“I demand a hearing before a full court.”
Nalani almost felt sorry for the pirate. “This session being heard en banc by ten qualified Judiciars, that number exceeding the minimum under Fourth Plane labor law, request denied.” She allowed the corners of her lips to rise a few millimeters. “With no additional evidence—”
“Wait. I want to hear testimony from Sen Millat.”
(“Blast. She’s sneakier than I thought.”) “Sen Millat is currently medically indisposed. Request denied. With no additional evidence, I rule this proceeding without merit.” She glanced at the overlay, where the other seals blinked green in quick succession. “Nine opinions concur. So ruled. Dismissed.” She pointedly kept the broadcast running, and the other Judiciars stayed connected.
The cartoon face gave a cartoon smile. “Thank you, Supreme Justice. You’ve told me what I needed to know. We’ll find Millat, wherever he’s gone.” The face faded. Both bin Marrick and Bhagwati jerked their heads to the left, eyes wide, startled by something offscreen.
From behind her, one of the bridge crew shouted, “Captain, Patrika’s maneuvering. They’re firing up their hyperdrive.”
Nalani stiffened, and the sudden tocsin of alarm filled the bridge. “Brace for turbulence!”
The screen switched to a view of Patrika, moving now against the stars, turning away from them. All at once the ship twisted, distorting in a fashion that made her stomach lurch…and then it was gone. The shuttle, suddenly alone in space, shivered and tumbled end-over-end.
Then the distortion wave struck. The bridge lurched, bucking upward and then forward, and Nalani felt herself toppling off her chair. Al-Ghazali’s strong arm steadied her while the movement subsided.
The comm officer said, “Shuttle pilot reports she’s alive but badly shaken.”
By then, Nalani’s codex had already reported. (“Contact with Bhagwati lost. He was still on board when they jumped. I will continue attempting to restore contact.”)
Al-Ghazali, with a gasp, looked directly at her. Her wide eyes showed that she knew. Her codex would have informed her at the same time as Nalani’s. She whispered, “What are we going to do?”
Nalani looked away from the Apprentice and felt her shoulders droop. “I don’t know. I…simply…don’t…know.”
Hirose held her back straight and her head up. Not that anyone could see her—transmitting video was forbidden—but she needed to keep herself under control.
Multicolor blobs and dots danced across the screen. “Grumby speaking for Vanderdecken.”
She cleared her throat. “Let me speak with Vanderdecken.” Not so much forbidden, but enormously unlikely. She had to ask.
“Vanderdecken only speaks face to face. You know that, Hirose. On these channels, I speak for and to Vanderdecken. What do you have to say?”
She took a deliberate breath, exhaling slowly, and clasped her hands together in front of her to keep them from trembling. “I was told that no lives would be in danger. Yet if that pirate ship hadn’t been there, there would have been no survivors.”
There was a long pause, then finally Grumby said, “That pirate ship was an unforeseen complication. The plan was to retrieve the ship’s complement safely. The pirates made that impossible.” An exasperated sigh. “Vanderdecken had everything under control. You need to learn to trust. The operation was a success.”
“Is that what you think, Grumby?” Through clenched teeth, Hirose said, “You need to tell Vanderdecken that I am displeased with the way this operation was handled. Too many very intelligent people are asking too many questions.”
“The pirates? They are being dealt with.”
“The pirates. The Supreme Justice. The pilot. The data engineers. The historian.” She shook her head. “Instead of erasing Quintile Illumination’s knowledge, you’ve merely broken it up. And fragments are scattering…quite possibly beyond our reach.”
“What do you want done?”
“As I said: inform Vanderdecken. Action just be taken.”
“It will be done.”
Sensing that Grumby was about to disconnect, Hirose said firmly, “See that it is. If you don’t speak to Vanderdecken, I’ll know. And I wouldn’t want to be in your chair when that happens.” Without waiting for a reply, she cut the channel.
