“You have got to be kidding,” Constable Eveth Baker rasped into the telephonetics handset as she furiously wrote notes into an old-fashioned, leather-bound notebook with an even older-fashioned pencil.
The written word calmed her. Words on a page, rather than a screen, somehow rearranged themselves in her imagination to create new links between clues that she didn’t think about consciously.
“Fine,” she continued. “But you better be right, or the weekly stipend we pay you for these sorts of leads just might dry up.”
Eveth slammed the handset down angrily and looked around the police bullpen where she was working. The space always felt dingy in her memory, when she wasn’t here, but the room itself was clean and spacious. Well designed for calming psychology. It was just her that wanted it to reflect some of the squalor of the job.
Across the shared desk, her partner looked up from his reading with studied casualness. Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray was a by-the-book cop. The old man of the precinct they had paired her with in an effort to tone down some of the crazier things Eveth knew she did when pursuing the criminal element.
He was tall for a Vanir male, more than seven foot, two inches in stocking feet, but skinny. The man weighed barely three hundred pounds. Grodray was an intellectual cop. Divorced with two kids in school. Forty One Standard Cycles old, the light brown hair on his temples was turning gray now, and while he might have lost a step in a footrace, the Senior Constable had gotten that much better at outsmarting the bad guys so he never had to chase them down.
And he had Eveth, if it came to that. She liked pursuing criminals who thought they could get away.
Even his uniform tunic somehow conveyed the image of a staid academic, well-tailored to his overall shape with the bright, cerulean-blue ring of the Accord of Souls over his heart. Hers were always wrinkly and dusty, but that was the time she spent crawling under desks and into dark corners looking for clues.
“Something interesting?” her partner asked in a quiet, droll voice.
The room was mostly empty this afternoon. Quiet, save for a drunk snoring loudly in a cage in one corner of the office. Everyone else was out doing things, so they had almost the entire floor almost to themselves right now.
“One of my secret informers,” Eveth shrugged and took a calming breath. Getting emotional with Grodray never did any good. The man was deduction, boiled down and decanted into a glass bottle. Emotions just washed off his narrow, sturdy chest like rain. “Usually, the man’s reliable. This time, he claims that they heard rumors of a human, of all things, running loose on Orgoth Vortai, right here in Punarvasu.”
“Again?” Grodray asked. “Haven’t we had enough of these wild goose chases?”
“Get this,” Eveth said. “Completely different description, this time. A pretty detailed one, at that.”
She relayed everything off of her notepad slowly, letting her partner digest the words. He was all about processing things like a prospector seeking gold flakes. Swirl the water slowly, let it settle, add some more water, swirl some more. Eventually, the good stuff would settle to the bottom of the pan, once all the dross was removed.
Something caught her eye as she repeated it. Intuition snuck in and bit her on the ear, like it did.
“What?” Grodray asked as he realized she had stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
Eveth turned her attention to the keyboard on the desk before her and typed furiously.
Suddenly, the screen flashed bright red and a beep chimed angrily at her.
WARNING. Information classified. Enter Level-7 security authorization to proceed.
“Fardel,” she grumbled angrily under her breath.
A Constable like her was only Level-3.
“What are you trying to do, Baker?” he asked warily, standing and walking around towards her side of the desk.
She showed him the description of the clothing the human was supposedly wearing, written hurriedly as the informer had spoken.
“See?” she asked. “Red jacket. Black and gold design on the chest. I was trying to look something up about the humans that I thought I remembered, but the system wants a Level-7 clearance. Not worth trying to ask a Senior Inspector. They’ll just tell me I’m imagining things.”
“What are you imagining, Eveth?” Jackeith questioned quietly.
“A uniform,” she said, flipping back through her notebook unsuccessfully. “Or something. It was part of a throwaway line that one Inspector made, back when they briefed us about humans during the first scare, last winter. Damn it, this notebook is too new. I’ll have to look it up when I get home tonight.”
“Here,” Grodray said, leaning over her shoulder and typing something into the keyboard.
The screen flashed a welcome and brought up an image of a Vanir male. Except it wasn’t. This was a human.
And Jackeith Grodray had typed his password into…
“How in the nine hells did you do that?” she stared up at him in surprise. “That was a Level-7 authorization.”
“Uh huh,” he smiled back serenely. Like always.
“But you’re only a Senior Constable,” she continued, confused and maybe a little frustrated. “That should only grant you Level-4, maybe Level-5 at best.”
“I only ever wanted to be a Senior Constable, Eveth,” he answered calmly. “Plus, I had to do some things several years ago. This was back before we were partners. They had to read me in on some very dangerous secrets.”
Eveth flushed with a moment of pure avarice at the thought of the crimes you could solve with that level of clearance.
“So what have we got?” Grodray continued, still serene, damn it.
Eveth pointed at the screen, going back and forth between her notes and the image.
“White pants,” she observed. “Check. Dark red tunic with weird gold things on the shoulders. Check. Black background a foot wide, center of chest, with some weird logo in gold in the middle. Check. The description also included three white rings around the black, separated by red lines.”
“Three, you said?” he asked in a voice suddenly gone cold and stern.
She looked up again, feeling her face harden. It matched Jackeith’s in that.
“Yes, three,” she replied. “What’s going on, Grodray?”
She watched him call up a menu item quickly and toggle something. The image changed, and now the chest had three rings around the black.
“The thing in the middle are two letters, Baker,” he said carefully, glancing up to make sure they were still alone in the room. “From the principle language on Earth. SP. Stands for Sky Patrol. Part of the Earth Force that humans have over their single solar system.”
“A military?” she asked, suddenly scrambling to her feet. She needed to be out on the streets, if there really was a human, a warrior, loose in this city.
“No,” Grodray placated her with one hand and a calm voice. “That’s the uniform of an Earth Force Sky Patrol Field Agent, Baker.”
“Meaning?” she asked.
“He’s a cop, like us.”