The Impossibles Read online

  The biggest problem with AutoLearn, however, was that the learning was actually time-stamped, and it would expire in two weeks if not reinforced. She usually didn’t reinforce what she AutoLearned with real learning—the cases vanished that fast—but she had a hunch she might have to do so here.

  While that program fed information to her brain, she headed to holding for a moment with her other client. She let his file run in front of her left eye: Fabian Fiske, which had to be some kind of made-up name. If she had time, she’d search the file to see if he legally changed his name somewhere along the way. But she didn’t have time.

  She barely had time to glance at the facts:

  Fabian Fiske worked for Efierno Corporation as a construction day worker. That fact alone made her cringe. Most of the defendants she got here were construction day workers. They signed up because they needed the work and waived the right to company protection should anything go wrong.

  Since construction workers usually went into strange areas before the bulk of the business itself, construction workers were more likely to break intercultural laws. And the least likely to have a good lawyer to defend them or have access to the corporation’s Disappearance services.

  Here was the problem, the fact of Kerrie’s everyday life since she graduated from law school and ended up in this godforsaken place: Everyone believed that someone accused of breaking the law of another culture ended up in front of one of thirty Multicultural Tribunals—and technically that was true. Technically, Earth Alliance InterSpecies Court was a branch of the Multicultural Tribunal for the First District. In practice, there was nothing multicultural about the courts Kerrie stood before. No panel of judges from different cultures heard these cases. It wasn’t practical.

  Instead, a single judge from a rotating group of judges from different Earth Alliance cultures handled cases like Fiske’s, usually with two or three questions and a pound of the gavel. If a judge didn’t act quickly, the court system would get jammed, because contrary to popular belief, people got accused of breaking other culture’s laws all the time.

  That wouldn’t be a problem if the cultures weren’t so vastly different. Over its history, the Earth Alliance made treaties with a wide variety of alien cultures. Those treaties facilitated trade within the sector, making the Earth Alliance the most powerful governing body in the known universe.

  But the price of those treaties was steep—at least from the human perspective. The treaties all stated that the violator of a law got punished by the culture whose law was broken. It sounded straightforward, but the differences in cultures made for punishments humans—and many aliens—did not like.

  The most famous early case, and one every law school student studied, was of a man who accidentally stepped on a flower—a crime in the community where he was temporarily assigned for work—and he was sentenced to death.

  That sentence was carried out.

  As were thousands—millions—of others. Humans didn’t like that, and refused over time to work for the large corporations. So the corporations developed a way of skirting the law, first by hiring the best lawyers for their people, and when that didn’t work, by setting up Disappearance services, allowing the employees accused of the most egregious crimes to get a new identity, leave their lives, and slip away.

  Of course, those employees either paid for the service themselves or they were high up enough in the corporate structure to qualify for a free Disappearance.

  Independent Disappearance services also existed, but they were so expensive that someone who worked as a construction day worker couldn’t afford the consultation fee, let alone the price of a full Disappearance.

  On her way to the holding section of the courthouse, Kerrie had to go through security—a small machine that scanned her entire body. Then she had to go through another scan as she walked through the double doors.

  The scans disrupted her file review, and she had to scan backwards, missing—of course—the most important part: what, exactly, Fiske was accused of.

  She didn’t have trouble finding him. He was older than the image in his file by at least two decades, but he looked like a dried out version of the man pictured. His hair was gray, his face lined, and his hands gnarled. The poorest of the poor. He couldn’t even get his hands enhanced so that he could do his job properly.

  “Fabian?” she asked.

  He stood, politely, and nodded at her. A man who followed rules. He wore a rumpled blue work shirt, and muddy pants that he brushed off as she walked toward him.

  A trickle of compassion washed through her and she tamped it down. She couldn’t afford it, any more than he could afford to have a real defense.

  “Do you have a suit?” she asked.

  “No, miss,” he said, inadvertently accenting their age difference and the fact that he had no idea who she was.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “My name is Kerrie Steinmetz. I’m your lawyer. In court, you have to call me Ms. Steinmetz.”

  If she let him speak at all, which she doubted she would.

  “All right,” he said softly, bowing his head.

  She sent a message across her links to Miguel, one of the paralegals. Need a suit from the closet, size—

  She glanced at him, unable to measure, visually. She wasn’t used to seeing men with such broad torsos and such slender legs. “What size do you wear?”

  “What?” Fiske blinked at her.

  “Suit. And shoes. What size do you wear?”

  He shrugged. He had never owned a suit.

  “Clothes, then,” she said. “Shirt, pants, shoes.”

  She repeated the shoes in case he was overwhelmed, and softly, he answered her, color rising in his cheeks. The kind of man who didn’t like revealing personal information. The kind of man who tried hard not to be noticed.

  What the hell had he done?

  She sent the information to the paralegal, then led Fiske to the chairs.

  “I need you to go over this with me,” she said. “Who is accusing you again?”

  “The Baharn,” he said.

