Snippet #2761153

The jury were an odd bunch. Of the fifteen, eight were human and seven alien beings hailing from worlds in systems as far flung as the Andromeda galaxy trillions of lightyears away. Yolihuani Ixehuatl had battled nobly with her colleagues Geraldine Batchelder-Lockerby and Thục-Đoàn Phùng in selecting which jurors could be sufficiently impartial as well as sufficiently representative of Terra's (and Wing City in particular) xenodiversity, finally agreeing these last weeks on the group including a young refugee from a Taiyou outlying system; a distinctly out-of-place mage garbed in intricately-patterned robes from the mountains in Therrier-Paix; a Tauron laborer recently naturalized, with an interpreter accompanying him; a Murghb'qq emigré firmly resettled at a cushy teaching post at a Hafirjan university; and a stray Azrik veteran, wizened and ancient, of the Scatteran-Aschen campaigns long past. The mage, an enormously fat and pale-faced woman with long silky hair in a single loose braid, had been the prosecution's hardest fight. And though Yolihuani had fought valiantly till the bitter end of voir dire, the mage had been seated, promising she would not be biased against Elijah.

Yolihuani didn't believe it for a second.

In the past many months, her client had refused to meet with her, claiming he did not want a lawyer. Ordinarily, Yolihuani might have shrugged and turned her attention to other cases in sore need of it. But the high-profile nature of this particular case demanded she do her due diligence at every possible turn. And so, she'd had to tell her wife that yes, this trial would continue as scheduled, and Yolihuani might be keeping long, late nights for weeks or even months to come. The Terran people wanted blood. And it was Yolihuani's uneviable role to do her damndest to fight for her client's life and limb.

Prison was almost inevitable, but she could spare him death, perhaps, and might yet succeed in obtaining an acquittal on at least some of the many charges filed against him. Elijah Alexander Kenton was a mass murderer to a scale and scope even untamed Terra had rarely seen before, millions of deaths following in his destructive wake. Yolihuani's wife had texted just that morning to inform her, not without a smidge of resentment for her involuntary involvement, that another death threat had arrived at their door. This time, in the form of a severed goat head, brain matter spilling from the cracked skull, on the front porch. Well, that was an occupational hazard at this point in Yolihuani's career as a heralded public defender in Terra's judiciary.

And now, the first day of opening arguments (and perhaps a final opportunity for pretrial motions) was set to begin.

Yolihuani had appeared before Judge Acheampong before. The last three times, she'd prevailed; the four before that, her clients had been convicted. These prosecutors, though, Yolihuani barely knew. The European woman was known as an old-school hardliner, the Southeast Asian woman a dogged pursuer of righteous justice with an occasional instinct for uncommon mercy. They'd both worked on the investigation into Terra's intelligence director for war crimes. But Yolihuani had yet to go against either in court, and had to instead rely on Jamshed's sideyed observation in the office that Geraldine was a bitch and Thục-Đoàn a maverick.

"You best watch your back in there," he'd said that morning. "They're out for Kenton's blood, sure. But in the meantime, they'll probably settle for yours."

And that was when Yolihuani saw Judge Magister Marlene McGregor. This turn of events could not bode well for a timely trial.