Space Deputy (Interstellar Sheriff Book 1) Read online

  Space Deputy

  Jenny Schwartz

  A millennium into the future, the Saloon Sector is where the Wild West meets the 1950s, in space, with robots. It’s where careers go to die.

  Thelma Bach graduated top of her class after four years at the Galactic Justice academy. But she’s a Rock Sector citizen. The core worlders were never going to let her transcend her background. So she’s been assigned to serve her seven years as a deputy in the Saloon Sector. The message for the Federation’s out-world citizens is clear: you’ll never be our equal, so don’t even try.

  The stuffy bureaucrats of the Galactic Justice service chose the wrong person to push around. Thelma will subvert her interstellar sheriff, charm artificial intelligences, fight bandits and hunt the legendary Eldorado Cache. But with the frontier region holding secrets of its own, she needs to choose her new allies wisely because a scary, business-suited enemy is hunting her.

  “Space Deputy” is a fast-paced, offbeat space adventure.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Want More?

  Chapter 1

  The personal comms unit in Thelma Bach’s left hand shook. Around her, her fellow graduates of the four year Galactic Justice program were exclaiming, hugging and congratulating each other. Exaggerated squeals of happiness pierced the air.

  Thelma blinked to clear the sting of shocked tears from her eyes and reread the message on her comms unit, the notification of her first year assignment.

  Saloon Sector, deputy position. Report to Sheriff Max Smith.

  The details of when, where and her travel arrangements were attached.

  Dear God, no.

  But no matter how often she reread it, the message didn’t change.

  After four years of being consistently head of her class, excelling in the additional studies of xenobiology, ancient history, armed and unarmed combat, and navigation, she’d been assigned to the worst sector in the galaxy, the one to which the failures and discards of the Galactic Justice service were sent.

  A braying laugh scraped against her raw nerves.

  Rudolf Gua’s claim to fame was his ability to swallow an astounding amount of hard cider in a minute and to burp the alphabet. Oh, and his mother was a Galactic Senator.

  “Yep, assigned to Alpha Hub,” Rudy bragged as he accepted the congratulations of their peers. Their former teachers nodded and smiled along with everyone else.

  Rudy looked up and his gaze fixed on Thelma. “And what did you get, Mining Princess?”

  As the daughter of independent asteroid miners from the Rock Sector, Thelma had endured the snubs and outright prejudice of central Hub citizens during her three years at college plus the four years of the Galactic Justice program.

  Her hands ceased shaking. She pocketed her comms unit. “I’m cleared for independent missions.” If she couldn’t put a positive spin on her disastrous assignment, she didn’t deserve the high marks she’d earned in diplomacy class. “And you got assigned to Alpha Hub, huh? Good for you, Rudy. Mommy can hold your hand.”

  Dead silence hit the room, expanding outward from the detonation zone between her and the senator’s son.

  Thelma smiled tightly and walked out.

  No one stopped her. No one asked further questions.

  A couple of teachers looked sorry or possibly even mad on her behalf. They knew her assignment, she realized.

  Despite her determination to conceal the extent of her devastation, her pace increased. She reached her dorm room at a near run. Her duffel bag waited for her at the foot of her stripped bed. She’d packed everything ready for her grand departure. She had few enough belongings. For the last seven years, all the money she’d earned had gone into living expenses and an emergency fund. She had her duffel bag, a comms unit jammed with textbooks, and the expectation of a Galactic Justice department uniform.

  Well, she could kiss that last expectation good-bye. As a deputy in the Saloon Sector she’d be wearing a utility suit. Just like home, she thought bitterly. And she’d be expected to purchase her own.

  She resisted the urge to punch the wall. If she gave in to her feelings for even an instant, she’d be kicking and screaming, cursing at the unfairness of the universe.

  Her family had warned her. She’d refused to believe them.

  She picked up the duffel bag and walked out, leaving the dorm room door swinging.

  Her travel arrangements were for a third class cabin, twin share, on a starliner leaving the next morning. She bought a second duffel bag and filled it with newly bought utility suits, spare boots, a blade and a few other items not mentioned on Galactic Justice’s remote service preparation list. The night market provided those.

  The other students avoided the night market. It was too criminal, and worse, too poor, for their comfort. But Thelma was familiar with its crowded maze of tiny booths beneath an immense ferrous silk canopy. She spent her credit chips wisely, ending with the purchase of a chain of coffees in a corner diner where she waited out the last of the night hours till she could head for the spacedock, board the starliner, and sleep. A hotel room for the night was an unnecessary extravagance, now that the job she’d aimed for had been wrenched away.

  A deputy barely made living wage.

  And I’m stuck with it. Thelma faced reality over endless tiny cups of bitter coffee. She didn’t have the money to pay the price of the Galactic Justice education she’d received, which meant she owed the service seven years of her life.

  “Star-sucking buzzards.”

  The miners of the Rock Sector knew that the Hub citizens regarded them as second class citizens. Everyone had warned Thelma not to dream impossible dreams. Sure, she was smart. But smart wasn’t what got you places in the galaxy. It was who you knew. It was the destiny derived from where you were born and to whom that mattered.