  She actually felt a second of hope, and tamped that down. Unlike many of the cultures she dealt with, the Baharn accepted financial fines in lieu of an actual sentence.

  “And you…?” She let her voice trail off.

  “Got drunk.” Fiske’s voice wobbled. “I don’t even remember it.”

  “But there’s a visual, right?” she asked, not because she knew, but because that was how these things worked.

  “I just passed out,” he said. “They said I touched one of their—I don’t know what they’re called. The kid of someone important.”

  “Kid?” Kerrie asked before going farther. There were no fines when someone tampered with a Baharn child, no matter what caste the child belonged to.

  “Teenager. Adult really, by our standards. Twenty-something. Full grown.”

  She nodded, feeling a bit of relief.

  “I brushed him when I passed out. What was some religious kid doing in a human bar?” His voice went up. “No one will tell me that.”

  The kid had been trolling for trouble. Or a percentage of a fine. But she wasn’t going to tell Fiske that either.

  “Did someone ask your companions for money to make it all go away?” she asked.

  “They ran,” he said. “They left me.”

  Smart people. And he had passed out.

  The paralegal came in with a suit on a hanger, shoes dangling off it. “I need you to put this on for court,” Kerrie said to Fiske.

  He looked at it.

  “You have to dress properly for court or they won’t listen to you.”

  He took the clothes. “Where do I—?”

  There were no private areas. She nodded toward a back corner. “Over there,” she said. “We won’t look.”

  She thanked the paralegal and told him to wait for a second, then turned her back as Fiske changed, using that moment to review the visual. It went down exactly as he said, except that
the “kid”—a long horned tentacled creature so wide that he didn’t fit into a human chair—had hovered near the bar, clearly trolling.

  She couldn’t use that as an argument—that was an appeals argument or something that actually would have to go in front of a real Multicultural Tribunal with an expensive defense attorney arguing the case. Fiske didn’t have the money for that and she didn’t have the time.

  Then she looked at the fine, and frowned.

  Fiske came back, shuffling in the shoes. They didn’t quite fit him. He looked lost. He was lost, although not as lost as he had been before.

  “You need to pay the fine,” she said to him.

  He shook his head. “I can’t afford it.”

  She didn’t insult him by telling him it was a small fine. To her, it was a small fine. To him, it probably was a fortune.

  “You can’t afford not to,” she said. “If you go in front of the judge and you don’t pay the fine, he’ll send you to Baharn lock-up. Then someone will brush against you and the fine will go up. By the time you leave that place, you will have accidentally touched half a dozen Baharn, and each time, you’ll receive a brand new fine.”

  “They can’t do that,” he said.

  “Of course they can. You’re already considered guilty of the crime. You’ve just compounded it. You get five years for every unpaid fine. After two weeks, you’ll probably have forty years to serve. And after a month….” She shook her head, then softened her voice. “It’s a death sentence, Fabian. You have to pay the fine.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have work. I don’t have the money. My family will be destitute.”

  “What will happen to them if you are in prison for the rest of your life?” she asked.

  He lowered his head.

  In a gentler tone, she said, “The court will put you on a payment plan. You can pay as little as you like, and you can stretch the payments out for the rest of your life, but that’ll keep you out of a Baharn prison.”

  He raised his head, his eyes wide. “I thought you could get me out of this. I was drunk. Can’t we go to the judge and say it was an accident?”

  “We can,” she said. “He won’t listen. And honestly, can you prove it?”

  “What?” Fiske asked, clearly shocked.

  “Can you prove that you didn’t brush against that Baharn on purpose?”

  “I was drunk,” he said. “I passed out.”

  “Can you prove that?” she asked. “Were tests conducted at the scene?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But my friends—”

  “Ran. And they’re not on this starbase, and you don’t have the money to send for them. It’ll cost more to bring them here than the entire fine with penalties and interest. Pay the fine, Fabian.”

  He swallowed.

  “Or spend the rest of your life in a Baharn prison. Those are your choices.”

  He shook his head.

  “Decide now, Fabian,” she said, glad he had an unusual name, because she could remember it. She used to give her clients time to make a decision, but then she realized it wasn’t worth it. That took time away from other clients. “This is your last chance.”

  “If you were me,” he started, “what would you—”

  “I’d pay the fine,” she said. Then she put a hand on his back and shoved him toward the paralegal. “Miguel will take you to the court. I’m sending the filing ahead. You’ll have to sign and set the payment schedule.”

  Then she sent the filing before Fiske had a chance to say anything else.

  Her gaze met the paralegal’s. “He’s due in Judge Weiss’s court at 9 a.m. Take him to the clerk, fill out the last few details, and for godsake, make sure he’s off the docket. If you fail to take him off the docket, I’ll fire you myself, is that clear?”

  The paralegal nodded, looking scared. She’d made that same threat last week to a different paralegal who was now no longer employed with the Public Defenders office. Unlike some of the other attorneys, she carried out her threats. There was no room for error here—and she had learned that the hard way.

