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Righthere Station was a relic of an older era, the one where it was considered completely reasonable to place space stations around dying cinders of stars for no other reason than because one could. It was now mostly a research outpost for scientists to study what was previously thought impossible: a star that was dying without going supernova or red giant. The station was home for scientists of all stripes, and with the exception of that one research grant allocation session gone terribly wrong, crime was consistently very low. Any police officer who found themselves assigned there knew that they were being shunted sideways because they could not be demoted, and could look forward to several years of very, very dull street work.
Sergeant Rilz knew all of this, intimately so. Assigned to Righthere Station after mouthing off one time too many to her supervisors, she had been here for three years already and would be here for another seven, unless said supervisors either died or had the sticks taken out of their asses. Neither seemed likely. She had been joined by the hapless Corporal Laks in her second year, promoted far beyond his experience because of who three of his progenitors were and then shunted out of the way so that he would not endanger himself and others, and had resigned herself to dealing with nothing more interesting than histrionics of drunken astrophysicists claiming that their rivals stole their grants.
The fact that all five of her detainment cells were filled with persons to question was a historic event. Even more historic were the events that gave rise to having all five of her detainment cells filled.
The CCTV footage had shown a Terran man in a grocery store at the Downtown Mall, standing in front of the aisle of cleaning products and complaining vigorously on his comm-link. Laks was still trying to enhance the audio, but they already knew he was talking to Gamora, which was enough to gain Rilz’s attention and justify her arrest given subsequent events. Then two Hazard Protection Agency officers wearing their protective suits were thrown into the frame of the footage, where they were suspended in mid-air by the antigravity tech in their suits. Their colleague had been the one who called for backup, except that he had panicked and called his manager as opposed to the police, causing the situation to stretch out far longer than it should have. A man appeared, all of his visible skin marked with red tattoos, carrying the HPA probes in each hand like poorly designed javelins, closely followed by what appeared to be a rodent with a very illegal weapon slung over one shoulder and a small potted plant in a front-opening sling across his chest. The Terran man looked over at the altercation, rolled his eyes in obvious annoyance, looked up at the security camera and shot it.
Rilz and Laks had arrived just as the raccoon had shot out the freezer aisle, superheating the contents and giving anyone standing nearby a very light sunburn. In a way, that was quite funny, as Rilz had fielded no less than thirty complaints in the last hour from scientists who had learned that tonight they could not rely on their usual meal of microwaved hot pockets and would instead have to learn how to make a grilled cheese or something similar. She had shared this sentiment with Laks, who had just shaken his head at her in apparent disbelief.
At the time, however, there had been some concerns about how they were going to arrest these people. Righthere Station barely warranted body armour, let alone the kind of weaponry necessary to subdue Drax the Destroyer. Fortunately, the Terran man had convinced them to surrender without a fight once they had deployed the containment nets. It was fortunate, because the nets had not been maintained in several years, and could barely detain a small child.
Right now, Laks was studying each of the detainment cells in turn to ensure that none of their prisoners tried to escape. Each prisoner was housed in a small room furnished solely with a table and two chairs, all made of metal and bolted to the floor, and a terminal on a stalk arm. The stalk arm was bolted to the wall and the default position was just out of reach for most species in the galaxy to reach, even had one of their hands not been handcuffed to the leg of the chair they were sitting on or, in the case of the raccoon, both hands not held down by the recessed handcuffs on the table top.
“All right, enough screwing around,” she said, leaning over Laks’ shoulder. “What reports do you have for me before I interrogate these guys?”
Investigation time 02:00 - Interrogation of Drax “the Destroyer” by Sergeant E Rilz.
Drax the Destroyer was a man that Rilz knew only by reputation. Judging by the way that this interrogation was going, she wished it had stayed that way. Drax was frustratingly literal, and it had taken Rilz ten minutes just to establish that he had boarded Righthere Station and spoken with the Hazard Protection Agency officers stationed at the first checkpoint.
“Thank you,” she said, remembering her training in appropriate interviewing techniques. “Then what happened?”
“I informed them that the Star-Lord was coming and that they should prepare themselves for his arrival.”
