APRIL 7, 2074
TRANSLUNAR ORBIT
Hunting was in her blood. Her fingers stretched inside her spacesuit like cat’s claws, and her adrenaline stoked as Tesseract’s docking clamps clunked, grappling with the deep space supply ship NYS Vega.
The display controls confirmed three minutes to docking lock.
Vega’s spiritless metallic groans echoed through her cockpit. Its crew ring frowned outside the window. At twenty-two, its space-worn aluminum skin looked exhausted after countless supply runs hauling its five-hundred-odd cargo containers from low-Earth orbit. There were far newer, bigger vessels now, automated, and capable of hauling thousands of containers at once. NYS Vega’s every weld creaked retirement.
She tried to let it go. She’d inherited her affinity for pursuit from her parents, FBI counterterrorism agents, killed in the line of duty when Kate was twelve, and her grandfather Jerry, a hardened internal affairs agent, a cop’s cop who lived and breathed rooting out corruption. Letting it go didn’t suit her. Like her wife’s house cat, Scar, no matter how comfortable he looked purring on the bed, his eyes always flitted, waiting for the next skittering rodent.
Today’s skittering rodent was Frank Lebofield, who bilked clients for billions and fled justice with his parents. His trademark big bushy hair was all over the finance servers, a con man’s cultivated image, projecting big-brained self-assured confidence as he stole people’s retirement money.
When the US Attorney General called to ask a favor and asked her to apprehend Lebofield, she was inclined to say no.
Kate’s official title was Chief of Colony Security. People called her Sheriff Devana, although she was much more than that. Four hundred thousand kilometers from Earth, she was the FBI, the U.S. Marshalls, a counterintelligence agency, a counterterrorism agency, the state police, and sometimes a child services and animal rescue agency all in one. Her wife, Doctor Rachel Torres, or Rae, was the Chief Medical Examiner and handled forensics. She was expected to handle all that with one-soon-to-be-two deputies, a borrowed race rocket, a few drones, and her wits. Most days, she was low on wits.
Lebofield faked geological surveys of a worthless asteroid and swindled grandmas and grandpas out of their retirement funds. A con as old as mining claims and money. Bad, but compared to human trafficking and berserk, murderous robots, not her top priority.
Lebofield’s mousy law professor parents would argue NYS Vega was beyond her jurisdiction. But here she was, with two minutes and thirty seconds to docking lock. Maybe it was the fact that Rae said he was laughing at them. Frank Lebofield wasn’t just running from justice. He was livestreaming it and blogging about his victimhood as he passed the moon. He was a narcissistic con man with the resources to rent a million-dollar-a-day supply shuttle and taunt her on his can’t-catch-me podcast while skirting the edge of cislunar space. Her space.
She had her own image to cultivate. Rae said he was thumbing his nose at her. She couldn’t let it go. Tesseract was a fast ship. A stallion, even among race yachts. She was the law in space. Her jurisdiction was as broad as Tesseract’s reach, and the image she wanted to project was that Sheriff Kate Devana could hunt people down wherever they were.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
In two minutes and seven seconds, Tesseract would complete docking with NYS Vega and she would drag Lebofield and his parents off that ship in handcuffs.
This could go sideways any number of ways. She preferred to kick doors at 4am, when both night owls and early risers were likely to be asleep, but space rarely afforded her that luxury. Space was vast, empty, and modern optics could identify a misplaced pea from a million kilometers away. They’d seen her coming. No doubt alarms sounded hours before her docking clamps clunked.
She couldn’t count on them not being armed, either. This was a supply ship, and supply ships that smuggled fugitives also smuggled weapons.
“Jin, picture?” Her deputy, Jinho Knight, monitored NYS Vega from his office on the lunar colony. He’d hacked the ship’s computers, shut the engines down, shut and locked the fire doors, and reset all the passwords.
“Green. I’ve sent the manifest to your phone along with staff photos and biometrics. Eleven souls, eight staff, plus the three fugitives.”
“That we know of.” Ships that smuggled known fugitives and weapons often smuggled other people, too.
“Life support metrics and water recyclers confirm the headcount. If someone else is aboard, they haven’t taken a piss in sixteen hours. Rae will want their bladder for scientific study.”
Kate smiled. “Copy that.” Tesseract’s computer indicated one minute and forty seconds to docking lock.
On paper, Lebofield was nonviolent, but her grandfather Jerry taught her that all cornered animals were capable of shanking an officer in the throat to keep from going to jail. So would their tribe, their friends and family. She’d seen it. Her deployments in the Marines and then Space Force only reinforced that Lebofield’s law professor parents would first start defending him with words, but when those failed, might escalate to hurling bullets or fragmentation grenades. Tribes protected their own. Often, hesitation killed. There was no such thing as too much suspicion, too great a speed, too big a gun, or too much body armor. These were the rules, passed down to her by her grandfather.
Eleven people versus her. The captain and his officers would comply out of the hope of salvaging their careers. But financial executives that could bilk people for billions had a gold tongue, and no doubt Lebofield had convinced some of the Vega’s crew that she was a jackboot thug government agent coming to wrongfully imprison the innocent.
Which meant it was down to her against three fugitives, plus a few sympathizers.
One minute to docking lock.
Once Lebofield got past the shock and anger of her boarding NYS Vega, she expected him to bargain. The man who insisted his ankle monitor range be extended to a day spa so he could livestream from a Florida sauna would whine, make excuses, and then demands.
Lebofield was arrogant, so he’d want a human judge who he hoped to charm.
She was not a judge. Defendants got AI robot judges to administer the law, or in rare cases, a human judge. AI judges were fair, and the algorithms ensured consistency. But every person had the constitutional right to a human judge, a human defense attorney, and a trial by a jury of their peers. Most defendants waived those rights. The smart ones, anyway.
Federal judges liked in-person trials, as much to hear their own voice bellow in the courtroom, as to smell the acrid sweat of fear on witnesses. Despite the strain that providing protection detail imposed on her office of two-soon-to-be-three deputies, she got along amicably with federal judges when they arrived because they took even less shit than she did. She once saw a witness, a billionaire CEO, roll their eyes at a judge. The judge cleared the room, and when they returned, this CEO who employed tens of thousands, owned a hundred million dollar yacht, and dined with heads of state, was red-faced and sweaty in the box. After that, the CEO answered in clipped sentences, looking over his shoulder for approval like an obedient dog. Federal judges were ornery Gods who could slay Presidents. Forcing a federal judge across cislunar space to hear worn out arguments that Lebofield’s shit didn’t stink would put them in a foul mood.
She grinned. Lebofield should be careful what he bargained for. She might give it to him. The defendant that requested a human judge received, on average, a five-years harsher sentence. She called it the ego tax, imposed by federal judges on celebrities with a big ego. She’d be happy to collect it.
Tesseract’s display dinged. Docking lock complete. It was time to capture a skittering rodent without getting shanked in the throat.