Warring States

by Susan R. Matthews

  “Padrake’s expected return date is in approximately five days,” Tirom said. That would be two days out, one day to resolve the problem, two days back. “We’re hoping his absence doesn’t delay things. Vogel can speak for Chilleau.”

  “That isn’t why I came, though,” Vogel said, suddenly. Maybe not suddenly — no, his tone of voice was temperate and his body language perfectly calm and respectful — but it surprised Rafenkel; and Tirom as well, apparently.

  Vogel nodded his head in response to Tirom’s questioning look, and continued. “I’m glad to be here to speak for Chilleau Judiciary. But I was actually coming to introduce a new element into the deliberations. There are nine Judiciaries represented here, First Secretary, and yet nobody speaks for a developing market that stands in as much need of regulation of trade and preservation of civil order as any. Maybe more.”

  Tirom was staring. Rafenkel thought she might be staring too. She knew perfectly well what Vogel was saying; she just didn’t quite believe it.

  “Launch-fields are burning,” Tirom said. “Cities are in a state of anarchy. Entire economies have been thrown into a state of chaos. And you want to talk to us about Gonebeyond space? There is no Tenth Judiciary, Vogel.”

  Vogel shook his head. “No, First Secretary, you’re absolutely right, there is no Tenth Judiciary. But there will be. The Selection we make will define Judicial policy for the next twenty to sixty years.” Depending upon the choice, and the individual chosen. “The new First Judge will have to deal with Gonebeyond. The previous incumbent’s policy is no longer appropriate in that respect.”

  The previous incumbent, that would be Fontailloe. Tanifer, who stood toward the back of the small crowd at the airlock, looked thoughtful to Rafenkel — but made no remark. None was required. They all knew that Fontailloe’s approach to Gonebeyond had been to ignore it.

  “It’s not a formal position,” Balkney said to the First Secretary. “But Vogel’s right, as well. We haven’t been putting as much weight on that element as perhaps we should, in light of the population expansion in Gonebeyond.”

  Yes, it had come up, and no, they hadn’t made a tile for it. They had too many problems within Jurisdiction space, right here, right now, to care much about Gonebeyond, which after all presented no challenge to Bench markets. Still, Vogel’s point was well taken. Gonebeyond was a market. And the new First Judge was going to have to decide how to deal with it as things changed and developed over the years.

  Tirom seemed reluctant to accept Balkney’s remark — though it was clearly reasonable, and nobody objected to it. After a moment he nodded his head, slowly. “Very well,” Tirom said. “And on behalf of the new First Judge, whoever she may be, thanks for raising the issue, Specialist Vogel. There should be no real delay to process, I hope. If all of the Judiciaries represented are willing to hear Vogel speak on behalf of Gonebeyond space Brisinje has no objection.”

  And again, nobody spoke, so nobody was objecting, either. The small detail of Supicor being unrepresented with Nion dead went either unremarked or discounted as overtaken by events.

  “Thanks,” Vogel said to Tirom, at least in part to end an uncertain silence in which nobody seemed willing to speak up. “We’ll get right on it, First Secretary.”

  Go away now and leave us alone, we’ve got work to do. Well, maybe not so much leave us alone as we’ll get back to it.

  Whether Tirom took it in the former or the latter sense Rafenkel couldn’t tell. There were no hints in his tone of voice or his expression; maybe that was the answer right there, though. In whichever sense Tirom interpreted Vogel’s words, he was not obviously offended.

  “Thank you as well, Specialist Vogel. The Bench appreciates your willingness to step in at this time of need. You know how to reach me if you need to — ” they’d all just tested that, with the crisis created by Nion’s assault and death — but it was something to say, Rafenkel supposed. “Till later, then. I’ll see myself up, yes, thank you.”

  He had brought Security with him, waiting in the lift-car; but they all knew what he meant. Once the airlock had closed, once the telltale on the wall had reported that the lift-car had begun its ascent, Capercoy raised his voice. “Let’s all gather in the theater,” Capercoy suggested. “We probably need to brief Vogel. I wouldn’t mind a briefing myself.”