Rilz looked at the terminal screen. On it was a statement taken from the Hazard Protection Agency who Drax had attempted to skewer with his own sensing tool. It was a fortunate thing that the hazmat suits that all HPA officers were required to wear on duty were able to withstand anything up to necroblasts, because her budget did not stretch to covering a murder investigation. He had been shaken by the events — not surprising, given that HPA work rarely involved physical violence — but after a stiff drink he had been able to write his account of what happened.
“What word did you use to describe Quill?” As she asked this question, Rilz reached behind her ear and switched the translator on to translate from Standard to the second most commonly used language on the station, a dialect used by a people whose planet had been consumed by Galactus so long ago that they did not have a name for their planet anymore.
“I did not describe Quill. I told them that the Star-Lord was coming.”
Rilz closed her eyes and prayed to the progenitors to give her strength. It translated as both ‘the lord of stars’ and ‘the consumer of stars’. Of course it did. She took a breath and let it out slowly in lieu of what she wanted to do, which was curse everyone in the immediate vicinity for shooting up a grocery store over a translation error.
“What happened next?”
“The small one said that Quill will have to be contained.” Drax looked around the detainment cell. “I did not think that was proper. We do not have criminal records and have committed no crimes.”
Rilz resisted the urge to rub at the bridge of her nose. “Why did you think that he would be arrested?”
“I am learning about euphemisms. I know that ‘contain’ means ‘to imprison’.”
“Then what happened?” Rilz was very proud of how her frustration did not come out in her voice. She sounded calm and professional, like someone who shouldn’t be stationed at Righthere Station.
“They turned on their silly little suits.”
“And then you fought them.”
“Yes.”
This questioning was going better than Rilz had hoped for. She had not expected Drax to simply admit all of this.
“You admit that you assaulted three Hazard Protection Agency officers with their probe equipment.”
“Yes.”
That was everything she needed for a bail undertaking. She thought it was a fairly open and shut case, but there were procedures to be followed. She pushed the terminal towards Drax, careful to keep her own hand well away from his. His reputation had been quite explicit about how good a hand-to-hand fighter he was, and Rilz held no illusions about her own skills.
“All right, bail undertaking’s on the terminal. Standard conditions, and an additional one: you’re not allowed to make contact with any Hazard Protection Agency officers.”
“I understand,” Drax said. He read the screen and then frowned. “I am Drax the Destroyer. My bail should be higher than a mere forty thousand units.”
Rilz wished it could be too. However, rules were rules, and Drax was, through some truly outrageous events, a cleanskin. She could not even put on the usual charges for aggravation, let alone the standard charges of inducing public terror that would accompany the arrest of a man with Drax’s reputation. “That’s your bail,” she said instead, blandly. “Take it or leave it.”
Drax frowned at the screen and for a moment she thought that he was going to refuse to enter into the undertaking out of pride. Then he placed his thumb onto the terminal and authorised the transfer of bail money.
Investigation time 02:40 - Interrogation of Rocket by Sergeant E Rilz.
Rilz had had the misfortune of arresting Rocket in the past, on a different space station, for what had started out as a public nuisance charge. The raccoon had told her at the time that he would escape and leave her police station a smoking crater, which a younger Rilz had thought was unlikely given that he was three feet tall and a talking rodent. The resulting smoking crater created by a jury-rigged explosive made from his handcuffs, the power source that he had apparently swallowed on his arrest, and a writing stylus, meant that Rilz was sparing no precaution this time. If this station was blown up it would take years for a replacement to be built, and she did not want to spend her bureaucratic exile working in a tent.
“Rocket,” she said flatly.
“What?” Rocket said, not pausing from his attempts to try to slip out of the cuffs. “These are cutting off my circulation!”
“They’re not,” she said. “What were you doing at the Downtown Mall?”
“That is such a stupid name,” Rocket said. “You come up with that?”
“What were you doing at the Downtown Mall?” she repeated.
“Shooting people,” Rocket said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the galaxy. Perhaps to him it was.
“Why?”
“It seemed like a good idea.”
“Did you believe that the Hazard Protection Agency officers had come to arrest Quill?”
