GETTING HERE FROM THERE
Twenty Years Under Jurisdiction
“Blood Enemies” is the seventh novel in my series “Under Jurisdiction,” which debuted in April, 1997. There’s been a lot of story between then and now; let me try to summarize what you might like to know before you head into this one.
My protagonist, Doctor Andrej Koscuisko, arrives at this novel after a troubled career as a State-sponsored judicial torturer—a Fleet Inquisitor—and years spent in struggling against the very system he exemplifies, earning him the reputation of a renegade of sorts.
When he graduated with honors from a prestigious medical college’s school of surgery, his father told him it was time he did a stint of service to the State—the Jurisdiction Fleet—before he took his place at the head of the Koscuisko familial corporation. That’s traditional; and Andrej comes from a very traditional culture, rather parochial compared to worlds under Jurisdiction taken as a whole. He’s an important person in his extended family, and by extension in his system of origin—the Dolgorukij Combine. He’s the inheriting son of an old, rich, profoundly influential family; the posting he takes to render service unto Caesar must reflect the prestige of both his family and the Combine entire.
There is only one posting that’s acceptable to his father, under the circumstances: that of Chief Medical Officer on board a Fleet cruiser-killer class battlewagon, traveling from system to system keeping the peace, monitoring compliance with Bench rules and regulations, supporting the rule of Law and the Judicial order.
There are, however, significant drawbacks to the posting. Fleet serves an old system of government, its authority—and tax base—threatened by its increasing inability to maintain civil order and serve the common weal of an ever-expanding number of worlds under Jurisdiction. The government is getting a little anxious, increasingly authoritarian; and has instituted a formal—and increasingly ferocious—program of state-sanctioned torture as an instrument of social control.
As can be expected of a system of government based on law and order above all else, the Writ to Inquire, and everything it entails, is documented and controlled at every imaginable level. Candidates for the Writ must be accredited physicians, qualified medical professionals. As might also be expected it’s not all that easy to find people willing to embark on a career as a professional torturer, especially people drawn exclusively from the medical establishment; so when the Bench grants the Writ to Inquire it also grants the rank-position and perquisites of Ship’s Surgeon to all of the Bench’s torturers: Chief Medical Officer, Ship’s Inquisitor.
Andrej fought the assignment as fiercely as he could, but filial piety is the founding principle of the Dolgorukij social order. Andrej’s family—and Andrej’s position in it—make his behavior a highly visible reflection on the respectability, even the morality, of the entire Koscuisko familial corporation. In the end he does as he is told.
Then it gets worse, because during his orientation course of training and indoctrination Andrej makes the life-shattering discovery that there’s a savagery within himself he’s never experienced before.
Along with this unexpected passion for torture, and an unexpected genius for using it to find things out and punish transgressions, comes an almost equal genius for getting sideways of people in authority: for making trouble, just trying to find a scrap of decency and justice within the cold hard iron system of Judicial inquiry.
Andrej’s a stubborn man—he was raised to be an autocrat, after all—and one would almost say that he makes enemies more easily than friends, especially enemies in high places who are accustomed to people doing as they’re told with deference and dispatch.
Over the course of years Andrej keeps trying to do the least harm, struggling to control the expression of his native will for dominance in Secured Medical as he does so. The more prisoners are referred to him, the more field assignments he’s sent on, the harder and harder it becomes for him to hold on to his psychological balance; but he never stops fighting Fleet, the Bench, himself.
It can’t go on forever and it doesn’t. During the course of the novel “Hour of Judgment” Andrej finally determines on the only course of action left to him. He won’t be Bench torturer any more, even though refusing to perform his statement of work is mutiny. Even a Ship’s Inquisitor—granted Bench immunity from sanctions for almost any crime—is vulnerable to a Tenth Level Command Execution.
If there’s anyone who knows what that can mean it’s Andrej Koscuisko; but if he’s going to die, there’s someone who needs to die first, and Andrej’s just the man to make that happen.
The Bench has chartered a very small number of special agents, Bench intelligence specialists, to read between the lines—wriggle between the cracks—serve the rule of Law as individual operatives with powers of extraordinary discretion. One of them, Karol Vogel—the protagonist of “Angel of Destruction”— has been losing his faith in the rule of Law for years; and it’s his own innate sense of justice, rather than any concern for Andrej, that leads him to protect Andrej from the consequences of his crime.
