Warring States Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Warring States

  a novel under Jurisdiction

  by Susan R. Matthews

  Chilleau Judiciary’s senior administrative officer has been murdered in the very heart of Chambers. Bench Intelligence Specialist Jils Ivers has been unable to ferret out the perpetrator, and that means she’s the Bench’s prime candidate for execution –- so that justice may be seen to have been done, whether or not she is guilty.

  Andrej Koscuisko means to take this opportunity to execute a daring theft -- stealing six bond-involuntary Security slaves to send them away beyond the Bench’s reach to Gonebeyond Space.

  But the corruption of the Bench extends even further than its use of institutionalized torture as an instrument of State. Before Jils Ivers realizes who killed the First Secretary and why, the rule of Law will be rocked to its very core, and the fundamental nature of the Bench will be changed forever.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-262-4

  Copyright © 2006 by Susan R. Matthews

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  Originally published in 2006

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Jeff A. Elf. He was a charitable soul who truly left the world a better place than he found it, and we’ll always be lucky to have known him.

  We miss you Jeff!

  Special thanks to Alex Boyd and Jeri Stephan-DeButy for their assistance in preparing the OCR scan of this document for publication. Any remaining errors are mine and mine alone!

  Prologue

  When the sun came up in port Ghan the city started to stir, the hem-fringes of the docks first, where the poorest people lived. The warehouses were secure. But the loading equipment and the stacked pallets were not always watched as carefully, and there were almost always bargains to be had where produce was off-loaded — fruit and vegetables that would not survive the handling between the docks and the markets in the outreaches of the port, the green and gracious suburbs where the wealthier people lived beyond the towering sound-walls that shut away most of the noise and stink of an active launch-field. Ghan was in a desert; that was why the launch-fields were there, built first and foremost in the early days where the ground was already flat and hard and packed down solid by the years of sun and heat so that the job of thermal hardening had been half-done already.

  Out in ever-widening circles from the launch-fields the residence areas and the business districts went, more expensive in relation to how far they were from the launch-field. There were good livings to be had in Ghan, though, even near the docks — the inverse relationship between proximity and price could work in a family’s favor, and the important thing was to save enough money to be able to send the children into the mountains in the summer where they could play in the green woods and the clear water.

  Little things like siphoning off excess fuel-vapors that might otherwise be wasted helped to save money and the green woods at one and the same time, because excess fuel vapors were no better for the health of lakes and streams in the far hills than they were for the people who serviced the transport craft deep in the heart of the city.

  It was not time to send the children into the mountains. It was still early in the spring, and it was cold at night. People turned on their heating when they got up to warm their houses while they roused the children and made mid-meals to be carried to the workplace to save the cost of buying expensive tidbits from the street-carts. The municipal utilities were no less ready to take advantage of a savings than the people that they served, and there were places where fuel-scrubbers had been tucked away ready and waiting to take in heavier-than-air vapors from the launch-fields that could be denatured and rendered harmless for heating. Everybody knew that. Nobody cared. But everybody knew.

  There was no way in which the introduction of the poison into the fuel-mains could have been accidental.

  When the sun came up in port Ghan that morning people rose and went to wash and cook their meals, turning on the fuel-vents, opening up the feeder-lines into their furnaces, starting up their stoves. Port Ghan ran on liligas because it was cheap and plentiful, environmentally friendly, easy to use and safe. The chemical marker that had been added to the fuel so that people would be able to smell a leak before it could get dangerous was more than enough to cover the subtle perfume of the poison in the lines.

  It had been carefully planned, carefully done, and still luck played a part. It had been colder than usual; almost everybody turned on their heat, when they got up. And it was a rest-day, so the city’s custodians weren’t expecting a morning rush, and were inclined at first to chalk up the failure of the morning shift to come to duty as a worse-than-usual instance of excess celebrations the night before.

  When supervisors tried to contact their crews, no-one answered at their homes. When people went to look for their reliefs they didn’t return, but they didn’t call in, either, so there was at first no panic — no understanding that an atrocity was in progress.

  The civic shelters were warmed at night and in the morning as though they had been someone’s home, and the floating indigent population of the city could be counted on to come out into the streets even on holidays to make their ways to the day-labor shops and the places where they could find a free meal. But the only people who were on the street that morning as the sun rose had been on the street all night.

  Nobody came away from the municipal shelters. Nobody came away at all. Only the people who had already accepted that they were going to be cold, that they were not going to be able to warm themselves in any way, only those people survived the morning.

  By the time enough of the poison had escaped to set off the alarms in the streets there were more than three thousand dead, women, children, men, and two thousand more who died in the horrible two days that followed, between the poison and the panic and the rioting.

