you may recall from 'Civics for Insurrectionists' that Harry went undercover teaching in the university, uncovered a plot to assassinate the emperor, and was put in charge as planetary count after getting married. This follows right on.
Disorganised Crime: a Harry Kowalski story
Having been coerced into being a noble – and now I quite understood Mad Indira’s feelings on the subject – I decided to pull strings and have my platoon shipped in as my personal bodyguard and troubleshooters. Sure, being a count meant that I had a heap of official bodyguards, but I did not kno w any of them, and I did not know if I would have to protect them in combat. Or, indeed, whether I could trust them.
Having dangerous people like Marines around who look as if the moment they see trouble, they shoot it, can actually prevent a lot of violent... misunderstandings.
“So, what are we really here for?” asked Phwedulp, my corporal. He’s a Tsshst, or ‘Newt’ as many call them, and they usually serve in all-Sshst battalions for their environmental needs. Phwedulp was considered insane by a lot of his kind, liking an exciting life.
“I need people I trust,” I said. “Half the nobility here were traitors and I don’t say that a lot of the rest didn’t support them.”
Phwedulp flipped his tail, happily.
“And people talk freely in front of us po’ iggerant Newts, as well as not being able to tell us apart,” he said. Newts don’t talk like tha
“How so?” asked Serenaa – my wife! I could still hardly believe it. “The arrangements of markings on your face is distinctive, especially for being assymmetric.” That’s Serenaa for you; observant to a fault, and young enough to blurt out what she sees.
“Harry, you picked a good mate. Do not let her swim away!” said Phwedulp.
“I’ve no intention of doing so,” assured Serenaa. “He’s mine.”
“Ah, a good female who knows her husband’s place,” said Phwedulp. Newts are matriarchal.
Phwedulp, strictly speaking, is my scrounger. Because few people are as observant as my lovely wife, and cannot tell two Newts apart, Phwedulp can walk into a supply depot to demand whatever we required, saying that it had already been requisitioned. And rather than face filling in all those forms in triplicate to say why the requisition form had never arrived, most supply officers give up and hand over whatever it is.
It’s easier to log it as ‘lost in transit’ than to have to face the Imperial Bureaucracy. We rather relied on this.
It is said that any Tsshst can quote all the regulations about anything.
Phwedulp knew the most well known ones, and made up the rest. Nobody ever checked.
“I see you believe in a diversity of experience and views,” said Serenaa, regarding my lads.
Having a Babar and two Wargini and Phwedulp was a bit of a giveaway, I suppose; but she also acknowledged with a glance Antti Jansson, my Niflheimer, his heavy, squat frame showing his high gravity origins. Jenni Devar and Eranuu Fłanaa were fairly ordinary human females, though specialists in their own way.
The Wargini would not stand out; the race made by the Forerunners out of early dogs were not common on this planet, but there were a smattering of them. I would ask Keaanuur, the Babar, to be my personal bodyguard.
Babari, seven feet and more tall of feline muscled grace and power, barrel-chested from a rib-cage built more like a geodesic dome than our own rather vulnerable ones, are intimidating even before they go into action. And Keaanurr was not merely a master of the Twelve Ways of Cutting, he could also put down an enemy without unsheathing his claws, marine fashion.
Yes, putting an enemy down is marine-speak for doing so permanently.
You know, our rib cage is a pattern for both our early ships and roofs of houses; Babari have always built in domes made up of triangles, and had circular, rather ineffective ships. Water ships, obviously, not space ships. Do I have to explain everything? Their spaceships are close to the traditional Solcentric view of flying saucers. There is much to be considered of one’s own anatomy in the way architecture and machine architecture grows.
This was brought home to me when I went to see my seat in the capital.
