A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet

by Ron Miller

  The Fox’s progeny gazed, from their loftily assumed position, with disdain upon those on whom they preyed. They were educated, skilled, appreciated, feared, invisible—a special, unique class of their own and Pilnipott was scrupulous in making certain they never forgot that.

  As soon as the children were able to walk, or at least stand unaided, they were expected to begin repaying The Fox for his generosity. For half a day, from dawn to noon, they underwent intense indoctrination by the Faculty. They were taught to read, write and reckon, for The Fox recognized the criminal utility of literacy (the need, for example, to write a ransom note or perhaps a memo informing a teller that she’s being held up. There was no excuse, The Fox earnestly believed, for these things not to be done in the best penmanship. To do otherwise offended his sense of the aesthetic. Slovenliness in details reflected upon him). For the remainder of the day, from noon until whenever they were returned, the children were leased out, as we have seen, to beggars, charlatans and shoplifters, who found the presence of a dewy-eyed toddler adding verisimilitude and engendering trust, or found tiny fingers or slim, lithe bodies useful in any number of ways. Those children who had some talent for mimicry or acting commanded the highest prices, for they could be trained to impersonate the blind, crippled or otherwise handicapped. These were allowed to attend special classes on prosthetic makeup and appliances, enabling them to all the better impersonate the afflicted. The older children, from eighteen months to two years or so, he allowed to operate independently if they showed sufficient talent and ability and these he released into the streets like an army of light-fingered monkeys. So confident was he in their indoctrination that he never doubted their trustworthiness.

  Somewhere between the ages of five and ten, the children were allowed to fend for themselves, turned out to make room for the next generation—but were beholden for life to The Fox for seven-eighths of their income—and so well-trained were they that few, if any, questioned the fairness of such an exorbitant tithe. There were those, of course, who rebelled, and they simply were not seen again for The Fox did not allow paternal instincts to interfere with business, and none of the children questioned this, either.

  At the time Mr. Gerber sold the child who was to become Captain Judikha to Hipner Pilnipott, the latter had been operating his syndicate for more than thirty-five years and had turned whole armies of larcenous urchins onto the streets; indeed, there was much to support the suggestion that in all likelihood the entire criminal class of the Transmoltus—and a dozen other cities both in Tamlaght and on the Continent—had its origins in the nurseries of The Fox.

  Gerber depended upon his quarterly sales of ten to fifteen infants to The Fox for the greater part of his business. No more so than this particular time when his wagon held less than a third of its usual capacity. His accustomed sources had disappointed him terribly—mostly due to the combined effects of the drought and the volcano. Had he even suspected the appearance of the latter he certainly would have taken the northerly and easterly routes. He hadn’t, of course, and had instead found himself wandering uselessly around a blistered and fruitless landscape. So it goes.

  Upon his arrival in the Transmoltus, he carefully pruned his stock—what was left, of course, after natural attrition. Some of the survivors were so sickly he knew there would be no point in showing them to The Fox. These he let go to his discounters at a loss. This left him with a miserable fifteen or so—a scant fraction of his usual selection. The Fox would be terribly disappointed, but there it was.

  He had this dozen-odd cleaned up and kept them for a few days to give them a chance to fatten a touch, gritting his teeth at the cost of the milk, even though he purchased the soured, clotted, plaster-adulterated stuff at a considerable discount.

  The Fox was, as Gerber half expected he would be, very disappointed.

  “Hardly a decent showing this season,” he said, hands clasped behind his back, rocking on the balls of his feet, two sure signs that he was annoyed.

  “Scant pickings, what with the drought and all,” Gerber explained, aggravated at having to apologize. “And the volcano.”

  “Surely people haven’t stopped breeding? You’d think with all the farms dried up they’d have nothing else to do with their time.”

  “So I would have thought,” agreed the broker, “but such did not prove to be the case.”

  “Well, let’s see what we have then.”

  The Fox waddled up and down the line of baskets that Gerber had placed in a neat row on the floor. He paced with his hands clasped lightly behind his back, his short arms barely allowing him to do this, stopping occasionally to rock back and forth on his little feet, as he considered first one infant, than another. He made little clucking noises with his tongue that made Gerber’s sweaty fists clench.

  “All things considered,” The Fox said, finally, “it’s not a bad collection, even given the small number.”

  “Thank you,” replied the broker, reluctant to acknowledge a welling surge of relief.

  “Well, let’s see here. Might as well get right down to business.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hm. I’ll take these first three here. And that one. Um, that one. Those two. How many is that?”

  “Uh, seven, Mr. The Fox, sir.”

  “Hm. This one looks likely. And those two, and the one next to those, and...hm...oh, that one, too, I suppose.”

  “That’s twelve, sir,” offered Gerber, scarcely able to believe his luck—and The Fox did not yet appear to be finished!

  “Twelve, eh? Well...I rather fancied that one and that one too. Might as well take ‘em. How many’s that, now?”

  “Fourteen, sir.” Holy Musrum!

  “Fine. Five crowns each, as usual? That’s, uh...”

