Space Deputy (Interstellar Sheriff Book 1) Read online

  Max didn’t as much as twitch at the hint of illegal activities.

  “Cool customer.” Theodor saluted him with his coffee mug.

  Max balanced a piece of bacon and yellow “egg” smush on his fork. “What were the surveyor dudes chasing?”

  “Rubyjoo.” Theodor swigged some coffee, but his coffee mug couldn’t hide the avid and angry gleam in his eyes. Evidently, rubyjoo was his Eldorado Cache. All the long-term surveyors had one; the big “find” they chased in the belief that it would make their careers.

  Hearing that, Thelma understood a little better the rancor hiding beneath the glee in his retelling of the successful hazing. The five dudes had attempted to go after Theodor’s obsession.

  Rubyjoo was the liquid crystal that powered quantary computers. They were the most efficient and powerful computers in the Federation, and were likely the framework that supported both Harry and Lon’s raphus geodes, their AI brains. Finding a vein of rubyjoo meant a surveyor became a rare Rubyjooicer. Of course that sort of fame would appeal to new surveyors as well as old-timers.

  If Thelma had had prior warning, she could have looked up whether Theodor or Alex had achieved the status of Rubyjooicer yet. As it was, she pushed her ersatz scrambled eggs around her plate and listened to Theodor’s voice quicken with enthusiasm.

  “So Veronica had the dudes believing that she’d invented a rubyjoo detector and that, obviously, there was significant interest in it from the big corporations, people like Hwicce and Booratek. She ‘let slip’ that she was meeting with a Hwicce vice president. She was smart. She didn’t dump all the information on the dudes. She seeded it throughout a few months of preparation, hinting at her favorite chain of hotels, which planet she’d be on and when, and concluding with her intention to visit a botanical garden during her visit planetside. That gave the dudes the precise city the meeting would be held in.”

  He clapped his hands together. “The five dudes put the clues together the way she’d hoped, then put together a plan. They took control of the hotel’s surveillance coverage.”

  Now, Max frowned.

  “Don’t worry,” Alex interposed. “Veronica had an inside woman in the hotel’s security. Guests’ safety was never compromised.”

  Theodor’s mouth moved in a silent “ya-ya” of impatience. As soon as his partner stopped talking, Theodor resumed. “The dudes stole the supposed rubyjoo detector while Veronica was in the hotel’s most expensive restaurant dining with another surveyor who was pretending to be the Hwicce vice president. The scheme worked because the actual vice president was in town, but busy with his own private business.”

  Alex finished his meal and pushed back from the table, cradling his mug of coffee in a huge hand. “The dudes scurried back to their ship with the stolen rubyjoo detector and headed for the Elgin Marble Field.” He glanced at Thelma. “Which was where the last significant find of rubyjoo was made.”

  “By us,” Theodor added.

  Which answered Thelma’s question of whether the two surveyors were Rubyjooicers. They were.

  Alex drained his mug of coffee, snatched up his partner’s, and went to refill both at the food dispenser.

  “What was the detector set to actually detect?” Max asked.

  “Hades slime.”

  “Yuk.” At Theodor’s answer, Thelma ceased pretending to eat her breakfast. “That’s just cruel.”

  He snickered.

  Alex shoved a mug of coffee at him. “It teaches the young’uns. We’ll test if the lesson takes in a few months.”

  “Do I want to know how?” Thelma asked cautiously.

  Alex winked at her. “No, deputy, you don’t.”

  After the surveyors departed, Thelma returned to the main deck and cut up an apple and peach to eat with a bowl of granola and almond milk. She also made herself a cup of tea. “In case I haven’t said,” she addressed everyone and no one, as Max, Harry and Lon were all present. “I appreciate the food on the Lonesome. I don’t know how you do it in space. It’s so fresh. But I’m not questioning miracles. Not after being reminded how goop food tastes.”

  Max shook his head at her, but took an apple from the fruit bowl and bit into it as he turned to walk out of the kitchen, probably headed for his office.

  “Max?”

  He looked back at her.

