Perdition

by Scott McKay

  And Reese eventually cultivated a relationship with Bernard Grace, the city prosecutor of Principia, which led to the latter offering him a job as a state-advocate. His portfolio contained mostly cases involving violent crime, but also a few public-corruption cases involving some more stringent investigation, which he found particularly rewarding to his career and exceptionally compelling of his time and effort. He even managed to adjudicate a couple of cases which involved, in the vocabulary of the city prosecutor’s office, foreign influence.

  Specifically, Reese found himself faced with a ring of child traffickers who presented themselves to orphanages in Principia as representing a wealthy family in the eastern city of Millmead, on the Oriole River not far from the seaport city of Port Harford, which had large agricultural holdings and was interested in training young unfortunates to manage that land and the family’s burgeoning commercial interests. But with some concerted investigative effort, Reese’s team built a case that the children taken from the group homes under that fraudulent story were being exported to Uris Udar. The team even identified a ship carrying the children to that savage land, though the ocean steamer Lockhart somehow slipped out of port and avoided interception by the Navy before it disappeared into the Great Sea, and it hadn’t resurfaced even six years later.

  The case turned out to be a sensation in Principia, as criminal cases involving children always aroused the interest of the broadsheets, and anything involving the exotic and brutal Udar always attracted media attention. Reese’s quotes appeared in all the Principia papers, including the Peace Party standard The Conciliator, the most read of the capital’s broadsheets, and even in the opposition Principia Herald.

  Though his investigation wasn’t as successful in identifying the leaders of the criminal conspiracy, Bloodworth did manage to get a Bill of Suspicion on a merchant named Barles Kendall, who was known as an importer and exporter of goods, and who operated a small fleet of ships engaged in the ocean trade out of the port of Principia. Kendall’s trial was something of a circus, in which his defense counsel produced documents showing that Kendall had actually leased Lockhart, which he owned, to a Thosian company engaged in the olive oil trade and therefore had no knowledge or control of any aspect of its movements or cargo.

  The jury refused the conviction of Kendall, which created no minor source of outrage among the populace, and Reese resigned from the city prosecutor’s office. His resignation letter, which was published in all the broadsheets, apologized to the children his investigators couldn’t save and to the people of Ardenia whom they couldn’t protect from what Reese called “the oozing slime of the Southman barbarians bent on stealing our babes and our culture.” He said in the letter that to successfully secure the nation from the Udar threat would clearly require more talented protectors than himself, and thus he was stepping aside so that such men could be found.

  And then Reese disappeared from public view.

  Interestingly, so did Barles Kendall. He sold his import-export business and his shipping fleet, then liquidated his real estate and other holdings into gold, silver, and currency. Kendall then went into retirement and seclusion. No one ever saw him again, not even the purchasers of his assets. Rumors abounded as to his whereabouts, and something of an urban legend developed as to what had become of the sizable cash fortune Kendall had taken with him into the unknown.

  It was said that the man had departed Ardenia for Uris Udar, or that he’d been killed and his fortune stolen, or that he’d joined the monastic Order of St. Archibald and was thus spending his days meditating on mountain peaks in the Baylor Range southeast of the capital. There was no particularly convincing evidence to support any of those stories, and the public demand to account for his whereabouts waned quickly. It was considered a good thing that Kendall’s enterprise, tainted as it was by the allegations that he was involved in selling Ardenian children to the Udar, had been sold off.

  But a couple of years later, there was a rash of disappearances of Ardenian scientists, inventors and cultural figures, and the Barles Kendall case was rekindled in the public’s mind. It was assumed the Udar had something to do with those cases just like they had with those children.

  This time, Parliament was moved to act. It created the Army-Navy Office of Special Warfare and tasked that office with putting a stop to whatever nefarious acts had accounted for the disappearances. A famous retired Navy admiral named J. Allen Sayers was named to head it, but the Number Two man in the new agency was Reese’s old boss Abraham Dees, now an Army general.

  And very quietly, Reese Bloodworth was hired in the Office of Special Warfare’s counterintelligence unit, without any specific portfolio or stated responsibilities. He just had a job working there, but with no salary appropriated in the office’s budget.

  It was all quite clandestine.

  But for the next four years there had been interesting developments the public could perceive.

  For example, there was the Principia club owner who perished in a sizable early-morning explosion at his establishment, a tragedy blamed on the gas oven in the kitchen. When Principia’s fire department was able to finally douse the blaze, investigators from the city constable found evidence to substantiate another urban legend; namely, that this was the much-whispered-about Udar Club, a secret hedonistic gathering place where patrons engaged in sexual practices of the savages held in great disfavor by Ardenian society. Those practices, though socially unacceptable in Ardenia, weren’t illegal, though. What was illegal, were it true about the Udar Club, was the rumors about women and children drugged and kept there against their will and trafficked through the club on the way to Uris Udar.

  This was no longer a rumor following that explosion, for in the basement of the burned-out facility investigators found a frightening sight: several cages which had recently been occupied by human captives, equipment for holding people captive, even instruments of torture, and a supply of marwai, the psychotropic Udar concoction made from hallucinogenic cactus and poisonous berries, which was illegal in Ardenia due to its effects of robbing people of their free will.

