It had been added to her data between the time she had carried it on board, and now. There was only one person who could logically have done it, who had the skill and the specialized knowledge and the daring to do it, but Jils couldn’t stand to think of what that meant.
There was a way to find out. Picking up the data reader she opened up her door and stepped into the corridor to signal at the opposite door, to see if Ise-I’let was in there talking to Koscuisko.
###
Chapter Eighteen
Smoke and Clarity
Koscuisko had invited him in almost eagerly, and closed the door — out of respect for his privacy, Shona supposed, and was grateful. He wasn’t sure how he felt being so close to the man in such a small space; whether it was knowing who Koscuisko was, or knowing that Koscuisko wore the knives, or what, Shona didn’t know, but it was there. This man was to be watched and warded. He was dangerous. He meant no harm to Shona, of that Shona was convinced; but there it was. Koscuisko had the ghost of the wolf in him. Joslire must have seen it, Shona decided; and known that Koscuisko was fit to wear Emandisan steel.
“No,” Koscuisko said. Koscuisko had a bottle on the table, two glasses; Shona had accepted the offer of a drink politely, but hadn’t taken more than a few sips. Koscuisko’s cortac brandy was a taste not commonly cultivated among Emandisan. The bloodlines lacked the ability to metabolize the poison in the drink. An Emandisan could share a sociable glass if he was very careful and took no more than a fraction of the flask, but if he forgot himself in a misguided fit of camaraderie after sunset, he would be deathly ill before the sun rose in the morning.
Koscuisko had to know that. Koscuisko did not press Shona to drink, and when Koscuisko poured for himself and tipped the bottle to top up Shona’s drink he let the gesture go with a clink of glass to glass each time, and did not raise the level in Shona’s glass by so much as one drop. It was only the ritual, for Koscuisko. Shona was content to sit and taste the brandy in small sips from time to time, and listen.
“No, we never really talked about that. I suppose I could have asked him, but I didn’t want to ask him, because if I did he had to tell me. It didn’t seem that it could possibly be something he would wish to discuss. When he mentioned any family it was too obvious that the memory gave him very great pain.”
So all of this time Koscuisko had known that there had been family, but no more than that. Of course Joslire couldn’t have explained to Koscuisko about the knives. It would have been as much as an admission that Joslire had put them on Koscuisko, and Joslire — as Koscuisko told the story — had enjoyed the joke of that until the very end.
“It’s one man in a generation, your Excellency, chosen by aptitude and willingness and temperament, and endorsed by the ancestors. Those who have gone before had my brother singled out from the day he was born. So goes the story, at least.” Koscuisko needed to understand. It was important. Shona felt an anguished ache in his heart that Koscuisko should understand, and wondered if the brandy was affecting his emotions.
“There are Malcontents, on Azanry,” Koscuisko replied, in an encouraging and contemplative tone of voice. “The Holy Mother has marked them from the moment of their birth, because it goes without saying that no one would chose that path if there were any other. But it is between the soul and the Holy Mother. Sometimes it is clear that a man is for the Malcontent, but at other times it comes as a surprise to everyone.”
Including the individual concerned? That did seem to be Koscuisko’s point. “The knives themselves will not stay sheathed for a man they do not accept. He would have known when he first sheathed one against your body. If the knife did not jump out of the sheath, it meant that it had tasted your spirit and decided that you would carry it with honor.”
Koscuisko looked concerned and wary at once, as though he wasn’t sure of what he meant to say next. “I have wondered how I could carry them in that way,” Koscuisko said. In what way? Shona wondered. With honor, perhaps? “To take them with me, everywhere I have gone, Shona. Everywhere. Many times have I decided I dishonor his gift and made up my mind to leave the knives behind. I do not wear them often on shipboard, but — other times — I want to have them there.”
Koscuisko couldn’t know what he was saying. He didn’t know. The fact of the knives aside he was no more Emandisan than Shona was Aznir Dolgorukij. Shona took a deep breath to steady his voice. “May one ask whether his Excellency ever — used them. With respect. Sir.”
