The Coward's Option

by Adam-Troy Castro

  Cort circled the desk and read the floating text. “Att: Artis Bringen. Below you will find documentation of a number of serious charges I want filed against Ambassador Virina Pendrake of the Confederate mission to, blah, blah, blah, relieved of duty, blah, blah, blah, gross misconduct, blah blah blah, and so on.” She tapped the hytex connection at her throat, flicking the letters off, before coming back around the desk to face the kneeling woman with folded arms. “In case you haven’t figured it out, that means you’re under arrest, you intolerable bitch.”

  Pendrake moaned, rubbed her injured forehead, and glanced up at her two scowling captors, seeking room for negotiation and finding none. “When…did you…?”

  “Last night,” Cort said. “Long after everybody else was asleep. Same time you picked, the night you fixed me. Marys enlisted help and together with her two friends outside overpowered me, drugged me, and got me to the Xe. He turned out to be very upset when he found out that Confederate law didn’t sanction your personal version of justice. He had no problem ordering the immediate emergency removal of my device.”

  “I was afraid he wouldn’t,” Kearn said. “I thought he’d take too much satisfaction in ordering the treatment for a human, any human. It turns out that he also has a sense of honor…or self-preservation, if you prefer. The last thing he wanted was to be the center of his own diplomatic incident, when your over-reach was reported. He was eager to help. He even apologized.”

  Cort’s could barely contain her fury. “And they got it out of me barely in time, too. I only barely survived the procedure. You know what the redeemer told me, afterward? That it turns out human beings grow their new neural connections a lot faster than Caith do. I was supposed to have another week left. The redeemer said I would have been beyond help in another forty-eight hours.”

  Pendrake’s terrified gaze was now flickering from Cort, to Kearn, and back again, as if driven to debate over which of the two constituted the bigger threat. “B-but…how did you even manage to tell her…”

  Cort saw no reason to go into all the things that had gone right with the conversation in the dining hall. “Information’s like water, Ambassador. It cuts its own channels, no matter how carefully you try to contain it. Given the impression she’d formed of me on our one day together, and our briefing on the Caith treatment still fresh in her mind, Kearn here was able to discern what was wrong with me in one brief conversation. I’m just fortunate that she could also figure out that you were not the one to ask for help.”

  Kearn’s righteous fury was a less evolved version of Cort’s own. “That much was easy, Ambassador. You were the only person who stood to benefit from the Counselor staying on. Plus, if you don’t mind me saying, I had a bad feeling about you from the first moment I met you.”

  Cort flashed one of her rare uncomplicated smiles. “Yes. It appears that Marys here is wasted in her current career path, not when she could be a lot more useful in the prosecutor’s office. She has a frightening knack for discerning patterns, and turning tangled evidence into straight lines. I intend to talk her into requesting a transfer, and sponsoring her training in my department. I think she’ll find the work, not to mention the environment of New London, a lot more enjoyable than her position here.”

  Pendrake moaned again, rubbed her head some more, and said, “Varrick.”

  “Oh, him? I’m actually glad you mentioned him. He’s the single detail that leaves you most screwed. The Xe informed us during our visit. It turns out that your resident murdering thief was on the extreme lower end of the survival spectrum, and lasted only about a fourth as long as expected. It wasn’t so much the growing weight, which may not have even been uncomfortable yet, so much as the unrelenting terror. A few hours of staring oblivion in the face and the poor sick son of a bitch pretty much jettisoned his will to live. The Xe said it happens sometimes.”

  As if in hunger for some form of justification she could find in all this, Pendrake blurted, “He was going to die eventually anyway.”

  Kearn made a disgusted noise and looked away.

  Cort said, “True. But your understanding of the Caith rivals your understanding of ethics for sheer idiocy. They’re not without their own capacity for moral outrage. True, the man was already sentenced to death—and yes, granted full understanding of what the Caith treatment entailed, he might well have chosen that death as his preferred alternative—but by handing him over to the Caith under false pretenses, you turned an execution planned by the state into your own personal killing of convenience. The Xe was most upset to find out that you’d taken such terrible advantage of him. He didn’t appreciate being reduced to a weapon in your hands. He was so upset, in case, that he intends to charge you with murder.”

  Terror flared in Pendrake’s eyes. “That’s a stretch. I’ll fight it.”

  “Sure,” Cort said. “You can do that. That’s your right. You might even win. But then what happens? You take one step out of their jurisdiction and find yourself facing Confederate law next.

  “And there, Ambassador, your situation becomes far worse.

  “The instant you’re in my power, I see to it that you get charged not just with murder, but also with assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and slavery. Maybe half a dozen other serious charges; I haven’t compiled a full accounting yet. In order to make them all stick, I’ll be forced to tell my superiors everything that happened here, and that’ll get you declared such a security risk that any sentence you receive will be spent in the kind of place where we only send people too dangerous to ever be permitted any further contact with other human beings. You’ll spend the rest of your life locked in a windowless cell, with no way of telling the difference between night and day, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but feel your mind fragment. I promise you. For you, Caith justice is better. You might as well surrender to it.”