Rocket snorted. “No. That was just Drax. Verbally dense dumbass didn’t even recognise hazmats suits. How stupid is that?”
“Why did you think it would be a good idea?”
“I thought it would be funny. It’s not like I could even get through their shields.”
“You admit that you shot at three Hazard Protection Agency officers in an unprovoked attack?”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
Rilz released one of Rocket’s hands from the handcuffs using the terminal, then pushed it all the way across the table towards him. “Your bail is —"
Before she could finish, Rocket had already accepted the terms of his bail undertaking. “You’re not going to read it?” she said, eyebrows raising.
“Nah,” Rocket said, stretching out his now freed other hand. “I’m not going to follow it anyway.”
“Of course you’re not,” Rilz muttered under her breath. “You’re free to go,” she said louder, pretending she did not see Rocket’s smirk. “Don’t let me see you again.”
Investigation time 04:30 - Interrogation of “Groot” by Sergeant E Rilz.
On the table sat a small clay pot, filled with potting mix and covered with badly painted depictions of what Sergeant Rilz suspected was Ronan the Accuser’s ship, the Dark Aster, being shot at by a spaceship she did not recognise. The crude depiction of male genitalia on the bow of the Dark Aster was, she felt, an unnecessary touch of artistic innovation. Planted inside the pot was what appeared to be a small sapling, albeit one that could move, hum and say in a high-pitched squeak “Groot!” every so often.
It had done this for four hours.
The fact that it knew its name meant that Sergeant Rilz had been able to do a search on it. Apparently it was a “flora colossus” which Sergeant Rilz assumed at first was an attempt at irony. As its record continued to load slowly on the poor network connection that was all her superiors would pay for in this backward planet, she realised that instead it was merely a description of the blatantly obvious. She looked from the screen of a lumbering giant of a tree to the small sapling that was dancing to a beat only it could hear.
"How did you end up with a commendation from the Nova Corps?” she said finally.
“Groot!” chirped the sapling.
She really should have predicted that it would go this way. There was a tension headache building behind her eyes, and she hadn’t even started with the last two in their holding cells. She stood up from the hard metal chair and switched off the network terminal, conceding defeat for the moment.
“We keeping this one, Sarge?” Corporal Laks asked dubiously as Sergeant Rilz closed the door behind her and locked it with a ostentatiously loud click. “I got pets more capable than it is.”
“For the moment,” she said, massaging the space between her eyebrows. “I’ll laugh if the only person we can send it home with is Thanos’ daughter.”
“Don’t you think it’s creepy that she just agreed to come in like that?”
Sergeant Rilz did think it was creepy. She had not grown up hearing stories about Thanos’ children like the terribly young Corporal Laks had, but she knew of Gamora’s history. She knew what she had done, and that painted a very grim picture for this little, understaffed police station if she was planning something. However, the video footage from her cell suggested that she had not moved since sitting down in the metal chair and her expression was as stoic as it had been since Sergeant Rilz had detained her.
“What’s Quill doing?”
“The same thing he’s been doing for a while,” Corporal Laks said with a martyred sigh. “Do we really need to keep the audio feed on?"
Investigation time 04:45 - Interrogation of Peter Jason Quill aka “Star-Lord” by Sergeant E Rilz.
Peter Quill, apparently known as ‘Star-Lord’, though more commonly known as ‘that pretentious dick who calls himself Star-Lord’, had been singing a song about sharing alcoholic beverages he had taken from a wall for twenty minutes now. Somehow, it was infinitely more annoying than Groot’s dancing. It was probably the fact that he was singing it off-key.
For not the first time in her career Sergeant Rilz cursed the ancestors that gave her perfect pitch. Why was it so common for suspects to sing when they were detained? Why did they insist on doing it when they could not sing on pitch? Why was she the one on shift when it happened? Instead of giving voice to her undying hatred for suspects who sung in her detention cells, she opened the door.
“Star-Lord,” she said with all the sarcastic disdain she could manage.
Quill appeared to be immune to sarcasm, as he brightened immediately. “Finally! I’ve been recognised!”
“Your … associate told me that.”