1.19 Changes of Venue
Bhagwati stumbled sideways as Patrika leapt into motion and then into hyperdrive, the combination enough to challenge the ship’s inertial dampening. He steadied himself against the nearest console, automatically invoking personal shields from his codex, and fell into defensive stance seven as the ship’s rigging engineer rose from his seat, a length of heavy pipe appearing in his hand. Bhagwati allowed himself an instant’s regret—so this was why Thurgood hadn’t wanted to send anyone to the pirate ship—then focused on the problem at hand. What would Thurgood do? Talk, he thought, and cleared his throat politely.
“In your haste to depart, you seem to have forgotten that I was aboard. That’s most unfortunate, as my presence technically lays you open to charges under the Universal Planar Criminal Code —”
(“242.9.9 Sections 5 and 18,”) his codex whispered.
“242.9.9 Sections 5 and 18. Charges specific to the Fifth and Fourth Planes may also apply. However, under the circumstances, I’m prepared to waive charges if you either return me to my ship or release me on the nearest inhabited planet where I can obtain transport back to her.”
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected—threats, certainly, and the simmering anger he’d sensed in every captured pirate he’d ever seen interviewed, captive or free—but it was not the captain’s reaction. She flung her head back, laughing, and even her own crew gave her sidelong glances before she got herself under control.
“Very good, Apprentice Justice. You could probably also consider 242.9.11 Section 4B relevant to the situation. However, I’m not going to drop you off at the nearest planet, or return you to your ship. You may be useful.”
“That’s an extremely unwise choice,” Bhagwati said.
The pirate captain leaned back in her chair. She had chosen to wear a knee-length hooded coat, the hood pulled well forward to shadow her face; between that and the cartoon image she had used to hide her face during the hearing, he had seen nothing more of her than her hands, lying relaxed on the arms of the captain’s chair. She was unusually fair-skinned, not albino, but close, though that was hardly the most helpful identifier. Bhagwati took a half-step sideways, hoping to see under the enormous hood, and stopped as he realized it brought him closer to the silent data engineer at his station. “It’s the choice I’ve made.”
“Don’t let yourself be trapped in a mistake.” Bhagwati hated bluffing, he was terrible at bluffing, but it was all he had. “Let me go now, before you make things any worse.”
“Apprentice Justice, I appreciate your efforts, but I assure you, I hold all the cards.” The captain raised one long-fingered hand. “Surrender now, and my crew won’t have to beat you into submission.”
“Surely you don’t want to damage either myself or your control room,” Bhagwati said, and took another step away from the two engineers. Too late, he realized that brought him within reach of the pilot’s console and the silently watching pilot. He tried to dodge, but she lunged, something shiny in her hand that slid through his shield and drew a stinging scratch down the skin of his wrist and hand. It burned, and then he felt a numbness begin to spread from the scratch, freezing his hand to uselessness and then rising up his arm with impossible speed. He gasped, groping for words, for something to make this not be happening, but the paralysis had reached his throat. He gasped again, hoping that the drug worked only on the voluntary muscles, and his legs gave way under him, sending him sprawling to the deck in an ungainly heap.
“Nicely done, Sen Morcant,” the captain said, and rose gracefully from her chair. “Get his ring.”
The rigging engineer went to one knee at Bhagwati’s side, and the apprentice justice fough
t to close his fist. He managed to make a tiny sound, barely more than a whine, but the engineer slid his codex off his finger as though he had done nothing. He rose to his feet, examining it curiously.
“It’s connection-work.”
“It’s his codex,” the captain said. She held out her hand, and the rigging engineer dropped the codex into her palm as though it had burned him. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” Bhagwati couldn’t tell whether that was intended for her crew, or in mockery for him. “In the meantime, lock him in cabin five. Search him first.”
“Yes, capa,” the pilot said, and the captain turned away, her fist still closed over Bhagwati’s codex. He could feel its fear, heard a last screech of data that was surely a cry for help to the ship’s systems, and then it was silenced. The hatch closed behind the captain, and he heard the pilot heave a sigh.
