Strapping on formal belts and armor plates that day – too hot outside and too cold in the temperature-controlled courtroom – was the clear evidence of civilization’s insanity. Yet there I was, shivering along with the other miserable scaled folk huddled in the sterile granite halls of justice. What in Kktkrkz’ gargantuan gullet was I doing in this pantomime of her afterlife? I wasn’t the one on trial. I wasn’t the wronged victim. I’m not part of either of their packs. I wasn’t prosecuting or defending or judging or even guarding the sanctity of the court. Why would I subject myself to such easily avoidable misery?
Oh,
right: money. I had been promised a
job. I was supposed to exonerate the
Taratumm slob on the block up there. He had
pack… herd… with money, even if he looked like trampled carrion. His bulk was slumped forward, leaning heavily for support on the railing that separated the trial block from the audience pit. His otherwise impressive crest was cracked and half the grey scales on
the left side of his face were either chipped or gone entirely. That eye was patched over. Prison wasn’t providing any cosmetic
services. It was barely giving this
bruiser enough care to avoid infection.
And no
wonder, given the charges. Grust of herd
Torbur was accused of attempted murder, aggravated assault, destruction of
property, public intoxication, and a list of secondary offenses. The state prosecutor, a Hrotata called Lagghitl,
had laid out the case in her opening statement.
Her professionally groomed red fur fluffed dramatically in mock horror as she recounted the crimes of the accused.
Per the accounts of more
than ten witnesses, Grust had exited a drinking establishment, challenged the
male of a mating pair to a head-butting challenge, then went ahead with the act
without his consent. That the target
was a Hrotata was as unfortunate as it was bizarre. The poor sap had gone down like a puddle of
limp fur, skull cracked. When his Vislin
guards realized what had happened, they stopped laughing and started
clawing. Only after getting bloodied did
Grust go from piss drunk to pissed off. His frenzy
left two Vislin with broken bones, cost a roast tuber vendor his cart, and made
four shop owners down the street happy they had paid up their insurance.
It had taken another two
Taratumm to slow down the dumb herbivore.
They had to do it the old-fashioned way, stomping the sense back into
his well-padded brain. Most of the
damage on him was their work. It was
tough to sympathize. For the sake of my
paycheck, I did my best to try.
Besides the pointless
violence of the rampage itself, its context was faintly scandalous. The Hrotata had been challenged over its
female partner. That was perverse into
dimensions that required a social psychologist to seek help from a theoretical
mathematician. First, Hrotata are
matriarchal. Challenging a Hrotata male
for his female is like asking your server to sell you his restaurant. He doesn’t own it. Second, there’s the
cross-species thing, especially where
Hrotata are concerned. There’s plenty of
naughty stories about members of the Great Family fooling around across species
lines. It’s dirty stuff because it’s so
unlikely. For one thing, the parts just
don’t work like that. For another, our
libidos don’t run on the same timetables.
And for a third, there’s just no point.
Sure, times have gotten pretty progressive, particularly after the
Terrans were accepted into the Collective.
There’s zero doubt in my mind that Hrotata and Humans are all up in one
another’s bedrooms. But a Taratumm getting
stompy about a Hrotata female? That’s just
impractical.
So what frost had shut down
old Grust’s fruit pit of a brain? No,
no, not just shut it down, twisted it like a Tesetse’s tortured genome. The prosecutor was claiming that the fault
was just plain old criminal tendencies topped off with a healthy dose of
pickling liquid. Grust was a bad egg, a
time bomb that had finally gone off in public.
Empty eggs, this furry mother had a vicious mouth!
Grust couldn’t blame any of
his acts on frenzy. The ‘I wasn’t in
control’ defense hasn’t worked in centuries.
That was a good thing for the Vislin victims of Taratumm brutality over
the years. You kept yourself under
control, either through discipline or by keeping a friend, pack mate, or
handler close by, to talk you down or tie you down. That was one of the things pack was for. If you had none of those things, then you
stayed away from society, like the dangerous animal you were.
Listen to me sermonize. To these fine family folk, I wasn't much
better. Packless. Unpredictable. Liable to frenzy in a packed courtroom. Kkkk, it was just uncomfortable there, not really
that infuriating. But I had been in a few bad spots in the
past. It was just the luck of
circumstances that kept me off that block up there… that, and the witnessed fact
that the other guys clawed first.
You know who my helpful
buddy is? My heater, Rtrtr. A little package of ceramics, carborundum
lenses, titanium silver mirrors, and fancy wiring, wrapped in fancier polymers
and a very special leather holster. He
sits on my thigh and reminds me that if I frenzy, I’ll forget about him and the
wonderful things he can do. He heats
things: makes them very hot very fast, at a pretty good distance. Things made of meat explode when you do
that. Other things also explode or
melt or vaporize in pieces, depending on where Rtrtr points. He does his thing very well. The least I can do is stay lucid enough to
let him argue on my behalf.
Rtrtr had to stay home
that day. The courts frown on the inclusion
of firearms to their proceedings. You’d
think that things would stay more
civilized with more firepower easily at hand, but the matriarchs
disagreed. Apparently, not everyone is
as soothed as me by the companionship of potential flaming death.
Okay,
Stchvk, I thought to myself, think
less about you and more about the client.
By that point, the prosecutor was done, having named her slate of
witnesses to be summoned later. The
defender, a more imposing Vislin female named as Ktlrsh, stood to give her
rebuttal. I got a good view of her thick aquamarine tail, which was enhanced as much as it was concealed by her back armor plate. Hey, legal proceedings are boring. You have to keep yourself attentive somehow.
“Mother Judge,” she intoned,
bobbing respectfully to the elderly Hrotata female that sat in office over
the proceedings. “Grust of herd Torbur
first accepts blame for his lack of control.