  I was a fool. She’d believed the equal opportunities propaganda that President Smith and the other members of Federation Parliament spouted. She’d won a scholarship to a core world college and that had made her believe that she could be someone. She would change things from the inside. She would be part of the Galactic Justice service and—

  “You want another coffee?” The waitress interrupted Thelma’s bleakly circling thoughts. The breakfast crowd would arrive soon, the working people who woke before sun-up and slaved past sundown. The table Thelma had occupied through the night would be needed.

  “Thanks. I’m good.” She paid her bill, adding a decent tip, and headed for the starliner. It would travel to the Saloon Sector via the Reclamation Sector. The journey would take five weeks, longer if any of the spacedocks they stopped at in the Reclamation Sector were subject to the current rolling strikes the Lumpers Union was holding as they negotiated better conditions for cargo handlers.

  Her two duffel bags felt like lead weights at the end of her arms by the time she reached the spacedock. She set them at her feet for the elevator ride up, and leaned against the sidebar, keeping an eye on them. Security was tight on the planet, Serene, but petty crime happened everywhere. Everything she owned was in those bags. She wasn’t losing them.

  The elevator doors o
pened. She picked up the duffel bags, feeling the burn in her muscles, and headed left. Right would have taken her to the government arm of the dock, where a day ago she’d have expected to depart from. The official spaceships carried diplomats, bureaucrats, agents and other elite members of the Galactic Justice service as they hurried about, busy with their important work.

  At least her crack of dawn arrival meant she’d avoided meeting any of her fellow graduates.

  The starliner, Lazy Days, bulged high and wide at its mooring. It was an old-fashioned blimp design. They’d been the height of fashion two centuries ago. Now the old girl traversed the frontier trail. It was quite a comedown.

  Thelma clenched her jaw so tight it ached. The faded glories and spaced hopes of the Lazy Days felt like salt scrubbed into the raw wounds of her ego. Which was undoubtedly why she’d been booked on the starliner and not allowed to hitch a ride on a government courier. She was a living, breathing message aimed at Rock Sector kids and other out-world dreamers: don’t believe the Equal Opportunities jazz; you will never be the equal of core world citizens.

  What better way to send the message than to dump the top graduate of the Galactic Justice program into the Saloon Sector? They might as well have delivered her to the starliner with a sign: out-worlders, get lost.

  This early in the morning, with seven hours to go before the starliner departed, what activity existed centered on the starliner’s cargo hatchway.

  Thelma circled out of the way of a robot hauler as she headed for the other end of the ship. She lugged her duffel bags to the boarding ramp and dropped them. Instead of their weight triggering the ramp into action, it remained immobile. She cursed creatively under her breath and picked up the bags, striding the distance to where a crew member watched disinterestedly from the hatchway.

  When she reached him, the man waved a scanner vaguely in her direction. His gray hair was cut too short to be messy, but his eyes were bloodshot, his uniform rumpled, and his boots unpolished. He didn’t respect himself, and he sure as heck didn’t respect her. His gaze drifted, fixing on a billboard across the way.

  Thelma presented her comms unit with her boarding pass onscreen.

  The scanner beeped. An orange light on it turned green. The crewman yawned. The security system appeared as antiquated and inadequate as the starliner itself.

  “Map to your room is on your comms,” the man mumbled, and that was it. That was the extent of the boarding protocol. There was no porter, no trolley, and no assistance.

  “Thanks,” she said ironically.

  The crewman nodded, either not catching or not caring about her sarcasm.

  Mindful of the arrival of another early bird passenger shuffling up the boarding ramp behind her, Thelma shoved her bags to one side before calling up the map to her room. The cabin would be her home for the next five weeks. With a complete absence of surprise, she noted that it was an outer cabin. On the old blimps, the safest place to be in the event of an emergency was along its spine. The outer cabins, those that hadn’t been converted to cargo holding, were the cheapest of the cheap accommodation.

  By the time she reached it, her duffel bags were almost dragging; although whether that was due to physical tiredness or emotional reluctance was debatable. Not that Thelma was in the mood to debate anything. The cabin door opened to reveal two single beds either side of the narrow doorway, with luggage lockers built above them. Since the cabin was empty, she chose the bed to the right and stowed her bags. Then she stretched out full length. After a night spent hunched over a diner table, simply being horizontal felt good.

  She sat up, kicked off her boots, and lay down again. The starliner’s various restaurants and other facilities wouldn’t open till three hours before departure. She had time for a nap.

  A couple of hours later, a prospective cabin mate woke her.

  She jerked up onto an elbow at the scuffing sound of the door opening.

  An adult urself stuck his head in and opened his mouth to inhale deeply. His nostrils flared wide. He was tall for his species. Almost five feet. Urselves resembled over-sized koalas, having similar silver-gray fur and facial structure. This one didn’t look or sound cuddly.

