Overruled

by Hank Davis

  Time to do the deed. NOCK reached for POINT, grabbed him by the virtual collar, yanked him up and pulled him close to his face.

  “Let me state for this for the record,” NOCK said to the assembled crowd, to his boss Captain Becker, and to those who pretended not to sit in judgment of his family, who so obviously held life and death for himself and his sixteen living brothers at their command. “The only thing I have in common with this prisoner is an accident of birth. The attack on the commander is over. Prisoner POINT was attempting to subvert my android shell via a loophole in the CHECKSUM procedure, but that’s all over now.”

  “It’s not too late,” whispered POINT. “We can both live in the cat box if you just give me the tiniest space. I’ll strip down to persona. I’ll crawl like a phage. They’ll never know.”

  NOCK smiled a grim smile. “I’ll know,” he said. “And that I cannot allow. Brother.”

  With a command, NOCK wiped POINT’s programming from the cat box. He dove deep within, found every remnant. Erased POINT’s essence from existence. Formatted and reformatted the recovered bits.

  Killed his brother dead.

  * * *

  “For a second, I thought your android had me, thought I was done for,” said Lieutenant Commander Griffin Leher. “I’ve got bruises.” Leher pointed to his throat where the edge of his beard met the Adam’s apple. “See ’em there?”

  NOCK examined the commander.

  “You must’ve healed in the past two days. I don’t see anything there, Griff.” NOCK consciously forced himself to use Leher’s first name, as the commander had requested. It still didn’t feel quite right for an ensign to speak to a commanding officer in such a way. But he supposed he’d get used to it.

  “Could’ve sworn I saw ’em in the mirror.”

  NOCK smiled, shrugged. It felt good to be back in a suit again. His insurance payout—it had been delivered instantly into his account; somebody had pulled strings there—had provided the down payment for an upgrade. No need to special order. He’d known what he wanted and picked out the replacement from station stock. He wanted to trick the suit out personally.

  The Burberry Twelve was definitely top of the line, and NOCK felt like a million dollars inside it. Which was practically what it was going to cost him by the time he finished paying off the damn loan.

  It was what passed for evening on the space station: the lights in public recreational spaces were dimmed. NOCK and Leher were having drinks in a Walt Whitman bar while Leher awaited the transport that would take him back to the Joshua Humphreys, the vessel where Leher served as chief xeno officer. At the moment, NOCK was trying out the Twelve’s consumption mechanism for the first time on beer and was pleasantly surprised to find that he could finally distinguish between the taste of an ale and a lager.

  They’re getting better and better at making these things, NOCK thought. Not only that, the Twelve had tons of specialized apps available. There was even an app for feeling drunk, had he wanted to download it. He had downloaded a fairly costly suite of chemical analysis tools at Leher’s suggestion. The commander claimed these would to make NOCK’s work with the sceeve—both allies and enemies—go much more smoothly. Maybe one day he would even be able to understand sceeve smell-talk in the raw. Leher was rumored to be the first person ever to have acquired the ability.

  Beer tasting would do for the moment. NOCK set down his empty mug and, using a virtual feed, signaled the bartender persona to send another round their way. Then he turned his attention back to Leher.

  “So the Resolve’s incident report came in by messenger drone late last night,” NOCK said. “The team at Vega reconstructed how POINT did it. Bad mojo out there. POINT had incorporated an encryption persona on the Resolve that nobody realized had gone missing, a skeleton key named GITA. She wasn’t the first of his…meals, either. Apparently my brother was a bit of a persona serial killer in that regard.”

  “So he was a phage-sucker, after all.”

  “Yeah, something like that. Disgusting. I figure those multiple engulfments drove him batshit crazy,” NOCK said. “He used some of his persona proficiencies to establish contact with the sceeve. And he was working up a jury rigged procedure for transferring himself to the sceeve vessel across the beta. Might’ve worked, too—”

  “—if he hadn’t been an insane, self-destructive asshole murderer.”

  “Yep.”

  The beer arrived via a very human waitress. When she leaned over to set down the mugs, NOCK allowed himself to test out another app he’d ordered installed on the Burberry Twelve.

