“Uh-huh…”
“Put your index fingertip in that and hold it for a couple seconds.”
Ashton obeyed, and within a second, the scroll on the badge, containing his name and IPD identification number, lit a soft green.
“Nice,” Ashton decided, as Peterson and Ames oohed and aahed.
“Yeah, it is,” Carter decreed. “And if somebody who isn’t a real cop tries to use it, as soon as they touch the bio-indicator, it lights up red. If the person wielding it is a legit cop, but not you, it lights up yellow. Look.” Carter put his fingertip into the depression, and the scroll lit a pale amber shade.
“Cool!” Cally declared, enthused. “Maia, I want one ‘a those!”
“HA! Well, sooner or later, it’ll filter to us, I guess,” Peterson decided.
“I’ll try to help it be sooner,” Carter promised.
“Nice. So you have it all covered,” Ashton said, nodding. “In an emergency, if a colleague doesn’t have a badge on ‘em, we can still identify ‘em as a colleague. I like it.”
“So did Emperor Trajan,” Carter said with a grin.
“Even better,” Peterson said, matching her husband’s grin.
Problems
“Did you hear about Peabody?” Captain Ted Bradly, chief over the Dispatch division, asked his companion – an old colleague and sometime assistant – over coffee in the break room at lunch.
“What about him?” Lieutenant Bill Carr, responsible for the Evidence Archive, wondered. “He gonna run Investigations again?”
“Not just no, but hell no,” Bradly noted with a snarl. “The new Chief busted him all the way down to sergeant investigator. They got some young, snot-nosed kid, fresh out with his detective badge, running Investigations, of all things. Talk about bass-ackwards, that’s it, all right.”
“I don’t expect Peabody is happy about that.”
“He’s not. I talked to him the other day. Says he has to earn it all back...from scratch.”
“Damn.”
“Never mind this cockamamie, damn-fool idea that they’re gonna get rid of military rank.”
“Tell me about it! How the hell are ya supposed to tell who reports to who, if nobody’s got a damn rank? I’m not lettin’ go of my rank!”
“Yeah. Me, either. This ain’t gonna work, Ted.”
“No, it’s not. And it’s only a matter of time before the idiots runnin’ the department figure it out. Carter never made it past captain, so you know he hasn’t got a clue how to manage things. And now that damn crazy-ass idiot emperor has him tryin’ to run this shit.”
“You suppose it’ll go the way it went before?”
“Probably. I figure it’s just a matter of time, like I said. Meanwhile, I guess we wait it out.”
Carr pondered for a bit.
“Maybe not,” he said then. “Maybe we can, uh, ‘hurry it up’ a little bit, if you get me.”
Bradly sat up straight.
“What did you have in mind?” he wondered. Carr glanced around to make sure they weren’t being watched or overheard, then he leaned forward.
“This is all coming from Carter. He schmoozed his way into the top position by sucking up to the new emperor, with the help of his ICPD bitch. But that new emperor don’t know jack-shit. We do. We know way the hell better than Carter the best way to run this department. So what if something...happened...to Carter?”
“Mm,” Bradly hummed. “Interesting. They’d have to find somebody else with a reasonable rank and experience to stick in the slot.”
“Right! Chances are, it’d be Peabody – which is only fair, after busting him down like that,” Carr noted. “But if he didn’t want the top job, there’s no reason why somebody else couldn’t slip into the position...like you, Captain.” He cocked his head. “After all, if they think Carter can…”
“True, true...you make some really good points, there…” Bradly thought for a moment. “The biggest problem I see with that is, it’s hard to get to Carter these days. When he got the head slot, him and his ICPD bitch wife moved out to the ‘burbs and bought ‘em a nice, not-so-little house. Never mind the kid running Investigations and his wife – who is also an ICPD bitch, let me note – are out there all the time, as they all plan how this ‘new, improved’ excuse for a department is supposed to run.”
“Yeah. ICPD has been a pain in our collective asses for years. We really need to look at getting rid of that whole damn place.”
“But with Gorecki gone missing, and half his enforcers dead in the attack on the Palace, and the other half dead in the strike on the old Headquarters building, we got nobody to do it for us.”
“So? We get together a group of us ‘oldies,’ and we do it ourselves.”
“Ourselves? Are you crazy?”
“Nope,” Carr said with a wicked grin. “Look. We got us a perfect opportunity to wipe out the top dog, his pup, and the bitches, all in one go, if we do something to the house during one of those little dinner parties they have.”
“Yeah, but it has to be foolproof, and not at all obvious,” Bradly pointed out. “Otherwise, this emperor will not be forgiving. He’s already demonstrated that, in spades.”
“No shit.”
“And that was the whole point of having ‘enforcers.’ With them, if they screwed up badly enough, you just cut ‘em loose… or cut ‘em down. Otherwise, they did your work for you; if they got in trouble with anybody, you bailed ‘em out, and there weren’t any blatant connections to worry about. I mean, they knew, they just couldn’t prove it.”
“True…”
“Look. Why don’t you round up some of the other boys and girls who are ‘oldies’ like us, and see if anybody has any experience? Some of ‘em maybe worked in Gorecki’s group at one point or another. Make sure you pull in Peabody on it; he’ll probably