He accepts the charges of destruction of property and simple assault
against those who suffered from his frenzy.
He should have stopped much sooner.
The costs of repair to property and persons will be repaid by him and his
herd, who apologize also for not being present to contain his outburst.”
So far, this defender was
doing a lousy job.
She continued, “However, as
to the charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault, public intoxication,
lewdness, and public disturbance, Grust of herd Torbur denies guilt.”
She raised her voice to continue over the
chitters and grunts of displeasure voiced in the chamber: “The defense will
argue that the defendant had not consumed excessive drink, to his
knowledge. Instead, he was unknowingly
administered psychoactive medications which impaired his judgment and led to
his public actions.”
The mother judge’s frozen
stare and rising white-tipped fur finally silenced the noise in her courtroom. No sane Family member would risk the anger of a Hrotata matriarch of such advanced age and rank. It was just as well. While watching the guards subdue and expel
protesters was usually the only entertainment value in attending court, this
case was finally promising to get interesting.
Drugged? It was a solid defense, provided that there
was some sort of proof. Hopefully, herd
Torbur and their lawyer had been smart enough to demand blood tests right after
Grust was dragged away into custody. The
city custodians probably could get a fair amount of the Taratumm’s bodily
fluids off of the street… and walls… and the roast tuber cart… but that
evidence was only as good as the capability and fairness of the
custodians. Given the nasty nature of
the accusations against Grust, it was entirely possible that exonerating evidence
might get lost or contaminated.
Yeah, contaminated. The law is dirty in Layafflr City. As prosperous a port as my nest town has
become, its roots as an illicit settlement run deep. Smugglers, pirates, and slavers still manage
to slip their business past dock customs, getting access to and from the whole
of the planet. Their money keeps a
sizable chunk of local law enforcement comfortably ‘employed’ doing things
other than reducing the actual crime rate.
The rough frontier past and nasty criminal present of our town mix
together to taint the morality of its institutions.
The Collective has been
putting pressure on the Great Family to clean up their planet and particularly
its largest port. The planet’s official
name was translated as meaning ‘spore’ by the bureaucrats. That word was then translated back into the
Terran and Zig and Mauraug equivalents, along with versions in other languages.
But to the Hrotata it is ‘Rrwm Kshlll’, the ‘furry egg’; to the
Taratumm it is Mwasstchef, ‘fern pollen’; and to the Vislin, ChtkKttp, ‘thorned
seed’. We had each named it for
something round, fertile, covered in protrusions, and perversely beautiful. Our world has mountains big enough to protrude
beyond the horizon when viewed from space.
It has jungles the size of continents back on Hrotata Prime. It's the home world writ large. Of course we had settled here in droves,
generations upon generations ago. Only
now, with the need to look good for the Family back home, are we bending to
the standards of the Collective.
That pressure translated
into these elaborate, televised, increasingly frequent show trials. Grust was being made an example of as a
public nuisance, the sort of low-life we were supposedly driving out in order
to make Layafflr City a bastion of civilization. Except he probably wasn’t that bad. I didn’t have to be on his herd’s payroll to
give him a pass on that. He wasn’t big
enough, mean enough, or capable enough to be a criminal enforcer. If he was a real threat, he would have caused
more damage and looked more frightening doing it.
He sure as frost wasn’t
running any gang. Taratumm are, as a
rule, followers. Sure, they have
leaders, but they’re more like ‘the biggest’ or ‘the oldest’. Yeah, okay, sometimes that means ‘the wisest’
and ‘the best survivor’, but you know what I mean. They’re not big planners. Big eaters, big… fine. Back to the frosted trial.
The defense wrapped up with
a sketch of the scenario, with promises to elaborate as the trial went on. Grust went to the bar to have some fun after
work, she said. He had a couple of
drinks, sang some songs, then went to go home.
Sometime between song K and exit T, some villain slipped him something
funny. According to her client, he was
extremely ‘aroused’ and thought he was challenging a particularly small and
weak Taratumm. He was confused by what
he took as a cowardly refusal of his challenge, then further confused and
enraged by the honorless victim calling for help from Vislin. And after that, dear mother, he only
remembered waking up in medical restraints, still half sedated.
It was a pretty rough
skeleton of a defense. It was going to
need a lot of meat before it could hope to walk around, let alone dance enough
to win a prize. And that, patient
listener, was where I came in. Sure, the
defender had her own group of witnesses to attest to Grust’s good character and
‘odd’ behavior that night, but she was expecting me to fill in the
details. I had to find the joker who supposedly shuffled the deck inside that big, hollow skull.
That’s what I do. Like a lawyer, I make money off of
trouble. I’d like to think that unlike a
lawyer, I actually care who was responsible. I find lost merchandise, lost reputations,
sometimes lost pets. Occasionally, I end
up adding extra services like videography, body guarding, and murder in
self-defense. Notice that I don’t say
involuntary. In a city like Layafflr,
there aren’t many jobs with my license.
I’ve managed to avoid raising the crests on either the gangs or the
custodians. For better or worse, I’ve
also avoided much notice by the gentry of my fair nest town.
Still, word of beak keeps me
employed. Herd Torbur knew where to find
me: just behind the sign that says ‘Stchvk Investigations’. It’s on the opposite side of town from the courthouse
and, not coincidentally, close to the street where Grust was out
drinking. They needed someone who wouldn’t
mind getting their claws bloody in the name of justice… or cash… and would
produce results in two days. Oh, right,
did I mention that I had two days? It
was going to be a fast trial, one way or another. If Grust got convicted, I didn’t get paid. No pressure.
Failure just meant going
back to synthetic protein and home fermented beverages for a while. Tsss, that was motivation enough.
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