The Coward's Option Read online

  I regarded her expression, which was direct and appealing and as far as I could tell, sincere. This really wasn’t a trap. This was a genuine overture. And the one thing I remembered about her, that still defined her for me after all this time, was that when she took on a project, she finished it. It was interesting, on an intellectual level, to consider just how she would tackle this one, if she had a chance.

  Even so, I shook my head. “You’re fooling yourself, Tasha,”

  “Am I? I know you read what I wrote about you. And you know that when it came down to my life, I did trust you.”

  “You trusted me,” I said, “to solve a problem when it was put before me. You trusted me to see your chosen image, apply it to our experience together, and know exactly what your fail-safe must be. You trusted me to get the message you had sent. None of these mean that I can be trusted to change, or even that I might want to. I appreciate the offer, Tasha. But I’m not friendship material. And I’m not hoping to be.”

  I slid out of my seat, thumbed the credit pad to pay for my drinks and hers, and aimed myself at the door, but given the cramped space between tables and the floor plan that required me to walk right past her in order to make my way to the exit, she had time to grab my wrist.

  She looked more stricken than angry. “Come on, Andrea. This can be the way to something better. You don’t have to always try so hard to make the world see you as a bitch.”

  I gave her a sweet smile before pulling my hand free.

  “And yet,” I said, filling my words with venom, “how extremely fortunate for you that it was the one word that best summarized our relationship.”

  She averted her gaze, and I made my way out.

  The Coward's Option

  Griff Varrick was a ruddy and furtive man, whose wooly red hair sat centered atop his egg-shaped head like a thatch of moss. He had at some point since his recent conviction for murder taken a swing at one of his guards, not incidentally a man who had before the arrest been a friend of his. As a result considered dangerous to himself and to others; so for this conversation he’d been given a neural block that reduced him to a state of temporary quadriplegia, more confining than any known chains. The layer of fat he’d picked up during his months in confinement had nothing to do but sag.

  He said, “I don’t want to die.”

  Counselor Andrea Cort’s expression, marked by thin eyebrows that tilted inward to meet with only a slightest gap of pure tension over the bridge of her nose, betrayed not an ounce of sympathy for his plight. The one lock of hair she kept long hung loose over one chiseled cheekbone, bisecting that side of her face like a slash. As uniform she wore her usual severe black suit, more formal than any her superiors in the Dip Corps actually required outside of courtrooms, with the addition of tight black gloves she’d adopted to ward off the chill that somehow found its way into even the warmest rooms of this embassy to a planet that was exceptionally miserable and frigid. In her ten days on Caithiriin she had already overheard and ignored one muttered comment to the effect that these adjectives described her as well. She would never have admitted it, but it had secretly pleased her.

  She told him, “You shouldn’t have killed somebody.”

  He grew louder, more insistent: “Do you have any idea how they execute people on this planet?”

  Cort wondered how Varrick could imagine she’d been working on the case this long and not found out. “I don’t see how it’s relevant.”

  “Slow death by crushing, that’s how. They strap you down and lay a flat board over you. Then they put a basin on top of that and let water dribble into it, a little bit at a time. It gets heavier with every drop. They say it takes hours before you even feel the weight, hours more before it starts to hurt, hours more after that before breathing becomes a problem, hours more before bones start to break. They say I might live five days, in agony for three of them. Three days, Counselor.”

  Cort sighed. She was not a monster, despite a carefully-cultivated image to the contrary, and she was absolutely vulnerable to the terror and desperation on the other side of the table. But she was also a realist. “I’m not saying I don’t feel sorry for you. But the matter’s been settled. You’ve run out of legal options.”

  “I refuse to die that way.”

  “Oh, well,” she said mildly. “You refuse. Is that how it works? Very well, then. Now that you’ve specified you refuse, I should let the locals know that you feel that way, and we should be able to clear this misunderstanding right up.”

  His trapped eyes widened. “Is this a joke to you, Counselor?”

  “No, Mr. Varrick. Your feelings are understood, but irrelevant. Unless you have information that casts doubt on the result, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

  “And you take pleasure in that, don’t you? You…bitch.”

  And that, the epithet that ended so many of Andrea Cort’s professional interactions, should have been the end of it.

  She was ready to walk out, and end the final conversation Varrick was scheduled to have with any human being before being turned over to Caithiriin hands.

  She began to stand.

  Then he said, “Wait—”

  * * *

  The only reason Varrick was still in human custody at all, this many months after his conviction, was the same one that, under most interspecies treaties, allowed human beings charged of serious crimes on alien-held worlds to remain under the care of their own species until all legal remedies were exhausted. Cort was the last of those legal remedies.

  The custody issue was a minor mercy, reciprocal to most species that had diplomatic relations with the Confederacy. Locals weren’t always expert in the care and feeding of human beings whose crimes were too serious to warrant protection under the principle of diplomatic immunity. In many cases they would have done any amount of damage to a human prisoner without meaning to, just by subjecting him to the same prison environment as one of their own kind.

