Punctuating the quiet

I consider it a good thing that no one has, as yet, started shooting at us. Much. Though it hasn't been entirely quiet. Gallagher had been chasing down that miscreant, InupThoret Yuhara, for various crimes here and elsewhere. The clown had been Bound by Law more times than I cared to count and had taken to spending time on Hale's committing petty crimes and otherwise inconveniencing my citizens. Raiders and Pirates we were used to. Local criminals? Not so much. For most of the townsfolk, stealing from your neighbor was like stealing from family. You just didn't do it.

Except this guy did, and when he tried to rob the re-opened bank, it was no real surprise an extra fifty or so townsfolk came out to watch some on-duty Militia help Gallagher take the guy down. I was both happy with them, and a might disappointed. Five of our Militia's finest to take down one guy? Ok. So he was holed up in the bank, but it's not like he was in the safe or something seriously armored. I can't be the only person on Hale's who can take out a target from long range. Can I?

Of course, they were trying to capture him not kill him. Which, ultimately, is what they did. I let Gallagher handle the interrogation and subsequent hand off to the Alliance Marshal for the region. While we had some legitimate legal claim to the guy for what he'd done here, we weren't really equipped to handle long term incarceration and I didn't feel like presiding over another trial. I'd learned a valuable lesson the last time.

Of course, the Alliance didn't do a very good job handling him. Seems they lost him en route to holding. Seems that, according to Gallagher's intel at least, Yuhara had some kind of connection to that sadistic old bastich, Niska.

That didn't sit well with me. Not at all. He'd tried to get some leverage here a while back and I'd sent his hirelings back to him in a box with a very clear message:

World beyond your reach.
You can ill afford the price.
Dust feeds your lackeys.

I doubted there would be any direct fallout our way from this, since it appeared to be entirely the Alliance Marshal's doing. But still. We'd been having issues with Alliance LEO's recently, including their Special Investigations Unit.

What'd started out as some kind of investigation of some fake artifact from Zenobia had recently led to the same investigator coming back to Hale's to look into the murder of an Alliance officer. Never mind we had no record of the guy ever being here, not that our record keeping was actually that good, the investigator was back looking into our business. Again.

x0x0 wasn't happy about it. I wasn't happy about it. And I didn't have a lot of intel on her unit. Zenobia historically hadn't been a major player on the Alliance stage, though recently some of their local corporations had been trying to expand more into the Rim worlds. Though, in all honestly, the 'Verse was a big enough playground that it didn't surprise me some local leader wasn't trying to expand their influence. New players. Same game.

Something else to add to my plate. Historically there had always been an uneasy relationship between the Justice and Intelligence communities. Spooks and LEO's rarely got along very well. Probably because, by their standard, most Spooks weren't much better than Criminals in how we did what we did. And by our standards, LEO's were more likely to get in the way of an Op than add anything useful to it.

The investigator from Zenobia, Pepper something or other, probably didn't know I was a Spook. My records were classified at very high levels, though it seemed unlikely she'd looked into my records much if at all. Chances were good that if she did, she didn't have the clearance to see them in any case. To most folks, I was just a Coreworlder who'd slipped out to the Rim and gotten elected Mayor of a small mining colony. Some folk knew I'd served in the war, and at least as many knew I wasn't exactly a slouch in hand to hand or with a firearm, but very very few knew what I'd actually done during the war. Fewer still knew what I'd done after.

It would be interesting to see how this turned out. Would the Investigator or the Spook have better connections? I knew who my coin was on, but then I'm biased.

Perhaps fortunately, that wasn't the only break in the quiet. While I was over at Firefly's 'showing the colors' so to speak, we got a local broadwave from Lily asking for a doctor. Seemed that one of Duncan's new crew had somehow wound up over at the West side infirmary with some pretty serious injuries.

Being as we didn't have a doc on sight at the time, I went over to do what I could. Still not more than a field medic, but I'd pried more than my fair share of bullets out of folk over the years and we would have a doc available soon enough.

The wound wasn't too serious, but the kid, Cody his name was, had lost a fair bit of blood. Biggest surprises to me were first, that Duncan had put the Raivenn back in service, and two, the kid had somehow wound up here. Hale's Moon just wasn't that close to Coop's new stomping ground over at McLaran's Drift. We weren't exactly far but for a wounded crewman to wind up here after a salvage Op went bad?

Didn't really matter though. A couple of folk were quite interested in making sure he healed up right, and Lily was watching after him to make sure the wound didn't reopen before a real Doc could look at it.

Wasn't my usual fare, but I had to admit it felt good patching someone up rather than taking them apart.