Chapter 31 Markus Bauer is Freed
1076 Words
Markus Bauer woke up in his prison cell aboard Morgan Henry’s pirate spaceship. For the last month, Markus had felt a puzzled sense of optimistic fear for his situation. When he was first picked up by Morgan’s crew, he had felt a terrifying fear and disappointment that he merely hadn’t perished a peaceful death from suffocation in space. Morgan Henry was notorious for mutilating and torturing prisoners for days on end, to please his sadistic tendencies. At least this was what media portrayed, and Markus had no reason to question the media portrayal of Morgan Henry, the evil space pirate. But during the first interrogation, he hadn’t been tortured at all. Instead, Morgan Henry had merely extracted the data from the microchips in Markus Bauer’s brain and then sent him back to his cell. Markus had questioned the usefulness of this procedure, as most of the data on these chips were heavily encrypted and impossible to read without the decryption keys. Markus was, however, smart enough to not question Morgan Henry. After the first interrogation, Markus was left in the cell with little contact with his captors, but they had provided him with enough nutrition and hygiene products to avoid disease.
Suddenly Markus Bauer heard a pistol discharged. He recognised the sound that he had heard for a few times in the last month. It was Morgan Henry’s own custom-made pistol that used special propellant to accelerate the bullets to ten times the speed of sound, while still being low recoil and easy to carry. The pistol was designed to have enough power to penetrate any armour, even the highly advanced Terran Council’s special operations armour. Suddenly, the door opened, and Morgan Henry stood there with blood splattered all over his face.
Morgan Henry:
- Aye Lad, you are coming with me.
Markus Bauer:
- Are you going to kill me?
Morgan Henry:
- Kill you? Why would you say that?
- Ah, you mean the blood on my face. I do all the executions on this vessel. The one who gives the sentence should carry out the killing himself, that’s our code.
Markus Bauer:
- That’s barbaric!
Morgan Henry:
- Nay, what’s barbaric is ordering others to kill for you, while rich folks like you are sitting and sipping space cognac and smoking cigars from the safety of your elegant boardroom back on Earth!
- But enough of that. Aye, today is your lucky day. Arrrr! Someone posted your large ransom; a hefty amount for the price of returning you alive! They will meet you close to the dock, and I will bring you there.
They walked together to the docks where they met with Tzi Chen Cheng; the chairman for the Terran Council Science Commission and a high-ranking member of House Cheng. Markus Bauer was baffled to see him under these circumstances, and even more baffled to see him alone without any bodyguards. Morgan Henry made a signal to his men, and he and his fellow pirates left the docks to the two men.
Markus Bauer:
- Tzi Chen! What on Earth are you doing here, on the ship of the most notorious pirate of the solar system, at the fringe of this solar system?
Tzi Chen Cheng:
- We are close to Earth, Mr Bauer.
- Mr Henry and his men secretly work for us as an independent party. By having pirates carry out objectives for us, we have plausible deniability when things go wrong. All Terran houses operate the same way.
Markus Bauer:
- But I am not affiliated with House Cheng? I come from House Muller territory, and I work directly for the Terran Council.
Tzi Chen Cheng:
- True, but it would be silly to deny any connection with Morgan Henry when I am on his ship. Besides who would believe your claim, if you made our secretive association public.
- Truth to be told, I came to see the body of Keila Eisenstein, if it even exists.
Markus Bauer:
- It exists! I examined it myself before the explosion on the Science Bay at ISS Supreme Earth occurred.
Tzi Chen Cheng:
- Very well.
- Let’s examine it together. Morgan Henry claims that it is stored in that crate over there.
Both men walked to the crate where Tzi Chen noticed that this was a phony.
Tzi Chen Cheng:
- You fool! Chief Scientist on a Terran Council vessel, and you cannot identify that this is a forgery!
Markus Bauer:
- What do you mean?
- I had a suspicion that it could be a non-functional clone, but it was hard to determine due to bullets destroying the spine and the brain, making it impossible to be analysed in its entirety.
Tzi Chen Cheng:
- It’s a lot easier to determine just by studying the bone structure. The bone structure of the corpse matches the body of someone who grew up on Earth. But Keila grew up on Mars. She should have more hollow bones due to the lower gravity on Mars and different colour pigment on the skin tissue, due to the various elements present in Mars food produce and harvest.
Markus Bauer:
- I am not sure that I follow you.
Tzi Chen Cheng:
- What you have in front of you is a clone, made with Terran equipment emulating a person who lived under the conditions of Earth. Whether it was a functional or non-functional clone is still to be examined, but I can guarantee you that it was definitely not Keila Eisenstein.
Markus Bauer:
- So, what are you going to do? Expose Bjorn’s deceit?
Tzi Chen Cheng:
- No, that’s your job. I am not going to officially complain about a senior member of another House, based on a corpse I found on a pirate ship. That’s not a good look for House Cheng and not a very credible claim.
Markus Bauer:
- So, what am I going to do?
Tzi Chen Cheng:
- You’ll figure it out. Now let’s leave this ship. There are better places to linger than a pirate ship, regardless whether the captain is your top-secret agent or not.
After saying that, they entered Tzi Chen’s private shuttle and set the direction to Earth.
- Writer
