It was odd, as Kyriaki thought about it. She kept a secret that many people would kill for. One of the darkest, most dangerous things possible, anywhere in the galaxy, as far as she knew.
She should have arrested the man. Hauled him back to Cronus Prime in chains, where she would have been celebrated as one of the greatest security officers of all time. But every time she thought about it, Valentinian Tarasicodissa got into her head and muddled everything. And he didn’t know the truth about Dave. Only she did.
Knew that Dave had volunteered to go to his death at her command, if she would just let him rescue his captain first. Had even offered gain, after it was done.
Instead, she had helped him rescue his kidnapped captain, and then provided him an escape afterwards, when he was ready to surrender to her and her badge, and go home to be executed as a traitor. And she still didn’t really understand why.
She supposed, lying in her warm bed trying to sleep, that it might make her a traitor as well. Certainly, if the truth ever came out, there would be no distance she could run to escape.
Even Dave Hall, the name the man went by now, would be simply shot by his hunters, but Inspector Kyriaki Apokapes, an honored officer of the Dominion’s Internal Security forces, would be seen as a worse conspirator.
They would never stop hunting her down if they found out. Even death would only be an escape for her soul, as her comrades would disinter her corpse to haul home and burn, if nothing else.
And she could offer no good excuse for her actions. Lots of bad ones, but that just made her a bad person. Dave Hall wasn’t behind any of them, other than as an example of an honorable man.
And then there was the reason she couldn’t explain. The man that had caused her to stay her execution. Valentinian.
Nobody would believe that she had felt an instant attraction to Captain Valentinian Tarasicodissa, even before she knew his name. That he just smelled right, in a way unlike anyone else she had ever met. That part of her reason for digging so deep into the man’s past in the first place came from a desire to find something she could hate about him. To justify walking away.
And that things only got worse when that hateful thing, whatever it might have been, wasn’t there.
Or that she felt like she owed Dave Hall for backing her up at that moment when the bad guys might have gotten away with whatever murder and mayhem they had planned.
She still could have arrested him at the end. The man had actually closed up his telescoping baton sword and been ready to hand it to her, so that she could put him in cuffs and make the arrest of a lifetime.
After he had just killed or disabled at least five men armed with flamer pistols in a small office. A space he had reached by using some sort of parkour technique to bounce off the side of a building and catch a grip on a fire escape five meters in the air with one hand, and then pull himself up so he could climb the rest of the way.
She couldn’t do that today, and Dave Hall was nearly twice her age, at least fifty years old, an age when one’s physical capabilities had already receded to the point that one must rely on their wits to get by. What must that man have been like when he first ascended the throne?
Good enough to win a Tournament of Domination. Good enough to get himself appointed Supreme Leader of the entire Dominion, and then hold that title for twenty-five years.
Good enough to suffer a secret mid-life crisis. To plan a way to fake his own death and escape the gilded cage he had lived in, and then somehow maneuver a number of highly competent players in such a way that he would have disappeared forever, had Inspector Kyriaki Apokapes, White Hat cop, not pressed. Not dug into Tarasicodissa’s background and turned her own bosses onto the captain’s trail.
Kyriaki gave up sleep and threw back the blanket. She slid across the bed and pulled on a pair of loose, warm pants to go with the shirt she slept in. She was awake, and that wasn’t going to change for a while.
She could survive a night with little sleep. Wouldn’t be the first. Not likely to be the last, not while she wore the Dominion’s White Beret.
Instead, she pulled her pillows up and leaned herself back against the headboard to meditate. Almost as good as sleep, and maybe she would be able to calm all her racing thoughts enough that she could catnap for a while before dawn.
Tomorrow, she would need to give evidence before a grand jury in the case of the Dominion versus Axarnashalic ’Nash’ Bogomelous. It was an airtight case. She had arrested the man in the act of kidnapping two Dominion citizens with force and deadly weapons. And she had legitimately deputized Dave Hall to help her, so the six men killed or crippled in the process of getting arrested all got charged with capital murder to go with everything else.
They were all going down, and she would still look like a hero.
Kyriaki was already prepared to seem extremely surprised and disappointed when Valentinian and Dave failed to show up at the hearing, but their absence would not impact the case. Lianearia Cleray was no longer chartering Valentinian’s ship, the Longshot Hypothesis, and had remained behind on Tartarus while her troupe put on performances and the woman sought alternate transport.
A former business partner of Bogomelous, she would be all too happy to see that man prosecuted, right after he got out of the hospital from the wound Dave had inflicted on him with a blunt sword. The kind that had permanently shattered the man’s knee cap, when she knew Hall was good enough to have severed his shin instead. Hall hadn’t missed with his swing.
No, Dave and Valentinian would officially disappear. Gone, just like that. She had warned both of them to do exactly that before calling in the local Security detachment to arrest everyone.
And they had.
She believed Dave Hall that Valentinian didn’t know the truth, but could still be relied upon to flee at the first opportunity. And she would cover for both of them as long as she could, for reasons she could barely explain to herself.
A chime on her nightstand caused Kyriaki’s eyes to open, her meditative state shattering like a dropped glass. That tone was reserved for the security band, and nobody on this planet knew to get a hold of her that way.
She leaned over and grabbed the card-reader, checking the sender. Ambassador Rodosthenis Mataraci. Her boss’s boss back home. The head of the White Hats on Dominion Prime, the Dominator’s Winter Palace station in orbit of Cronus Prime, the capital itself.
Here.
Have arrived with news. Urgent we meet soonest. Send location and ETA. RM
Well, that was one way to completely ruin her evening. Nothing like possibly getting your hand caught in the cookie jar at the very moment you were apparently suffering a crisis of conscience.
It was a good thing Valentinian and Dave had a good head start.
Their time had just run out.
Hopefully, not hers as well.