Warring States

by Susan R. Matthews

  Curious to see how far Dawson would go Andrej put out his own hand in turn. Dawson took it. There was no sudden shock of antipathy so strong that it repelled the threat of physical contact with a father’s murderer. Dawson frightened Andrej, now. How could such strength be natural?

  Dropping Dawson’s hand Andrej stepped back half-a-pace. “Very well.” Dawson was watching him with what seemed to Andrej to be almost equal parts uneasiness and fear — that he would go back on the promise he had made, perhaps? “I will have to interview each ship’s commander, and perhaps three or five others. In order that the record be complete, and no question remain. You may have your representative at the interviews. It may be reassuring to them.”

  “And I’ve got just the man for the job,” Dawson replied. “Thank you, your Excellency, and I don’t suppose there’s an extra one of those doses about that wouldn’t be missed? No? Oh, well.”

  It was perfectly true that Andrej needed to talk to enough people to reassure the vector control officer that Dawson’s party could be released. But it was also true that this unexpected assignment offered opportunity, as well as challenge. There was a surgery here.

  The operation was actually a rather simple one; only the fact that the slightest perturbation in the process would mean an agonizing death complicated matters. That and the fact that it was illegal, but he had not been notified that his Writ to Inquire had been rescinded, and until it was he remained immune from prosecution for any crime he might wish to commit short of mutiny, as represented for instance by the wanton murder of a superior commanding officer. What was a little misappropriation here and there in the face of such immunity?

  “Send that person to me this evening.” It was mid-afternoon already. “By which I mean, halfway through third-shift. I will have a list.”

  Between now and then he would go and check the surgery, and undoubtedly discover that the surgical machines were in need of calibration. It would be several days before he could be finished with his investigation, and leave; and the Ragnarok was still several days away from finalizing its supply manifest with Emandis Station. Andrej was expecting to rendezvous with his cousin Stanoczk, whose aid he had enlisted in his purpose. Several days, six bond-involuntaries, three of whom required no surgery; he did not have very much time.

  Security took Dawson away. Andrej was alone in the room with Stildyne. After a moment Andrej spoke. “Send someone to inventory stores,” Andrej said. “Physical inventory. Controlled List. I’m concerned about the quality of stores.”

  No, he was not. He simply wanted a decent excuse for pulling excess medication for the Ragnarok’s ship’s stores without being too obvious about it. Would the ruse fool anybody?

  It didn’t matter. “I’ll set Robert right on it,” Stildyne said, and left Andrej alone, to brood about justice and retribution and mortality.

  ###

  The angry grief that the Second Judge held so fiercely within her heart seemed almost to shimmer visibly in the brutal heat radiating off the baked flat clay walls of what had been the Chively Dam. Jils Ivers waited, silently, at a respectful distance; she’d seen the horrific aftermath of natural disasters before. This one had not been natural.

  The Second Judge Presiding at Chilleau Judiciary was a tall hawk-boned woman with pale hair and brown eyes who picked her way through the rubble at the base of the breach in the dam with grace and assurance. As she turned her head down to mind the shifting of the wall’s wreckage, she happened to glance behind her, and caught Jils’ eye. Jils knew how to read the subtle gesture of that minute nod and came forward to accompany the judge on the way across the broken threshold of the dam.

  Chively had been holding the spring run-off from the Ato watershed for generations. The city had grown up on either side of the spillway’s watercourse to nestle in the shadows of the beneficent protector of them all; there might never be a true tally of the lives that had been lost when somebody had blown the base wall and loosed the accumulated weight of Chively Lake, as old and venerable as an inland sea, over the roofs and highways all from the way from Chively to the ocean.

  “Only a year,” the Second Judge said. “In the name of the Law, Ivers, if you had told me that people could do such a thing to one another. Under my own presidence.”

