Prisoner of Conscience Read Free Page B

and since Kaydence was the same generally clay-colored sort as the rest of them, it made him go all feverish in the cheeks. Well, clay-colored like Robert, at least. Their officer was so pale he was nearly blue in the face. And Toska was a little butter-colored, but Salom hominids were supposed to be that shade of sun.
    “Sat down to make my shot, sir. Didn’t stop moving. Probably just bruised, though, your Excellency — don’t make me take off my boots, sir, please, there’s a hole in my boot-sock — ”
    As if Kay thought pleading would do him the least bit of good.
    Andrej Koscuisko merely tilted his head fractionally to one side with one of his most killing “Oh, but you know better than that” looks, and snapped his fingers.
    Toska and Robert knew what was expected, and moved in to implement their officer’s will and good pleasure.
    There was no standing between Koscuisko and the welfare of his Security assigned, and whether or not said Security would rather not have an un-mended undergarment exposed before all Infirmary had nothing to do with it whatever.
    It could be worse.
    Security Chief Warrant Officer Caleigh Samons could be here.
    Their officer was only interested in the well-being of the skin beneath the stocking, not the condition of the boot-stocking itself, but let Caleigh Samons once find out that the officer had seen one of her troops out of uniform and there would be the very Devil to pay.

    ###

    Command and Ship’s Primes, Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Scylla , never met more informally than this — and in the Captain’s office, rather than in meal-hall. There were allowances to be made for the state of exhaustion the officers shared with the rest of ship’s assigned resources, but Andrej Koscuisko was too tired to make them, and he wished that his fellow Primes — and Ship’s Command Branch officers, as well — would just go away and let him sleep.
    “ — carapace hull,”Ship’s Engineer was saying in between sips of hot shurla. “We lost most of the fiber-loads. Secured Medical as well. Significant damage to the maintenance hull, but the atmosphere hasn’t been compromised, we were lucky.”
    Wait, wasn’t that good news, about Secured Medical being stove in? Andrej almost thought that meant something. Surely it would be significant once his brain started to function again, after he had slept perhaps five shifts. No, that was only forty hours. Perhaps six shifts, then.
    Ship’s Intelligence paused on his way to his lounger to offer Andrej a flask of rhyti, talking as he went. “Prelims from the rest of the Doxtap Fleet indicate that we actually did comparatively well. We only lost three flyers in action, Fleet’s quite pleased. Goes without saying Eild is a little depressed about the whole thing.”
    Andrej accepted the flask of rhyti with a nod of thanks. Of course Eild was unhappy. The planetary population of Eild had lost its final bid to retain autonomy; and if recent history was anything to go by, they had only want, repression, and relocation to look forward to now. Relocation for selected portions of the population, at least, scattered, dispersed among sixty-four eights of Bench-integral worlds.
    Not as though there was much left of the population of Eild by this time, and it had been an outpost world to start out with — like most Nurail worlds, with typically a hundred and twenty-eight grazing animals to every Nurail soul.
    It was still a lot of people.
    Even after starvation, plague, and war, there were surely sixteens of eighties of Eild Nurail to be moved. To be removed. To be raped from their native soil and abandoned in alien worlds where nobody would even speak their language.
    “That’s as may be.” Captain Irshah Parmin’s voice was dry and uninflected, clear indication of how he felt about the use to which his Command had been put. Irshah Parmin was a professional Fleet Captain whom Andrej had grown to respect deeply over these three years of assignment to