“Honey? It’s Owen. I’m right here. Sheila, baby, can you hear me?” Jackson asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“What did you just say?” he asked, as several doctors ran in. They immediately began checking her vitals.
“Said...I th’nk so, too.” Her eyelids fluttered, then parted slightly. “Dey go’ ‘im, righ’?” she slurred. “Go’ Dirk?”
“And there’s our witness confirmation. Yes, ma’am, we have him,” Gorski confirmed. “You’re safe now.”
“Thank...you.” She offered them a weak smile, as her eyes slid closed again.
Gorski gestured at Ashton, who had returned to his side, instructing him to respond to the woman.
“You’re very welcome, ma’am,” Ashton said, adding a gentle, understanding smile at a deeply relieved Jackson. “We were glad to do it.”
Then he looked back at Gorski and smiled again.
Gorski grinned and patted him on the back.
“Way to go, kiddo,” he murmured. “You just finished your very first real case as a proper investigator, all successful-like.”
Ashton beamed.
This kind of case load went on for more than a year, and with that level of practice, Ashton was getting good at it. More, he was moving up in rank and status; his unofficial rank had transitioned fairly quickly, and as promised, from Investigator to Sergeant Investigator, and he was nearing a promotion to Lieutenant Investigator.
Finally the Deputy Chief of Investigations, Colonel Peterson, called him into her office.
“Have a seat, Nick,” she told him, gesturing at the visitor chair across from her desk. “it’s time we made some decisions, you and I.”
Ashton drew a deep breath.
“Transfer, or go back,” he said then.
“Yes, which also means going back as someone who has ostensibly ‘learned’ under a past master of the gamesmanship in the Imperial Police, at least at Headquarters,” she confirmed. “And it means stepping back into that rat hole and being one of the rats.” She eyed him closely. “And you don’t strike me as a rat.”
“No ma’am. I’m not,” Ashton averred. “I’m not goin’ back to that snake pit, rest assured on that.”
“But there’s one other option you have.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“You could really transfer off-planet. Go to another sector in Sintaran space. For the most part, it’s only the headquarters here on Sintar that’s corrupt, because of how close it is, physically and organizationally, to the Council. Hell’s bells, the upper echelons tend to be friends with the Council members. But the other sectors’ departments tend to be pretty straight. And Lee and I could help you decide where you’d fit best. Hell, you could always go back to your home planet, for that matter.” She shrugged. “You wouldn’t have Stefan for a mentor, except long-distance, but from what I’ve been hearing, you might not need him now, except for that. And even that, only on some particularly hairy case.”
Ashton paused, gnawing his lower lip, in deep thought; he hadn’t considered that – any of that. And to be honest, going back home to work held a certain appeal; his parents were gone, but there was other family still there. The problem was, Flanders generally had a very quiet sort of population; even in Norwich, there hadn’t been very much crime. Which was good, but he didn’t want to sit around and twiddle his thumbs, either. Which, in turn, gave him another question.
“What’s the most active police sector in the Empire?”
“Oh,” Peterson said, somewhat startled by the question. “That would have to be Sintar, specifically Imperial City, hands down. Partly because of the corruption, and partly just because it’s the power center. I think power is kind of like gravity; it tends to attract all the people who want it, or the money that usually comes with it, and don’t care how they get it.”
“Hmph. Makes sense.”
“Yeah. Why did you want to know?”
“Because I don’t want to sit around and do nothing but grow dust bunnies in a quiet sector, on a quiet planet,” he explained. “And that includes my home planet. I don’t want to stagnate, I want to be someplace where I can actually do some good. So…”
“So…?”
“So let’s do it, I guess,” he decided. “After all, Imp City is still part of the Empire-wide police organization, and I want to be of some use, here. Which means,” he looked to her for confirmation, “I need to formalize this whole situation, so you can actually give me those ranks?”
“Exactly,” Peterson said with a wide smile. “I was very much hoping you’d say that. Yes, we’ll get this formalized and you placed directly into our system, rather than on the periphery.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask – how did you do all that without getting somebody into trouble, in the first place?”
Peterson drew a deep breath.
“You aren’t the first good-guy cop the ICPD has had to ‘help’ out of that rats’ nest, Nick,” she said with a sigh. “It doesn’t happen real often, because they’re generally pretty good at picking guys outta the Academy who have their particular corrupt leanings, but once in a great while they go for brains instead of bribery and the like. Lee and I think that’s what they did with you. Sometimes they’re able to get the brains to go along, and sometimes they don’t. That’s when Lee or one of a handful of others over at the Headquarters building pings us. Or, well, Lee used to ping us.”
“So you have a system within the system?”
“Sort of, yes. Everybody in a position of authority at Imp City Police knows about it. And they know when someone is inducted into it. You’re the latest, and doing well; we haven’t had another inductee since Lee left, though…which says he was right about them putting a toadie in his old position. And that bodes badly for the rookies. But we can’t keep you in the special system indefinitely; it wasn’t designed for that. So
