For Writers

By Writers

FJD

by

Stephen Leese

Prologue

2045AD London, England

The harsh wind howled like a banshee as it blew across the ruins. The buildings, blasted and collapsed, funnelled the air and modulated the eddies and the breezes until a soulful, morbid tune of despair was created.

The snow had stopped falling, but it was piled ten feet deep in places. From the smothering white shroud, gradually hardening into ice, jagged piles of masonry projected like a dead man's fingers, clutching forlornly at the sky.

The man staggering through the devastated city gave no thought to the blasted moonscape that the city had become. He wore a heavy layer of rags, furs and a mixture of whatever clothes he could lay his hands upon. He looked like a beggar or a tramp but curiously, the other pathetic denizens treated him with respect, drawing themselves fully to painful attention when he passed. Some even saluted.

The man returned the gestures with barely a nod. He was chilled to the bone and desperate to find shelter. His stomach was rumbling with cramps and he had not eaten in four days. He made his way along the street as fast as he could.

Finally, chest heaving with exertion, surrounded by a white fog of breath, he reached one particular cluster of ruins. This building seemed to be in relatively good condition, having several floors intact and, most importantly, a roof. The man hammered on the charred wooden door until it swung open.

He collapsed inwards and was caught by swift, strong hands.

He allowed them to carry him into the building, noting as he went that whatever the exterior looked like, the inside of the building was no different from any other. The floors had collapsed and what remained was little more than a shell. Only the ground floor, sealed under tons of masonry and ice, was in any way intact.

The man's escort led him to a crudely excavated hole in the rubble and helped him onto the ladder. Once he was secure they took up positions of guard and allowed him to descend alone.

The ladder was long, made of aluminium, and squeaked alarmingly as the ragged man went down it.

Finally he reached solid footing. The place where he stood was like a cavern, formed when the upper floors had fallen in and come to rest on their own stony flesh. The room that had been created as a result was shored up with baulks of timber, finely appointed and most importantly, warm.

There was an ornate dining table groaning with pilfered food and wine. There were portraits on the 'walls'. There were immaculately dressed waiters and servants and, seated around the table, were the twenty guests.

They wore military uniforms of various styles. The man at the head of the table, clad in the uniform of a general, was aged about thirty, blond haired and was incredibly handsome, his clean-cut looks spoiled only by the raw scar on his cheek that disappeared behind a grey eyepatch.

"David," he said, his voice deep and rich. "Good to see you. Have a seat. Waiter! Food for my comrade!"

David Learmount shrugged off the constricting layers of rag and wool until his dark blue police uniform was all that was left. In the light of day he was a brown-haired young man, his features pinched and cruel. He settled into one of the seats and gave the sagging ceiling a jaundiced look.

The general saw the look and chuckled. "Don't worry," he said, lighting a cigar, "it's all braced. Structural engineers assure me it's safe."

Learmount nodded. He trusted the general. They all did. The man was the saviour of Britain, the man who had led the fight back, who had liberated the country and defeated the invaders. "I'm sorry, General Hyde," he apologised, coughing softly as the cigar smoke reached him. "It's just a little distracting, that's all."

"Put it from your mind," said Hyde with an easy and charming smile. "We've more important things to discuss."

"One more bomb blast and the whole thing will go," said another man nervously. "There are still UXB's out there. They go off all the time."

Hyde's smile turned icy. "The area has been surveyed and charted by the troops. This building is safe. All right?"

The timid man nodded. "My apologies, General. I'm afraid I'm not used to all this cloak and dagger. Up until now my remit has started and stopped at road traffic control."

"I understand, Mr Cleves. Trust me when I say that this is necessary for the future of Britain." Hyde looked over the assembly. "This is necessary," he repeated firmly. "Our country has been devastated. You only have to look at this city to see it. We have won the war but the price has been steep, too steep. That's the purpose of this meeting: to salvage something from the rubble."

"That'll be a challenge," said Learmount dryly.

"Precisely," said Hyde, overhearing him. "It will be a challenge. We will be working to resurrect Britain from the ashes and make her great again. We in this room will provide the means for that resurrection, starting now."

"Does the King know of this meeting?" asked Cleves carefully.

"The King is irrelevant," said Hyde firmly. "His Royal Highness got the country into this war. His opinions no longer matter."

"That's disloyalty," said Cleves, his voice catching.

