C15 Jurisdiction (Patreon)

Here's the rest of yesterday's Executioner's Gambit post!

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“It’s not my job to kill Thojy! It’s my job to catch him,” she shouted. “The courts are responsible for deciding his fate.”

“That’s just a rationalization, and you know it,” he said. “If you arrest Thojy, the court will find him guilty, and they will execute him. If you arrest him, you’re killing him.”

“He’s a murderer, Dask!” She wagged a finger up at his face. “He’s killed himself through his own actions. The court just enforces the laws.”

“Well, my job is no different, Tori,” he sighed. “Geroo laws might not classify being disruptive as a capital crime, but to the company it is—at least when it rises to this level. And like it or not, enforcing company policy isn’t murder, it’s execution.”

She hated this conversation. He was right about the company’s attitude toward slaves, but how could he be so wrong about everything else? Her ears fell back as she tried to think of a way to explain. “If you were doing this yourself, publicly announcing someone’s ‘crimes against company policy’ and killing them, then sure, let’s call that an execution. It’s still immoral every which way you look at it, but paying someone to sneak around and poison a crewman’s food? No, that’s way beyond the pale. Not only is that reckless beyond reason, it’s a form of terrorism.”

“Good,” he grunted, surprising her. “I hope it scares them.”

“Dask!”

With a deeply-furrowed brow, the krakun scratched a huge talon into the aluminum deck. Without meeting her eyes, he growled, “I hope that they are afraid of what will happen to them if they treat their fellow crew poorly. Maybe they’ll think twice before they do now.”

She put a paw to his talon, stopping him, the meter long swarf he’d gouged from the deck stopped growing. “How can you—?”

He pulled his claw away then used the tip of his talon to fiddle with the thick aluminum shard. Without looking at her, he explained, “Whether they fear something formalized like crime and punishment or something as informal as an angry mob, the concept remains the same.” Then, he interwove his talons and looked her in the eyes. “Society shapes behavior with rewards and punishment. There are too many rewards in the system for treating others badly—money and power, above all—so we must rely on punishment to balance the scales.”

Tori was all for punishing the bad bosses, but there were tons of ways to do that other than executing them—fines, demotion, public shaming. She’d even opt for corporal punishment over capital punishment!

“I realize how this sounds,” said Daskatoma, “but you’d have done the same.”

Her eyes popped open. “What?” she gasped.

He gestured with an open palm. “Come on, Tori. Just imagine there’s some task that you know you’re supposed to do but you don’t want to do it—it could be anything, washing the dishes perhaps?”

She balled her fist tightly at her side. “Murdering people and washing the dishes have nothing in common!”

“Listen to me,” he said, unfazed. “Imagine you need to wash the dishes and for whatever reason, you really don’t want to do it. You hate washing the dishes or something. And then, someone volunteers to do it for you—not like you hired him to do it. He just offers to take care of it.”

Tori pointed in his face. “But you did hire him! You paid Thojy to kill all those people.”

“Pff. Company credits,” scoffed Daskatoma. “It didn’t cost me anything. You guys have an open economy. Any credits I put in Thojy’s strand just appeared out of thin air when I typed in the number. It would be no different than you ‘paying’ someone to wash the dishes with belly lint and bits of string.”

Thojy offered to murder people? He did have a hateful streak, but…? “And he just agreed to this?” she asked, ears hanging low. “What a psycho.”

The krakun frowned harder. Clearly, he didn’t think so poorly of his friend, but then again, Thojy was trying to help him—despite doing it in a depraved way. He drew a deep breath and slowly released it before admitting, “He was … uncomfortably excited to see Nija on the list. Sure, she was only the tenth worst one, but he has…”—he couldn’t meet her eyes—“a special antipathy for her.”

“Has?” Tori shouted. She growled, “Try had. He murdered her yesterday.”

Daskatoma’s eyes went wide, and he covered his open mouth with a claw. “What? No,” he gasped. Then explained, “I had Thojy steal the pills and when we saw there were only nine in the bottle, we agreed that this project would be a maximum of nine targets, not ten.”

She glared at him for many long moments. How could someone with such a big brain possibly be this gullible? “I think you agreed, Dask,” she said. “Clearly Thojy intended to include her.”

“That little… Grr!”

She paced back and forth in front of him with her slow, shuffling steps. “So, Thojy ‘volunteers’ to do your dirty work, you pay him with money that means nothing to you, and he goes where he wants with…” She stopped and focused an angry glare at his face. “You put a root access key on his strand, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” the krakun admitted. “Commissioners know all of the ship’s codes.”

Tori groaned and looked around for a chair, but the corridor was empty. She laid out the rest, “But of course, he can’t get more pills because now that they’re secured with a padlock—no digital code is going to open a mechanical lock.”

The deputy commissioner—or former Deputy Commissioner, perhaps?—closed his eyes, and he nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. I bet he did go back looking for more when I took Nija off the list.”

Tori sighed. “You didn’t want me transferring here. You were afraid I’d catch him.”

