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sobbing and relief of the families as well as the overlying sadness of the situation washed over her and she let it touch all of the jurors before she dismissed them. Having her mind to herself once again was the best part of the day.
    The moment that the last person was gone, she gave the signal to Harry to close the ship.
    “File the records with the imperium courts and get us off the ground. Requisition me another dagger.”
    “Yes, Judge Dex. We will be on our way in thirty minutes.”
    “Thanks, Harry.” She turned to the shadow of Ex-Hess. “Executioner, you are dismissed.”
    “Thank you, Judge Dex.”
    There was a world of relief in his tone. He headed back into the private section of the shuttle.
    She did a final sweep of the closed courtroom and put a sterilizer on the blood left behind by the guilty party. No sense in courting a deadly pathogen.
    “I will sterilize the courtroom after you are out of it, Judge Dex.”
    “Thanks, Harry. This was a tricky one.” When she said tricky, she meant painful. Wading through the victims’ lives and their impending deaths was hard and Harry had a program that let him analyze her stress response.
    With a deep sigh, she left the collapsed courtroom and returned to her home away from everything.
    Even in the living area of the shuttle, she couldn’t take off the concealer until they were off world. If she was seen and associated with being the judge, her life would be more at risk than it already was.
    A shadowy black blob was making a pot of tea. He sat heavily on the bench seat and she could feel his fatigue. “How often do you do that?”
    “What?”
    “Deal with that particular brand of monster?”
    “Whenever they need me to. The people of Yiksadu have nothing in place to deal with this sort of thing. The jury found the defendant guilty on several parts. One was the intent to damage a person not involved in the initial interaction, another was the forcible ingestion of a substance they were unaware of. The actual act of contamination was not a chargeable offense, but the means of using the husbands as an incubator to kill the wives was a bio-warfare tactic. So, she was charged under the deliberate transport of a viral weapon on sixteen counts.”
    “How did you manage that?”
    “This sort of filing allowed me to present an altered set of charges to the jury. It is judge’s discretion.”
    A shadow slid a cup of tea toward her.
    She laughed and took the tea between her palms. “I am guessing that you haven’t travelled with a jury channel before.”
    “Um, no, but the way you were speaking, there was no doubt that you had more than just yourself in your head.”
    “Yup. I can contain a jury of seven.”
    “How does that work?”
    “I open a corridor in my mind and the jurors enter. When I have seven, no more can join. Those seven are all around the imperium and selected just as a regular jury would be. As judge, I have power of veto, but I rarely have to use it.”
    She drank the tea and unkinked her shoulders. Having the seven jurors in her mind had not been the stressful part. Sorting their reactions to every bit of information had definitely been the roughest part of the day.
    “How do you do it?”
    She sipped at the cup and relaxed a little. “Do what?”
    The engines hummed and they lifted off.
    “Stare into the face of evil and weigh the evidence when you know they are guilty.”
    “Guilt is not always the actual crime. Cruelty is far more of a concern to me. A good man may carry guilt with him for his actions, but a cruel man revels in them and shrugs the guilt away. We are here to find the difference between the two.”
    “That is one helluva difference.”
    She finished her tea and got up to refill it. She carried the pot over to the table and his cup appeared out of the shadows.
    “We are leaving the atmosphere. Communications with the surface are off.”
    Sighing in relief, Jayd turned off her concealer. The belt and harness were