"And treason?" said Hyde, with a disarming smile. "Perhaps, but if so, he's brought it upon himself. It was the King who overruled Sandhurst, remember? Up until then Britain was neutral. Alright, so we won, but has it really been worth it? Fifty million dead people worldwide, millions more dying of disease and the effects of poison and fallout? Our experts estimate that the death toll will double before the country recovers. I repeat: was it worth it? I, for one, think not." The General leaned forwards, his hands curled into fists. "The King has destroyed Britain. As a result, his opinions no longer count."

"His opinions will count if he catches wind of this conversation," said Cleves unhappily.

"That's already been taken care of," said Hyde calmly. "The reason I've called you all together is so that we can decide what to do next."

The muttering started at once, rising steadily in volume and alarm. Learmount listened for a few moments, then raised his hand languidly. "Question," he said.

"Proceed," nodded Hyde.

"What have you done with the bodies?"

Hyde' eyes narrowed. Including Learmount in the plot was always going to be risky. The man was like a stiletto, sharp and dangerous. "Bodies?"

"The royal deceased," shrugged Learmount. "You wouldn't be telling us all this if they weren't dead. So what have you done with them?"

"General, please tell us we've understood wrong," implored another officer. "You can't have killed the King!"

Hyde examined his nails diffidently. "As I said, it was the King who got the country into this mess by trying to rule like some feudal lord. Yes, he's dead. So are the Queen and the Princes. He was presented with an ultimatum – abdicate or be forced out. He tried to fight it. He lost." He glanced at Learmount, nodding. "The bodies were buried in quicklime in an old mineshaft a few miles outside the city."

Learmount nodded. "Risky business," he remarked.

"Risky business!?" shouted the man. "This is regicide! I won't sit here with murderers and calmly discuss the future! We have no future! We should turn ourselves in and stand trial!"

"Turn ourselves in to whom, pray?" said Hyde, his voice softly menacing.

The man spluttered, his voice trailing away as the realisation hit him that there was no higher authority left. There was nobody to surrender to . Hyde was it . The man stood abruptly and ran for the door. "Let him go," said Hyde, as the guards moved to intercept the fleeing man. "It's his loss. If anyone else wants to leave, now's the time. Well?"

Nobody else moved. There was dead silence for nearly a minute.

"So what's the plan?" said Learmount at last.

"We need to start over," said Hyde. "We need to rebuild, fast. Europe has already started. Indeed, in Denmark I hear they've nearly finished their capital city already, and here we sit in the depths of the worst winter in living memory, not a new brick placed. The King's lunatic idea of giant monuments took first place. Now that he's out of the way, common sense can prevail."

"You'll need a hell of a workforce," said Cleves dubiously. "Where will you get them?"

"We have a whole population," shrugged Hyde. "They'll be put to work. We'll take a census, see how many people have survived and anyone capable of lifting a shovel will lift it, on pain of death."

"They won't like that," said Cleves.

"The hell with what they don't like," said Hyde dangerously. "They'll do it because it'll be a direct order. We need to instil the habit of obedience in them. We have to convince them that the only way for an easy ride is to do as we say."

"So we're going to be the new military junta," said Cleves resentfully.

"Not a junta," said Learmount in a revelatory tone. "No, we need to be something less sinister, more appealing to the citizens. We'll be a…" he pondered for a second, then smiled thinly, "a council of elders."

"I'm not old," said Hyde. "Neither are you, come to that."

"We are wise beyond our years," said Learmount. "That will be our respectability. Wisdom, intelligence and fortitude."

"And guns," said Cleves. "However you dress it up, this is still going to be a military government, isn't it? The soldiers will have the guns and the people will have nothing. No choice but to obey."

"What's the matter, Bernard?" said Hyde sardonically. "Don't you like the idea of being in absolute control. Don't you want power?"

"I never said that…" Cleves stopped. It dawned on him precisely what Hyde was offering. "Could we rebuild properly? With a proper sense of order and purpose, instead of all this clutter and historical debris?"

"This time we'll do it right," nodded Hyde. "We'll create our own British Utopia."

Cleves blinked rapidly as the new ideas poured into his mind like golden sunshine. "Could we… create new roads, then? Proper roads, ones that work and don't get clogged?"

"Roads, highways, express maglevs, anything you desire," said Hyde. "All you have to do is agree. It's just an interim measure, until we can get the country back on its feet again. Then we'll have some elections and everything will be all right again."

Cleves smiled, flushing slightly. "Well, put like that, how can I argue? I'm with you, General."

"Excellent," smiled Hyde.