  In the case of the Caith, who preferred near-freezing temperatures and had an atmosphere only about a tenth as dense as what humans prefer, Varrick would have perished of hypothermia or suffocation long before the verdict was read.

  Nobody on either side disputed the man’s guilt, not even Varrick himself. By the time of his arrival on Caithiriin, Varrick’s career had already involved three prosecutions for petty thievery from his fellow indentures, and a number of incidents of attempted robbery from the indigenes of the worlds where he’d been assigned. Thievery was in his blood, that’s all; it was something he did not possess the will or the character to stop doing.

  Caithiriin, a low-prestige assignment where a number of diplomatic careers had gone to die, should have been his last chance. But even there, driven by whatever motivates a man who cannot live unless he’s taking what’s not his, he’d started slipping out at night to loot a local holy site of its relics, and had with competence unusual for him gotten away for this for weeks on end before local authorities discovered the thefts and posted extra security to stop him. On the idiot’s very next trip, surprised by the presence of a Caith guard where there had been no guards before, and where an intellect of his limitations had just naturally assumed that there would be no guards ever, Varrick had simply killed the creature with a blow to the head from a sacred figurine that was now profaned forever from its momentary use as bludgeon, thus adding blasphemy to his array of more serious crimes.

  Being a compulsive thief and an idiot, he hadn’t figured that the new security precautions installed by the Caith would now include holo cameras to record every move on the grounds.

  It was a petty, stupid, obvious crime, committed by a petty, stupid, obvious man, who never should have been inducted into the Corps in the first place.

  The Corps had erected the usual legal barriers to trying him by local laws, going so far as to assure the locals that his betrayal of the service merited a life in prison already. But there really wasn’t any defensible reason short of the irrelevant humanitarian
grounds why they weren’t obliged to let the locals have him.

  Cort’s task, a mere formality at this point, had been to handle the final review, the last-ditch effort mandated by treaty to find some loophole that might free him. She hadn’t expected, or found, any procedural or diplomatic grounds for appeal. There was simply no point, principled or perverse, in even trying to prevent the Caithiriins from executing him.

  With that conclusion, she had looked forward to lying comatose in a bluegel crypt for the transport back to her home base, the cylinder world New London; but Varrick, utilizing the one last right of defense that remained to him, had asked to see her one last time. And so, this pointless exercise. In truth, she’d expected little. Most people who’ve exhausted their legal options, not just in capital cases but in every kind of proceeding from the smallest suit on up, continue to believe that they can still affect the outcome if they just keep talking. This would be nothing more than the No, wait, waitphase, the last desperate bargaining of the trapped man who honestly believed that his own story, the story that he honestly believed the most important narrative ever written in the history of the universe, could ever possibly end like this. Surely, the hind-brain reasoning goes, there had to be one more twist! A surprise ending! A pardon! A last-minute charge to the rescue!

  The hind-brain has never been an expert in legal procedure.

  * * *

  In any event, now that she’d gotten to the inevitable you bitch moment, and the useless wait that came after it, Cort was free to leave.

  “I am sorry for you, Mr. Varrick, but if that’s all there is—”

  From the crafty expression that suddenly flashed on a face not built for expressions of great intelligence, Varrick still believed that he had one card left to play. “There’s an alternative.”

  “That alternative,” she said mildly, “was not to kill anybody.”

  “Don’t get high-and-mighty with me, Counselor. You’ve killed.”

  Yes, she had. Once as a child, once in the line of duty, two more times her superiors in the Dip Corps didn’t know about. Cort was well used to having her history thrown in her face, and was if anything darkly amused by having it done by people with no other cards to play. “I’m not the one whose fate is at issue here. I’m giving you thirty more seconds to interest me.”

  “It’s going to take more than thirty seconds to explain—”

  “I didn’t say you only had thirty seconds to explain. I said you had only thirty seconds to interest me. Start and give me a reason to keep listening. You’re now down to fifteen seconds.”

  And of course, now that the door he’d kicked open was once again in danger of closing, panic struck. He rushed through what explanation he could without pause, the words racing after one another like refugees. “Look it up. Whenever it’s one of their own convicted of murder, they present the poor bugger with a choice. They can choose to be executed or they can choose to undergo this treatment they have, that supposedly fixes them so they don’t kill again.”

  Cort felt an unwelcome prickle on the base of her spine: the sign of unwanted interest in a problem that might keep her here, on this monochrome world of frost and darkness, where even the sealed habitats kept warm enough to satisfy human beings still felt cold by sheer association with the landscape outside. She was well aware how illogical this was; after all, the temperature outside her home base, the cylinder world of New London, was the absolute vacuum of orbital space and much colder than anything Caithiriin had to offer. But New London still possessed the warmth of a place she was used to, and Caithiriin was an unlovely place with nothing to recommend it but a task she had found simplistic and unrewarding. “That sounds like an urban legend, bondsman. Nobody’s ever mentioned it to me.”

  “It exists. It’s not used often, but it exists. Like I said, check it out. I’m not making up anything.”

