He had known that he could not escape his dead, he had known it all along. He almost didn’t want to escape them — they had a natural right to be revenged. That was right. It was proper. It was decent and moral. But he had been certain that there would be no more of them once eight years were finally over, finished, done.
The enormity of this disaster left him without the capacity for coherent thought.
“It is intolerable to suggest that I should be punished in this manner. I have done my duty and upheld my Writ, and if the Bench has not heard me to disenfranchise Captain Lowden of my Bonds nor has the Bench any complaint to make of my performance — ”
Except. Except, that he had cried to Heaven at the Domitt Prison, and been heard. And Chilleau Judiciary had held the responsibility for the Domitt Prison. Was it for the pride of Secretary Verlaine that this carefully planned torture had been prepared for him?
“Indeed no such thing is contemplated, your Excellency.” It seemed that he had genuinely startled her; Ivers spoke slowly, as if putting her thoughts together with care. “The First Secretary holds no grudge of whatever sort associated with the unpleasantness at the Domitt Prison.”
He could not sit here for a moment longer.
This horror was too huge and terrible for him.
“Very well, Specialist Ivers.” Reaching for his rhyti flask he drained it in one half-convulsive draught, letting the sharpness of the heat in his throat pull his energies into one solid and protective core within him. “You have come to me, and told me. I am not to be permitted to go home to my child.”
Why had he ever imagined anything different? He could not go home. How could a man so much as look on his child, with such a stain on him? “Very well, I have of this understanding, and you have delivered your message.”
Rising to his feet, Andrej reached out his hand to help Ivers up, politely. There was a peculiar ring of chafed skin around her wrist beneath her sleeve, showing for a brief moment as she moved. Chafed from cold? Or had she recently been in manacles?
“Now it remains only for you to explain how it is that I am to get around it. I do not believe that I can go to Chilleau Judiciary and live, Specialist Ivers. I have only this long survived because the longer it was, the nearer to the end it became.”
Was that grammatical? Did it make any sense? Did it matter?
Andrej hardly knew what he was saying. It surprised him to realize that he was trembling; but whether it was fury or horror or a combination of the two Andrej could not begin to guess. “Tell me the way out of this, Specialist Ivers, or I am lost.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Ivers repeated. She sounded as though she was surprised at the evident sincerity in her own voice. “In my professional opinion the First Secretary has covered all vectors of approach. I have no advice for you except to enjoy the perks, because as far as I can see you’re to be genuinely stuck with the duty whether you enjoy the perks or not.”
Polite of her, to gloss over that issue of enjoyment so delicately. She was a Bench intelligence specialist. She probably knew as much as his own gentlemen about what Andrej enjoyed, and how, and when. Or where. And yet her reference was utterly innocent: oh, yes, very delicately done indeed.
“Good-greeting, then, Specialist Ivers. You will excuse me. I must to someone go speak, to understand the meaning of what you have just told me.”
Nodding gravely in acceptance of her dismissal, Ivers gave him the bow without another word. Just as well. Too much had been said already. Andrej accepted Ivers’s salute in turn with a nod of his head, and she left the room with swift silent dispatch.
He was alone, and the enormity of the disaster that had just overtaken him weighted him down until he could hardly so much as breathe. A sleep-shirt made of lead. An atmosphere of viscous fluid of some sort, that sat in a man’s lungs and gave no air, but could not be coughed loose.
He could not stand here in his office. He would choke.
Possessed with dread and driven by horror Andrej fled the room for the one place on board of all Ragnarok where hope could be found — if there was any hope, any hope for him at all.
###
It was a quiet morning, all in all, now that Lowden’s staff meeting was out of the way. Convoy duty was not very challenging; things were quiet in Section. Ralph Mendez was treating himself to a little inconsequential talk with Ship’s Intelligence when Koscuisko — as blue in the face as a man near-dead of cold — staggered through the open door into Two’s office, palming the secure on his way past with so much force that Mendez half-expected he’d put a dent in it.