"What about law and order?" asked Learmount. "Whether or not it's for the public good, this is going to generate resistance. People won't take kindly to being forced into slave labour camps. They'll object, first loudly and then violently."

"The army will see to it that they stay in their place," shrugged Hyde. "You can't argue with a bullet."

"Too totalitarian," said Learmount, shaking his head. "We can't just bully the people into accepting us. It never works. We need to make them want us, not just see us as the only alternative to death."

Hyde's eyes narrowed. "Carry on…"

"The people need something to be frightened of," said Learmount, thinking on his feet. "They need an enemy, something they can see in their midst, something to worm its way into the very core of their lives and imperil their very existence. A threat that will make our way seem so much more palatable."

"I see," nodded Hyde. "And where would we find such an insidious threat?"

Learmount smiled silkily. "That's the beauty of it, General. The enemy is already in place, in the ghettos. The Little Italys and the Chinatowns, whatever's left of them. Those places teem with enemy agents, spreaders of false rumour, plotters seeking to exploit the power vacuum and turn the country over to our enemies. Foreigners, in other words."

"Institutionalised xenophobia?" said Cleves.

"Why not?" countered Learmount. "The war was fought against a foreign power. The bombs and chemicals that devastated our green and pleasant land came from overseas. It should take very little effort to convince the people that foreign agents walk among us. With the right sort of propaganda we could create the ultimate bogeyman and drive the people to our cause en masse."

"With just a little help from the army," said another man derisively.

Learmount looked around and identified the speaker. "No, Colonel Forman. Not at the point of a gun. All we need to do is play on their latent paranoia and survival instinct and they'll do it all for us. Your Ministry of Information will help smooth things over. You'll see. Just play the right tunes and you can watch them dance."

"It sounds like a huge risk to me," said Forman doubtfully. "We could end up swinging from the lampposts, especially if the King's loyalists get wind of what we're planning."

"It's a good idea," said Hyde decisively. "David is correct – give the people a witch to burn and we'll have them eating out of our hands. Hound out the foreigners, punish the enemy agents, make the people really hate . In this clime that shouldn't be hard to do, should it?"

Forman shook his head. "Just a question of rewording the propaganda loops in the archive, I suppose."

"Excellent," nodded Hyde. "Let's be at it then."

"Just like that?" frowned Cleves. "Isn't this a little undemocratic? I mean, what about the rest of us?" He looked at the other officers, and saw that many of them were nodding thoughtfully. It was clear that Learmount's plan appealed to them.

"It was democracy that caused the War," said Hyde pointedly. "Democracy has failed. It's time to do things a different way." He gathered his papers and headed for an inner door. "This meeting is concluded. Go back to your units and spread the word. The past is gone. Only the future remains." He winked at Learmount. "Long live the Council!"

"Long live the Council," chorused the officers.

"David," called Hyde. "Come with me. I'd like to discuss the new police forces with you, if I may. And then I have a job offer for you. A seat on the Council, in fact, if you're up to it…?"

Learmount stood. "Of course. We Learmounts have always lived to serve."  

FJD

Part One – Midnight

2175AD

The sun was just creeping over the horizon when Elenna Pointer halted at the gate. She had stopped her car, a green FolksWagon, at the key card panel and now, with the handbrake applied, she fumbled in the glove boot for her Record card.

Finally she found it, tucked away at the bottom of her purse, of all places. She was sure she had put it in the glove compartment yesterday but there it was, her petrified mug staring back at her, locked in a rictus that might have passed for a smile, in the right sort of light. The face on the card was of a good-looking young woman of about twenty-eight, dark-complected but of Caucasian appearance. She had coffee-brown eyes, a slightly pointed nose, full lips and – since she was apparently grinning when the picture was taken – disquietingly long teeth. She had come to loathe that photograph, because it looked exactly like her.

She swiped the card through the slot with a quick, efficient gesture, then put it back and rolled up her window while the machine digested her identity. It seemed to take too long, but eventually it decided that she was who she claimed to be. The steel mesh gates, electrified and topped with coils of razor wire, slid aside and the mines in the road beyond were quietly disarmed.

She trundled the FolksWagon forward, wrestling the thing into first gear after a struggle and a grinding of cogs. Like her, the car was badly in need of a makeover, or perhaps a serious change of scene.

She drove over the mines with her teeth gritted. There had been occasions in the past when one of them hadn't got the message to disarm, and the resulting explosion had blown car and driver sky-high. It was with an audible sigh of relief that she cleared them.

Now there were the turrets to worry about.

