A Tangled Road to Justice Read online

  Paladins of Distant Suns

  Book 1

  A Tangled Road to Justice

  by

  Olan Thorensen

  Books by Olan Thorensen

  Destiny’s Crucible

  Cast Under an Alien Sun

  The Pen and the Sword

  Heavier Than a Mountain

  Forged in Fire

  Tales of Anyar

  Passages

  Paladins of Distant Suns

  A Tangled Road to Justice

  Greta Havorsford Novels

  (writing as Kelsey Robibeaux)

  The Pink Flamingo

  Copyrighty 2018

  All rights reserved

  This is an original work of fiction. Any resemblance to people and places is coincidental.

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 1

  I never imagined becoming a hired gun, secret agent, or whatever else you’d call what we do, but life has ways of surprising you. Nor did I have more than a vague notion about gunslingers, rustlers, or why “high noon” was a landmark time of day. That was before I worked with Edgar Millen, the perplexing and complicated man who led me to this moment.

  Whatever happened next, I wouldn’t be able to say my time on Astrild hadn’t been interesting, although interesting could be highly overrated.

  One of the few not-too-terrified citizens of Justice had run to the café, warning us that trouble was coming. Fifteen minutes later, we had just dug into breakfast when a comm message to Millen alerted us that the previous warning had been well behind the times. Men with evil intent were waiting at Wakefield’s Solar Cycle Rental and Repair shop. By then, I’d managed to wolf down three-quarters of my omelet. What passed for indigenous eggs on the planet Astrild were chewy when cooked but with a taste surprisingly similar to those from chickens.

  “At least we got most of the way through eating,” I said.

  “Obliging of them, I guess,” answered Millen, “though I wish they’d waited till we finished.”

  I laid my fork down. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason to delay.”

  “None that I see.”

  We’d come prepared. The Dynaplex bodysuit wasn’t the most protective equipment known, but it had one big advantage: it could be worn under clothing and not be obvious. I’d have preferred combat armor—not that we had any. However, even if we’d had it, the men gunning for us might have had second thoughts, which we didn’t want. This needed to happen, and best if we got it done while having as many advantages as possible. The downside was we’d have bruises. The kinetic energy of projectiles would spread over a wide area when they hit the suit. Of course, our heads remained unprotected, but anyone not knowing we wore the suits would aim for the body as the biggest target. Not accounted for were shooters who couldn’t aim straight or didn’t follow our logic.

  You can’t have everything.

  We hadn’t taken off our pistols to eat. We rose and picked up our shotguns and assault rifles leaning against the wall behind our table. Before exiting the café, we automatically checked the loads and action on all the weapons. We had extra magazines, but we figured most encounters would be over within seconds.

  Outside, Gliese 777-A was well above the eastern horizon, and the yellow sun’s light cast hues so closely matching Earth’s, I sometimes forgot where I was. This sun’s companion, a red dwarf, was visible at night only as a faint smudge if you knew where to look, or so I’d read.

  We stood for a moment in front of the café. The street was empty, except for a mangy dog scurrying out of the way. Millen once told me humans had mongrel dogs wherever they colonized.

  Word had spread, and only a few furtive faces peeked out behind slits in curtains and blinds. We walked down the settlement’s shabby, dusty main street to where twelve men waited to kill us. Others had the same intent, but we needed to deal with one group at a time. I took a moment to acknowledge how surreal it was walking to a gunfight under a sun slightly larger than Sol and seeing a shuttle contrail arching up from the Oslo spaceport 2,600 kilometers away.

  I was tense but not scared. I’d signed up for this, and my heightened senses were preparing for action. Fear didn’t enter into the equation. At least, that’s what I told myself.

  We need some theme music, rose unbidden in my thoughts, further prompted by Millen’s words as we started walking.

  “Let’s go see what’s happening at the OK Corral.”

  I didn’t need to ask why Millen had renamed the repair shop. I’d been around Millen enough to catch the reference, and I wondered what the next anachronism would be.

  He read my mind and started whistling a theme I’d never heard before he’d introduced me to it. I grimaced at yet one more antiquated reference, then gave in.

  “Okay, although we need a couple of those serapes to set off the music from that Italian guy.”

  Six Months Earlier

  The first time I saw Edgar Millen was in a bar on Geminorum Station orbiting Thalassa, the fourth planet of the 61 Cygni-A star system. The station consisted of three wheels, each 1,000 meters in diameter, connected by dozens of thick struts and four elevator shafts between adjacent wheels. Humans had figured out how to go faster than light, but gravity still mocked us, and we constructed stations with rotation simulating gravity as depicted in movies and novels from hundreds of years ago.