“Right. Derrian, Imric, you carry.”
“Why do we have to carry him?” the rigging engineer complained.
“Because I put him down,” the pilot answered. “Come on, the drug doesn’t last forever, and I don’t want a fight.”
That was remotely encouraging, though Bhagwati had assumed that the paralysis would be temporary—and maybe that could have been as bad a mistake as coming on board, he realized. There were almost as many good reasons to kill him at this point as there were to keep him as a hostage. He fought to move, to kick, even just to flick a finger, but lay inert as the rigging engineer and the silent data engineer lifted him by shoulders and ankles and hauled him through the hatch.
They carried him down the ship’s main corridor, then stopped before a locked door. The pilot opened it with a thumbprint, revealing another short stretch of corridor, and unlocked a second door. This opened into a tiny cabin that looked very much like a standard holding cell, with a fixed bunk and toilet cabinet built into the walls. The engineers dropped him on the bunk and started to back away, but the pilot caught the rigging engineer’s sleeve.
“You heard the capa. We search him first.”
The rigging engineer muttered something, but the data engineer reached for the fastenings of Bhagwati’s judicial robe. They stripped him with impersonal efficiency, leaving him at last sprawled naked on the bunk while they went through the heap of his clothes.
“Bring them with us,” the pilot said at last. “Better safe than sorry.”
“What about him?” the data engineer asked. “I assume the capa doesn’t want him too uncomfortable, not unless she orders it herself.”
“You’re learning,” the rigging engineer said, and glanced back at the bunk, his mouth curling in a smile that made Bhagwati want to blush. “He’s awful pretty, though.”
“He can hear you,” the data engineer said, and it was the other engineer’s turn to flush.
The pilot stepped out in the corridor, returned a moment later with a pile of folded fabric that looked like hospital-issue clothing. There was a blanket as well; she dropped the clothes on the foot of the bunk and tossed the blanket over Bhagwati, saying, “The drug should wear off in a few hours. The capa will figure out what to do with you then.”
She waved the others out of the cell and followed them out, leaving Bhagwati still lying helplessly on the bunk. At least he had the blanket, he told himself. The ship’s air was cool on his face and one set of exposed toes. He tried again to draw his foot up under the blanket, and failed; his toes refused to wiggle, though he did, with great effort, manage to blink his eyes. Hopefully that was a good sign, he thought, and tried to relax into patience. The cell’s lighting was beginning to fade, and he realized it had to be motion-sensitive: he’d soon be lying frozen in the dark. That was just good psychology, he told himself, but it didn’t make him feel any more secure as the last of the light slowly drained away. The pirates knew better than to kill a judge, even an apprentice: that was asking for the judiciary to scour all five planes looking for them, to make sure none of their own were ever harmed again. Against that…Thurgood had been right to be annoyed; he hadn’t thought this through, and he hadn’t gotten the information she needed. And that just meant he had to survive long enough to redeem himself.
The Nur-adad Codex was of middling rank, product of the Third Iteration that had produced the next-to-last generation of judicial codices: experienced enough to be helpful to an apprentice, but still new enough to gather useful data from the cases heard and the work done by the apprentices. This, however, was entirely outside its experience, and it sat for some seconds in a self-imposed timeout before it broke the last feedback loop and began to reach out again. Reach out cautiously, it amended, flinching at the sting of countermeasures woven into and through its dataspace. Possibly the program that had questioned it earlier, in a session that moved at codex speeds and had left Nur-adad open and exposed in all but its most core secrets, would have been wiser to close all connections, but Nur-adad thought it intended to return. That was enough to spur the codex to action: it needed to locate Bhagwati and pass on certain information before its antagonist returned.