  “Two eighths,” Tanifer agreed. “Time for a beverage break. What’ll you take, Vogel?”

  This was actually not so much a polite request as a subtle signal, I for one don’t feel like I need to watch this man every moment. There was more than one kind of baseline being established, here.

  “Bean tea if you’ve got it.” Vogel’s response in turn was similarly coded, and I don’t mind not watching you fix my beverage. “Kavene if you don’t. Thanks.”

  Bean tea, indeed. Some Bench specialists had an exalted notion of what was available in small scientific research stations. It was a pretty safe bet that there were few enough sources of bean tea in Gonebeyond. Rafenkel shook her head, and went off to open up the theater.

  ###

  Chapter Sixteen

  Resets

  “We’re operating at a disadvantage here, Vogel,” Rafenkel said frankly, once everybody had assembled. The theater was much the same as the last time Rafenkel had been here — the table at the end of the room, the three ranks of chairs in tiers, the secured communications console behind the table on the far wall. “So we’re just going to have to do our best and let things fall out where they may. I’ll start. The Sixth Judge is for Chilleau. She won’t have Fontailloe. She’ll take Cintaro if she can’t have Chilleau, but she’d rather claim it for herself than admit a confederation.”

  This wasn’t what anybody had planned; they had wanted something more formal, more professional. Nion had taken that away from them. It was a good thing she was dead.

  Balkney sighed. “Ivers has kept Chilleau alive to date, we’ve been unable to disqualify the Second Judge and move on. Haspirzak is willing to accept Chilleau, but not Cintaro. Haspirzak believes that any other choice will bring chaos.”

  “And Ibliss is afraid that selecting Chilleau will bring chaos, and wants to go with Cintaro,” Rinpen added, with dispassionate regret. Maybe it was good to sit down and lay things out in plain speech. They’d been talking around it so carefully, so much, that the situation hadn’t been as clear as it might have been.

  Now that she sat in the theater and listened, it seemed clear to Rafenkel that there had been little real movement on anybody’s part since they’d got here. If anything, peoples’ opinions seemed more — and not less — polarized than she remembered them as having been, when they had begun.

  “Supicor believes she has a chance as a compromise consolidation,” Zeman said. Zeman was here for Eighth, not Seventh, but there was no one to speak for Seventh and Zeman had spent the most time with Nion in discussion to date. “Eighth just wants an answer. Any answer. She’d even go for confederacy if she had no choice, but that’s Delleroy’s position.”

  Vogel nodded. “I can speak for the Second Judge,” he said. “Though I’m sure Jils has been doing a better job of it than I can. I can tell you with a fair degree of confidence that Verlaine wouldn’t have accepted any solution that included Fontailloe, and he didn’t like Cintaro either. To the extent that I’m representing Gonebeyond as well as Chilleau, I’m going to have to insist on that.”

  Strong language. Bench specialists usually didn’t issue ultimata, not amongst themselves.

  “What’s your reasoning?” Capercoy asked. “Verlaine’s dead.”

  Vogel nodded. “Dead, but I can still hear him clearly enough. More Judiciaries and more local authority, he’d say. And Fontailloe was to blame for making torture an instrument of State, he’d say, and Cintaro was right there with her.”

  If this was true, Verlaine had been much more radical in his thinking than anyone had guessed — or at least more so than Rafenkel suspected. “Explain,” she suggested. “More Judiciaries?�
�

  Vogel nodded again. “Yes, each with a reduced span of control. It’s all a control issue at the heart of it, obviously enough. And when did we start getting in to Inquisition in a big way? Fontailloe felt that it was losing control. Feeling the lines of direction and administration beginning to slip. Jurisdiction’s gotten too big for nine Judiciaries.”

  Which would explain Vogel’s reference to a non-existence Tenth Judiciary, Rafenkel supposed.

  Balkney shook his head, as though there was something in his ear that he was trying to dislodge. “We’re not going to argue dead men’s protocols, Vogel,” Balkney said firmly. “What’s your agenda?”

