Medium height. Dark hair, thinning at the front from stress. Permanent creases in the forehead. Overweight, overworked, and underpaid. Drink coffee like its going out of style, and rarely without a donut. On the clock twenty-five hours a day, and working thirty hours worth. Its a rough life, but I wouldn't ever want to do anything else. Sometimes a call comes in that needs a firm hand in space, and when that comes, I go. Mostly though, I'm behind the scenes calling the shots. Lots of other people claim to be in charge, but the truth of the matter is, I run the show. Who am I? I'm Jim Markey.
Being a Deputy Chief of the LPI can be like herding cats sometimes. Patrols have to be shepherded or they wont go; logistics and planning to make sure there's a good supply of air and blood on station. By that, I mean donuts and coffee. You can't run a police facility without copious amounts of both, its been tried. It works for about a week until performance suffers.
I wasn’t always a Deputy. I walked the beat on Cali Minor when I first signed on, later got promoted to patrolling the lanes. That was about 792, and for about eight years it was pretty smooth. Track down and arrest the miscreant perpetrators of injustice. Some threatened, some lied, some tried to run, but I prevailed. I got on the fast track upwards, got promotion after promotion, landing at Captain in 799. In 800AS, some guy named Edison Trent did some jobs for the LSF, and then the call came through to shoot the guy as a traitor. Obedient guy I am, I tried. He got away though, out of my beat. Navy’s problem now.
It was about three hours later I heard that Deputy Chief Roy Wilson had been killed in the pursuit of that Trent and his partners. Seems some other Navy folks had gone nuts, taking a cruiser battlegroup against the majority of the Navy to get Trent out and he'd been hit in the crossfire. I still don't know why that battlegroup did that, they never told me, and they don't pay me to question that. I had a pretty clear-cut job: Bring justice. Word was out that Chief Matt Myers and the other two Deputies, Karl Agathon and Hull O’Brian, were headhunting for a replacement for the deceased Wilson, and everyone was on edge.
It was Fred Hamilton who first told me I was on the list, high and proud, of possible new Deputies. Ill admit, it was kind of a shock. I never considered myself command material before, but the prospect was intriguing. I hit the books hard. There's a lot of things a Deputy needs to know that a Captain doesn't, it turns out. Things like who can fly what, and where, and when. I used to get a list of things to assign and complete by the end of a day. Now there was a chance I'd be making the lists.
The stress really sort of got to me in that time. I was trying to keep my head above water with regards to my other duties, as well as observing O'Brian and Agathon, trying to figure out what they did that I didn't and that made the entire LPI run like a well-oiled machine. I studied hard, trying to absorb the information as fast as possible. I got perhaps three or four hours of sleep a night. Circles around the eyes, haggard, pale. I looked like I'd been run over a few times with a transport. I don't know how I managed, but I did, somehow.
I did my best to keep up with my lists and my studying, and turns out I did okay. I got called into Myer’s office about two weeks later. A spacious place. Tastefully decorated, too, with a few bits of artwork here and there, interspersed with commemorative plaques from various awards and services performed. Big rug on the floor, makes you sink into it about an inch. A tool to keep people off their balance and the Chief in charge of the situation, as was the window behind the desk giving a panorama of the space around One Police Plaza.
"Jim," he said, shuffling his bulk around in his chair. He motioned me to sit, and I did. "I 'ssume you know why you’re here,"
"I think so, sir. The Deputy Chief replacement?" That carpet was working wonderfully. I’d never been so stressed out in my life. If someone walked in with a polygraph machine, I knew I’d have failed any test they asked.
"Mostly. You done good, Markey, and it’s my pleasure t’ promote ya to Deputy of da LPI. Now go take a vacation. Ya been workin’ too hard dese past few days."
"Thank you, sir. Do you have any suggestions on a good place to visit?" I was secretly hoping for somewhere quiet. I never was much of a tourist.
"Try someplace in Kusari, mebbe. Quiet there...‘least fer now." The specter of war was foremost in everyone's mind these days.
