Warring States

by Susan R. Matthews

  It was a trip that Shona had made before — ferrying Specialist Delleroy — but this time it was not his responsibility to do the vector calculations, so he only went to the wheelhouse out of habit, really. And because his heart was too full to speak further with Koscuisko just now. The pilot that Emandis Station had sent was an older man, Nairob; Shona knew him, if not intimately, and greeted him with a cordial salute as he stepped across the threshold from the corridor.

  “Pleasure to be carrying,” Nairob said cheerfully, his hands on his boards as he ran his baseline calibration. They were clear of Emandis Station; “Four hours to the exit vector, and then Chilleau in four days after that. Enough time?”

  Shona opened his mouth to confirm that supposition, but thought again. Four days from Emandis Station to Chilleau Judiciary meant shaving a little more than two days off the usual transit by taking Emandisan to Chilleau direct, which could only be done with a courier but was only seldom if ever attempted by larger craft — there was a risk involved.

  Any time a man made a vector transit there was a risk, risk was a fact of life, but Chilleau direct — if the calculation went wrong they could be killed, yes, there was a chance, but they could be worse than killed. They could be lost. Lost, killed, it made little difference to most people, but Andrej Koscuisko was traveling on the courier this time — and Andrej Koscuisko was carrying five-knives.

  They were Joslire’s five-knives. If they were lost in a vector mishap it would be the end of a line of direct transmission that went back to the days of open-fire forging in the desert. Koscuisko was a man, but those knives were part of what it meant to be Emandisan. It had been a crime to ever have let them leave Emandis, a crime for which the government that had persecuted his family had been punished. To put the knives at risk would be worse than a crime: it would be a betrayal.

  “No.” He couldn’t do that. It was no fault of Nairob’s that he made the suggestion; Shona was personally notorious for taking slightly riskier approaches and getting away with it. Nairob was only doing as he not unreasonably expected Shona to have done in his place. “Let’s take the slow transit just this once, Nairob. More time to talk. We’ve got knives on board.”

  The expression on Nairob’s face changed from one of mild confusion to one of moderately horrified understanding. “Knives,” Nairob said. “You’re right, Shona. Six days it is. Dar-Nevan to Brisinje, to Chilleau via Anglerhaz.”

  Shona nodded. “We’ll be bored,” he said, with gratitude for Nairob’s quick comprehension. “Or maybe your people will be bored. But we won’t be sorry. Thanks, Nairob.”

  He knew where Koscuisko was — in Delleroy’s bed-cabin; he knew where Specialist Ivers was, too. It was an unusual feeling to be a passenger on the courier rather than its pilot; but he was a passenger, and he was going to take advantage of the privilege to go and lie down. He had six days. He had time.

  When he got home he was going to write down everything that he could remember, and then he’d go and tell it to the trees.

  ###

  “I wasn’t sure you’d go along,” Ivers said. She didn’t want to play cards; she claimed she had work to do and she probably did. She was who she was, after all, while Andrej himself wasn’t. He was what he was, yes, but as to who he was — that remained open to debate. “I appreciate your willingness to contribute to a non-violent solution.”

  He shook his head. Unlike Specialist Ivers, he had nothing to do, nothing whatever; his personal effects were on board the Ragnarok, and who knew where the Ragnarok was? He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  Scylla had provided him with appropriate uniform, clean linen; but as far as new translations of the corrupt and confusing text to the controversial “Apiary” section of the story of Dasidar and Dyraine went, Scylla’s on-boards had had nothing to offer. That was hardly surprising.

  The work was still too raw and unpolished; the Autocrat had yet to authorize its release, nor would she until and unless a consensus could be reached on whether Dasidar had slept in the meadow in the summer sun dreaming of the sweetness of Dyraine’s lips, or had simply broken open somebody’s skep to rob the bees of honey to sweeten his drink.

  Andrej had his own opinions. Stealing honey might well be less noble an occupation than dreaming of lost love, but Dasidar had been starving all throughout the “High-mountain-song,” and a man who didn’t have the sense to eat when he was starving fell a few pegs on the estimability scale, in Andrej’s mind.

  “I’ve no choice, really.” He was sitting at the tiny work-table in his tiny bed-cabin with a recent issue of proceedings from a conference at the surgical college on Mayon. The controversy of the day was whether surgical interventions that remediated the results of simple aging were too obviously reasonable to be considered twice, or an affront against nature and religion and morality and the dignity of persons needing but unable to afford such interventions to address deficits resulting from poverty, illness, or trauma. Andrej was not much interested in it. “My ship’s gone off without me. And Vogel has probably told you about the Record. So you see.”

  No, she didn’t see. Vogel hadn’t told her. In which case Andrej wondered whether he should have, but it was done now. “No, your Excellency.” She didn’t need to call him that; but it was the title appropriate to his civil rank, as well as the military or judicial rank he was ready to surrender. “Karol said something, but I wouldn’t have connected it. Where did you find him, anyway?”

  She was sitting opposite from him at the table, which was so small that their knees periodically touched. She was leaning just the slightest fraction of a little bit. The tech on Scylla had told him that Ivers had a genuinely nasty scrape all up on one side of her rib-cage, and scored bone hurt — especially ribs, because they were always moving when a person didn’t expect them to be.

