Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  “And it’s not like there aren’t anomalies. Things humans are still arguing about and trying to explain and reconcile. The veil is perfect. It was made by Beings with infinite power and knowledge. It’s human understanding that is still catching up with what has been left for them to see. What’s really out there … well, you couldn’t exile humans to a world and leave that visible. They’d kill themselves trying to get to it. The veil is the perfect cover to keep them hidden behind, keep them busy. It’s like we’re in a giant puzzle box.”

  “And we don’t have the resources or the cooperation to breach it,” Ash said.

  “Even if you did, I don’t think breaching is on the table,” Gabriel replied. “There’s no way out – the best we’re hoping for is a sort of a breathing hole.”

  “So why are the Demons looking for the edges?” Ariel asked.

  “We’re not the only ones who could use a breathing hole,” Ash said in a low voice.

  Gabriel pointed at her in agreement. “Exactly. And Mercy 1 may not need to go much further before it starts beaming back information that helps them get it.”

  “By your own admission, Archangel,” Aunt Agñasta said, “the Demons might have their own agenda in doing so, but they would also keep the human race alive – yes?”

  Gabriel gave a humourless laugh. “That’s true,” he admitted unhappily. “The Demons might be the last best hope for humanity at this point. I think they’re the only ones with the gumption to go out and try. We – the Angels – have failed at every turn. Part of that was our own blindness, a stupid adherence to the old ways,” he laughed again. “Old ways that the new Angels barely even understood.”

  “We humans have had centuries to get our act together, sir,” Jarvis said. “I hardly think the blame need lie on the Angels or the Demons. We do perfectly well on our own with no help from either side.”

  “Most of the problem was just that,” Gabriel said, staring at the notebook moodily. “Not enough immortals to change the course of mortal events. Not enough authority. No spank. And, of course, there was this overwhelming urge to focus on terrestrial problems. We did it, and humans did it. We stared into our own navels. Oh, you humans have done your best, and it’s just proven impossible. You made it very clear you’d rather go on arguing about stuff down here. There’s no money to be made in space. Even this world just about wiping you out didn’t convince you to leave. Not that there’s anywhere for you to go at this point. Getting Mars and Venus habitable again would be an even bigger job than cleaning Earth up.”

  “So we just have to make do with what we have here on Earth,” Ariel said, characteristically keeping things as positive as she could.

  “Right,” Gabriel agreed.

  “And leave the salvation of the human race to the Demonic space programme,” Ariel added brightly. Gabriel and Aunt Agñasta shot her amusingly identical dirty looks. “Well,” she went on bluntly, “they seem to have overcome human self-interest and they’ve got the setup for it. If they can wake up the Destarion and get her to work for us, even get another hole in the veil for us to breathe through, with our help … would that be so bad?”

  Gabriel opened and closed his broad mouth for a time. “I don’t imagine things will turn out well,” he said finally, “if the exile ends and Earth is restored, and the Demons introduce the Pinian Disciples as their latest allies.”

  “If the exile ends,” Ash said. “If it doesn’t, aren’t we more or less obligated to do everything we can to ensure that humanity survives, even if it means selling our souls to the enemy?”

  “Literally?” Ariel added.

  “Okay,” Gabriel said, putting his hands palm-down on the coffee table. He didn’t need to lean particularly far forward to do so. “I think we’re veering again. Yes, there are a lot of different possibilities here. Ideally, if Mercy gains access to any new information about the veil, it would be great if we could use it ourselves. Pass it on to our contacts outside. Stormburg, if he’s still alive. And yes, it would be fine if we could reinstate that gentlemen’s agreement and work together with the Demons, a necessary evil. That would certainly appeal to my traditional sensibilities, not to mention my driving ambition to get through this in one piece with minimal conflict and all the help I can get.”

  “You just don’t think it’s going to be possible,” Ash said. “On account of the Demons having this unprecedented shot at owning the Disciples.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel agreed darkly. “Yes, that’s what I think.”

  “Which leaves us where?” Ariel asked.

  “It leaves us doing what we can to gather intel on the Demons and their operation,” Ash said. “We’d do that if we were preparing to kill them all anyway. I search in my world, you search in yours, Roon searches in hers,” she nodded at her sister, who nodded back. “We get whatever data Gabriel and his Angel and Imago friends have–”

  “Imago,” Gabriel corrected halfheartedly.

  “Imaygo, Imago,” Ariel replied.

  “And on the basis of that information we decide whether working with the Demons is workable, or if taking them out before making our own play is the better alternative,” Ash looked at Ariel. “How long have you been waiting to use that ‘Imaygo, Imago’ line?”

