Hour of Judgement Read Online Free PDF Page A

to afford the mother of the prince inheritor to the Koscuisko familial corporation. Not even if they pooled all their resources.
    Two rearranged herself in a rustling of wings from her anchor-perch in the ceiling, and her translator sounded — its calm precise Standard diction at odds with the peculiar idiom of Two’s speech. “To you I will certainly tell, Andrej; but a hint would be much appreciated, what ‘this’ is it?” No telling whether she could catch Koscuisko’s state of mind or not. As difficult as it was to decipher Two’s expression when she was on the ground, it was next to impossible when she was at her ease hanging upside down in her office.
    Koscuisko paced the floor between them, gesturing with his small white hands raised beside his face as if what he really wanted to do was tear his own head off. “This woman that Verlaine has sent, Two, she claims that I can be requisitioned to the Bench, if my father permits. And I cannot trust my father to understand, so you must tell me.”
    What Koscuisko’s father had to do with things Mendez had never quite understood. He’d loved his father too, as far as it went — which didn’t go anything like as far as it seemed to go with Koscuisko. No accounting for culture.
    Two reached a wing out casually to the far wall to code up a display on her speakers. Mendez knew she couldn’t actually see that far; it only made the unerring precision with which she found her target all the more unnerving — that, and the fact that her wings spanned the entire room when she stretched them.
    “Well. There is a plot in motion, Andrej. I have not discussed it with our Captain because he is cross enough about the issue of your replacement.”
    Didn’t that call for a question? Ralph wondered. If she had known of plots in motion —
    “Two, if there were things of which I needed to be apprised — I cannot understand, why was I not warned. Surely you could not have thought of it as of no interest — ”
    Koscuisko was still pacing, visibly tense with unexpressed conflict. But at least the level of the body language had toned down a bit.
    “I am uncommonly clever, Andrej, it is true, but I cannot see more than three days into tomorrow,” Two scolded. “And it is not established that the draft would be approved. So Specialist Ivers has been just a little forward, if she told you that it was done.”
    Finally Koscuisko stopped, and sat. Threw himself into a seat, pushing the fine fringe of blond hair up from off his forehead with one hand as he did so. Mendez was just as glad that the cup of konghu that he had on the side-table was half-empty, the way it shook.
    “She did not say that it was done.” Koscuisko needed a haircut; Koscuisko usually did. Nothing to do with actual length, and everything to do with straying from its place. “She said that it would be accomplished, if Verlaine had anything to say about it. Is there nothing to be done, except be damned?”
    “It is metaphorical, this ‘damned’?” Two demanded. Not unreasonably. “If you are not pleased to be desired you are certainly in a bad place, Andrej.”
    Mendez felt it was high time he found out exactly what was going on between his officers. Between Two and Koscuisko, that was to say. Nothing went on between Koscuisko and Wheatfields except for bad language, and the occasional physical assault.
    “Somebody fill in the First Officer?”
    “The maddening thing is that it was not even anything that I did, in the beginning at least,” Koscuisko replied. As if he was explaining. “There was a student in orientation with me. She puffed me up to her Patron out of spite, and Fleet gave me the choice to wait for him to requisition me or leave for Scylla before the Term was ended.”
    Which in turn had meant that Koscuisko had had to perform his final exercise, his benchmark Tenth Level Command Termination exercise, when he was already on active duty. Mendez had heard about Koscuisko’s Tenth Level