“You know, you say that and it does not sound like a good thing.” Then after a minute, he added, “which one’s my associate?”
“Drax the Destroyer.”
“Oh.” Quill winced. “We’re not so much associates as we are … people who travel in the same direction. And work together on things. We don’t really have a name for that, because he’s not really the business partner kind of guy. Less negotiation, more stab it in the face.”
“Associates then,” Sergeant Rilz said flatly.
“Aw, man, why you gotta say it like that?”
“Mr Quill, you were arrested at the Downtown Mall —“
“You have the least imaginative names,” Quill muttered under his breath.
“— Which was the scene of two crimes, committed by your associates. Why were you there?”
Quill looked sheepish. “I was buying cleaning supplies.”
“Why?”
“Gamora said I had to because my ship’s disgusting. Her words, not mine.”
Rilz shook her head. “You just happened to be there because Thanos’ daughter told you to clean your ship?”
“Hey, she’s not his daughter. He kidnapped her, you know that?”
She did not, but also did not see how that was relevant to the current line of questioning. “Mr Quill, you haven’t answered my question.”
“My ship is really disgusting,” Quill said, smiling ruefully. “Nova Corps didn’t even want to touch the inside, and they rebuilt part of it.”
Rilz checked Quill’s profile. It, like the others, had a commendation from Nova Corps and a clean record. There was even an annotation confirming his assertion that Nova Corps had rebuilt the exterior of his ship and that even the contractors who cleaned crime scenes wanted nothing to do with the interior of his ship. She pushed her chair back two inches after reading that.
“Who are you people?” she said. “You have a commendation from the Nova Corps, the most dangerous woman in the galaxy has a commendation, even the singing tree has a commendation!”
“Wait, you interrogated Groot? Wow, that must have been useful. Let me guess, he just said ‘Groot’ all the time?”
“I did not interrogate Mister Groot,” she said icily.
“Right, right, of course you didn’t.” Quill smiled in a way that obviously was meant to be charming and rakish. Sergeant Rilz had seen several attempts at that this week alone and was not impressed. “You asked who we are. We are …” and he paused for effect. “The Guardians of the Galaxy.”
You’re a bunch of assholes, Rilz thought but managed to not say aloud. She did, however, permit herself to roll her eyes.
“No, man, seriously! We were the guys who stopped Ronan the Accuser! We saved Xandar! We used the Infinity Gem and lived!” He gesticulated with both hands as best he could with one hand cuffed to the leg of the table. “We’re the good guys!"
“You’re the guys who shot out a grocery store,” Sergeant Rilz said, cutting him off before he continued on his diatribe.
“Hey,” Quill said, raising a finger of his free left hand to point at the ceiling. He used this hand to emphasise parts of his next sentences. “I shot out a camera, which I admit was very bad of me. I am very sorry and I won’t do it again. But I did not shoot out the rest of the store.”
“So you admit you did deliberately shoot the surveillance camera with the intent of destroying it?"
“Yep,” Quill said.
“Okay, we’re done,” Rilz said, rotating the terminal on its arm and pushing it towards Quill. She stood up and wiped her hands on the front of her trousers, having touched something sticky. She hoped it was chewing gum but didn’t care to look. “Your bail is two thousand units, payable immediately.”
“Wait, don’t you care why I did it?”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?” He seemed genuinely surprised at this.
Rilz shrugged. “It’s a minor offence,” she said. “I have real crimes to investigate. Put your thumb on the screen and authorise the transfer if you are going to enter into a bail undertaking.”
Quill looked at her in suspicion. “What other bail conditions are there?”
“It’s the standard terms, Mr Quill.” She jerked her head at the terminal. “It’s all there if you care to read it.”
Quill scowled at the screen as he scrolled through the bail undertaking, before putting his thumb print on the terminal screen. Once the payment had been approved, the handcuff around his right wrist released him, drawing back into the table silently. He rubbed his wrist with his other hand.
“About my ‘associates’,” he said, using his hands to create air quotation marks. “When will they be released?”
“Soon.” She did not tell him that she had one person of interest left to question.
