a mister Beecher fic from Simon

 This is still very much in draft, getting the story outline down, and Simon plans to expand it. 

Rogue Newts

 

 

‘Another Rogue Newt!’ The headline proclaimed. Rogue newt, two words I would never have thought to see used together. This was just after I was informed that my toilet had exploded. They’d moved me to a new office in the back of beyond. It had to be in the back of beyond so that no gravity wells interfered with the new, experimental and highly temperamental wormhole communicators. They weren’t instantaneous but pretty close to it. Unfortunately being in deep space so far away from anything meant messages had to be sent on to various worlds by jump ship. Still, we could contact the Capital in a couple of weeks, rather than half a year. However, this didn’t explain my exploding toilet.

“I’m going to have to get back to my old office,” I panicked.

A man whose immune system is seriously compromised cannot afford to live somewhere where the toilet facilities are... randomly subject to unscheduled disassembly. Going to public lavatories opens me to death from random microbes left on the seat which generally only pose a danger to eyebrow mites.

“You need not worry, Mr. Beecher, my mate installed you a secret, private lavatory opening off your office, in what was a large cupboard,” soothed Bwephulp, my secretary. Bwephulp is a Newt, or rather, more correctly, a Tsshst, an approximately amphibious alien race, whose talents with bureaucracy were much appreciated by the Imperium. And they were universally loyal.

Which is why ‘Rogue Newt’ was newsworthy.

I avoided making any puns about Newtworthy.

There was already a movement calling for the suspension of all News with the horrible tagline of ‘No Newts is good Newts’.

And of course, that was Bwephulp’s husband, or mate, who had blown up my toilet. Sshphilb, which is his name, is the  chief water and drainage engineer on this new station – something else the Tsshst excel with – and he volunteered to go rogue to go under cover.

Because rogue Newts have never happened before, and suddenly there was a spate of them.

You might say that two plus Sshphilb doesn’t exactly constitute a spate, but where Tsshst are concerned it’s three more than have gone rogue in the last 800 years of their association with the Imperium. Tsshst are conservative, ordered, easy-going until you try to push them around, at which point they take passive aggressive to levels beyond the torture of filling in tax returns, and their usual forms of rebellion are usually to discover new rules with which to inflict difficulties on the lives of those who irritate them.

And if you are polite, friendly, and don’t make waves, they find laws which work to your benefit.

I’ve never paid a parking ticket on Deneb since I took on Bwephulp as my secretary; she always finds reasons why my minor traffic violations are an exception, and rather than plough through a ton of red tape the traffic bureau just cave when they see her on the trid phone. Her opal necklace is well known; for some reason a lot of humans find it hard to tell Tsshst apart and they get over this, if they want to be known, by wearing large and often garish jewellery, beads for females, plaques on chains for males, because nobody likes to be gender-reassigned in conversation with some dimwit musclebound oaf from the Arenaworlds Alliance. And yes, I am prejudiced.

 

I looked at the files of the two other so-called rogue Newts.

Isshsstulp was the first, an aging female who had seemingly become obsessed with ancient laws and started having every starship captain arrested for not having a bale of feed in his starship to feed the animal which was its motive force.  I don’t think there has been a vehicle in the imperium for the last thousand years or more which uses animal motive force. It was dealing with too many smugglers which did it, according to the psych report, and Isshsstulp had suffered severe PTSD as a result of this and being held hostage by some smuggler, who got away by leaving his hostage in a diminishing air supply, so that any decent law enforcers would have to rescue her instead of pursuing the perpetrator.  They broke the poor female, and she took refuge in the petty regulations which were, according to the report, a way of calling for help to have more searches. When she actually assaulted the President of Deneb over his own lack of care for his flying beasts, she had to be confined. She insisted he was the one who had taken her hostage, which was disproved by his alibi.

 

The other rogue Newt was a chap named Dluppsh. A youngster, apparently, who worked for the cops as a clerk. Regulations insisted that he carry a piece, like all cops and those who work for them. Tsshst aren’t usually big on weapon use, but those required to use them are usually very efficient and assiduous in their training, as with everything.

Dluppsh came back from holiday and calmly blew away everyone in the holding cells because, he explained, it ‘cleared his desk’ because they did nothing but ‘make paperwork and untidiness.’ He walked out and vanished before anyone could react.