“I cannot endure it,” Koscuisko said. “I will not be asked to tolerate. Your pardon, First Officer, Two, you will tell me, if there is to be no way out of this?”
Straightening in his seat, Mendez waved Koscuisko’s apology off, interested. He didn’t usually see Koscuisko so exercised in spirit. Angry, yes, and from time to time in an ugly sort of state of savage amusement — when Lowden was working him particularly hard.
This didn’t look like angry, or frustrated, or hostile, or otherwise distracted. This looked like somebody’s mother was due to be sold to the tinkers for a drab, and no seven-hundred-thousand tinkers Mendez could imagine could possibly begin to afford the mother of the prince inheritor to the Koscuisko familial corporation. Not even if they pooled all their resources.
Two rearranged herself in a rustling of wings from her anchor-perch in the ceiling, and her translator sounded — its calm precise Standard diction at odds with the peculiar idiom of Two’s speech. “To you I will certainly tell, Andrej; but a hint would be much appreciated, what ‘this’ is it?” No telling whether she could catch Koscuisko’s state of mind or not. As difficult as it was to decipher Two’s expression when she was on the ground, it was next to impossible when she was at her ease hanging upside down in her office.
Koscuisko paced the floor between them, gesturing with his small white hands raised beside his face as if what he really wanted to do was tear his own head off. “This woman that Verlaine has sent, Two, she claims that I can be requisitioned to the Bench, if my father permits. And I cannot trust my father to understand, so you must tell me.”
What Koscuisko’s father had to do with things Mendez had never quite understood. He’d loved his father too, as far as it went — which didn’t go anything like as far as it seemed to go with Koscuisko. No accounting for culture.
Two reached a wing out casually to the far wall to code up a display on her speakers. Mendez knew she couldn’t actually see that far; it only made the unerring precision with which she found her target all the more unnerving — that, and the fact that her wings spanned the entire room when she stretched them.
“Well. There is a plot in motion, Andrej. I have not discussed it with our Captain because he is cross enough about the issue of your replacement.”
Didn’t that call for a question? Ralph wondered. If she had known of plots in motion —
“Two, if there were things of which I needed to be apprised — I cannot understand, why was I not warned. Surely you could not have thought of it as of no interest — ”
Koscuisko was still pacing, visibly tense with unexpressed conflict. But at least the level of the body language had toned down a bit.
“I am uncommonly clever, Andrej, it is true, but I cannot see more than three days into tomorrow,” Two scolded. “And it is not established that the draft would be approved. So Specialist Ivers has been just a little forward, if she told you that it was done.”
Finally Koscuisko stopped, and sat. Threw himself into a seat, pushing the fine fringe of blond hair up from off his forehead with one hand as he did so. Mendez was just as glad that the cup of konghu that he had on the side-table was half-empty, the way it shook.
“She did not say that it was done.” Koscuisko needed a haircut; Koscuisko usually did. Nothing to do with actual length, and everything to do with straying from its place. “She said that it would be accomplished, if Verlaine had
anything to say about it. Is there nothing to be done, except be damned?”
“It is metaphorical, this ‘damned’?” Two demanded. Not unreasonably. “If you are not pleased to be desired you are certainly in a bad place, Andrej.”
Mendez felt it was high time he found out exactly what was going on between his officers. Between Two and Koscuisko, that was to say. Nothing went on between Koscuisko and Wheatfields except for bad language, and the occasional physical assault.
“Somebody fill in the First Officer?”
“The maddening thing is that it was not even anything that I did, in the beginning at least,” Koscuisko replied. As if he was explaining. “There was a student in orientation with me. She puffed me up to her Patron out of spite, and Fleet gave me the choice to wait for him to requisition me or leave for Scylla before the Term was ended.”