This planet, Hamilcar, is what is generally known as a garden world. A world in the right place in the habitable zone of a nice, G-type star, and with the right combination of chemicals to have an abundance of life, and plenty of water. The university was in the first established city, with the starport, but the show-city, to which visitors were firmly herded if not here for the university or the commercial district, was built to a design. And it was beautiful. All white with organic lines, and gardens on specially designed balconies. I had read the blurb about it, and it was inspired by a city on earth called ‘Barcelona.’ Broad walkways swept along the shopping level, for the beautiful people of the beautiful city to walk, chat, shop, and visit the many parks. There were road levels below this for anyone who drove any kind of vehicle, with discreet extractor fans for anything obnoxious, not that there should be any fumes from a fusion drive, other than helium, but it was extracted anyway, in case heavy traffic had the beautiful people speaking like a bad Immagaashu translation program. To simulate this, put your private parts in a vice, and try to speak very fast with a mouthful of stones.
You get the idea.
Immagaashu are small, frail, and a bit spindly, and cannot tolerate a gravity higher than 0.6. They have some superb engineers in their population, and do a lot of mining on moons, using moving machines into which they plug in their consciousness. This has been their method of choice for dealing with the environment since they could first make machines. They were almost wiped out by the Wiłanu, had not the extermination force admiral stopped to watch the ‘robots’ first and discovered that they were parked up and left inert when the driver climbed out of them. The thought of plugging your consciousness into a machine makes most Wiłanu physically ill; but then, the idea of writing science fiction would never occur to anyone of Wiłu descent. But they could see the usefulness of the Immagaashu, and upon such things, the decision to commit genocide turns. With the Imperium in Solcentric hands, they aren’t allowed to be as actively racist as they used to be.
I don’t know why I’m lecturing you, you aren’t one of my students, and I don’t have to poke you through an exam.
I suppose it’s partly because Immagaashu technology was being developed for wider use than mining machines. From mining machines with laser cutters, it’s only one step to war machines with more aggressive tools, called weapons, based on an old concept long forgotten from Earth science fiction. And the idea of being plugged into a spaceship. I thought that, had not my friend, James Beecher, been recently healed of his allergy problems, he might well have opted to test such things. Not with a new wife, however, I did not suppose!
And I, and my new wife, had a job to do.
“I’d like to do a walk-through of the city centre,” I said, to my team. “Hang loose and try not to look as if you want to kill everyone.”
“I think that goes against your training, Gunny,” said my wife, affectionately. Phwedulp, Keaanurr, Antti, Bwurff, and Arffrur laughed.
The city centre was certainly a place to attract visitors. That organic white look was exciting enough to scream the height of modernity, even if the design was taken from one hundreds of years old, but also somehow held a comfortingly primitive feel to make it simultaneously somehow cosy and inviting. Parks flowed into civic buildings, as though the buildings were natural rock structures in some respects, inviting places to spend time. Doubtless inside, the practicalities of civil services meant that they were less exciting, with space allotted ergonomically to be as efficient as possible, which is to say, usually uncomfortably close together; and then the usual headaches of civil service life of which bureaucratic red tape was the least, and the demands of a generally idiotic public paled into insignificance next to the real problems. Such things as the brown liquid of unidentifiable origin out of the drinks machine – if it was working at all – the insistence of the automated hand-washing machines in the toilets to spray you in the face with soap, the likelihood of your favourite stall being blocked up and out of use, and the not unnatural distress of a female colleague if the sanitary protection machines were empty. Again. Most sensible civil servants stock up on sundries and keep their own kettle and beverage stores. Locked up. Nobody is as voracious a thief as a civil servant without his first of the morning fix of whichever stimulant floats his boat, be it tea, coffee, cocajua, or biutuwu. But I had to give credit to the external appearance. There were balconies in plenty, shaded from the sun, which as a G1 was hotter at midday in the more central zones than was totally comfortable for humans to put up with was a necessary amount of shade. Earth’s star is G2, and one’s evolution makes a difference. There was no shortage of water, here, however, and plashing fountains and natural-looking artificial waterfalls made things much more comfortable.
There is such a thing as too comfortable, however, but fortunately I am well enough trained to overcome it.