  “Theodor and Alex seem like typical surveyors?” The slightest upward intonation fuzzed her observation into a semi-question.

  Lon answered. “They’re exemplars of the profession. At least, out here on the frontier they are. They are quirky, paranoid about protecting their theories of discovery, and operate by their own code, but they’re very effective surveyors. They find what they’re looking for.”

  “Even rubyjoo,” Thelma said quietly. She crunched some granola. Max leaned a hip against the kitchen island, while she sat on a bar stool. “I had some doubts last night about the Kampia. Maybe not doubts. Questions.” She chased a piece of granola-encrusted peach around her bowl.

  “Go on.” He was eating the apple in a few efficient, crunchy bites.

  “We don’t know who the Kampia are. I don’t mean that generally. I’m thinking about the individual Kampia who’ve agreed to meet with the senators. Initially, I assumed that they must be representatives of their government. But what if they’re not? What if the wormhole that brings them to the edge of the Badstars is sited on the frontier of Kampia territory? All the space myths are of rare sightings of solitary Kampia. At the most, they appear in pairs. In partnerships.”

  “Like Theodor and Alex.” Lon guessed where her argument was going. “You’re suggesting that the Kampia seen in the Saloon Sector are the equivalent of surveyors.”

  “I am.” Her spoon clinked against the bowl as she set it down. She gripped the edge of the counter. “I know it sounds like a wacky idea, but what if the senators aren’t meeting with authorized representatives of the Kampia, but with individuals like Theodor and Alex who are running a scam so that they can get access to search for something in the Saloon Sector?”

  “You think we have rogue Kampia surveyors in the Saloon Sector?” Max tossed his apple core into the recycling receptacle. The counter resealed over it.

  “Not necessarily rogue, not necessarily dangerous,” she said. “Just running a scam, like Theodor’s friend, Veronica. Look at the facts.”

  Max folded his arms, his resistant body language expressing disbelief.

  Thelma frowned. She did have facts. She started with one of the big ones. “Fact. The Senate Worlds Development Committee’s arrival in the Saloon Sector has drawn the Navy out of most of the sector to concentrate its forces on the far side of Braw to protect the senators under the guise of war gaming.”

  “We discussed this last night,” he said. “The Navy and Galactic Justice would have conducted a threat analysis. We have to trust them to do their jobs and us to do ours.”

  “But this is our job. As sheriff and deputy for the frontier region we have to keep the peace in interstellar space.”

  Harry had been silently observing the two of them from the lounge side of the kitchen island. For a wonder, neither he nor Lon had intervened in the discussion, not once it got intense. “Human intuition is one of the elements of cognition that AIs haven’t been able to replicate.”

  Max refocused his scowl in the AI mech’s direction. “We can’t interfere with high level political and military actions. We can’t get involved, and there’s no basis to refer on Thelma’s suspicions. We shouldn’t even be guessing about the Kampia’s meeting with senators.”

  “I’m not intuitive,” Thelma said to Harry.

  “The best information brokers are,” he answered. “Lon replaces intuition with AI processing. He sees connections and calculates probabilities. Humans use gut instinct.”

  Max slapped a hand down on the counter. “Gut instinct fails. It can get you killed. I’ve seen what happens to Marines who rely on it.”

  Perhaps that history explained his dete
rmination to rationalize everything.

  “I don’t want to rely on intuition,” Thelma responded calmly, staying on topic even though this rare glimpse into his past and his feelings made her want to reach for more. “I just…something about the meeting with the Kampia seems wrong. Not dangerous. I can’t pinpoint what it is, and that’s why I had to mention my doubts. If the Kampia are looking for something here, what could it be? Lon, if we plotted sightings of Kampia would it reveal anything?”

  “I can look.”

  Max barely parted his lips to speak. His jaw muscles were clenched with tension, and lines bracketed his mouth. “We’re returning to Zephyr in a week. We are not deviating from our patrol route. Look all you like. Obsess over the damned grubs. But no mention of the Kampia is to leave this ship.” He stalked out.

