Detective Wilcox Read online

  Detective Wilcox

  Jaxon Reed

  Copyright

  Detective Wilcox

  Agents of the Planetary Republic Book I

  Copyright © 2020 Jaxon Reed

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Historical figures are used in fictional settings and dialogues, within fictitious alternate universes. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover by Jacqueline Sweet Design

  Editing and formatting by edbok.com

  Dedication

  The usual thanks go out to author Jada Ryker and other longtime Patreon subscribers. I cherish the support and continued encouragement.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Other books by Jaxon Reed

  1

  Former Marine Sergeant Gina Wilcox sighed as she sat back in a café chair sipping coffee.

  She looked tall. In fact, she was bigger than many women. Men too, for that matter. Nonetheless, she managed to display femininity in or out of uniform while still maintaining an air of physical competence.

  She had short blonde hair, befitting her recent military service. It had yet to grow back out and for now she liked keeping it short. It was easier to manage that way, even if all the movie starlets and models showed off long and luscious hair.

  Of course, most movie stars were artificial constructs these days. Other celebrities, also computer generated, read the news or dispensed relationship advice.

  But Wilcox was not looking for a relationship right now. Her hair would remain short for the foreseeable future.

  She just finished lunch, a sandwich and chips provided by a polite android server. Now she wanted some quiet time to herself before going back to work.

  But with her unique skills, her mind easily captured all the electronic signals nearby. There never was a truly quiet time for her, anymore.

  She gained her abilities during the war, which officially ended a few months ago. Tetrarch Thrall asked for a ceasefire from his home world of Clarion after the Republic took Epsilon, and Chancellor Cole granted it.

  The Republic was tired of fighting. So was the League, but they might have continued were it not for the fact they were beaten down by Lute’s privateers and the Planetary Republic’s new battleships.

  The Condor-class, capable of almost unlimited firepower by teleporting in solar material from the nearest sun, made all the difference.

  The tides of war turned after Condors were introduced, with the Republic eventually coming out on top thanks to additional help from Lute’s privateers.

  But now that peace broke out, the Republic turned its attention inward.

  Wilcox served on one of those private warships for a while, alongside her mother who was the Ultima Mule Company’s quartermaster.

  In those final days on Epsilon, the last planet the Diego Fleet took over, Wilcox made the acquaintance of Jodi Fonteneaux, Director of Naval Investigations Division.

  After a rocky start, Fonteneaux warmed up to Wilcox. It helped that the younger woman was a former sergeant in the Republican Marines. Her time on assignment with the crew of the Ultima Mule came to a close with the end of the war, and Gina accompanied Director Fonteneaux back to Diego, the Republic’s capital planet.

  Wilcox reflected on all this as she absently scanned through the neural implant feeds of everyone else in the small café.

  She no longer paid for subscription services, as signals were open to her without the need of an implant. She could spy on anyone nearby and follow along on their feed. She could also pick out most any other broadcast or entertainment, and hack her way into all sorts of electronics.

  The term for what she could do, she had decided, for what she now considered herself to be, was an electronic telepath.

  Or maybe not. She still kicked around ideas for what to call it in her head.

  Psychic was too close to psycho for her comfort. Telepath sounded better, but it did not really capture the essence of her capabilities.

  But, the term would do for now.

  As far as she knew, she was the only person able to do . . . this thing she could do.

  Her ability to decipher and control electronics was vast. In another time, perhaps, she would be famous. She could go the P. T. Barnum route and amaze an audience for money by reading their implant’s playlist, for instance.

  But Fonteneaux insisted Gina keep her powers secret.

  “We don’t want to tip off any criminals of what you can do. Not yet,” the Director of NID said.

  So, Wilcox stayed quiet.

  She rented an apartment close to NID headquarters in the sprawling Navy city known as Plairmont. This giant urban area housed multiple living spaces and office buildings, all serving military personnel.

  With the lessons learned from the last war, particularly the newfound ability of naval forces to bring in solar bombardments, discussions were underway about breaking up Plairmont and evenly distributing operations around the globe.

  That way, should war erupt with the League again in the future, the enemy would have a harder time wiping out important military resources.

  Work on this effort stalled with the peace agreement, however. In four years of war, the League never came close to Diego. The lessons learned were from Republican bombardments of League planets, instead.

  Since it “never happened here,” there was less impetus about changing things now that the shooting stopped.