  No final tally was ever agreed upon. The rioting spread across the planet, and then across the system. Fleet did not have the resources to contain the panic because Fleet was already trying to contain civil unrest in too many other areas, and there was only so much the Jurisdiction Fleet could do, in the absence of a strong central authority. The First Judge was dead. It had been a year, and there was no new First Judge. The Bench was rudderless.

  Port Ghan, however, was at peace. It was the peace of the dead, but it was unquestionably the quietest place on the entire world, an open tomb; it was its own memorial. No single culprit was ever identified, and after so many dead it ceased to really matter. Whoever had done it gained no advantage from the crime, because the killing that erupted in reaction to the massacre harvested across all of Ghan’s populations equally.

  The true horror of what had happened at Port Ghan was not the thousands dead, and the hundreds or thousands more who died in the months that followed.

  The horror of Port Ghan was that it was just anothe
r incident, just another symptom of the uncertainty that plagued all of Jurisdiction Space in the absence of a First Judge to lay down the rule of Law and to enforce it.

  ###

  Chapter One

  Field Expedients

  Andrej Koscuisko, chief medical officer on board of the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok, sat at his desk in his office doing his best to concentrate on the controversy over whether an increased incidence of a peculiar skin rash meant that there was a mutant fungus on board, or simply that they were brewing with mother-of-grain in Engineering, or both.

  When the talk-alert sounded he did not answer right away. He wasn’t sure how to face what it might bring; and yet he had brought it on himself. Staff would expect him to answer promptly, however, unless he were in the washroom or possibly passed out drunk, which had not happened on duty for simply months now.

  “Koscuisko, here.” Therefore in order to cover his tracks as completely as possible it was necessary to respond. There were four procedures yet to accomplish, somehow. Would he be detected? If only he could ward off accusation for long enough it would not matter.

  “Robert says Lek’s up, sir.” That was one of his surgical crew leaders. She didn’t sound as though she were suspicious; Andrej took a deep breath, careful to exhale as quietly as possible. “‘Respectfully requests an audience with the officer at his convenience,’ I think it was. Are you available, your Excellency?”

  Senior officers didn’t usually come when they were called, especially not when called by bond-involuntaries, who had no rank to speak of. No status, either. Well, they had status, but it was as property.

  “I am coming directly. Thank you, Jahan.” At the same time he had performed the procedure himself, and people were accustomed to the display of a possessive instinct on his part where Security were concerned. The Bench had created them to serve a Ship’s Inquisitor, after all. What was more reasonable than that he should think of them as his?

  He tried not to hurry as he left his office for sterile quarantine, where patients were sent to recover from procedures that tapped a spine or crossed the blood-brain barrier. Telbut brain-slug was something that could happen to anybody, and among persons inhabiting worlds within the trading entity known as the Dolgorukij Combine it was more rather than less likely to turn up in Sarvaw because of the poverty of the world and their general suspicion of authority, doctors, teachers, law enforcement officers. It kept them from seeking periodic care as freely as they should.

  He could see Fantin coming from the other direction with her tray of doses in her hand, and he quickened his pace a bit as he approached the enclosed bay in which his patient lay waiting. He dared not risk so much on Lek’s self-control, not so soon.

  “What is this?” he asked Fantin, cordially standing in front of the door. “Oh, good. I am just going in, will you trust me to see the doses put through?”

  She looked up at him a little startled, apparently, and for one moment Andrej wondered whether he had gone too far. The moment passed, however; she smiled and surrendered the doses with a clear eye and a serene countenance. “Of course, sir,” she said, in that familiar “we-know-how-you-worry” tone of voice. “If you’d just post to the log, though, so we know how he’s doing. Ugh.”

  “You are very kind,” he assured her, with genuine gratitude. “I will unfailingly perform this duty.” Yes, brain-slugs were moderately disgusting, in theory. That didn’t matter. All that mattered was that in order to extract the sexually mature symbiot before it multiplied, a man had to lie on his belly and let the surgeon send a probe up through the place in his skull where his spine descended, and lure the greedy thing out of the brain in pursuit of a supposed mate.

  Fantin went away about her business without any apparent second thoughts. Andrej collected himself; then turned, and opened up the door. Robert was there. Robert did not look happy. Had something gone wrong? They would have called him. They couldn’t not have called him. They weren’t supposed to know what he had drawn out of Lek Kerenko’s skull, instead of a non-existent brain-slug.

  Lek pushed away from the cradle-chair in which he had been laid to rest six hours ago, after the procedure; pushed himself up and away with such violence that Robert was hard pressed to restrain him, even though Robert had the advantage of leverage, since Robert was already standing.

