Warring States Read online

  “So this is the situation.” It was Garrity’s turn to speak. “He’s been checking up on our families. He plans a leave on Emandis. Nobody understands what good he might think it will do to give us a taste of freedom if we were just going to have to go back, and we know he doesn’t expect to be here for very much longer.”

  That was true. Koscuisko was here because he had evidence that would protect the Ragnarok against its enemies in Fleet, but once the Ragnarok had been exonerated by an audit inquiry Koscuisko could go home. Verlaine had freed Koscuisko, given him relief of Writ to be executed at Koscuisko’s good pleasure. So Koscuisko was in the same situation as he had put them in, except backwards; he had come back from his home to rejoin his Command, and would be leaving Fleet to go back home, but not before he took care of business.

  “So he’s made a plan to steal us from the Bench. That cousin of his.”

  Robert could tell from the tone of Hirsel’s voice that he was having a hard time getting used to a man who looked a lot like the officer but behaved so differently. He knew he was. Koscuisko’s cousin was due to leave as soon as the Ragnarok dropped vector, though, so that was something.

  “Are we going?” The Bench could not do more to his Megh than it had already; and she belonged to the Danzilar prince now, at any rate, who had decided to make of her a token of the contract he wanted between him and the people of Burkhayden, and would defend her accordingly. There were Nurail in Gonebeyond and rumors that the son of the war-leader of Darmon had escaped and was growing to manhood there, with all of the rest of his family dead. Maybe somewhere in Gonebeyond there was someone who remembered that Robert had had family. Megh would expect him to go. He would never see her again.

  “That’s to decide,” Godsalt admitted. “Pyotr’s twenty-four and some, less than five years short of reborn. I don’t know what I would do in his place. But none of us really knows what’s going on in the officer’s mind, do we? And I’m not asking Chief.”

  There was nothing in Godsalt’s brain to reinforce the respect due to rank, no reason they need call Koscuisko “the officer” and Stildyne “Chief” in quarters. But habit was a powerful force. And Koscuisko had warned them about giving themselves away; it would be too ungrateful to let all of that good work come to nothing. It was important to maintain appearances.

  “I would.” For what it was worth. “Whether it was six years or six weeks. I knew a man who embraced his death to be free.” He hadn’t actually been there when Joslire died, though. Koscuisko had had one of the others kiss Joslire on Robert’s behalf. He’d heard about it from Code, who had come back to Scylla without the rest of his team. “I never doubted his decision.”

  Garrity stood up. It was almost time for him to report to Infirmary. Garrity was on sprains-and-strains in orthopedic, this fifth-week. Robert had never cared for that particular assignment; he had emotional associations with particular sorts of disjoints that were not to be quieted when there were too many near reminders.

  “We’ll hear about it before the end of his leave comes up,” Garrity said. “So we’ve got a few days. But I’m glad we had a chance to synchronize. I couldn’t believe what I thought he was thinking of. I should have just remembered that he’s mad.”

  Robert nodded, and thumped Garrity in the shoulder in a friendly fashion as Garrity passed, to comfort him. Yes. Koscuisko was mad. Koscuisko was mad in this instance like a war-leader, who could imagine indescribable retreats when it came to saving the lives of those who had accepted his direction.

  They hadn’t been given any choice; a bond-involuntary had to accept direction, that was the whole point. That, and punishment. And still Koscuisko was quite correct to take them for people who had put their trust in him to direct and to guide them. There were contracts in a man’s life that not even the Bench could break or regulate, unspoken and intangible; which reminded him for no particular reason that he owed Engineering an extra half-a-day’s maintenance on the Wolnadi fighter for which his team was responsible.

  The basic truth of the whole thing was simply that the Bench was about pain and fear and force, and there was no force in all of Jurisdiction that could stand against trust and faith and charity. That was the real reason that Koscuisko was so dangerous. All of this time the Bench had believed it was because the man had the truth-sense in him and could hear a person think, and the Bench had been wrong.

