“Jils Ivers is at Brisinje,” Vogel said to Koscuisko. “I’ll see if she can be spared to mediate. If you think it might help.”
“I’d be happy to see Dame Ivers again.” No, there was still something else going on with Koscuisko, Caleigh decided. What was it? Something to do with Ivers, whoever she was?
“If you’re quite finished, Koscuisko, you can clear out. Provost Marshall, go, Specialist Vogel, good-greeting. Intelligence, put the Ragnarok on monitor.” Just so that the captain could cultivate his aggravation by watching the Ragnarok leave, Caleigh supposed. “First Officer. Send someone to pick up Doctor Lazarbee, would you? Very kind.”
Fleet Captain Irshah Parmin didn’t trouble himself over-much with things he couldn’t help. This situation was one of those things.
But he was unquestionably as angry, in his calm resigned fashion, as Caleigh thought she had ever seen him in her life.
###
Chapter Fifteen
Intervention
“If Fontailloe can’t seat the next First Judge from existing Judicial resources, then Fontailloe can’t seat the Second Judge from Chilleau,” Jils said firmly. “The issue remains the same.”
“There may be no single judge at Fontailloe ready to assume the role of First Judge, true.” Jeru Tanifer had grown old in the service of the Bench. What would become of Tanifer under the new administration at Fontailloe was anybody’s guess. “All the more reason to provide on-site guidance during a difficult time.”
“Fontailloe has to promote a judge either way,” Nion said suddenly. Jils was startled to hear it. Nion was observing; she wasn’t supposed to be engaging in the debate, in any sense. Turning her head toward the window Jils examined Nion’s face in reflection — belligerent in expression. Tanifer had turned his head as well, but to look at Nion, apparently as surprised as Jils.
“Inappropriate interjection,” Tanifer said reprovingly. “Ivers. Your call. The point is one that I might have brought into discussion. I’d rather not have to abstain from making it.”
Nion’s point was hardly one that hadn’t occurred to people before, though. With one last long look at the reflection in the window — Nion, Tanifer, Ivers — Jils turned back to face Tanifer. “The point is in fair play,” she agreed. “To return to your point. On-site guidance might be for the long-term good of Fontailloe, using the Second Judge’s experience as a resource to develop a newly promoted judge’s confidence. Such an accommodation has not been felt necessary in the past, however. And who’s to see to Chilleau if we move its Judge?”
Nion had folded her arms and was staring out the window with evident frustration and disgust. The only direction in which there was anything to see from the observation float was toward the station; the station’s lights illuminated its walls, and the walkway between the shore and the float was lined with gleams. In every other direction there was nothing but black water, the cave’s roof disappearing into the darkness, and the far shores of the lake out of sight.
It was night-time in Brisinje, Jils realized. No light from the surface shone through those light-wells to give any definition to the world outside the float. There was only the dark, and the station.
“A new First Judge from Fontailloe could be perceived as outside the Bench’s entrenched interest,” Tanifer said thoughtfully. “Promote at Fontailloe, send the new judge to Chilleau while Chilleau’s new First Secretary comes up to speed.”
“That’s the worst of both worlds.” It was a prescription for disaster, and Jils meant to write the dosage instructions out carefully. “Meanwhile you pull the Second Judge out of the Judiciary that she has made her home for an entire career and place her at the mercy of the First Secretary of the old First Judge, a man loyal to the memory of na Roqua den Tensa and accustomed to doing things the previous incumbent’s way. There will be inevitable resentments if they feel they are having a Judge imposed on them, especially if she is just going to be there for a few years.”
In fact, the only thing that Jils could think of that would be worse than sending the Second Judge to Fontailloe would be not declaring a new First Judge at all. Confederacy still took the prize for the single worst solution to the situation they were in, as far as Jils was concerned.
Tanifer sighed. “I need a personal functions break,” he said. “Want anything from the kitchen? Coming with me?”
