“We did not come here to harm you,” Jethrigol said to the judges and to Kent’s team. He held up one hand and slowly holstered his gun with the other. “The only threat to you here were the Nwandu.” The rest of his soldiers put away their own weapons, standing peacefully while the Alliance soldiers figured out what to do next.
“We were negotiating a highly complex agreement for peace with the Nwandu Ambassador!” one of the Associates cried, eyeing the mess that used to be the Ambassador in shock. She clearly hadn’t quite caught up with what was really going on here. Then again, I wasn’t sure that I had either. But right now, I had more urgent problems to deal with.
“Kade,” I said cautiously, as I arrived at his side. I put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Stand down. We’re under control now.” I glanced at Kent, who nodded, moving himself and two of his men to take over guard duty on the Nwandu. “Give me the gun, Kade.”
Kade didn’t move.
“Kade,” I said, a little more sharply. “Give me the gun.”
His attention remained fixed on the Nwandu. I reached out to try and take the weapon out of his hand, and he shoved me roughly aside, keeping his focus firmly on the Nwandu. What the fuck?
“He’s not going to listen to you.” It took me a moment to place the voice, accented and tinged with amusement. It was coming from Volgoch, yet it sounded so different from the flat monotone he’d used for the rest of the hearing.
“Why not?” I asked, feeling a thread of panic inside me. I’d told Kade to disregard my orders during the hearing, but my intention had been for only the ones that pertained to winning our case. Was it possible that he was just doing his own thing now, having taken that permission to cover a far wider context? I thought I’d been careful as to how I’d phrased things…
Volgoch picked himself up off the floor, grimacing as he eyed the remains of Ambassador Vendanu. He edged out from behind the last row of seats, straightening his jacket as he did so. “Because Vendanu asked us to program him differently. His primary order, in any and all circumstances, is to protect his master. Regardless of any other orders you give him. She wanted a foolproof bodyguard who would do literallyanythingto protect her. So for as long as Kade sees the Nwandu as a threat to you, you can’t control him. No one can.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Aiden
Irounded on Volgoch, fury bubbling in my veins. “And you didn’t think it was a bad idea to unleash an uncontrollable elite assassin on the galaxy?” Because that’s what Kade was. I’d seen it in the jungle with the Culrads. I’d seen it in the desert with the Geshtoch. And now I was seeing it in a courtroom full of innocent people, while he stood with a weapon in his hand that could kill every single person in this room in under a minute. “What the fuck are we supposed to do?”
“If you want him to calm down, I suggest you remove the threat,” Volgoch said negligently.
“Henderson?” I snapped, my nerves frayed. “Can we secure the Nwandu and have them removed from the room?” That would be the quickest way to ensure nobody else died.
Before Henderson could reply, Kade spoke up. “They have highly advanced hand-to-hand combat skills,” he announced. “They’ll need to be restrained.”
“I’ll go round up some handcuffs,” Henderson said, heading for the door.
“Try manacles instead,” Kade advised him, not giving a shit that he was giving orders to a superior officer.
“In the meantime, nobody move,” Associate Nors spoke up. “This is clearly a delicate situation, and we’re all going to wait until it’s more under control before we start thrashing out the details. Everyone just take a deep breath and stay exactly where you are.”
Thankfully, her authoritative tone worked. Everyone stood still, glancing at each other nervously, until Henderson came back with a handful of police officers and the requested manacles. They worked quickly to secure the remaining Nwandu, then escorted them out of the room.
Once they were gone, I turned back to Kade. “Give me the gun,” I told him sternly. This time, he did. I handed it off to Kent, who hurried it from the room, presumably to be secured in the weapons lockup.
“Right,” Nors said, swiftly taking control of the situation. “I think we need to start getting a few answers. Jethrigol, would you send me that shipping manifest, please?”
“Certainly.” He tapped a few buttons on his comm, and then Nors’ comm beeped. She and the judges huddled around the bench, running a few analyses on the file and muttering amongst themselves. Finally, she stood up again. “It seems that you’re telling the truth. On this part, at least,” she said to Jethrigol. “It is a genuine shipping manifest. And it does, indeed, list Vendanu as Kade’s intended buyer.”
I put a gentle hand on Kade’s shoulder. He seemed perfectly relaxed, now that the Nwandu were gone, but I wanted to be sure. “Are you okay?” I asked him softly.
“Yes, sir,” he said, his tone almost dismissive. As if killing an interspecies ambassador was an everyday occurrence.
“We’ll still need to verify the authenticity of your other videos,” Nors said to Jethrigol, seeming somewhat at a loss for what to do next. “This is… disturbing news.”
“I have a whole lot of questions about this,” one of the judges piped up, looking unkempt and startled with her ruffled feathers. “The first one being, how the heck did you know this case was happening? How did you know we were negotiating with the Nwandu? And how did you get into the building?” Okay, so that was three questions, but all of them were going to need rapid answers if we were going to trust anything Jethrigol said.
Jethrigol bowed his head, and I got the impression he was attempting to look respectful. With facial expressions and body language so varied across different species, it could be hard to tell with the peoples we weren’t familiar with. “The same way anyone gets information they need that is not publically available; bribery,” he answered. Then he snorted, his respectful stance temporarily vanishing. “The same way the Eumadians got a handful of your own Parliamentary representatives to humour the absurdity of this case. Alliance laws have already created provisions for Vangravians who end up here. And yet you were debating whether or not this particular dimari was an animal or a person?” He laughed. “Bribery was also the way the Nwandu were able to sneak lethal weapons into a restricted courtroom. If you pay people enough money, they will let you do literally anything.”
The judge looked suitably disturbed by that news. “We’ll have to look into that,” she said, and I could imagine that whichever of the court’s security personnel had let the oversight happen were going to be in some incredibly deep shit.
And some of the Associates had let themselves be bribed into helping the Eumadians? Associate Nors looked like she wanted to kill someone, and I predicted that heads were going to roll when the truth of that clusterfuck came out. With an election coming up in six months, there would be a handful of Associates suddenly finding themselves out of a job – or possibly in jail, depending on how deep the rot went.
But then Jethrigol continued. “But on the issue of how we knew the Nwandu were here in the first place… Weeks ago, we intercepted a Nwandu Skullier traversing Alliance space. Ever since they attacked us, we’ve kept a close eye on their activities. So finding them loitering here was concerning. We caught up to their ship as it was approaching the Fol wormhole and tried to destroy it. Unfortunately, we were not successful. We only managed to disable it.”