  “It wasn’t my idea. I don’t think he likes me.” Though Vogel liked him well enough, or disliked him little enough, to have covered up the murder Andrej had done at Port Burkhayden. If he started thinking about that, though, he might accidentally say something about it. “My cousin Stanoczk came with letters for me. Vogel arrived with him.”

  The Malcontent wouldn’t be interested in the controversy at Mayon either. To a Malcontent the solution would have been obvious: let those who wished, and could afford it, purchase such services at a premium, to fund the surgeries for those whose need was not a matter of relative convenience and who could not otherwise afford to seek healing. There were ways in which life made sense from the Malcontent’s point of view. Let all souls under the Canopy of Heaven contribute what they can, and be provided what they need.

  “Did he say anything about where he’d been, or why he’d gone?”

  Andrej thought about this. Could he answer it without compromising himself? “He told the captain that he had evidence of the subversion of the Judicial process to accomplish individually motivated acts of vengeance not sanctioned by Judge or required for the upholding of the Judicial order.” Yes, that was right. Vogel had said that to ap Rhiannon. “Then my disgusting cousin told him that there was a Record that contained false evidence in the custody of the Ragnarok. He wanted a look at it.”

  She wasn’t saying anything, waiting for him. He sighed. “Which he was granted. The Record blew up, Specialist Ivers. We lost one of the surgical imaging sets, which was annoying because you see nobody had mentioned to Medical that one was to be borrowed. The Record is gone. The Ragnarok is judicially naked. And ap Rhiannon does not like me either.”

  Was it just him, or did he sound as though he was whining? Yes. He was whining. He shook his head at his hand lying on top of the table, discouraged.

  “That’s good,” Ivers said. “You’re off the hook. Security has taken off for parts unknown, your ship has gone after them, and the record no longer requires the presence on board of a Judicial officer to preserve its legal integrity as evidence. You can go home.”

  Except that his Security had gone off to parts unknown and the Ragnar
ok had gone after them, and the ship had no Judicial officers on board to give legally valid evidence of what he knew about the motives and actions of the captain and its crew.

  Oh, and the fact that he longed for the environment he had believed that he sought to escape, addicted to the pleasure that the beast intrinsic to his being had learned to take in the suffering of captive souls. He could go home and hang himself, and if he was lucky it would be before anybody offered to show Anton Andreievitch some tapes.

  She apparently misinterpreted his abstraction, because she added a gently voiced “Does he remind you very much of Curran?”

  He knew exactly what she meant, though it was hard not to smile at the turn her questioning had taken. “Joslire has been dead for many years.” He had no wish to embarrass her. “I’d forgotten how much I missed him, and Shona — I beg your pardon, Courier Pilot Ise-I’let — is not so much like him in appearance as in manner. I know that Joslire is dead, and to see a man out of the corner of my eye who moves in the same way is disconcerting.”

  In fact there were ways in which he could have wished that he had never met Joslire’s brother, because it freshened his awareness of bereavement. The pain was older now, though. The ache of it was familiar enough to almost be a comfort in itself. “And he is his own person, which is helpful. Also I have much to tell him about his brother and the debt I owe. Six weeks would not be enough time for that.”

  Six days in transit, the pilot had said. Andrej wondered whether the Ragnarok was off vector, wherever it had gone. He wondered if his people had arrived in Gonebeyond, and what welcome they had found there.

  “When he approached me first I thought he meant to confront you,” Ivers said, rubbing at the back of her neck with one hand. She was clearly weary, but was being difficult about medication. In that way she was like her compeer Vogel. These people simply lacked a basic respect for pain and its effects on their own bodies, and as a doctor Andrej could not approve. “Took me a moment to remember. And you did kill his brother, after all.”

  People did not need to keep reminding him. He knew what he had done. He had been there, she had not. “Begged him to stay,” Andrej said, remembering. “The Captain had told me that he had petitioned for revocation of Bond. He might have come home a free man, and known his brother. He would not agree.”

  “Loved him, and killed him anyway?” she asked. “My apologies for the intrusion, your Excellency. I should get back to work.”

  Yes, it was an intrusion; yes, she owed him an apology. But on the other hand she had always been honest with him, as far as he knew, and had held up her end of it when he had asked her not to file the documents that would have taken him away from the Ragnarok so long as he could do it any good by staying there. He would tell her. Somebody needed to understand. No, somebody else; the Emandisan seemed to know all that there was, as it seemed to Andrej.

  “Killed him because I loved him.” He hadn’t wanted to. He could have made Joslire stay. It had been in his power, even his authority, to do so. And had he denied Joslire for his own selfish reasons his shame would be even greater than it was already. “It was his wish. To have done less would have been to dishonor the service he had done me. Not despite, Specialist Ivers. Because.”

  She should understand that, if anybody could. On the other hand in her line of work perhaps one of the reasons for avoiding personal ties was precisely to avoid a conflict between duty and devotion. She nodded, as though accepting his assertion without necessarily understanding it; and left the table to go across the narrow corridor to her own bed-cabin. She had data to examine.

