Warring States

by Susan R. Matthews

  The Bench was all about regulation of trade, at its heart. Yes, its form was that of a Jurisdiction — nine judges on the Bench, each responsible for lower courts and circuits and the entire range of governance; but when it came down to it all the Bench was really interested in was protecting and perpetuating itself for the greater good of the Judicial order and the maintenance and regulation of trade.

  Jils sighed in frustrated resignation. “All right. Has anybody put their name to it?” Twenty hours clear already? She hadn’t really noticed the passage of time. She was sure she’d learned the first few sections of that data by heart, but that was a poor return on a Bench specialist’s time.

  “There’s a preliminary report on it, Dame, but nothing official. I’ll let you know if anything comes in.”

  Right. “Thanks, pilot, Ivers away here.” She’d spoken to him four or five times on her way to or from the galley; personable sort with an unusual name. Weren’t they all unusual names? The pilot was Emandisan. She’d track down her nagging sense of recognition later, when she had time. Jils reached for the pull-strap above the lintel of the door that separated cabin from corridor and pulled.

  The ceiling-panels moved apart to either side of the cabin; there was the exercise apparatus stowed and waiting. Its own pull-strap fell free of the ceiling panels and Jils put her weight to it to deploy the device, an exercise globe, flattened for storage but unfolding into the metal skeleton of a sphere as it descended.

  Each of the cabins contained a piece of stowed equipment in its ceiling compartment. She had made sure that she got the cabin with the globe. There were times when the only thing to do was to step into the cage and strap in and work it into a freely-spinning inertial resistance training machine.

  The straps of the man-mount in the middle unfolded and fell straight from their anchors as the globe completed its descent, and something fell to the floor. A piece of paper. Caught up in the apparatus from the last time it had been deployed, perhaps?

  She didn’t care. This was a well-maintained little courier, but things could be overlooked, and a stray bit of paper in an overhead storage bin was no big deal. Opening the door of the spherical cage Jils stepped inside and started to strap herself in, thinking. How far had she gotten in the data?

  She’d gotten through most of the Terek vector’s records, only partially distracted by its casualty list. Terek was powerful — giving access to more than five exit vectors — but loose; it was easy to end up where you didn’t expect to be, if you didn’t pay attention.

  Some of the Terek’s multiple exit vectors were in undeveloped territory. There were supposed to be emergency depots at even those, in theory; but with Fleet stretched thin and complaining about resource starvation, if the resupply and maintenance crews hadn’t been by and the last ship had taken atmosphere, you could find yourself without enough good air to last until next planetfall if you had to turn around and take the vector right away. Setting the wheel in motion was a gradual process, and she had to exert herself to get the wheel started. That was the whole point, after all. There’d been a lot of traffic through Terek lately, at least during the audit period. Never any shortage of people willing to risk their lives to save time and resources. A really good pilot had nothing to fear from the Terek vector, true enough.

  The wheel was beginning to warm up and start spinning, slowly. The piece of paper in the floor was like a visual brake that interrupted Jils’ train of thought every time the rotation of the wheel carried her past. That wasn’t just an ordinary piece of maintenance log-sheet. There was something disturbing about the way in which it was folded.

  Terek vector, Jils told herself, firmly. Ships could occasionally slip through Terek during a solar disturbance that reduced the capacity of the vector control’s recording devices. Might a ship have come in the wrong direction — from Gonebeyond — carrying an assassin?

  Why wasn’t that piece of paper resting on the floor moving in the air-currents that the movement of the exercise sphere created as it spun faster and faster? Just how heavy was it? She’d seen heavier paper and thinner paper, and even metal foils could be used for hand-writes from time to time. Metal foils could be quite heavy. But if it was a metal foil would it have fallen the way it had?

  She braked the machine with the weight of her body, going limp, leaning back against the harness. This was no good. She wasn’t getting anywhere. The wheel spun to a stop; Jils unstrapped herself. Reaching through the metal frame of the sphere Jils picked the damned thing up and unfolded it. Heavy paper — sketch paper — and a simple cartoon in which Jils recognized a message.