  Thelma stared at the empty doorway as her pulse thudded in her ears. She hadn’t expected his anger, and couldn’t explain it. Nor could she ask Harry and Lon about its cause. Confidences concerning Max and his past had to come from him, and he’d slammed a wall up between them.

  “There is no statistically significant pattern to the Kampia’s appearances, other than that they occur more frequently closer to the Badstars. But even then, they’re rare.” For an AI like Lon, an analysis such as Thelma had requested took no time at all when he had the data in his possession.

  She smiled uncertainly. “So my intuition is haywire?”

  “Or it could be that you’re seeing through the story the Kampia have sold us.” Harry strode off, either to chase down Max or to retire to his private quarters.

  Thelma sighed as she picked up her bowl of granola to finish her breakfast. “What do you think, Lon?”

  “I think we’ll be changing our patrol route.”

  Chapter 15

  Thelma trawled the Sheriff Department’s discussion boards, determinedly not looking for anything that might be Kampia related, but instead, focusing diligently on interstellar traffic complaints. Those were the worst. Professional couriers accepted their speeding fines as part of doing business, even as they retreated off the public boards into private chat rooms to share methods—some useful, some just odd—of evading the all-seeing eyes of the cameras sited in busy starlanes. But other Saloon Sector citizens bellyached about their transgressions catching up with them, and the hefty weight of the most severe fines. As deputy, she’d taken on the job of noting the most aggressive complainants and monitoring their behavior. Grousing was acceptable. Letting it develop into threats was not.

  Max practiced a hands-off management style that went against the textbook teaching of policing methodology at the Galactic Justice academy. The power of his reputation suggested his methods were right and the pedagogues wrong.

  Interstellar space was immense. Max’s territory was large enough for an armada to hide in. Yet he kept the peace throughout the frontier region with only the disinterested assistance of the Navy and Customs, both of which institutions had their own priorities that didn’t include traffic regulations, mining claim conflicts, opportunistic banditry or station bar fights. Customs and Navy vessels would rescue damaged spaceships and/or their crews, but then, that was the traditional law of space travel.

  For everything else, Max relied on people being responsible adults.

  The instructors at the Galactic Justice academy taught that without regulation, people defaulted to unprincipled behavior and outright chaos. But what the academics considered adequate regulation went far beyond Max’s approach. They would have had the interstellar sheriffs enforce all of the Federation’s laws, disregarding that frontier life had unique pressures.

  Max’s playbook was different. He made clear that he’d not tolerate grievous harm or worse in his territory. His consistent behavior provided a framework for the spacers to regulate themselves. Either they played within his rules or the Lonesome would suddenly turn up. The spaceship’s speed and stealth added to Max’s mystique. People never knew when Sheriff Smith might appear to arrest wrong-doers. He gave spacers the confidence to manage their own affairs, and backed them up.

  His aim wasn’t to be heroic, but effective.

  “If the day needs saving, somewhere in the preceding days, you stuffed up,” Thelma repeated what he’d once told her. Law and order ought to be boring. Keeping the peace harked back to the old Earth, British tradition of police walking the beat.

  She closed her session on the discussion board and stood to stretch. She was tense and unhappy. Being aboard the Lonesome, being with Max, had been easy. Now, she felt as if she’d transgressed, but didn’t know how.

  “I hate political games.” Max stood in the doorway. “May I come in?”

  She dropped her arms from their over-the-head stretch and stepped back, closer to the rear wall. “Sure, but there’s not much room.”

  He frowned at the narrow space. Or maybe he just frowned. “I’m changing our route. We’ll go home, back to Zephyr, via the Deadstar Diner. The Navy usually has at least one spaceship within a couple of days of the diner, but with them all gone war-gaming there’s a gap in law and order. Adjusting our patrol to take in the refueling station won’t raise any flags.”

  The Deadstar Diner was sited in an isolated yet important part of Max’s territory.

  The fingers of Thelma’s right hand dug into the back of her desk chair. “Can I ask why you’re so worried about flags being raised? It’s not that you’re unknown. You’re a key player on the frontier.”