Investigation time 05:45 - Interrogation of Gamora by Sergeant E Rilz.
Gamora had not moved since the last time Rilz looked at her on the video feed. She did not move when Rilz opened the door to the detainment cell, nor when Rilz sat down in front of her. Her expression was impassive and demeanour stoic, a stark contrast to the free-wheeling Peter Quill. If it had not been for the fact that the video footage clearly showed him speaking to her just prior to his shooting out the camera, then Rilz would never have believed these two were associated.
“Gamora,” Rilz said. Gamora did not move. “Why are you here?”
She was silent.
“Does Thanos have anything planned for this planet?”
Gamora looked at her now. “I wouldn’t know,” she said evenly. “I am no longer privy to his plans.”
Rilz had taken the opportunity to review Gamora’s record, like the others, before the interrogation started. She also would have a clean criminal record, with the only thing of note being a commendation from Nova Corps. This, Rilz thought, was beyond a joke. Quill’s criminal record would have been a collection of petty crimes. Drax’s record could have been a mistake, though how that mistake could have happened Rilz could not imagine. Gamora, on the other hand, had a reputation that far preceded her. “No longer his daughter?”
“I was never his daughter.” There was cold fury in those words, in the way that she snapped that out without raising her voice. Her face was a stone mask.
“Maybe not, but you were involved in the shoot-out at Downtown Mall today.”
Gamora shook her head. “My involvement is limited to telling Quill that yes, he must buy cleaning supplies.”
“Why?”
Interestingly, this question broke the stone mask that kept Gamora expressionless. Her jaw bunched in frustration as she said, “Because he is a child. A whining child who complains about spending a handful of units to fix his mess while spending hundreds of credits on his pornography addiction.”
Rilz really hoped that the sticky substance on the stalk of the terminal in Quill’s room was chewing gum. While trying not to think about it, she checked the surveillance records of the station. Gamora, it seemed, had stayed on Quill’s ship until a few minutes after Quill had started talking to her, then she had gone straight from the ship to the police station.
“Our records show you went from your ship to here.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know your crew were here?”
“They are not my crew,” Gamora said. “And I could hear gunfire when Quill called me.”
“So you just … guessed they’d be here?”
“Yes.”
Rilz checked her records again. There really was nothing here to legally allow her to keep Gamora. “All right, you’re free to go.”
“Thank you,” Gamora said. She stood up, and somehow managed to imbue even that with lethal grace.
“Next time, do an online order,” Rilz said. “Righthere Station isn’t equipped for you mercenary types.”
Gamora blinked at the mercenary line. “Yes. It isn’t. May I have my weapons back?”
“Collect them at the front counter. And for next time, Righthere Station is a weapons-free zone.”
“I’m sure you believe that,” Gamora said as she took her leave. Rilz permitted herself another eyeroll, now that she was sure that Gamora could not see her, before she closed the cell up. Honestly, these losers deserved one another. The fact that they had all waited for each other in the police station would have been charming if they weren't taking up space that she could use for literally anything else.
Corporal Laks looked at her from where he was processing the bail agreements with both sets of eyebrows raised. “You just let her go?”
“We had nothing on her,” Rilz said with a shrug. “We can’t just detain her forever because we want to. Besides, we’ll have our hands full getting the people we have evidence against to pay up.” She sighed. She really needed to put in that application to transfer to literally anywhere else in the jurisdiction. Maybe then she would have the funding she needed to do proper police work.
“You don’t think they’ll pay up, Sarge?”
Rilz did not even try to stop herself laughing at the naïveté of the young. “Oh, Corporal,” she said finally, with the cynicism of someone who has been in the police force for decades. “I will bet a month’s salary that they’ll try to escape to who knows where.”
Investigation time 361:00 - Recovery action by Sergeant E Rilz.
It did not come as a surprise to Sergeant Rilz when the day for the so-called ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ to attend their court dates came and went without any appearances or transfer of money. She did receive a scan of what appeared to be raccoon testicles, which she put in the file with all the other unwanted dick pics she had been sent over the years.
“Issue warrants for their arrest,” she told Corporal Laks. “And add a charge of public indecency for the raccoon.”