  It was a hanged man. A stick figure on an old-fashioned tee-frame, the noose — a specific noose, a technically correct detail — clearly indicated. And across the stick figure a scrawled strike-out heavy and black as if the person who had done the cartoon had wished to call the image back. Jils knew better than to imagine that to have been the case, however, because she recognized the style.

  She always sought the cabin with the globe. She frequently diverted herself with exercise when she was thinking hard about something, and she had been thinking hard ever since she’d found Verlaine’s body.

  The doodle would mean nothing to anybody else; it had been left there for her, only her, in the hopes that chance would bring her to this cabin. The news of a Convocation had been leaked months ago; that it was to happen at Brisinje was common diplomatic knowledge. Chilleau Judiciary had no Bench specialist to send but her. The odds of Jils traveling to Brisinje on this one courier were by no means as long as they might at first though seem; and who knew how many doodles had been planted in how many cabins, and by whom?

  Karol Vogel wanted her to know that Simms “the Hangman” Balkney had not done the murder of First Secretary Verlaine.

  Ever since she had realized that Karol had gone missing she had sought for news, clues to his whereabouts, some sort of a hint about what he was doing — any scrap of information that might explain why he had disappeared so disgustingly completely on his way out of Burkhayden space, nearly a year ago, now. She had found nothing. She knew what the doodle meant in the immediate sense, at least on the surface; but what its meaning might carry as a deeper message — and how long it had been here, waiting for her — she could not afford to stop and brood about.

  Would Karol be in Convocation? Surely not. But Balkney might well be. At least Karol wasn’t dead, or hadn’t been, recently enough to have left her a message.

  She left her cabin as it was and took the piece of paper to the wheelhouse where the pilot sat at his station. He looked over his shoulder as she came in and started to rise, but she waved off the courteous gesture and sat down in the second seat at the pilot’s right. What was she going to ask him? What was she going to ask first?

  “Feed from Brisinje space,” the pilot said, and cued a visual. “It’s shameful.”

  She could see the pearl-gray globe of Brisinje, its great oceans, the brilliant white sands of its countless beaches outlining the landmasses clearly even hours and hours away; she could see the dark smudge in the atmosphere at Brisinje’s equator feathering like a plume from Brisinje Judiciary’s seat on the famous Reggidout River. It was the gem of the Judiciary, so pure and clear a river that it was celebrated throughout the Judiciary and even beyond; and the black smoke lay across that beautiful blue thread for what had to be octaves and octaves.

  She didn’t have to wait for the reports to be written to know the cost in human suffering. The river had no defense against the outrage that was done to it, and on behalf of the white sand beaches and the clear blue river Reggidout Jils knew a special kind of anger in her heart.

  “We’re scheduled in at Imennou,” the pilot said. “Priority override, we’re the last party to arrive. You’ll be met.”

  She’d just bet. Met by a guard of honor, yes, but one that was a guard detail beneath it all. They needed her for Convocation, though; Karol wasn’t here to speak for Chilleau and there was nobody else
who’d been associated with Chilleau at any recent time who wasn’t already absorbed in the affairs of other Judiciaries. That gave her a reprieve of sorts. Perhaps.

  She opened her mouth to ask a question but closed it again when she realized how little good it would do her. She could ask the courier’s pilot where he’d been, and he would tell her; she could check its records, for that matter.

  She could ask the pilot if he knew where Karol Vogel was, but Bench specialists could travel unregistered; it was part of their privilege package. They were not obliged to tell anyone where they’d been or were going. If Karol had been here the pilot might well have been instructed not to mention it, and pilots were by definition conscientious and careful people, as a rule. If Karol had not identified himself, he was traveling as someone else, in which case a passenger list in and of itself would do her little good.

  What did it matter? Karol had been here, and left her a message. “Imennou.” She wasn’t sure she even knew where that was. “How long to Brisinje from there?”

  “Six hours by ground-car, they tell me, Dame. I’ve never ridden in a top-of-the-line ground-car. Is it true that they stock the refreshments bar with all of your favorite snacks?”