  “Seventy crowns, Mr. The Fox, sir.”

  “Come on to my office and I’ll get the money for you.”

  “Mr. The Fox, sir, why don’t you take one more, as a bonus? The last child? As my gift, as a, a kind of thank-you? Make it fifteen altogether.”

  “A bonus? Free, you mean? No charge? That’s very generous of you, Gerber, quite generous, but I don’t know that I really need fifteen.”

  “Please, sir. I’d consider it an honor,” and one less mouth to feed, not that he would have fed it for long.

  “Well...all right, if you insist.”

  The fifteenth infant was, of course, our heroine.

  Mr. Gerber received his seventy crowns and disappears from our history, concerning us no more than the fate of the remainder of his stock, which, the reader will readily appreciate, is just as well.

  Judikha received her name strictly as a matter of expediency. She was flanked, alphabetically, by Joram, Jorilla and Jotham on one side, and Jugutha, Jumel and Jumieges on the other. Pilnipott got the names from a book, 10,000 Perfect Names for Baby, which he had stolen the very same week he had first started his enterprise, and was methodically working his way through it. It made no difference to The Fox whether the gender of the names was appropriate: a child received his or her name in the order in which they came, to do otherwise was a niggling detail upon which Pilnipott did not wish to waste time. Probability came to the rescue of most of the students who received names that were, if not particular sonorous, were at least appropriate. Still, there were husky male criminals named Dolores and Cissy and delicately feminine miscreants named Bruto and Edouard, but Pilnipott reasoned that this just made them tougher.

  Judikha was at this time, of course, too young to be particularly interested in her surroundings, let alone her name. This did not particularly matter, since her surroundings did not change in all the time she was to remain under Pilnipott’s care. They were no different on the day she arrived then they were ten years later. The operation had established an efficient status quo long before her arrival and Pilnipott saw no reason to ever change it. He had created a fine machine that with very little attention methodically transformed useless, unwanted babies into productive, money-gener
ating criminals and like any good engineer he wasn’t about to tamper with what was already perfect. The machine remained unchanging and the children were nothing more than the raw material that passed through it.

  All of the children lived together, regardless of age or sex, in a kind of barracks-nursery. As the first class became older, they were put in charge of the younger, and so on until, after several years, there was established an iron-clad order of society and responsibility. This relieved The Fox’s mother, if she was his mother, of considerable burden.

  Pilnipott, with his usual careful organization, had arranged the loft somewhat on the plan of an assembly line, with the newest infants at one end of the room and the oldest children at the other, with the remainder graded between according to age. The rows of wooden cots, placed only a couple of feet apart, were not unlike the conveyor belt of an assembly line, with raw material continuously pouring in one end and a finished product coming off the other. Every year, as the infants became old enough to begin their formal training, the two-year-olds moved to the next row of beds further down the room, the three-year-olds to the next and so on. The oldest children, of nine or ten, having no beds to move to, were therefore “graduated” and forced to find lodging outside the school, in whatever way they could, though their ties to The Fox were of course expected to be no less stringently observed.

  Judikha’s earliest unambiguous memories were from the age of two or three years. By that time she was already well advanced in her training. There were three reasons for her rapid progress. The first to be exploited by Pilnipott was that she was a particularly appealing-looking child with a pale, fine-boned face and enormous dark eyes. She quickly became the infant of choice by those who were leasing babies from The Fox as props, as it were. Thereby she was exposed earlier and far more often to the outside world than most of her comrades, to say nothing of the role models who were her de facto employers. The second reason (and one that soon supplanted the first) was that she grew quickly. Tall for her age, and an early walker, she quickly graduated to more advanced training, while most of the other infants were still little more than toddling props. She developed into a long child, as skinny and lithe and quick as a salamander. A dark child, with mahogany eyes and fine, straight hair the color of oiled teak.

  The third reason was her almost preternatural intelligence.

  The Judikha of these first few years was a quiet, introspective, shy child who never voluntarily mingled with her surrogate brothers and sisters. She neither made nor encouraged friends. This aloofness at first involved her in a good many brawls with her classmates, who understandably felt slighted. But in addition to her intelligence Judikha was as tough as spring steel and not the least loathe to fight with an imaginative dirtiness against which the mere physical superiority of her enemies was no match. She was soon left alone, which was exactly her intention.