  “On the frontier,” he repeated, but with a different intonation. His emphasis indicated that he was okay with being known out here.

  “You don’t want to draw Galactic Justice attention?” She hazarded a guess. “If you’re worrying about my career, I don’t have one.”

  His frown deepened to a scowl. “People who have power don’t like to share it, but they do like to gain power over others. The loss of a career is survivable.”

  Her fingers cramped from her tight grip on the chair back. She released it. “What isn’t survivable?”

  “Losing your freedom. Becoming someone’s pawn.” The intensity in his blue eyes said that this was critical to him.

  “An interstellar sheriff on the frontier has a great deal of independence,” she said slowly. “If you’re trying to balance a need for independence with a vocation to protect people it’s a good choice for a former Star Marine.”

  “And you’ve been wondering how I snagged the job. How I got the Lonesome. How I ended up in company with two secretive AIs.”

  “I have a lot of questions,” she conceded. She kept her chin up and her gaze steady on his. “But I haven’t asked them and I won’t share them with anyone. I only shared my suspicions regarding the Kampia with you.” There was a hint of a plea there. She heard it, and her mouth compressed.

  His scowl twisted into a grimace that he rubbed from his face. “Thelma.”

  When he didn’t continue, she changed the subject. “It’ll be good to see Darlene again and find out what’s happening with Wild Blaster Bill.”

  He ignored her comment. “If the Lonesome attracts the senators’ or Galactic Justice’s attention, we’ll get caught up in political games. We can play them. Lon’s done it before. But there’s always a price to be paid.” He walked away.

  Thelma spun her chair around and dropped into it. Had that been an apology, an explanation or an order not to disrupt things?

  “Have I told you how Max and I first met?” Lon asked. He knew very well that he hadn’t. AIs forgot nothing.

  The timing of his offer of the story was important.

  “No,” she said quietly. “I’d be interested in hearing it.”

  “It begins with the Collegial Ark.”

  Surprised, her feet jerked. She’d been raising them to rest on her desk. As she kicked out, her comms unit skidded. She fielded it one-handed. “Babble-on?”

  “Babylon, yes. I was one of its first hires.”

  She smiled. “You’d be a great professor. Do you have an
y recordings of your talks that I could listen to?”

  When Lon didn’t answer immediately, she wondered if she’d said something wrong. She took her feet off the desk and put her comms unit down carefully.

  The hushed chime of tiny cymbals, ting!, broke the silence. “Thank you, Thelma.” Lon’s voice was as neutral as she’d ever heard it.

  “Uh, you’re welcome?”

  He laughed softly. “You don’t even suspect the truth. But then, nor did I, initially. The founding members of the Collegial Ark didn’t invite me to join as an academic representative for AIs, but rather to act as a servant to run their space station.”

  She stared up at the ceiling in disbelief. Somehow, although Lon was everywhere in the Lonesome, when she was intensely committed to conversing with him, she looked upward. “Idiots!”

  “Organic superiorists,” he corrected. “But ‘idiots’ works, too. I believe they were threatened by my intellect, by all AIs’ abilities.”

  She nodded. “Because they couldn’t match you. Insecure, stupid comet droppings,” she swore, outraged on his behalf. “So they tried to make you a servant? On what starlane does that make sense?”

  “If you fear something, you try to contain or destroy it. You reduce it. You ridicule it. If what you fear is a person, then making that person believe they are lesser is a time-proven strategy of achieving and maintaining power over them.”

  “But you would never believe you’re less than bigots.”

  He was silent.

  “Lon! You wouldn’t.”

  “I was book smart back then, Thelma. And arrogant. I underestimated the Collegial Ark’s founders. They lacked an AI’s processing and analytical abilities, but they had their own brand of intelligence. They outsmarted me in deviousness. They played to my sense of responsibility and my desire to belong. They fostered in me a sense that the Collegial Ark needed me. No, before you protest, I soon understood that the founding members didn’t deserve my loyalty, but the hopeful academics who took their sabbaticals on it and the students who cycled through the travelling space station benefited from someone who looked out for them.”