  Robert took that simple truth down with him to the maintenance atmosphere and set it on a shelf while he changed into a cover-all, then carried it with him out to where the Wolnadi fighter stood in wait for the cleaning of some of its intake vents. It was a plain fact, no more and no less; but it was worthy of admiration still, breathtakingly seditious, categorically revolutionary, absolutely conservative, all at the same time, and he was proud of himself for having welcomed it.

  ###

  “Of course it’s not impregnable,” Vogel said. Rukota couldn’t see Vogel’s exact expression, because of the goggles that Vogel was wearing. They’d borrowed some of the equipment from Koscuisko’s surgery, though Rukota didn’t think anybody had gotten around to telling Koscuisko that, yet. With luck the equipment would all be back in place, safe and sound and never the worse for wear, before Koscuisko noticed it was missing; and taking it to Secured Medical was simply moving it from one medical area to another, really, wasn’t it?

  “But there are good reasons to pretend it is. For one, the Bench expects every citizen to hold the Judicial process in the very highest respect, it certainly couldn’t suggest that there could be any question at all about the integrity of its own employees. Particularly its elite.”

  Rukota could see the point, but it was a weak one, in his opinion. Leaning back in Koscuisko’s chair he stared up at the ceiling. It had been two, nearly three days, and he was almost beside himself with boredom. Yes, Vogel was an interesting man. But Vogel was busy. Concentrating. And a Bench specialist, so he wasn’t comfortable talking very much in the first place.

  “For another — ” Making a final adjustment, Vogel grunted in apparent satisfaction. The record lay on a portable table under a bright light; it bristled with wires and probes from Koscuisko’s surgical set, and Vogel was using a scaling glove to move about within the record’s interior, watching his progress on one of Koscuisko’s monitors. All Rukota could see from where he sat was the plain box that housed the record.

  “For another, the moment you mention any such thing people will start looking for it. It’s human nature. Not their fault. And then if they get past one level of security they’ll realize that there’s another. And then another. It’s just asking for trouble.”

  Not that anybody would believe that a record wasn’t protected, not if they stopped to think about it. Rukota guessed that Vogel’s point was along the lines of discouraging people from stopping to think about it. Records couldn’t be had by just anybody, anyway; yes, there were powers of eights of them, but they were still a controlled-access commodity.

  “Any hints yet on how this one was compromised?” Hour after hour watching Vogel sit perfectly still, moving his probes so carefully that Rukota couldn’t see that he was even moving them at all. He’d watched over Vogel’s shoulder for a good while, but that hadn’t been able to hold his interest forever. The fact that he hadn’t any idea what he was looking at — apart from the obvious, circuits, access nodes, input-output channels — hadn’t helped him concentrate, either.

  “Well.” For a moment Rukota thought Vogel was trying to decide which version of “mind your own business” would best suit this particular circumstance. Vogel surprised him; completing an adjustment that had apparently distracted his attention, he began to talk.

  “It’s Pesadie’s on-base record. There’s not much question of that. Noycannir had access codes. They were inactive but not revoked which would make it easier to sneak one past the record. But these pieces of evidence had to be formally logged by someone with an active Writ, or else she had to have talked someone out of surr
endering an open code. She had the open-and-close marker with her when she got there, I suspect, just a question of deciding what to fit in the space between them. I need to find where that code’s hiding out. Once we find it, it can be analyzed, but until we do — no telling.”

  And it took as long as it did because records had complex and inter-related anti-tampering protocols, self-defense mechanisms in place. Also because Vogel wanted to avoid accidentally damaging any of the false evidence that had been read into this record, to preserve the best picture of how it had been done.

  “Now, the warrant that was issued to me to execute wasn’t anything like a record in terms of its sophistication. But once I got suspicious and began to look at it I decided that the wear around the edges of the authorization chops wasn’t quite normal. Looked as though they were perfectly ordinary Judicial chops, at first analysis, very well done. But by the third run-through there were some interesting anomalies in the layering. It’s a signature of sorts. I’m wondering if the signature we find here will be the same.”