  “Chilleau,” Vogel replied calmly. “Behind Ivers all the way. With a sideline in the future of Gonebeyond space. Whoever takes the Selection is going to be presiding over a crucial point in the history of the Bench. We’re going to need a Judge with the flexibility to face a whole new set of challenges. It’s not going to be like it’s ever been before. Gonebeyond’s too big to just send in the Fleet and hope for the best.”

  So Cintaro was out, from Vogel’s point of view. Because Cintaro wanted more prisons and more emphasis on the Protocols, and Vogel’s point — to the extent that Rafenkel thought she understood it — was, among other things, that to open a dialog with Gonebeyond would take a Judge who was capable of understanding what had forced people to flee in the first place. No administration identified with the maintenance or furtherance of Inquiry was going to get very far in persuading Gonebeyond to consider any sort of integration into Jurisdiction space.

  “Well, we knew from the start that the default solution was Chilleau if it could be done,” Tanifer said. “Ivers and I had been discussing whether the Second Judge could be moved to Fontailloe. Supicor, I think we can all agree that Supicor wasn’t going anywhere. Am I right?”

  Nobody disagreed, so Capercoy spoke. “Down to Fontailloe, Cintaro, Chilleau,” Capercoy said. “If it’s not Cintaro, the Judge will very possibly claim a degree of independence, with all that that means. If it is Cintaro we over-rule the clearly expressed majority opinion, and that means even more of the same.”

  Capercoy didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. They all knew where it was going.

  They couldn’t pass over Chilleau Judiciary — her administration couldn’t hold the Bench together — but they couldn’t select Cintaro, who would elect to respond by turning her back on the rest of Jurisdiction space. There was one solution that acknowledged the weakness in Chilleau’s administration and minimized the damage that would be caused by a Fifth Judge deciding to make her own rules —

  “Forget Fontailloe,” Rinpen said to Tanifer. “Fontailloe is not going to happen. If we all work Chilleau versus Cintaro we may have a solution by the time Delleroy gets back. We can’t wait any longer than that. We don’t dare.”

  Tanifer nodded. Rafenkel was almost certain she knew what he was thinking.

  There would have to be a newly promoted Judge at Fontailloe no matter what; and if it turned out that the confederacy model was their least-worst choice there would be a new First Judge at Fontailloe. Because all of the Judges would be First Judges, in their own jurisdictions.

  If they were to be forced to consider confederacy after all, after all the sport they’d had with Delleroy on the issue, she was never going to hear the end of it from him.

  ###

  “Taken?” Padrake asked, coming forward into the wheelhouse where Jils stood looking over the pilot’s shoulder at his schematics. Two days from Brisinje to Emandis Station; Karol had come in person — so the Ragnarok was at least two days gone. Koscuisko was two days detained. She wondered — no, she didn’t — what sort of a mood he was going to be in when they got there.

  “That’s what it says,” she agreed, passing the briefing sheet to Padrake. “They pulled him out of the service house between late supper and early breakfast. Did it so quietly that there were no alarms for his Security, except that his Security had apparently already left by the time it happened.”

  Padrake leaned up against the bulkhead to one side of the entryway into the wheelhouse, shaking his head as he scanned the brief. “Protest from the Ragnarok against unauthorized detention of personnel assigned. Counter-argument from Scylla for overdraw of Fleet resources at depot, but it’s the EHDF that runs that depot, isn’t it? And the Ragnarok’s left without him, so they can’t be that upset that Scylla’s got him. A little bit insulting, that, wouldn’t you say, Jils?”

  “It’s better not to make any assumptions where Koscuisko is concerned,” Jils said, shaking her head. “He’s got his own standards. Some of which I like, and some of which make no sense to me. You might want to be sure you come with me, when we get there, I’ve heard rumors about Koscuisko’s vocabulary that we may find substantiated. We’re going to need a record, a heat-resistant one — ”

  “With respect,” the pilot said. It was the same pilot who had brought her here from Chilleau, and she’d been under the impression that Ise-I’let had been anxious to get home; what had happened? “If you’d clear the wheelhouse, Specialist Ivers, Specialist Delleroy. Vector transit to calculate, Specialists.”