  And that is probably typical, Gina thought.

  All too often something bad has to happen before people seriously consider changing things. She thought about Pearl Harbor in a long ago war back on Old Earth.

  Wrapped up in her thoughts, she missed seeing the car drop down past the café’s huge picture window and crash in the street.

  Everyone turned to look at the noise.

  “That’s not supposed to happen,” somebody said from a nearby table. “Flying cars hardly ever go down.”

  Smoke billowed out from the damaged vehicle. People gathered by the window and out in the streets to look. Several bystanders activated their implants to call 911.

  A piece of plexiglass popped out when somebody kicked it from inside the car.

  Gina and others watched as a man wearing black leather slacks and a matching shirt crawled out of the wreckage.

  He stood medium height, Gina estimated, maybe five foot nine or 175 centimeters. His hair and head were obscured by a black leather helmet and dark round old-style flying goggles.

  He reached to his waistband and pulled out a blaster.

&nb
sp; Somebody said, “He’s got a gun!”

  Everybody on the street backed away when he waved it around, many holding up their hands.

  More calls to 911 went out.

  Gina sighed.

  “I can’t even get away for lunch,” she muttered under her breath.

  The sound of sirens filled the air as police cars swooped in overhead.

  The man aimed up at them and fire off several blasts.

  Thoop! Thoop! Thoop!

  The cars were equipped with their own blasters, though. Now that Gina looked, it looked like they had shot the man’s car out of the sky. These squad car weapons were far bigger than his handgun, and the police fired back.

  ThoopThoopThoopThoopThoop!

  He ran zigzag down the sidewalk, avoiding explosions as they tore up the concrete around him.

  Then he jumped through the café window, sending glass crashing inward and scattering everybody inside.

  Gina backed up with the others.

  Four black and white cop cars landed in the street, lights flashing. Eight officers jumped out. They took up positions behind the vehicles, aiming blasters at the broken café window.

  One of them activated her implant, amplifying her voice.

  “We know you’re in there! Come out with your hands up and nobody has to get hurt!”

  The leather helmet guy with his curious goggles looked at the crowd of customers watching him. He picked out a young woman in a sailor’s uniform.

  “You!”

  He stepped forward and grabbed her, pulling her roughly by the hair to the window. She held her hands over her ears and closed her eyes.

  “Please don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!”

  He aimed the blaster at her head while facing the street and the police.

  “If anybody comes closer, she gets it!”

  Gina sighed and stepped up behind him. She tuned in to his implant and scrambled everything, making it emit a violent high-pitched noise.

  He jerked his gun away from the sailor’s head and clutched under his ear.

  Gina slugged him in the back of the neck. He fell down in a heap, dropping his gun. She kicked it away and slammed her foot down on his face to make sure he stayed down.

  She thought about picking up his blaster and killing him. Back in the war, it was something she would have done without hesitation.

  Gina looked up at the cops. They all stared at her, guns aimed at her now and recording her every move with their implants.

  She felt the eyes of café patrons behind her, many of whom no doubt were recording this, too.

  She stifled her urge to completely eliminate the threat. The war was over.

  Instead she gave a mental command to her own implant, and her brand new holo badge appeared in the air beside her face.

  She adopted what she hoped sounded like a diplomatic tone.

  “Detective Wilcox, NID. Looks like you all have it under control.”

  2

  Wilcox walked back to her office, located in a dull square building that covered a city block. Its exterior was off-white, the color favored by the Navy for land-based structures. No one knew why that color was preferred.

  The door on the street opened for her. The building’s security system ran on one of PLAIR’s subroutines, and recognized her.

  The Planetary Lead Artificial Intelligence Representative, known more commonly by her acronym PLAIR, controlled most aspects of citizens’ lives in the Republic in one way or another. The AI kept a watchful eye on almost everything.

  The Republicans got a leg up on the League during the war with the corruption of their artificial intelligence system, known as StarCen.

  Wilcox shuddered with that thought, and hoped one of the lessons learned on her side would be to prevent such degradation from happening here. Life without the AI, or even worse, a corrupted AI, was unimaginable.

  She looked down a long hallway as she passed it while heading for the elevators. The entire building seemed enormous. She waited in line with others and entered the first pod that arrived.

  She missed the close quarters of her Marines, crammed in a troop transport for months before porting down to take over a hostile planet.

