Star Law: A Marshal Cole Series

Chapter 17 (b)

Horn smiled as he remembered how it started. He wondered what sort of wisdom he would have imparted to his younger self. And now he was retired and no longer in the game. Still, he had unfinished business. This is what brought him to the fringe and why he was again together with Marshal Garner Cole.

"You said you needed my help," said Horn. "How?"

"There have been two murders aboard the ship," said Cole. "One of them took place during flight, the other most likely at Arcturus Terminal with the body being dumped aboard ship."

"I see," Horn nodded. "Give the security monitoring aboard a ship, it seems your answer on the person responsible would be evident right away."

"So you would think," Cole answered. "However, we found our victim in a locked room. Video surveillance shows no one else entering or leaving."

"That could point to a number of things. Not the least of which is tampering with the security system," Horn mused, "I suspect you have considered that angle."

"I have, and there have been security breaches with stolen ID," Cole said. "Hard to trust the data when that happens. I've taken some measures to mitigate that though."

"You obviously have something you think I might have thoughts on, yes?" Horny said. Sometimes his English accent sounded more regal than normal. With the white hair, he could pass for an Oxford don.

"I do," said Cole. He pulled out a datapad and placed it on the desk. He brought up an image on the wall monitor. "We went through the cargo container of the victim Aubrey Chase Chen. It was there that we discovered the body of an ArcTerminus dockworker named Burnside. Most of the attention by ship security has been this crewmember and the relationship to the murder of Chen."

"But you have something else that caught your eye" questioned Horn.

"Yes, I do," said Cole. "I am focused on the Army uniform in the container."

Cole brought the picture up of it on the screen and Horn examined it closely. "She was active duty?"

"She listed herself as retired and carried a civilian passport," replied Cole. "Of course that means nothing. As part of my job in the Navy, I often travelled on a civilian passport."

Horn was continuing to look at the uniform when his widened. "I know this unit," he said pointing to the unit insignia. "I spoke to a Commonwealth senator not more than six months before about this group."

"Wait, back up," said Cole. "Tell me more."

"Back on Earth a Senator Goderich pulled me into a meeting about a Commonwealth Army Intelligence unit called "42." I see that insignia in this picture now. He was concerned about their work in psi research and wanted my view. In particular, he wanted to know how other sentient species dealt with oversight of a subset of the population that had advantages over the rest of the people."

"And what did you tell this senator?" asked Cole.

"I said that I had come into contact with at least 30 different species not generally known to most people on Earth and all of them, every last one of them, had some oversight over psi abilities."

"I think we've both seen some incredible stuff out on the frontier," said Cole quietly. "We know the dangers."

Horn saw the expression that had come over Cole's face. He reached out and touched the marshal's shoulder. "We do know the dangers. The majority of people will never know what we did to protect them."

"If they did, do you think they would embrace possibly the biggest murderer in human history?" asked Cole referring to himself.

"Don't talk that way," said Horn. "They have no idea the sacrifice made on their behalf."

"And who we lost," said Cole with eyes downcast.

"And who we lost," repeated Horn. His voice was heavy with the weight of that statement.

"What else did the senator want in regards to your thoughts on psi?" asked Cole bringing the subject to the heart of the matter.

"He asked me if the Commonwealth Intelligence was still researching psi. I told him that this was a question best left to the director but I had heard anything on the civilian side of thing other than what we filed as offworld reports," said Horn. "American and British governments invested millions into psi research in the 1990s and 2000s but nothing conclusively came of it. My impression was that the military might still be interested and the senator's query about Unit 42 was verification of that."

"I wonder if alien contact pointed the military in a new direction," Cole mused. "Might explain why the senator contacted you."

"Very possible," said Horn. "In any event, you were correct to focus on the uniform here. It would appear that your victim was in the Army Intelligence Psi Unit at some point. Any idea why the uniform would be in her cargo container?"

"There could be a variety of reasons not the least of which is that she's still active duty," said Cole. "A military uniform is encoded so it can only be nanufactured by a military iNan machine. The reason for keeping it could be for that reason or as a veteran's keepsake or because there was no time to dispose of it."

"Is there a connection to this Chen being in a psi unit military and her murder?" questioned Horn.

"Maybe," replied Cole. "It does fit with a particular theory of mine of how she was killed inside a locked room."