  “I’ll check it out,” she assured him. “But if this option exists, why didn’t you mention it before?”

  “I was, whaddayacallit, keeping it in reserve. Hoping the case wouldn’t go as far as it has. Hoping you’d find some procedural reason to ask for a retrial. But now that I’ve got nothing left to lose…” He paused, unable to shrug, but communicating the same nothing-to-lose sentiment with a flutter of his eyebrows. “The bastards never even offered it to me. At least, you owe it to me to ask the goddamned question, why.”

  Cort refrained from telling Varrick that she owed him nothing. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  But it wasn’t the thought of saving his life that drove her.

  It was another simple question, which she found far more disturbing.

  * * *

  Cort had never been impressed with any of the Confederate ambassadors she’d met in the course of her travels. In most cases they had struck her as bureaucratic place-holders, mediocrities granted titles and positions that conferred the patina of expertise without ever quite requiring it. She had in her time known one ambassador whose idiocy had almost started a war, and another whose total lack of interest in his job had left him spending much of his day inebriated in his quarters, while his runamuck staff proceeded to turn his tenure into a series of diplomatic incidents.

  She was so far not extremely impressed with Ambassador Virila Pendrake either, but then hadn’t expected to be. The Caith were not a major race who merited the best the Dip Corps could offer, but an unprepossessing little civilization that possessed only three borderline habitable worlds, all in one solar system, and a total population of no more than about thirty million, not even enough to fill a minor human city. They barely existed, diplomatically; they only possessed a place in trading circles because of some of their substantial innovations in information-processing technology. Posting here was therefore for beginners like the fresh-faced indentures who constituted most of the staff, outright embarrassments like the larcenous Varrick, or those who had risen only so far in their careers and would never ascend any higher, a group in which she included Pendrake.

  Meeting and dealing with Pendrake had not given her any reason to alter her preconceptions. The woman was a tight-lipped, orange-complexioned prig whose nose and chin came to points, and whose professional demeanor seemed to testify nothing more than the aggrieved impatience of a woman whose life had known little but disappointment and was now an exercise in counting down the years still remaining on her Dip Corps bond. It was a completely different form of unpleasantness than the severity Cort found useful to cultivate in herself, which she liked to consider a tool of her profession. But then, Cort was a prosecutor, and had use for a fearsome reputation. Pendrake was an ambassador, which meant that at least part of her job was to be ingratiating…and Cort had yet to see her manage that trick. The woman had brought up Cort’s own controversial legal status three times in the course of their very first briefing—and not to clarify the information, but as an attempt at pre-emptive intimidation, which appeared to be the only management tactic she even understood.

  She was about to find out that Cort was better at it.

  The embassy lounge was a lonely place that consisted of a few round tables for gatherings, a dartboard, a chess set, and an immersion tank filled with topical euphorics that didn’t look like they’d been filtered of pollutants any time recently.

  Pendrake was at the least of the offered entertainments, a holographic boxing simulator calibrated to a setting so low that trading punches with it was less like sparring with an opponent than beating the crap out of a weakling who didn’t even know enough to protect his face. Given Pendrake’s powerful arms and rock-hard shoulders, more appropriate for a soldier than the likes of an ambassador, maybe that was the very point. The simulated figure moaning with every bare-knuckled blow had been programmed with the face of a certain Dip Corps commander, known for the malicious delight he took in banishing mediocrities to low-prestige positions: a commander who just happened to be her direct superior.

  Pendrake didn’t meet Cort’s eyes when she walked i
n, but instead threw a groin-punch that made the projected image squeal in breathless agony. “You done with him?”

  “For now.”

  Another punch. “I was hoping you’d wrap it up today.”

  “Your man in there holds that he wasn’t given a sufficiently zealous defense.”

  “Sure he does,” Pendrake grumbled, directing fresh assaults at her target’s face and chest. “A guy like that thinks the defense should always be faulted, by not being eloquent enough during the summation. Your honor, look at this poor baby. Sure, he killed his Mommy and Daddy, but we need to take pity on the orphan!”

  Cort ignored the ancient gag. “I don’t believe the summation to have been the problem.”

  Pendrake turned away from the cowering, bloody image without bothering to pause the program – which, nevertheless, did not take advantage of her lack of attention to score any strikes on her unprotected form. “Oh?”

  “Varrick maintains that the local legal system offers an alternative punishment that you’ve failed to explore. My initial inquiries confirm that this is indeed the case. My question to you is whether you mounted your defense without first bothering to learn all his options…or whether you had some other reason for keeping him, and me, ignorant about them.”

  Pendrake stepped away from the simulated enemy, which sputtered out and contracted to a lone dot before blinking off. “What are you implying?”

  “I never imply, Ambassador. I just come out and say. When I ask you how this failure occurred, it’s only to determine what form your dereliction of duty took.”

  Pendrake wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “It wasn’t dereliction of anything. The Corps holds itself to a higher standard. Indentures who commit serious crimes on alien soil put all of us at risk, and aren’t entitled to any easy out the locals let slip into their law books.”