When Augustus entered the inner office, Sheriff McAllen was half-dozing with his cheek propped on one hand, the rosy flab of his face spilling out between his fingers. Our honorable sheriff was clearly locked in some fierce dream-battle with imaginary enemies—his brow was deeply furrowed, and he hadn't noticed a thing at the door.
"Ahem." Augustus cleared his throat.
But McAllen remained fast asleep.
Seeing this, Tychus calmly lit a cheap cigar inside the office, then strolled over and pressed the burning tip straight onto the sheriff's thick, fatty forehead.
"AAAH!"
Sheriff McAllen bolted upright with a roar. His pale blue eyes bulged wide open, and his glare was as fierce as an enraged lion.
"Who the hell—?!" he bellowed, his voice matching the volume of a lion that could rival his own massive body. "You—you bastard born of some whore—I'll have you thrown in El Indio Prison!"
"Give our sheriff a little wake-up call," Augustus said, cutting off Tychus before he could explode. He turned to Raynor, who promptly pulled out his Colt revolver and pressed it against McAllen's forehead.
"You thugs—how did you even get in here?! I don't care what you do, you'll never get a single safe code out of me!"
The sheriff was quick to assess the situation. Now fully alert, he squinted hard at Augustus, trying to match his face against the wanted posters he knew by heart.
"You… You're the new marshal?"
His tone flipped instantly.
"I'm Sheriff McAllen," he said, suddenly smiling, flashing the oily, ingratiating grin that had served him well in politics.
"My apologies—I got a report last night that there'd be a robbery at the town bank, so I spent the whole night on stakeout," he added smoothly.
"That was my mistake, then."
Augustus tossed his dual-revolver holster onto McAllen's desk without asking if the story was true.
"Sit."
"Please—sit," McAllen echoed quickly, gesturing toward the chair.
Sheriff McAllen was nearing fifty, with only six or seven years left until retirement. He was an old hand—his tenure went all the way back to the earliest days of the Confederacy, alongside the oldest marshals in Hinterland. Had Augustus not abruptly replaced him, Judge Ida—who had no one else to turn to—would have almost certainly promoted the town's sole sheriff to marshal by default.
"Please, have a seat."
Sheriff McAllen stepped aside to offer his own chair. He wasn't the kind of local tyrant who relied on a badge to throw his weight around in a small town. The photo on the wall from his younger days might not have screamed charisma, but it did show a man with a sturdy, capable build.
Still, obesity was far from uncommon among Terran Confederacy police—especially for someone like McAllen, a sheriff slowly fading into the background as age caught up with him.
"No need. I have my own office," Augustus said, waving it off. He'd already been briefed about McAllen by Judge Ida. In his youth, McAllen had been a tough, justice-driven hardliner. But as retirement loomed closer, old injuries had sidelined him. And the man who once spat venom at criminals had finally surrendered to doughnuts, soda, and every other carb-laden vice that warped his frame over time.
"Of course," McAllen said with a smile. "This place is yours now. The former marshal's office is just next door."
"He's got some sense, at least," Tychus muttered to Raynor loud enough for everyone to hear. "Otherwise I'd've made him regret ever being born."
"No argument here," Raynor replied.
It was only then that McAllen finally gave the group behind Augustus a closer look. Though long past his prime, his eyes still retained a sharp edge. It didn't take him long to spot the trouble: Tychus and Raynor weren't men you'd want to run into in a dark alley. Mira Han, chewing gum and blowing bubbles like she owned the place, was clearly just a teenage delinquent in uniform. And as for Corporal Faraday—his plain clothes and mild demeanor made him look like any forgettable young man you'd pass on the street.
"They're new recruits," Augustus said. "You'll need to help process their onboarding paperwork later."
"There's no need to drag this out," Augustus continued, brushing dust from his coat. "Let me be clear: from this moment on, there's only one voice that matters in Echo Town Police Station—mine."
He let out a heavy sigh, then shifted his tone.
"I'd rather not see a respected sheriff forced into early retirement just to protect his reputation."
"This place needs to be cleaned up."
"You're right," McAllen replied quickly. "The officers could use a refresher on professionalism." He had clearly realized his subordinates might not have made the best impression on their new boss. "But they're still young—they've got time to learn."
"That's not what I meant," Augustus said.
"There are too few officers here."
"We're hiring more."
His tone left no room for argument.
"Hmm… We've still got sixty-nine open positions. The hangar crew's also short-staffed," McAllen said. "How many people are you looking to recruit?"
"Start with two hundred."
Augustus's answer was blunt—and shocking.
"That's impossible."
McAllen reacted instantly, clearly thinking Augustus was out of his mind.
