-BEN-

  The old people were acting like children again.

  Ben sighed, and leaned into his chair. He tried to ignore the obnoxious loud voices, but he couldn't; and that was mostly because the most annoying person in the room was talking at the moment.

  High Judge Rotterman sat on an ornate chair in the center of the large dais, which was erected at the front of the courtroom. Everyone else sat a level or more below him, and he was making sure they knew it.

  Rotterman was an old school judge. This was reflected in the fact that he still wore a voluminous black robe when other judges had moved on to more functional attire. The robe swished with every motion, and that had the effect of making Rotterman look much larger than he was.

  The old judge had a mean glare that seemed permanently plastered across his face. The domineering effect the glare produced was added to by the fact that his head and eyebrows were clean shaven.

  Rotterman bellowed at the entire courtroom. "This young woman deserves the full weight of punishment this court can bring to bear!" He gestured wildly as he spoke, robe waving all around him.

  There were two other judges in the room: Judges Winter and Grain. They were silent now, but not long ago, they too had been screaming at the top of their lungs. They had screamed at each other and Rotterman, but mostly, they screamed at the last group of people on the dais: the 10 member jury.

  The presence of the jury had been the first thing to set off the judges. Juries were powerful things in galactic law. In the old days, juries were composed of normal everyday folk.

  That wasn't the case anymore.

  Nowadays, people with particularly high intelligence were selected to enter a jury pool. After that, they were trained in how to execute their duties. That duty was to be a counter to the power of judges.

  Juries were reserved for the most complex of cases. However, the case they were adjudicating today was not a complex case. It was open and shut, so it did not make sense that there was a jury present.

  Yet here they were, and the judges did not like that.

  They yelled, and the jury yelled back. The ensuing arguments had spiralled back and forth on the topics of truth, justice, and fairness.

  It took a long time, but High Judge Rotterman finally got a hold on the proceedings.

  He did it by shouting over everyone. It was crass but it worked.

  Now he was on a diatribe, expressing his own personal beliefs, and glaring daggers at anyone who looked like they wanted to challenge him.

  No one yet had actually addressed the person who had brought them all there. She was seated in a small booth between the judges and the jury, smiling while playing with her hair.

  Her name was Kaja, Kaja Khan. Ben had been told that her last name indicated she came from old Earth royalty. Still, he hadn't expected her family to be able to influence the justice system this much.

  Kaja was average build with jet black hair, which probably would have flowed down to her waist if she let it free. She chose, however, to wear it in braids which were twisted into two large buns atop her head.

  Her eyes were blue, and her irises seemed to sparkle and glow. Yet, her eyes were not the most striking feature on her face.

  That title went to the large black tattoo on her left cheek. It consisted of three thick vertical lines. The central line extended down from her left lower eyelid down her chin. The two other lines were shorter and flanked the central line. They also started from her left lower eyelid but terminated halfway down her face where they bent and joined the middle line.

  It was called a Kulox, the mark of an avenger. Kaja had told Ben that she had borrowed it from a long dead culture.

  She didn't act like an avenger though. Not to Ben at least. For the short time Ben had known Kaja Khan, all she had acted like was a spoiled annoying petty criminal.

  She had tried to escape him three times.

  Ben foiled her each time, but she had kept trying. Kaja had strange magic. The mission brief had described it as the ability to talk to Machines, but Ben didn’t understand that (and he understood a lot about magic).

  He had heard of people transferring consciousnesses to machines. That was what the Dreglin did. But talking to machines assumed that machines had a consciousness of their own. That simply wasn’t true.

  Yet Ben had seen it. During her attempts to escape, Kaja Khan had spoken to Ben’s ship. Not the ship AI. But to the ship directly. And for some time, it seemed to obey her.

  Unfortunately for Kaja Khan, Ben was quick. He knocked her out each time she tried to escape. By the time she woke up from the last knockout, they were already on Terra, the home planet of the Stellar Authority.

  They placed her in some mana-dampening cuffs, and Ben wondered if Kaja could talk to those too. He wouldn’t put it past her. Now they were in the courtroom. Ben was sitting at the back, which was mostly empty.

  Suddenly, he heard a ping in his ear. He bolted up. His sudden movement created a loud shuffling sound which drew attention to him.

  Even the judges turned to look at him.

  Ben raised a hand in apology.

  It had been so long since he had assimilated something. He had forgotten about the ping once assimilation was done.

  Ben leaned back in his chair and zoned out from the court proceedings. He opened his Alchemy interface. It popped up as a rectangular holographic panel. There was a notification on the screen.

  It read: ASSIMILATION COMPLETE.

  ‘Great,’ Ben thought.