Vogel also shares with Andrej the fact that someone highly placed in the Bench administration is determined to see Andrej dead, for reasons totally unrelated to the murder of Captain Lowden. Partially because Andrej needs to consult a specialist for help, partially because Andrej needs to see his lover and his child safe and protected when the time comes that his crime is discovered, Andrej goes home—for the first time in years—to take care of business.
While he’s there he meets unexpectedly face-to-face with an old, implacable, and by now insane enemy from his earliest days at Fleet Orientation Station Medical, who reveals to him the existence of a plot to frame the entire crew of the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok for a nonexistent mutiny to cover black-market racketeering at high levels of Fleet’s administration. In order to ensure that he gets the proof on Record in his capacity as a Judicial officer Andrej has to get back to the Ragnarok as soon as possible, narrowly avoiding being murdered himself on his way.
They almost don’t let him back on board, reasoning that a man who has as much to lose as Andrej Koscuisko—who is, after all, a Judicial officer—is unlikely to back their plans to remove the ship to some safe haven while the legal niceties of the situation are sorted out. He convinces them that he is on their side, taking an unusually active role in shooting their way out of a trap.
Now the Ragnarok has committed “mutiny in form,” and Jurisdiction’s Fleet is distracted by political developments adverse to the rule of Law and the Judicial order. This is Andrej’s chance to steal the bond-involuntary Security slaves with whom he’s forged a strong mutually supportive relationship over the years.
Bond-involuntaries are a special class of criminals condemned to participate in the process of Inquiry under extreme coercion from an implanted governor in their brain; all that Andrej has to do is pull the governor, and then smuggle them all out to a safe haven in the sanctuary of Gonebeyond space. It’s an illegal and complex surgical procedure: but he’s Andrej Koscuisko.
Everything runs about as well as Andrej could have hoped until the very last, when Andrej’s Chief of Security—Brachi Stildyne—realizes that there’s one thing Andrej hasn’t arranged: someone to accompany the Bonds who knows why they act the way they do, how to protect them from their own savagely thorough conditioning, what they need to un-learn to be free men again.
Before Andrej Koscuisko Stildyne didn’t know what “love” was, let alone unrequited sexual passion that matured over time to selfless dedication. Now Stildyne goes away into Gonebeyond with Andrej’s troops, and when Andrej realizes what Stildyne’s done and why he did it, Andrej realizes that he owes Stildyne the biggest apology of his life.
So Andrej follows them into Gonebeyond. That doesn’t exactly work out as planned, because he got Karol Vogel to take him, and Vogel has parked him at Safehaven Medical Center where he’s been in protective custody—more or less under house arrest—ever since. Safehaven needs doctors, especially ones with Andrej’s experience and surgical qualifications; Andrej needs protection, because Gonebeyond is full of people with very good reasons to want him dead.
He and his Security-in-exile, Stildyne included, have exchanged brief, necessarily impersonal, messages over the past year; but Andrej is determined to make his apology face-to-face.
As the action of this novel opens, therefore, we find him at Safehaven trying to get away, and his life—as well as that of Stildyne and the stolen bond-involuntaries—about to get involved, by accident, in a desperate mission to locate and destroy a Dolgorukij terrorist society determined to cleanse Gonebeyond of ethnic impurity in the name of the Holy Mother and the Angel of Destruction.
Seven novels, over twenty years. Man! What can I say? When Harper Collins published “An Exchange of Hostages” in April, 1997, I knew I had a lot more to get done before the story was over. There was a complex personal story to work out with Andrej Koscuisko from start to finish, and an entire dystopian government to replace.
There were significant unalterable events in the time line, even then: someone Andrej loved had been killed in an assassination attempt; Security Chief Stildyne had a long painful road to travel from being a casually brutal survivor of unspeakably mean streets to becoming a human being capable of concern and empathy; Andrej himself had not one, but two really significant moral conflicts to resolve.
Those were the fundamentals of my story as I understood it, twenty years ago. There’ve been refinements, evolutions, complications as the novels have gone by. There are things I wish I could go back and tweak, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. I wish I’d made more notes as I went along. I wish I’d gone east, rather than west, with some non-load-bearing plot element or other. I wish I’d written that line differently, or used a fresher adjective, or added a paragraph, or deleted one.
The novel you’re going to be reading or listening to is one that I’ve known was waiting for me all along, though it doesn’t look much like I thought it was going to on my first way through. I think it kicks butt harder, further, and faster than any of them since “An Exchange of Hostages.”
I take a tremendous amount of pride in this book. I hope you find it’s worth the read.