The Devil and Deep Space

by Susan R. Matthews

  “Observation station, Admiral,” the technician on duty said, disbelief clear in her voice. “Seems to have exploded. No coherent structure on scan.”

  No trace of a lifeboat, then. They hadn’t had time. They hadn’t had warning. There was plenty of debris; that was all too depressingly obvious, and somewhere in that debris floated the probably fractionalized bodies of the people who had been watching the exercise from remote location. The Ragnarok’s acting Captain. A Command Branch officer. That meant a full–fledged accident investigation. She couldn’t afford one.

  Some of the debris in that cluster would bear unmistakable chemical signatures of controlled merchandise — armaments, bombs — that could be traced back to specific points of origin, failures in inventory control, even the occasional warehouse theft. It would be difficult to explain, almost impossible to overlook. Unimaginably expensive to deny.

  “Poll all stations,” Brecinn ordered. “Let’s be sure of our facts before we send any formal notices. We’ll take a short recess while we confirm whether the station was manned. Two eights, gentles, and reconvene here.”

  Taking a recess was risky. They were her staff, true enough, but they would be watching for the first hint of uncertainty on her part to gut her carcass and throw her to the scavengers while they hurried to harvest everything they could salvage ahead of a forensic accounting team. She had to have time to think.

  One by one, her people stood and left the room. The Clerk of Court from Chilleau Judiciary excused herself; the armaments evaluator from Second Fleet put his feet up on the back of the chair in front of him, with every apparent intention of having a nap in place. Fine.

  Eppie and one or two of the others would have gone directly to her office. They’d be waiting for her. Damn the Ragnarok and its crew anyway, Admiral Brecinn told herself crossly; and went to join her aides and advisors for private conference.

  ###

  Strolling thoughtfully through the halls beneath the Admiral’s management suite Mergau Noycannir switched on her snooper with a casual gesture that mimicked rubbing behind one ear; and was immediately rewarded.

  “ . . . damage assessment, as soon as possible. We needed those rounds to fulfill a contract coming due. We’ll have to make up the difference in cash, if this gets out.”

  Eppie, Mergau thought. It was a daring act of espionage to have planted a snoop on the Admiral. As it was, she could only afford one of the timed sneakers. One quarter of an eight, and then it would disintegrate into anonymous and untraceable dust. With luck, no one would even have discovered that there had been a transmission.

  “That means an inventory of all the stations. Not just to discover what went up. To be sure we know what’s where.” Admiral Brecinn’s voice, annoyed and anxious. From the way the others’ voices rose and fell in volume, Mergau guessed that the Admiral was pacing.

  “We’ll have to cover for it somehow, Admiral. After all. Command Branch. Bad luck all around.”

  She’d suspected Brecinn’s command of black marketeering from the moment she’d arrived. She recognized some of the names and faces from the secured files at Chilleau Judiciary. Here was evidence; but more than evidence, perhaps.

  “Our counterparts are counting on us to be well placed for the new regime. We lose their confidence, we lose everything. We’ve got to contain this somehow.” The Admiral again, and she sounded just a little — frightened. Mergau Noycannir knew what frightened people sounded like. She recognized the subtle quavering behind the fine false front.

  “Admiral, it was an accident. It could have happened to anyone.” Mergau knew better. Brecinn apparently did, too.

  “People who conduct business with professionals don’t have accidents, Eppie. No. We can’t afford to let it be an accident. We need a cover, and we need it fast.”

  Mergau knew her time was running out; the snooper would stop transmitting at any moment. She could extrapolate well enough from what she had heard, however, and with that she could build the perfect solution to the Admiral’s problem. Her problem as well.

  Admiral Brecinn needed to cover the fact that the explosion that had just killed the Ragnarok’s acting Captain had resulted from the illegal stockpiling of stolen armaments for sale on the black market; Mergau needed all the protection she could get.