She had turrets similar to these at home, surrounding and fortifying her farmhouse in the wilds, but most of her turrets were loaded with nothing more dangerous than stun darts. These squat, grey, evil things fired explosive flechettes that fragmented on impact and ensured a nasty death for anyone not treated immediately. As with the mines, the turrets sometimes went rogue as well, and they were quite capable of turning the FolksWagon into so much chaff in seconds.

The turrets tracked her as she drove up the lane, keeping her locked in a deadly crossfire but thankfully not opening up. Being shot to bits on a Monday morning was not a good way to start the week.

At any rate, the turrets had decided to let her live for at least today, and she finally reached her parking space, in an area occupied at this moment by three other vehicles, and stopped her car in a vacant bay. She switched off the engine and clipped her Record card to her black tunic.

Stepping out of the car, she locked the door at the second attempt. Like everything else about the car, the door locks were worn out and had a habit of letting the Mistress know it, usually at inconvenient times like this. Once the door was locked she kicked it for good measure.

"Morning, Elenna," said a cheerful voice.

She looked around at the sound, and spied a compact, muscular man clad in a black, silver-trimmed uniform exactly like her own. The man was balding and wore a patch over his left eye and a wide smile on his face.

"Morning, Pat," she said wearily. "Busy night?"

Patrick Peach shrugged. "Not really. Four customers all night. Sally's sorting them out at the moment. They've had their hour and they're on the way downstairs."

Elenna shuddered slightly. It was all so routine these days. She changed the subject. She indicated another parked car, a maroon Dat-Ford. "Where's Trilly?"

"Helping Sally," said Peach. "One of the ropes was stuck and they needed the cutter to get it off."

"She's far too keen, that girl," commented Elenna as she adjusted her uniform.

"Some would call that a good thing," said Peach as they walked together up the hill toward the complex.

"Do you?" Elenna looked at him.

Peach shook his head. "She gives me the creeps."

"Glad to know I'm not the only one, then," smiled Elenna.

"They say she'll go a long way," said Peach. "Especially when she's serving with you. You know your rep as well as I do. You're someone to look up to, they say. The top Executioner in the country. An example to us all."

Elenna sighed. She didn't like being reminded of what she did for a living. It was hard enough having to do the job without being worshipped for it. "Right now I don't feel much like an example of anything, except maybe a walking corpse."

Peach eyed her carefully, noting the pallor, the crows-feet, and the tic in her cheek. "Have you put in for any holiday?"

"Nowhere to go," she said. "There are too many people who want me dead for me to risk leaving home for anywhere but here. Sad, isn't it?"

Peach said nothing. He knew as well as anyone how hard it was to coax Elenna Pointer out of her home for anything but business. She was practically a recluse, rumoured to be hooked on anti-depressants. It went with the territory. Elenna was long past the usual burnout point for a state Executioner. Normally they lasted about five or six years, but Elenna had been plying her trade for nearly eleven. He, Patrick Peach, had practised the art for four years and was feeling the strain. It was little wonder Elenna looked so bad. According to the statistics she had personally killed over a thousand people. That was enough to give anyone the jitters.

They reached the complex at last. In fact, the place was a very simple layout. There were three structures in there – a cabin where the Executioners waited for business, where they drank coffee, ate snacks or watched the television, there was a yellow-painted morgue building, capacity twelve deceased persons, with a tool shed around the back, and there was the gallows itself.

The gallows… It never failed to induce a cold shiver, however often you saw it. It was about twenty feet high, standing on huge wooden legs, and resembled a gigantic table. At the top was the platform, which consisted mainly of trapdoors, two of them, which ran the length of the structure and which fell with a massive, reverberating 'boom' when the lever was pulled. Above the trapdoors was the beam, a huge oaken thing nearly two feet thick, supported on a pair of similarly heavy A-frames. At equal intervals along the underside of the beam were strong steel brackets, from which hung lengths of chain. The chains were there to eliminate bounce in the ropes that were attached to them. Without the chains there was an unfortunate bungee effect when the customers went through the trap. With them, the customer went from a forty m.p.h. fall to a dead stop in under a second, the resulting impact invariably breaking the neck. Elenna had had those eleven years to refine her craft, to the point where she could operate the hellish machine blindfold. In fact, she often wished that she could do so.

Incongruously, at the bottom of the staircase that led to the platform, there was a clocking machine. She ran her card through it and a long day began.