Which in turn had meant that Koscuisko had had to perform his final exercise, his benchmark Tenth Level Command Termination exercise, when he was already on active duty. Mendez had heard about Koscuisko’s Tenth Level even before Koscuisko had been posted to the Ragnarok. He’d wondered what kind of psychopathic maniac Koscuisko was at the time; but now that he knew Koscuisko a little better — after four years of breathing the same air — he was regretfully aware of the fact that the question was a little more complicated than that. “You went to Scylla, he took it personally, and that business with the Domitt didn’t sweeten him on you?”
Koscuisko shuddered. “I cannot go back to the Domitt, First Officer, I swear it. Not in one lifetime. And to submit to the First Secretary would mean the same, even if the name of the place itself were to be different.”
No need to ask whether Koscuisko had believed the testimony presented to the Bench about poor decisions made by subordinates, errors concealed from the audit branch, abuses not sanctioned.
“But Verlaine’s set up to draft his Writ.” Now that he felt he understood the background maybe Two’s information would benefit both of them. She cocked her head at one corner of her room, listening to the speaker — he assumed, since he couldn’t hear a damned thing. Then she nodded, which always gave him the chuckles, when she was upside down.
“It is confirmed, yes. Very much does Verlaine want Andrej Koscuisko. He has spent many favors which I am not at liberty to divulge, many of them irreplaceable. Once our Andrej leaves this ship — there are several months of accumulated leave, you could go and visit my children, the cave is large. It would perhaps be possible for you to become lost.”
The humor did not appear to penetrate far enough to touch Koscuisko in the state of mind that he was in. “If I could have known. It might have been better to have gone to the Bench in the first place. I did not understand that such a place was even possible, as the Domitt Prison.”
“So tell me, Two, if Andrej is too depressed to ask.” Moral support. “Is there a way out of Verlaine’s draft?”
It was of only abstract interest to him, of course. Koscuisko wasn’t a bad sort as a Chief Medical Officer, once one got past his personal quirks in the Secured Medical area. But Mendez wasn’t sure he really cared one way or the other.
“It is a problem for Andrej. No one can decide it for him.” Two had learned to shrug as an old woman, she had told him, and he was to treat her accomplishment with the respect due to the aged instead of asking her if she needed her back scratched between the shoulder-blades. “If the Combine protested there would be difficulty, and perhaps Verlaine would not be able to accomplish his goal. But the Combine has received many benefits from Chilleau Judiciary. Especially recently.”
“My father wrote to me, after the trials.” Koscuisko’s sudden interruption startled Mendez, since Koscuisko had seemed well sunk in silent gloom a moment ago. “He said that I had done well, that he was proud. That I should also behave with more humility, in future, because when all was said and sung a man should have respect for authority, and it did not present a pleasingly filial appearance for me to have appealed to the First Judge in so public a manner.”
Mendez winced. If Koscuisko’s people could say something like that to him, after those trials, then they simply didn’t live in the same world as that in which the Domitt Prison had existed, and that was all there was to it.
Respect for authority, yes.
Complicity of silence in atrocities of that nature — well, no.
Nai.
Never.
“Well, there.” Two let so long a pause develop that Mendez wondered if her translator had failed; but no. She seemed to be expecting a response of some sort, her beautiful brilliant little black eyes fixed on Koscuisko’s face. Koscuisko made a gesture with his hands of either helplessness or confusion, and that seemed to clue Two in that she hadn’t made her point.
“You are clever, Andrej, you can see. There are four things that you can do, and one of them is to go to work for the very influential First Secretary — who wants you very badly — of the woman who will quite possibly be First Judge someday. You could make your practice in the border worlds, but there are people out there who might recognize you, and you are not much qualified for such a life of crime.”
So Two didn’t think that voluntary self-imposed exile was a viable option. “Of course you could also go to your home, and — what is the phrase — slide on the ice into fruit-butter, because your life has no more astringent seedlings. Is this the Standard? I am not sure I translate the idiom correctly.”