  “Any idea how much longer it’s going to take?” This was a rude question, but Rukota was an artilleryman and it was armed transport that was supposed to be genteel if anybody was. No, it was the Combine home defense fleet that was supposed to be genteel. Beautiful manners, Dolgorukij, and such beautiful cheerful smiles that you almost had to smile back even as they rolled right over you — a Sarvaw had told him that. But she’d been an artilleryman herself, so a little attitude was to be expected.

  Vogel shook his head. “I’m picking off the layers from the back to front till I can get at the internal auditor. Once I get through to that, I can see whether or not it recognizes some elements in common with the forgery on that warrant. One way or the other I should be able to talk it into disclosing the pedigree of the Writ that logged the core details of that false evidence, as well as the Writ that applied the shell. Reports say that the evidence was presented in good form, so there has to be a valid interrogation record buried in here someplace, and I want to know — where — it — came from.”

  Fair enough. Maybe he shouldn’t be talking; it could distract Vogel. Vogel kept talking, though; talking to himself, maybe. “Forging a Judicial chop takes considerable technical sophistication. I couldn’t do it. It was hard enough to catch the little nick in the edge that tipped me off. In a manner of speaking.”

  Soft, low-voiced, and apparently talking to the record as much as to Rukota. “There’s this, and we were lucky, there’s no other word for it. Sheer luck. If ap Rhiannon hadn’t sent those troops home with Koscuisko, he might have gone off with Noycannir. We’d never have seen that record again. Maybe not Koscuisko, either, I heard that they found some ugly things in her baggage.”

  Somebody could have taken a short-cut of some sort, in other words. Not expecting the forged record to ever have to stand up under any kind of scrutiny. Rukota stifled a yawn; watching Vogel work was about as exciting as testing a maintenance atmosphere for leaks in its plasma field.

  “But that clerk was from Chilleau Judiciary. And just very shortly after someone tried to get Koscuisko off on an unauthorized transit of some sort, Verlaine is killed. The security systems expertly compromised. Chilleau. Could be a coincidence.”

  If he stared too long at the ceiling, Rukota decided, he could begin to make out the shadows of equipment panels behind the false netted surface that the Engineer had in place. He didn’t care to. It was hard enough to get clean when they left this place. He’d scrubbed the palms of his hands all but raw, after their first session. He didn’t know how Vogel was taking it, but for himself his strategy was to avoid noticing anything that might remind him of where he was. He decided to study his thumb-nail for a while. He didn’t have to worry about falling asleep by accident.

  “Don’t believe in coincidence, do we, sweetie? No. No, we don’t.”

  Vogel’s voice had changed. Rukota straightened up, intrigued. Not only had Vogel’s voice changed, but something was different about the relationship of Vogel’s body to the probe array — focus, perhaps. Vogel had been sitting there delicately playing a probe and talking about things just a moment ago. Now Vogel wasn’t there at all — he was somewhere deep in that record-box, all of his attention directed at some single point with an unnerving concentration that seemed to intensify by the moment.

  “Yes, that’s right. We don’t believe in coincidence. We’re suspicious. We’re paranoid. We’re hostile and unpleasant, aren’t we, girl? Yes. You’re such a clever record. Show me what you’ve got. You can tell — ”

  Vogel stopped. His voice cut off abruptly in mid-phrase; the track of the probe on the screen that Rukota could just see from one side didn’t waver. Vogel had frozen in place. As near as Rukota could tell Vogel wasn’t even breathing. When Vogel spoke again it was in a perfectly normal tone of voice, but the word he said explained it all to Rukota, a little too well.

  “Destructor.”

  It was a bomb.