For a moment Koscuisko looked confused, and Shona concentrated on not holding his breath. He couldn’t imagine it. No one in custody of Emandisan steel could, not what Koscuisko was tasked to do. Then Koscuisko’s face paled and he started back in his chair, and Shona knew that it was all right.
“May all Saints turn from me in my final hour if I could ever have done so mean a thing to Joslire.” Koscuisko knew what Shona had meant. Exactly. “I am a sinner, Shona, a murderer of men and women and there have been those that I knew to be too young and killed anyway, as quickly as I could. Joslire’s memory I have never soiled in that manner. They’re the only clean things about me, and I do not wish to give them up.”
Shona closed his eyes for one brief moment of relieved gratitude. Joslire had known what he was doing. It hadn’t been a fluke, an accident of circumstances and opportunity.
“No one could dare to request them of you,” Shona said. “They cannot be alienated from you, by law and the ethic of the holy steel. You don’t need to be concerned about it. Trust me on this.”
The talk-alert at the door signaled before Koscuisko could reply, and the doors opened without any polite interval to wait for an invitation. It was Dame Ivers, and she had a flat-panel data display with her — a reader of a sort that Shona recognized, from seeing Specialist Delleroy with them.
“You,” Dame Ivers said to Shona, who stood up when she came in but who had no idea what might have excited her. “Ise-I’let. You were at Terek after Verlaine was killed?”
The question was unexpected; Shona had to think. When exactly had Chilleau’s First Secretary died, been killed, when had he heard of it? Coming off of Wellocks at Terek, hadn’t it been? “I’m not sure, Bench specialist,” Shona admitted. “Is it important?”
“These are traffic records from Terek,” she said, brandishing the data reader. “They say you were at Terek. They didn’t say that before. The data’s been compromised. I need to know if — ”
There was a voice behind Specialist Ivers now, though, in the hall, and although Shona couldn’t see who it was he recognized Nairob’s accent.
“With your permission, Bench specialist. We’re coming up on the vector debouchment, Dame, I’d like to ask for Ise-I’let’s presence in the wheelhouse, if he can be spared.”
Nairob would drop vector by himself if he had to; Shona had done it on more than one occasion. Prudent and responsible pilots backed each other up, however, and Shona was the one who had reminded Nairob that there were five-knives on board. Or were there? Koscuisko had not offered to let him see them — they’d been in company before, and it hadn’t seemed to occur to Koscuisko since.
Shona hadn’t thought about it either, until just now. Maybe Koscuisko didn’t actually have the knives with him. Maybe the knives had left with the Ragnarok — but how could that be? He felt comfortable with Koscuisko. Koscuisko smelled like family. He had to be carrying the knives.
Specialist Ivers nodded — if a little reluctantly, as it seemed to Shona — and stepped aside. “Of course,” she said. “There’ll be time later. Please feel free, courier pilot.”
So now of course he did have to leave the room and go with Nairob to the wheelhouse, wondering. Trying to remember. Where had he been? Terek? He’d picked up Specialist Delleroy at Ygau where Delleroy had been on board of JFS Galven, that was right. Delleroy had been working with Fleet and vector control to help contain the panic when they’d found out that the traffic offices had been sabotaged. That had been before anybody had heard
about Verlaine’s death.
As Shona crossed the threshold into the wheelhouse he heard Koscuisko suddenly raise his voice, behind him, in the corridor. “It’s a bomb!” Koscuisko shouted. “All shields. Now!”
There was a sound of something falling to the floor on the other side of the corridor — as if from Specialist Ivers’ bed-cabin — but Shona couldn’t stop to think about it. All shields, Koscuisko had said. The nearest mechanism that could be used to engage the courier’s blast containment defenses was on the outside wall, though, just outside the wheelhouse; Nairob was already at his console and looking up — alarmed, concerned — as Shona turned back to the corridor.
