Hour of Judgement

This book is dedicated with love to my mother (than whom I could not have chosen a better, had it been mine to choose) because Two has always been her favorite character in the story. My mother’s children have always been her favorite characters in their lives, and between her and my daddy they raised all six of us with astounding tolerance and grace.

Acknowledgment

I would like to gratefully acknowledge a “random act of kindness” committed by a gentleman on a plane last October who, when we arrived at SeaTac Airport, chased me half the length of the concourse to bring me my manuscript book, which I’d been writing in during the flight and had left on the seat. There were forty pages of manuscript that I hadn’t typed up in that book, and if it hadn’t been for him I would have lost it all. Thank you again, sir, and may your tribe increase.

Special thanks to my cousin Lori York for her assistance in preparing the OCR scan of this document for publication. Any remaining errors are mine and mine alone!

Chapter One

It was early evening in Port Burkhayden. The air currents that blew toward the bay in the morning hours had stilled and reversed themselves, and the breeze grew colder by the day; but it was warm on the back steps still, sheltered from the wind by the bulk of the great house behind them.

“All right, then,” the gardener said, his tone light and challenging. Almost Sylyphe wanted to call it affectionate; but that wouldn’t be proper, not with the distance between them. Skelern Hanner was a good gardener. But that was all he was.

Plucking a bit of black-twigged greenery out of the little pile that lay between them on the steps, Hanner continued to quiz. “You’re solid on the sdotz, one and all. Sdotz are good for color, but delicate tones need background, don’t they now?”

It was Hanner’s game to tease her, when all she’d ever done was ask him questions about his gardening. He didn’t take her seriously. Why should he? Because she had been to school, and he had not — but there was no question that he knew much more about his garden than she did.

“Markept-branch?” she guessed, eagerly, frowning at the twig of evergreen Hanner held out to her. “Or — no, it’s markept-branch. Surely. Oh, tell, Skelern.”

He laughed at her eagerness, and Sylyphe blushed, wishing the breeze would turn and carry the prickling heat of her own gaucherie away from her face. She hated to see herself blush, She blushed in splotches, obvious and awkward, and it always made her blush when Skelern laughed. She wasn’t certain why. She only suspected that it had to do with the suddenness of the sight of his white teeth, when the rest of him was ruddy-brown with sun or sweat.

“Perfect marks, little maistress, markept—branch it is, and from the far reaches. From Perkipsie, in fact, come across the Senterif vector to Burkhayden before the Bench came down upon us.”

If she was right, why had he laughed? He teased her too often. It was unkind of him. She didn’t know why she tolerated his impudence; and yet she’d had nobody else to talk to, not these six months gone past. Standard.

“The Danzilar fleet is only four weeks out, they say.” The Senterif vector, somewhere past Burkhayden’s pale new moon this time of year. Sylyphe frowned into the darkening sky, wondering where to place the space-lane’s terminus. “There will be an end to the Bench, Skelern, in a sense at least. That will be good, won’t it?”

The Danzilar fleet was what had brought her mother here six months ago, to position Iaccary Cordage and Textile among the industries eager to enter into partnership with prince Paval I’shenko Danzilar to exploit his newly indentured world. The Bench had been sending Nurail into exile here for longer than that; but Skelern Hanner himself was a native, bred and born in Burkhayden.

And bitter about what had become of Nurail under Jurisdiction, for all that he did not seem to blame her for it. Not personally. “Sold is sold, sweet Sylyphe. I wasn’t born cattle. And I had a mother and a father, once.”

It was hard to blame him. He had suffered loss and privation under Jurisdiction. It had all been for the preservation of the Judicial order, she was sure of that; though it was hard to understand what threat a gardener could have posed the Bench.

“All the same.” She didn’t like to argue with him, especially when she felt he might have good cause to feel resentful. But she wished he wouldn’t sulk. There was nothing either of them could do about it, after all. “The first step toward citizenship, Skelern. They’re odd people, from what I’ve heard, but practical.”

Well, perhaps that was a little overgenerous of her. Dolgorukij were practical, yes. But more than that, Dolgorukij were ferocious competitors, notorious for milking any commercial exchange for everything it might be worth. Not people one would chose as one’s employer, if one had the choice; and it would only depress Skelern to remind him that he had none.

Why had she tried to say anything?

Sylyphe hugged her knees to her bosom and frowned at the back of the garden, disgusted at herself.

Hanner spent some moments picking out pieces of grass and fern with a great show of concentration on his dark sharp-chinned face. “The Danzilar fleet. Well. There’ll be parties, little maistress, you’ll want for a corsage.”