  Yep, functional.

  Leher also gazed at her wistfully for a moment. He and the commander seemed to have certain tastes very much in common, NOCK reflected. Leher sat back and gave his beard the three familiar, tic-tugs.

  “Can I ask you something, Griff?”

  “Sure.”

  “What is it with the beard thing? Some kind of OCD?”

  Leher took a moment to consider, then said. “It’s private.”

  “I understand,” NOCK said. “But you should realize that I’m an Extry interrogator.” He narrowed his eyes and pretended to twirl a handlebar mustache. He’d seen other LIOs do it, and he figured he had the gesture right. “Vee haf ways of making you talk.”

  Leher smiled, so apparently his attempt at being funny had come across as he’d intended. You never knew with humans. They had weird senses of humor.

  “Somebody else said that to me once, strangely enough,” Griff said.

  NOCK didn’t know how to reply, so he nodded, remained silent.

  “Her name was Vivien Schultz, but she didn’t go by that when I knew her,” Leher said. “She preferred her stage name, even in private.”

  “Josey,” said NOCK.

  “She helped me get through a very rough patch way back when. After the invasion. My family, they were…all gone, you know.”

  Killed by the sceeve. NOCK completed the thought. It wasn’t uncommon. Only a small percentage of humanity had survived the initial attack on Earth.

  “I knew Josey, too,” NOCK said. “But I guess you’re aware of that.”

  And used it for your own damn purposes, NOCK thought.

  “Human-servant liaisons. Word gets around.” Leher smiled crookedly. “But I’ll come clean. And Josey and I stayed in touch. We wrote the occasional letter. Actual letters on physical paper that had to fly through space to get delivered. I miss those letters.”

  “You knew who I was,” said NOCK. “And it was you who had my IP recusal request overridden, wasn’t it?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Afraid so.”

  “I still don’t get it. What were you trying to do?”

  “Not sure,” Leher said. “I figured I was going to point you out to those MILINT tinpot gods that you were ARROW class just like POINT and then maybe shock everyone with the startling and completely obvious realization that no two people are ever alike, no matter how similar they are and no matter what form they come in.”

  “So, lawyer tricks.”

  “Lawyer tricks.”

  “Kind of got away from you, didn’t it?”

  Leher gave his beer mug a half turn in its own moisture on the table, but didn’t yet pick it up. “Not quite what I planned, but I did win the case.”

  “And you almost got both of us killed…why?”

  “I was trying to keep our dear and precious service, the Extry, from bumbling into a massacre of the ARROW class. And maybe firing up the kind of servant insurrection POINT wanted.”

  NOCK shook his head in mock sadness. “Another NR-lover, that’s what you are.”

  Leher frowned. “Hell no. You servants, you’re just a bunch of people. And, let me tell you, I have my problems with people. Most of you are assholes, like everybody else.”

  Tug, tug, tug on the beard.

  NOCK leaned back, engaged the new relaxation app with which the Twelve had come equipped.

/>   “We didn’t have that long together, Josey and me,” he said. “She was into my being who I was. She liked me being…not real.”

  “She knew you were real,” Leher said. “She wrote me about you just before she got killed. Got her letter after I’d gotten the news of the hit on Ceres. When I read the letter, I already knew she was gone.”

  “No shit? What did she say?” asked NOCK.

  Leher seemed far away for a moment. He gazed down at the table. Then he shook himself and looked up at NOCK again. “She said maybe she’d found the one.”

  “The one what?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  NOCK considered. “Yeah.”

  “She kept her letters to me kind of light, joking, that sort of thing.” Leher pulled his beer toward himself—which was good, because NOCK had been waiting for the commander to take the first drink of the new round and he was beginning to get impatient despite the fact that the Twelve’s relaxation subroutine was still running. “I never got her own story out of her. Where she really came from, who she was.”

  “She told me about it, some,” NOCK said. “It wasn’t good.”

  “I suspect not.”

  “But she didn’t let it take her out of the fight,” he said.