  Pendrake heard this, and absorbed it, and clung to one last hope: “You don’t dare. If you tell your superiors, word gets out. If I go on trial here, I’ll make sure word gets out. Either way, people will find out about the treatment. Everything you were afraid of will come true.”

  “Also correct,” said Cort. “Either way, billions suffer. But if those are the only options, then at least we’re comforted by the knowledge that the human race now encompasses trillions. For everybody who suffers because this technology gets loose, there’ll be others who still manage to escape it; others still whose worlds will refrain from using it. As a species, we’ve swallowed fouler medicine, and survived. As a species, we’ll survive this.

  “And on top of that I have to consider: right now, you’re the most pressing threat. If you’re not removed with all possible haste, the word gets out anyway. Everything will be just as bad, with the extra added intolerable consideration of you getting away with what you tried to do.

  “And besides,” she said, her voice taking on the chatty tone of a shared confidence, “I really do think you underestimate just how much my hatred for you factors into my decisions, now. I don’t retain much of a rational sense of perspective at the moment. After what you’ve done to me, I find seeing you get what you deserve more pressing than what might happen to billions. I’m willing to take the risk. Trust me. I’m almost eager for it.”

  Pendrake lowered her head and sat shaking for several seconds until the time for bargaining began. She appealed to Kearn, who had stood apart during the entire recitation, wearing a face just as stony as the counselor’s. “Can’t you help?”

  Kearn’s voice was a symphony of eloquent loathing. “Why would I even want to?”

  “You can’t take this as personally as she does. You have to see what she’s risking…”

  Kearn shook her head. “I think I’m the best judge of what I’m willing to take personally, Ambassador. I like her. And I don’t like you.”

  The ambassador buried her head in her hands, shuddered, and, groping for a handhold on the edge of her desk, pulled herself back to her feet. The other two women stood apart as s
he found her way back to the cabinet, removed the bottle Cort had come to hate, and set it down on the desk. They watched as she set her chair upright again and collapsed into it, with a finality suggesting that all of her ability to support her own weight had fled, and would never again return to her. They let her squeeze four drops of the powerful euphoric into a glass, drink it, and enjoy a brief moment of exquisite pleasure before, too soon, it faded, and left her in the same trap she’d inhabited before. They were prepared to stop her if she drank more, but she thought better of it, putting the bottle away before placing her hands palms down on the desktop. “All those things you said, Counselor…those are all things you can do. But they’re not what you’d prefer to do. Are they?”

  “No.”

  “I could tell. That letter was a draft. You haven’t sent it, have you?”

  Cort shook her head. “No.”

  “Then there has to be something you want. We can negotiate.”

  Cort stared down the ambassador, hating everything she stood for in this world, hating especially that she continued to draw breath. “What I want,” she spat, “is the pleasure of ripping your throat out with my bare hands. But the legal repercussions would destroy me. I’ll satisfy myself with what I can have.”

  “I can appreciate that,” Pendrake said. “And that is?”

  Cort said, “I can offer you two alternatives to prosecution.

  “The less preferred of the two: Kearn and I leave this room for ten minutes. You kill yourself. You don’t leave a note. You just find some way to die. You’re an imaginative woman; you can come up with something…perhaps an overdose of that awful orange stuff, if an overdose is possible. You become one of those mysterious cases of sudden, unexplainable self-destruction that occur every once in a while, and are never explained to anybody’s satisfaction. Kearn will see to it that her friends outside support the story. I won’t raise any objections.

  “This would, I admit, give no small degree of pleasure. The only difficulty I have with this option is that it still leaves us with the problem we started with, keeping this treatment out of human hands.

  “The preferred option: survival. You decide you want to live, at any cost. You come with us and pay a discreet visit to the Xe, pleading guilty to charges that he will keep from the official records in exchange for your promise to submit to immediate treatment. You allow us to take you to the redeemer and you take the treatment. You come back here. You retain your position. You stay quiet. We watch you for a week or so, until we’re certain the effects have become permanent. You go back to doing the same things you were doing anyway, living your life, pursuing what’s left of your mediocre career without your dangerous capacity for acting on malice or ambition.

  “But from now on, you operate with only one priority, under my explicit orders: finding some acceptable and discreet means of bringing our relationship with these people to an end. You send me regular reports on your progress. You take what satisfaction you can from the knowledge that you’re doing some good for the human race. In a few years, with this place in your past, you retire wherever you would have chosen to go anyway, and live in peace. All that time, you live your life as a spectator, but at least you still get to live it. And you never hear from me again.”

  Cort’s voice cracked as the anger and hurt overwhelmed her. “These options will only remain available for the next ten minutes. Otherwise, I start the legal machinery and let what happens, happen. Is that goddamned clear?”

  Pendrake used a knuckle to wipe at the corner of her eye. “Yes. Thank you. It’s understood.”

  “We’ll let you get to it, then. Goodbye. Maybe we’ll see you alive again. Maybe we won’t.”