Jils declined with a polite wave of her hand. She didn’t particularly need to stretch her legs just now; she’d save her break, she might want it later on in the session. They were three hours into this session, and it was the second day they’d been arguing. Two, three hours to go, and then they’d pick it up again after a sleep break.
Tanifer rose to his feet and left the room without looking at Nion; Jils stayed sat, running through their progress in her mind. She wasn’t sure they were much closer to agreement than they had been days ago.
“Look at that,” Nion said, suddenly. Jils pulled herself out of her concentration to see what Nion was talking about. Standing up from her observer’s post, Nion took the six steps required to cross the room to stand at the outermost angle of the room, staring into the blackness; what did she see?
Jils didn’t feel like standing up. She was tired, and her ribs hurt. Nion was an unpleasant person. Jils didn’t like her. Her teeth were all wrong, baby teeth, baby teeth grown to adult size in an adult jaw to grotesque effect. Jils had to shake her head at herself; Nion’s teeth were a part of her lineage, not a moral failing of any sort. But Jils still didn’t feel like standing up. “Look at what?”
“That,” Nion repeated, encouragingly, and pointed.
Wearily Jils rose to her feet — there wasn’t any point to being gratuitously rude, after all — and went to stand beside Nion, a little behind Nion and to the left. It was a habit. It was just a habit. Most hominids were right-dominant. Their instinct was to turn to bring their right hands into play against an enemy standing to their left. It didn’t work with Bench specialists, or with anybody else who had trained much in hand-to-hand; but it was still a default.
Facing away from the station into the darkness all Jils could see was the interior of the room, mirrored in the glass. “I’m not getting you,” Jils said. “I don’t see anything except for our reflections.”
“While I see a traitor to the Bench.” Nion took a step to the right, turning so that she and Jils faced each other. She had a hand-harpoon, a light little crossbow handarm-sized that could be folded flat and carried almost anywhere concealed in a sleeve or a boot. “And the person who will restore the honor of the service. You killed First Secretary Sindha Verlaine, Ivers. Die for it.”
Nion fired. Jils feinted right — if Nion was right-handed it would be Nion’s instinct to follow an attempted escape from right to left in her own frame of reference — and dropped to the ground with a push to the left, trying to move as much of her body out of the path of the harpoon as possible. Pocket-harpoons didn’t have much range, by and large, and made up for the lack by carrying poison in the cutting edge of the barbel-headed point. Nion didn’t have to deliver a traumatic wound to kill her, so Nion would — had — aimed for the body.
It was a very slim chance, but it was the only one Jils had. There was only one round to a pocket-harpoon. It had no target tracking system; part of the reason that the weapon could be successfully concealed was its lack of an intelligence of its own. If she could confuse Nion’s aim enough, and move fast enough, she might escape a fatal cut. She reached out for Nion as she dropped, hoping to set Nion off balance; she got Nion’s ankle, pulled it sharply, and Nion lost her footing and fell.
Had she been hit? Jils couldn’t tell. She didn’t have time to check, either. Nion would have used a fast-acting poison, one without a readily available antidote; Nion’s best hope of having her act accepted as a killing for cause lay in being sure that the “killing” part of it was already accomplished before the question came up, because once Jils was dead the precise reason why she had been killed r
eceded somewhat in importance. Jils knew how that worked.
She didn’t feel a cut; the sharp pain in her scraped ribs when she hit the ground distracted her. If she hadn’t been cut Nion would, necessarily, try to cut her again. From the moment Nion had drawn the weapon it had been Nion against Ivers to the death, and if Jils was going to die at the hands of someone with such unnatural teeth she was going to do her damnedest to take Nion down with her. Self-respect demanded nothing less.
Nion fell, and before Nion hit the ground Jils rolled away, curling her body into the space in which Nion had been standing to avoid the harpoon if it had not pierced her. It lay on the ground behind Jils; maybe it had sliced her as it passed, but if it hadn’t, she wasn’t about to lie still and wait for Nion to pick it up.
