“This is a Sunguard arrest! Drop your weapons. Now!”

Johnson shouted the command as he forcefully broke down the door to the apartment.

It had taken the Sunguard computers only seconds to scan through the security footage from the café, rapidly matching the faces and voices of the individuals involved with the Terran Federation’s record of all Jerrassian citizens.

Other security cameras had captured images of the suspects entering this particular apartment block. That’s where the track had ended. No matter. As a Special Agent, Johnson had full authority to enter any residence without justification. The squad with him had systematically gone from door to door, questioning tenants and, if necessary, breaking down doors when residents refused to open them. People had their own reasons for not wanting to talk to the Sunguard. In this part of the city, Johnson mused, there were plenty whose work was of the more, shall we say, shady kind.

But those small-time criminals weren’t his concern. He was a Special Agent, here to hunt down and destroy the Jerrassian Liberation Front. The local drug dealers, muggers, pimps, and jaywalkers could be handled by the regular Sunguard agents. He was a wolf on the hunt for bigger prey.

On the third floor, they encountered something more than the usual miscreants.

There had been nothing particularly suspicious about the door. Its faded green paint and broken, rusted handle were no different from what he had seen elsewhere in the old building. When he had knocked on it, he heard someone move around inside, and when they didn’t open the door as commanded, his team broke it down.

The moment the door was reduced to splinters, three men - all of them Jerrassians - opened fire on the Sunguard squad from inside the apartment. The apartment erupted in chaos. Johnson hurled himself to the floor, then rolled to the side to avoid the gaser beams’ deadly violet glow as they excited the air molecules they sliced through. When he hit the ground, the Sunguard soldiers behind him - a mixed group of Jerrassians, Terrans and Kelar - returned fire, filling the apartment with smoke. He heard a piercing scream and saw the shadow of one of his men fall backward, then a second scream from within the hazy room. Johnson took cover behind a large, battered bookshelf, filled with everything from communist pamphlets to doctoral theses on hyperspace field theory. As he cautiously peered out from behind it, he saw one of the Jerrassians collapsed on the floor. The man cradled another in his lap, blood pouring from a deep wound in the other's throat. Off to the side, the body of the third man lay still, his lifeless body marked with lethal wounds inflicted by the coherent gamma rays.

He was just about to stand up and repeat his order for the two remaining terrorists to drop their weapons and surrender when his whole world was torn asunder. The room seemed to shatter in an instant. The explosion ripped the bookshelf to pieces, its splintered shelves flying through the air like arrows. Johnson was flung across the room. For a second or two, or perhaps longer, he must have lost consciousness. When he woke up, there was a persistent ringing sound in his ears. The room was filled with dust and smoke, the furniture reduced to fragments. The remaining Sunguard soldiers - many of them now bloodied and wounded from shrapnel - searched through the chaos and wreckage for further threats. He quickly realized the soldiers weren’t the only ones injured; he could feel the warm trickle of blood running down his face from a deep gash in his brow. Nothing that wouldn’t heal eventually, but it would definitely keep him out of any photo ops for the next month or two!

Slowly, he rose to his feet. There were no broken bones, just bruises and scrapes that would fade with time. He moved to the other side of the scorched apartment to inspect the door leading to the next room, which was now hanging precariously from only one hinge and very clearly in need of replacement. As he neared it, the door suddenly burst free from its last remaining hinge, and a lumbering dark shape crashed through. With the reflexes of someone who had years of martial arts training, Johnson threw himself to the side, allowing the muscular Jerrassian to pass by without hitting him squarely in the chest. He then swiftly grabbed her from behind, his right arm clamping across her throat, and using his legs for leverage, he pushed with all the strength he could muster.

As a Sunguard Special Agent, he was an accomplished fighter - the best of the best - but he was still only human. The Jerrassian possessed muscle groups that didn’t even exist in a Terran. Though she was shorter than he was, she probably weighed a bit more, and with the brute strength she possessed, the outcome of the fight was far from certain. He knew he had to subdue her immediately if he was going to succeed in doing so at all. He didn’t want the soldiers to have to open fire on her. With the three Jerrassian men now dead from either gaser fire or the explosion, she was now his sole link to the terrorist masterminds.

But fate did not show him any mercy that day. As they struggled, they both fell to the floor of the apartment, which was cluttered with the wreckage of broken furniture, overturned tables, and sharp pieces of glass. One of those jagged shards penetrated her side, slicing her paraliver in two. As she bled out on the dusty, stained floor, one of the Sunguard soldiers, a Terran lieutenant in his early thirties, approached Johnson.

“All the suspects have been neutralized. What are your orders, sir?” he said, his voice betraying his pride in the work they had done.

“Identify her. Such a large female would likely hold a leading position in the organization. Once we know who she is, we can find her connections. She’ll have friends or family we can put pressure on.”

“I’ll get right to it, sir,” said the soldier. He brought out a forensic kit, retrieved a sampling needle from it, and inserted it into the limp body of the Jerrassian woman. Though she was unconscious from the pain, she was still alive; however, that would not last long. With her paraliver severed, she would bleed out within minutes.

Fifteen seconds later, the screen of his sampling kit lit up with a soft glow. The needle had wirelessly transmitted the full genome of the Jerrassian to the kit, which then matched it to the Sunguard database.

“Kham Gar,” he read from the illuminated screen. “Forty-two years old. Born in Kervmor-ra. Married to a Kham Men since 2173. No children.”