  Ariel smiled whimsically. “Longer than I’m willing to admit in front of the Archangel.”

  “Pinians,” Gabriel sighed.

  SLOANE, WORKING (PHASE ONE)

  Augustus Sloane did enjoy his job. He was rarely called out more than once or twice a year, but it certainly made a change from mice and hamsters.

  His current work was almost over. It was a standard extraction and punishment, the sort of thing that was only necessary one time in a hundred, one time in five hundred. The best thing about it was that he didn’t need to actually extract anything. The research was in. Torture didn’t work for finding information. Torture, in fact, only worked for one thing.

  Torture worked to make Sloane happy.

  He stopped what he was doing occasionally to cut in a few interactive cues, stepping away from the table and cleaning his hands, bringing over a saline infuser and painkillers. These interactives would be seamlessly merged out of the finished product and only called up when his patron – watching with the man’s wife, or husband, or sibling, or mother, or whoever the actual target was – stepped in and told him, ‘in real time’, to stop. The target would have given up the information needed, made his or her amends for whatever betrayal he or she had done, and the purpose of the torture would have been served. And nary a hair on the target’s head would have been touched. What was seen at that end, long after the fact, could be tailored according to what happened there and then, not here and now.

  The show went on, though. The show always went on. It was never going to stop, by the time Sloane was called in. He always played through to the end, and left nothing behind. His only concession to the fantasy of an alternate ending was the interactives. With those, his patron could create any ending deemed appropriate.

  Sometimes, his patron let the target see the rest. See the other alternates, see the ending. See through the illusion and realise that there had never been anything else. Other times, the target was allowed to believe the victim was fine. There were interactives for that too, cut in from before the festivities began. Usually, once it got to the point where Sloane was involved, the target was not long for this world anyway, and would serve only as an example. Sometimes, though, the target was released with his or her illusions intact, and never saw the victim again. Of course.

  None of that was Sloane’s business, though.

  Taking these little breaks was like a palate cleanser. It allowed him to take a breath, pull back and see the bigger picture, prevent the numbness that came down after a few hours. It was elegant.

  “You must be a pretty pathetic sociopath,” the victim surprised him by speaking up after they’d both been resting a little while. To be honest, Sloane had thought the guy was all screamed out, and
usually the amount of blood-loss he’d suffered would take the gumption right out – at least until such time as the nutrient drips did their job.

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  The victim laughed, spat blood, grimaced, and spat up a spongy shred of something else, something from inside him. “To survive ’76,” he said. “Did you watch your betters apologising and dying? When did you realise you weren’t going to make the cut?”

  Sloane continued wiping his hands, took a drink of prune juice infused water, and smiled widely. “I’m not sure whether I should be flattered or insulted by your assumption of my age,” he said. “I was eight in ’76. Do you know who the youngest person was to die in the Atonement?” he didn’t wait for the victim to speak, not that he was likely to anyway. “Husuf Phan, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia. He was twelve years old, and by all accounts a profoundly troubled but highly intelligent boy. It was never really confirmed whether or not his parliament may have faked his declaration, and then medically induced a coma and then quietly smothered him a few weeks later. The next oldest was seventeen, quite an age gap if indeed–”

  “I’ve changed my mind, go back to cutting on me.”

  Sloane paused in astonishment, and then laughed aloud. “Alright,” he said, tweaked the recording devices and checked the drips one last time, then put down the cloth and picked up his scalpel. “When I saw the Atonement happening, of course I thought I might go,” he went on idly. “I’d never done anything but the obligatory small animals and pets – ah, so clichéd, I know…” he leaned in and began carefully carving away the large pectoral and shoulder muscles and tendons.

  It was cripplingly painful, of course, but as long as the victim remained immobilised – and as long as Sloane avoided the major blood vessels – it wasn’t fatal. The victim screamed hoarsely, his voice rising and cracking until it was a mindless animal noise like a panicking pig. Sloane continued, even as the victim shrieked and begged for him to stop, to go back to talking, to tell him more about the Atonement. He couldn’t stop at this point, it would be a waste.

  This was an easy and relatively quick piece of work, useful for demonstrative effect. He finished up his cuts, dropping the quivering strips of meat into the nearby solvent tub. Then he pinched the skin and flesh together with medical adhesive, tape and staples, leaving maimed and shrunken ruination behind. In the unlikely event that he was left to heal, the victim had to be aware that nothing in his body would ever be as it had been. Not anymore.

  “Don’t, don’t, stop now, stop, don’t,” the victim panted through his raw windpipe.