Nion had scrambled to her hands and knees, reaching for the harpoon. Jils kicked once to send it clattering away from them, and then again to connect with Nion’s throat. Nion wasn’t paying attention. Nion wanted the harpoon. Jils didn’t have one.
She had a fraction of one second to think about her alternatives while Nion lay gasping for breath on the floor with her hand to her throat. Jils wasn’t armed because they were all to have left their weapons on the surface. That was to her advantage. Nion was distracted by the loss of her harpoon.
Jils started to rise to grab a chair and see if she could break a tube out of the frame to serve as a bludgeon; started, but her ribs had other ideas and sent her back down to the floor with a gasp of surprised pain that was only intensified when Nion — having struggled to her feet, now, in the time that Jils had let escape her, handicapped by the pain from recently scored bone — kicked her in the ribs where the cut had been before stumbling across the room; for her harpoon, Jils supposed.
She couldn’t breathe, and her ribs hurt like little she could call to her mind for comparison. It didn’t matter. If she didn’t do something she was much worse off than hurt, she was dead. She caught at the leg of the chair by the table, the one she’d been sitting in, and managed to push it into Nion’s pathway as Nion turned on her with harpoon in hand like a knife.
It would work very well for a knife. All Nion had to do was to cut her, but Nion fell over the chair that Jils sent across her path of advance and crashed to the ground. Nion did not loose her hold on the harpoon.
Jils couldn’t let Nion rise again, not if she was to have a chance, any chance at all. Staggering to her feet Jils put one foot down on Nion’s hand to fix it in its place and dropped down heavily onto one knee, which landed in the middle of Nion’s back. She was off balance; Nion almost threw her, fighting, snarling with an inarticulate cry of rage.
Jils smelled blood, and knew it wasn’t hers. Nion had been cut by the harpoon, Nion was poisoned by her own weapon, but that wouldn’t stop Nion from using the last few moments of her life to take Jils out with her, any more than it had stopped Jils even with less certitude of the coming end. Jils couldn’t afford to gamble on whether she could get out and defensibly away from Nion before Nion got her. Not in her condition.
Jils took Nion’s hand between her two hands, got Nion’s jaw cradled into her left palm, and twisted. Something snapped. The body went still.
Now finally Jils could crawl away from Nion, so long as she kept to the other side of Nion from the hand that held the harpoon. Nion was not dead yet, though she would be losing consciousness quickly. But Nion was no longer capable of coordinated movement or directed action: Jils had broken Nion’s neck. It was over. They didn’t have the medical equipment here on station to stabilize so serious a compromise, and the poison on the harpoon would be doing its work as well.
Had Nion killed her? Had she been cut by the harpoon? Was the white-hot aching anguish in her side just the protest of her recently injured body?
She sat down at the table, her movements slow and clumsy. She tried to remember what the sequence of the attack had been to give herself a list of things to check, places to look for her death warrant incised upon her skin by the poisoned edge of a hand-harpoon. She couldn’t remember. Was she dying already?
The door to the room burst open with a sudden furious force, and Padrake came through with fragments of structural beams decorating his shoulders. He had beautifully broad shoulders. Jils had always particularly admired them.
“Harpoons,” Jils said to him, hearing the slurring at the edges of her own words. “One down. Don’t know about self.”
“Can you walk?” Padrake asked, his eyes moving from point to point as he took in the particulars of the scene.
Jils shook her head. “Not sure. But I don’t want to fall into the water.” There were others coming in behind Padrake. There was Tanifer, for one. Capercoy. Balkney. Rinpen. “Not confident of swimming.”
She didn’t want to breathe. It hurt to even think about swimming. “Medical,” Padrake said firmly. “Sorry about this, Jils, please don’t kill me — ”
If he’d tried to take her up in to his arms to carry her, she would have. It was too absurd. His innate sense of self-preservation served him well; he shouldered her instead, one arm hooked around a thigh and the other supporting her shoulder. Being carried like a sack of spent-grains was marginally better than being carried off in a litter, Jils supposed.
