Oxygen

Charlie wasn’t the only one in the class. It’s a thing, cops studying law through night school. The ones who don’t try it, talk about it, and the ones who don’t talk about it at least think about it, think about all those hours spent in courtrooms watching lawyers screw up their perfectly good case and knowing they could do it so much better if they just had the chance.

I’ve taught enough of them to know the type, and besides, I’ve dated a cop or two in my life. Well, or three or four, really.

Look, I have a type, all right? Is that a crime? 

Anyway.

Charlie wasn’t the only cop in my first year Introduction to Trial Practice class, but he was the only one to stick it out.  Sharp enough in class, middling marks on assignments, which was understandable once I knew he had a couple of small kids at home. He was quick enough to tell me about them, too, not so much making excuses as politely letting me know he was off the market, or off the market where I did my window-shopping, at least.

Like I said, I have a type. 

He got through first term, and it was somewhere in the middle of Criminal Law Theory that I started to notice a few things about Charlie that didn’t fit so well with the law-school-at-night-cop that I had him pegged as. For one thing, he didn’t live on station. I saw him a couple of times after class going into the Interbus hub, and not the system shuttle either, the inter-system exchange. Now, I ask you, what law enforcement official has the disposal income to commute intersystem for a night class – even if most of it is by correspondence?  

I would have assumed he was on the take, but Charlie – he didn’t seem the type. Not that you can tell, always, but his suits had the shiny patches of long wear on the elbows and ass, and when he brought food to class it was sandwiches, not takeaway. So I figured that whoever was the other parent of those kids he carried pictures of on his datapad had money, and plenty of it.

Cia, he said she was. Not my wife or my partner, just her name, but the way he said it – you know how it is with some guys, they fall hard and that’s it, mortal lock, for life. He said her name like it was code for oxygen. Not that he talked about her much, or about anything much. Just kept himself to himself, did the work, came to class, let something slip sometimes in the chit-chat during break.

Kept coming, too, term after term, plodding through the work, Advanced Criminal Practice, Interjurisdictional Procedure, Principles of Evidentiary Admissibility … scraping through, sometimes barely, but by enough for his name to wind up on the list of students who’d accumulated enough points to graduate and maybe get into a real law school somewhere, or at least get something to hang on their wall, a nice holoscroll with their name and the course on it.

Charles Etay, Certificate of Legal Studies, his would say.

We have a proper graduation ceremony for them. It’s just about the only thing about the school that is proper, truth be told. Not that the students aren’t smart, some of them anyway, or the teachers dedicated – for this salary, let me tell you, you’re either dedicated or too crap to get a job elsewhere and we have a mix of the two – but we’re not exactly Pator Tech, or the Republic University.  

We’re affordable, is what we are, when you get right down to it, and we run our classes at hours that let people with jobs get to them.

But we have a proper graduation, so the students who’ve managed to stick it out can show off to their uncles and aunts and the rest of their clan or culturally-appropriate extended family grouping. Even hire a good hall, up on C Deck, with a view over the station undock and the students from first year catering studies circulating with food and drink afterwards.

I was glad for Charlie that he’d gotten through, even if I was a little sad to see him go.  Face like that brightened the scenery in any classroom, after all.  Certainly brightened the scenery in the hall as all the soon-to-be graduates milled around in their ceremonial robes or best clothes or some combination of the two, too nervous to stand still and craning their necks to see where their family and friends were sitting so they’d look in the right direction when the visiting dignitary of the day handed over the scroll.

It always makes me tear up a little, yeah I’m a sentimental old fool, I know, seeing them all together like that, not the best and brightest youth of the Republic but the ones who didn’t quite make the cut or came back here as adults or didn’t get their shit together and get serious about education until after formal schooling was done, but not giving up, no. Studying nights, working days, two jobs some of them, scraping together tuition by skipping meals, all to get here, today, bare-chested Brutor men and fur-trimmed Sebbies, a Vherry girl with a feather headdress and another in a shimmering nano-mesh that had to be the most expensive piece of clothing she owned for all the pattern kept glitching on the shoulders.  

And Charlie, in his well-cut, well-mended Gallente suit.

I always check especially to see where the students are looking out into the audience, because there’s always one or maybe two who aren’t looking, who know there’s no-one there to cheer for them.  I make a special fuss for them myself, all the teachers do, when they cross the floor.

So I was looking to see who had someone to look for, and that’s why I was looking at Charlie when it happened.