And the man in the badly-fitting suit, the shorter leg wrinkled horribly at the knee where it stopped, and the tunic pulling across something of a paunch and setting the half sleeve into uncomfortable looking rucks looked like trouble.
The half-dozen Wargrini toughs with him did add to this appearance.
The human smiled at me.
I think it was a smile.
I’ve seen friendlier expressions on a Babar warlord whose territory has been violated.
“Do you have a problem, neighbour?” I asked.
Neighbour; it’s a neutral sort of word. I would not be calling this man ‘friend,’ and starting out a conversation calling someone ‘arseface’ is never the most diplomatic.
“You’re trying to muscle in,” he gritted out. I’ve read that expression in stories for young people, from between the ground together teeth of some baddie. I’d never seen or heard it done before, but those authors of kids’ tales did know a thing of two.
“And you have a problem with this?” I asked. I wasn’t trying to muscle in, technically speaking, I’d been involuntarily muscled in by the emperor, who thought I might make a good job of being Count of Hamilcar.
“Mr. Big says to get off planet pronto,” said Arseface.
“Is he as ugly as you?” I asked, sympathetically. “If so, I can sympathise that he is jealous of my ineffable charm, good looks, and beautiful manners.”
“Think you’re funny, do you?” gritted Arseface. “Teach him an’ his boys a lesson, an’ bring his squeeze to me.”
Have you ever seen a squad of imperial marines in action? If you have, it was like that. If you haven’t, well… let’s just say my lads were like a well-conducted orchestra of movement, and the opposition were soon listening to hints of the choir eternal as they lost interest.
Serenaa had gone over to Arseface, who was salivating, kneed him in the wrinkly crotch as he reached out to touch her, and nutted him as he folded. I love my wife very much.
And then the cops arrived.
“Come on, you, hands up, spread your legs,” said a burly cop.
To me.
“Excuse me? We were attacked and you are pointing your weapon at me?” I said.
“Blatant violence against peaceful citizens,” he said.
I took his weapon away from him; plainly he was not someone who should be permitted to hold one.
Then I poked my patent of nobility under his nose.
Actually, I slammed his face down on it, on a convenient park bench.
“Read that, you idiot,” I said.
He read it, perforce, as I was standing on his lumbar region to hold him steady to do so. He started babbling.
It was a grovelling apology for making a mistake, and enough sycophantic syrup to drown a candy factory.
I let him get up.
“Nothing going on here!” he shouted to his squad.
“Lieutenant, haven’t you forgotten something?” I said.
He turned, his eyes bulging.
“I… I’m a captain,” he said.
“You were a captain,” I said. “And you have forgotten to order your men to take away the trash who attacked my wife and me, whilst we were having a peaceful walk in the centre of the showcase city.”
He gobbled again, and he and his men reluctantly loaded up the semiconscious and unconscious thugs.
“And this one,” said Serenaa, sweetly, dragging over the puking thing she had manhandled. “And yes, I would like to prefer charges of attempted sexual assault.”
“And lieutenant,” I said, “He and his men had better not be processed and released without charge, or somehow manage to escape, or there is such a charge as ‘treason.’ I trust I make myself clear?”
He was sweating.
I had made myself clear.
And it looked as though the police in this city at least could do with investigation.
As could one ‘Mr. Big.’
“Like a swan,” said Serenaa.
“What?” I asked.
“Big water bird from earth; they imported some for the university lakes,” said Serenaa. I knew what a swan was, I was just failing to keep up with her metaphor. She explained. “On the water it glides gracefully and looks serene. Under the water, the little legs are pumping away and churning up mud and debris.”
“Well, as I understand that swans sing only once, on their deathbed, we shall call the cleanup, ‘Operation Swansong,’” I said. “Come, my dear, let us go and file charges, and see what we can extract from officialdom; lads, you know what to do.”
My lads, including the lasses amongst them, knew what to do. Separate and question people to find out what they might of the ‘Mr. Big,’ and the perceived depth of the involvement of the police.
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