Rock Killer (11 page)

“Wait a minute. Isn’t that a Constitutional guarantee, to face your accuser?”

“Well,” Freeman breathed, spreading his hands, “the Sixth Amendment means less today than it used to. Hell, the Second almost means nothing. The property rights provisions of the Fifth and the Fourteenth are violated daily in the name of environmental protection and growth management. And ‘equal protection under the law,’ as stipulated in the Fourteenth, is ignored by bias crime laws and affirmative action. But, all of those laws have been held up by the Supreme Court. The Constitution, unfortunately, means exactly what the current court says it means.”

“Can I still file a complaint?”

“Yes,” Freeman replied. “But they’ll probably never find him.”

“You mean they’ll never look.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what does probation mean?”

“It means that if you commit another crime during the probation period, you will definitely get a harsh sentence.”

“Am I free to go? I live on the Moon, you know.”

“Yes, you can come and go as you wish.” He stood. “Come on. Let’s go talk to the DDA.”

“Boy,” Charlie commented dryly while standing, “things have sure changed since I was last dirt-side.” Either that or she was no longer used to it.

***

Alex held his wife as she slept in the large, four-poster bed that dominated the master bedroom in their Boulder home. The next day he would return to space and leave her again. He felt unbelievably lucky that she married him almost 17 years ago. He kissed her china-delicate white shoulder and she stirred and opened her eyes.

“Hi,” she said groggily and turned in the bed to face him.

“Hello,” Alex whispered.

“Can’t sleep?”

“No.”

“Wha’cha thinking about.”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Yeah, right,” she retorted, turning on her side to face him.

She wrapped her arms around his back. “I know you. You’re worried about something.”

“I was thinking about McConnell. I really screwed it up for you, didn’t I?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’ll be okay. But that’s not all of it.”

Alex smiled. “Why did I ever marry a psychologist?”

“You didn’t. A psychologist married you.”

He pulled her to him and kissed her gently but persistently.

That stopped her questions about things he didn’t want to talk about. And it got his mind off Frank, and the
Rock Skipper
, and the Gaia Alliance.

Later he asked playfully, “Why did I marry you, anyway?”

“Must have been my bedside manner,” she whispered dreamily. She fell asleep with her head on his shoulder.

He looked at the room’s computer display. The green numbers unsympathetically indicated that his plane left in less than twelve hours.

Chapter Six

“...no compromise when it comes to protecting Mother Earth”

The deputy district attorney was a harried looking woman. She met Charlie and Freeman in her cubical-like office. Also present was the public defender, a snide young man who regarded Charlie as if she were something he’d stepped in. Freeman explained to Charlie that a court ruling had determined everyone got a public defender, not just the indigent. If she wanted to pay for a better lawyer, she could, but that would delay the proceedings.

Charlie stuck with the public defender. She wanted this ordeal over.

Freeman then explained to her lawyer that Charlie planned to plea bargain. Charlie’s stomach turned at the phrase. She’d always thought plea-bargaining was something criminals did to get out of the punishment they deserved; she never thought she’d be doing it herself.

At one point, as the DDA and Charlie’s defender conferred, Charlie said, “I feel like I’m being railroaded here.”

The two lawyers looked at her.

“I mean,” she added, “what are my options?”

“You may,” the public defender explained, “plead not-guilty, be held over for trial, which will take about nine months, most likely be found guilty, and probably be sentenced to time in jail.”

“Oh,” Charlie breathed. D
oesn’t leave me much choice
, she thought ruefully.

Her lawyer and the government prosecutor talked about the deal, the details were established, and Charlie was told to wait to see the judge.

A few hours later, a bailiff escorted Charlie into the courtroom. The judge was a middle-aged woman with fading blonde hair. The public defender stood next to Charlie and the DDA read the charges. Freeman sat in the gallery.

All the while, the judge peered down on Charlie. “Ms. Jones,” she said in a New England nasal tone, “it has been decided not to charge you with a bias crime, because it cannot be determined that you were motivated by bigotry. However, you are charged with unlawful self-defense.”

“He assaulted me,” Charlie explained in vain. “I was protecting myself and my property.”

“It is the job of the police to protect the citizen. We cannot tolerate citizens taking the law into their own hands. You acted unilaterally to punish the alleged perpetrator without due process. This is intolerable in a lawful society.”

“How many police officers are there in Washington?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t know,” the judge replied. “What does that matter?”

“Because there aren’t enough to protect everyone,” Charlie answered. “You take away a person’s right to defend themselves and they are automatic victims of anyone willing to break the law. First, you disarmed the law-abiding with gun control laws. And now you’ve made it illegal for them to fight off an assault with their bare hands.”

Charlie remembered the fire in her grandmother’s eyes when she showed Charlie her illicit handgun. She said she didn’t care what any idiotic law stated; she would kill anyone who tried to violate her home. She’d rather spend time in jail alive than be permanently dead.

The judge glared at her and the public defender said, “Ms. Jones has decided to plead guilty in exchange for the government’s recommendation for a fine and a suspended sentence with probation.”

The judge looked at Charlie. She was debating if that was acceptable.

“We have a rather full docket,” the government’s attorney stated flatly.

That decided the judge. “Okay, Ms. Jones,” she proclaimed, “sixty days suspended and one year probation, plus a thousand dollar fine, court costs, and police department reimbursement. You can pay the clerk when you leave.”

Charlie was about to stand to leave when the judge said, “However, Ms. Jones,” and proceeded to lecture Charlie on a) not taking the law into her own hands, b) no property is worth protecting with violence, and c) she was in the U.S. now, not in space, and subject to the laws of the United States and not, what the judge implied, were the low moral values of Space Resources Incorporated.