  Admiral Brecinn only knew that Mergau was a Clerk of Court at Chilleau Judiciary. She didn’t know how low on the First Secretary’s table of assignments her placement had become. Mergau naturally had not hastened to explain how sadly reduced her position was from the days when she had brought the Writ to Inquire back from Fleet Orientation Station Medical at the First Secretary’s desire; and she did have contacts, even yet.

  That was how she had arranged for the forged entry of Andrej Koscuisko’s name on an unauthorized Bench warrant.

  Had the Bench warrant been exercised, it would not have mattered, in the end, whether it had been forged or not. Once the thing had been done, the Bench would have been forced to stand behind it, or admit to the falsification. The Bench couldn’t afford to do that. They’d have had to defend the warrant as true, if anyone ever found out about it — not that there’d been any reason to fear that anybody ever would.

  But the Bench specialist to whom it had fallen to execute the warrant had recorded it as written against somebody else entirely, and that raised all kinds of difficulties.

  Someone had said something that Mergau hadn’t quite caught, handicapped as she was by the directional nature of the snooper. Admiral Brecinn’s response made the nature of the question clear, however. “Ap Rhiannon. Priggish little self–important bitch. Crèche–bred. Of all the luck.”

  A tiny spark of heat against the skin at the back of her ear, too brief to be painful; the snooper died, and destroyed the evidence of its existence. Where she’d tagged Brecinn, the Admiral would not even notice the snooper’s disintegration.

  Mergau continued in her thoughtful meditative stroll, heading for the water–garden outside the canteen. There was a great deal to think about here. Admiral Brecinn needed help. Mergau needed protection. Mergau didn’t know quite how it was going to play out, not just yet. But she was confident.

  Somewhere in this morning’s events she was going to find the key to her salvation, and defense against the chance that some Bench specialist would turn up some day to confront her with her failed attempt to satisfy her vengeance against Andrej Koscuisko with a Judicial murder.

  ###

  The observation deck cleared out. The Admiral had left the room; her staff had melted away into the figurative woodwork. The Clerk of Court that Chilleau Judiciary had sent to observe the exercise had similarly excused herself. That meant that the room was as clean as any on station just now, and General Dierryk Rukota had no particular desire to go anywhere.

  The technicians were still here, of course, working the boards: status checks, population reconciliation, traffic analysis. All to try to determine for a fact whether the Ragnarok’s Command had been on that observation station when it had exploded.

  Someone brought him a cup of bean tea, and Rukota accepted it with a nod of grateful thanks. Good stuff, too. He had no grievance with technicians. He just didn’t think he liked Fleet Admiral Brecinn, or her pack of scavengers.

  Everybody knew that the Ragnarok’s research program was due for cancellation with the selection of a new First Judge. It was traditional. New First Judges needed all the leverage with Fleet that they could get, especially during the early formative years of their administration — leverage a new research program, with a generous provision of funding from tax revenues, could provide. That didn’t mean they had to be so obvious about it.

  The Ragnarok’s black hull technology was the culmination of twenty–four years of technical research, hundreds upon thousands upon millions of eights of markers Standard, untold hours of labor, and the product of the focused intellect of some of the finest mechanical minds under Jurisdiction.

  It was bad enough that the pr
ogram had to be at least suspended while the new First Judge, whoever she was, decided exactly what to do with it. Rukota wanted to see Fleet concentrating on doing what it could to harvest the lessons learned to date, rather than blowing it all off as yesterday’s news. The ship had performed well in test and maneuvers. There were solid innovations there in its design.

  Flying on the order of that last fighter’s run spoke for esprit as well; people who didn’t care about where they were and what they were doing couldn’t be bothered to shave their fuses like that. So the ship had more than just its experimental technology going for it. And Fleet would throw that away, too, dispersing the crew in every which direction when the time came to decommission the hull.

  It was a very great shame to put so much into a battlewagon and never let it meet the enemy. And yet the enemy — the Free Government — was not one that could be met with at all, by even the greatest of battleships. They were small and only loosely organized, poorly armed, ill provisioned.

