Freelance
TravellerSergeant Wekkilikkit’s Identity Crisis
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2026 issue.
Author’s Notes
- A general description of Anther may be found in Freelance Traveller #129, May/June 2025
- Sergeant Wekkilikkit can be found with a description as well as classic Traveller and GURPS Traveller details in ‘There When You Need Them: The District 12 Enforcement Office’ by Robert Prior in The Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society [SJ Games], April 30, 2002.
I have nothing but admiration of the highest kind, and maybe a little higher, for Anther’s System Rescue Squad. I am telling you they are the sort that make the rest of us look like we are just standing around waiting for the lift to three decks up. These guys put their lives on the line regular as a pulsar for very little in the way of Credits and nothing at all in the way of thanks. I am not one that is averse to dropping a tenth Credit for them in Mizzy’s collection box. Their kind of heroism does not often make the retellings; if you ask me, this is a mistake, they are a breed apart, like truweevils amongst the faux.
Not like some of the stylus pushers on decks in the 700s.
It is a matter of general knowledge around Cormach Station that a half turn ago there is a fire aboard a liner, the Lelant Flarecatcher. If it is not, then perhaps you are living on some rock out in Far Orbit where even the comms relays are too polite to disturb you. The Flarecatcher is just Jumping in from Capital. Something critical, some engineering detail Haron the Hull will tell you all about, catches fire and they are close to losing the whole ship. Close but not quite. Passengers and crew make it to the lifeboats and rescue balls. Every sophont aboard escapes, even Captain Cornwall who is last off. She knows all are watching; she knows the drill.
Of course, it is that touch and go that they all escape with only the clothes they are wearing. Some not even that. While it is not my habit to intrude on the tender moments of others, if you do know the story, it is probably because of the honeymooning couple caught on ’vid sharing a rescue ball. They are making the headlines for a day or three and seem not at all to mind the mirth that goes round the station and back again. They are making their Credits in the days after, telling their story; more to sundry than all; the honeymoon goes on.
So, the SRS gets every soph back to the station while a salvage crew brings the liner in. She is still in the Yards now. Company says it is another turn before she is on her schedule again. To give them credit, they are not ones to stint with Credits in such a situation as this. As I am saying, all aboard lose everything. No time for personal effects, no time to send final messages, certainly no time for baggage. No, that is not a polite thing to say about your beloved spouse. However, everyone, crew, High Passage and Mid Passage, gets clothes and necessaries and new ID while the advocates, insurers and investigators do their things. All, that is except Sergeant Bwappo.
Hey, do not look at me like that. He is called that, I hear, in his own office. If you want to know, his full name is Sergeant Wekkilikkit, although I have it on good authority that even that is just a short form. The rest of it will take a lunch break and strong drink to get through. A price I am not willing to pay. He is a police sergeant who runs a unit in District 12 in Dulac City on Rek-shons which as any lowdecker knows is two parsecs trailing and rimwards; he just happens to be a Bwap. You know, the sophs who love admin, hate lying and have a proper way of doing things. They love paperwork the way some people enjoy a visit to The Drop, only with more mud and better filing. There is a whole colony of them down in the 100s where the humidity is high, the forms flow and the admin is, well, admirable. Yes, Newts – but that term seems to have gone out of fashion lately. I don’t think they take offence but there are those flappers who take offence for them.
Sergeant Wekkilikkit is in poor shape when he comes in. Though far be it from me to describe what good shape means for a Bwap. It turns out rescue balls don’t have enough in the way of climate control to get the humidity up to the right levels for him, and his flesh is a colour that even the most flamboyant crèche has not tried out in skin markings. Nifty Zane can probably sell you something that will knock up the shade if you want to look like you are several days past needing burial. The Sergeant spends a few days in Medical Four-Three and after their ministrations is as right as rain. Which is pretty much what he wants when they sign him out. Or at least the dripping of the nearest mud bath.
