Constable

Gareth the Vanir looked up as the door to the hospital room opened, admitting Eveth Baker and Jackeith Grodray. He saw another pair of armed Constables guarding the room from the outside before the door closed again firmly.

Talyarkinash had been seated next to Gareth’s hospital bed, where she had been eagerly consuming some medical article on her pocketcomm. She put it down now and looked up expectantly.

Gareth considered the several empty dishes on the tray stretched across the bed. He hadn’t felt the need to be in a private clinic, but had been unable to convince anyone else that he felt fine.

At least they had been feeding him better food than he remembered from his previous hospital stay, and enough for three people. And he had been able to transform himself back into a human, well, a Vanir, although that had left him so exhausted that he had been at the mercy of the two cops. But they had only brought him here.

On each trip to the tiny restroom in the last three days, Gareth had measured his new, Vanir body against the door frame, until he had finally stopped growing.

Seven feet, four inches. Three hundred and forty pounds, but he would need to get back to the gym and PT soon. It had been almost two weeks since his last morning run around the gym level, back at The Arsenal. He hadn’t shaved in a week, and his hair was far too long for Sky Patrol regulations.

Eveth Baker was closer, with Grodray standing off to one side and a full stride behind her. Something about the man left Gareth concerned. The eyes were too bright, too knowing for a simple police detective.

“Some of them got away,” Baker began without preamble. “Maximus, Maiair, Yooyar, and Zorge being the most important to elude capture. We’ve caught many others. Your two helpers, Morty and Xiomber, have also vanished. For now.”

“For now,” Gareth agreed. “I only promised Maximus a one day head start, so he’s already gotten more than I bargained for.”

“You think you’ll be chasing after him, Dankworth?” she challenged.

“I am a Field Agent of the Earth Force Sky Patrol, Constable Baker,” he responded solemnly. “A cop, among other things. So yes, I’ll be going after him as soon as you let me out of this hospital bed.”

“How?” she asked.

“I can’t go back to Earth. Ever. That much is certain,” Gareth said. “I had to sacrifice everything, with Talyarkinash’s help, to do something crazy enough to defeat that man, however temporarily he escaped me afterwards. He becomes my next mission.”

“You’re not a cop here, Dankworth,” she noted angrily. “You are an illegally-enhanced, alien creature whose very existence is a crime.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “That still doesn’t change my task.”

“And if we won’t allow it?”

“You let me know when you have someone who can stop Marc Sarzynski, Constable,” Gareth retorted. “Because nothing I’ve seen, read, or heard in the Accord of Souls suggests the sort of ruthlessness to fight that man nose to nose.”

“I could,” she suggested.

Gareth studied the woman for a second. Six foot seven. Built like an East German Olympic swimmer, with a long, feminine frame covered over with muscles.

And a brain like a computer.

“You might,” Gareth made a peace offering. “But I know how that man thinks. He was my best friend for many years before he turned to evil and lost himself. And you are at the top of what a geneticist like Talyarkinash here could do to improve you. Marc’s not. Especially now that he knows what lengths I was willing to go to in order to stop him.”

“You’re it, then?” Eveth sneered.

Gareth shrugged, and addressed his next words as much to the Nari scientist next to his bed, who had become his friend, as the cop looming over him now.

“If I could deliver you his head on a platter today, I would happily walk into a cell for the rest of my life tomorrow,” Gareth said. “Or ask you how to erase enough knowledge from my brain that you could shrink me back down and send me home. Until then, I might be the only thing standing between you and the darkness.”

He expected Baker to say something more, but her partner placed a silent hand on her shoulder.

Baker nodded and stepped to one side silently.

The Vanir man, Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray stepped up now, into her place.

“You don’t know our ways, Gareth,” he explained in a calm, deep voice.

Gareth shrugged again, rather than answer. That much was a given. He had been here for all of a week.

“Back home, you were a Field Agent of Sky Patrol, correct?” he asked.

“Correct,” Gareth nodded. “Only about a month ago, I got my third ring, and was all set to propose to the woman I loved, the night this all happened.”

Grodray nodded in turn, his face turning pensive and serious. He turned to the fourth person in the room.

“Dr. Liamssen,” Grodray began in a heavy voice. “You belong in the cell next to Gareth, and normally I would be happy to put you there.”

Talyarkinash surprised both of them by standing slowly. She couldn’t look the giant man in the eyes, but that was a physical thing, not a measure of her stature. Gareth felt a surge of pride in the woman.

“And?” she asked in a hard, unforgiving voice.

From the look on Grodray’s face, she might have gotten the same response, the same look on his face, had she just slapped him. Baker shared Gareth’s grin from behind the scene.

“Under the auspices of the Official Secrets Act, I can deputize you into a posse for purposes of supporting efforts of the Constabulary to fight crime, in extreme circumstances.”

Gareth had spent enough time around the Nari woman to measure her own shock at those words, ears flat backwards, pupils slitted all the way open, jaw hanging, fur on her neck and arms standing up.

Something niggled at the back of Gareth’s mind. He had spent the last three days eating, sleeping, and reading.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a concerned voice. “But I don’t believe that a Senior Constable has that authority. I don’t have the book in front of me to quote the statute, but I have been studying your manual.”

Grodray’s eyes got big. So did Baker’s.

After a moment, the man nodded once and reached into his back pocket. He pulled out his wallet. The badge inside was the standard blue ring of The Constabulary, but then the man opened what looked like a secret compartment to reveal a second badge, smaller and made of platinum.

Eveth Baker gasped.

“You would be correct, Gareth,” Grodray conceded carefully. “However, Senior Constable is a cover. I am actually a Prime Investigator with the Constabulary, something roughly equivalent to a Senior Special Agent with Sky Patrol. And that kind of person does have the necessary authority.”

Gareth nodded, his own jaw almost on the floor next to Eveth Baker’s.

“And under the Official Secrets Act, any disclosure of that information will result in a jail sentence of not less than ten years, so you have been warned.”

“How can I help?” Gareth asked. Then he turned to Talyarkinash to include her in the conversation. “How can we help?”

“My superiors have come to the same conclusions you have, Field Agent Dankworth,” Prime Investigator Grodray intoned seriously. “Your help will be necessary to stop Maximus and his gang, and to return some level of honest government to the systems of the Accord of Souls, where too many of them have become infected with corruption. We’re not sure how we’ll use you, yet, but you represent an entirely new option in our fight against crime.”

Gareth nodded.

The underworld had an overlord who had once been one of the most dangerous criminals in the Solar System in Marc Sarzynski.

The Constabulary would need a Star Dragon.