  Fighting the Free Government with great ships like the Ragnarok was a little like deploying a field gun against the small annoying birds that were forever mocking one from the trees downrange. They were always long gone before a round could impact. All a person ended up with was wasted ammunition, and an overabundant supply of surplus toothpicks.

  Rukota sipped his bean tea and stared into the great sweep of the observation screens, brooding. Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok. He knew an officer on board that ship; he’d been young ap Rhiannon’s commander not too long ago, when he’d had a stubborn pocket of resurgent civil resistance to deal with and she’d been sent to command his advance scout ships. It hadn’t been a pleasant experience, at least not for him.

  Ap Rhiannon was crèche–bred, inflexible, intolerant, and all but unteachable. When she’d seen that elements within Fleet’s own supply lines had been aiding and abetting the insurrectionaries — for a nice profit — she’d redirected her assigned ships to intercept an arms shipment, and shut the pipeline down.

  There had been a very great deal of embarrassment in upper Fleet echelons. He’d been blamed for not keeping a closer rein on her, when it hadn’t been any of his doing one way or the other. She hadn’t even told him. That had given him deniability, and saved his career; but it had bothered him at the same time, and bothered him still.

  Had she not told him in order to reserve the blame for herself, when blame came — as it was almost certain to? Or had she not been able to decide whether he was in on it?

  She’d made her point about black–market traffic in armaments. And been assigned to the Ragnarok for her pains, a dead–end assignment on a dead–headed research vessel headed for decommission with a crew that fleet had notoriously been packing with malcontents and malingerers for years. And here he was, for his own part, pulled off–line to provide administrative support on training exercises. As close to dry–dock as an officer could get.

  He knew where the Ragnarok was on–screen; its position was marked, and with its maintenance atmosphere fully expanded the lights were easy to pick out against the black backdrop of space. So when something disengaged from the Ragnarok and started moving out and away from the ship it caught Rukota’s attention. Small blip. Picking up speed quickly enough to indicate a courier of some sort.

  Rukota leaned his head back against the low headrest of the chair in which he sprawled, and caught a technician’s eye. “What’s that?” Ap Rhiannon coming to see Admiral Brecinn, perhaps, though what her purpose might be was not something Rukota felt he could easily guess.

  The technician squinted at the light–track, and then consulted a log. “Oh, Ship’s Surgeon, General. Home leave.”

  Right. The blip wasn’t tracking for the station. It was angling out toward the Pesadie exit vector, leaving the system. Ship’s Surgeons were ranking officers; they were also Ship’s Inquisitors, and Ship’s Inquisitors never, ever, ever traveled without Security.

  There was a thought at the back of his mind, a vague and unformed suspicion that there could be something interesting about that courier. If he thought about it —

  If he thought about it, he might discover something that he’d have to call to somebody’s attention. It wasn’t any of his business. Pesadie was jealous of its rights and prerogatives; they didn’t need any help from him. He had as much as been told so, and by Admiral Brecinn herself.

  Shifting his feet from the back of the chair in front of him to the floor, General Rukota put it all out of his mind. Pesadie Station was responsible for its own Security. Let them deal with it.

  “Thanks,” he called over to the technician, still hard at work on the assessment task. “Good bean tea. Best of luck with damage control.”

  So long as he left the area he didn’t have to worry about keeping his own suspicious mind in check. A quick nap before Admiral Brecinn reconvened, and any miscellaneous thoughts he might have would be safely put to rest.

  ###

  Andrej Koscuisko was very close to sober and not entirely happy about it. Standing behind the navigation console in the wheelhouse, he watched the forward scans, listening to the traffic in braid over the inter–ship channels.

  Lek — their navigator — was tired. Combat evaluations were intense enough to be exhausting even with dummy ammunition, and these had been live–fire exercises. If Lek was given a chance to start to wonder about all of this . . .

  “Courier ship Magdalenja, Dolgorukij Combine, Aznir registry. Koscuisko familial corporation ship. Requesting release of pre-cleared passage.”