  She extended her hand. Fiske took it hesitantly.

  “Stay on Earth or the Moon from now on, Fabian,” she said. “Don’t go near unfamiliar cultures, and I promise. Things will get better from here.”

  Then she let go, gave him a half smile, and left holding, feeling jubilant. She didn’t let Fiske see her face because he wouldn’t understand. The paralegal probably didn’t either, but this was what passed for a win in Earth Alliance InterSpecies Court—and she had learned early to celebrate these wins, because they were all she had.

  Of course, if she were the superstitious type, she would have wondered if this win boded ill for the morning’s other big case.

  But she wasn’t superstitious. She wasn’t going to let one tiny victory color the rest of her day.

  ***

  Since she didn’t have to go to court at 9 a.m., she was free to see her new client. Prisoners didn’t get transferred to the holding area until an hour before trial, so she had to go to the jail. As she left, she sent a message down her links to have her client moved to the interview room.

  Two tram rides, jam-packed with lawyers and paralegals and law clerks, all heading to the jail to do something at the last minute before someone’s court appearance. Had she taken two more trams, heading to the prison part of the base, she would have also encountered family, friends and hangers-on, but fortunately she wasn’t going there. She didn’t need to see any of that anyway.

  The trams went through tunnels drilled deep in the base, far away from the outer rings. Transportation on the outer rings belonged to the shuttles to Helena Base. From Helena, people could go anywhere in the sector.

  But security learned early on that running the shuttles and the trams on similar tracks facilitated jail breaks. So the tram system got moved to the deepest part of the base.

  Since there was nothing to look at, Kerrie reviewed the case as best she could. But she had barely looked at any of the files by the time she reached the jail. She used the lawyer’s entrance, pressing her hand against the door all the way in. Her identification opened those doors, but didn’t stop the full-body scans, searching her for a weapon.

  She’d learned to ignore that, even when the scans got invasive. Instead, she simply went deep inside her own mind, studying the cases, preparing for the next court session.

  She stepped into the interview area, walled off from the rest of the jail by thick walls and soundproof barriers. A guard met her, called her by name, and took her down a corridor she had never seen before.

  She expected to be in the large communal interview room, where privacy shields lowered over the table where she would sit with her client. She would have been able to see all the other lawyers talking to their clients, but not hear them.

  Instead, the guard led her to a tiny room, made of the same clear material as the privacy shield. But a long table was bolted to the floor here, along with four chairs and a very visible panic button, in case she needed out. The door to the prisoner’s wing was reinforced with shields and warnings, and the door on her side had some kind of prod attached that would zap the prisoner if he even tried to get out.

  As she let herself in, she saw that the Peyti lawyer had already arrived, even though she hadn’t asked for him. Her only indication of the Peyti’s gender was his clothing, suit, tie, pants, even though Peyti culture didn’t require those things at all. It showed the Peyti was sensitive to human conventions, and thought it important that humans know that about him.

  He was stick-like, so thin that he looked like he was about to break. His breathing mask covered the lower half of his face, and the three long thin fingers on his right hand tapped the tabletop rhythmically.

  He had no patience, which was unusual in a Peyti. And he was not as tall as the average Peyti.

  She felt her heart sink. He was young—hence the clothing, the worries about what someone else would think, a
nd the impatience.

  She opened the door.

  “I’m Kerrie Steinmetz,” she said. “I’m the public defender your client requested.”

  He stood and extended his right hand.

  “Uzvik,” he said, voice so soft she could barely hear him. She understood why Maise hated working with the Peyti. They were hard to hear, for one thing, and for another, their names were confusing. Most Peyti she’d met had “Uz” in their names somewhere. She would have to be careful not to use the wrong suffix when she spoke to him.

  She took the fingers gently in her own. They felt like bendable chopsticks. She had learned not to shake them or even grip them too hard. She didn’t want to cause him pain.

  She held the fingers for the requisite fifteen seconds, then let go. “I’m a bit confused, Uzvik. Public defenders get assigned for clients who can’t pay. Yet you’re here.”

  He tilted his head, a sign of sadness among the Peyti. “I am not being paid. It is a courtesy.”

  “For whom?” she asked.

  “My client,” he said.

  “If you are not being paid, how is she your client?” Kerrie asked.

  “Someone must stand by her,” he said softly.

  Crap. A loyal companion. She hated those. “Do you belong to the Multicultural Tribunal Bar?”

  “No,” he said so softly she could barely hear him.

  “What’s your specialty, then?”

  “Criminal law,” he said.

  “With a specialty in what?” she asked.

  “Piracy,” he said, and if he had been human, his tone of voice would have made her think he was embarrassed by that.

  “Then you’re completely out of your jurisdiction and your presence here compromises my attorney-client confidentiality. You’re going to have to leave.”

  He nodded and stood. “She is not guilty of this.”

  Kerrie would be rich if she got paid for every time someone said that to her. “You know as well as I do that it doesn’t matter here.”