A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet by Ron Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

reduced to an endless procession of shuffling feet, snuffling noses and downcast eyes, a kind of tattered mechanism depositing an endless stream of coins. Since it had been Judikha’s habit, from the very first, to stride purposefully across the room, never taking her eyes from her master, toss his share of her earnings onto the blotter, pivot on her heel and march back through the door, it is easy to appreciate how she came to not only attract Pilnipott’s attention but excite his suspicions as well. No one could be that self-assured without having something to hide.
    Initially, the Fox did not quite know what to make of Judikha’s behavior. In the normal course of things he would have attached considerable doubt to actions far less overt than those of this scrawny, large-eyed girl. It was the scale that bothered him. He was far more accustomed to the detection of barely perceptible signs of guilt: an infinitesimal tic, a minute shift of an eye, a nanosecond’s hesitation. Judikha’s gestures were broad, coarse and overt. Too, anyone with something to hide wouldn’t charge through the door as though they owned the place and toss a fistful of money onto his blotter with same negligent—even supercilious!—gesture that would be used to fling a few coins to a street beggar. However, when he entered her accounts next to her name, he noticed that the numbers were never suspiciously less than he expected them to be and, surprisingly, were often more.
    Not knowing what to make of her, he had her punished once or twice just as a precautionary measure. It was not until she was nearly seven years of age did Pilnipott realize what she had been doing.
    One evening, in counting Judikha’s weekly tithe, he noticed—and noticed for no particular reason other than that they were her coins—that one of the bronze ten-pfennig pieces had two peculiar wedge-shaped cuts in it, as though someone had twice jammed the blade of a knife into its edge. There was no cause to take special notice of this anomaly: he merely glanced at the coin for perhaps a quarter second longer than usual before tallying it with the others. However, when on the succeeding Friday he saw a ten-pfennig piece bearing vaguely familiar wedge-shaped marks, he remembered the disfigured coin he had seen the week before. Curious , he thought, and was about to place the coin with the others when another, more disturbing, even horrifying, thought came to mind. Taking from his pocket his own penknife, he opened its blade and made a third notch in the rim of the coin adjacent to the others. He looked at it for a moment, wondering why he had done something so atypically capricious, then tossed it into the growing pile and returned to his accounting, trusting to a genius even he sometimes failed to fully understand.
    Once again he had forgotten the strange coin until, on the following Friday, he saw it lying in the palm of his hand. It seemed to be sneering at him. By Musrum’s bristly balls! , he thought with more sincere reverence than any psychic eavesdropper would have thought.
    When Judikha found herself unexpectedly summoned to The Fox’s office, she stood before the great desk, placidly looking at the fat man behind it with enormous, dark, vaguely disinterested eyes. There was nothing at all furtive, conciliatory nor cowed about her gaze and this impressed The Fox not a little. He knew that she knew perfectly well why she was there and that she could maintain an expression of such calm, clear dispassion impelled an unfamiliar sense of pride. She had no ready excuses, no wary mask of guilt—she was wasting nothing, waiting upon his initiative.
    “Ah, Judikha,” he began, wondering why he began so hesitatingly. “You know why you are here.”
    “If you say so, sir,” she replied. It should have sounded insolent but did not. It was just a polite statement of fact.
    “Are you suggesting that you don’t know why you are here?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Then would you