  It wasn’t the sort of thing that really called for an answer, or to which there was an answer. Only a year. Jils stood with the judge on the sloping slab of a piece of dam-wall, sheared away from the breach with explosive force under the pressure of an almost unimaginable weight of rushing water. The broad scar of the water-course was as smooth as the back of her hand. It was an effort to look down and away toward the remains of the city and realize that the bits and fragments of rubble and rock were each of them the size of a small school, in which all of the children had been killed.

  “There’s no underestimating the corrosion of anarchy.” She was sorry that she hadn’t found Verlaine’s killer. She was almost sorry she wasn’t Verlaine’s killer. It would have been so easy to lay the blame on the person who had discovered the body in Chambers that the only reason the Second Judge hadn’t — so far as Jils could guess — was that it wouldn’t have done the slightest good. The problem wasn’t so much that Verlaine’s murderer was as yet unidentified, unfound. The larger problem lay in the fact that nothing could bring him back.

  “Go to Brisinje for me, Ivers.” The courier ship was waiting for her, there, a short distance removed, resting on the scoured surface of the flood-bed. It was dry, now. It would be months before the water level in the holding-basin behind the ruined dam wall was high enough to wet the base of the rocks there. “Tell them it was all a subtle ruse. Tell them that Sindha isn’t dead, and that his dying wish was to see his life’s work come to fruition. Maybe not at the same time, no, but tell them. And then get back here. When you have a suspect I want you to fetch Koscuisko for me.”

  A viable suspect, of course. That was what the judge meant. There were no lack of suspects — political enemies, agents of other Judiciaries angling for advantage, Free Government terrorists aiming to destabilize the Bench by throwing it into disarray, even Fleet assassins bent on countering a challenge to Fleet’s autonomy and privileges. Plenty of suspects.

  Plenty of dead ones, particularly, but the Second Judge had passed the point of being angry enough to authorize extreme measures on speculative grounds. Plenty of suspects, plenty of confessions, a useful opportunity to purge the body politic of undesirable elements, and yet they were no closer to a lead than they had been a year ago.

  It went without saying that the Second Judge would much rather have sent Karol Vogel to Brisinje to represent Chilleau Judiciary. But Karol Vogel was not here. Nobody that Jils had spoken to or contacted seemed to know where he was or what he was doing, unless there had been information in the odd little quirk that the Malcontent “Cousin” Stanoczk had gotten to the corner of his mouth when Jils had raised the question with him. And there was never any telling, with Malcontents.

  “As you say, your Honor.” The Second Judge didn’t want Koscuisko to solve the mystery for her — it was Jils’ job to discover who was responsible for the killing. That hadn’t been her point. No. The Second Judge wanted Andrej Koscuisko to execute her vengeance with the demonic flair characteristic of his notorious genius. “Your front office said there was to be material for me to take with me.” Andrej Koscuisko would execute no Tenth Level ever again, not even if his life depended on it. He had successfully convinced her of that.

  All of Jurisdiction space needed the Selection to be resolved, and a new First Judge to be named to be the supreme authority so that peace and order could be restored. Needing the Selection to be resolved so Andrej Koscuisko could surrender his Writ to Inquire and go home was a very small part of the greater problem; but it was a part.

  The judge turned to look back over her shoulder; there were several clerks of Court in her party, as well as Security. “These are the completed traffic assessments,” the judge sa
id, nodding for one of the clerks to pick her way awkwardly through the debris. “Thirty-two days before and after, all vectors. The last pieces just came back from analysis yesterday.”

  There was something wrong with what the judge was saying, but Jils couldn’t afford time to think about it now. Holding out her left hand to the clerk the judge passed a flat-panel data display to Jils, who accepted the flat-panel with a respectful bow. Data could contain evidence, and evidence could cost lives. It was worthy of the respect due any potentially dangerous weapon.

  “Very good, your Honor.” Jils could see from the activity of the ground-crew down range of the courier that it was ready to launch. “I’ll give you regular reports, and hope to return to my primary task as soon as possible.”

  The murder investigation was her primary task. She remained the single strongest default suspect; she knew that to be true. She couldn’t afford to let it interfere with her reason or her judgment. She knew perfectly well that she had not stabbed Sindha Verlaine, even if she still had very little idea who actually might have done.