“Well, yeah! Thojy’s my friend,” he said, gesturing wide with his palms. “I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

He tapped his palm with a talon as he explained, “There was nothing I could do about Security Chief Tipohee being on the case, but it didn’t sound like he was trying all that hard. That was a risk he just had to face.”

“A risk?” Tori perked a damaged ear high. “Wait. Are you saying … you’d have let your friend die if we caught him?”

When he said nothing, she poked him with her cane. “Answer me, Dask! If Tipohee had managed to catch your assassin, would you have intervened and owned up that this was some off-the-books madness?” Still no reaction. “Or would you have disavowed your friend and let him be executed to cover it up?”

Daskatoma turned his long, slender neck away, tucking the tip of his nose away from her, between his arm and the wall. After a long pause, he muttered an admission, “I don’t know, Tori. I warned Thojy when he came up with this ridiculous idea that he’d be taking a huge risk with his life. Even with my access code, someone was liable to spot him. There was a real chance security could catch him and try as a murderer.”

He pulled his nose back out and stared at Tori, but with his head pulled back away from her, as if afraid of her judgment. Quieter now, he said, “And, oh sure, he could claim that I’d okayed these killings, but in all likelihood, the courts wouldn’t listen to him, and the first I’d hear of it would be in the captain’s bi-weekly report.” He pitched his voice as if reading a dispassionate report, “‘Serial killer Thojy: caught, tried, and executed.’ It’s not like they run punishments by me, Tori, before carrying them out.”

She waited for him to answer the obvious, then growled in frustration when his silence forced her to voice it, “But what if you happened to be here? If we caught him while you were on board and you had a chance to pardon him? Would you?”

He laid his mighty head back down on the cold deck, his eyes open but staring into space. “Honestly? I’m not sure,” he admitted. Then explained, “The whole goal was to empower the crew, to make them see that they have power. I don’t want Thojy getting hurt, but if my involvement was ever revealed, then it would undo everything. Instead of the crew believing in themselves, instead of bad bosses fearing their subordinates, they see me in the role as the only one who can fix things.”

He glanced her way. “Then, it becomes my eternal responsibility to micromanage staffing decisions. I’d have no choice but to handle executions myself—forever!” He clicked his tongue and dropped his eyes to the deck. “And if my uncle or the company ever lost their patience with me, they’d just replace me with someone who would. I needed this plan to work.”

Tori knew there was truth in that. Troykintrassa had been planning to fire her friend and go back to doing things himself. But then, Thojy had saved the big lizard in the foolhardiest way possible, by murdering his uncle. She doubted Daskatoma would be particularly understanding about Thojy’s motives.

“So, you didn’t come here to meet with Thojy,” she said. “You came here to get rid of him.”

He nodded. “I promised Thojy that if it ever got too hot, he and his family could jump aboard my shuttle, and I’d transfer him to a new ship. He could start over, and the investigations here would run cold.”

“And now that he’s finished your list?”

“It’s not safe here. He has to transfer,” said Daskatoma. “Even if you hadn’t pieced it together, he’d be living with risk every day. Besides, he’s got all the money I gave him. If he tries spending it, it’ll be suspicious as hell to everyone who knows him. But if he starts over on a new ship, he’s got a blank slate. His new peers will presume he comes from a rich family.”

She pointed an accusing finger. “And him being on this ship is a risk to you too,” she said. “It’s unlikely that Jintauroka will ever question him, but there’s no guessing just how determined he’ll prove to be.”

And then, a cold chill tingled its way down Tori’s spine. Daskatoma had been pretty candid with her this past week. He’d shared details of his life when there was nothing for him to gain from it. He’d been, in a word, a friend. But even then, there were times he could be coy—like he’d been about her transferring back.

But now, he was an open door, holding nothing back. Was that because she’d already worked out his secrets, or was there more to this?

She paced closer to the wall, toward the gap where Daskatoma’s rounded body didn’t quite reach all the way to the corner between deck and wall. She took careful note of how the krakun moved his head, trying to keep it between her and the gap that led back toward the airlock and his ship beyond.

He wasn’t politely engaging her in a conversation, was he? He was actively engaging in subterfuge!

Aw, damn. Now, she was pissed. She changed directions once more, walking closer, crowding him so he pulled his head back against his body. She turned again and squeezed by him. Regardless of what he’d done, what he was doing, he didn’t want her hurt, right? Surely, he’d take care to keep from crushing her…

The krakun said nothing as she hobbled around his head toward the corner. He’d already worked it out, understood that she understood.

When she ducked beneath his underarm, she called, “This was all a trick; wasn’t it? You weren’t trying to explain yourself to me!” With each step, Tori angrily banged the cane against the deck. In her mind, she recalled the triumphant climax to his video, Boots. “You were just trying to stall me, just like Esho with her empty bottlecap.”

He didn’t deny it. Instead, he simply said, “Remember, Tori, once he’s in the airlock, he’s out of your jurisdiction. You can’t touch him.”

But she wasn’t so certain that she agreed.

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19gcdxRPaoXg6qgOiTpM6NR5lYrEat-I-qZ21mYuG0Tg/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?