So I went. Visited a little place in Shikoku, Junyo. Owned by Samura, yeah, but the food was good and it's pretty isolated. Not many people visit, which suited me fine. I was there about a week and a half. I saw the sights, but mostly just relaxed. At the end there, I hopped back down to Liberty. It felt strangely good to be back on Fort Bush, surrounded by underlings. I'll admit, I abused my power a slight bit the first few days back, but it was all in good taste.
While I was away, the hangar techs had refitted my Eagle's transponder. Now it broadcasts that I'm Jim Markey, Deputy, and with that moniker is the authority of the entire Liberty judicial system. Felt good. Real good.
It only took a week for the true stress of the job to hit. Paperwork was my new worst enemy, and I hardly ever got a chance to leave the office. It got bad enough four days in that I just moved in a cot and slept in the office. I started to wish I'd never heard of the job. My hair started coming out from running my fingers through it constantly, and I'd never known so much coffee in the entire sector could be consumed by one man: Me. I felt the shackles of my job clamping down on my arms and legs, forcing me down in my chair as the paperwork stacked up.
Two weeks and I was in danger of going insane from cabin fever. A man can only take so much of being crammed into a paperwork processing plant. I swear, those case files breed. I caught myself going down to the med bay for a caffeine IV twice, and actually made it down there for caffeine patches God-knows-how-many times. I put on a fair bit of weight in those two weeks alone, going from a fairly trim 5'11-and-a-quarter of 170 to a not-so-trim 5'11-and-a-quarter of 247. My hair up and told me one day that it was leaving, and after that I was stuck with a semi-chromedome. I had to get out.
Two weeks and a day after I got promoted, I finally got the chance to get away from my desk and back into my Eagle. I decided to take a spin around Liberty, and bagged a few minor crooks beating on the lanes. Nothing eventful. I was just heading to Texas from Norfolk when the lane ended and I was spit out in front of a rather large, rather strange looking ship broadcasting absolutely no IFF and looking at me in a none-too-friendly way. Oh bad.
"Unidentified craft, what the hell are you doing?" I figured I might as well be blunt about it. Bravado and a good bluff might buy me enough time to figure out what was going on here.
When it became obvious no reply was forthcoming, I nudged my engines online and started to move to the lane again. WHAM! Shields gone. What the hell I called Fort Bush.
"Fort Bush, this is Jim. I've got a possible bogey out here on the Norfolk-Texas lane. Took out the lane and popped my shields. Trying to get a rise, but nothing yet."
"Copy that. You want some backup out there?" I thought about it a moment, then comm'd my agreement.
"Yeah, that'd be good. I should be fine, but better safe than sorry."
I turned my attention back to the whatever it was.
"Unidentified craft, just what the hell do you think you're shooting at, some scrap? This is Deputy Jim Markey of the LPI, and you're on thin ice here." I punched the shield batteries to force the generator to reboot and turned to face the ship, which still wasn't moving. I prodded the attitude thrusters and slipped sideways, towards the lane. Again, a shot slammed into my ship and sliced the shields off. This was personal now.
"Right, you just made a big mistake, mister. I don't care who you are or who you work for. You're under arrest for assault of an officer of the law!" I hit the shield batteries again, got a warning: I was almost out. Damn. Pull a fast jink, fly up. I arm my shieldbuster Debilitator guns and get to work. The other ship never moved, or shot, just took the fire. I was perplexed by this, and once the shields dropped, I stopped moving and disarmed the guns.
Looking back, that was something of a mistake. "Start talking or I'm going to start perforating your hull. I'm not in a patient mood right now." They talked. With gunfire. Shields dropped, again. I tried to pull the thruster online and beat feet out of range, but it slapped me with a cruise disruptor. So not good.
I hit what bats I had left, but those weren't enough to fully refill the shield core, and anyways, it just dropped again. The shots started to rake my hull, gouging out sensors, weapons, equipment. I tried to move away, but they must have had some kind of a modified tractor beam on that heap of junk, because I wasn't going anywhere.
The computer barfed at me: They had started jamming. I punched up Fort Bush again and tried to force a message out through the electromagnetic fuzz.