  The pilot’s voice was firm and clear, but there was tension in it that Jils didn’t understand. Karol always got a little unhappy about his vector spins, though — not because there was ever anything wrong them, just because it was the way that he was. Maybe the pilot had already done his calculations when she’d joined him at Chilleau. It didn’t really matter why. He wanted them out; they’d leave.

  “Sorry, Ise-I’let,” Padrake said, straightening up. “Gone directly. Jils. I’ll be in my cabin. Got a little bit of a technical problem to chew on.”

  Right. “You go right ahead.” No, she didn’t need his company, not in the same room. The bed-cabins on a courier were small. She had work to do. “Let me know when you have a moment, though, courier pilot. I have a question. Thanks.”

  Out. He didn’t have to say it; the word lay writ large across the tension in the fabric of his uniform across his back. Something was eating at him. It was a good idea to leave people alone when they were calculating vector spins; she followed Padrake out of the wheelhouse and through to the middle portion of the corridor, where the bed-cabins were. Padrake’s was across the hall.

  Padrake closed his door behind him, with one last concerned glance at her as he did; she winked at him — she wasn’t going to be fussed over, no matter how much of a guilty pleasure it was — and went to the small locker in her bed-cabin to pull out the data she’d been carrying with her since she’d left Chilleau. She left the door open. She was tired of feeling enclosed.

  She hadn’t gotten very far with it before. She’d just kept on starting, realizing she couldn’t recall a word she’d read, starting again. She started at the beginning one more time, re-reading those long dry bits of ships going one way, ships going another. Cargoes. Passengers. Fleet movements.

  There’d been a battlewagon at Ygau, and Fleet presence at several other vectors besides — Burig, Ktank, Upos, Wellocks, Panthis. She found that she remembered more than she’d realized; and was just marveling, again, at the casualty rates that the Terek Vector assessed against its traffic when the pilot rapped with his knuckles on the frame of the open door to announce himself.

  “You had a question, Dame Ivers?” The vector calculation seemed to have taken it out of him; he was pale, which was not in the least attractive on an Emandisan.

  Jils had to pull herself up out of the traffic at Terek and think for a moment. Yes. She had wanted to ask the pilot. “Thank you, courier pilot. Personal curiosity. You ferried Specialist Vogel from Emandis Station?”

  The pilot shook his head. “From Imennou, Specialist. We’ve been lending a hand at the launch-field there, trying to handle the overflow from Brisinje.”

  He wasn’t going to volunteer any information: discreet young man. A good choice, for a courier pilot. She’d thought his name was familiar; why was that?
“I was interested in whether you’d seen Specialist Vogel before. I’d found a piece of paper in the exercise wheel on the way from Chilleau that appeared to have come from him, but I hadn’t realized at that time that he was anywhere in particular.”

  The pilot smiled, very easily, very engagingly. “Specialist Vogel told me that you would be wanting to know,” he said. “Yes. I’d seen him before, but he’d been acting as a port inspector at the time. Some weeks ago, and it was at Panthis, I think.”

  Miserable tanner that he was. A port inspector. Karol didn’t like port inspectors; he took advantage of the role to act out everything he found objectionable in the breed, and sometimes she thought he had a little too much fun doing it, too.

  “I hope he didn’t make things too difficult.” Though if the pilot remembered Karol he was likely to have reason.

  The pilot smiled again: but there was something hurt and hungry creeping into his face that made Jils anxious for his sake. “It was a memorable occasion, Dame. He pretended that there wasn’t anything wrong with our documentation, and that he was furious about it. No chance to kick up. Free liquor at Panthis for as long as we care to drink, kind of him, you know there’s always something wrong with the documentation.”

  Yes, she did. And she knew exactly how Karol had played it. “Something on your mind, pilot?”

  “You and Specialist Delleroy.” The words came out in a bit of a rush. “I do my best not to overhear conversations that are none of my business, Dame. But I’d resigned myself to the fact that Andrej Koscuisko was gone and I was not going to get to see him, after all.”