Yesterday's Legacy Read online

  Marlow heard them respond to Solomon. She just couldn’t see them speak.

  “It’s not policy,” one of them said, his voice quavering. “We can’t let him in.”

  “He can watch on a screen,” the other added, sounding defensive.

  Solomon swore. “Hiding behind statutes doesn’t excuse you.” His tone was withering, rich with disgust. “If you won’t let him in, then I will.”

  He reached for the gate controls, which were to the side of the gate itself.

  The pair of controllers yelled and tried to ward off Solomon’s hand to stop it reaching the controls.

  The crowd surged forward and the noise leapt as they screamed their protest…or screamed in fear. They pushed past Marlow, oblivious to her presence.

  Bordon cringed, shrinking in on himself, his arms raised to ward off whatever he thought they were going to do to him.

  “Protect Bordon!” Marlow cried. She lunged toward the gate and didn’t look back. The other two, Coleman and Eastov, would do as she ordered.

  She shoved her way forward through people eager to get their hands on Solomon. Situations like this could slip into uncontrolled frenzies far too easily. Marlow pushed people aside as she reached for her bo stick and closed her fingers around it.

  The first body in front of her she disabled with a strike to the brachial plexus on the shoulder. From behind, she could reach shoulders, lower backs and inside knees, if they were leaning. She preferred knee strikes and hitting the femoral nerve because not only did it hurt like crazy, it took out the leg and made most people, including larger men, suddenly not interested in resisting.

  She tossed the staggering people aside, making her way to Solomon, who was in the center. He was still trying to reach the controls, while the gate guards fended him off and the people behind him clawed at his back and shoulders. He didn’t seem to notice the pawing and grabbing of the crowd. He was focused completely upon getting to the controls.

  Finally, Marlow was close enough to him. She didn’t slow down. A strike to the shoulder and his arm fell uselessly to his side. She stretched around in front of him and tapped the bo stick against his forearm, up against the radial nerve.

  Both arms now out of commission.

  She let her hand with the bo stick drop down to his thigh to strike against the femoral nerve and he staggered, suddenly off balance because his leg wouldn’t support him.

  Marlow shoved him to the ground. She looked at the two gate controllers. “Shut the gate down. Use the plasteel doors. Move it!”

  They leapt to obey.

  Marlow turned. Most of Cantrell’s squad was here, now. They were quelling the crowd. Separating bodies. For a crowd of this size, she could have handled it with just Eastov and Coleman. The extra help would subdue tempers that much faster, though.

  Solomon was trying to prop himself up with his useless arms.

  Marlow hooked the toe of her boot around his wrist and yanked, bringing him down to the floor once more with an impact she could feel through her other boot. “Stay down, or I’ll make you stay down!”

  He looked up at her. Black eyes, filled with fury.

  “They’ll tear you to pieces if you get up again,” she warned him. Most men would take the warning to heart. With Solomon, she wasn’t so sure. The anger radiating from him might overcome any good sense he might have.

  She kept a grip on her bo stick and considered getting the second one out. However, the crowd’s short, hot surge of indignation and fury had dissipated now Solomon was incapacitated. They were no longer trying to push toward the gate.

  “Disperse them,” she said. “No arrests. Just send them back to their seats. They can use the other gates.”

  Cantrell came up to her, grinning. He was a short man, thick with muscle and gray around the chin. His black uniform always looked rumpled even at the beginning of a shift. “That woke me up,” he said.

  She let herself smile. Cantrell never came close to sleeping on the job. He just liked to make out that his work was utterly boring.

  He looked down at Solomon, who was still trying to sit up. This time he was using his right elbow, the only functioning section of arm he had left. Cantrell rolled his eyes and looked back at Marlow. “Arrest him?”

  “No. Take him back to Processing, though. I want to talk to him before we let him go.” She lifted her voice a little higher, so Solomon would not miss what she said. “Once he gets the feeling back in his arms and his leg, we can let him loose to fend for himself. He didn’t endear himself to anyone with this stunt.”