This was why we had had Sshphilb blow up a lavatory.

His cover story was that he was a janitor, not chief engineer, and that human waste smelled so foul and they were so untidy in bathrooms that he could bear it no longer.

Now we were waiting for the news to hit the starlanes, and for someone to react. Because the anomaly in the case of each of the others was that they had been away from their desks before going rogue.

True, Isshsstulp had already been a little... strange... but then, she had also been on holiday before her obsession with bales of feed had begun.

I hoped that Sshphilb [his wife called him Phibbi but I wouldn’t dare] would not get hurt. He had accepted the implant of an experimental piece of kit which would record all he saw and heard, and which he could trigger to put his conscious thoughts into a coma.

It had proved of equivocal use in humans so far; the boffins believed that the ordered mind of a Tsshst would accept it better.

And Sshphilb was keen to clear his people of having some kind of racial madness, and find out what was going on.

Personally, I leaned to some kind of terrorist organisation trying to rid the Imperium of its efficient bureaucracy in order to stage some coup, but I was prepared to be open minded, and consider anything down to as random and simple as a virus infesting a Tsshst resort.

Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by random chance or incompetence. And where the Tsshst were concerned, random chance was more likely than incompetence.

 

Life went back to normal for a while, other than Bwephulp handing me the wrong file once. She went a whiter shade of green when I commented,

“I’m sorry, Mr. Beecher, I... I have no excuse,” she said, her skin ducts flowing down her face.

“It’s all right, Bwephulp, I understand the strain you’re under,” I said.

“I should not permit it to affect me so,” she said, wrinkling her forehead to control the ducts, an act much like a sobbing human sniffing.

I passed her a towel, and her skin flowed in earnest.

“Take the rest of the day off,” I suggested.

“Certainly not!” she was scandalised.

She got herself back on par by amusing herself with my tax auditor. I heard later that he fled the the building where she was sending communiques, weeping.

This having restored Bwephulp’s bonhomie, she came in and switched on the news.

It was the President of Deneb.

He was a fatuous little man, and how he sleazed his way into power, I could only guess, and it fell under the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

He was holding forth. Or rather, he had held forth. He had made the speech two days earlier on Deneb as we’re two light days away out of the plane of the ecliptic.

This problem we are facing with Rogue Newts has to be addressed. It is my considered opinion, however, that every Newt in governmental employ should be placed on administrative leave whilst the reason behind this aberration is investigated. Who knows what other random acts of violence might be perpetrated by these unstable aliens...

I hit the off switch at this point. Reginald Amphlet Boxinall Packer made me want to throw things at the screen.

His stock in trade was to play to xenophobia. He also wore silver lamé shirts with dictator breeches and over the knee boots, and a sash as a nod to formal wear. This might look almost dashing on young men with a figure, but on Mr. President Too-Many-Names Packer the paunch spoiled it.  

“You ought to watch him,” said Bwephulp.

“I pay Dexter to watch the news and precis it for me,” I said. “I can quote Packer from memory. Things about a blight upon the human empire, placing our trust and our most precious commodity, knowledge into the hands of aliens who can surely never understand our traditions and our culture -  and he includes Wiłanu and other human sub-groups taken by the Forerunners in with other aliens – and trampling the glorious rise of mankind from its cradle, the Earth. I don’t need to see it to know how it runs. I wish he had not had an alibi when Miss Isshsstulp was made off with.”

“He’s a transhumanist. How do you know he doesn’t have a clone or body double?” said Bwephulp.

Boy, she really did not like the creep.

“I don’t know,” I said.

And I didn’t know. Because it had not occurred to me. The tinkering with the body which is the ideal of transhumanists did not appeal to me.

Unless someone came up with a way to clone my body without the changes wrought to it by those blasted fungi AND transfer my mind as it is into it. Then I’d cheer for the whole business.

I don’t think it’s hypocrisy; just that I can’t see any point in making changes for the sake of it. We had enough of that with some of the alterations the Forerunners made.

Some of the crazier Transhumanists hold that the Forerunners are our future selves who travelled back in time to set up some other earthborn to be of use to us.

That sort of causality loop gives me a headache; and Packer downright rejected it. He doesn’t believe in the Forerunners, either. He doesn’t dare say it but his creed is ‘the only good alien is a dead alien.’

