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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Bloodytearsofrage on 2024-10-01 23:24:04+00:00.

(Synopsis: Mercenary spacer Ophelia ‘Opie’ Walczak is in a bad mood and just wants to be left alone for a while. She meets a little girl on the run in a town with a dark secret. Opie’s bad mood is about to become everybody’s problem.)

(Note: this story is part of the Captain Hargrenn series, but can be read on its own.)

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“Kid! What are–?” I killed that idiotic question before it could fully form, since it was obvious what she was doing. “Get back here before you catch a blaster bolt!”

But Harmony did nothing of the sort. She just calmly strode over to the doorway. “If they want me alive, they won’t shoot,” she stated. There was just enough of a quiver in her voice to show that she understood the risk. This wasn’t just stupid teenage bravado. “And if they do shoot me, then Mr. Stejni doesn’t get me, right? That makes him and that woman not win. Isn’t that what you’ve been talking about?”

It was, sure enough. But to talk that shit was one thing. To see the kid actually skating the edge of getting killed while I was still in a position to do something about it was something else. But I couldn’t argue with her. She was exactly right. All I could do was hold my breath, maybe take a gulp of Dutch courage, and be ready to start laying waste to every fucking thing in sight if a blaster bolt came at her.

It didn’t, though. As the voice kept squawking for us to respond, Harmony ran shaky and obviously squeamish hands over the dead Gonhir policewoman’s body until she found the source of the noise, the communicator clipped to her uniform collar. She made the trip back on shivering legs, but back stiff and erect, forcing herself not to run. She was holding the comm between two fingers and away from her. Drying flecks of purplish Gonhir blood were stuck to it.

Taking it from her, I found the controls and switched it to ‘receive video/transmit audio only’ mode. I wanted to get a look at who I was talking to, but had no intention of giving them the same courtesy. Never miss a chance to limit how much information the enemy can glean about you – more basic mercenary tradecraft. Taking care to set the holocomm where I could still watch out the window beyond it, I finally keyed the thing up.

“–calling the occupants of the Bayview Cafe,” the image was saying. “We know you have the fucking holocomm, so please respond!” The speaker was a Dahu guy in late middle-age, head-wool streaked with white and worry-lines in the lemon-yellow flesh around his eye. His uniform was rumpled and he looked like he needed a nap.

“We hear you,” I replied. “If you’ve got anything to say worth hearing, get on with it.”

The Colonial cop jerked like I’d goosed him, but recovered quickly enough. “This is Chief Stamvra of the Serenity Island Colonial Police,” he said, calmly, but with a little throb of well-repressed rage sharpening his words. “Whom am I addressing?”

I wasn’t giving this shitweed my name or any other useful info if I could help it. “This is the officer commanding the defenses of Fort Skurwysyn.” I picked out one of the nastier epithets from my native language, because pedo-town didn’t deserve anything dignified. “You can call me ma’am.”

Stamvra clenched his jaw, but soldiered on in his Mr. Reasonable persona. “We are prepared to hear out your demands,” he said.

It was a good thing I’d disabled video transmission, because I know my face must have looked pretty stupid right then. I glanced at Harmony, but all she could do was shrug.

“This is your chance to negotiate,” Stamvra added when I didn’t immediately respond. “We’d like to get the innocents out of this situation.”

“I wasn’t aware that there were innocents on your side of this situation,” I shot back. Truly, after the media response, I was beginning to doubt that there were any innocents in this town – not adult ones, anyway. Maybe not on the whole damned planet.

“There are civilians trapped in the shops down the road from you.” Stamvra must have been as much politician as cop, because he managed to sound almost believably concerned about them. “They can’t leave because of your gunfire. What about them?”

I shrugged, then remembered that I had the video off and he couldn’t see that. “If they want to leave, they’re welcome to do it. As long as they go peaceably. If anybody takes a shot at us – civvie, cop, or anybody else – while those people are out on the street, I’m dropping every motherfucker I see. But if they go quietly and you don’t do anything stupid, I’ve got no problem with it.”

