In retrospect, it should have been obvious.

  Had he been biotic, he would have made the connection immediately. But his biological brain simply didn’t have the capacity to retrieve any memory of his with the perfect clarity he needed at his beck and call.

  He knew Kal had been imprisoned by the Sunguard on Caloris Base for several years, and he was aware her time there had been traumatic. Although his friend hadn’t told him much about her experiences in prison, he still knew enough. She had been caught up in a Sunguard raid in the aftermath of a Jerrassian Liberation Front bombing, and despite being innocent she had been sentenced to hard labor along with the actual terrorists. Once inside the prison, her roommates—the real JLF terrorists—had taken advantage of her feelings of injustice to radicalize her, indoctrinating her with their poisonous ideology of bigotry and hatred. That is, until something had happened to her that had changed her completely, from the inside out. Mikhail didn’t know what, but it had turned the hateful JLF recruit into the woman he now called “friend”.

  Her roommates.

  Specifically, Tamor Wren—as in Travel with Tamor, the travel agency on the other side of the street from Tomaw Park.

  Once he had remembered her name, looking up the former JLF terrorist’s current whereabouts had been a simple matter. She had—together with Kal and the rest of their JLF cell—been locked up for a few years at Caloris Base on Mercury. But the Terran Federation—and by extension, the Sunguard—didn’t believe in punishment as a deterrent for criminal activity. From the very beginning, the Sunguard had been founded on two pillars: Codex Inquisitionis—the doctrine that capturing criminals takes precedence over punishing them—and Codex Vitae—the principle that intelligent life is sacred and holds greater value than personal integrity. These doctrines served as the foundation of the organization even in the days before the Terran Federation was formed. The remaining two Sunguard doctrines, Codex Praeventio and Codex Vindicta, were only formalized years later, during the Jerrassian uprising.

  It was easy to see why the inquisition codex was so important, Mikhail thought, as the waitress took his order—black coffee, a danish, and a punsch-roll. Most career criminals tended to be risk-seekers. If they were given the option of committing a crime that would render them financially independent for life, but there was a 50% risk they’d get caught and sentenced to ten years in prison and forfeiture of their criminal gains, many would still take that chance. Yet, if they instead were told they’d get only a single year in prison for the same crime, but also told with complete certainty they’d eventually get caught, very few—if any—would make the same choice.

  After her release from prison, Tamor Wren had switched career paths, from cutting the throats of perceived Terran sympathizers to selling leisure cruises to tourists. Obviously, her relatively short sentence didn’t mean she was now a trusted member of society—on the contrary, every move she would make for the rest of her life would be monitored by the Sunguard’s intelligent computers. Some would call that an invasion of privacy, but to Mikhail, it was a small price for her to pay for the twelve innocent Terrans, Etarians and Jerrassians she had killed during her reign of terror. At least, she still had the chance to make a life for herself.

  Once again, the pair of colleagues—separated by time and biochemistry—sat at the small table in the café, well out of sight of Jonas Dao. That didn’t matter. Now that they had identified him, the surveillance grid kept a close eye on his whereabouts, and if that wasn’t enough, orbital surveillance also tracked him wherever he went in the city.

  For now, it was a waiting game.

  “You could just arrest him, you know,” Mikhail said to Special Agent Nyasi with a wry smile. “You have the authority.”

  It was true. The Special Agents had always had wide authority to conduct their business as they saw fit, allowing them to act not just as soldiers and police officers, but also as judges. But with the introduction of the biotic Special Agents their authority had been greatly extended—now, they also had the authority to create new laws, entirely at their own discretion. Special Agent Nyasi could simply declare it illegal for Jonas Dao—specifically him—to visit Jerr and then arrest him for this newly created crime against the Terran Federation. And unless the Solar Council or another Special Agent revoked that law, no one would or even could question her decision.

  Special Agent Nyasi flashed him a faint smile in return. She knew his suggestion hadn’t been meant to be taken seriously.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “I could,” she replied with conviction. “But I won’t. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should. The power to declare Dao a criminal just for sitting on a park bench is one I’ll hold in reserve for the day when it truly is needed, but this is not that day. For now, my job is to protect and observe. In this case, that means protecting a Jerrassian bigot from a Terran racist, and Jonas Dao from himself, because they’re both still human. Their lives matter, even if both their ideologies are abhorrent.”