  Would the judge give Jils over to Koscuisko, to try to settle her own mind once and for all? She’d think about it later.

  The courier was waiting for her, the roaring of its jet propulsion escape engines sounding curiously hushed within the great bowl of the destroyed dam. It was a tidy little beast with modestly raked canards, a standard model of vector courier wearing the marks of the Emandisan Home Defense Fleet. Boarding, Jils secured her kit before joining the pilot in the wheel-house.

  Through the courier’s forward viewports she could see the judge walking away back into the wrecked breach in the dam-wall as the flight techs deployed the field blast-barriers so that the courier could lift. She wondered, suddenly, whether the judge had wanted to be personally assured that Jils was safely loaded, and would not take advantage of an opportunity to disappear.

  It was an unsettling thought, but the joke was on the judge. If she had murdered Verlaine — if she’d had the skills to bypass all of the security that surrounded the office and the person of the second most important soul, the most important man, in all of Chilleau Judiciary — a few of the judge’s Security would not stop her from disappearing.

  The pilot was a man of moderate height whose amber skin and black eyes were as Emandisan as the fleet-marks on the courier. He greeted her with a polite nod, neither smiling nor frowning. Emandisan characteristically presented a stoic and serene front to the world and to each other.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jils suggested. Had an Emandisan killed Verlaine? Emandis exported security operatives, sharp-shooters, military snipers. There had been a political upheaval in the government at Emandis perhaps five years ago. Chilleau Judiciary had been identified with the ousted government’s disgraced officials. Were the Emandisan holding a grudge?

  “Very good, Bench specialist,” the pilot said, locking into the comm braid. “Courier Gamesil, prepare to launch, secure for lift. Launch control. Request permission to escape atmosphere outbound for Brisinje Judiciary via Anglerhaz.”

  Traffic at Chively was very heavy these days as the local government struggled to get disaster aid to the area and to the people who, having survived the terrorists’ breach of the dam, had been displaced by the horrific if inevitable result of emptying the great lake of Chively in so astonishing a fraction of the time that it had taken to grow the lake to its former extent. Jils, however, was traveling for the Second Judge, and the Second Judge was anxious for Jils to be off and away to represent her interest in the convocation of Bench specialists at Brisinje, where the Ninth Judge presided.

  “Launch control here,” the control station said. “Cleared to exit, courier. Going home, I take it, good space to you.”

  “And to all those who have to travel through the dark.” The pilot returned polite phrase for polite phrase, but Jils thought that he sounded a little distracted by more than just his pre-flights.

  She waited until the courier was on trajectory and headed out of atmosphere before she asked her question. “Have you been traveling long?”

  The look he gave her was surprised but only mildly: perhaps he was too absorbed in his task to notice being surprised, and of course it didn’t take a Bench Intelligence Specialist to put “going home” together with a tired pilot and derive a long mission.

  “Seems like much longer than just four months, Dame Ivers. Yes, ma’am. — Anglerhaz vector in twenty-four, and expected drop in Brisinje by four days.”

  “Thank you, pilot.” She’d just be getting aft to brood, then, or maybe get started on the data that the judge had given her as she left. Unlike Karol Vogel, this pilot was apparently perfectly confident of his vector spin calculations. No cross-check would be solicited or required.

  Karol Vogel and Jils had partnered at Chilleau Judiciary for years, and partnered well, too. The sexual tension that had been between them had been the comfortable background pulse of a heartbeat, something that made it pleasant to be in each others’ company — bearable to be sequestered together, sometimes in impossibly small places, without losing perspective.

  He’d been moody and broody the last time she’d seen him. She’d thought she understood — he’d been carrying a Warrant, an execution or assassination order, and Karol had always found killing mildly distasteful — but it had run deeper than that. Because Karol had dropped out of sight on his way out of Burkhayden and had not been seen since.