  Cort and Kearn left the room, shutting the door the door behind them, nodding at the two men standing guard, but moving past them to the end of the corridor, where Andrea Cort released the breath she’d been hoarding and fell against the wall, chin trembling.

  Marys Kearn hovered over her protectively, clearly half-expecting a further surrender to gravity, not relaxing it even after it became clear that Cort was steadier on her feet than she looked. Noting this, but not commenting on it, Cort had the distant, analytical thought: this must be what having a friend is like. She could not help rejecting the label itself as inappropriate, in her case – she had no room in her life for friendship—but was able to find some enlightenment in the principle: a datum she might be able to use, someday, in her work.

  After a minute or two, in what appeared to be more an attempt to fill the silence than anything else, Kearn asked: “Were you actually serious about recommending me for transfer?”

  Cort managed a breathless, “Yes.”

  “I’m honored. But I’m not certain I want it. Not if I have to think the way you do, all the time.”

  “If you do come to New London,” Cort said, “I think you’ll find that the majority of the counselors you’ll meet are significantly more human than I am. I’m my own piece of work. But the decision’s yours. I just want you to know that the offer’s there.”

  “All right,” said Kearn.

  But there was something else, and as the minutes passed Kearn made a number of false approaches, each time retreating from the issue just before trusting it to words. Cort didn’t prompt her; she just let the process take its time, following the thought process with every sideways glance, every suppressed interjection, every moment when the decision was made, and then rejected. It was beautiful, she thought. That’s what life for any sentient being should be: the constant consideration and selection of options.

  Then, still circling the issue, Kearn said, “I think she’s going to decide to live.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that at all. A creature like that can’t conceive of the world without her in it. She also can’t conceive of a world where she isn’t really isn’t control, even if she’s not supposed to be. She’ll choose the Caith treatment believing that she’s really putting one over on us, and imagine she’s scratched out a victory, up until the moment she has to live with it and finds out how little power she truly has.”

  Another hesitation, and Kearn finally arrived at the terrible place she’d been avoiding. “I noticed: as angry as you got in there, you never once told her what it was like for you, what it was going to be like for her. You never even referred to it.”

  At the other end of the corridor, Pendrake’s office door slid open.

  “No,” said Andrea Cort, as she went to receive the ambassador’s decision. “I sure didn’t.”

  Appendix:

  Andrea Cort Chronology

  The Andrea Cort stories are part of what I now call the “AIsource Infection” universe, which details a substantial alteration in the nature of humanity.

  As the stories in this larger universe take place over a period of many years, and in fact begin approximately a century from now, some stories merely use this history as background and others are more important to the grander story being told. Andrea Cort is one woman whose life is especially touched by the critical events.

  Most stories now being written take place at the beginning of her career. This chronology is current as of November 2017.

  “With Unclean Hands” (ANALOG, November 2011) is likely to remain her first recorded adventure. She is still an unformed thing of very little personal influence, though this will change as it becomes clear to her superiors how very formidable she is.

  “Tasha’s Fail-Safe” (ANALOG, April 2015) In this story, she is still suffering the political fallout from her extreme actions in “With Unclean Hands.”

  “The Coward’s Option” (ANALOG, March 2016) Once again trusted enough to be sent on a mission, though she’s not expected to be much more than a rubber stamp. As frequently happens with Andrea, there are complications.

  There is now a gap of several years, into which almost all new short fiction will be inserted. During these years she is continuing to work on various missions, some of which cement her ruthless reputation. She also
zealously maintains her social isolation, a situation that will not improve for her until the novels.

  Following the gap, we are introduced to her again with the first Andrea story I wrote, “Unseen Demons” (ANALOG July / August 2002), by which time she is a well-known controversial figure in the Diplomatic community, and widely recognized as a force to be reckoned with. In this story, she receives her mission in life, reaching the epiphany that leads into the trilogy of novels.

  About a year later, she appears in the first novel, EMISSARIES FROM THE DEAD, which changes her status quo, changes her agenda yet again, and introduces her to the great love of her life, the linked man and woman with one personality, Oscin and Skye Porrinyard. They remain with her for the rest of the series so far.

  This is followed by the second novel, THE THIRD CLAW OF GOD, in which she travels to the planet Xana and learns something she never suspected about her past.

  The story finished yet still to be published, “A Stab Of The Knife” (ANALOG, 2018) takes place after she returns from Xana, and is in part driven by the relationships formed there. She in fact still has the very un-Andrea hairstyle she obtained in that novel, though she didn’t like it at the time; maybe the Porrinyards do.

  The final Andrea Cort novel for now, WAR OF THE MARIONETTES, the one currently available in English only as an Audiobook, but planned for an upcoming e-book, wraps up the trilogy and ends with her making a very personal decision that will change her forever.

  The novella “Hiding Place” (ANALOG, April 2011), takes place less than a year later and will likely remain the final Andrea Cort story chronologically, as it concludes with her facing significant changes. At this point Andrea Cort will either move on and become a completely different person, or will retreat from her personal growth and back off from its implications. I cannot move on from this point at shorter than novel length, and that is unlikely to occur unless things change spectacularly. (But there’s always talk.)