The Devil and Deep Space

by Susan R. Matthews

  He couldn’t speak for the shock of the surprise, the clear sense of assault and the fear he had of predators with such sharp glittering teeth. Half–stupefied, he could only freeze — still lying on his back — and wonder, for the crucial moment that it took her to find a foothold at the top of the empty equipment locker. Clambering up, she inverted herself, wrapping her wings around her in a thunderous gesture of high dudgeon and rocking sullenly back and forth in expectant silence.

  For a moment he considered whether the particularly nasty bowl of soup he’d gotten for his mid–meal had poisoned his brain somehow. It could be a bad dream, couldn’t it? Delusions. Why would the Ship’s Intelligence Officer, one of the Ship’s Primes, have come down to the dismal space that Mendez had assigned to them, in person? And — in the unlikely event that she had decided to indulge a taste for fresh raw Rukota — what conceivable reason could she have for bringing witnesses?

  He sat up carefully, taking stock of the situation. He was trapped in here, alone, with her. Security was at the door, but by the looks of them they were not inclined to intervene should Two take it into her head to tear his throat open for a snack.

  “Your Excellency. A very great pleasure, ma’am. To what do I owe the honor?”

  Her great black leathery wings filled the room like an explosion as she gestured. “I am not mollified; you are not in order. I am keeping all of them. Confined to courier. You will have to sleep in some room else.”

  All right, it was Pesadie’s team. They’d done something; or something that they’d done had been traced back — the information ap Rhiannon had announced to Admiral Brecinn, perhaps? “If her Excellency would be graciously pleased to explain, ma’am.”

  Two was still muttering, and how she managed that with a translator Rukota could not fathom for the life of him. Not that he wanted to dwell on that particular phrase — the life of him — with an obviously angry Desmodontae in the same small room as he was.

  “As if you think that I am stupid. Lax. Remiss in procedure,” she accused, shifting her wings with an angry sort of irritated restlessness. “As if you think we are to be simply walked in on and queried by any uncleared parties. As if you have no knowledge of plain Standard or good discipline. It is intolerable, I remind you!” she shouted yet again, her wings an agitated scrim against the back wall.

  “Yes; ma’am, but if you’d just give me the worst of it. I am responsible for the conduct of the team, after all.” Technically, at least. In fact, they’d made it all too clear that he was only there for show: but at least the Captain and crew of the Ragnarok seemed to understand that as well.

  Two dropped from her perch; Rukota shut up. Scuttling forward on her strong little feet, using the primary joint of her wingtips to hurry her along, she paused before Rukota on her way out of the room, lifting her sharp black face toward Rukota’s with an expression of immense dignity, only somewhat weakened by the fact that she surely could not see him.

  “Members of your party have been found using guest–code to access ship’s computers.”

  Rukota closed his eyes with involuntary pain. Violating Security protocols was a willful endangerment of Fleet resources, not to speak of lives.

  “And once members of your party had accessed ship’s computers, they tried to command–prime to the First Officer’s administrative log. It is just as well that our Captain did not notice. For myself I do not care, but there is a default penalty, yes?”

  Indeed there was. The default penalty for compromising administrative security was six–and–sixty, and dismissal from service without benefits. Jennet ap Rhiannon was entirely capable of invoking it; she would probably not make dismissal stick, but nobody on board would stand between those people and the whip. Rukota set his teeth against a grimace of disgust.

  “Thank you, your Excellency.” They had put him in an absolutely unacceptable position, that of being responsible for an act that he had not authorized and of which he deeply disapproved. “I’ll see to it that it’s so noted in the official report. Confined to courier, you said, your Excellency?”

  She glared up at him for a few breaths longer before apparently making up her mind. “We will not speak of it again. First Officer has found a place for you, we are short a Ship’s Third Lieutenant. It is at least a clean berth.”

  It occurred to Rukota that for the second time Two had rather pointedly excluded him from the well–deserved quarantine of the preliminary assessment team. He was grateful, if surprised. He didn’t like those people.

