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SCL Chapter 153: The Most Dangerous Lawman in the Confederacy
🕑 Added 2025-07-16 23:49:43 +0000 UTCWalking through the town’s crowded central street, Augustus and the others found that Echo Town—like every settlement across the Terran Conf
Walking through the town’s crowded central street, Augustus and the others found that Echo Town—like every settlement across the Terran Confederacy—was no exception when it came to the presence of sex workers. Women with hair dyed in every color imaginable flirted with the young, bashful soldiers of the Revolutionary Army, flashing them inviting glances.
But the ever-watchful Papa Tychus took it upon himself to block every single one of the women—just in case they were assassins, of course.
Whenever one of the prostitutes made a move on Augustus, Tychus would bark, “Hey! Daddy’s here!” Then he’d stuff a few small-denomination Confederate credits down her cleavage, give her ass a pat, and shoo her off like herding sheep. Before Augustus or Raynor could even react, Tychus would vanish along with the woman, leaving them staring after him in stunned silence.
“Follow him. Don’t let him forget his own damn name once his tail’s up in the clouds!” Augustus barked at Sergeant Faraday, ordering him to trail Tychus closely. “Knowing Tychus and his piss-poor self-control—this doesn’t surprise me one bit.”
“This sets a bad precedent,” Raynor said sternly. “Discipline within the Revolutionary Army must never be compromised. Even Tychus should follow the rules—revolutionaries aren’t supposed to visit prostitutes. Or at least, they shouldn’t.”
“True, bad precedent. Officers should lead by example.” Thanks to Tychus’s antics, Augustus had soon distanced himself from the cloud of perfume and brightly dressed women and was heading toward the town center. He was now very close to his destination—the Echo Town Sub-Court.
“Jimmy, let Tychus be. Better for him to mess around with women trying to make a living than to cause trouble for the female soldiers in our ranks.” Augustus chuckled. He could see the restless spark of youthful desire in Raynor’s eyes, that aching curiosity for the opposite sex. Augustus wasn’t surprised—he’d been young once too.
“When I make sheriff, we’ll go get a drink.”
As unlikely as it might sound, the most notorious rebel leader in history had come here to apply for the position of town sheriff. In preparation for the possible evaluations, he’d spent hours practicing pistol shooting without the aid of power armor and had even memorized Confederate law like a schoolboy cramming for an exam.
Right now, the Terran Confederacy’s members of Parliament, cabinet ministers, the Federal Internal Security Bureau, the Ministry of Safety, the Navy Command, and even the Army’s senior officers were all wracking their brains trying to figure out where the rebel fleet was hiding. What none of them had expected was that Augustus was planning to infiltrate Mar Sara’s police system—and use a government paycheck to buy himself a new cowboy hat.
“Alright then, I’ll have a Scotty Bolger's Old No. 8 Whiskey. You know my taste,” said Raynor, clearly not looking to humiliate Tychus.
“You’ve really grown fond of that stuff. Back on Turaxis, you used to stay well away from it at first.” Augustus laughed heartily. “Now you can’t live without it. Everyone knows your safe code is Old No. 8.”
“Hate to disappoint you—it’s actually my mom’s birthday. Dammit.” Raynor grumbled as he caught up to Augustus, and together they knocked on the door of the colony courthouse.
The courthouse was a neoclassical structure built from white marble pillars—simple in lines but imposing in presence. All the stone had come from Echo Town’s own quarries, and every pane of glass had been supplied by the local factory. When construction first began, local judge Ida Rio had received only one-twelfth of the originally approved funding, forcing him to take out a loan from the Confederate Bank. That debt had only been paid off two years ago.
When Augustus knocked on Judge Ida’s office door, the well-respected magistrate was in the middle of processing a civil dispute sparked by a domestic quarrel. The cramped room contained only two filing cabinets, a mechanical clock, and a Mark I railgun mounted on the wall.
The man—short golden hair, a trimmed goatee—was scribbling notes across a sheet of paper, pen in hand. His exposed forearms bore the hardened muscle of someone forged through years of labor, and the pronounced lines of his back swelled like a lion ready to pounce. Men of Mar Sara were like the sand and stone that shaped their orange-gray world—tough, weathered, unyielding.
As he continued writing, Judge Ida set down his pen and called, “Come in,” only then glancing up at the slowly opening door. The moment he saw Augustus’s eyes—sharp and predatory like a hawk—they etched themselves deeply into his mind.