The suggestion startled her into turning her head, meeting his black eyes over the posy he offered. It was a perfect little bouquet, wrapped in a leaf and pinned into a tidy bundle with a thorn. Beautiful. Sylyphe took the delicate favor with confused delight, admiring it in the failing light as Hanner spoke on.

“And with the fleet. An escort ship, the
Ragnarok
, have you heard of the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship
Ragnarok
, Sylyphe? It’s a man with the blood of Nurail souls on his hands that carries the surgery there, him from the Domitt Prison. Black Andrej.”

Sylyphe frowned.

The Domitt Prison . . . it had been years ago, five years; she’d been much younger. The Judicial briefings had mesmerized her mother, and Sylyphe hadn’t ever quite understood what the fuss had been about; and still —

“Andrej Koscuisko, do you mean, Skelern?” And still she could recall one image among many, one image that sprang up readily before her mind’s eye. A slim young officer, blond, and wearing the black of a Ship’s Prime officer — the Ship’s Inquisitor, Jurisdiction Fleet Ship
Scylla
. Andrej Koscuisko.
I have cried Failure of Writ against the administration of the Domitt Prison, and I will hazard my life against the justice of my plea.

“The same.” Skelern was looking at her with rather an odd expression on his face. She blushed once more, without knowing quite why. “And there’s more than several here in Burkhayden in these days to remember him from Rudistal, but he’s got nothing to fear from us. Not after the Domitt. Unlike young Skelern, now — ”

Tumbling the pile of flowers into her lap with one swift gesture Hanner rose to his feet, talking as he went. “ — who’s much to fear from my respected maistress your lady mither, if I don’t get the turves trimmed up in the tea-garden before the morning comes. I’m off.”

And in a bit of a hurry all of a sudden, as well. What was on his mind? Sylyphe gathered the cuttings into a loose bunch, careful to keep her posy from being crushed. “Black” Andrej Koscuisko. It had a wicked sort of resonance to it.

The Court had awarded him execution of the sentences passed down at the conclusion of the hearings; he had killed men, and at the Tenth Level of the Question. Taken vengeance for the Bench against the criminals judged responsible for the Domitt Prison. There was a measure of attractiveness to the idea of such a man — an indistinct figure of glittering menace, irresistible with the demonic allure of all of one’s darkest nightmares . . . an Inquisitor. Torturer. Executioner.

Perhaps she would meet him at a party, since there were to be so many when the Fleet arrived at last. She would be presented, he would bow; she would return the courtesy with calm – self-possessed — fearless maturity, and he would check himself and look more closely at her, struck by her unusual poise, her womanly grace. . . .

The sun was going down. The breeze from the hills behind Port Burkhayden worried at the leaf — laden branches of the trees at the back of the garden, and the summer’s growth of climbing-rose canes bowed anxiously down before the wind’s whisper of ice as if in supplication. Sylyphe tucked her armful of cuttings under her arm and stood up, putting her idle fantasies away from her with a mixture of regret and childish guilt.

Enough was enough.

She went into the house to set the cuttings in a vase, to wait for her mother to come and arrange them.

###

Captain Griers Verigson Lowden — tall and thin, big bones, brown mustache — strolled down the halls towards the senior mess area with all deliberate speed, fuming. The news from the Bench was not at all satisfactory: no Inquisitor to be assigned, not any time soon. No Inquisitor was even identified for assignment yet, since the latest class at Fleet Orientation Station Medical wasn’t scheduled to begin for several weeks yet. If he’d convinced Koscuisko to commit to an additional term of service
. . .
but he hadn’t; and the Bench meant him to suffer the lack accordingly.

Nor was he so naive as to believe that the two Bench intelligence specialists who were visiting from the Danzilar fleet had no ulterior motives. He knew all about Koscuisko’s appeals to the Bench. He had connections, and paid well for information pertinent to his survival and prosperity. Koscuisko had been trying to get the
Ragnarok
declassified for Writ for years now: to no effect.

What would Koscuisko do, Lowden wondered, if Koscuisko ever realized that the money that thwarted his purpose at every turn, the money that did such a good job of protecting Captain Lowden against the best of Koscuisko’s arguments, the secret influence that baffled Koscuisko time and again was funded directly out of Koscuisko’s own handiwork?

Copies of the Record, copies of interrogation cubes, were the property of the Bench, and were to be strictly controlled and accounted for at all times.

That only made them more valuable.

And whether or not torture at Koscuisko’s level of expertise was functionally restricted to the Protocols — there being no law to interfere with religious practice under Jurisdiction, should religion demand frightful contrition rituals — there was no question but that Koscuisko was a genuine artist in his field. Captain Lowden had never seen anything quite like Andrej Koscuisko in Inquiry. The man was phenomenal. His tapes had proved phenomenally lucrative in turn, over the years.