  Somebody had blown up the Udar Club, ostensibly to free its captives and put it out of business, but the investigators couldn’t tell whether it had been hit while it was in session. Only one body, that of the owner, had been found.

  And then there were the ships mysteriously exploding in harbors in Principia, Port Harford, Beacon Point and Port Excelsior. Nobody could quite understand the reason, as there didn’t seem to be a ready cause for any of them to blow up. Investigators suspected some sort of bomb had gone off near the hull of the ships, but there were no eyewitness reports of a naval shelling in any of the cases. Each of the ships was owned by somewhat shadowy corporations that, as the broadsheets investigated, were under suspicion of being involved in the Udar human trafficking trade.

  The fascinating ordeal of Martin Shearling was another indication that something different was going on. Shearling, an inventor from Perseverance who had earned fame and a small fortune in creating a portable machine that would rapidly heat up food by passing electric current through iron coils in an enclosed space (he called it a Fast-Roaster), suddenly disappeared while he’d been working on another invention, a device that would use electrical impulses to amplify sound in concert halls, sports stadiums and other venues where it would be useful.

  Shearling turned up, a week after his disappearance, at the train station in Admiral’s Bay, boarding a locomotive for home. He was somewhat bedraggled and clearly out of sorts, and the local constabulary stopped him. When he was identified as the famous inventor who’d gone missing and thus questioned, he invoked his right to silence and said, “It’s over and it’s nobody’s business; I’m fine and I want to be left alone.”

  This hardly tamped down the interest in Shearling’s case, but the Ardenian national authorities issued a statement that, as the inventor didn’t wish to report a crime, there was no cause for further investigation. Rumors circulated that
he’d been rescued, and those rumors only increased in volume when four bodies were found in barrels at the Admiral’s Bay city dump four days later. All four had been shot in the head, and their bodies showed signs of having been worked over with blunt instruments. But most importantly, all four were Udar; this was known because all four had burn-scars in the center of their backs, an unmistakable sign that they’d undergone the bilayo, the Udar rite of passage committing its votaries to the service of the fire-god Ur’akeen.

  It was posited in the local broadsheet The Navigator that the dead Udar were related to Shearling’s disappearance and potential rescue, and one member of the Admiral’s Bay constabulary was quoted as saying that was its theory of the case. But there was an immediate pushback from the Sweetwater Provincial Attorney’s office and the Parliamentary Investigative Bureau, insisting that no crime had been committed where Shearling had been concerned. No one was particularly convinced by that insistence, but it did tamp down reporting of the issue, and the case of the four dead Udar went into the unsolved bin.

  And then, most recently, there was the case of Repperton Blythe, a brothel owner in the southern port city of Dreadwick, who was found blown to bits along the shore of Amber Bay just two weeks ago. Blythe, a known criminal who had been publicly caned in the Dreadwick town square for having physically abused the prostitutes working in his establishment, and who had spent three years impressed into naval service for having murdered a man over a card game, had been suspected of Udar sympathies and involvement in the human trade. But the bomb that made him less than the sum of his parts was of an exotic design, according to investigators, and one of three Udar men who surrendered themselves to the local constabulary confessed that it was a device of their construction intended to destroy St. Angela’s Hospital. The governor of Amber Bay Province, who had loudly and repeatedly proclaimed his priority for wiping out human trafficking through Dreadwick’s seaport and in the lower valley of the Rambledown River at whose mouth the city sat, had been committed to St. Angela’s for a broken hip suffered in a motorcar accident of suspicious nature, and the Udar confessor said the bomb was aimed at finishing the governor off.

  The story got juicier from there, because according to the Udar savage, it was Blythe, whose brothel was located just a block from the hospital, who was to deliver the bomb to the basement of St. Angela’s; but something had happened to him before he could do it. The Udar said it was the Gray Demons who got to Blythe, and he and his two accomplices surrendered to the local authorities rather than allow the Gray Demons to get them.

  A few days later the three Udar “escaped,” only to be found the next week, tied by the necks to a pier at the Dreadwick wharf, their throats cut from ear to ear.

  It was that curious incident which occasioned the meeting between Bloodworth and Dees in a private room of the Bawling Hound, a dive bar along the wharf in Dunnansport, where business matters had brought both.

  “I don’t have long,” said Dees. “I’m on the train back to Principia in an hour for that crucial meeting we’ve discussed. But I did want to get an informal review of the Dreadwick operation from you. Seems like an incomplete success.”

  “Agreed, boss,” Reese replied. “We intercepted the bomb before it could be armed, we got just about everything out of Blythe we could have, then we arranged a colorful demonstration for our southman friends in a safe place outside of town. All of that went perfectly.”

  “Then they surprised you.”

  “They did. We expected them at the wharf attempting to board a ship out of there, or at the train station lighting out for Port Excelsior or Summerwood. What we didn’t expect was for them to surrender to the constable.”

  “These weren’t quite the varsity, I take it.”

  “They made a good bomb, I’ll give them that much,” said Reese. “Assuming it was these Udar and not our old friend.”