At that particular moment two of the ropes were occupied, the bodies hanging utterly motionless, disturbed only by the breeze. A third rope hung slack and empty alongside, evidence of another victim who was nowhere to be seen.

The door of the morgue banged open and two figures emerged, carrying a stretcher between them. They were clad in the uniforms of Assistant Executioners, the drudges of the job as far as the state was concerned. They did the arm straps, the medical checks and the fetching and carrying. At that moment they were in the process of removing the bodies. Elenna watched them as they worked.

Trilly Mason was easy to spot. She was slender, her blonde hair tied up in childish pigtails, her face pale with over-applied makeup. As did all the Executioners, she wore a shoulder holster from which the handle of a .38 automatic pistol projected, which she could draw, aim and fire in under two seconds, not that she ever had much reason to, since all the customers were drugged before they were hanged. At that moment she was chatting animatedly with the other woman, Sally Rigby.

Sally didn't seem particularly interested in conversation. In fact, her body language had 'fed up' written all over it. A veteran of the job, as were Elenna and Peach, she just wanted to get home and forget all about what she did. Trilly's keenness for the job was notorious and it was all she could to tolerate it.

Together they lugged a stepladder under the nearest body and began the laborious job of taking it down, Trilly talking all the time.

"I don't know how you put up with her," said Peach sourly. "If she was my Assistant I'd have knocked her teeth out by now."

"I think they wanted a stabilising influence," shrugged Elenna. "Around me she's pretty well behaved really. 'Learning at the feet of the master,' she calls it," she added bitterly. "You know she wants to beat my record?"

"Who doesn't?" said Peach. "She's made no secret of it. She's eighteen next week and she's done fifty hangings already. She scares the hell out of most people. What do you think of her?"

Elenna looked at him in surprise. "What do I think of her? I think she's a bloodthirsty little vampire in sore need of a lesson in reality. Maybe they thought that by putting her with me she'd have a nervous breakdown like Darrow did."

"Darrow wasn't up to the job," said Peach. "You get some like that. They do fine in training then come apart at the seams in the real world. How long did he last? Five or six, wasn't it?"

"Six," confirmed Elenna. "I could see he was on edge right from the start. When he finally ran away it was no surprise to anyone."

"Except him when he ran over the mines, I suppose," added Peach.

"Bad way to go," said Elenna. "Not his fault he wasn't up to it."

"I'd rather have a dozen headcases like Darrow than one Trilly Mason," said Peach fervently. He looked at his watch. "Nearly time for off," he said. He looked over at the gallows. Sally and Trilly were back for the third and final body. He waited until the Assistants had finished and then called Sally over.

"Time to go," he said.

"About time too," said Sally, with a pointed glance at Trilly, who was standing on the platform examining the lever. "Doesn't she ever shut up?"

"We were just talking about that," said Peach. "I think we should get a gag made for her."

Sally Rigby grinned. "One made out of a grenade would suit me," she said. She unbuttoned her tunic and then clocked off. Peach followed suit and together they walked down to the car park.

Elenna watched them go with a wistful expression on her face. Her shift had barely started and she wanted to go home already. She wished she could just walk away, go back down to the car park, wrench open the FolksWagon and disappear over the horizon, but it was an impossible dream.

Executioners were Final Justice Department employees, but the Special Police watched them as closely as anyone else. Closer, in fact, because in their paranoid little world, nobody had more contact with the criminal classes than those paid to kill them. The only concession their status earned the Executioners was a slightly more sympathetic approach from the State's paid weasels.

A grumbling of engines announced the starting up of Peach's and Sally's cars, and she watched as they backed out of their bays, then turned and made their way down the hill to the gate. She had just turned away when a cry from Trilly reached her.

"What is it?" she called.

"Truck coming," replied Trilly, peering theatrically into the distance.

Christ, they were starting early! Elenna's fists clenched with a sudden spasm of anger. What had happened to taking things easy? Why such a hurry these days? In the old days they might get five or six customers all day. Now it was such a production line that there was talk of extending the morgue, or even of fitting double-decker slabs in there.

She was damned if she was going to haul corpses around all day. She had just enough self-respect left to be revolted at the idea.

She pulled the soft black Executioners mask from her belt and put it on, motioning for Trilly to do the same. The fabric felt warm and comfortable and provided a few millimetres of insulation from the horror of the world she lived in. With it on, tied around her face so that only her eyes were visible, she could put some small distance between her and those she must kill today.

"Rich pickings, looks like," said Trilly enthusiastically from her perch on the gallows platform.

