They were already late. How late were they? He had no idea what time it was. He didn’t care.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.” Belan almost stuttered in his nervousness. Andrej could empathize; it was a hard thing to be shot at in the first place, and a senior officer’s being ambushed while in one’s company was probably the stuff of nightmare from an Administrative point of view. “There is Infirmary at the prison, sir. Shouldn’t your party rather proceed now to your station, rather than make a side trip to the civil facility?”
“No, we should not.” Prison infirmaries were not hospitals. Erish needed a hospital. He deserved a specialist. And more than that, the body was to burn, but it was not to be considered for a moment that Joslire’s corpse should be put to the fire in a prison — as though still the Bench’s prisoner, a slave, a bond-involuntary. Joslire was free. He would be decently cremated with all due respect. And at a hospital, since as far as Andrej knew there were no Emandisan churches.
It was too much to hope that Belan would understand, and so Andrej didn’t try to explain it at all. “Take us to emergency receiving, if you please. At hospital. We will once the sun has risen see to the body. Lieutenant, you must arrange for handling after that.” They had not been at the Domitt Prison when the attack had taken place; formally they were still the Dramissoi Fleet’s concern. Perhaps. One thing was for certain; they were bound to go to the Domitt Prison, but what remained in the world of Joslire Curran should not.
“As you say, sir. I’ll tell the Administrator.” Belan was confused and a little resentful; he hadn’t given Belan any good reasons for his apparently high-handed behavior, Andrej realized. His insistence must seem arbitrary to Belan. He didn’t care. He didn’t have the energy.
“Tell also your service house. I will want a suite. And sufficient professional assistance, for my gentlemen. For tomorrow morning. I am sure the Domitt Prison will not grudge us a day for mourning. We have lost somebody that we loved.”
As had some of Plugrath’s Security, but it was different. None of them were Bonds. Or perhaps it was the same, but his own people were all Andrej could be expected to keep in his mind, surely.
Belan nodded, unhappily, but went away.
Andrej hoped he wasn’t in trouble with the prison administration even before he’d gotten to the prison. But if he was there was no help for it.
“They’re ready to load you for the hospital, sir. You can all ride together, if you’d like.”
All ride together?
Did Plugrath mean with Joslire in the car?
The street had been swept clean, debris cleared away. Far above in the black sky Andrej could see the brightest of the stars over Port Rudistal shining in the night. This was the street that had taken Joslire away; Andrej took one final look at it, convinced that he would remember every detail for as long as he should live.
But Erish had to go to hospital.
Turning away, Andrej climbed into the transport-cabin to go to hospital, and put the street behind him.
###
Their baggage had been packed in the rearmost car, recovered more or less undamaged after the firefight. Once they got to the hospital’s wake-room, the first thing that the officer did was wash and change his uniform. The one he had been wearing was soaked with Joslire’s life’s-blood, clear through to the skin; and while they’d dealt with such issues with their officer before — on other assignments, mostly — it had always been the blood of someone else, someone they didn’t know.
Code almost thought Koscuisko didn’t want to wash the blood away, because it was Joslire’s blood, and rinsing himself clean of it was letting go of some small piece of Joslire. But it couldn’t be helped. Joslire was dead. The officer had to change, because he couldn’t go into treatment rooms with his uniform so heavily contaminated with blood and dust.
Once he had changed, it seemed to Code that the attitudes of the hospital staff changed, as well. As if they only just realized that Andrej Koscuisko was a ranking officer, rather than just one step up from Bench Lieutenant Plugrath.
They’d all trooped up to check on Erish, and by that time the bone man was just finishing glazing the last chips of patella back into place preparatory to closing up Erish’s knee. Koscuisko lectured Erish about the brace he had to wear, too, which was a joke on their officer, because the bone man noticed the field bandage wrapped around the officer’s hand while he was gesturing to make his point, and called a soft-tissue specialist.
Having just made so strong a point to Erish about obeying medical instruction, their officer had no choice at all but to sit and let them do things to his hand. It was funny. Almost it was funny. If it hadn’t been for what had happened to them it would have been funny.
Then it was two hours before sunrise, and they had all gone back down to the wake-room adjacent to the body-mill. Joslire’s body was there, and Joslire’s kit. The officer claimed it was important that the body be dressed in clean clothing when it was burned, and Code didn’t see where that made any sense at all, but as long as it made the officer feel better they would all go along with it.
It wasn’t as if they’d never lost a member of a team before, though this was the first time it had happened to Code since Koscuisko had been assigned to Scylla. With Joslire and Robert St. Clare, who was bound to be hard hit by this event; Robert was sentimental.
So they all took off their duty-blouses and rolled back the sleeves of their under-blouses and undressed the body that had been Joslire, and washed the wound that had once been his chest as best they could, and dressed him once again in clean undamaged clothing. Code wondered whether Koscuisko wasn’t right in some sense about it being important.
Handling the body helped to separate his sense of sorrow from his here-and-now, in some way. There was so clearly nothing left of Joslire there, not even when he knew it was Joslire’s body, and Joslire’s clothing.