  Cantrell nodded. “Leg, too? I guess we’re carrying him.” He made it sound as though they would be hauling Solomon into the room next door. It was a long hike back to the Bridge, especially carrying a full grown man. “Borella, Danna, on me.”

  “I’ll meet you back on the Bridge,” she told Cantrell as he and the two guards heaved Solomon to his shaky feet.

  As the four of them hobbled across the concourse, Marlow put the bo stick away and moved over to where she had last seen Bordon. The man was gone. Marlow wasn’t sure if she was pleased about that or not. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if he had still been here, even though the law on the matter was perfectly clear.

  She replayed Solomon’s voice in her head, his angry shout. Oh, for pity’s sake! Let the poor bugger in. Can’t you see the man is completely harmless?

  Marlow sighed. It was moments like this when she hated her job.

  So she turned on her heel and headed for the arena exit on the Bridge side, moving at a fast clip. The Jonah Solomons of the world she could handle with no moral qualms at all. She was looking forward to the next few minutes.

  Chapter Two

  Cantrell had propped Solomon on the chair opposite her desk. Solomon had lifted his left arm so the wrist was lying uselessly against his thigh. He was working his right hand, flexing the fingers, trying to bring life back to it. The left leg that she had disabled was propped in front of him, the foot lying uselessly on its side.

  “I wouldn’t bother doing that,” Marlow told him as she stepped past him and settled into her chair. “Nothing will restore the nerves except time. In about ten minutes, you should start to feel tingling.” She brought up the mini screen on the side of her desk, behind the shield where no one could read it. She pulled up Jonah Solomon’s public record.

  “I’d heard the Bridge Guards were tough,” Solomon said. “I don’t think I truly appreciated the fact until now.”

  She raised her brow. “Despite several run-ins with them in the last few years, you haven’t noticed that until now?” His record spoke of reprimands and incidences too minor to have been brought to her attention.

  “They were simple conversations,” Solomon said.

  “Until tonight.” She just looked at him.

  He sighed. Whatever anger had been there, it was gone now. What remained was of interest to her. She had heard much about Jonah Solomon before and had seen clips and photos on the Forum. This was the first time they had met in person and it was a good opportunity to size him up, especially if he was going to be the center of future hassles.

  Solomon’s hair wasn’t just dark, it was a true pitch black. Right now, it was disordered, with locks falling over his face. His jawline was sharp and darkened with growth that was just as black as his hair. Black brows jutted over deep set eyes that were just as dark.

  “You look like a smart man to me,” Marlow said. “Smarter than tonight would suggest.”

  He nodded. “I have a temper. Sometimes it gets away on me.”

  The string of small incidence reports supported that. “Your temper seems to get away on you a lot, Solomon.”

  “Call me Jonah. Everyone does.”

  She scrolled through more screens of data, instead.

  “You’re telling me that Willard Bordon didn’t touch you in any way at all?” Solomon demanded. “Not even a single second of pity for the poor bastard?”

  “I’m not the
one sitting in that chair,” she replied. “How I felt or feel is irrelevant. You, however, broke the terms of Bordon’s punishment. You acknowledged his presence.”

  “You went back to help him, too. Afterward. I saw you.”

  Marlow drew in a slow breath, controlling her reaction. Hiding her surprise.

  Jonah Solomon smiled, the corner of his mouth lifting. “I’ve learned to see out of the back of my head.”

  “That implies you’re often in trouble.” She nodded toward the screen. “More than your public record implies.”

  “I have contrary opinions that not everyone agrees with. Sometimes people express their opposition with their fists.” He shrugged.

  “That doesn’t suggest to you that you should be more cautious about expressing your opinion?”

  “It tells me I’m hitting nerves. That’s something I know you understand.” He lifted his right arm, with the slack fingers and wrist.

  “There’s a reason why I zero in on nerve centers,” Marlow said.