However, his own kind, that is to say not Newts but Cormach police are soon knocking on his door. It turns out that while everyone else gets processed with fresh ID, there is some snarl up with the Sergeant’s. Maybe it is because he is the only non-human aboard; maybe it is because he is filed last in the manifest and ends up on the last page by himself. Whatever the reason, the local flatfeet say he is currently an illegal immigrant and there is enough media interest that they cannot let it slide until the paperwork is through; not even for one of their own. I say nothing about how law works unto its own, but I’m sure you know the drill on whatever world you come from.
This is when the Sergeant’s troubles really begin and if you think it ends with a couple of stamps and a handshake, you are a more optimistic soul than I. First, he has to go up to the Bwap embassy in the diplomatic quarter up in the 950s. That is straightforward enough for one such as he and it only takes a day to get invited to the right mud bath and go through all the bureaucracy that is required to get in the queue to apply for a new Bwap identity chip. That is only the start, however. Before the ID can be processed, he must get a form signed by two upstanding citizens that will vouch for who he is. One is easy enough as he knows a retired Inspector who works in District 12 for a term some years back. He makes an appointment and a few days later gets the eneri on his pad.
The other is tricky as there are certain requirements as to who the sponsors can be and how long they have known each other and just what their relationship is. After some checking around, he finds that Trader Tambik is one soph he knows and he finds out that the merchant is one who frequents Mizzy’s on occasion. Trader Tambik is a human I find it is wise not to loan Credits to, however much she asks. Not if you have fond hopes of seeing the Credits once again. But Trader Tambik, one way or another, makes her pile and qualifies as an upstanding citizen. Though I would describe her more as downsitting in a booth at the back when she is not out doing, as she calls them, her rounds.
How Sergeant Bwappo comes to know Trader Tambik is not being made clear, but it is certain that the Bwap can call in this favour. They arrange to meet at Mizzy’s and I happen to be on hand to witness the form signing which is how I come to know the details of all this.
With both signatures in hand, if that is the right word, the Sergeant marches back to the Embassy to spend several days doing things properly. This includes getting a standard biometric sample which as I hear it must be taken at just the right time of day after just the right time spent in a mud bath with just the right amount and type of aeronutrition added. Still, there are specialists to help, although I can tell you for nothing it is not an employment I am at all interested in.
It also turns out that while the Sergeant is collecting his signatures, the Embassy reorganizes the queueing system. To get back in the right column, there is now a Queue Transfer Form to fill in. In triplicate. But this is just thirday for a Bwap and the sergeant makes shorter work of it than I might a hot kava and kornkake. Now he only has the identity confirmation interview to negotiate. It is no place of mine to say, but I think thirty minutes reciting lineage, employment history and mud preference to a junior attaché is really not long enough for such a delicate matter of properness. Still, the Sergeant does manage to correct three errors in their genealogical database before they are done, so everyone comes out ahead.
I hear there are some who say the Bwap was just getting his just desserts and they make off-colour remarks about amphibians. There are a few in Mizzy’s who think that the Bwaps are influencing our bureaucracy too much and that ‘something’ must be done. My opinion is that there are always some blabbers who consider that this constitutes thinking and in that they are mistaken. Such personages do not even have a suggestion as to what the ‘something’ is. There are others who think some low-level official in customs and immigration is taking revenge on the Sergeant. Making him jump through all the hoops for some previous encounter they do not like. That they are feeling slighted by him or worse. My thinking is that if this is their thinking, they are rolling in the wrong mud bath. Bwaps will consider following such procedure not a punishment but a gift. I have it from the Bwap’s mouth when Sergeant Wekkilikkit tells me, with the air of someone who just completes the Thousand Deck race in full dress uniform, that it is the most satisfying week he ever spends off-duty in his entire career and that if I ever lose my ID, he will be most pleased to advise me on how to replace it properly. This is good to know, I tell him, though I am hoping my affairs will not come to such a pass. Still, if they do, I will be sure to bring extra forms.