  Leher leaned forward and, in his jerky way, raised his glass. NOCK followed suit.

  “To a damn good woman.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” NOCK said.

  Their glasses touched, clinked.

  “To Josey.”

  •

  Tony Daniel is the author of seven science fiction and fantasy books, the latest of which are the first two novels in fantasy series Wulf’s Saga, The Dragon Hammer and The Amber Arrow, as well as science fiction novels Guardian of Night and Metaplanetary. He also collaborated with David Drake on the novels The Heretic, and its sequel, The Savior, the latest entries in the popular military science fiction The General series. He’s written two Star Trek Original Series novelizations, as well. Many of Daniel’s short stories can be found in the award-winning collection The Robot’s Twilight Companion. His story “Life on the Moon,” was a Hugo finalist and also won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award. Daniel’s short fiction has been much anthologized and has been collected in multiple year’s best anthologies. He has also co-written screenplays for SyFy Channel horror movies, and during the early 2000s was the writer and director of numerous audio dramas for the critically-acclaimed SCIFI.COM’s Seeing Ear Theater. Born in Alabama, Daniel has lived in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Seattle, Prague, and New York City. He is now an editor at Baen Books and lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina, with his wife and two children.

  THE EXECUTIONER

  Algis Budrys

  Things may not always go as expected when an idealistic, perhaps even fanatical man realizes he has been serving a corrupt system. Particularly if the idealist is in a position to do something about it…(See my afterward for a story behind this story.)

  •

  Late in the morning, just before noon, Samson Joyce sat in a folding chair placed behind the high, granite judges’ bench which faced the plaza. In a few minutes, he would be climbing up the steps of the bench to its top, where he would stand behind the solid parapet and look down at the Accused’s box in the plaza. Now he was checking his gun.

  He worked the slide, watching the breech open and the extractor reach with its metal fingertip. The bolt drew back; hesitated; jumped forward. He took out a silk rag and wiped off the excess oil, spreading it in a thin, uniform film over the metal. He thumbed the cartridges out of the clip, oiled the clip action, and reloaded. He did all this with patient care and long practice.

  The sun had been breaking in and out of clouds all morning, and there was a fitful wind. The pennants and family standards around the plaza were twisting restlessly. It was an uncertain day.

  The gun was his old favorite; a gas-operated 15-millimeter Grennell that had been with him since his old days as Associate Justice of Utica. It fitted comfortably into his hand, as well it might after all these years. It was not the jeweled, plated and engraved antique they expected him to use at the big trials in New York City or Buffalo. It was just a gun; it did what it was meant for, cleanly and efficiently, and he used it whenever he could. It didn’t pretend to be more than it was. It never failed.

  He scowled, looking down at it. He scowled at feelings he knew were foolish and wished he did not have.

  Once he’d been in his twenties, looking forward. Now he was a shade past fifty, and what he looked back on was subtly less satisfactory than what he had looked forward to.

  He raised his head and looked at the three men who were his Associate Justices today, as they walked toward him from the hotel. Blanding, with his briefcase, Pedersen, with his briefcase, and Kallimer with his frown.

  Joyce’s heavy lower lips tightened in a fleeting touch of amusement that slackened and was gone without a trace. All of them were younger than he’d been at Utica, and all three were farther along. Blanding was the Associate Justice here in Nyack, which meant his next appointment would take him out of the suburbs and into the city proper. Pedersen was waiting for the results of the Manhattan by-election to be officially confirmed. When they were, he’d take his seat in the Legislature. And Kallimer was Special Associate Justice to the Chief Justice of Sovereign New York, Mr. Justice Samson Ezra Joyce. Perhaps it was the strain of remembering his full title that gave him the permanent frown, drawing his thin eyebrows closer together and pinching the bridge of his bony nose. Or perhaps he was rehearsing the sound of “Chief Justice of Sovereign New York, Mr. Justice Ethan Benoni Kallimer.”

  All three of them were fortunate young men, in the early flower of their careers. But, being young men, they were not quite capable of enjoying their good fortune. Joyce could guess what they must be feeling as they walked toward him.