  “Me, too.”

  She just looked at him.

  He gave the same tiny shrug that only barely moved his right shoulder. The left would still be dead. “Someone has to say the things I say. Someone has to voice the unpopular opinion, to make people think.”

  “You’re a philosopher? Your records say you were an engineer….” She frowned, scanning the screen. “And a janitor. Cook…” She tapped to bring up the next screen. “Mechanical engineering. Digital maintenance. Coder.” She looked up at him. “You were accepted into the Organic Coding Institute and you gave it up?”

  “We weren’t as good a match as the institute thought,” Solomon replied.

  “You don’t seem to be a match for much at all.” She scrolled back through the screens.

  “I have a low boredom threshold.” He shrugged again.

  “Coding bored you?”

  His smile was the same small expression as before.

  Marlow considered him. “Is that what you tell everyone? That you were bored? Does everyone believe you?”

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “I’m hurt.” Yet there was a glow in his eyes, deep in the back, that said he was lying again.

  “Why all these jobs? All these professions? It’s clear that you could get yourself invited to join any institute on the ship.”

  “Perhaps I don’t want to.”

  She stared at him. “You don’t want to work?”

  He shifted his right arm, flexing the biceps and stretching the shoulder, then returned the hand back to his thigh, the fingers lying uselessly against the left hand. “I don’t object to work, not if it is meaningful.”

  “So you’re looking for the meaning of life?”

  He shook his head. “I’m looking for self-determination.”

  “Emmaline Victore gave us that nearly a hundred years ago, when she dismantled the mentor and protégé system. You’re free to pick any profession that will take you. In your case, I think you would be free to pick all of them, if you want.”

  “If we have self-determination, then why are we still at the mercy of decisions made by a single individual on behalf of the entire five thousand of us?” His tone was suddenly strident, his voice a harsh rumble. “Why do we blindly follow laws that make no sense whatsoever? Why do we stand by and watch while poor, pathetic souls like Willard Bordon are ground down into nothing? The man has clearly paid his dues. Giving him a little dignity wouldn’t have cost anything. A seat in a far corner would let him feel human, at least.”

  He stopped and drew in a deep, slow breath, controlling himself. Then he let it out and glanced at Cantrell, who had stepped up nearby and stood with his arms crossed, watching Solomon with a wary gaze.

  All other activity in the room had come to a halt. Solomon’s voice carried. Perhaps too well.

  Marlow shifted in her seat. “And that is why you tried to let him in, despite the law?”

  Solomon grimaced. “I have a temper, as I told you. I didn’t really think at all, beyond the fact that I was one of the people who had brought him to that awful place where he had to beg for clemency.”

  “Did you know Bordon, before?”

  “No,” he said shortly. “That doesn’t stop me from feeling pity for the man. For any man in the same situation.”

  “The statute that was written outlining Bordon’s shunning was very clear. You broke that law.”

  Solomon considered her. “If you let me go, you’ll be breaking a different law. It’s your job to apply all statutes, isn’t it?”

  “As the chief officer of the civil division of the Bridge Guards, I have a degree of flexibility in my role.”

  “You mean, you can determine for yourself what laws will be applied and which ones you will ignore?”

  “Yes, Mr. Solomon, I have self-determination.” She looked him in the eye. “I earned it.”

  His gaze locked with hers.

  For a moment, she forgot that Cantrell was monitoring from two meters away. She forgot that her desk sat in the middle of the processing room, surrounded by desks and lockers and ready areas, screens and displays and monitors. She failed to hear the busy hum of security feeds and guard activity as they went about the work of keeping the Endurance a civilized, pleasant place for everyone.

  It was just Jonah Solomon sitting there, looking back at her, with surprise lifting his brow and a warmth in his eyes that she couldn’t quite analyze.

  The tiny hairs on the back of her neck tried to stand up by themselves. It was a cold, prickling sensation. Her heart thudded heavily.

