CHAPTER X: Arbiters
21M.998
Imperial Core, Imperatoria Sector, Terra
Jane Pryce
She loved this planet, in fact, she felt proud to have been born on Old Earth, to be Terraborn. She was happy to call herself an Earthling. She had spent her life on this city-world that was the very heart of humanity, of the Galactic Imperium. When she patrolled Terra’s bottomless towers she watched how the districts breamed with life. This deep down in the city-world the sun as possible to catch on occasion if you were in the right place but those places were rare. Right then she patrolled a marketplace. People walked about looking and buying from shopkeepers, a hover-truck was offloading goods to a shop owned by an Oannonian-woman. She was of standard height for her species, a meter and a half, and her long head-tresses flowed down her back. Jane believed that it looked like they were longer than normal by a significant measure. The woman had probably had her blue tendrils lengthened by plastic surgery. The fact that she wasn’t wearing a breathing mask meant to Jane that she had had work done on her organs to make herself able to breathe the same air as humans. Normally Oannonians breathed methane but it wasn’t uncommon for them to change that through complex surgery if they lived away from their homeworld.
Eyes shifted to her as she rode into the plaza on her hoverbike. Some eyes were casual, some uneasy, some fearful. They had all immediately recognized that an Arbiter had arrived. In her blue uniform, the stylized red helmet and white eagle-head pauldrons she couldn’t exactly hide in a crowd. That wasn’t the point of course. Arbiters didn’t hide. On her hip was a holster that had a bolt-pistol. She had been augmented just enough so she could use it. Otherwise, Jane would have been killed by the recoil when she pulled the trigger.
Her trained eyes looked around for any suspicious or outright criminal behavior of note in the plaza. She saw an old woman that looked to be in her nineties yelling at a lawman and pointing at a young man with a thick squashed-in nose and nonexistent chin. Occasionally she lashed out at him with her bag. She left the minor matter to the lawmen that were already there. It was not a task for an Arbiter. There was a pair of men arguing rather loudly not far from the old woman. They were terribly similar so she assumed they were brothers. They yelled and pointed accusingly at each other.
“Hmm, mark it for the lawmen,” she told her VI.
The Virtually Intelligence in her helmet responded with a light beep.
She continued to slowly drive around the plaza platform’s edge. Then the Arbiter’s eyes caught something behind the black visor. Below the visor, her mouth twisted. There was a hooded man that walked through the ground, his steps casual. He stopped on occasion to gawk at some merchandise. The problem was that she saw clearly how two men stalked him in the crowd. No, three. Three men in casual garments but with hidden small arms. Her HUD estimated that two were armed with pistols and the third with a bolt-pistol by analyzing the size of their bulges. The bulky man with the bolt-pistol wore colorful green, blue, and pink robes common on Mars. Whoever they were they weren’t common thugs. They weren’t augmented to use boltguns. Then she caught a lens flare atop a roof on the east side of the marketplace. She knew instinctively that it was the flare from a scope. A marksman’s scope. The hooded man had also seen it for he began to run. The three stalkers ran after him, pushing their way through the crowd.
“Arbiter Pryce to Control,” she called into her commlink.
“This is Control,” an Androgynous voice responded.
“Assassination in progress. Requesting assistance from any nearby Arbiters,” she reported as she sped up her hoverbike.
“Control copy. Dispatching Arbiters to Patriarch Sextus Julius Plaza.”