"We can't afford that many salaries."
"And you've been around long enough to know how this works—especially on a backwater like Mar Sara, a place Tarsonis's forgotten exists. Everyone knows the Confederacy is the biggest, most bloodsucking leech in all of Terran space. They might throw me in jail for saying that, but it's the truth. The government's stinginess is legendary. Hopeless."
"They don't often delay payment—but they never pay much. And over the years, they've paid less and less."
"Here on Mar Sara, only people blinded by justice still want to be cops. The job barely pays more than a factory worker's, and they get to risk their heads catching bullets."
"Even if we had that kind of money, we couldn't find the people."
McAllen was being brutally honest.
"You don't have to worry about that," Augustus replied. "How many suits of powered armor do we have in the armory?"
"Twenty-two sets of CMC-200," McAllen said. "Leftovers from the military. The kind of scrap they throw to local police like table scraps to dogs."
"That's not your concern either." Augustus shook his head again. In just a few days, he'd be able to march openly across Mar Sara with an entire company of Revolutionary Army troops.
"We don't need that many people. Echo Town's just a small place," McAllen said, clearly puzzled.
"Rebels!" Augustus declared firmly.
"Remote colonies like Mar Sara are exactly where rebels are most likely to hide."
"To deal with them, we need to strengthen our local forces."
"Also," he added, as something else occurred to him, "I need to know: are there any tough bastards around here, or places crawling with local warlords? Skip the obvious ones like the Pegasus Brotherhood."
"There is one," McAllen said after a moment's thought.
"There's a canyon out in the desert they call the Death Zone. It's a critical route between the Capital District and Hinterland, but it's also swarming with criminals. We call it the Perdition's Crossing."
"Other police stations say there's a rare crystal mine underground in that area. The crystals give off electrical pulses that interfere with the local magnetic field and comms signals, making outside communication nearly impossible. It's the perfect place to disappear."
"Are we certain the interference is caused by the rare crystals?" Augustus had asked casually at first, but now he was fully focused.
"No idea," McAllen admitted.
"Then what else could it be?"
...
2489.9.12, 07:00
Echo Town, Sheriff's Office, Temporary Command Center for the "Anti-Gang Operation".
"The Pegasus Brotherhood's boss, Mital Sevira, shot himself during our final roundup. Every one of his personal terminals, electronic devices, and old records was destroyed."
Tychus Findlay stood tall in his khaki colonial police uniform. An electromagnetic pistol hung from his waist, and under the wide-brimmed cowboy hat sat a rugged, menacing face.
With one hand, Tychus slapped a wanted poster down in front of Augustus. With the other, he drew a gleaming, blood-grooved dagger from the sheath on his hip and pinned the poster to the desk.
"That means we're probably not going to dig up any higher-ups behind that infamous drug cartel. No chance now to uncover a bigger syndicate."
"Not bad, Sheriff Tychus."
Augustus had to put in some effort to pry the dagger out of the desk. He glanced at the wanted poster, its photo already stained with blood.
"Has no one ever told you you've got a knack for being a cop?"
"Just playing my part," Tychus muttered without much expression.
"If you had me working as an officer for real, I'd definitely be sneaking into the armory or the supply depot looking for a little something on the side. But if you're paying me to pretend to be a cop, well, I don't mind that at all."
"I don't think that's too much to ask—so long as you keep that rotten temper of yours and your sticky fingers in check."
Augustus tossed the dagger back to Tychus and then tore down another wanted poster from the wall.
Now, only a few names remained on the board—fugitives wanted across the entire Confederacy. Among them were the newly risen drug lord from Deadman's Port, and prominently listed: Augustus and his father, Angus.
"Who knows," Tychus said, lighting up a cigar. "We've already cleaned out all the gangs in this town. Even the street punks loitering around aimlessly got a good beating."
Suddenly, he chuckled.
"Just thinking back to the look on those gangsters' faces when over a hundred Revolutionary Army boys in powered armor showed up on their doorstep cracks me up. They probably never imagined they'd witness something that intense in their entire lives."
For Augustus, who now commanded a Revolutionary Army unit, clearing out gang influence from a small town was an easy feat. Several Ghost agents captured from Vyctor 5 were under his command, and with their outstanding telepathic abilities, Echo Town's entire gray-market network was laid bare.
From there, his well-trained revolutionaries simply dressed up as police and went in swinging.
Officially, Echo Town's police force numbered around two hundred. But in reality, all Augustus needed was a few extra sets of uniforms—then his usable manpower far exceeded that number.
---
I will post some extra Chapters in Patreon, you can check it out. >> patreon.com/TitoVillar
---