Hour of Judgement (3 page)

Skating perhaps a little close to politically questionable discourse, but nothing actionable. Ivers seemed annoyed.

“Resources must be carefully husbanded in unsettled times, your Excellency. As you may be aware the Bench can exercise the power of annexation of critical resources. According to the provisions of the Political Stabilization Acts the Writ to Inquire is a Bench-critical resource.”

Now of a sudden the flooring fell away from underneath his chair, and Andrej knew he dared not so much as glance into the bottomless chasm that gaped open at his feet or else he would fall in. He gripped the armrests of his chair desperately. He could feel the suction of the moiling vortex of black Hell: He had to hang on.

“Annex critical. Resources. Name of all Saints, Specialist, what are you saying?” It had been eight years, eight years, eight years, he was done with this, he had fulfilled his term, he was free to go —

“His Excellency declines to continue service in Fleet. That is understandable in light of his Excellency’s stated convictions and dissatisfaction with his post. The Bench cannot afford to lose your skills, sir.” She could not see the abyss that yawned hugely between them. She could not have spoken so calmly had she done. “First Secretary Verlaine offers you pride of place at Chilleau Judiciary, command of the sector’s medical resources and all the rights and emoluments accruing thereunto. The need is too great, your Excellency. The Bench must make difficult decisions for the greater good of all under the rule of Law.”

Chilleau Judiciary.

No.

Andrej swallowed hard, focusing on the talk-alert on the far wall to anchor himself in the world. He had to control himself. He could not panic. There was no reason to panic. She could not mean what she seemed to be saying. It was intolerable.

“Specialist, no one could wish me to this work a single day the longer, Judicial Order or no. Not even for my sins should it be wished on me, and you must know that they are many, and grievous.”

Her expression was pained, almost irritated. Andrej didn’t care. The rule of Law was no excuse for torture. He had to press what advantage he had, while he could still feel that he had the advantage —

“Say therefore to First Secretary Verlaine that I would rather sell myself to a Chigan brothel and suckle at fish than have anything to do with Chilleau Judiciary. Or the Protocols. Not one day the longer, Specialist Ivers. It has been eight years.”

Irritation had shaded over into stubbornness in her face, somehow. Andrej wasn’t quite sure how that had happened.

“You’ve earned a rest, sir. No one dreams of disputing that. You have three eighths of a years’ worth of accumulated leave, and I have the privilege of bringing word from the prince your father” — reaching into her over-tunic, as Andrej stared in horror — “with a personal message. Your Excellency.”

Holding out a heavy square of folded paper she waited. Andrej was afraid of that message, suddenly. He didn’t want to disgrace himself by showing his fear in front of the Bench specialist. It was an effort, but he forced himself to reach out his hand in turn to receive the note, his hand almost absolutely steady. There was his name on the note, in script so black against the clotted fabric of the writing-cloth that it was almost red. And bled as Andrej stared at it, the blood draining from the letter to stain his hand and overflow his fist down to the floor.

Son Andrej.

It will be good to see you again, child. We are glad of the First Secretary's charitable gesture, in letting the past forget itself. Come home and kneel for your mother's blessing before you go to Chilleau Judiciary.

His father’s hand, his father’s voice, more loving than it had been these past eight years, and as much as Andrej ached for his father’s blessing he could not force himself to accept that he would have to pay so high a price to purchase it.

“I cannot go.” He whispered it half to himself, half to the room, transfixed with horror. “Oh, it is too much. I cannot be made to go, Specialist Ivers, surely. And my family. I owe duty there that I have much neglected.”

Ivers sat unmoving in her chair, straight-backed, formal. Unyielding. “And the First Secretary understands, sir. There need be no impediment to a long and well-earned duty leave to see to personal business. The facilities at Chilleau Judiciary will be awaiting your arrival upon the conclusion of your leave. I’m sorry, sir — ”

She hesitated, but she said it anyway. What, did she see the roiling pit at last, and hear the tortured screams of damned souls in horrific torment? “I’m sorry, your Excellency. Secretary Verlaine has communicated with your family, and has taken great pains to explain the value of your technical qualifications to your father. How much Chilleau Judiciary needs your skills. And it is a Bench prerogative to annex, sir.”

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?”