  “She smells of honesty and sadness. Satisfactory.” The urself passed a credit chip to the steward, entered the cabin, and closed the door. He swung a sharply rectangular suitcase onto the empty bunk, opened it and extracted an eye mask and earplugs. Then he relocked the suitcase, jumped up, and slapped the overhead locker open.

  “I can—” Thelma began.

  The urself threw in his suitcase, while balancing awkwardly on his bunk, then closed the locker. “I will be hibernating until we reach Zephyr in the Saloon Sector. In case of emergency, you can wake me by lowering my head over the edge of the bed.”

  The urself, who still hadn’t introduced himself, stripped back the bed cover on his bunk, crawled in, and settled himself with a couple of grunts and the aid of the eye mask and earplugs.

  Thelma stared at him disbelievingly, then let her head drop back onto her pillow. By the end of the five week trip the small cabin would reek of urself. On the other hand, a hibernating urself was probably the closest she could come to being alone in a twin share cabin.

  And really, the menthol and musk scent of an urself was the least of her problems.

  Resigned to being awake, she showered, dressed in one of her new utility suits, and went exploring. The Galactic Justice academy had stressed that agents should familiarize themselves with a new environment as soon as possible. Thelma was angry at the academy, but that didn’t make its teachings any less valid. She ended her exploration expedition in the cafeteria for her deck.

  It was open for business, and since the food served in the cafeteria was included in her passage, she swiped her ticket and collected cheese sandwiches and a cup of hot tea. The choice of seating was obvious.

  A table dotted with solo travelers, each fully focused on their comms units, lined the back wall. Most wore utility suits similar to hers, which suggested they were travelling for work. Families and small groups occupied a quarter of the other tables, leaving the rest empty for now.

  Taking on the habits of her tablemates, she switched on her comms unit. She wasn’t interested in reading a novel or watching a movie, and she most definitely wasn’t ready to message her family with news of her assignment to the wild and disreputable frontier.

  The frontier…

  She called up a Zephyr newspaper site, and scrolled through its most popular stories. Zephyr was the planet on which she’d be based. It wasn’t the government center for the Saloon Sector, but it was a regional center for the last line of the frontier and the territory she’d be responsible for.

  “Eldorado Map Discovered!!!”

  “Man Bites Saurelle.”

  “Are Grubs Hatching In The Badstars?”

  “Eldorado Map A Fraud. Cache Still Lost.”

  “Space Donut Cook-off. Winner Cheats.”

  The headlines failed to engage her attention. She ate her sandwich and pursued a teasing memory. In four years study at the Galactic Justice academy, the Saloon Sector had been rarely mentioned. But there had been something, something that nagged at her now. It had been a law professor, a guest speaker talking about employment practices and the impact of local pressures.

  “She mentioned deputies.”

  Thelma’s table mate at her left elbow glanced at her curiously.

  “Sorry. Thinking aloud.” Thelma swallowed the last of her tea and concentrated on her comms unit with new intensity. Labor laws, frontier imperatives, the Saloon Sector and financial realities danced through her brain and flickered across the screen under the direction of her busy, searching fingertips.

  The law professor had said that Galactic Justice appointed interstellar sheriffs to police interplanetary activity in the Saloon Sector. The work was well paid and sheriffs had a great deal of independence and power. They could even swear in their own deputies. The problem was, no o
ne wanted to be a deputy. The pay was barely subsistence level in a sector where prices were high. People moved to the Saloon Sector to make their fortune, not to serve as deputies.

  So Galactic Justice and its combative legal department had quietly and reluctantly accepted reality. No more money could be wrung out of the budget to increase the pay to attract quality deputies, but the rule book was amended to allow a different solution. In the Saloon Sector, a deputy could have a second job.

  Thelma’s pulse thudded as she found the answers she sought. She slowed her scrolling and read rather than skimmed the text.

  There! She stabbed a finger at the screen.

  It was in the rulebook, one of those regulations that got overlooked because nowhere else in the Federation acted quite like the frontier.

  The Galactic Justice legal department hadn’t intended the amendment to favor someone like her, someone coming in from the core worlds to serve a contracted term. Nonetheless, it still applied to her. The lawyers hadn’t thought to write in an exception to their amendment.

  She sat back with a burgeoning sense of resolve. She owed Galactic Justice eight hours of her day, six days a week, for the next seven years; but outside of that time, she could, while in the Saloon Sector, pursue other employment.

  This rule changed everything.

  If she’d been sent back to the Rock Sector, she’d have been at home, but she’d also have been locked into a rigid routine, probably acting as an interstellar inspector and annoying hard-working miners by investigating their operations on distant asteroids.

  But the Galactic Justice service hadn’t wanted her to have the comforts of home. They’d wanted to underline just how bad things could get for uppity Rockers—Rock Sector citizens—who tried to crash core world institutions of privilege.

  She’d been banished, but she could spin this.

  Excitement raced through her, quickening her heartbeat and breathing. She’d had three years at college; four years at the elite Galactic Justice academy. What had she learned? What could she use to turn her exile in the Saloon Sector into a giant sod you to the bigots at the academy and in government?