Nairob would have to make the vector drop by himself after all. Shona had to engage the blast shields, and once the wheelhouse was sealed off it would stay that way until the courier was boarded.
Half-a-step toward the open doorway to pull the plunger-rod and close the circuit, manually, but Koscuisko had reached and thrown and something sank into the outside wall facing the corridor, sank deep into the emergency containment access and quivered there, ringing with the force of its impact.
Shona started back on instinct — it was too close to his face, he reacted without thinking — and that reflexive recoil saved him from being crushed as the blast shields fell with brutal force and the speed of desperation.
Shona stood there staring at the now-sealed connecting door between the wheelhouse and the rest of the ship. All over the ship the blast walls would have fallen, sealing the courier off into nine separate life-sustainment zones, each quarantined from the others to minimize whatever damage might have befallen them. The rest of the crew would be wondering what had happened. Shona was wondering what had happened himself.
“Did he say a bomb?” Nairob asked. Shona shook himself out of his temporary paralysis and turned back to the boards. The knife. That was what he’d seen. Koscuisko had thrown the knife. That was how Koscuisko had engaged the blast shields. He’d seen it, and he hadn’t seen it at all. What was going on?
“I’m not sure.” He couldn’t remember what he thought he’d heard Koscuisko say. He was shaken by the brutal suddenness of it, by the fear that gripped a man when the blast shields came down to know that something had gone terribly wrong and that their lives were at the mercy of luck and chance. “He may have said a bomb. I didn’t see a bomb. Did you see a bomb?”
Nairob reached for a control on his console, scowling. “No. No sign of one in health monitoring, either. We’ll drop vector and then we can try to figure it out. Check my calculations? I’d appreciate it.”
Shona was good at vector calculations. It was a natural aptitude that had served him well in the past. “He seemed perfectly rational just now,” Shona said, calling up the model. “There’s no telling, I guess.” He’d wondered if Koscuisko had the knives. Koscuisko did. Shona had seen one.
Was it still there, outside the wheelhouse, sunk deep into the structure of the ship? Did the emergency containment initiation sequence generate enough heat or other energy to damage the blade, to destroy the knife, to obliterate something that carried the lives and souls of all of its custodians with it, lost forever?
He was shaken to the pit of his stomach. His hand trembled as he picked out threads on the console to test the patterns of force that would work upon the courier as it dropped from vector transit back into normal space. Concentrate. The needful task now; speculation later. The knife. Koscuisko had thrown the knife. Shona had seen her. It had to be her. It couldn’t possibly have been anything else.
Something knocked all at once against the sealed doorway between the wheelhouse and the corridor, as though the courier had been a gigantic melon that some huge hand had just slapped to hear how ripe it was by its resonance. Tock.
It felt like something hitting Shona in the head from all directions at once, sending him sprawling across his console while Nairob actually fell forward into the narrow space between the consoles and the viewing-port. One blow, one giant’s fist, and then the alarm system on the inboard health monitors started up all at once orange and venomously green and red: the upper lining of the ship below the hull. The atmospheric integrity of the cargo bay. The power-plant where two of the crew were on duty while a third sat on the communications board.
Something had hit the courier, but from the inside out, and from the monitors responsible for the passenger cabins just outside the wheelhouse, from the corridor itself — there was nothing.
Nairob dragged himself to his feet, clambering up and over the console. “A bomb,” Nairob said. “Do we have navigation? Do we have propulsion? Can we see?”
The view-ports were still registering, but the modeling projections had gone blank. There was nothing there. The consoles claimed that the courier was still at speed and on its course, some minor perturbations, nothing that couldn’t be addressed; but the ship was blind.
There were no projected schematics, no visual summaries, no sense of whether the course that Nairob had scheduled would drop them where and when they were expected. Shona took a deep breath. It could be done on manual. Nairob had had the calculations done, and the ship could still tell them what they had to do to correct for what had just happened.
He’d never wanted to drop vector by hand, but once they’d got past this they would never have to do it for the first time ever again. They’d get past this. They would. The courier was a good piece of machinery, a very capable craft, and Nairob was good. He was good.