One thing was more than obvious: Joslire was gone from there. There was no sense in grieving for Joslire. Joslire was feeling no pain. For himself, yes. But later.
The officer took away the knives and gave them to Chief Samons. The knife that had killed Joslire had been cleaned, and Koscuisko was wearing it once more in its harness between his shoulder blades. To think that Koscuisko’s knives had been Emandisan, and all this time they’d all assumed that they were so much better than Fleet-issue because Fleet issued better to officers. To think. All of this time. Emandisan steel. Joslire’s own five-knives.
Erish could not do much, because he was drunk on the drugs they’d given him; but Erish cut the braid away from Joslire’s sleeves once he was dressed in his clean uniform. Joslire was free. He should not wear a slave-uniform, not even to be burned in.
Code could envy Joslire, being dead, because though he was dead Joslire was free.
It was almost time.
The sun would rise within the eighth.
It was important to the officer that the body not go into the fire before the sun came up. It made no sense to Code, and there was a question in his mind about whether the officer had a reason or was simply carrying a childhood pattern forward because he was in shock.
Scant moments before sunrise. Koscuisko had called for the precise time from the Port Authority and marked it by the clock in local reckoning. The furnace was ready: square and white and featureless, the door standing open, the interior gleaming in reflected light.
The corpse for burning on a narrow gurney, ready to wheel up to the mouth of the furnace, when the body would be slipped onto the high gridded floor of the furnace on a plank.
The officer, waiting, and the rest of them with him, exhausted and addle-headed with grief and the medication that they had all been made to take, and waiting for the next part to be done.
Now the time had come.
The sun cleared Port Rudistal’s horizon, though there was no telling from inside this room. It would be sending its first long feelers across the relocation camp, across the black cold sullen river,
into the Port, up to the foot of the Domitt Prison that had caused them all so much grief already — and before they’d so much as even arrived there yet.
Koscuisko spoke.
“Oh, holy Mother,” the officer said, and just for once it wasn’t an oath or a profanity. Code realized that the officer was praying; and it sent a shudder through him to hear it.
“This is Joslire, your child, the child of your body, who you love. Whom we have loved. Now it has pleased you to take him back, and we bitterly regret it, though I am grateful that you took only one of their lives.”
Koscuisko was not religious, though he kept the icon with its ever-burning lamp tucked into the corner of his sleeping-room. So much was merely habit; Koscuisko had never paid the slightest bit of attention to his patron saint — of Filial Piety, as he’d once told Code — in all this time.
“Send therefore guides and adequate equipage, and see your child safety home to shelter beneath the Canopy. And extend your hand over me and mine, Chief Samons not excluded, for you have bereft us all to your own purpose, which we are not empowered to understand. Holy Mother. So prays to you with all his heart your child Andrej, unfilial and unreconciled, but your child yet.”
A gesture of his hand for them to move the body into the furnace let them know that he had said what he felt needful.
Koscuisko stood and watched while they put Joslire in the furnace. Chief Samons secured the door.
She touched the switch, and the safeties engaged, and then the telltales on the wall began to move as the temperature within the furnace started rising.
Long moments, and Koscuisko watched the telltales, and Koscuisko wept, but to himself this time — not like before.
Code wept as well. He didn’t notice what the others were doing. He and Joslire had had a rocky start in the beginning, because of some forgotten issue with Robert, and Joslire trying to keep Code out of trouble with Koscuisko while Code had thought Joslire was trying to cover for Robert. Who had annoyed him.
The index on unreduced organic matter within the furnace started to fall off, first bit by bit, then in a smooth slow curve. Flesh did not long remain in such temperatures. Bone was more resistant: but the furnace had been built to serve the dead.
When the index fell below its breakpoint, the officer straightened his shoulders and wiped his face with his white-square.
“It’s done,” Koscuisko said. “As done as done.” Though it would be a while before the furnace could be opened. It took time, to vent such heat. “And we have nothing left. Oh, holy Mother. Gentles, let us go away from here.”
Nothing except each other.
Kaydence in the lead, and Erish limping, they left the room.
Left Joslire behind.
Joslire was gone.
###
Koscuisko had cleared it with Plugrath and with the Domitt Prison — Administrator Geltoi, if Caleigh remembered the name correctly. The prison was treating the issue very carefully. Bond-involuntaries were much more exotic than ordinary mortals, and common report embroidered upon a special relationship between them and the Inquisitors in token of the unusually absolute power a Ship’s Inquisitor had over their lives.
No one who had witnessed the death of Joslire Curran — howsoever indirectly — could doubt that the relationship between Koscuisko and his dead Emandisan bond-involuntary had been intense and highly personal. At this point Koscuisko could probably have told the Domitt that he was going into retreat for two weeks, and taking his people with him; and no questions would have been asked. At least not right away.
As it was, he was simply going to Rudistal’s service house, and for a day. More than reasonable. Really.
They left the hospital in the bright morning; it amused Caleigh to see how many more Security posts there seemed to be, suddenly. Ship’s Inquisitors were even more rare a commodity than bond-involuntaries. To have hazarded the life of one created a huge embarrassment for Dramissoi and the Domitt alike, even if it had most likely been the Domitt that the ambushers thought they were striking at. Well, they had. Indirectly, maybe. But no less effectively for that.
