Nick sat on the sofa, Cally beside him, while her parents took the two armchairs, positioned across from the sofa in a kind of conversation circle. Cally took Nick’s hand, as both parents folded their arms and waited, unsmiling, and without speaking. Cally squeezed his hand in hers; he drew a deep breath and commenced.
“I grew up on the planet Flanders,” he explained, “and always had an interest in detective work. When I graduated from the Imperial Police Academy, rather than go back to Flanders, which is kind of a quiet place, I decided to accept an offer to come to the Imperial City and work at the IPD Headquarters…”
“And what did your poor mother think of that?” Laura remarked, in a somewhat snarky and wholly reproving tone.
“Mother,” Cally warned.
“My parents died in a lightning-sparked house fire about a year before I graduated the Academy,” Nick said quietly. “I was pretty much on my own. I had an aunt and uncle, but they’d only just come back to Flanders from where Aunt Beatrice’s job had taken her, over in Sunda Sector, and I didn’t really know them very well yet.”
“Oh,” Laura said, subdued.
“Yes, ma’am, and I was probably way more naïve than was good for me, in a business like this,” Nick admitted. “Long story short, I had no idea IPD Headquarters was so corrupt – corrupt at all, really – until I got thrown into it head-first. There were a couple of people I knew who played it straight, but not many. After I got involved in a couple cases by being first on the scene, and royally pissed off the detective over me, my supervisor – who was one of the straight guys, like me – had to clear me out of there fast, or one of the ‘enforcers’ was gonna come down on me like twelve tons of brick landing square on my head. So he managed to get me transferred over to ICPD. I’m still not sure how it all worked, because as far as anybody at IPD HQ knew, I had been sent off-planet for some ‘training’ that would make me crooked like them.” He paused, then shrugged. “Then my supervisor got the hell out, himself, by applying for extra-early retirement.”
“Wow,” Alexandre said, leaning forward. “Was he in danger, too?”
“And what kind of danger?” Laura asked.
“Danger of getting killed, ma’am, and yes, sir, he was,” Nick explained. “When they didn’t like something you did, they generally just eliminated you if you didn’t come around to their way of thinking pretty damn quick.”
“And they kept trying, even after he was over at ICPD,” Cally interjected. “Though it took ‘em a while to realize he was there, and not off on another planet someplace, getting ‘trained.’ Which at least gave him a chance to get settled in, and a little more on-the-job training under his belt.”
“Yeah, they did keep trying,” Nick agreed. “Because once I realized that ICPD wasn’t at all like that, I made the transfer permanent, rather than just a kinda ‘loaner’ situation, if you understand what I mean. And ICPD put me into Investigations, where I wanted to be, whereas IPD had kept me a basic beat cop, and so I started to learn and really do some good.”
“And he moved up the ladder in the division,” Cally added. “Pretty fast.”
“Yeah. But the IPD goons were still after me. They even shot me at one point. Square in the chest.” He rubbed his chest, where he could still remember the pain of the impact. “Fortunately, I was wearing body armor, or they’d have killed me outright, then and there – though I didn’t have shock plates in it, and damn, did it hurt. Hell, they even blew up my old apartment within hours of my moving into a new apartment. Killed the maintenance guy, who was there doing all the updates an’ stuff so they could lease it back out to a new tenant.” Nick shrugged. “Not that they cared. I felt awfully bad for his family, though. He had three kids.”
Both of Cally’s parents gasped.
“But why?” Laura wondered. “Why were they after you? Why did they stay after you? What did you do to anger them that badly?”
“I don’t really know for sure. As nearly as I was ever able to figure,” Nick elaborated, then paused and backtracked. “Okay, lemme give you some history first, so you’ll understand. You know about the Imperial Council rebelling against the Throne and killing the last Empress a few months ago, right?”
“Yes…” Alexandre said, and they both nodded. “She seemed a lovely woman, and a very capable Empress.”
“It’s been all over the news,” Laura added.
“Well, the reason Headquarters was so corrupt was ‘cause the jerks at IPD Headquarters were the Council’s right hands, and the ones who assassinated the Empress and the whole rest of the on-planet family of the new Emperor, for the Council,” Nick practically growled. “I think they were trying to usurp her authority, because I’m pretty sure what got ‘em really pissed at me was when I prevented the theft of something called the Empress’ Sigil. It was a signet ring with a special version of the Imperial emblem on it, given to the, I dunno, like a chamberlain or something for one of the early empresses from centuries ago, that showed he acted with her full authority, and in her name… and he could use it as a seal on documentation an’ stuff…”
“It was way back before all of the nanites and VR and QE radio and all that stuff was invented,” Cally explained. “They had to use real old-fashioned means to communicate.”
“So that early empress had issued a royal decree authorizing the Sigil, and none of the empresses since that time had ever revoked that, even though the thing was in a museum now,” Nick noted. “I expect it