  Mikhail nodded to himself. It was, more or less, the reply he had expected to hear from his successor. There was a reason the biotic Special Agents had been granted such extreme authority and so little oversight—they were, fundamentally, incapable of abusing the powers given to them. Their devotion to the ideals of the Terran Federation was literally written into their genes.

  Nothing happened until the following morning.

  This time, Jonas Dao didn’t travel to the park alone. Instead, he and a young Jerrassian woman wearing a long, thick overcoat flagged down an autocab and traveled from their hotel to the city center together.

  That in itself was suspicious, Mikhail though. The Terran supremacist had previously taken great care to stay at a Terran hotel and only eat at restaurants run by Terrans. Granted, those establishments catered to non-Terrans as well, but it was clear Dao’s racist ideology had affected the choices he had been making during his visit to Jerr.

  And yet now, he was travelling in the company of a Jerrassian.

  Sadly, the mystery was quickly resolved when the pair didn’t sit down on the park bench, but instead entered Tamor’s small shop. Once inside, Dao lifted off the coat of his partner, revealing a small, homemade bomb strapped to the chest of the frightened Jerrassian woman.

  Outside the reach of the Sunguard grid, and out of view of orbital surveillance, Dao had apparently kidnapped another guest of the hotel where he had been staying. Hidden from prying eyes inside the building, he had forced her to become his human shield as he prepared to commit his act of terrorism.

  Special Agent Nyasi sprinted effortlessly across the park towards the travel agency. Mikhail followed as best as his aging body allowed. When he finally reached the corner of the street where the shop was located, he was panting heavily, and there was a sharp pain in his left side. Biology, he thought, could be cruel indeed.

  Being a civilian now, he was obviously no longer authorized to carry a weapon, but that didn’t stop Mikhail from following Special Agent Nyasi into the hornet’s nest. Jerr was his world now, and he would stop at nothing to protect the people who shared it with him.

  The two Sunguard officers—the former and the current—took great care to stay out of sight, hiding behind the corner so Dao couldn’t see them through the large glass windows, plastered with travel posters of white beaches and turquoise seas in exotic locations, that the storefront was constructed from. In silence, Nyasi handed him a neural writer headset. Mikhail removed his grey fedora and replaced it with the sleek, cobalt blue headband.

  He felt a slight buzzing sensation as the neural writer synchronized with his brain. First, it read the electromagnetic field of his neurons, mapping their locations and functions. Once it had identified how to best interface with his brain, it started to emit a precisely controlled electromagnetic field, which induced weak currents into his neural pathways, effectively prompting the creation of nerve signals indistinguishable from those that naturally occurred in his brain.

  The surveillance grid had been using a laser microphone pointed at the large windows of the travel agency to listen in on everything that was said in there. Now, the noisy signal from the microphone was cleaned by the Sunguard’s intelligent computers, and fed to his neural writer headset, which in turn injected the sounds wirelessly into his auditory nerve. Mikhail could now hear, with perfect clarity, everything that was said inside the store.

  Special Agent Nyasi had no need for a neural writer. The sound from the laser microphone was already fed directly into her biotic brain through her radio link.

  “This is for all the Terrans you killed!” Mikhail heard Dao shout from inside the building.

  The former Special Agent froze where he stood, the cold grip of fear that had haunted him for half a century returning in full force. This wasn’t just an act of terrorism. Dao had specifically targeted Tamor Wren for her actions as part of the Jerrassian Liberation Front all those years ago—and had conveniently ignored her Etarian and Jerrassian victims, instead focusing only on the Terrans she had killed.

  This wasn’t just terrorism. This was about revenge.

  At best, Jonas Dao was about to kill a number of Jerrassians simply because they were Jerrassians, which was bad enough in itself. And at worst, he was about to restart the spiral of violence that had plagued the planet for the better part of Mikhail’s life.

  “When we’re finished with you, none of you pandas will be left to threaten decent Terrans on Jerr!” the supremacist continued.

  Mikhail and Special Agent Nyasi turned to look at each other, a common sense of understanding and dread filling them as they realized the implication of what Dao had just said.

  We. None of you.

  Dao wasn’t alone here, and Tamor Wren wasn’t their only target.

  The Sunguard had kept tabs on all the old members of Tamor’s JLF cell. And the only other former member currently located on Jerr was Olem Kal.