“If you mean that, we’ll arrange something in a few minutes, then.” For some reason, Chief Stamvra didn’t look relieved by that at all. I felt like he should have, but if anything, our agreement seemed to ratchet up the tension in him by a notch or two. “I’ll, uh, alert you when the civilians are prepared to move. I’m taking your word that you won’t fire upon them.” He glanced at someone out-of-view. “Now, about your hostage…”

“What hostage?”

“The ch–” The cop chief stopped himself from saying the word. “The… Arcadian individual you took from the Stejni Group.”

“The child, you mean? The little girl that ran away from Pedophile Central? That Arcadian?”

“Legally, she is not a child,” Stamvra said stifflly. “She is a biological product. A legally-purchased import.”

“Like livestock, you mean?” I was getting legit personally angry at this bastard now. “In your eyes, a little girl is on par with a goat or an omniboar? Except that can’t be right, because I’ll bet you assholes arrest people for raping their farm animals! So this kid is even less than an animal to you!”

“Don’t you get self-righteous with me, you murdering bitch,” he snarled back at me. “It was you Humans who decided she isn’t a person! You! Her own people! We’re just following the laws of her native Human planet!”

Had Chief Stamvra been in front of me right then, I’d have shot him right in the head. Straight up, no warning. Just pow, dead. “Did you just call me an Arcadian, you yellow fuck?” I growled. “By God, I have killed better people for less than that!”

He seemed to realize he’d gone too far with that. He reined himself in with a visible effort, the veins pulsing in his single huge eye. “Wait,” he grated out through clenched teeth as he held up his hands. “Let’s all… keep our tempers, here. Let’s not let these talks stall out.”

“I don’t see what we’ve got to talk about,” I snapped, ice-cold. “Our only interaction needs to be across the sights of a rifle.”

“No, wait. Please.” There was another of those glances to the side, like he was looking for support or reassurance. “We really do need to talk.”

“About what?”

“Th-the Arcadian,” he stammered. “If you could be compelled to let her go…”

I rolled my eyes. This obtuseness was getting tiresome fast. “I’m not holding her captive, asshole, and you know it. I’m protecting her from you.”

That huge eye narrowed at me. “Is that what you think you’re doing? Is that why you’re killing good cops? Because you’ve got some kind of hero complex?” He threw up his hands in exasperation. “Seriously, how do you think this ends? You’re fighting a whole city, a whole planet! Sooner or later, we take you down and Mr. Stejni’s property is returned to him, no matter what you do. The only way this plays out for you is death or a prison cell!”

“Wow,” I said as sarcastically as I could manage. “You should write that down, put it in a folder, and file it under ‘shit I already know’. It’s not about winning. It’s about me making this as miserable and bloody for you as I possibly can.” This Stamvra guy wasn’t really cut out to be a negotiator. He kept alternating between riling me up and trying to cool me back down. He should really focus on one or the other.

“Those were good cops you murdered,” he snarled. “Any one of them was worth more than you or all the disposable offworld whores put together!”

Ah. Now I knew where the Zharg bailiff from earlier had gotten his outlook.

“Those were men and women with families, damn it. They had children.”

I sneered, although he couldn’t see it. “If they’re the kind of people who call children ‘disposable whores’ and hand them over to child molesters, then their families are better off without them.”

“They were public servants, guardians of the law! They laid down their lives for–”

“They died to protect a rich shitpail’s ability to rape kids and you know it.” I barked out a nasty, scorn-laden laugh. “You could end this quick by laying on the firepower or gassing us or burning us out. But you can’t do that, because that would risk damaging Mr. Stejni’s precious, expensive toy, right? So you have to do this the hard way, the way that gives me a chance to jack up the body count, because you can’t piss off your unofficial boss. So tell me, Chief Stamvra, how does it feel to work for somebody who values your people’s lives less than his own disgusting pleasures?”

He glanced at the out-of-shot person again, but glaring a bit this time. Through gritted teeth, he told me, “Mr. Stejni does a lot of good for this planet. He is a vital pillar of our nation and economy.”

"Your nation is built on the principle of keeping fucking child molesters happy, huh? Anybody who actually deserv…

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