“I can crawl fairly well.” The inbred formality of the aristocratic class of Aznir struck her as more amusing than it probably actually was; they had just been blown up together, and he was calling her by title. “Just point me at the probable location. I want a drink of water.”
No, she wanted his medical kit, because stimulants and painkillers seemed clearly the order of the day. “Far wall,” Koscuisko gasped. “Farthest from the wheelhouse. I don’t know what direction that is, right now. Regrets.”
Yes, she had regrets too, and the fact that she was going to have to keep moving was worth a series all to itself. Koscuisko had been between her and the corridor. If she turned around and crawled the other way she should find the far wall, and the bed-cabins were small. They were lucky the bomb hadn’t breached the hull. If Koscuisko hadn’t gotten the blast shields deployed it might have done. What had Koscuisko used to set the sequence off? A knife?
“Bedding,” Jils announced. “Fabric, anyway.” So she was on the right track.
Koscuisko coughed. “Go left. Small trunk. Maybe destroyed.” His voice was sounding stronger. Weren’t there emergency stores in the hull somewhere? She was feeling better as well, but it was important not to take that as a sign that nothing was wrong. They were undoubtedly both in shock. That was in turn probably why she wanted water.
She took it slow and easy, and by the time she’d found Koscuisko’s trunk Koscuisko had come dragging himself over the remains of walls and furnishings to join her and help her dig it out. A good third of the upper part of the case had been smashed in, but Koscuisko didn’t seem to mind. Prying the trunk open with an effort visible even in the low sulfur-lights Koscuisko searched the interior, then grunted in evident satisfaction.
“Well done,” Koscuisko said. “Thank you. Water?” His voice had the strained and gravelly sound of a man trying not to cough, because if he started he wouldn’t be able to stop. Jils had done her coughing. She wished Koscuisko luck with the attempt.
There was no predicting some of the exact impacts of any one blast; this one had taken the doors off of the emergency stores that had filled one wall between bed-cabins on that side of the ship, but left the stores themselves more or less intact. She pulled out items as she located them, water, oxygen, the medical set. It was hard work even with Koscuisko to help her and she wasn’t at her best just now. Koscuisko didn’t seem to be bending his right hand or any of its fingers, but that could be a trick of the light.
“Enough,” Koscuisko said, and lifted the seal on a water-flask. “Here. Take these.” He had a small assortment of tablets, pills, capsules in his left hand, passing them to her awkwardly with the flask held between two fingers.
She accepted the offered medications, and the flask; but paused to toss them in the palm of her hand, weighing them up. “What’s this?”
“Later.” Koscuisko had turned back to his kit to sort out a set of drugs for his own use, washing them down with a second flask of water. She wondered why she was taking drugs in this form, but then she realized that the dose-styli were usually kept in the lid of the kit, and the lid was damaged. Maybe they were smashed. Maybe Koscuisko didn’t trust them. “Shut up and drink.”
Nobody had spoken so bluntly to her for a long time. It made her smile; Koscuisko was not to be questioned in his own field. It took her most of the flask to get the pills down one and two at a time, with her throat as raw from coughing as it was; when she had finished she sat still in her temporary resting place and closed her eyes to wait for something to happen. Was it getting cold? No. She was cold because she was in shock. There were emergency blankets in stores, perhaps, but she didn’t have the energy to find them.
“What happened?” Koscuisko asked, after a while. “I can’t quite remember. Do you?”
She thought about it, appreciating the fact that her body was beginning to not hurt as much and that she was feeling much warmer and that it seemed easier to breathe. Had he given her an altitude booster? “There was something in the data I wanted to ask Ise-I’let about. That started it.”
“You came to ask him whether he’d been at Terek when — something.” Koscuisko spoke slowly, but there was less and less slurring to the edges of his words as he spoke on. “Shona had to leave. You said that the data had been tampered with.”
It was beginning to come back to her. “I’d have remembered it. Not the first time through, no, I might have missed it once, not made the connection. But I’d looked at that exact data at least three times. It wasn’t there before.”