  “Bench specialists don’t have favorite snacks.” It was the response he would expect; she’d play along. “And we live on plain water and survival rations. It’s to avoid establishing a pattern that could be used to locate and identify us when we’re under cover. And when you’ve been living on survival rations almost anything else counts as a favorite snack, believe me.”

  The pilot grinned. “I’ll send ahead, Dame,” he promised. “Refreshments bar to be stocked with plain water and survival rations. Supplement tabs.”

  She almost had to laugh, and missed laughing so much that she did. “Very good,” she said, with an assumed frostiness of dignity. “Carry on. I’ll just be going back to quarters.”

  She didn’t want to watch the world come closer. She didn’t need a clearer hint of how Brisinje was suffering from fire and sabotage. The fuel tanks on the launch-field had been breached. The toxins in the atmosphere would be damaging the river’s flora and fauna for years. It was criminal. But that was stating the obvious.

  If she survived the Convocation she would ask to be allowed to stay on at Brisinje, and see the villains punished herself, if possible. If she didn’t get through to the truth about Verlaine’s death her own execution was all but inevitable.

  ###

  “True enough,” Koscuisko said to the convoy commander Dawson, standing on the platform before the last of the mercantile ships to be unshackled. The unchaining was figurative, of course; it seemed to Stildyne that what Koscuisko had just offered to tell Dawson about Dawson’s father was likely to be distressingly concrete. “He might have liked you to know, all the same. Shall I tell you?”

  Dawson looked at the vector officer, who seemed to shrug her shoulders as well as anybody could while she was standing on her dignity. She was operating at a significant handicap in the dignity department because she was on Koscuisko’s right, and Koscuisko could project ferocious self-possession in his bare feet and a soiled nightshirt. Stildyne had seen him do it.

  Looking back over his shoulder, checking the progress of the preparations for departure, Dawson took a deep breath and thinned his lips with an expression of resignation. “I repeat that I can’t imagine what a man might want to hear about his father’s death by torture,” Dawson said. If there was hatred in his voice Stildyne couldn’t place it. “Speak as you like, Uncle.”

  The familiar tone that Dawson took had surprised the vector officer, so much was obvious. She knew how to take her cue from Koscuisko, though; that was obvious as well. And Koscuisko didn’t seem to be bothered by the imputation of kinship.

  “I paid little attention to it at the time,” Koscuisko said. “And only now realize what it meant. Your father knew that you were not taken. I showed him the list of friends and family known to be dead and in custody, you were not on it.”

  A strange light leapt into Dawson’s coppery eyes as Koscuisko spoke, but it seemed to die away as quickly as it had kindled. “It’s a small matter,” Dawson said. “Thank you, but I — ”

  Koscuisko shook his head emphatically. “Excuse me that I insist, Dawson. It is no small thing. I meant to dishearten him by showing him that all was lost, and he knew by my showing that hope remained. Had that changed during the course of our acquaintance I would have told him, he would have known to be sure of that, and it had been some weeks. Months. That you had not been taken or identified among existing prisoners meant good hope. I left him little enough to take with him as he died.”

  The whole Domitt Prison thing had been before Stildyne’s time, though it had been at Rudistal that he had first met Andrej Koscuisko. Fleet had elected to effect Koscuisko’s formal transfer from Scylla to the Ragnarok while Koscuisko was back in Port Rudistal to execute the sentence of the Court against the Domitt Prison’s administration. He’d met Koscuisko’s former chief of Security, and made some assumptions about their relationship that had created problems for him later. He was glad he hadn’t been there the night Koscuisko had taken Joslire Curran’s life, though.

  “And he left you with the weave.” Dawson had gone pale. “I never learned my mother’s weave, Uncle, nor my father’s either. And you. You wrote them down. You said so.”

  Had Koscuisko had conversation with Dawson that Stildyne hadn’t known about? It was possible, if difficult to imagine. Stildyne liked to know where Koscuisko was, and with whom. It was his job. Koscuisko only nodded, though, so it had clearly happened, somehow.

  “Eight and eighty of them,” Koscuisko agreed. “And have given the text to the Church to be protected, since there is no security on board of the Ragnarok for any of her crew. No personal criticism is meant by this, Brachi.”