  Although the bar had a great view of Thalassa, the sight through the floor bothered me. Since the wheels’ rotation pushed objects outward, down was away from the station’s hub. The bar had a ten-meter-square dance area that doubled as a window looking down at the planet. Thalassa came into view, slid across the window as the station rotated, and then disappeared, only to reappear on the next cycle.

  It was disconcerting, especially since the elevator I’d arrived in opened to the dance floor, making it look like I was about to fall into space. My clue that wouldn’t happen? The people walking across the floor and a few couples dancing. It took me a few seconds to register what I saw, but even then I edged myself around the wall until reaching a solid floor.

  I’d just come out of stasis recovery status six hours earlier and needed a drink. It was both my first time off Earth and my first experience with the conditions for interstellar travel. In the hours of recovery, I went from feeling every nerve ending on fire to shivering cold and finally every part of my body aching. They’d given me medications to help, which did, but now I felt wiped.

  Once released, I’d checked on two personal bags containing all my possessions: clothing, multiple copies of what family records and photos I had, and a few souvenirs. For someone who was never returning to Earth, I had selected what seemed like a pitifully few items to remind me of my life up until then.

  Did I say I needed a drink?

  I looked for a small, empty table—the only one being on the edge of the floor window. I sat and waited for someone to take my order, only to feel unsettled every time I glimpsed the planet sweeping into and out of view. I tried to avoid looking directly down, but it didn’t work. I felt nauseated almost immediately. Motion sickness. It
was the movement on the periphery of my vision. I needed to either look directly down or away completely. I worked it out by first focusing my attention on the people. I’d been exposed to different cultures on Earth, and I wondered whether I could identify if some of the patrons were from the planet below. After a few minutes, I couldn’t be sure; they could just as well have been a collection of humans from different regions on Earth.

  A man in a cute outfit stopped at my table. I intuited he was staff—either that or he was about to hit on me. It was the former, and I ordered a beer. He said it was local, but what that meant on a station three hundred kilometers above a planet, I didn’t know. Maybe later I would switch to something stronger.

  By the time I was two-thirds finished, I could examine Thalassa more closely as it passed. Lots of water, which was not surprising, given its name. During the last hour of my recovery, my brain had functioned well enough to want something to do—anything to take my mind off the discomfort. The only option was to watch an endlessly recycling video extolling the station and Thalassa. I learned the name meant “ocean” in Greek, a Greek sea goddess, a moon of Neptune, a planet in an old science fiction novel, a chain of mountains on the planet New Mumbai, and a genus of ladybugs on Earth. Since my view of the planet was almost all ocean, I figured the name came from the first view of the initial survey ship. Only 10 percent of the surface consisted of land in a cluster of small continents, and all of it on the opposite hemisphere from what I saw.

  I also learned that 61 Cygni is a binary star system in the Cygnus Constellation and consists of two K-type stars orbiting each other about every 700 years. That made the system unusual since multiple star systems were thought too unstable for life to develop on its planets. However, 61 Cygni-A had a blue jewel, Thalassa.

  I finished the beer but hesitated to get blasted too soon. I was supposed to meet someone on the station—I just didn’t know who or when. The little information I’d been given said the next leg of the trip aimed for a planet named Astrild in the Gliese 777-A star system.

  ***

  Now, one might find it odd that I had come here, eleven light-years from Earth, and was about to continue traveling another forty-four light-years, without knowing who I was supposed to meet, exactly what job I’d signed up for, or who I worked for. But there it was.

  I’d served ten years in the military of the Federated States, FS—what passed for Earth’s world government. Right out of basic school, I was full of idealism, vim, and vigor. The ads for the FS Enforcement Service looked appealing to an eighteen-year-old: free education, sharp uniform, helping world peace, and women oozing over you. There was plenty of the first, and the second was de rigueur (see, I told you there was education), but piss little of the third and only sporadic occurrences of the fourth.

  After ten years, promotions and demotions, and seeing more places on Earth than I’d known existed and would just as soon never heard of, I decided I was tired of carrying out orders I didn’t believe in, from officers I didn’t trust or respect, and issued from bureaucrats who didn’t care about consequences. I wanted new scenery.

  The problem was that most of the education focused on topics related to duties that, when you got down to the basics, forced people I didn’t know to do what they didn’t want to, and it too often involved them shooting at me and me at them. At the time I signed up, I hadn’t considered how this restricted my future opportunities. But hey, I was going to live forever as part of the FSES. No one ever got fooled by thinking the word young wasn’t associated with words like naïve and stupid.

  Open country always appealed to me. I was from Indiana, one of the American states before all of North America merged into the Federation, which evolved into THE Federation. A cracker uncle, my only relative, raised me, and about the only good he did was teach me two things. One was to hunt. Not that I particularly like shooting animals, but the woods were peaceful, especially when I hunted alone. Although Earth’s population had finally stabilized at twenty billion, belated environmental concerns led most of the last ten billion to live in megalopolises, with swaths of land having held out against urbanization. What had been south-central Indiana was one of the lucky survivors, and I spent much of my youth roaming forests. The FSES also sent me to open country at times, but I was often too scared to enjoy the scenery.

