“Let me get this straight,” Mary, the duty solicitor, said, “you were on the scene to interview the bank manager about a previous robbery, when you spotted the bank robbers on the CCTV feed from the front of the branch. Let’s call them Group A.”
“Yes.” Wendy nodded encouragingly.
Mary nibbled the end of her propelling pencil. “You asked Mr. Granger to lure Group A into an office, and were in the process of arresting them when a different group of robbers—armed ones, let’s call them Group B—showed up.”
“Exactly. I was waiting for Group A to reveal what they were after before I arrested them.”
“And then—” Gibson began.
“I made a risk assessment, that four thugs with automatic weapons—they were shooting by this point—were a far greater danger to the public than the two unarmed suspects I was with, so I temporarily confiscated the item that Group A were interested in, then attempted to get them out of the bank so I could arrest them without fear of Group B intervening.”
“But there was a third party. Let’s call him Individual C.”
Wendy cringed. She’d never actually seen Individual C, but she’d heard the ear-bleeding crash of his shotgun, even over the roar of Group B’s guns. “He made his presence known.”
“What happened next?” Mary scribbled shorthand notes on her pad as she waited for Wendy to continue.
“Individual C shot out the lock on the corridor door. I assessed that Individual C—or members of Group B, if any survived—would be entering the corridor shortly, and they wouldn’t be looking for tea and sympathy. So I shot first, not aiming at people, just suppressive fire.”
Mary waited, but when Wendy didn’t fill the silence, she moved on to the next question. “According to the police you were unarmed when they apprehended you. What happened to your gun?”
“Oh, I don’t need a gun to shoot people…”
Mary sighed and massaged her forehead. “Run that by me again?”
Gibson cleared his throat. “Ms. Deere is a transhuman, class three, one of our augmented Field Investigators. Her ability is what we call a somatic illusionist.”
“I can make imaginary things,” Wendy tried to help.
“She creates illusions,” Gibson clarified. “Illusions that are tangible enough you can weigh them or hit somebody over the head with them. They don’t last very long if she loses physical contact with them—a couple of seconds—and she can’t make anything complicated or very big, but she’s never unarmed.”
“Side-arm baton.” Wendy raised her right hand and produced her nightstick with a flourish. “Or, in this case, a lightweight compound bow and as many arrows as I can shoot before my arm falls off.”
The solicitor froze. “You went up against armed robbers with a bow and arrow?”
Wendy shook her head. “Not exactly—I just fired enough arrows down the corridor to make the robbers think twice about storming it while I evacuated everyone through the fire exit.”
“I think I see why the police are having a hard time working out the sequence of events.” Mary was keeping it professional but Wendy could tell that the solicitor was having a hard time believing her story. “What happened next?”
“The bank should have the CCTV recordings from the interior? I’m pretty sure they also had a couple of cameras overlooking the fire exits and the back alleyway. Um.” Wendy glanced at her boss for confirmation.
Gibson nodded. “We’re getting access,” he said. “Continue.”
Wendy took them through the sequence with the weird and abrupt wave of existential nausea that had swamped her, the teenage kid’s uncanny ability to pick the pocket of an armed and alert thief-taker, then their escape in the getaway car and her abortive pursuit on imaginary rollerblades. “Did you run the plates—”
“Yes. Cloned,” Gibson announced.
“Well fuck.” Wendy was abruptly out of self-restraint. “After all that effort—”
“First things first.” Gibson laid a restraining hand on her forearm. “What’s the legal picture looking like?”
“Well.” Mary the duty solicitor smiled like a rodent preparing to sink its teeth into the ball of an unsuspecting human’s thumb. “Let’s tackle the worst case analysis first. The police can charge you with carrying an offensive weapon. They can also charge you with reckless endangerment. Theft or handling stolen goods would be a bit of a reach—”
“Excuse me?” snarled Wendy.
“—Did you or did you not take an item from a safe deposit box that had been procured under false pretenses?” Mary shrugged: “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, channeling my inner Crown Prosecution Service jobsworth in search of an easy conviction. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that one would fly because you were given custody of the box by someone in a position of lawful supervision—Mr. Granger—and took the item for temporary safe-keeping in the presence of known criminals, with the intent of returning it. The offensive weapon charge I’d defend by taking the position that, as a transhuman, it’s a manifestation of your person, and you can’t reasonably set it aside any more than an Aikido black belt could reasonably be expected to refrain from using their skills in self-defense when attacked. The outcome … I’d say it depends on how good a barrister we could get for you, and whether the judge got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. A toss-up, in other words. The hard bit is the reckless endangerment, but it’s all on CCTV, and as you weren’t aiming at anyone in particular…?”
“Who, me? Nope, never.”
“Good, then we have at least a mitigating factor to set beside the thugs with highly illegal automatic weapons who were shooting at you. No, Ms. Deere, the police are highly unlikely to charge you—not unless they have some reason to hold a grudge against you.” She put her pen down on her notepad for emphasis, and smiled brightly.
Wendy offered her a strained smile in return. “We’ll just have to see, won’t we. Sir?”
“I suppose so.” Gibson didn’t sound happy. “I can’t afford to have you off the job because some randos with heavy artillery took a dump