  The record wasn’t a bomb, no, but it had been provided with a little cyborg intelligence that would put a bomb together from the materials provided in a record, if anything happened to set off its sequence. Two layers of normally inert microfoam here. A minute chip of an ordinarily harmless spacer-card there. A safely isolated impulse-generator way over there, where it could not possibly interfere with anything going on with the mechanical workings of the record, until some tiny crazed guardian rushed from pillar to post collecting bits and chips and rerouting circuitry —

  Rukota dove for the open door between the chamber and the ready-room, to close it down. To contain the damage as much as possible. He and Vogel were on the wrong side of that door, but he wasn’t going through by himself. He’d been given an assignment, to observe, he couldn’t observe from the wrong side of a closed door. He had only Vogel’s word that the record was going to explode — Vogel’s word and his body language, and the tension that communicated between souls on a subconscious level and said get out get out, get out, get out now, get out —

  “After you,” Rukota said. The door was closing. He wasn’t going to stand here and let it just close. Was he?

  Vogel sprang like a tension-wire slipped out of true, up and away and through the closing door to crumple in a heap against the far wall of the small ready-room, the other side of the outside corridor. Rukota swung himself through the fast-narrowing aperture after Vogel, wheeling to one side, snatching his arm away just in time to prevent his hand from getting caught in the door and confusing it into opening wide all over again. Vogel was clawing his way to one side of the wall opposite Rukota — away from directly across from the door, well, that made sense —

  ###

  It was quiet. Very quiet. Blissfully, peacefully quiet. He didn’t want to distract it. It was wonderful. Quiet. No sound. No noise. Nothing. Tranquil.

  Something jingled at him. He tried to scowl at it; nothing happened. Scowling was noise. He could hear the creaking sound of his numb muscles; he didn’t want any disturbance. No. It was too nice just the way it was. Quiet. Quiet was the good way to be.

  Where was he? He opened his eyes, but he couldn’t see anything. Had he opened his eyes? Sometimes a person just thought he’d sat up, and gotten up, and gotten dressed and started to put his boots on and then the alert would go off again and a person would realize that he’d been dreaming. This was like no dreamscape Rukota had ever seen; it was a soft pearly white, absolutely uniform in tint and hue. When the atmosphere did that, a man couldn’t tell eight from an eighth for visibility. No clue. But he’d heard his eyes open, the scrape of the inside of the lid against the surface, the clanging sound his eyelashes made knocking against each other as he dragged the upper past and away from the lower. Terrible racket. He’d never realized that his body was as loud as it was.

  Something big and black suddenly swooped down upon him from somewhere in that pearly mist. It startled him. He couldn’t move. What? What? He smelled —

  He smelled the snow-e
dged tang of bottled atmosphere, and realized that he couldn’t move because he’d not been breathing. It wasn’t mist. It was fire suppressant foam. Someone was here with a mask. He still couldn’t move. Protective gear, that was the answer, people in full environmental suits lifting him onto a litter. Air. He needed air. He wasn’t getting enough air.

  He could feel his muscles tense to take a breath, and something told him that it was a mistake but his body wasn’t listening and then it hit him in the left side like a reverberation round and he recognized the sensation. Ribcage again, damn it. He hated cracked ribs. Single most aggravating injury a man could sustain, in Rukota’s opinion. It had happened to him twice or three times before in his life and he was heartily sick of the experience. Muscles didn’t seem to learn, though, they were still working, gasping for air.

  Down the corridor — he presumed — then stop, and wait for the corridor to clear. Airlock, obviously. He could see walls, again. Here were his good friends in Security, at least he thought that was one of Koscuisko’s people — Garrity? Into a mover and hurrying through the corridors hell-bent for Infirmary. It was still eerily quiet. He could hear the blood pulse in his jaw beneath his ear, a rushing sound like white noise, but it wasn’t constant. Volume up; volume down. Volume up; volume down.

  Then while they carried him down the corridor, just as they angled past a turning with impressive precision and commendable urgency, sound and sensation returned with equivalent suddenness and brutal force, taking his breath away all over again. Damn. That hurt. What had happened? He couldn’t remember.

  The litter-bearers slid the litter expertly onto the therapeutic bed in Infirmary’s emergency room, and here was the scowling face of Koscuisko himself. Hospital whites, so that was good. Even in his duty whites Koscuisko’s rank was lined through with crimson, however; there was no forgetting that this man was an Inquisitor, which made things just the littlest bit awkward for a man in Rukota’s position of not knowing what position exactly he was in.