Hour of Judgement Read Online Free PDF

even before Koscuisko had been posted to the Ragnarok . He’d wondered what kind of psychopathic maniac Koscuisko was at the time; but now that he knew Koscuisko a little better — after four years of breathing the same air — he was regretfully aware of the fact that the question was a little more complicated than that. “You went to Scylla , he took it personally, and that business with the Domitt didn’t sweeten him on you?”
    Koscuisko shuddered. “I cannot go back to the Domitt, First Officer, I swear it. Not in one lifetime. And to submit to the First Secretary would mean the same, even if the name of the place itself were to be different.”

    No need to ask whether Koscuisko had believed the testimony presented to the Bench about poor decisions made by subordinates, errors concealed from the audit branch, abuses not sanctioned.
    “But Verlaine’s set up to draft his Writ.” Now that he felt he understood the background maybe Two’s information would benefit both of them. She cocked her head at one corner of her room, listening to the speaker — he assumed, since he couldn’t hear a damned thing. Then she nodded, which always gave him the chuckles, when she was upside down.
    “It is confirmed, yes. Very much does Verlaine want Andrej Koscuisko. He has spent many favors which I am not at liberty to divulge, many of them irreplaceable. Once our Andrej leaves this ship — there are several months of accumulated leave, you could go and visit my children, the cave is large. It would perhaps be possible for you to become lost.”
    The humor did not appear to penetrate far enough to touch Koscuisko in the state of mind that he was in. “If I could have known. It might have been better to have gone to the Bench in the first place. I did not understand that such a place was even possible, as the Domitt Prison.”
    “So tell me, Two, if Andrej is too depressed to ask.” Moral support. “Is there a way out of Verlaine’s draft?”
    It was of only abstract interest to him, of course. Koscuisko wasn’t a bad sort as a Chief Medical Officer, once one got past his personal quirks in the Secured Medical area. But Mendez wasn’t sure he really cared one way or the other.
    “It is a problem for Andrej. No one can decide it for him.” Two had learned to shrug as an old woman, she had told him, and he was to treat her accomplishment with the respect due to the aged instead of asking her if she needed her back scratched between the shoulder-blades. “If the Combine protested there would be difficulty, and perhaps Verlaine would not be able to accomplish his goal. But the Combine has received many benefits from Chilleau Judiciary. Especially recently.”
    “My father wrote to me, after the trials.” Koscuisko’s sudden interruption startled Mendez, since Koscuisko had seemed well sunk in silent gloom a moment ago. “He said that I had done well, that he was proud. That I should also behave with more humility, in future, because when all was said and sung a man should have respect for authority, and it did not present a pleasingly filial appearance for me to have appealed to the First Judge in so public a manner.”
    Mendez winced. If Koscuisko’s people could say something like that to him, after those trials, then they simply didn’t live in the same world as that in which the Domitt Prison had existed, and that was all there was to it.
    Respect for authority, yes.
    Complicity of silence in atrocities of that nature — well, no.
    Nai.
    Never.
    “Well, there.” Two let so long a pause develop that Mendez wondered if her translator had failed; but no. She seemed to be expecting a response of some sort, her beautiful brilliant little black eyes fixed on Koscuisko’s face. Koscuisko made a gesture with his hands of either helplessness or confusion, and that seemed to clue Two in that she hadn’t made her point.
    “You are clever, Andrej, you can see. There are four things that you can do, and one of them is