  Lek sounded steady enough. And once they were on vector Andrej could have a quiet talk with him. There were drugs on board. He never traveled without drugs strong enough to overrule even a governor, and after what had happened to St. Clare — whose governor had gone critical at Port Burkhayden, and nearly killed him — Andrej had stocked his kit for triple redundancy. He was taking no chances with his Bonds. He was responsible for them. They trusted him to take good care of them.

  The courier was approaching the perimeter of Pesadie Training Command’s administrative space, ready to clear the station. From here it was only a matter of three hours’ time before they reached the exit vector. The vector was patrolled, of course; exit from Fleet stations was controlled as strictly as authorized entry. But the transit plan had been precleared. There was no reason for anyone to challenge his departure; Andrej concentrated on that. No reason.

  “We confirm, Magdalenja.” Pesadie Station’s port authority sounded bored. Almost casual. “For the record, confirm souls in transit, please.”

  Lek looked around and up, back over his shoulder, seeking guidance from Andrej. Or perhaps from his Chief, Stildyne, who stood to Andrej’s left; but this was Andrej’s arena. He knew what to do. Ap Rhiannon surely had not intended her ruse to go on record so soon after its initiation.

  “Voice confirm,” Andrej said, and if he sounded a little irritated it was because he was unhappy. “I am Andrej Ulexeievitch Koscuisko, Chief Medical Officer assigned to the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok. Traveling home on leave with my Security also duly assigned, and I have not been home in nearly nine years, so I would appreciate your cooperation in expediting clearance.”

  Meaning, if you dare insult a ranking officer by insisting on a voice–count just because it is the letter of the procedure, said ranking officer is entirely capable of taking it personally, with subsequent negative consequences to your very own personal career. Which will be ending. Andrej didn’t usually resort to bullying, but if a man was going to pull rank there was no sense in being the least bit subtle about it.

  It took several moments for the voice confirm to clear; to claim to be Andrej Koscuisko was not something that could be lightly ventured. He held the Writ to Inquire, and could lawfully deploy the entire fearful inventory of torture in the Bench’s Protocols on his own authority. Making a false claim to the authority of a Judicial officer was a capital offense; and an abomination beneath the canopy of Heaven to take pleasu
re from the suffering of prisoners in chains —

  But that was an old guilt. Old, if ever present, sin. No less deep and damnable now than the day Andrej had first begun to realize that he was a monster, but it had been nine years, Creation had not risen up to swallow him and take him to his punishment, and Andrej needed his wits about him to get past this procedural check and to the exit vector. He could not abate his sin by brooding on it. There would be time enough for that in Hell.

  “Thank you, your Excellency.” The Port Authority sounded much less casual now. “No offense intended, your Excellency. Cleared to vector. If I might presume to offer personal good wishes for a pleasant holiday, sir.” No, you insolent groom’s boy, you may not. It was presumptuous. But Andrej had already made himself unpleasant. He wanted the Port Authority to be too grateful to be out from under his displeasure to think about placing any additional administrative requirements in his path.

  “You are very kind, Control, thank you. Magdalenja away here, I think? Yes?”

  This was Lek’s signal to pick up the thread, and he did so smoothly, with no hint of tension in his voice. “Magdalenja away here, Pesadie. Going off comm to prepare for vector transit.”

  Clear.

  The corvettes standing by at the entry vector could still cause a fuss, but it was much less likely that they would do so now that Andrej had snarled at Pesadie, and they had been unlikely enough to interfere with him in the first place.

  It was just his nerves. And his nerves weren’t the nerves he should be worrying about. “Mister Stildyne, may I see you for a moment?”

  There was a private lounge just off the back of the wheelhouse, and it had all the privacy screens on it that a man could wish. Stildyne followed him into the lounge and pulled the barrier to, sealing the room.

  Andrej went to the drinks cabinet at the far end of the lounge and considered the available options. Wodac. Cortac brandy. The proprietary liquor of the nuns over whom his elder sister was abbess, widely renowned for its healthful botanicals. Alcoholic beverages from one end of the Combine to the other, and all Andrej really wanted was a cup of hot rhyti, and something for a headache,