  Of course not. It was the security of the Ragnarok as an entity that Koscuisko meant, not the quality of protection provide by any of its Security teams.

  “Does the Dolgorukij church speak scream?” Dawson asked, with an almost completely suppressed tremor in his voice. Koscuisko shook his head.

  “Not so much in these latter days, but my cousin Stoshi can read my handscript better than most. We have a similar handscript, or at least we have had in the past.”

  That was true. There was a family resemblance. Stildyne was in a position to know, having seen one or two examples of the writing of Koscuisko’s cousin Stanoczk. It had been a shame that he hadn’t been able to keep them, but the matter of the notes that Stanoczk sent to Stildyne was not such that Stildyne could take the risk of accidental disclosure.

  “What must we do to get the weaves back, then?” Dawson demanded. The maintenance crew was coming off the last of the convoy ships, and the members of Dawson’s crew who had been detailed to accompany them looked satisfied and eager. They would be leaving soon.

  “It is your property, or rather the property in common of any Nurail. The Saint holds the manuscript in trust, and will transcribe it. I meant in this way to be sure the books were safe.” It was technically illegal to transcribe Nurail weaves, and had been for years; part of the Bench sanctions. Of course Koscuisko could do so with impunity. The Law did not apply to Inquisitors, or applied only in a limited sense.

  The vector officer’s maintenance chief had waited politely for Koscuisko to stop talking. Koscuisko could see her waiting as clearly as Stildyne could, of course, and raised his eyebrows at the woman, inviting her to speak.

  Which she did, to her vector officer, as was appropriate. “Cleared and registered, vector officer,” the maintenance chief said. “Buy-off on all stats. Ready for immediate departure.”

  Vector Officer Vaalkarinnen nodded. “Get out of here, Dawson,” she said. “I wouldn’t waste any time. Go. Move. Shift.”

  “And take your surgical kit with you,” Koscuisko added. The vector officer looked up sharply at Koscuisko as he spoke, but Garrity and Hirsel, taking their cu
e, were already moving the two solid crates forward at as brisk a pace as the assists would tolerate.

  Dawson offered the vector officer his hand; she seemed to think about whether she would protest, but apparently made up her mind to let it go. She shook Dawson’s hand, and Dawson turned away to hurry into the open passenger loading ramp of the nearest ship with Garrity and Hirsel following close after.

  “I looked at their manifest,” Vaalkarinnen said to Koscuisko. “They’re not carrying surgical kit. Just standard medical maintenance and emergency.”

  “And I have done an inventory of your medical facility, Vaalkarinnen. Do you know how outdated a significant portion of your stores have become? I have been forced to destroy materia medica that might otherwise fall into the wrong hands. You will have to make do with a single inventory-set until your replacement stock arrives from Emandis Station. It may be ten days but I have placed the requisition on urgent status.”

  Was that what Koscuisko had been spending all that time in the station’s surgery doing? Building a colonization medical kit for Dawson’s fleet? Stildyne wouldn’t put it past him. And it would explain. When Koscuisko got off on a medical tangent Stildyne tried to stay out of his way. Koscuisko had threatened him with reconstructive surgery more than once, and Stildyne was not taking any chances.

  “Thank you, your Excellency.” Koscuisko had left Vaalkarinnen with nothing else to say. She sounded sincere enough all the same. Stildyne could empathize with the dilemma that she’d been in, and with Koscuisko here she had been able to release the entire convoy without so much as a bruise or a yelp or a drop of blood. “I understand that I am responsible for imposing on you. I’m very grateful to you for your assistance.”

  Well, it wasn’t as though it had been Koscuisko’s idea, precisely. Koscuisko said as much. “Your sense of conservation is to be heartily applauded, Vaalkarinnen.” The sincerity in Koscuisko’s startled a blush out of her. Stildyne wondered if she minded. Blushing was a much under-rated ability, so far as Stildyne was concerned. He didn’t think he’d ever been able to do it. “I applaud your dutiful care of souls under Jurisdiction. I have said as much when I made my report.”