I strongly suspected him of subscribing to, if not outright belonging to, the terrorist organisation which comes to prominence every now and then before being put down by the Imperium, who call themselves the Purge of Xenos.

 

“Boss, we have problems,” said Dexter, bouncing in. He was the office junior.

“We have several,” I said, dryly. “Like about the number of the Tsshst population.”

“Oh, you saw what that fatuous jerk suggested?” said Dexter.

“Oh, Hell, what did I miss?” I groaned.

“He wants to have their moisture garments banned as they can hide their identities with the hoods up,” said Dexter. “He’s suggested that human citizens should rip off Newt robes. And the Newts have gone on strike.”

“Oh, that was what it’s for,” I said. “A clone or body double might go the other way; both of you, I want you studying Packer’s genealogy. Minutely.”

 

Then there was the waiting. Waiting for information. Waiting for a call from Sshphilb. Or rather, his handler.

His handler was the best in the Imperium; because I demanded the best. His handler was Indira Kelso, ex scout, film-maker, archaeologist, sometime spy, maverick and generally too hot to handle for most  law enforcement, but she got things done no conventional forces could manage. No questions asked.

She’s also richer than anyone short of a megacorp CEO and is utterly incorruptible.

 

oOoOo

 

Indira Kelso arrived on station with Sshphilb who was recovering nicely after she had been treating him for injuries and exposure.

“And it’s just as well I’m a moderately competent psionic, as I was able to hold up a shield in his head because that ruddy implant was worse than useless,” said Indira. “He flung himself over the balcony where he was being held, into the sea, and I picked him up in my fuel scoops.”

“So what were they doing to him?” I asked.

“Well, apparently they were delighted to find a Tsshst who was already a bit loopy, as they saw it, but wanted to check him out. They have some sophisticated brainwave altering equipment and a skilled psychologist who has been struck off on other worlds for malpractice. I can dig too,” said Indira. “Uh... there should be a Marine report when they dig out the perps and their equipment.”

“Dig out?” I asked, suspiciously.

This is why Indira is too hot to handle. She gets creative.

She shrugged.

“I might have used my ship laser to seal them into the complex a little bit,” she said.

It could have been worse, I suppose.

“Marines?” I asked.

“There weren’t any scouts available.”

“But law enforcement...”

“When the president is at least a creep and probably a crook? I wanted them arrested and staying arrested, and this is a potentially Imperium affecting matter so I pulled rank with being an inquisitor without portfolio,” said Indira.

And this is why she is an Inquisitor without Portfolio, because the Emperor trusts her, and wise to do so too. In many ways, she’s his spare hand out here on the marches, and I’ve never known her overstep the mark.

It did make me feel easier about what I suspected about Packer.

“Packer has a twin brother,” I said. “They were reared separately but met in college.”

“And Joshua Esterhazy Amberfield Packer is suspected of being a smuggler,” said Indira.

“So, is he supplying the Purge of Xenos?” I asked.

“According to Sshphilb, who’s a damned good agent, he overheard some discussion. And no, no terrorism. Just profit margin.”

I stared.

Then I nodded.                                                                                                                        

The amount of contraband which gets picked up with routine custom checks is worth an archduke’s ransom. And without the bureaucracy to run those checks, to alert port authorities to anything hinky....

“No wonder the bastard can pay anyone off,” I said.

“He’ll find it a bit harder to pay off the Imperial authorities,” said Indira. “But I wanted to return a brave chap to his good lady.”

Bwephulp was making little bubbling noises to Sshphilb in the infirmary.

They’re a nice couple.

 

oOoOo

 

Packer’s sensational arrest and that of his twin brother hit my trid screen the standard two days after it happened. Indira Kelso borrowed a squad of marines to make it happen.

I wrote up the report and went back to the usual routine of checking out  those random things which stand out, to see what patterns there are.

It’s my job.

I’m good at it.

And now I suspect I may have a psionic Tsshst on the team as well. It’s one of those things the psionics never talk about, but Indira removed the hardware from his head, and he seems to be having long, wordless conversations with Bwephulp.

Well, that might prove interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Newts up in arms about rumour spread that their moisture garments will be withdrawn for dryer atmospheres. Terrorist group want to destabilise bureaucracy. Except it isn’t a terrorist group, it;s smugglers.