She was very tired.
She concentrated on breathing past the pain in her side and was pleasantly surprised when she did not, in fact, die on her way to the station’s tiny medical area.
###
In the past seven days Shona Ise-I’let had worked double shifts for material management and then recreated himself in the warehouse moving stores with cranes and auto-movers, sleeping when he had to and eating whenever he paused to think about it.
The launch-fields of Brisinje proper were still fully enveloped in the fires that had started days ago. A huge black stinking stain in the atmosphere had reached the brilliant clear blue skies of Imennou, the night-fog leaving sooty streaks on the white walls as it lifted in the morning. The flowers were dying, poisoned.
People who worked outside had to wear respirator masks and wash carefully as soon as they were indoors; people with respiratory illnesses were not to stir out-of-doors at all. The public services in Imennou were stretched to their limit to see to the welfare of such people, young and old alike.
If people couldn’t get out-of-doors they couldn’t get to the markets. If people couldn’t get to the markets they began to run short of provisions. Provisions were beginning to thin, though there was still enough food — the local crops had been almost exhausted, but there were still areas the smoke had not reached, fields that continued to yield. Local transport could still sustain them.
One of the old quarters of Brisinje had been burned as well; there’d been a rumor that some of the saboteurs responsible for the destruction at the launch-field had been found, and a mob of frustrated, fearful people had gone in to take the very most primitive kind of revenge on guilty and innocent alike. There needed to be an answer. There needed to be a Selection. That a riot could light fires in Brisinje within eyeshot of Bench chambers was a horror too profound to be described.
Shona had worked — with Brisinje out of operation, all of the cargo handling had to be absorbed through smaller facilities well removed from the source of the disaster — but Shona had been counting, as well. Seven days. The Ragnarok had almost certainly left Emandis Station. He had no hope.
His family had met Andrej Koscuisko. They had taken him to where Joslire’s ashes had been scattered into the sacred earth. Then they had heard nothing more of him. They had been told that Fleet had jurisdiction problems, that the Port Authority had lodged a complaint; but they’d not seen the man himself but the once.
Shona had resigned himself, almost. His crew, the others on board of the courier, had done what they could to help him along, alternating between attempting to distract him and leaving him strictly alone.
He could not honorably put his private thirst to meet the man to whom his brother had given the most p
recious thing on all Emandis above the fact that cargo had to move and trade continue or else the suffering caused by the burning launch-fields of Brisinje would extend far beyond the boundaries of Brisinje Jurisdiction. Could not. Wanted passionately to be able to, and worked as hard as he could to manage his piercing sense of deprivation — or at least to dull it, with fatigue.
Six days, and Shona was sitting in the launch controller’s function room in front of three schemers, juggling alternate projections to find a launch sequence for ships of varying sizes that would maximize the weight that they could lift in the next thirty-two hours.
Things were relatively quiet; and in every quiet moment a man consulted the schemers on the question of re-arranging the launch sequences. There were always adjustments that could be made. There was always new information coming in. The entry lines were out on a courier coming in from Emandis Station; Shona heard the ship’s identification without paying attention. He was tired.
Someone came and handed him a launch-ticket, and he sighed in resignation. Priority redirect, depart for Brisinje immediately, and depart from there on arrival of passenger or passengers for Emandis Station as quickly as possible, all available means to be employed to speed the transit.
He punched the orders into the nearest schemer, watching the ship’s identification scroll across the reader while he waited for the schemer to calculate the delay that this would create for everybody else at Imennou. Yes, that was an elite Emandisan courier. Yes, it could clear in very little time. Yes, the crew was on site. Yes, he could bring it in to Brisinje, there were places you could put a courier down if you really had to — somebody really had to —
Wait. That was his courier. His ship. He was the pilot there, on the manifest. Courier pilot Shona Ise-I’let, in support of Bench specialist Vogel. Imennou to Brisinje to Emandis Station, special priority, departure — immediate.
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