  “Dan Gale?” asked Dees.

  “I’m not sure,” Bloodworth said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Dan Gale was the name of a man Bloodworth and his colleagues had been hunting for quite a while. He was, Bloodworth thought, the head, or one of the heads, of a group of Udar spies called the Train-Riders, so called because they traveled all over Ardenia making mayhem. Much of what Gale and the Train-Riders did was kidnappings and disappearances, and they followed a similar pattern. The victims were usually inventors or scientists, people who had knowledge of technology the Udar could use, or highly attractive young women. Dees and Bloodworth both knew the enemy was a lot less backward than the average Ardenian perceived; Dees had been howling publicly about that for a long time, only to find deaf ears among the country’s political class. But Gale and the Train-Riders were suspected of bombings and an occasional assassination as well, and the Dreadwick operation wouldn’t have been out of character for him.

  Dees motioned for Bloodworth to continue.

  “As to the operational side, we’ve certainly seen better,” said Bloodworth. “It seems when Blythe met his end on the beach, they lost their nerve and figured they’d be able to invoke rights with the civilian law authorities. It was awfully unusual.”

  Dees furrowed his brow. “Don’t assume that was a mistake,” he said. “You might consider that this was an attempt to make our counterintelligence operation public. What did he call you? The Gray Demons? Where did he get that?”

  “That’s months old,” Reese said, chuckling. “Remember that business in Port Harford? The ship? We let one of them go to tell his tale to his friends, and that was apparently what he came up with. They’ve been calling us that ever since.”

  “I see,” said Dees. “The problem is now you’re going to be known by the public as well as the savages. That means politics will intervene.”

  “I understand, General, but I don’t think it could be helped,” Reese said. “I have fourteen men. That isn’t enough to cover a whole city. And putting out the word to the authorities in order to catch a few Udar…we’ve already recognized that’s not how we want these operations to go.”

  “Correct,” Dees said. “I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying we might have to rethink where we are with these operations going forward. And in any event, you’re going to be getting a new task.”

  “Name it,” said Reese. “We’re ready.”

  “For now, I want your team down here, and in Barley Point,” Dees told him. “I have a plan for the savages who want to invade along the lower Tweade, and it’s going to require a combination of ruthless violence and the quiet touch in order to carry it out.”

  “Blue Pox?” Reese asked. Dees raised an eyebrow.

  The Office of Special Warfare had coordinated with the Navy Office of Force Protection in developing a top-secret laboratory to study the dread hemorrhagic fever, known as the Blue Pox because of its signature manifestation, with an eye toward its potential weaponization.

  The Blue Pox had a history of causing havoc among the nations of the world, and particularly of the nations across the Great Sea. Leria, particularly, had been for centuries decimated by occasional outbreaks of the Blue Pox; so much so that Ardenian trading vessels had been turned away by fear of the disease’s spread. Outbreaks had caused massive mortality not just in Leria, but also in Thosia, Taravel, the Thengreve Archipelago, and even Cavol over the past several centuries, and terror of its spread had prevented the trade between Ardenia and those countries.

  That was true until a few decades ago, when Ardenian medicine had invented a vaccine for the Blue Pox. Implementing that vaccine for Ardenian naval personnel had been a trial-and-error nightmare, but eventually it had been perfected. Once it had, practically everyone in Ardenia had been issued the vaccine, and so had the citizens of most of the nations across The Great Sea.

  So far as Reese, or anyone else in Ardenia, knew, no one in Uris Udar had been vaccinated against the Blue Pox.

  It would thus be a potentially devastating problem for the Udar if the disease were to break out among their pe
ople. Those infected with the Blue Pox were contagious within a day of contracting it, but the disease incubated for somewhere between two and five days before symptoms manifested. From there, it progressed very quickly, beginning with loss of appetite and then a quick outbreak of large, blueberry-colored pustules on the skin, then violent nausea and diarrhea, then internal bleeding and finally a shutdown of all biological systems, all within three to five days of the pox appearing on the skin.

  It had been discussed that to weaponize the Blue Pox against the Udar could debilitate if not annihilate any military force brought against Ardenia, and therefore the Navy had opened a wing of its unit based in Port Excelsior devoted to immunizing Ardenians against the disease and experimenting with Blue Pox as a method of unconventional warfare.

  The prospects of the biological weapon had been very promising. A year ago a captured Udar pirate had been injected with a serum containing the Blue Pox virus, and then quietly landed on the island of Aros, southeast of the port of Bak Jayen, where a somewhat isolated Anur operated a fishing village (along with the occasional attempts at piracy in Watkins Gulf) without a great deal of trade with the mainland. Within three weeks the Anur had been almost completely wiped out, so total was the infection. Only one Udar remained alive when a Marine unit quietly landed on Aros to survey the effects of the serum. She was an old woman who responded to interrogation by explaining that the infected pirate had been very active in the nightly sexual escapades of the Anur, and if he was contagious with the exchange of bodily fluids he might have personally infected well more than a dozen people within the first week before showing symptoms and succumbing to them. By that point the freely sexual Udar would have multiplied those exposed to the disease by several times the original vector.