The Hanging Judge

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

People fear Judge Esmé Morell. They call her The Hanging Judge because she actually uses the execution chamber she travels with from colony to colony. She places market value on lives.

But she might come to regret that. Because not everyone fears her as much as she thinks.

In this insightful story, Hugo Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch proves that when it comes to space exploration, expect the unexpected.

"Rusch has style."

—Charles de Lint

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Jun 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201400767

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.   

Book preview

The Hanging Judge

The Hanging Judge

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing, Inc.

Contents

The Hanging Judge

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About the Author

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Hanging Judge

They called her a hanging judge, even though no one ever got hanged. However, Judge Esmé Morell did travel with an execution chamber deep inside the prison wing of her small ship. She used that chamber—and the threat of that chamber—more than all of the other judges on the circuit.

At conferences, at judicial review, she justified her position this way: The Anzler Colonies were still a group of colonies, loosely tied. None had great prison facilities, most didn’t have the resources to house prisoners. No one seemed to agree with her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t get in trouble, although she occasionally had to justify a decision.

She didn’t worry about it. Instead, she did her job—she went to the outlying colonies, stayed a month or two, listened to cases, passed judgment, and then came home for a month or two, got some sleep, and then repeated it all. None of it made for a great personal life, but it did make for a fantastic public one.

And one of the things she liked the very best was that moment at the space port, when she and her four armed guards stepped off the ship. Inside the small port—and outside Latica, they were all small ports—the crowds would often wait for her in the narrow passageway between the docking bay and the interior of the port. Those crowds would always watch her warily. Sometimes she could actually see the words, The Hanging Judge, as she walked past the gossips.

Everyone thought they had something to fear