At first, I just figured we’d scored a bigger wig than the usual bigwig for the ceremony, when the security guys came in.  They had that look, not casual muscle or rent-a-guards, that serious professional look that goes with a career looking out for someone whose life is worth a lot and whose death would do more than leave a family grieving.  Out of the corner of my eye I could see people turning to look, staring, curious about who exactly this was all for.

But I was looking at Charlie, and he wasn’t even the slightest bit curious. He relaxed, and gave that almost-not-quite-a-smile of his, like it was exactly what he’d been hoping to see.

It still took me a minute to work it out.  I think it was how large the group was that came in next that threw me, too many of them too close in age and too different in heritage to be a family group. No, it was an entourage, and so I was still thinking V.I.P. when I picked out the handful who moved oblivious through the rest of them, knowing that people would get out of the way and move the furniture and damn well cut a door in the wall if it was necessary.

Two Caldari were the ones I marked out first, maybe husband and wife, the man looking a bit vague and distracted, the woman looking around with sharp interest and a grin.  And then a Gallie woman, a little kid on one hip and the other hand steering a determinedly-independent toddler along.  

When she looked our way and smiled with recognition, the coin dropped.  Charlie’s Cia had money, all right, she had the kind of money that makes you need round-the-clock protection by professionals, and why he was working at all in that case, let along working and doing night-school, was beyond me, if he didn’t need the salary and he had a woman who looked like that at home.

She gave him a puzzled look, not angry though, and when he replied with one of those Gallente shrugs she just laughed, and shrugged herself, and kept on steering the toddler – her son, their son – towards the seating.  Charlie watched them as if everything had come right with the world when she entered the room, with his world anyway, and I tell you, if a man like that had ever looked like that at the sight of me crossing a room …

But there you go.

I looked back at Charlie’s woman, partly because I couldn’t look at him looking at her like that much longer without starting to hate her and myself as well, right as she turned to take her seat.

And I saw the glint of jewels and metal on the back of her neck.

Charlie’s Cia was a caspuleer.

The V.I.P. came in around then, in another little bustle of security, noticeably smaller than the one surrounding Charlie’s family, and no fucking wonder is it, given who or what was in that family.  I got busy lining all my students up and making sure they were in the right order so Harbuko Ardreas didn’t get Nia Reyspander’s certificate, and then the first one was off and across the floor and you wouldn’t think it would be possible but I did forget about Charlie and his capsuleer for a while, in all the cheering and whistling and hooting and stamping for each student. One Brutor woman turned and did a few steps of an impromptu war dance on her way back across the stage and got a standing ovation from the whole audience, and then every student had to get a standing ovation, even the tiny old Vherokior man who was so embarrassed by it he fled back to his seat at a sprint.  Even the V.I.P., one of the higher-up academics from a real university, got into the spirit and yelled and clapped like the rest of us as the students, my students at least until the ceremony was over, took their holoscrolls with as much pride as if they were graduate degrees from Pator or Caille.

And why shouldn’t they, after all?  I’d bet a year’s meager salary that there wasn’t a student anywhere in the Cluster who worked harder, all things taken into account, than mine.

When the registrar called out Charles Etay I looked back at his capsuleer, I couldn’t help it.  

She was staring at him crossing the stage like he had suddenly turned bright purple or taken off all his clothes or something, and then as he got about halfway there her face lit up with – I don’t know, exactly. Happiness, yes, but something else.

Comprehension. And, I could have sworn, relief.

And then she was on her feet, before he even had the scroll in his hand, smiling and clapping with tears streaming down her face, and that was the cue for everyone else to be on their feet too, so Charlie got his certificate in the middle of so much hollering and applause I doubt he could even hear what the V.I.P. said to him.  

He took the holoscroll and made his way off the stage, past where I was standing, and by the time he had, his capsuleer had scrambled out of her row and come running down the side of the hall – causing, I have no doubt, a certain amount of professional consternation among the hard-eyed men and women on her security team.  She was still crying and smiling at the same time as she threw herself at him, arms around his neck.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I head her ask. “I would have – ”

Then she pulled back and looked at him, and maybe she heard the words that had come out of her mouth or maybe there was something she saw in his face, because she stopped herself right there.

They looked at each other for a moment, one of those looks when there’s no-one else in the room even if you’re in the middle of a crowd, not that I know from personal experience but I’ve seen it happen, once or twice.

Then she put her arms back around him, and said his name.

Like it was code for oxygen.