For himself Mendez was almost certain that she hadn’t, but her meaning was clear enough. Still, she’d said four things, and Koscuisko was waiting.
“Or there is only one other thing. I must come down to you for this so as to gauge my effect. It will be one moment.”
Walking across the ceiling like an impossibly large stalking insect, shifting her weight easily between her strong little feet and the steely three-fingered hands at the first joint of her great leathery wings. Reaching the ground with a final hop from her ladder on the wall. Crawling up onto the surface of the table beneath her anchor-perch, sweeping it clear of its litter of bits of document-cubes and the stray container of fruit that had been dropped onto it from the ceiling with a gesture of one wing as she settled herself once more.
“Because it will be a joke, and it is good to share humor with others, it helps one to remember not to harvest from them. The joke is about the shortage of replacements for our Andrej. It is a thin joke, because the shortage is very short.”
“No.” Koscuisko stared at her, his face full of blank horror and disbelief. Two stretched out her wings and put her tertiary flanges over Koscuisko’s shoulders where he sat; a curiously tender gesture, a Desmodontae embrace, of sorts.
“It is of course not funny, as a joke, but such is the way of things. And it could be that there would be a transfer away from here, since you would volunteer, and you would be more useful on an active-duty craft.”
Mendez decided that he didn’t want to look at Koscuisko, just at present. Inspecting his manicure instead, he found the point that Two was making all too obvious, even if written in a scant thumbnail’s space.
Koscuisko had put Fleet between himself and Secretary Verlaine, at the beginning.
Fleet had loaned him out only grudgingly over the years, because a good battle surgeon was almost as hard to find as people who could live with themselves as Inquisitors, if what Koscuisko’s life had come down to could be called living.
And now, just at the point when Koscuisko had thought that he was clear, just at the moment when Koscuisko had believed he could get away — Verlaine blocked his path.
And only Fleet could stand between Andrej Koscuisko and First Secretary Verlaine.
“What must I do?” The voice sounded more than half-strangled, but it was not Two’s voice, so it had to be Koscuisko. “First Officer?”
“You’ll be obliged to write a statement explaining why you changed your mind about renewing.” He still didn’t want to look at the man, because his sympathies were engaged. T
hat annoyed him. Koscuisko was smarter than he was, richer than he was, better educated, even better dressed, within the constraints of uniform.
Koscuisko was also put to it more brutally than any bond-involuntary by this turn. Well, more brutally than any bond-involuntary on the Ragnarok since Koscuisko’s arrival, at any rate, Koscuisko being a little odd about his people.
Stildyne was going to need to know about this.
“Oh, holy Mother.”
Now that he had to look — now that the naked despair in Koscuisko’s strangled voice demanded attention — he couldn’t see, because Two had Koscuisko covered over with her wings, sheltered within a matte-black cocoon of rustling skin.
“I will never get away from here.”
A pause, and Koscuisko’s voice strengthened, leveled out. “Thank you, First Officer. I would . . . rather . . . even whore for Captain Lowden than for the man who should have known about the Domitt Prison.”
Stildyne needed to know because Stildyne wasn’t going to want to leave the Ragnarok with Koscuisko still on it. Stildyne needed to know because Koscuisko was clearly in desperate need of moral support, and Mendez was not in a position to provide it. Koscuisko was closer to his Security than anyone else on board of Ragnarok.
Though whether or not Stildyne himself had ever been admitted to that intimacy was something that Koscuisko and Stildyne were apparently still negotiating, and none of Mendez’s business either way.
“I’ll send Stildyne with the documentation, Andrej. Soonest. Two, send a stop order on the termination payments, tell Fleet Medical we’re processing a variance in lieu of replacement.”
Koscuisko would get a significant increase in pay for renewing his term. It probably wasn’t a good time to mention that. As if an increase in pay meant anything to a man like Koscuisko, who had once offered the Bench to buy his bond-involuntaries out — all nine of them, two hundred and fifty thousand Standard each.
Hour of Judgement Page 3