Charlie waited with infinite patience during the diatribe. When the judge was finished Charlie stood silently and walked out of the office. Freeman followed, hurrying to catch Charlie, who was almost running.

“God damn it!” Charlie growled at him in the corridor.

“I’ll take you to a hotel to rest,” Freeman said calmly. “We’ll meet tomorrow. I’ll pick you up so you won’t have any trouble.”

“Damn that woman,” Charlie spat, refusing to calm down.

“Come on,” Freeman said, reaching for her arm. “You’ll feel better after some rest.”

Charlie let him hold her arm and pull her toward the elevator. They paid the clerk, who accepted Charlie’s payment from her computer’s SRI account. Charlie was sure Mitchel would approve the expense.

Then the clerk asked, “Residence?”

“Huh?” Charlie blurted.

“We have to sign you up on probation,” the clerk explained. “Residence?”

Charlie looked at Freeman.

“Tell him what he needs to know,” Freeman instructed her.

“Space Resources Incorporated Facility, Room 210, Nippon/European Space Agency Facility One, the Moon, in care of Space Resources Incorporated, Tokyo, Japan.”

The clerk looked at her. “Don’t you have a more, uhm, local address?”

“No,” Charlie said, again growing angry.

The clerk sighed and typed on his computer. “Employer?”

“Space Resources Incorporated, Tokyo, Japan.”

“Do they have a more local office?”

Charlie knew there was a United States Liaison Office in Washington but she didn’t know anything about it other than part of its function was to house security’s Eastern United States Terrestrial Information Gathering Office. “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t know the address or number.”

“Fine,” the clerk mumbled. “Name and address of a person who would always know how to locate you?”

Charlie rolled her eyes and wondered when the humiliation would stop. “Eugene Mitchel, Head of Security, Space Resources...”

***

Griffin watched Knecht work the computer. She was plotting their course to the asteroid belt.

“Where’d you learn this stuff?” he asked.

“Stuff?” Knecht asked without looking up.

“Yeah: navigation, computers, ship piloting.”

“The Space Resources Incorporated School in Boulder, Colorado.”

“You worked for SRI?” he asked incredulously.

She nodded. Griffin liked the way her hair moved in zero-gee when she did that.

“I wanted to get out of the United States. I saw SRI as the way out.”

“Didn’t you know what they’re doing to the environment and to space?”

Knecht shrugged. “Not really. I didn’t get involved in the GA until later.”

“How?”

She turned and looked at him. For the first time he noticed the blaze of her sea-green eyes.

“SRI recruited me in Los Angeles. After graduating the SRI school, I had no place to go for the customary vacation, so I went to L.A. You know, Disneyland-California, the beach, the whole thing. That was where I met Linda.”

“Trent?”

“Yeah. She taught me about SRI and its degradation of the environment. She taught me there can be no compromise when it comes to protecting Mother Earth and her solar system. I honestly didn’t know the danger of taking asteroids out of the asteroid belt. She got me into the Gaia Alliance. Then I went to the safe house in Los Angeles and Beatty taught me about the revolution.”

“Beatty,” Griffin snorted, “is slime; right now, a useful slime.”

“He’s all right. Besides, the world’s full of slimy people,” Knecht stated flatly.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

Griffin could tell from her voice that it wasn’t “nothing.”

If I could get her to open up, talk about what makes her so angry, he thought. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

“I doubt that,” she snorted, almost mockingly.

“I’ve had my problems,” he said. “I know what it’s like.”

“No,” she grumbled, “not like me.”

“What do you mean?”

Momentarily her eyes flashed in anger. Then they softened and he could see deep, searing sorrow. “When I was fourteen,” she said softly, “I ran away from home. My stepfather liked me too much. I was just a thing to him to get what he couldn’t get or didn’t want from my mother. It was typical–I’ve read up on this kind of thing. When I told my mother, she said she didn’t believe me and called me a slut. I went to her for help and she rejected me, I think because she did believe me and was jealous; I’d taken her husband away. I sure as hell didn’t want him.”

“Oh, God,” Griffin whispered. “I’m sorry.” This confession was not what he had expected.

Knecht shrugged her shoulders. She knew his sympathy would do nothing about what she felt. “I ran away,” she said, “to Seattle. I met a man in a bus station. At first he said he loved me. Then he beat me and was worse than my stepfather. To him I was just a thing to make money.”

“You mean…?” Griffin asked.

“Yes, I prostituted for him. At first he was all sweetness and love. Do you know what that will do to a love-starved fourteen-year old? It was like a drug. I’d do anything for it. And I did, even after the ‘love’ was gone. I blamed myself when he beat me, thinking I’d failed him and deserved it. And he beat me almost daily for not making enough money, for not pleasing some john just right. All a man had to do was look at him funny and he’d think I hadn’t done a good job. He almost killed me a couple of times.”

“Oh, God,” Griffin said softly.

“I finally got away. He said he’d kill me. That’s why I joined SRI. I figured he couldn’t find me off Earth. But I was just a thing to them to make a profit: although the prostitution wasn’t as personal.

“Then I met Linda Trent in L.A. She convinced me I could find what I was looking for in the Gaia Alliance. But even to her I was just a thing to advance the revolution.” She shook her head. “I’ve known since I was eleven and a half what sex is. I still don’t know what love is.”

Griffin looked at her. Like this, open and trusting, she was a lovely woman, not a guerrilla soldier. He took a chance.

“Is that why you hate so?”

“I don’t hate, except my stepfather, my pimp, and SRI. I just can’t trust. I put up a barrier between myself and others that I never let down.”

She looked at him and for a moment their eyes locked.