An uneventful transit to the service house, uniformed troops at every turn. It wasn’t the most luxurious facility Caleigh had ever been to in Koscuisko’s company, but it would do. Koscuisko made a point of visiting service houses at every opportunity; it was for the benefit of his bond-involuntaries assigned as much as anything else, from what little Caleigh could tell.
Koscuisko’s bond-involuntaries had few opportunities to develop social bonds for recreation on board Scylla, though Robert St. Clare was a great favorite amongst the ladies in both Security and Medical. For what that was worth. So Koscuisko went to service houses so that his people could enjoy what transient pleasure could be lawfully obtained in the embrace of the professional partner of their choice.
Caleigh hoped there were free women at this service house. As far as she knew, St. Clare was the only one of Koscuisko’s people with a sister that had taken a Service Bond, but the other bond-involuntaries were sensitive about the issue as well.
When it came down to it, though, it wasn’t an issue of recreation as such that brought them to the service house this morning. Nobody had slept. And they were all in shock. And the officer was in no condition to stand an in-briefing with prison administration.
Koscuisko went up to the senior officer’s suite while Caleigh made arrangements for his people. A suite of rooms beneath the one Koscuisko would be using, with direct access in case of emergencies, per standard operating procedure. Food and drink and sexual contact ad lib: but these were all just comfort items.
It was as important for the bond-involuntaries to be left to themselves to share their common grief and observe what forms of mourning they might choose. There were ad-hoc rituals that bond-involuntaries shared, ways of coping that they had developed over the years; and that was strictly their own business.
Once she had assured herself that her people were to be properly seen to, Caleigh went up to the senior officer’s suite to give the officer a status report, wondering whether she should bother.
The senior officer’s suite was as large as the troops’ gather-room taken all together. Caleigh identified herself to the doorkeeper and sought out the suite’s exercise area, where she expected to find her officer.
She had to cross the front room to get there. They were laying the table for his meal; and she could see through to the bedroom with the bed made up and waiting, the bed-clothes arranged invitingly. It made her want to cry. And she hadn’t cried since she could remember. Wept, perhaps.
She was perhaps a little bit hysterical. She’d valued Joslire Curran as much as the next man; he’d been as genuine an asset as a Chief Warrant could wish. She’d learned early on to rely on him and St. Clare to manage the officer on those occasions when Koscuisko — for whatever good and sufficient reason of his own — had had too much to drink, and got the terrors.
Being in Security meant that people that you knew and relied upon were frequently killed, and usually traumatically so. It wasn’t that. She’d never seen a Bond claim the Day. She’d never dreamed of seeing Koscuisko so naked in his grief, on his knees in the street in front of everyone, the deepest — most private — secrets of his heart on display for anyone who cared to notice.
There was no reason for the sight of a waiting bed to make her want to cry.
She went through to the exercise area, where she could count on finding Koscuisko having a massage.
Right first time, Caleigh congratulated herself, stepping into the warm dark room. Koscuisko lay face-down on the padded bench-table with the house masseur frowning over his upper back and a towel draped discreetly across the middle part of his body. He wouldn’t be surprised to hear from her; she cleared her throat, to put him on notice that she was here. All right, she was intruding, but Koscuisko liked to know. Sometimes the masseur took it a little personally, however.
“H’m. Sir. I’ve seen to arrangement
s made for your people, sir. As you would wish it.”
Her interruption earned her a glare from the masseur. Koscuisko intervened to head off a confrontation.
“Thank you, Fishweir. I am very much obliged to you.”
Fishweir sounded Chigan to Caleigh. Impressive. The best masseurs in known Space were Chigan. A group of fellow Security had taken up a collection to buy her a massage for a promotion gift, years gone, when she’d made her first rating. She could remember it as though it had been yesterday. Wheatfields. The masseur had been of Wheatfields, not of Fishweir. Chigan was Chigan. Caleigh wondered, suddenly, whether she had just worked her way out of any chance of a massage herself by offending the man.
“I don’t like to prescribe, your Excellency.” Fishweir, whomever of Fishweir, shrugged it off, wiping excess oil from his hands on a clean towel. “But your whole body’s in knots. I think the only thing for it is a glass of caraminson wine. I’ll send up a flask.”
Yes, Chigan by the accent. Koscuisko made as if to rise; Fishweir placed a hand firmly in the middle of Koscuisko’s back and pushed. Koscuisko subsided, capitulating.
“You are very kind. It is generous of you to offer.” Koscuisko had the authority to prescribe whatever he liked for himself to ease his pain; many Ship’s Inquisitors took that way out, and became addicted to mood-altering substances. Koscuisko’s mood-altering substance of choice remained alcohol.
That didn’t change the fact that for most people a flask of caraminson wine was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, worth every bit of the cost. And only licensed professionals could provide it. “Here is my Chief of Security, Fishweir, her name is Samons. She knows that I am worried about my bond-involuntaries. One wonders whether massage might be made available for her benefit as well.”
Prisoner of Conscience Page 11