  She missed the camaraderie of the military.

  And truth to tell, she missed the adrenaline rush of combat.

  Toward the end, when Republicans began producing superior weaponry like Verberger combat bots that were actually worth a flip, taking on the League Army Expeditionary Forces had been kind of fun. Except for the possibility of getting killed part.

  She thought, you always let the bots serve as tanks and take the hits up front. Then human Marines perform mop up.

  Sergeant Gina Wilcox led the 31st in more than one port down to the surface of a League planet, helping the Republic put “boots on the ground.” That part of the war, the thrill of pending battles and the celebrations of victory . . . that part she missed.

  Or maybe I’m just looking at things through rose-colored glasses, she thought. It wasn’t that fun.

  The elevator dinged on her floor, and she stepped out into the large open office area designated for Naval Investigations Division.

  Jodi Fonteneaux occupied a large desk in the middle of the room. Glass shields could come down around it if she needed to speak to somebody in private. The glass would turn opaque if she required even more privacy.

  Right now her desk was wide open in the middle of the floor, as were hundreds of other smaller desks lined up in neat rows and stretching away for hundreds of meters.

  The workstations were occupied by Naval Investigations personnel busy on cases.

  A large holo played nearby and several people watched it. Other holos at desks around the room played the same news snippet.

  Wilcox stopped to watch it on the way to her own workstation. It showed video from one of the cops at the café.

  She watched herself fritz out the perp’s implant, then walk up and clock him from behind.

  Her face was blurred out.

  She watched herself stomp the guy on his odd leather helmet, then look right at the camera, which in this case came from the optic nerves of one of the cops watching her.

  She stopped, as if coming to a decision.

  A holo badge appeared in the air next to her face.

  Her recorded image said, “. . . NID. Looks like you all have it under control.”

  The artificial host cut in.

  “And there you have it, a remarkable save by one of the outstanding members of the Naval Investigations Division. PLAIR has edited her identity for security purposes. We hope to have additional comments from police on the scene momentarily.

  “In other news . . .”

  Fonteneaux made a twirling motion and the volume on the large holo near her desk went down as the artificial anchor switched topics. Those watching it wandered back to their desks, smiling hello to the detective.

  The Director of NID looked at Wilcox.

  “That was you, I take it.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I let the locals apprehend him. They know how to reach me if he has any links back to the Navy. But, I don’t think he does.”

  “Hm. Good job. Come in, let’s talk.”

  Gina walked closer to the desk and the glass walls came down in a large oblong circle around them. They darkened, but not completely. Instead, they blurred. Gina noted it was enough to keep others from reading their lips.

  Fonteneaux said, “Anybody ask how you blew out the guy’s implant?”

  “No, ma’am. They were too busy focused on his gun to worry much about anything else.”

  “Good. You know, I’m grateful PLAIR decided to edit out your identity in that clip, but I wish she took out the part right before, where you whacked his internal electronics. If someone knows what you did and they’re familiar with the technique, it’s obvious by looking at it.”

  “Not that many people know about it, Boss. From what I read, at the very end of the war on Epsilon, StarC
en used that trick when Thrall sent military forces to take her corrupted node out. No one had really considered the idea of weaponizing implants before that.”

  “Right. I read the same briefing. So has half the Navy brass. People are going to think my division has a special weapon that can do the same thing StarCen did, when they see that clip.”

  Wilcox looked at her superior, who worried about so many things, and she felt bad for adding to the Director’s troubles.

  She said, “You could just tell them PLAIR did it. After all, scrambling implants was StarCen’s idea.”

  Fonteneaux grimaced. “That’s the kind of statement that can be easily verified, if the person asking is high enough up the chain of command. It violates her privacy mandates, too. They’re not going to buy it if I tell them that.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure out what to say if anyone asks. Maybe we’ll get lucky and nobody will notice. Either that or I can come up with a plausible explanation for why the perp grabbed his implant like that.”

  PLAIR’s voice came down from the ceiling,

  “Director Fonteneaux, you are receiving a call from Admiral Severs.”

  Gina stood, getting ready to leave and give her some privacy. Severs, after all, was in charge of the whole Navy.

  Fonteneaux said, “Sit down. We both know you could listen in if you wanted to.”

  Wilcox raised her eyebrows and smiled in acknowledgement, but she sat back down.