Hellflower (v1.1) Read Online Free Page B

Wanderweb Justiciary.
    I wasn’t doing the pretty by this glitterborn, make few mistakes about it. In my business you do not make friends and be a angel of mercy-and I wasn’t grateful, not to Tiggy. I just wanted to see his face when I showed up. That’s all.
    The top twelve floors of the Wanderweb Justiciary had closed at the end of First Shift and it was now almost the end of Second, but Det Admin and Detention itself never slept. I admired the pretty statues and the nice murals on the walls while I waited for the lift. Wanderweb, city of progress.
    One level down it was a different story-looked like legitimate headquarters Empire-wide, with the small difference that the only uniforms in sight was the Guardsmen’s gaudy red-and-blue. I went to the Desk Officer and told him I was sure my First was in here an I’d come to bail him out. He asked me when my First’d been brought in and I said I didn’t know, only when I’d gone to lift ship he wasn’t around. Checked morgue, I said, and he wasn’t there.
    Same old story: Idiot High Jump Captain and her rake-helly crew. And it would all check green across the board if they bothered. Paladin and me had spent the whole day going over plans for the Justiciary and pieceworking a false data file on Firecat -a.k.a. the Starlight Express out of Mikasa.
    The Desk Officer sent me in-level to Fees & Records and told me to hurry because they was just about to shut down for the day, and if I got there after they closed I’d have to come back tomorrow at beginning of First Shift.
    Ha.
    I skipped over there, trying to look like nobody who was carrying a unscannable solenoid stunner under her jacket and grabbed some poor overworked bureaucrat who worked in Records. I spun him a tale about my missing First-Hamat, he was, because I knew Alcatote was being a good boy and there wasn’t another Hamat loose in twelve cubic lightyears. Of course the poor cratty couldn’t find him in his listings and of course I couldn’t remember when he could of come in. The cratty kept swearing my First wasn’t here and looking at his chrono-it was almost end-of-shift, remember?-and I kept insisting and being just short of nasty enough that he’d call some Guardsmen and put me in gig too. Finally he grabbed me and dragged me around to his side of the display and pointed.
    "I tell you, Captain, there are no Hamati in here!"
    I looked. It was an intake list for the last three days, broken down by Breeding-Population-of-Origin. It had no Hamati, twenty-seven Fenshee, and one alMayne. I memorized his file number.
    "But he’s gotta be in here!" I insisted, in my best wringing-her-pale-hands-and-moaning voice. "Look, check again-maybe you got his B-pop wrong. He don’t look much like a Hamat "
    "What does he look like?" said my good little straight sophont.
    "Well," I began, improvising, "He’s about a meter-fifty, striped—"
    "There are no meter-and-a-half tall Hamati!" thundered my long suffering soulmate.
    "Well, he told me he was Hamat!" I whined. "How am I supposed to know?"
    "Look, Captain, if you’ll just come back tomorrow—"
    "But I’m lifting tonight! I need him back now! Look, don’t you keep holos or something? I could look, an—"
    "One thousand and some very odd beings have been processed through here in the last three days!" my uncivil servant snapped. "But I told you what he looks like! He’s striped, he has a long tail, and blue eyes—"
    "Hamati do not have tails!" said my little buddy, who must of been a exobiologist in his free time..
    "You just gotta look for him—"
    "All right! We do keep hard copy images of detainees. I’ll find you a list of all the fur-bearing sentients—"
    "Striped. With a tail. And blue eyes."
    "-that have been processed in the last three days and then will you believe me that this-this-person is not here? Will you go away?"
    "Sure," I said, and watched him disappear, a broken man, into the inner room.
    Which was what I’d been angling for since I