  The Fox, after the first few years of his deanship, did not often thereafter take a great deal of interest in his pupils. The ministrations of the woman who may have been his mother, with the aid of trusties selected from the ranks of the eldest children, sufficed for all daily needs, such as they were. Every Friday morning, all were expected to file past his massive oak desk and render unto their master his rightful tithe. He took the offerings silently, entering the amounts in meticulous copperplate hand in the big ledger next to the appropriate names, otherwise neither acknowledging the receipt of the money nor the presence of the child, no more than someone would acknowledge receipt of a candy bar from a vending machine. He never questioned the accuracy of the amounts. They were always correct; on the rare occasions when they were not—when the child had held back a demipfennig or two for whatever purpose seemed important at the time, or for no purpose at all, perhaps, other than daring or rebelliousness—when there was even the slightest shortage, he knew instantly. There was never any need to count the coins. There was something about the way the small fist released its load of warm, moist coins, perhaps, a sense of haste, or of furtiveness, or of ill-feigned casualness, perhaps something entirely psychic—it did not matter because he knew and that was all there was to that. He never said a thing at the time because he never spoke to the children, but he made a mark beside the name in the ledger and later showed the book to the hag who might very well have been his mother. That same evening the miscreant was called from his or her bed and terribly punished. It did not matter whether the embezzled amount was a demipfennig—which was just barely capable of being traded for a piece of rock candy no larger than the end of one’s little finger—or an imperial eagle, the punishment was the same. And the punishment was always brutal because the woman who may or may not have been The Fox’s mother considered it an annoying chore and she disliked being annoyed even more than she disliked caring for the children.

  Pilnipott took notice of Judikha because, of all the children who had filed past his desk, hundreds upon hundreds of them, to fulfil their weekly obeisance, she was the only one about whose honesty he was not certain. Over the decades the children had been reduced to an endless procession of shuffling feet, snuffling noses and downcast eyes, a kind of tattered mechanism depositing an endless stream of coins. Since it had been Judikha’s habit, from the very first, to stride purposefully across the room, never taking her eyes from her master, toss his share of her earnings onto the blotter, pivot on her heel and march back through the door, it is easy to appreciate how she came to not only attract Pilnipott’s attention but excite his suspicions as well. No one could be that self-assured without having something to hide.

  Initially, the Fox did not quite know what to make of Judikha’s behavior. In the normal course of things he would have attached considerable doubt to actions far less overt than those of this scrawny, large-eyed girl. It was the scale that bothered him. He was far more accustomed to the detection of barely perceptible signs of guilt: an infinitesimal tic, a minute shift of an eye, a nanosecond’s hesitation. Judikha’s gestures were broad, coarse and overt. Too, anyone with something to hide wouldn’t charge through the door as though they owned the place and toss a fistful of money onto his blotter with same negligent—even supercilious!—gesture that would be used to fling a few coins to a street beggar. However, when he entered her accounts next to her name, he noticed that the numbers were never suspiciously less than he expected them to be and, surprisingly, were often more.

  Not knowing what to make of her, he had her punished once or twice just as a precautionary measure. It was not until she was nearly seven years of age did Pilnipott realize what she had been doing.

  One evening, in counting Judikha’s weekly tithe, he noticed—and noticed for no particular reason other than that they were her coins—that one of the bronze ten-pfennig pieces had two peculiar wedge-shaped cuts in it, as though someone had twice jammed the blade of a knife into its edge. There was no cause to take special notice of this anomaly: he merely glanced at the coin for perhaps a quarter second longer than usual before tallying it with the others. However, when on the succeeding Friday he saw a ten-pfennig piece bearing vaguely familiar wedge-shaped marks, he remembered the disfigured coin he had seen the week before. Curious, he thought, and was about to place the coin with the others when another, more disturbing, even horrifying, thought came to mind. Taking from his pocket his own penknife, he opened its blade and made a third notch in the rim of the coin adjacent to the others. He looked at it for a moment, wondering why he had done something so atypically capricious, then tossed it into the growing pile and returned to his accounting, trusting to a genius even he sometimes failed to fully understand.

  Once again he had forgotten the strange coin until, on the following Friday, he saw it lying in the palm of his hand. It seemed to be sneering at him. By Musrum’s bristly balls!, he thought with more sincere reverence than any psychic eavesdropper would have thought.

  When Judikha found herself unexpectedly summoned to The Fox’s office, she stood before the great desk, placidly looking at the fat man behi
nd it with enormous, dark, vaguely disinterested eyes. There was nothing at all furtive, conciliatory nor cowed about her gaze and this impressed The Fox not a little. He knew that she knew perfectly well why she was there and that she could maintain an expression of such calm, clear dispassion impelled an unfamiliar sense of pride. She had no ready excuses, no wary mask of guilt—she was wasting nothing, waiting upon his initiative.

  “Ah, Judikha,” he began, wondering why he began so hesitatingly. “You know why you are here.”

  “If you say so, sir,” she replied. It should have sounded insolent but did not. It was just a polite statement of fact.

  “Are you suggesting that you don’t know why you are here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then would you care to tell me why you are here?”

  “Because you sent for me, sir.”

  “And why did I do that?”

  “Because you wanted to see me, sir.”

  “And why do you think I wanted to see you?”

  “Well, sir, I could only guess about that.”

  “Try.”

  “Well, perhaps you found an error in your arithmetic, sir, and wanted to refund some of my money.”

  “Now you’re being insolent!”

  “I don’t know what that means, sir.”

  “There’s no use in pretending that you don’t know that I know you’ve been stealing from me!”

  “No, sir?”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “I’ve never stolen so much a demipfennig from you, sir,” she said, flatly, never taking her eyes from his.