Now Koscuisko was leaving, and that would be an end to new material. And though Lowden knew he could live quite comfortably off his banked proceeds, he couldn’t help but resent the fact that Andrej Koscuisko was to leave him alone on the
Ragnarok
with not so much as a replacement Inquisitor to remember him by.

Sour as his mood was, Lowden almost looked forward to staff meeting. There were good odds that he’d find an outlet for his irritation before the eight was up; and in that hope Captain Lowden went into the room.

They were waiting for him, of course. His senior officers were already rising to their feet as the lowest-ranking officer in the room — Jennet ap Rhiannon, newly assigned — called the formal alert.

“Stand to attention for the Captain, Lowden, commanding.”

Command and Ship’s Primes, Jurisdiction Fleet Ship
Ragnarok
. Here were Ralph Mendez, the
Ragnarok
’s First Officer, to whom the bulk of the daily tasks involving the operation of a ship of war — or even an experimental ship on its proving-cruise — devolved, by Lowden’s own benign neglect and implicit order.

The Ship’s Engineer, Serge of Wheatfields, the over-tall Chigan responsible for moving the ship from place to place and keeping the cyclers up.

Ship’s Intelligence, the Desmodontae known as Two, one of the few non-hominids with senior Fleet rank under Jurisdiction; two strangers with her, male and female, wearing unmarked uniforms of the peculiar shade of charcoal gray that identified them as Bench intelligence specialists.

His Lieutenants, and finally his Ship’s Inquisitor, Andrej Ulexeievitch Koscuisko, the youngest of his senior officers and by far the most valuable — as well as most high-maintenance.

“Well, let’s be started,” Lowden suggested, pausing on his way into the room to draw a flask of vellme. Plenty of shredded ciraby on top. “You’ve all got work to do. I don’t want to keep you from your tasks. First Officer, report.”

Mendez was a tall, long, green-eyed sort of Santone, his face tanned and deeply lined from youth spent under the dry glare of the Gohander desert sun. “Ship’s Mast and staffing, Captain. Ship’s Mast. Violation of critical safety protocol cried by Ship’s Engineer against technician second class Hixson. Adjudication of penalty recommended at three and thirty. Your endorsement, your Excellency.”

Passing the record cube across the table, Mendez recited the Charges drily, sounding bored. Lowden turned the cube in his fingers for a moment or two. Should he press Mendez on this? It would be perceived as merely petty, to squeeze Koscuisko for an extra ration of punishment so close to Koscuisko’s departure date. Koscuisko would enjoy it, but he would hate enjoying it. No. Too obvious. Lowden coded his counter-seal on the record cube and tossed it back without comment.

Nor did Mendez insult him by looking surprised. Mendez knew better. His First Officer had been part of the
Ragnarok
’s original proving crew, a good First Officer, a competent officer, but one who had stood on principle one too many times for there to be any real chance of a Command in his future. “Very good, Captain. Staffing, a new requirement just in, Chief Warrant Officer Brachi Stildyne has been offered a First Officer’s berth on the JFS
Sceppan
.”

Had he indeed? Lowden glanced quickly at his Ship’s Surgeon out of the corner of his eye. The four-year association between Andrej Koscuisko and his Chief of Security had been marked by conflict, misunderstanding, even a species of power struggle — great fun, all in all. If Koscuisko were not leaving he might be glad to replace Stildyne or he might be reluctant to face the breaking-in of a new Chief of Security. But Koscuisko was leaving. Koscuisko didn’t care. Or Mendez had tipped Koscuisko off; or both.

What a bore.

“Well, congratulations are in order for Stildyne. Please pass them on to him from me. He’s done good work for us.”
And we're sure that Koscuisko has no cause to complain of him
, Lowden wanted to add, but restrained himself. Once again the provocation would be too obvious. “Very well. Serge? No? Two, then.”

Desmodontae were newly integrated under Jurisdiction, an intelligent species of night-gliding mammals that subsisted on the protein-rich blood of a species of cattle they nurtured for that purpose. Very short compared to most hominids, Two stood in chairs rather than sitting in them; as far as Lowden had ever been able to tell she couldn’t sit at all, in the conventional sense.

Standing in her chair now, Two dipped her velvety black head sharply in token of having heard and commenced to respond, clashing the sharp white teeth in her delicate black muzzle in his direction rapidly, her pink-and-black tongue flickering back and forth in a disconcertingly random manner.