The truck was close enough now for Elenna to see into the cage. There were five people in there, hunched and shivering with the combined effects of the early morning cold and the tranquillising drugs they had been given to keep them docile and manageable. Without those drugs, hanging so many people – even hanging just one – could turn into an exercise in self defence or even riot control, but these days the drugs were so effective it was said that the victims were in such a state of bliss that even the sight of the gallows was taken in stride. Hell, she doubted it even registered in their befuddled senses, the poor bastards.

The truck clanked to a halt outside the hut and the engine stopped. The vehicle was a weird contraption that seemed to have equal parts of helicopter, submersible and tank in its ancestry. At each corner where a wheel should be, there was a set of caterpillar tracks, and above these was the flattened ovoid of the pressure cockpit. Precisely why the hell a simple tumbrel needed a pressurised cockpit was beyond Elenna, but the story went that if anyone tried to mount a rescue operation that cockpit would be hard to breach, and so the truck would be difficult to impede. That at least was certainly true. Just like the mail, the tumbrel always got through, though she wished to heaven that it wouldn't.

The big steel-mesh cage on the flatbed contained the condemned prisoners, three men and two women, each clad in regulation prison jeans and tee-shirts, their hands unbound, their eyes staring vacantly, jaws slack and drooling. Elenna made her way over to where the truck's driver, a gangling youth in a black Council guard's uniform, was clambering out of the vehicle's roof hatch.

His feet had not even touched the ground before Elenna was on to him. "Are you trying to be funny?" she demanded, snatching the clipboard from his hand.

The guard stared at her, astonished, then sneezed violently. From the look of him, he was suffering either from a heavy cold or hay fever, and Elenna leaned away. She was feeling bad enough as it was. She didn't need a chill on top of everything else.

"What do you mean?" the guard managed as he snuffled into a stained handkerchief.

"You know damn well what I mean," said Elenna. "Who's idea was it to send five customers at once? This is a four-rope gallows, pal. Someone gets lucky today."

"Fair enough," the guard nodded. He'd been expecting a query about his cargo. "Alpha Delta George isn't that far away. They can have number five."

Elenna frowned behind the mask. "Hold on a minute. Are you saying they send you out on delivery rounds now?"

"Now and then. FJD is getting busy. Summer's always like this. Must be something in the air."

"Apart from pollen," muttered Elenna.

"Huh?" said the guard thickly.

"Nothing." Elenna looked down at the clipboard and read the depressing list of serial numbers and crimes that were all that the poor wretches in the truck had become in the eyes of officialdom. Something caught her eye and she looked up. "Since when has 'loitering with intent' been a death crime?"

"Since this morning," said the guard glibly. "He was caught on some Councillor's property with a load of burglary tools on him. He was fast-tracked before you could say 'hang him out to dry.'"

"We've had no notification here about loitering being a hanging offence," said Elenna. "We can't take him."

"Wait a minute, lady," protested the guard. "You've gotta take him – "

Something small but crucial snapped inside Elenna and she grabbed the guard by the lapels, slamming him into the glazed nose of the truck's cabin. "That's 'Executioner' to you, friend. Clean your ears out and listen to me. We've had no notification, so we're not having him. Got that?" She released him with a contemptuous shove.

He stepped quickly out of arm's reach of her. The woman was nuts! He was only doing his job, for crying out loud! "You've got to take him," he repeated breathlessly. "I'll lose my job if you don't."

Elenna's eyes narrowed. "Why will you lose your job?" she asked levelly.

"I've brought live meat back before," he whined. "Supervisor put me on a warning last time. I'll be fired if I do it again."

Her lip curled. He would far rather see a potentially innocent man die than risk his job. That said a lot about society. Nice one, Council. "On the other hand," she said, in a reasonable tone of voice, "what will happen to you if loitering proves not to be a ratified death crime at all, and you only find out after we've finished with him?"

He looked blank, a nasty realisation creeping up on him. "I'll be fired," he admitted, blowing his nose again.

"They've got you all right," grinned Elenna. "Ever heard the saying, 'damned if you do, damned if you don't?'"

"What shall I do?" he asked plaintively, with such desperation in his voice that she couldn't decide between pity and disgust.

Wasn't totally his fault, the snivelling little idiot. They certainly weren't hiring them for brainpower these days. She took a pen from her breast pocket and scrawled a note in the margin next to the loiterer's serial number.

Cargo refused on grounds of legal uncertainty. Driver not responsible. E.J. Pointer, Senior Executioner.

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