Free The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown

her waist, tugging at it futilely.
    “And now we wait for the show to start,” Carew murmured.
    She looked at him. “I’ve never seen you this light-hearted before. I’m worried.”
    “I have a saying which I use in times of stress,” Carew said. “It’s this: reality is never as bad as you expect it to be.”
    Jed stared at him. “Great. What if they execute us?”
    Carew smiled. “They won’t, Jed.”
    The guards had retreated out of sight. Carew suspected they were not far away. The chamber was perhaps fifty metres wide, banked with seats, and directly ahead of them a long viewscreen looked out into space. Below the screen was a raised platform on which were five chairs – more like thrones – and a long table.
    Five minutes passed, then ten.
    “Why are they making us wait like this?” Jed complained.
    “Part of the softening-up process,” Carew said.
    Jed looked at him. “We’ve had it, haven’t we? Be honest, boss. This is it, isn’t it?”
    Carew thought about it, then said to Jed and Lania, “I’m not at all sure. There’s an old saying: I smell a rat.”
    “A rat?” Jed said.
    “A verminous rodent, once popular on Earth. To smell one was to suspect that all was not as it seemed.”
    “How can smelling a verminous rodent,” Jed objected, “mean that you think that all is not what it seems?”
    Lania snorted. “Jed, for pity’s sake.” She looked at Carew. “What do you mean?”
    Carew held up his fingers. “One, the authorities didn’t separate us – they’ve kept us together. Two, we haven’t been summarily executed, which is how trespassers on Vetch-held worlds are often dealt with. Three, all this... If you’ve failed to notice, this isn’t your usual criminal courtroom.”
    Lania muttered, “I’ll take your word for it.”
    “Jed?” Carew prompted.
    “Like nothing I’ve seen before,” Jed said. “But then it’s been six years or more since I was last arrested. Things might’ve changed.”
    Carew looked around the amphitheatre, considering the possibility that judicial procedure had undergone a transformation. He dismissed the idea. Something was not right with what was going on, and his inability to work out what was wrong disturbed him.
    A hatch to the side of the viewscreen sighed open and five robed men and women strode onto the platform and seated themselves behind the long table.
    They touched controls in the table-top and screens appeared in the air before them. They gave their attention to the screens.
    Carew leaned over to Lania. “It’s nice to see the faces of the opposition,” he said.
    “Who are they?”
    “Good question. I’ve no idea.”
    But his suspicion that this was not a run-of-the-mill judicial session was heightened by the figure in the centre of the five, seated on a chair raised slightly above the others, who wore a military uniform beneath his silver cloak. He was a tall man – attenuated, as if hailing from a low-gravity colony world – whose skull appeared almost inhumanly narrow; it gave him the appearance of the creature Carew had mentioned earlier – a rat.
    “For the record,” he said, “this session convenes at nine hundred hours on the thirty-second of St Jude’s, 1745, New Reckoning. Present are magistrates Dar, Matteo, Shor, Simmons, and myself, Commander Gorley.”
    The rodent-faced Gorley stared at Carew. “Session convened to try the following citizens: Edward Tracey Carew, fifty-five Terran standard years, formerly of the colony Temeredes; Lania Tara Takiomar, twenty-eight, formerly of the colony world Xaria; Jedley Neffard, thirty-five, formerly of the Pederson trading station, Perseus Sector. The charge is wilful transgression of Vetch space, unlawful landfall on Hesperides, Vetch legal territory.”
    The woman to the right of Commander Gorley leaned forward. “Further charges to be considered, pending.”
    Commander Gorley inclined his head. “These will be considered following the initial charge.” He