Koscuisko had given the knife to the ship to try to save them all. There was no report of any sort from the part of the ship in which Shona had left Koscuisko and Dame Ivers alike, and one of the skin-sensors thought that they might have begun to lose just the tiniest bit of atmosphere, which was just the tiniest bit more than they could afford.
“We need to get back on course,” Shona said firmly, setting his console to rights and sitting down. “We don’t have much time. We’ll start the distress beacon once we’re off the vector. Can you give me a calibration on the course deviation?”
They were going to bring this courier off vector safely whether or not there had been a bomb. There were six souls on board this ship, even if he didn’t count Koscuisko and Ivers. He didn’t dare include them, in his mind. He had to concentrate on the lives that they could save. There was nothing he could do about Koscuisko and Ivers until they could get help.
“It’s slow,” Nairob said. “But it’s coming. Here. Deviation on linear acceleration, mark.”
If he could not so much as bring lives that Koscuisko had tried to save to port, he would not dare to step into the family orchard, ever again.
###
Jils Ivers crawled over the debris of the bed-cabin wall painfully. The emergency sulfurs were glowing; the light gave everything a ghastly green-yellow hue, the shadows flat and deceptive. No depth perception: in the dim light she could make out nothing amidst the wreckage on the floor except for something rounded and lighter in color than its surroundings that could be the back of a man’s head.
The relative positioning was right — Koscuisko had been between her and the door when the bomb had gone off — but she couldn’t tell for sure. She was going to have to get to him somehow, and she hurt. Nothing was broken so far as she could tell — the joints that weren’t working were refusing to work in a manner characteristic of a sprain or torn muscle, not a broken bone — but one of the other things that she knew from experience was that it frequently came as a surprise, later, to realize the extent of an injury.
She’d had a rough time of it, recently, the collapsing chair, Nion’s harpoon, now this. Lovemaking with Padrake didn’t count and she wasn’t going to think about it now. “Koscuisko. Hey. You. Anders. Wake up. You’ve got explaining to do.”
He hadn’t gotten much done in the short space of time between his decision to seize the data reader and throw it across the corridor into her bed-cabin, and the explosion itself. If he had, she’d lost it in the haze that being blown sid
eways could cast over events immediately prior to a traumatic accident.
She hadn’t gotten the exact reason why, but Koscuisko’s conviction had been absolute. Between the two of them, they’d gotten the intervening doors closed, and they’d deployed the interior barrier wall, before they’d been interrupted. If they hadn’t gotten those things accomplished, it might well have been a termination, not an interruption, so she was just as glad.
“You. Andrej. Up, and face the world. Wake up. Are you bleeding, can you tell?” It was slow going, crawling across the floor. She had to stop every few moments to catch her breath, but she was beginning to worry about Koscuisko because she couldn’t see any movement in the rubble. There was very little of the barrier wall left; if he was underneath it, there would be digging to do.
The heap of rubble with the possibly blond head rumbled a bit like the ground in a seismic aftershock; subsided, buckled like the swell of a rising river, and said something in a language that Jils could identify as probably a Combine dialect of some sort, possibly High Aznir. She couldn’t translate it, but if he felt anything like she felt, it was probably just as well.
“That’s the ticket.” She said it as cheerfully as she could manage, but she couldn’t afford to relax yet. There was no telling. He was apparently alive, but in what sort of condition? “I hope your kit is somewhere you can find it. I’ve got a headache.”
Slowly, the rubble on the floor hove up and fell away, and Koscuisko rolled over toward her to lie upon his back making small grunting sounds. Very disgusted grunting sounds. She could hear him shift against the debris on the floor, a little a time; he was testing, she realized it by the pattern of sound. Feet, knees, hips, hands, elbows, arms.
“Nothing feels splintered,” he said, but his voice was very strained. “I don’t think I’m bleeding. How do you find yourself, Bench specialist?”
Warring States Page 43