“Honorable Judge Ida,” Augustus said, “my name is Caesar from Agria. I’ve previously served as sheriff in Agria, Hermes, and Tarsonis, as well as precinct chief of Victoria District and lead inspector for the Major Crimes Division in the Tarsonis Police Department. This is my full résumé.” He handed over the printed flyer for the Echo Town sheriff recruitment, along with a completed application form filled out with forged personal information.
The photo matched the face generated by his nano-disguise mask. On fringe worlds like Mar Sara, local government databases often went a decade without updates. For the Umojan agents under Augustus and the intelligence officers, forging identities was child’s play.
The registration location for this ID was several hundred light-years away from Mar Sara, and the person it belonged to had, in fact, once existed. Long before the Confederate Security Bureau had any clue, Umojan operatives had already embedded themselves into local society under various aliases.
Whenever a Umojan agent eliminated a similarly built Confederate and used chemical agents to erase the body, their nano-mask would then mimic the victim’s face—until a new target was found. Only then would the previous victim be officially listed as “missing.”
Disguised as colonists, over 200 agents and quick-witted rebel soldiers had already settled in Echo Town and two nearby towns. Using a wide range of subtle methods, they spread revolutionary ideology and recruited new members for the Pan-Terran Revolutionary Party. Augustus believed that, with time, as more locals were drawn to the revolutionary cause, this area would become a solid foothold for the Revolutionary Army.
Thanks to Umojan assistance, Augustus now had a nearly airtight identity. Even if someone were to launch an inquiry at the original registration site, they’d find a life history that perfectly matched Augustus’s narrative. And should anyone attempt to verify his identity through retinal scans, fingerprints, or high-level genetic tests, he had more than enough tricks to handle it.
“Your record is impressive,” Judge Ida said, pulling a terminal over and accessing the Confederate Citizen Registry to verify Augustus’s information. “But I have to say, I’m puzzled. The Tarsonis Police Department offers far better compensation than any fringe colony like Mar Sara. Even local sheriffs and capable precinct heads here, once they make the slightest mark, immediately apply for transfer to Tarsonis or one of the core worlds.”
“So why would someone like you give all that up to come to Mar Sara… to be just another backwater sheriff?” He locked eyes with Augustus, searching for the slightest hint of unease.
“I mean no offense, but I’ve seen plenty of people come to Mar Sara from the Core Worlds. Many of them are indeed talented—yet most turn out to be criminals fleeing justice, or anti-government dissidents escaping political persecution.”
“So… which one are you?”
"I'm just a law-abiding citizen of the Confederacy."
Augustus’s Umojan nanomask simulated the stern face of a dignified man with a full, orderly beard. His eyes were firm yet tinged with melancholy, and his voice was deep and gravelly—an embodiment of a Hemingway-esque rugged man who had weathered countless storms yet still stood tall.
The identity that came with that face was forty-two years old. In his youth, he had served in the Confederate Marine Corps, and later worked as a sheriff or chief of security on three Confederate colonies and interstellar orbital stations. Yet he had never completed a full five-year term at any of them before being forced to leave. He had been married twice and had two daughters, all of whom had died—one from illness, another in a traffic accident, and the rest during the Guild Wars.
"Tarsonis is far from the utopia people imagine. Even the Tarsonis Police Department, where justice should be upheld the most, is riddled with corruption, bribery, and backdoor dealings. Bribes change hands in the shadows everywhere. Tarsonis's excessive prosperity is like a towering tree in full bloom—its branches are adorned with blossoms, but the roots that sustain it have long since rotted." Augustus pulled his cloak tight across his chest, and the scar beneath his eye trembled with the subtle movement of his face—like a snake coiling and twisting.
"The Terran Confederacy is more corrupt now than it was thirty years ago. The uprisings of the Antigans and the Korhalians speak volumes."
"I came to realize that while the fringe worlds may lag behind Tarsonis in crime rates and economics, at least there's still a trace of justice out here. Someone once told me: 'Only on Mar Sara can you still find some decent folks—and they’ll surely offer you honest work.'"
The rasp in Augustus’s voice and the sorrow on his face touched Judge Ida. Using his authority, Ida scanned the personal ID card attached to the application and retrieved partial records from the Confederate data network. The background Augustus had assumed wasn’t exactly legendary, but it portrayed a man of integrity—known for solving several major cases and upholding the law diligently.
But he was also remarkably “unlucky.” Every time he worked in a precinct for a few years, high-ranking officials would wind up assassinated, or classified documents would mysteriously get copied and leaked.
No one knew that this identity had belonged, from the very beginning, to a Umojan Shadowguard—one of their elite agents who used powerful psionics to manipulate minds.
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