  For a moment Andrej was afraid that Lek would say something incautious. “This troop respectfully wishes the officer good-greeting,” Lek said; he should have known better, Andrej told himself, than to fear that Lek would abandon his self-discipline. On the one hand, whether or not Lek knew what Andrej had done to him, he was still the product of careful training and years of experience in living with a governor in his brain to see to it that he followed orders.

  On the other hand, Lek also knew that to speak to his officer of assignment — which was to say, Andrej himself — with such elaborate formality carried an unspoken message that did not need to be translated. With respect, your Excellency, I could perhaps be more angry at you than I am right now, but I’m not sure how.

  “Do not be annoyed with me, Lek.” Andrej set a humorous and affectionate tone to his voice, so that nobody who chanced to overhear would wonder if something were genuinely wrong. “I think no less of you for having one. Many decent people in this life have found themselves infected, and through no fault of their own.”

  It was too soon to be talking to Lek; he was overwhelmed by his realization, and still somewhat befuddled by the meds Andrej had used. “But it’s been part of my life for so long.” Lek was doing his best to keep his own tone of voice light, but Andrej could read his tension from a fair distance and more clearly as he came nearer. “How am I ever going to learn to live without it? Always there. And it’ll come back, sooner or later, I know it will.”

  Andrej had been unable to discuss any of this with Lek beforehand, and he dared not risk any very frank language now. There was a good chance he could get away with Lek, at least for now. How he was going to take care of Godsalt, Pyotr, Garrity, and Hirsel he did not know.

  “Well, that’s up to you,” Andrej said sternly. “Stay out of insalubrious environments. Clean living, friend Lek. If you don’t want to have a brain slug pulled out of your head again all you really have to do is stay away from places where there are such things, and that can’t be too difficult, can it?”

  There were governors to be had in major administrative centers throughout Jurisdiction space. How was Lek to avoid them? By getting out of Jurisdiction space, of course. Simple.

  Of course it wasn’t all so easy as that. Lek knew it; Andrej could tell. He desperately needed to be able to talk to Lek some place where there would be no danger of being overheard; but there was only one such place on board the Ragnarok, and he was not about to take Lek to Secured Medical.

  For one, he meant to never enter the torturer’s chamber in which he had exercised his Writ to Inquire ever again. For another, the Captain could over-ride even there, and people would be curious. The temptation to see what could bring Andrej Koscuisko to Secured Medical, especially with one of his bond-involuntaries, would be too much to expect anyone to withstand.

  “Now. Robert will sit with you, and keep you company. It is a minor procedure, but there is no taking chances with brains, and I mean you to stay quiet and rest. My cousin Stanoczk will be joining the ship at any hour, and you must conserve your energies for the inevitable excitement.”

  Lek Kerenko was Sarvaw. He knew that Andrej’s cousin was a Malcontent — an agent of the secret service of the Dolgorukij church, a slave of the Saint and typically up to all sorts of mischief. Andrej had some very particular mischief in mind, and Stoshi was coming to tell him whether the freighter would be waiting at Emandis Station to take Lek and Robert and the others far, far away from places where people could be placed under governor for crimes against the Judicial order.

  What if Stoshi should fail him?

  Stoshi would not fail. Andrej was the inheriting
son of his father, the Koscuisko prince, the single man who could direct the resources of the entire Koscuisko familial corporation. More than that, Andrej was the father of an acknowledged inheriting son of his own, and while a line of inheritance could be directed away from a man with no sons it had almost never failed to accord with tradition in cases where there was already an heir’s heir in training.

  If he had been killed before he had made Marana his wife, and their son his heir, the position of inheriting son might have devolved upon Iosev — the next oldest of their father’s sons. Andrej wondered what Iosev’s son felt about that.

  He was brooding, and he had no business doing so. With a cordial nod to Lek — who sat there watching as though to read his mind by main force of will — Andrej shifted his weight, ready to turn and go. The gesture seemed to provoke Lek beyond all hope of self-discipline; Lek was on his feet and face-to-face with Andrej before Andrej had had time to realize that the sound of falling objects that he heard was Robert, knocked backwards by the impact of Lek’s swift lunge.

  Lek didn’t speak. Instead he reached for Andrej’s hand and grasped it in his two hands, trembling. “No, don’t leave me here with Robert,” Lek said, with a tremor in his voice that matched the shaking of his shoulders. “Please. Sir. He’ll want to sing. I’ve done nothing to deserve it.”

  It was very forward of Lek to touch him, let alone restrain him in any manner. Lek’s fingers moved against the backs of Andrej’s own, but not because Lek was overcome with emotion. Finger-code. Andrej did not read finger-code very well, but Lek used small words, easy to understand. All of us?