  The second thing my uncle taught me was right from wrong—his version. It was only after years in the FSES that I understood his concept wasn’t universal, and I began questioning my own assumptions. The doubts lingered unaddressed until my time with Edgar Millen.

  I visited my uncle only twice before he died. We hadn’t been close, but I respected that he’d provided for a six-year-old he didn’t want when his sister and brother-in-law died in an accident. Not that he was abusive, but there were few hugs, and for twelve years I listened to all the reasons the old United States should have stayed independent and the hell with rest of the world. I also learned early not to get him started on colony worlds.

  Most people would have considered us beyond outliers, as far as modern technology was concerned. My uncle belonged to a community of like-minded people who reveled in what they called a simpler life. We had solar banks for power but no direct connections. Whatever experience I had with other types of technology was at school and when I spent time at other kids’ houses, especially those not part of my uncle’s community.

  Thus, when I signed up for the FSES, a good part of my decision—at least in retrospect, years later—was wanting to explore the rest of the world after a life of pent-up curiosity. As you might imagine, seeing the world was a shock. They dumped me into a basic training company of recruits, half of whom were from North America and the other half from countries sprinkled across a map of Earth. My first day provided more exposure to people of other countries than my previous eighteen years had.

  Basic training was tough, but it could have been worse. I was already in good physical shape, compared to most other recruits, but only in comparison. The first month, half of the company washed out, unable to endure the rigor. I lasted, but it wasn’t a sure thing. A few hundred times I wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

  Everything changed the second month after the culling and as we moved into actual training to be soldiers: two months of weapons, first-aid, tactics, communication, and a dozen other topics, some of which I’d never have associated with the military. I began to feel as if I fit, something alien to my previous years. The feeling solidified when I moved into an active unit: the 17th Mobile Infantry Brigade, home-based in the northeast of old Italy. The locals spoke mainly Italian, but Standard English was widely known. I noticed right away there were no Italians in the 17th. Later I learned the FSES policy was to station personnel away from their homes to reinforce loyalty to the Federation and the FSES.

  Needless to say, my first year was confusing, exciting, and, to my relief, offered evidence I was more than capable of performing the required duties. I settled into the life and began thinking of a career. I also had a home and friends, the likes of whom were novel. Not all the friends were men. The FSES was open to anyone who could meet all the requirements. Race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or anything else was considered irrelevant if you could do the job and didn’t have traits that impacted unit efficiency. Liaisons were not forbidden, but the consequences of creating problems were severe enough that most men and women pursued relationships outside the company level, either with people in other units or the local populace.

  As comfortable as my beginning years were, problems began when I reached the first level of sergeant. It was one thing to be given questionable orders when consequences fell only on yourself and something else when those orders affected people you were responsible for.

  I was good at the job, and the majority of my immediate superiors agreed. But there were a few commanding officers with whom I had trouble and that finally prompted, by mutual agreement, the severing of my FSES connection.

  The
day I mustered out, I was stationed with the 31st Mobile Infantry, based in Hyderabad, India. I had no plan. All I could think of was the out part. With ten years’ service, I had back pay and a small stipend—enough that I figured I’d find something to do before the pay ran out and I’d confirmed the stipend to be too small to live on. At this point in my life, I had experienced only two homes: my uncle’s in Indiana and wherever the FSES stationed me. I had no interest or current connection to the former and was leaving the latter. I had formed no particular relationships with any locals I’d been stationed near, nor did I have a family or a woman to consider, so my options were unlimited. This actually meant I had no clue what I was going to do next. What I did know was that nothing I’d considered sounded appealing.

  On my last day there were the expected forms to fill out, uniforms and other equipment to turn in, blathering briefings on adjustment to civilian life, and health benefits I was entitled to (very little, even with ten years in). After all that was finished at the release center, a prune-faced woman told me I had an appointment in the Quartermaster Center, Wing A, Room 1143. It took me two hours to find out the building was five kilometers away, get there, and then locate the room within a huge structure that looked dilapidated on the outside but clean and orderly on the inside.

  I wondered whether I’d have to wait for whatever they wanted to see me about. The answer was no. The open door revealed a small room, a desk, two chairs, and a nattily-dressed man of about fifty. Seated, he wore a white suit and looked at the door as if he knew exactly when I’d walk in. Or maybe he was a robot, waiting to be activated.

  “Lieutenant Cole, thank you for coming in. Or should I address you as Mr. Cole now? It’s going to be something of an adjustment, isn’t it?”