  “I’m very much obliged, your Excellency. I’ll take them off your hands as soon as we return to Pesadie. From Laynock, am I right?”

  She was between him and the door, with her back to the Security troops she’d brought with her. Looking up into his face, Two laughed.

  It was unmistakable. She opened her sharp–muzzled mouth wide, affording all too clear a view of her very beautiful, very sharp white teeth; curled the corners of her black lips back happily, and panted, the tip of her cunning tongue quivering with genial hilarity. He couldn’t hear a thing but he knew that she was laughing. This was something she had learned to do, apparently, to communicate with hominids, and it communicated very well.

  “Impertinent,” Two said, and with a sudden movement of one wing sent Rukota staggering back against the wall to collapse onto the ledge where he’d been sleeping. “My Captain will have a word to say to you, Rukota. Someone will come to show you to quarters. Good–bye.”

  Tucking her head down to her chest abruptly, Two scuttled rapidly from the room, and all of the Security went with her. The Ragnarok was not going to Laynock at all. They didn’t care if he knew it. What was a man to make of all of this?

  Third Lieutenant’s billet. So ap Rhiannon had not vacated the First Lieutenant’s quarters, and Seascape was logically in the Second Lieutenant’s berth. Was that where he fit into all of this? Impossible.

  Impossible that they should think to add him to the crew of the Ragnarok. Impossible to think that they could use an artilleryman. Impossible to imagine any set of circumstances within the realm of possibility that would enable such a situation. Warships did not select their own officers. Officers did not select their own assignments.

  Ships released to resupply went to resupply and returned to their Command of assignment. Or they were in violation of standard operating procedure. In the jaundiced view of Pesadie Training Command, violation of standard operating procedure could all too easily be interpreted as —

  He wasn’t going to think about it; he was going to wait and see.

  My Captain, Two had said. Not “acting.” Captain ap Rhiannon.

  He’d wait to see what ap Rhiannon would tell him: and then he could decide how soon he should get seriously worried about what was going on, on board the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok.

  ###

  Morning at the Matredonat.

  As accustomed as Jils Ivers was to moving in circles at all levels of society, the luxury of Koscuisko’s house rather stunned her. It was not so much a richness of food and drink and bed linen and appointments, though those would not shame a First Secretary — or even a Judge herself. This was a more profound wealth than material: all of these people with nothing whatever to do but wait upon her hand and foot, figuratively speaking, and Jils had no doubt that it would be literally speaking had she been inclined to accept a more extreme degree of body–service. All of these people.

  Things that could be done by machine, by automated process, were done by hand here at the Matredonat, because Koscuisko had the money to afford to support human souls to do work that machines could do at less cost and in much less time. It was a species of conspicuous consumption that she had only very rarely encountered elsewhere in her travels on behalf of the Bench, and then only in much more primitive societies.

  Koscuisko’s private library was on the ground floor of the master’s private house–within–a–house, a great, cool room with an immense hand-loomed carpet of considerabl
e antiquity and value beyond price, tall massy shelves stacked deep with old–format printed texts bound in the tanned hides of animals, and an immense long study table in the middle of the room the approximate size of a one–soul courier. Jils looked at the shelves of books and scanned the titles, some of them unreadable from a distance, the gilt rubbed black with handling and age.

  Garol should be here. He could probably read some of that.

  Koscuisko closed the flat–form docket and pushed it away from him a little space, turning toward her in his chair and taking up his flask of rhyti. He’d asked her to sit just at the end of the long side of the table, so that she was on his right, and there was not the great span of the table between them. It was almost intimate.

  “This represents an unimaginable reversal on the First Secretary’s part, Bench specialist. Does it not?”

  The rhyti server was near at hand; she had her flask as well. She preferred almost anything to rhyti, but she hadn’t let on, yet. She was waiting to see how long it would take for the house staff to come up with that particular piece of intelligence from other sources. It was an experiment. “It may seem so, your Excellency. But from my point of view it’s a consistent stage in the development of Verlaine’s thinking. That’s one of the things that convinces me that he’s telling us the truth with this offer.”

