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They stayed outside until the moon began to rise, then stood up and went inside. Steve kissed her on the lips, then pulled her towards the bed. Mariko smiled, then kissed him back. Steve gently reached down to her bikini and started to undo it, kissing his way down to her nipples and enjoying the taste of her in his mouth. And then the interface buzzed.

“Steve, it’s Kevin,” a voice said. Steve bit down the urge to swear virulently. Kevin didn’t have any idea of what he’d interrupted. “We have a political problem.”

“I should have known,” Steve commented. He reached for his dressing gown and pulled it on. Beside him, Mariko did the same. “I relax and look what happens.”

He sighed. “Two to beam up,” he added. “And this had damn well better be important.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Shadow Warrior, Earth Orbit

Kevin had been trained, long ago, in reading the subtle signs of their body language. A person pretending to be annoyed, his tutors had taught him, tended to overact as badly as a child actor and start shouting in outrage at the drop of a hat. Body language wasn’t entirely universal — it hadn’t been universal even before the humans had first encountered the Galactics — but there were plenty of points of similarity. And all of his training was telling him that Steve was very definitely annoyed.

He looked at Mariko. Unlike Steve, she was more composed, but there was a faint flush to her face that told Kevin precisely what they’d been doing when he’d interrupted them. Kevin sighed, inwardly, silently cursing their bad luck. If the whole affair had waited a few more days, Steve could have dealt with it without having to deal with sexual frustration too. Or, perhaps, nipped it in the bud before it got out of hand.

“This could become a major problem,” Kevin said, once they were seated in Steve’s cabin. “And it needs to be handled carefully.”

“No one has ever accused me of being subtle,” Steve commented, dryly. “Why didn’t you handle it yourself?”

Kevin sighed, out loud. “Because this requires your personal attention,” he said. “Because it could have a major long-term effect on our relationship with Earth’s various governments. Because…”

Steve held up a hand. “All right,” he said. “What — precisely — has happened?”

“We’ve had a request for asylum,” Kevin said.

“Oh,” Steve said. “Another one?”

Kevin scowled. The previous requests had been from men and women fleeing political, economic, religious or sexual persecution. They’d all been given the same chance to make it on the moon, with an added note that they would not be permitted to interfere in the affairs of their former home countries. Quite a few of them had accepted the warning, one or two had tried to steer events back home from the moon before they’d been given a sharp rebuke for breaking the terms of their citizenship. But this was different.

“Thomas Flynn,” Kevin said. “Have you ever heard of him?”

Steve shook his head. Mariko nodded.

“He was accused of rape and murder, wasn’t he?” She said. “I remember reading about it a year or two ago.”

“He’s an American citizen who studied in Germany for some reason,” Kevin said. “While he was there, he was accused of raping and murdering a German girl. There was no certain proof, but he spent two years in a German jail before being allowed to go home — and now the Germans want him back. He went to us and requested asylum.”

Steve leaned forward. “Is there a chance he will be sent back to Germany?”

“More than I’d like to admit,” Kevin said. “Right now, relations with Europe aren’t very good. They’re blaming the federal government for us, believe it or not, and there’s a strong field of thought in Europe that thinks the Americans are going to get away with it again. So it’s a political and diplomatic nightmare.”

“I see,” Steve said. “Why do I have the feeling that he was allowed to flee to us?”

“I have no doubt,” Kevin said tightly, “that the Europeans will raise precisely that issue.”

Steve rubbed his forehead. “I don’t see this as being a major problem,” he said. “Tell him that we will take him in, under the same conditions as everyone else, if he agrees to undergo a lie detector test. If he’s innocent, we will inform the German Government and insist that they abandon their pursuit of him. If he’s guilty, he will be judged under our law.”

“If he’s guilty, he would be a fool to insist on pushing us,” Kevin observed. “Rape and murder… they’re among the worst crimes a person can commit.”

He smiled at the thought. Lunar justice, having the ability to definitely separate the guilty from the innocent, was not soft. If found guilty, Thomas Flynn would be introduced to the joys of breathing hard vacuum. But if he was innocent… Kevin shook his head, remembering just how much trouble the DHS had proved over the years. Wasn’t anyone smart enough, these days, to realise that admitting failure wasn’t the same as suicide? But he wasn’t too surprised, sadly. Success often went unrewarded, but failure always drew fire from politicians out for a few soundbites. The German police probably had the same problem.

“Yes, he would be,” Steve said. “But this isn’t the only person who came to us with a criminal record.”

Kevin nodded. In the long run, he suspected, perfect lie detectors would change society as much as anything else. Why bother with an expensive trial when a suspect could be interrogated, then either jailed or released? But it would cause problems too, he knew. What was to stop someone from being interrogated on just about any subject? Like so much else they’d pulled from the alien databases, lie detectors were very much a double-edged sword.

He scowled, inwardly. There were several people on the moon talking about forming a canton of their own, a canton where everyone would wear personal lie detectors at all times. If anyone lied, it would sound an alarm and the speaker would be gravely embarrassed. There were some advantages, Kevin had thought, to such an arrangement, but they would also cause very real problems. What would happen if someone lied without knowing they were lying? The lie detectors could only pick up deliberate lies.

Maybe it would prove that the liar didn’t intend to lie, Kevin thought. Or maybe it would create another set of headaches because they misunderstood the difference between a lie and a mistake.

“I’ll take your message to him,” Kevin said. “And do we want to do the same in future?”

“If people are being persecuted by governments, then yes,” Steve said. “But we must always reserve the right to issue punishment if they are guilty.”

“Which leads to another problem,” Kevin pointed out. “What do we do if the person is guilty by their laws, but not by ours?”

It was easy to imagine quite a few possibilities. There were no laws restricting gun ownership on the moon, although there were dire punishments for anyone stupid enough to threaten the integrity of the lunar settlement. Nor were there any laws on self-defence, drug abuse or quite a few other issues that were criminal matters on Earth. Kevin could imagine several problems if drug abusers sought out the right to live on the moon. He didn’t give a damn if someone wanted to drug themselves into a stupor every day, but if they posed a threat to anyone else…

Mariko smiled. “We can offer to take them in, while their home country can cancel their citizenship if they wish,” she said. “And we can warn them that what laws we do have are not to be trifled with, not lightly.”