She didn’t know who these assassins were attempting to kill but she did know that they had made a terrible mistake to be caught in the act by an Arbiter. As she sped toward them she drew her bolt-pistol and fired three bolts at the marksman. Chaos broke out then. Her HUD confirmed that her third bolt had impacted the target and splatted the marksman’s skull and shoulders against the roof he’d laid on. The pursuit carried on down an avenue away from the marketplace and people fled in their path, not knowing what was going on except that the Arbiter had fired on someone. She was quickly upon them and steered the hoverbike up on the avenue and halted. She raised her bolter again and shot one of the pursuers in the chest. His chest exploded and threw blood in every direction. The second man with a regular pistol faced her, stopped, and fired at her. Two slugs hit her uniform but an Arbiter’s uniform was not made from simple linen. It was made from the steel-wool of the giant sheep from Novum Terra. Their wool was close to as hard as steel, and so the slugs bounced off her chest. The man then drew a knife, a poor decision since she shot him before he could take a single step. Then Pryce looked ahead for the third man and the hooded figure they were after. She quickly caught them forty meters from her. The man was easy to spot in his colorful Martian robes. She thought that shouldn’t a good assassin disappear when the attempt had gone so wrong. Or was it too important to kill the poor bastard?
It didn’t matter. She sped off after them with the hoverbike and quickly caught up with them. Her first bolt missed and the assassin leaped behind a parked hover-car. She had to dodge when he fired two bolts at her.
“Surrender immediately,” she ordered him. He didn’t answer. “By order of the law. Your punishment will be lessened if you do. Attempted murder, assault on an Arbiter. Life in prison. If your lucky a comfortable penal colony.” He still didn’t answer.
Fine, she thought and stood up. She fired several bolts at the hover-car and forced the man to lie down. Suddenly a bolt flew at her front in another direction. Upon a roof stood a fifth assassin, this one a woman garbed in black robes. Pryce moved for cover and fired a trio of bolts. The second hit the woman’s leg and blew it off. She screamed and fell off the roof but missed the avenue as she did – instead of falling into the depth to hit some platform or walkway a few hundred meters or even a few kilometers beneath this level. The time she’d spend doing that though, the colorful assassin had risen and was a moment away from shooting her. Before she could pull the trigger on him the gun was ripped from his hands, though there was no one to grab it. It flew from the surprised man and to the hooded man’s grip. Then she realized that he was psychic. He created a bolt of blue electric energy from thin air and launched it at the assassin, sending him back over the car. Pryce leveled her bolt-pistol on his head.
“Punishment execution,” she judged, then executed him.
She holstered her gun and walked up to the hooded man.
“Are you alright, sir?” She asked him.
“Oh, quite so,” he answered in a cheerful voice. Then he looked at her expectantly. “Well?”
Pryce failed to understand what he meant by that. “I will identify yourself.”
His pleasant expression fell and he looked insulted. “Are all Arbiters so damn rude?”
“I beg your pardon?” She was confused. This wasn’t the usual behavior she got when she saved someone.
“You bloody well should girl.” When he threw a hand up in the air she saw a necklace under his robe. It looked made of gold with a cross on it and a skull centered on it. It was the insignia of the Inquisition. “I saved your life girl. Least you can do is thank me on your knees.”
She didn’t answer and instead walked to grab her datapad from her hoverbike. Pryce assumed that he was purposefully trying to insult her for his own amusement. She had been insulted before and didn’t let even his claim bother her. “Do you know who your attackers were?”
“It’s no concern of yours.”
She saw how two Arbiters arrived on hoverbikes. Her HUD identified them as Nevers and Anders. They stopped beside her hoverbike and greeted her with nods. By then the Inquisitor had spun on his heels and walked away.
Anders looked to the dead man and to the hooded man. “That’s the victim?” He asked.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “He won’t cooperate. He’s with the Inquisition.” Which meant that he was above any authority they had. They had no authority to interrogate or bring in an Inquisitor if they refused to cooperate with an investigation.
“No point in investigating then,” Anders sighed.
They knew how it worked when the Inquisition was involved. Any investigation into the assassination attempt would be shut down within hours. It was always the same when they had to deal with the bigger players in the Terran-dominated Empire that was the Imperium. Pryce was painfully aware of the infamous District 54 Incident over four-hundred years ago. An Inquisitor had killed twelve Arbiters and had then walked away, protected from any blowback.
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