  Not the Bench order for relief of Writ. There was no controversy there; Koscuisko would execute it. There was no hesitation on Koscuisko’s part over the Judicial order that would make him a free man. It was what else the First Secretary had sent that gave Koscuisko pause, and rightly so, because the implications were staggering.

  “Speak to me, Dame Ivers. Permit me to share the benefit of your insight, because I do not trust this damned soul further than a starving wolf in the dairy, and yet I cannot but respect your professional opinion.”

  The Domitt Prison. Verlaine had not been to blame for that atrocity, perhaps, not directly; but he was responsible. Jils had never heard him try to pretend otherwise. It was one of the things that most annoyed Verlaine about Koscuisko. Verlaine had been in the wrong and Koscuisko had told the world. Regardless of what the formal decision of the special Court had been, Verlaine knew his honor to be justly tainted forever by what had happened to Nurail prisoners at Port Rudistal in a prison to which he should have paid more careful attention.

  “His Excellency will recall from his orientation that the First Secretary had sent a Clerk of Court to qualify for the Writ.”

  Mergau Noycannir, whom Verlaine had pulled out of a gutter somewhere and nurtured as his protégée. Ruthless. Determined. And willing to do anything for the First Secretary’s approval; a potentially very useful person to have on leash if only she could be kept on leash, because such people had no sense of proportion.

  “You came to Rudistal with her, as I recall, Specialist. Yes.”

  Noycannir had no formal medical background, and proved ultimately incapable of mastering the intricacies of the Bench’s Protocols. There had been no way to tell before they’d tried, and the sacrifice asked of Noycannir had been extreme. “The First Secretary’s choice of representative was not perhaps fortunate.” Verlaine had had no one else from whom he could have demanded so stern a proof of dedication as to go to Fleet Orientation Station Medical and become a torturer.

  “If you will however consider the motives behind the attempt. He wanted an Inquisitor not under Fleet controls, to break the monopoly Fleet had over Inquiry and reclaim the Judicial function for the Bench. This was his motive. The First Secretary became interested in you because of your ability. I respectfully suggest you consider two aspects of that instinct on his part.”

  Koscuisko stood up and began to pace, but he was listening. Perhaps he was remembering things. Jils knew what sort of pressure Verlaine had put on Koscuisko, in his attempts to force Koscuisko’s cooperation.

  As many special field assignments as Fleet would tolerate, making Koscuisko’s life as difficult as possible while he was assigned to Scylla — to make the point about Verlaine’s influence, and how much easier Koscuisko’s life would be with Verlaine as his friend.

  Assignment to the Ragnarok under the command of Fleet Captain Lowden after Koscuisko had cried failure of Writ at the Domitt Prison, knowing what Lowden’s record with Inquisitors was like — perhaps the single most ignoble, pettiest, and least worthy action to which Jils had ever known Verlaine to stoop.

  Verlaine had hoped month by month that Koscuisko would yield to the strain of serving Lowden’s corrupt interests, and petition to be called to Chilleau Judiciary. Koscuisko had not. Whether it was sheer stubbornness on his part, or whether Verlaine had underestimated Koscuisko’s sensitivity to the plight of the bond–involuntaries under Lowden’s command, Koscuisko had lasted out his full tour of duty; at what cost to himself Jils could hardly even guess. His determined resistance had frustrated and angered Verlaine — emotions tempered by the special heat that came from Verlaine’s knowledge that he was in the wrong.

  Finally Verlaine had backed Koscuisko into a corner with a threat to annex his Writ, and Koscuisko had kicked the bottom out of the box in which Verlaine had thought to trap him, and put the entire Jurisdiction Fleet between them. Again.

  Now Verlaine had finally decided to admit that his behavior had been inappropriately motivated, and worse, it had been — there was no other word for it — unjust. Cruel and unjust.