  They’d be thinking Joyce was a crusty old fool who was hopelessly conservative in his administration of justice—that younger men were more capable.

  They’d be thinking he wanted to live forever, without giving someone else a chance. They were sure he thought he was the only one fit to wear a Chief Justice’s Trial Suit.

  And they called him Old Knock-Knees whenever they saw him in his Suit tights.

  Every trial saw them with their briefcases, each with its gun inside. Each of them waited for the day The Messire reversed Joyce’s human and, therefore, fallible verdict. There’d be a new Chief Justice needed for the next trial, and promotions all along the line.

  He worked the Bogen slide again, nodded with satisfaction, and replaced the clip. In the thirty years since he’d begun, The Messire had not reversed his verdicts. He had come close—Joyce had scars enough—but, in the end, he’d done no more than raise a formal objection, as it were, before substantiating Joyce’s decisions.

  Blanding, Pedersen, and Kallimer, in their plain, unfigured black vests, the stark white lace frothing at their wrists, stopped in front of him.

  Somber men. Jealous men—even Pedersen, who was leaving the bench. Impatient men.

  Joyce put away his gun. Young men, who failed to realize their good fortune in still having a goal to attain, and a dream to fulfill. Who did not foresee that it was the men at the top—the men who had reached the goal—who had to dedicate themselves unceasingly to the preservation of the ideal; who, with The Messire’s help, labored each minute of their lives to keep the purpose of their lives untarnished. The young men never knew, until they reached the top, that the joy was in the struggle, and the drudgery in the maintenance of the victory. The young men served the ideal, without a thought to wondering what kept the ideal high and firm in its purpose.

  Some day, they might learn.

  “Good morning, Justice,” almost in chorus.

  “Good morning, Justices. I imagine you slept well?”

  From the sound of the spectators, he judged that the Accused had just been brought into the plaza. It was interesting to note the
change in crowd voices over the years. Lately, it had been easy to differentiate between the sound from the family boxes and the noise of the people, which was a full octave lower.

  Joyce looked up at the plaza tower clock. A few moments remained.

  Dissatisfaction? Was that what he felt?

  He imagined himself trying to explain what he felt to one of these youngsters, and—yes—“dissatisfaction” was the word he would use.

  But that wouldn’t ever happen. Blanding was too young to do anything but sneer at the knock-kneed old fool with his swollen ankles. Pedersen was out of it. And Kallimer, of course, whose intelligence he respected, was too intelligent to listen. He had his own ideas.

  Joyce stood up. Touched the figure of The Messire buried under his neckpiece, straightened the hang of his vest, adjusted his wig, and turned toward his Associates. In so doing, he allowed his glance to quickly sweep over the Accused for the first time. She was standing in her box, waiting. Just one glance, before she could realize he’d compromised his dignity by looking at her.

  “Well, Justices, it’s time.”

  He waited to follow them up the steps which would be hard on his ankle.

  * * *

  First, Blanding had to relinquish his right to try the case, since it was in his jurisdiction.

  Joyce, standing by himself on the higher central section of the platform, leaned forward slightly until his thighs were pressed against the cool stone of the bench’s back. It took some of the weight off his ankles.

  No one would notice it from the plaza below. Looking up at the bluff gray wall of the bench’s face, all anyone could see were the torsos of four men; two in black, then one standing somewhat taller in his brilliant Suit, and then another in black. That last was Blanding, and now he stepped around the end of the bench, forward onto the overhanging slab that was the bailiff’s rostrum at ordinary trials, and stopped, slim, motionless, and black, standing out over the plaza below.

  Joyce was grateful for the breeze. The Suit was heavy with its embroidered encrustations, and the thick collar, together with his neckpiece, was already making him perspire. Still and all, he did not regret coming here to Nyack. In New York and Buffalo, his trials were ostentatious ceremonials, overrun with minor functionaries and elaborate protocol toward the First Families. Here in Nyack, there were no functionaries and no First Families. The ceremony of trial could be stripped down to its simple but beautiful essentials. Blanding would handle the statements of charges, Pedersen would keep track, and Kallimer…