Law
They say there ain’t no law in the Rim City but, you know, like pretty much everything else it just ain’t true. Or at least not exactly.
There isn’t any central authority to enforce any central law. But, and it’s a big but, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any law at all. It’s just how much is a bit more…fluid…than it is back east.
See most of the settlements have some sort of laws, even if it is only “You do what I say or I break your head”. How much and what type depends on where you are though. Some of the bigger settlements, like the LA Mews, 6th C.O.G. Protectorate or any of the Urban Federalist communities they have laws that are – mostly – straight out of the constitution. Then you’ve got places like the Edgerunner turf, their “laws” are pretty much feudal and honour based. Then you get to the different varieties of religious court, or revolutionary tribunal, or court martial in different degrees of zealousness and…well you get the idea.
Yeah, all of that’s only true when you’re in the settlements. Once you get outside the, I suppose you could call ‘em borders, well the only law is what you take with you. Hell, in some of the settlements the only law is what you take with you, especially places like HavenUndercity or New Zigong.
This makes it seem a bit, you know, old West and I suppose it is, a bit. The real difference is that we’ve got modern net support, so we can communicate and verify and share the data a little faster. So yeah, all of us communicate and, I guess, co-ordinate things, technically a group of us are in competition when it comes to getting clients. But it’s a lot easier if we have gentlemans agreements in place when we meet up on the ground. That does happen a lot, we’re even on opposite sides more often than you’d think, too.
You want to know how it works? Well, ok it’ll be kind of basic but, well, ok.
So let’s say you’re a small community and you get along alright but you’ve got a troublemaker or two. It’s simple enough, you get your law to come down on ‘em. So far, so what, right? Well let’s say that one day it all gets a little out of hand and someone dies, and your suspect runs like hell. Now fair enough, you probably talk to your neighbours got all sorts of arrangements, right? But he knows that, so he doesn’t stop at your neighbours and you track him down to a non-stop mono to somewhere 200 miles away. End of the line for you. Your law probably doesn’t even do it full time, so taking a couple of weeks off to go hunt down this asshole and bring him back isn’t happening. Even if you had the contacts in whatever little enclave he’s bedding down in. Assuming he isn’t working for one the corps or holed up with an Altcult or whatever. So you get in touch with your local pinkerton…
…Yeah, yeah I know, we get called pinkertons, wadda you gonna do?…
…anyway, you get in touch with us and we talk to our local office, or send someone or, being honest, pass it onto one of the other pinkerton groups. Then the person gets picked up and brought back. We hand him over to you and you chip him, or kill him or sell his brain to the Hive or whatever your law says.
Anyway that’s the theory. It all depends on what pinkerton group you talk to and what sort of area your crim’s holed up in, there’s…politics involved. Then there’s if he was a visitor from somewhere else or has a contract with another pinkerton group or has a string of people looking for him. Stuff like that is a bit more hassle but, that’s where those gentlemans agreements come in, we can normally talk about it – put it up for arbitration on which law to use – you know, we can normally work it out.
That makes us sound like a cross between the LeDiv, bounty hunters and that whole Judge thingummy and I suppose that’s kind of fair but, the thing you need to remember is that we only ever get called in when it’s all gone way beyond local control and is complicated and brown coloured. And all of us pinkerton groups we’re all professionals. Well mostly.
- Willem van de Merwe, Drake Investigative Solutions
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