  It hadn’t made sense, though. Captain Lowden, the Ragnarok’s notoriously corrupt commanding officer, had been dead before the fire had started in the service house that night; forensics had said so. It wasn’t like Karol to set buildings on fire; he had always been careful in the past about endangering uninvolved bystanders, and a fire in a service house was a recipe for disaster. All of those patrons in all of those rooms, and the power had been off in Burkhayden that night. It was only a lucky accident that there had been so few injuries — and no fatalities — in the evacuation.

  In the secure privacy of her small passenger bed-cabin, Jils laid the flat-panel down on the table and addressed its secures, verifying her identity with the chop she wore around her neck. It was a very full collection; she could tell that as the initiating diagnostics ran. She’d been waiting for the traffic reports from the very start — from the moment at which it had been reported that something had gone wrong at Upos and destroyed the gate records, covering eight days’ worth of data from the stores. From the backup. From the virtuals. From the disasters. Physically destroyed.

  The records hadn’t been physically destroyed at Wellocks, no, only part of the damage had been fire and corrosion there; but what they had recovered had been irretrievably over-written by a very sophisticated blanking protocol that Jils wanted for her own. And Burig as well, not only the two vectors out of Chilleau itself but two of the vectors from which one could gain access to the Wellocks vector and thus to Chilleau — oh, it had been thoroughly done.

  Panthis and Ygau had been unharmed, undamaged, un-attacked except for some minor damage all too clearly designed to dilute the focus of an investigation by widening the field of avenues that had to be investigated. There wasn’t much doubt in Jils’ mind about that. The key to the problem was to be sought first where the unknown quarry had tried to hide it most completely. There’d been Fleet at Burig, Fleet at Ktank, Fleet at Upos and Wellocks and Panthis as well; so if it was a Fleet initiative Fleet had certainly had the resources in place to cover its tracks. Yes, if it had been Fleet.

  Months to restore the traffic reports by tracking every ship that had arrived at any vector it could have reached from any of the vandalized vectors. Months to collect and rationalize and sort the data, to try to make information out of it. It was up to her, now. There were still connections and clues that could not be elicited from any of the non-sentient analysis tools at the Bench’s disposal.

  Report of traffic, Bury Vector, inbound and outbound, minus sixteen to plus eight. Analysis record. Do you
wish to proceed? And yet something made Jils pause, and secure the log, and stare down at the flat-panel on the table for a long moment, thinking.

  It was an analysis record, and an analysis record by definition was an extract. The judge had publicly entrusted her with sensitive documentation; but the sensitive documentation with which the judge had entrusted her was derivative. Second-hand. Nothing that couldn’t be easily replaced, re-run, and — perhaps crucially — compared against a master record to check for errors and omissions.

  The Second Judge probably had her own people working on it already. It was just a piece of window-dressing, even if it was also something Jils had been waiting for. And any of the other Bench specialists she was traveling to meet at Brisinje would reach the same conclusion as Jils had, as quickly or more: if something compromised this data, there was no harm done. The judge didn’t expect Jils to get anything out of it anyway.

  This was not encouraging. It didn’t always take a warrant to authorize a Bench specialist to carry out an execution or Judicial assassination. Warrants were required to communicate the Court’s decision that someone had to die for the good of the Judicial order; Bench specialists were empowered to make their own decisions, about whether someone needed termination.

  Jils was going to Convocation, to represent the Second Judge’s interest. There would be a Bench specialist from each of the eight other Judiciaries, even Fontailloe, which by long-standing custom could not compete for the position vacated by the death of the previous incumbent. Eight Bench specialists, each of whom had the legal right to kill when it seemed necessary, so long as they felt they could justify their decision before a panel of their peers after the fact.

  A target didn’t even have to be guilty to need killing. Sometimes it was enough if a public perception of guilt existed, if failure to demonstrate some sort of sanctions would encourage defiance of the Bench, if it was taking too long to find the guilty parties and the public had begun to wonder, if the greater good of the Judicial order demanded a quick close to a problem so that that everybody could just move on. Any one of those people could take her life if they decided she was or might as well be guilty. She would do the same.