“And it seemed to me self-evident that the data had been booby-trapped as well as tampered with,” Koscuisko said, contemplatively. “I don’t quite remember — let me think.” He reached out for another flask of water; she passed it to him, remembering for herself while he drank and thought.
Yes. He’d been very definite. It’s a bomb, he’d said, and torn the data-reader from her hands. Tossed it through the open door of her bed-cabin, closed the door on it, pushed her very vigorously into his own — she’d fallen across the table, she remembered — and thrown something, before he’d jumped into the room and closed the door and put his back to it to catch his breath before he’d suggested that she help him deploy the inside wall, with such convincing urgency that she had.
Then nothing had happened. Nothing. They’d been sealed into the small bed-cabin with nothing to do but stare at one another, since Koscuisko had thrown her data into the next room and there was to be no getting out of this until they’d dropped vector and called the vector traffic control. Koscuisko had had some explaining to do. That was what she’d been thinking when the bomb had gone off.
“I don’t know if Vogel told you,” Koscuisko said. “When he tried to coax the secret out of the record that Noycannir had brought to Chelatring Side, it blew up in his face, which fortunately had been similarly assaulted in the past so that there was scar tissue that protected him. When the record realized that someone was suspicious of it, it destroyed itself.”
Koscuisko had told her at least part of that before, but maybe he didn’t remember. She wasn’t exactly sure what was new and what repeated, herself. “I hadn’t tampered with the data-reader, though. It wouldn’t have known I was suspicious unless it was carrying an ear, and a thinker as well.”
Both relatively sophisticated organics. It was possible.
Koscuisko, however, shook his head. He had shifted himself to put his back to what was left of the bed, now, and in the yellow light his expression was very difficult to read. His voice sounded increasingly confident, though.
“You wanted to ask Shona something. The new data raised an issue in your mind. Therefore it was placed there to send you to Shona. Therefore once you and Shona stood together it would explode. It wasn’t meant to destroy the courier, necessarily. It only had to kill the two of you.”
No, he was reaching. That didn’t make sense. She knew his reputation for making sometimes unnervingly precise intuitive deductions, reaching conclusions that seemed prescient or occult; she didn’t believe this was any such thing. So there was a reason that Koscuisko thought as he did.
“Help me out on this,” she suggested. “I’m not getting you. Data could be planted to incriminate Shona, or to mislead.”
She thought he might have nodded. “I’ll be honest with you, Dame Ivers, I’m not quite sure of that myself. But why would someone have wished to incriminate Shona? It is Bench specialists that he ferries, Specialist Delleroy, a great deal of the time. And if you were to ask me who my first guess was for a soul who could tamper with a data record, I might say ‘any given Bench specialist.’”
Padrake. Koscuisko had no way of knowing where her suspicions lay; she hadn’t shared the crucial timing with him. “Placing him at Terek at the wrong time would just lead to suspicion, though. And what if the next person who saw the data had no access to Ise-I’let?”
“You are to return to Chilleau, Specialist Ivers, you will not be using this data record. It will be
wiped and reconfigured. But if Shona was in a position to place Delleroy at Terek he might have said something to you. You might find out independently. Then if you found that the data was not there you would surely suspect a flaw in the source record. As it was you brought it to Shona direct, as I recall? I have a headache.”
She was getting sleepy. It wasn’t Koscuisko’s fault. He sounded a little drowsy himself, and maybe sleep wasn’t such a bad idea. If they were to live, the rescuers would wake them up; if they were to die it was surely better to die in one’s sleep, because if she stayed awake she’d be forced to confront how all the pieces trended toward a fit.
They didn’t all mesh, no. She needed to sit down with Ise-I’let to see what he could tell her. They simply all fit around a missing piece in the puzzle she had been trying to solve for months now, the problem of who had killed Sindha Verlaine. There was still that hole in the center of the picture; but as she put things together, the outline of that missing information looked more and more like Padrake Delleroy.