  The screen was intuitive, so he merely needed to think about seeing the results of the assimilation and it showed him.

  Only one thing had been successfully extracted from the dreglin dagger. It was displayed on his interface as a golden ingot.

  The description beneath it read: DREGLIN METAL; A TOUGH VERSATILE METAL CAPABLE OF ALL MANNER OF USES.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Ben thought.

  It was time to try recombination. Ben’s magic worked using templates he called modes. Modes were essentially different forms he could create by combining the different components he extracted.

  Ben had developed up to seven modes. Then Silver came along and cursed him. Now all seven of his modes were inaccessible. They weren’t gone, but Silver’s curse had corrupted them. When Ben tried to access a mode, the system simply rejected him.

  Ben switched the interface to display his modes. They appeared as seven shadowy columns on the screen. He had tried all sorts of things to reverse the curse, but nothing had worked so far.

  Stolen story; please report.

  He could only create and maintain seven modes, so if he wanted to create a new one, he would have to delete one of the others. Ben was attached to them, but this was best.

  "Delete Gladiator mode," he whispered.

  A message popped up on the interface asking if he was sure.

  "Yes."

  The column that represented Gladiator mode fizzled and dissolved. Gladiator mode had been a favourite of Ben’s. He had formed it from Nix-metal and the Vector Force energy he had received from Fen. He didn’t mind deleting it, though. He was about to create a new gladiator mode.

  "Start recombination."

  The interface asked him what material he would like to use. Ben selected the Dreglin metal and Fen’s Vector Force.

  The interface ran a calculation then returned with another message: ASSIMILATION IS POSSIBLE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PROCEED?

  "Yes."

  The interface was replaced by a symbol of a hammer and tongs. Hopefully it won't take too long. Ben dismissed the interface.

  The interface was in tune with his desires, so it knew to create something similar to his old gladiator mode. Ben simply needed to wait. He turned his attention back on the court proceedings.

  Everyone was looking at him.

  Ben blinked.

  "Sorry. Did I miss something?" he asked.

  "We’re calling you to the stand young man," Judge Rotterman said in a huff.

  "Right." Ben stood up and made his way towards the witness stand.

  From what he understood, he was one of several witnesses who would be brought to this trial. Kaja Khan was accused of multiple counts of bribery, grand larceny, extortion, and aggravated assault, along with a slew of cyber crimes.

  Ben took his seat and faced the courtroom. From his vantage point, he could survey the whole room, and he was able to get a good look at the final players in the trials.

  50 elderly people sat on an elevated stand at the back of the courtroom. They were known as Owls. Ben shuddered when he saw them. The Owls sat unmoving, skin shining like porcelain.

  Like High Judge Rotterman, their heads and eyebrows were clean shaven. Unlike Rotterman, their eyes had been replaced with circular lenses.

  They were human. Default volunteers who had decided at the end of their life to serve in the Galaxy’s legal system. Their families were well compensated. And they spent their lives, and their short careers (5 years at most), observing legal proceedings and voting on judgements and sentences.

  High Judge Rotterman, the other judges and the jury were here to maintain order and argue the case. The Owls would approve the final judgment.

  Ben tore his eyes off the Owls and looked back at Rotterman. Rotterman gestured at Judge Winter to start.

  Winter was a gray-haired stern faced woman. She glared at Ben and stood up.

  "Can you please confirm your identity for us?" Winter asked.

  "My name is Ben Wilson."

  "And what do you do?"

  "I'm an agent with the Authority. In the special crimes division."

  "Thank you agent." Judge Winter turned to Kaja Khan, who seemed oblivious to everything that was happening.

  "Do you know this woman?"

  Kaja was more of a girl than a woman. Ben did not think she was more than 18 years old.

  "I do," he responded.

  "How do you know her?"

  Kaja yawned. The sound was too loud to be accidental. Everyone turned to look at her.

  "Can we move along please?" she said, as she rolled her eyes. "We all know how he knows me."

  Judge Winter looked scandalised. Ben was not. This, he had come to learn, was Kaja Khan.

  "I retrieved Ms. Khan from Rector 9 two weeks ago," Ben said. "This was following Ms. Khan's alleged attempt to track down and kill four Dreglin fugitives. An attempt which had resulted in her capture."

  "Thank you Agent," Judge Winter said. "Kaja Khan is accused of multiple crimes against intelligent species. Our reports have described her as brash, rude, wicked, and thoughtless in her dealings with others. Can you corroborate this?"

  Ben mulled it over.

  "She's not wicked," he admitted. "Brash and thoughtless, however, describe her perfectly."