  In a few hours they would be dropping off vector to make for Anglerhaz out of Brisinje space, and then to Chilleau. Shona was giving the crew a hand, in between talks, fleeing to one chore or another as the weight of memory and reminiscence overpowered him and Andrej alike, one in receipt and the other in transmission. Andrej wished that Robert could have been there. There were important ways in which Robert and Joslire had been as close, or even closer, than Joslire and Andrej, and there were things about their life outside of their officer’s company that Andrej knew nothing about.

  But that had gone as Andrej had desired it to do, and Stildyne had gone with them. With them they’d taken his last credible excuse for wishing to remain with the Ragnarok. There was nothing left for him on ship-board any longer but duty and honor and the welfare of people to whom he was indebted.

  He had no way of following his ship, no way of rejoining the Ragnarok now. Ap Rhiannon had won. There was nothing left to him to do but to go home, and be damned.

  ###

  Jils Ivers closed the door to her bed-cabin and sat down at the table, ignoring the aching of her body with grim determination. She was being sent back to Chilleau. She needed to get away from the claustrophobic intimacy of Convocation, but she had no prize to take back to Chilleau with her.

  She’d headed off an unpleasant confrontation between Fleet and Emandis Station, yes, she was escorting Andrej Koscuisko to Chilleau Judiciary to be relieved of his Writ at last, but he wasn’t entirely happy about that. Nothing had been solved. The Ragnarok was gone, not vindicated, and if she had been Jennet ap Rhiannon she would not be coming back at any time soon.

  She had no news of the Selection, and was no closer to solving the problem of Verlaine’s death than she had been when she had left Chilleau eighteen days ago. As a Bench specialist, she had learned early in her career that if she tried to judge her impact on the world in terms of success or failure she would fall into error; it was sometimes as important for the good of the Judicial order that she fail as that she succeed.

  But she was tired, and losing hope. There had to be a solution to Verlaine’s murder, but was she ever going to see through to find it? She’d failed. Had failed, was failing, and could not see anything ahead of her but failure in the future.

  It wasn’t a good feeling; nor was the sickening sense of futility and familiarity that she experienced when she opened up her locker and took out the data that she’d carried with her from Chilleau to Brisinje to Emandis Station, and now back to Chilleau again.

  She’d at least put the first part of her analysis behind her. She’d scanned the first portion of this traffic record so many times that she almost felt she could write it from memory, now. Traffic incoming and outgoing at Wellocks, where the saboteur had successfully destroyed all of the records on site and only the presence of the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Shikander had kept order for the crucial hours between the discovery of the destruction and the resumption of normal operations. At Burig. At Upos.

  The traffic on all adjacent vectors, some of it just there to provide an index in magnitude of activity, some of it maybe holding information. Panthis. Ygau. Terek. The casualty rate on Terek before, during, and after, as aggressive young pilots in expensive couriers gambled their lives against bragging points for speed and daring and against each other, Pintabo and Mirag, Fleet’s adjutant courier service, desperately poor family-owned ships trying to make delivery premiums, home defense fleet and Combine ships and —

  Home defense fleet? Emandisan home defense fleet. Jils scrolled up eight and sixteen views on her data reader, confused. How could she have missed that? The pilot was identified, as well as the craft and its class and cargo; she’d come out with Ise-I’let on the courier. This courier. She would have noticed it on her way to Brisinje. Had she not gotten this far before Karol’s note had distracted her?

  It must have been. It wasn’t the sort of thing a person would overlook. There it was, plain as day, Shona Ise-I’let had been on the Terek vector outbound from Chilleau the day after the murder had been discovered, a day and three-eighths after it had been done. A good pilot in a fast ship could get from Chilleau to Terek in so long if he pushed it, though it wasn’t what the vector authority would assume.

  Except she clearly remembered some of the ships further down the manifest, partially because one of them was named after a politician that Jils despised. She r
emembered that. She didn’t remember having seen Ise-I’let’s courier in the data. She had to have gone right past it.

  She’d been over the same data at least three times, on her way to Brisinje, at intervals during her stay in Convocation, again on her way from Brisinje to Emandis Station. She hadn’t missed it. She wouldn’t have missed it. She was stressed and distracted and unhappy, but her brain hadn’t stopped working, she’d have seen it and taken it up to ask Ise-I’let what he’d been doing — who he’d been doing it for, exactly —

  Standing up suddenly Jils felt the pain in her ribs that reminded her of the fact that she’d sustained a painful if superficial wound even before Nion had tried to kill her. She had to fall back to lean against the wall to catch her breath. She hadn’t seen it. So it had not been there. Someone had tampered with the data, but the data was protected, it had its own secures, who could have gotten the data to open itself to be read, let alone managed to insert a record without the data-reader itself realizing that something was wrong?

  She’d kept the data in her locker at convocation. Anyone might have gotten access to it. Anyone. Nion, perhaps.

  But she’d looked at the data on her way to Emandis Station, she’d been looking at the data when Ise-I’let had come back from the wheelhouse to talk to her, and if that line of information had been there then she would have put her finger to it and asked him then and there. She hadn’t done that. So that line of information hadn’t been there.