“He always was good with his hands,” she said sleepily, and then woke up with an embarrassed start to the implications of her own choice of words. Koscuisko wouldn’t know. But she did. There was a problem. There had to be a problem.
She could find a way that it could not have been Padrake. She would, even if he had spent as much time as he could get alone with her. She’d thought it was because of old times, maybe to protect her — had he only been waiting for a chance to see the data all along, in order to subvert it? “But the record was a Judicial document. Where would he have — ”
She shut herself up as she realized the connection she had made in her own mind, while she had not been watching. Koscuisko didn’t seem to have noticed a lack of obvious connection between the two issues, the sabotaged data-reader and the forged record. Koscuisko was still thinking only along the lines of the idea that the same people had been responsible for putting bombs in both of them. Wasn’t he?
“One of my gentlemen on Scylla said to me that their new chief medical officer had powerful friends, at the very highest levels. He even said the words ‘Bench specialist.’ This was the gossip network’s explanation for the unexpected and unwelcome displacement of Doctor Aldrai in Doctor Lazarbee’s favor. Both officers of course have custody of a Writ to Inquire, as do I — for now at least. If a man wanted a favor, he could provide a blanked record, and authenticate evidence that was not there. One with a Writ could then add to the evidence, but if there had been no evidence, the record might be convinced that no addition had been made. Conceivably.”
No, Koscuisko was thinking back to the circumstances in which that damned record had been forged in the first place. The record hadn’t been forged. It was an honest record. The evidence had been fabricated, and the record tricked into accepting it as original and authenticated data. Someone had authenticated the data, or the data shell, someone with an active Writ — unlike Mergau Noycannir, who didn’t have access to records to carry around. Someone like the chief medical officer currently on board of the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Scylla.
“Padrake seemed not to know him,” Jils insisted, thinking back. “Where did he transfer from, did your Security tell you that?”
Her voice was more accusing, challenging, than she had intended. Koscuisko didn’t seem to notice. He’d taken medication too. “I think Code said he’d come from the Galven, if that helps.”
It did not. It didn’t help at all. JFS Galven had been at Ygau when the traffic records had been attacked, apparently unsuccessfully, but now she knew. The traffic records at Ygau had been altered to remove one single entry: Padrake Delleroy coming from Chilleau, met by Shona Ise-I’let piloting the courier.
Padrake wouldn’t have needed anybody’s help to engineer an apparently failed attack on traffic records. So the favor he’d owed Lazarbee hadn’t been that, but the provision of an authenticated record to be forged, a record that Padrake had provided to Mergau Noycannir for her own purposes — Padrake had no reason to wish Koscuisko dead, Padrake didn’t care about Koscuisko one way or the other, why should he?
No. Padrake had provided the record in exchange for something else. Security codes. Noycannir had sold Chilleau’s security codes to Padrake for the instrument of her revenge against Andrej Koscuisko, but he hadn’t needed any but a very specific set. Koscuisko had killed Noycannir; Padrake had assassinated First Secretary Sindha Verlaine.
Why?
The room shook, suddenly; Koscuisko made a sound of startled pain, followed by a series of shallow gasping grunts. He was more hurt than he had seemed to be, possibly more hurt than he had realized. That was the way of it. And frequently it was the relatively minor injuries that really hurt.
“What’s happening?” Koscuisko asked, his voice a little choked in his throat. The room hadn’t stopped shaking; if it was what Jils thought it was, it was going to get worse, instead of better.
“We’re dropping vector.” That had to be it. “And if we’re lucky we’ll make it in one piece. Hang on. This may not be fun.”
There was nothing to hang on to, but Koscuisko didn’t argue back. Maybe he had other things to think about. She knew she did. First Secretary Arik Tirom had said that Verlaine’s proposed reforms would destroy the entire Bench if Chilleau became the seat of the new First Secretary. Padrake hadn’t seemed to disagree. Padrake, and Nion, and who knew who else, had all seemed to believe that Bench specialists were the natural authorities under Jurisdiction, that Bench specialists should be running things.