  Jils kept talking, because Koscuisko was clearly still listening and thinking while he paced. “Your reputation, your Excellency, maximum results with only the minimum amount of force required, no more. Even your Tenth Levels, sir, shockingly effective demonstrations, maximum invocation of deterrent terror where the verdict of the Bench called for the extreme penalty. Surely you can see that you are the man that Verlaine would want if he had begun to have reservations about the entire concept of forced confession. You do it so well.”

  Verlaine was conservative; he hated waste, of any sort. Koscuisko was the single most efficient Inquisitor in the entire inventory. Koscuisko didn’t waste pain or blood, lives or limbs, not when he was given his own head. And in those instances in which Koscuisko had been handed a life out of which to make a public example, he hadn’t wasted that, either. He’d exploited the resource to its absolute fullest, so that it was Koscuisko’s work that people remembered when they called to mind the extreme penalty under Law for treason.

  “I won’t be pushed, Bench specialist,” Koscuisko said. “I have been sufficiently imposed upon, to my mind. And behind the First Secretary’s crude bullying I cannot but suspect I catch a whiff of a bitter old acquaintance.”

  It was true that Noycannir had carefully presented Koscuisko in the most annoying light possible before Verlaine. But Noycannir’s influence had waned over time.

  “He is not accustomed to being defied or resisted, your Excellency. You brought out the worst in him, and there’s no excuse for it. But you win. There is nothing more that he can do to make you his for the use of the Second Judge. His realization sheds too strong a light on the deficiencies in his own behavior. He perceives his clear duty to make what amends he may. And he is truly of a mind that Inquiry is a waste of lives, and no longer in the best interest of the Judicial order.”

  “Do you believe this to be a genuine statement of policy, Specialist Ivers?” Koscuisko asked, standing at the table behind his chair, nodding at the flat–form docket. “Because if it is genuine, I must endorse it. The personal history that I have with Chilleau Judiciary and its people would not deter me for an instant. If I but knew.”

  “He’s convinced me of his sincerity, sir. And an enriched sense of cynicism is part of our initial issue when we sign on.” It wasn’t as though Verlaine was the only person within the Judicial structure who had come to believe that the system no longer served a useful purpose, if it ever had. Inquiry had been an experiment that had taken on a life of its own; the initial result of institutionalizing torture as an instrument of State had been very
positive, but those results had been short–term. Terror could stabilize a population for a few years, but then it began to create a complex of destabilization all its own.

  Koscuisko sat down. “I will faithfully consider it, Bench specialist.” He had clearly already made up most of his mind. It was only the possibility of duplicity on the First Secretary’s part that troubled him. “For the rest of it. I will of course accept the offered relief. But how are my people to be managed, if I have become a private citizen?”

  Koscuisko felt somewhat less strongly about his un–bonded troops, perhaps, if only because they did not need as much protection. But it was still obviously an issue in his mind.

  “Once you have countersigned the document, sir, I will transmit it to Sant–Dasidar from the nearest Bench offices. It will take two to three weeks after that for all your voice–clearances to be purged. Until such time as you can no longer invoke the Record you remain a Judicial officer, your Excellency. Although with these documents on record your status will clearly be in the process of changing.”

  If Verlaine had been able to break Koscuisko’s bond–involuntaries free from Fleet and bring them to Chilleau Judiciary years ago Koscuisko would have come with them, almost certainly. Jils kept talking. “Until then the Bench will wish to continue to protect its officer. Your people can return to the Ragnarok once your clearances have all been purged, your Excellency, and at your instruction I will leave immediately for Bench offices, if you should wish it.”

  Because otherwise she was scheduled to travel to Chelatring Side with Koscuisko seven days from now, to be present when the Autocrat’s Proxy took her formal poll of the Koscuisko familial corporation. She had intended to leave for Bench offices afterward; that was what Cousin Stanoczk had arranged. But if Koscuisko was impatient she would not be surprised, nor was she unwilling to change plans. Koscuisko thought about it.

  “It is only a few more days, Bench specialist, and I am at home already. If I am to trust the First Secretary, I will trust that this is a done deed. No, do not change your plans on my account. It would only call attention. I need to think and plan how to reveal this to my family. Give me the document. I will make my mark.”