. “I’m sure.”

Hugh looked down at the damaged woman next to him, for once not having to suppress a shudder at her twisted appearance. The Chief had seen something in her, and in him – if he had to guess, it was that neither of them was a good fit for rough, tumbledown Temerity District.

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