Jils closed her eyes and concentrated, and if she wept she knew it was just pain. And that was all. What Padrake meant to do in Convocation she couldn’t imagine; she was simply going to have to go back, and find out.
###
Things got quiet.
They were either off the vector or they were never getting off vector, because the ship was losing atmosphere and the oxygen generators wouldn’t last forever. They could try to drop vector again, she supposed, but if they’d missed at Brisinje it could be another six or seven days before they reached a debouchment point. She didn’t think they had that long. She concentrated on her problem to keep her mind way from grief and horror, because she needed all the focus she could get.
Padrake had killed Verlaine in order to prevent Chilleau Judiciary from being selected. That done, why would he stop at further shaping of the Bench’s destiny? He believed that he was properly the man to shape the Bench’s destiny, he and other Bench specialists — but only right-thinking Bench specialists, clearly enough.
He’d used favors from Doctor Lazarbee to get the codes he’d needed to get in and out of Chilleau, and if Koscuisko hadn’t killed Noycannir, Padrake would almost certainly have had it done himself, and Jils couldn’t believe that Lazarbee had much of a future.
Padrake would do what had to be done to keep Lazarbee quiet until the danger had passed, and then Lazarbee would meet with some unfortunate accident or another, or be accused of falsifying a record for personal gain, to the detriment of the rule of Law and the Judicial order.
It could be Karol. It could be. Koscuisko had said that the forged record had exploded when Karol had tried to find out its secrets, but who was to say that Karol hadn’t destroyed it to prevent its secrets from ever being plumbed? Karol had disappeared, no one had heard from him; no one knew where he was. Karol. Karol could have done it.
No, he couldn’t have. Karol had had no possible access to the data-reader. Karol could have killed Verlaine, but Karol could not have gotten past all of Chilleau Judiciary’s Security to do it without leaving visual evidence or setting off the alarms. Karol’s talents in security codes and bombs were respectable and solid, but well short of the genius class. That was Padrake Delleroy.
But Koscuisko had also said that Karol had come on board with a Malcontent. Koscuisko didn’t trust Malcontents, but had absolute faith in them; Koscuisko was Dolgorukij, and could be wrong. But the Combine was a conservative economic power, and would h
ave no interest in the destabilization of the Judicial order and the disruption of trade. But wasn’t that just what Arik Tirom had claimed to fear would happen if Chilleau Judiciary took the Selection?
The Sixth Judge at Sant-Dasidar had endorsed Chilleau’s candidacy with the Combine’s full approval, but the Malcontent didn’t answer to the Combine. The Malcontent answered only to its founder and patron saint, who had been dead for some time.
It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. The Malcontent had the resources to have engineered it all. It would mean that the Malcontent had risked Andrej Koscuisko’s life; but only risked it, and it had been a madwoman from Chilleau Judiciary who had threatened it, so couldn’t that have been part of the Malcontent’s plan?
Karol wouldn’t have set a bomb that could destroy the courier. There were other crew here beside her and Ise-I’let. Karol killed when he had to, they all had, but Karol did his best to minimize the collateral damages. It was a personal quirk of his. Or he could have set the bomb to destroy the courier knowing that she would believe by that token that it had not been him, if something went wrong and she survived.
He’d set that fire in the service house in Burkhayden the night he’d killed Captain Lowden, after all, to put a good face on the cover story. That had been something so uncharacteristic of Karol that she’d had problems with it ever since, and had half-convinced herself that he’d fled in shame and self-disgust.
No one had been killed in the fire. The gods looked after fools and drunkards, favored the oppressed; Karol could not have counted on that, though, not when he’d set the fire. Unlike him. Absolutely unlike him. Why had he done it?
He hadn’t done it at all. That was why. Karol had brought Andrej Koscuisko in off of the streets that night and put him to bed at Center House, and gone back out. The story was that Karol had found Koscuisko wandering in the streets too drunk to speak, alone and unaccompanied. That was the story. Maybe it was true, at least that part of it.
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