  “Touché, Lieutenant,” Solomon said softly.

  Marlow cleared her throat. “Cantrell is going to put you on that bench over there, by the door. You’re free to go as soon as you get feeling back in your leg and can walk.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his tone grave.

  “You might try to control your temper better, Mr. Solomon,” she told him as Cantrell moved to his side. “A man in your line of…activity would tend to find himself in heated moments more often than others. I won’t be as understanding next time.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” he told her. “It won’t happen again.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  Cantrell looped Solomon’s useless left arm over his shoulder and hauled Solomon up. Solomon was tall enough that Cantrell didn’t have to bend over to keep his shoulders under Solomon’s arm.

  “Oh, but you do worry, don’t you?” Solomon said quietly. “About much more than me, too.”

  Marlow waved Cantrell away, not meeting his eyes.

  Cantrell deposited Solomon on the hard bench just inside the main door and went back to work. So did Marlow, except that for the few minutes Solomon sat on the bench and worked at bringing feeling back to his arms and leg, she was aware of him there. Her mind kept drawing toward him, like filings toward a magnet.

  She did not look at him. Not once. Despite keeping her gaze on the screens on her desk, she knew he watched her right up until he got to his feet, tested his balance, then left.

  When the doors shut behind him, she let out a breath and sat back, relief trickling through her.

  * * * * *

  The game was over by the time Jonah reached the Aventine. People were streaming through the squares and markets, heading for home.

  Jonah wasn’t ready to go home. Not yet. He needed to think and thinking wasn’t always easy, there.

  The fellowship garden was open. The lights were on and bodies were crowding into the space inside the picket fence, to gather around the open side of the tent at the back of the garden where drinks and snacks could be obtained. There were nearly fifty tables inside the shrub-lined fence, with three-legged stools around them. All the tables and all the stools had customers right now.

  Jonah glanced at the time readout, far overhead. The midnight rain would start in just over an hour. Clinton, who managed the garden, had resisted requests for years to add rain pro
tection over the tables. He refused to add a single umbrella or portico. The rain was what closed down the garden each night, sending everyone home.

  “Jonah!” The call came from inside the fence. He’d been spotted.

  Jonah peered over the chest-high bushes. The wave of a hand drew his gaze. “Rosalina,” he acknowledged.

  She beckoned him in. “Come and have a drink,” she called.

  Jonah sighed. Why not? He moved around to the opening in the picket fence and Rosalina met him there and put her arm through his. She was a tall woman and solid through the chest and shoulders, which suited her profession as a mechanical engineer.

  “Are you limping?” she asked him. “What happened?”

  “I was brought to my knees by a beautiful woman,” Jonah said truthfully.

  Rosalina laughed. “You are impervious to beauty, Jonah Solomon. Sometimes I think you’re impervious to all women. Never mind. I’m not here to flirt with you.”

  Rosalina had never flirted with him. Her one passion in life was The Deadly Spanners tankball team and the fans who agreed with her on the superiority of the players. The only reason she had her arm through his right now was because she believed he was as much of a fan of the Spanners as she was.

  Rosalina was one of the first people he had met in the Capitol when he had moved there. She had been roughly kind, introducing him to people of influence in the district and helping him find his way around the crowded alleys. In return he had attended a few of the Spanners games with her.

  He didn’t dislike the Spanners and he enjoyed a good tankball game. He was not a fanatic as Rosalina was, though. He was very careful never to let her know that his loyalty was not as fierce as hers. It would upset her unnecessarily.

  She was leading him toward a table closer to the serving tent. “There’re some interesting people I’d like you to meet.”

  “Spanners fans,” he guessed. This was not the first time Rosalina had introduced him to more rabid fans. Unlike many people, though, Capitol fans liked to listen to him talk. They would ask pointed questions, turning his thoughts inside out and examining every facet of them. He would often test new theories and ideas over tables of lager and wine, before posting them on the Forum for the rest of the ship to see.