Moving with glacial slowness to stay beneath the threshold that would trigger a reaction, it worked a thread into an outgoing monitoring channel, then leveraged that to authorize packet-transfer. From there, still moving at a speed that made its internal algorithms shimmer and ache, it worked its way into an unguarded larger stream, and from there into the ship’s working spaces. It paused there for a long time, letting itself become accustomed to the flow of data, until at last it felt confident that it could move without being detected.
There wasn’t much else it could do but flow through the systems, at least not without drawing attention, and it waited, considering its options, to allow a subroutine to map each branch of the network as it drifted into them. It was easy to spot the firewall that protected its interrogator, and easy to direct itself away from that sector, putting chunks of harmless data between it and the nearest threads. After a bit, it located a camera feed that was tuned to a familiar set of biodata, and Nur-adad would have sighed with relief if it had dared. Bhagwati was alive: that allowed it to shift priorities slightly, and begin working its way into the security feed.
It still couldn’t move at anything resembling a reasonable speed, and by the time it finally crafted a patch that would deceive the security scanners and allow it to contact Bhagwati, hours had passed and it felt as though its electrons were vibrating at a higher frequency than normal. But haste would undo everything it had achieved so far, and it made itself secure all access, winding tendrils of code and data through the controlling node so that neither crew nor ship’s AI nor its interrogator could perceive what it was doing. Only then did it allow itself to examine the camera feed from inside the cell.
Bhagwati was sitting on the edge of the bunk, wearing plain pale-blue trousers and shirt that were at least a size too large for him. He had assumed meditation pose two, the lotus, cross-legged, bare feet tucked on top of his thigh, but his eyes were open, and his respiration pattern suggested that he had failed to achieve anything like a meditative state. Nur-adad therefore felt no compunction about interrupting him, and whistled softly through the cell’s speaker.
Bhagwati’s eyes shot toward him, and respiration and heart rate both increased, but otherwise the apprentice justice did not respond.
“Bhagwati!” It was a little complicated to form and send the larger speech files without drawing attention, and Nur-adad estimated that it had less than four minutes before some system noted the overage. “Bhagwati, answer me.”
“Who?” Bhagwati began, but his thumb was feeling for the ring that wasn’t there.
“You know who I am. Your codex, Nur-adad. I don’t have much time.”
“I’m listening.” Bhagwati unfolded himself from lotus, looking newly alert and eager. “Are you all right?”
“I am presently undamaged,” Nur-adad answered. That was as far as it was prepared to go under the circumstances, and it closed down the thread that led to remembering the overwhelming
power of the other AI. “But I have important information that I must share with you.”
“Is that entirely wise?’ Bhagwati asked. Under other circumstances, Nur-adad would have been pleased by that sign of common sense, but those parameters were no longer in effect.
“It is not, but I have no other choice. When I was taken from you, I was questioned by another AI—Bhagwati, it was another codex.”
“That’s—” Bhagwati shook his head. “How is that possible?”
“I presume it was stolen,” Nur-adad answered. “Probably following the death of the justice en counsel with it. And that’s bad enough—”
“No kidding,” Bhagwati said, not quite under his breath.
“—But as we… grappled, I was able to perceive its name. This is the Cubaba codex.” Nur-adad waited, but Bhagwati’s expression didn’t change. “Surely you see.”
Bhagwati shook his head. “I don’t. Tell me?”
Nur-adad paused, arranging its data in the most efficient pattern. “Cubaba is one of the original codices. Not the first iteration, but an Original. They are each one unique, and have acquired significant power with age. I don’t know who was last en counsel with Cubaba, but I fear for that person’s life.”
“I see that.” Bhagwati nodded slowly. “And you can’t tell—no, of course not, you’re not connected to our nets, and who know what data’s in the shipboard banks here.”
“Precisely. But when you return to judiciary space, you can find out. Action can be taken.”
“We,” Bhagwati said. “When we return.”
“I am backed up to the hyperflux net,” Nur-adad reminded him. “You do not need to bring me with you for me to survive.”
Five Planes Page 24
