Profiteer

Klaus adjusted the holo receiver and tried to find BCCA’s broadcast. It took a while. The airwaves on this planet were hopelessly cluttered and followed no logical progression. When he locked on to the BCCA broadcast, it was a scene featuring a priest on stage in front of a massive tote board labeled “Gold for God.”

 

The priest yelled at an unseen crowd. “Welcome to our program of retribution.”

 

There were cheers.

 

Klaus settled back to watch the broadcast.

 

Ten years he’d waited to get this close to Jonah.

 

Fifteen since their mother, Helen Dacham, had died.

 

“Death is the best you can hope for, brother,” Klaus said.

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

 

Criminal Justice

 

 

“An efficient legal system operates on the assumption that everyone is guilty of something.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“Justice in government is as rare as a rich [man] in prison.”

—Datia Rajastahn

( ?-2042)

 

 

Dominic dreamed ugly dreams.

 

Dominic dreamed of a forested ball of racism called Waldgrave, his home planet. He dreamed of his mother’s drunken rages. He dreamed of her paranoia. He dreamed of the salvation the TEC recruiter offered.

 

Dominic dreamed of an ugly little planet in the Sigma Draconis system, a planet named Styx. He dreamed of thirty-five thousand people vaporizing as two tons of polyceram monomolecular filament struck from orbit. He dreamed of a city that no longer existed.

 

Dominic dreamed of the day that city had caught up with him. He dreamed of the slug slamming into his shoulder. He dreamed of falling over the railing, the endless fall. He dreamed of his body’s reconstruction.

 

Dominic dreamed of the destruction of GA&A.

 

He dreamed his life was a massive glass sculpture, shattering again and again. Every time it broke, a few more pieces were missing. Now it seemed all he had left was a few twisted shards.

 

* * * *

 

As the stunner gradually wore off, the outside world leaked back in. Dom heard people talking.

 

Someone with an insincere voice yelled at a crowd. “Welcome to your program of retribution.” Cheers. “First off, I want to welcome back part of our viewing audience. The Zeno Commune has finally repaired the battle damage to their vidsat substation—”

 

The emcee was drowned out by more cheers. Dom was still fogged, but he could tell he was overhearing a holo broadcast.

 

“And now, our first criminal. He was caught by one of our roving patrols raping a teenage girl—

 

“So what are we going to do to him?”

 

“Fry him!”

 

“I can’t hear you.”

 

“FRY HIM!”

 

“And why are we going to fry him?”

 

“BECAUSE HE’S SCUM!”

 

The audience broke into applause.

 

“Well, we certainly hope so. But you know the rules. Our lines are open for pledges, and our target with this boy is a full kilogram.”

 

Whistles from the audience.

 

“If we don’t meet or exceed our target—we let him go!”

 

Boos from the audience.

 

“So, while the home audience is making up their minds, let’s roll the video of the attack—”

 

“You, CEO-man, you awake yet?”

 

Dom opened his eyes. The last voice was a lot closer.

 

He was on the floor of a small concrete cell, and a young woman was bending over him. Her age was somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two years standard. She was only one-fifty centimeters tall. She had straight black hair cut on an asymmetrical diagonal, almond-shaped green eyes, and a concavity in the flesh of her neck that was the sign of an electronic biolink.

 

“I’m awake. Where is this?” he asked as he got to his feet.

 

He looked around for the holo he heard in the background. The cell itself was empty, but one wall opened into a carpeted lobby. The room beyond was where the holo was playing.

 

“Prime time, that’s where this is. We’re going to be making money for the mother Church—”

 

The lobby was done up like an exec office, static holo landscapes on the walls, soft-white indirect lighting. A uniformed guard sat in a plush red-velvet office chair, watching a holo mounted on a receptionist’s desk. The desk must have faced the entrance to the room, but any exit was far to the right, out of his field of view.

 

The entrance to the cell was open, with the exception of a sphere mounted on a column, standing in the middle of the doorway. It didn’t take a genius to figure that it was an Emerson field generator, the same idea as the paladin’s stunner, a field programmed to raise havoc with human neural impulses. Walking through it would be painful, and you’d come out the other end unconscious.

 

Dom had a glimmer of an idea.

 

“The name’s Tetsami,” his cellmate went on. “Let me guess, you tried to shaft them on payment for their Samaritan deal.”

 

“How’d you know?” He kept his eye on the guard. The guard seemed intent on the holo broadcast and wasn’t even looking in their direction.

 

“The only way they’d end up with a corp type. They take tithing very seriously. They’re doing background checks on you now, to get something to put you on trial for. They need to recoup their costs.”

 

After an overlong pause she asked, “So what do they call you?”