  He noted some of the jury nodding vigorously and smiling. They must have been happy he disagreed with the word wicked.

  ‘So much for being unbiased,’ Ben thought.

  Judge Winter continued. "Tell us in detail about your experiences with Ms. Khan."

  "After I retrieved her, I deactivated the stasis suit she had used to protect herself."

  Winter interjected. "A stasis suit she had stolen from a highly classified armory."

  "That's what I heard," Ben said.

  Winter spoke again. "A robbery which resulted in several individuals being harmed and one left in critical condition."

  "I did not know that," Ben replied. He glanced at Kaja Khan. She made it a point to look everywhere, except at him.

  Ben continued. "After I deactivated the suit, she attacked me."

  Winter shook her head. "Attacking her saviour. How vile."

  A member of the jury stood to his feet. He was a distinguished looking olive-skinned man with a full head of curly black hair and a matching beard.

  He cleared his throat and said, "I would remind everyone here that, at that moment, Ms. Khan had just woken up, having previously been in mortal danger."

  "Mortal danger she put herself in," Winter said with a sneer.

  Ben had a different response. "That's not how stasis suits work." He said coolly.

  The olive skinned man frowned. "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "It's a misnomer," Ben said. "Or a misattribution. There are real stasis suits which effectively put you to sleep. But what Ms. Khan had was more like an elaborate suitcase she had wrapped around herself. She could see and understand everything happening around her. The suit kept her alive and safe, but alert. I explained to her who I was before deactivating the suit."

  Winter looked triumphant. "And she attacked you," the judge said.

  "Yes. She attacked me three times."

  The olive skinned man sat down. He was obviously displeased.

  Ben kept going. "When she realised she couldn't overpower me, she apologised. But soon after that, she tried to steal my ship, and she got pretty close to succeeding."

  Again he glanced at Kaja Khan. This time she was looking right at him. She grinned impishly.

  "I restrained her with handcuffs," Ben said. "And we left Rector 9."

  "Mmm," Winter said. She waved her hands, urging him to carry on.

  Ben did. "She somehow managed to escape the cuffs and messed with my ship's fuel cells. I had to land on a nearby planet, where she tried to escape again. That was when I first knocked her out."

  "I see," Judge Winter said. "Agent Wilson, do you believe Ms. Khan is technically capable of all the charges placed against her."

  "100%"

  "Do you believe she is morally capable?"

  "100%"

  "Thank you Agent," Winter said. She turned to nod at the Owls, who remained motionless. She nodded at her fellow judges, then returned to her seat.

  As she left, the olive skinned man stood up and walked towards Ben. He smiled warmly. "Hello Agent," he said.

  Ben nodded in response.

  "My name is Malar Blackwell," the man said. "Tell me Agent Wilson, how did you get this mission?"

  Ben's eyes narrowed. No one was supposed to know. He had been careful. The captain was likely to be the only person who would find out, and Ben knew the captain wouldn’t expose him.

  "It was assigned to me," Ben said.

  Malar’s eyes twinkled. "Was it now?" Malar began to pace. "Agent Wilson, how could it be assigned to you when you are supposed to be on probation."

  "My probation ended."

  "Did it?" Malar’s eyes twinkled again. Ben didn’t like where this was going.

  "That’s strange," Malar said. "Because I’ve looked at your records. You had a psychological evaluation done by a Dr. Mensa. She described you as too eager, and recommended your reinstatement be delayed. Your captain was aware of that recommendation, and he hadn’t made a decision yet. But somehow you managed to get on this case. I have an idea how."

  Malar smiled at Ben.

  Ben returned the smile but it didn’t touch his eyes. Whoever this Malar guy was, he was thorough, and he was about to get Ben thrown out of the courtroom.

  Malar turned to the judges.

  "My judges. Agent Ben Wilson, manipulated the system to get himself on the case. As such, Kaja Khan’s arrest was illegal."

  High Judge Rotterman looked at Ben. His face was like thunder.

  "Is this true Agent Wilson?" he asked with a low voice that suggested repressed anger.

  Ben sighed. "Yes," he said.

  Rotterman exploded. "In all my years as a judge, I have never!!!"

  He went on saying other things but Ben stopped listening. Instead he looked at Malar who smiled at him. This was a checkmate, and they both knew it.

  Ben glanced at Kaja Khan. She was smiling too, but her smile seemed more sympathetic than anything.

  "Throw him out!" Rotterman screamed. "Get him out! And contact his Captain! I want him suspended! Or Fired!"

  Ben didn’t wait for the court guards to get to him. He stood up himself and left. It was his fault. He had done something he shouldn’t have. He knew that. But it didn’t stop the anger building up inside him.