  “Of course, I thought I might be one of those who were taken,” Sloane took his account back up as if the twenty-minute break hadn’t occurred. “Who knows, right? It was clearly the Will of God at work. I imagine even the best child sometimes thinks he deserves punishment.”

  “W – what…?” the victim said blankly, clearly remembering little of the dialogue that had gotten them here.

  “I did kill my foster sister, though,” Sloane reminisced “When the Atonement started. Just in case I didn’t get another chance,” he smiled. “She wasn’t quite two years old. Not much of a challenge. Still, when I saw that the wicked people of the world were beginning to fall, I took my chance.

  “A lot of criminals tried saying the words when they got caught. Did you know that? They pretended to go into comas. The first couple actually got away with it – I think one of them actually dosed himself with something to make it stick – but in the end, there was no faking it. You can’t fake a coma, and you can’t fake the Will of God.”

  “Please–”

  “I never tried,” Sloane confided seriously. “It would have been cheap. It would have been hubris. I did say the words, though. Every night, after they took me away and put me in Shadyvale. I said it like a prayer. Quiet-like. Just between me and God,” he smiled. “But am I unhappy I wasn’t taken in the Atonement? Absolutely not! Obviously, there was still work for me to do here…”

  He paused as one of the recording and interactive devices gave a soft chime, signalling an incoming call. This massively complicated the flow of things and he usually avoided distractions at all costs, but this particular channel … well, only higher-priority communications would be coming through on this one. That meant any problems with the flow of things could be safely ignored.

  He wiped his hands again, stepped up the victim’s medication until his face sagged and began to grey, and moved a polite distance away before activating his interface.

  “Sloane.”

  The warm, rich voice on the other end of the link was that of Mercibald Fagin. “Hello Augustus.”

  “Mister Fagin.”

  “An opportunity has arisen,” Mister Fagin said. “You remember the Model, the Mechanic and the Murderer.”

  “I do,” Sloane said, trying to hide the eagerness in his voice. “Is it time to begin?”

  “Yes. Let’s call it phase one, shall we?”

  “Yes,” Sloane echoed, surprised at the grateful warmth he felt. “Yes, Mister Fagin.”

  “We have arranged a place for you on a team of builders,” Mister Fagin went on. “Part of a special contracting group that will be working on renovations on the target’s property. The renovations will provide you with a unique, and unlikely to be repeated, opportunity to prepare the ground.”

  “Yes, Mister Fagin.”

  “We have specs for a security back door,” Mister Fagin went on. “Electronic, technological, as well as physical mechanisms for the systems they have in place,” the man spoke with a strange, yet somehow charming awkwardness when he discussed technology, as though he was working from a lexicon he hadn’t quite got the hang of. “I understand you usually like to take care of all the details yourself, but this is a particularly delicate case. You will play your part and learn what you can while setting up the back door.”

  “I understand, Mister Fagin.”

  “Perhaps you do and perhaps you don’t,” Mister Fagin said, but not in a stern or judgemental way. “You’re preparing to move against a decorated officer of the ASEAN Union Special Forces, and against a mechanical genius of formidable reputation, not to mention the fact that the target’s nobility and money and position brings with it a certain profile. The Model also makes for extra security. And there may also be a … nascent artificial intelligence … integrated into the Mechanic’s work.”

  “Yes, Mister Fagin,” Sloane said quickly. “It was–” all in the initial briefing, he was about to say, but understood on some level that there was a line between professional enthusiasm and getting smarmy. “It was something I was wondering about,” he concluded, “how a thing like that…”

  “Once you have completed your work, you will go to ground and wait for us to send you approval to proceed,” Mister Fagin said. “There are three main criteria and we will inform you when they are met. Nevertheless, you will want to know them.”

  “I appreciate the information, Mister Fagin.”

  “The Mechanic must complete her work,” Mister Fagin said. “The Model must be out of the country. And the Murderer must be firmly entrenched. Those are the three prerequisites for phase two. You will not have the chance to affect any of these criteria. Our own capacity to encourage them is severely limited, since invisibility and deniability are key. But there they are. There will be some warning, but not much. You will complete your preparations, and then you will wait. And maintain readiness.”

  “I understand.”

  “Phase two comes with special conditions. You are to extract information if you can, but be cautious. You are to operate only between dawn and sunset. All other tasks cancelled.”

  “Very well. And conditions of phase one?”

  “Phase one is purely civilian in nature, your work within the house must absolutely go undetected. It has been contracted into different streams and you will have the responsibility of uniting them all into a workable back door, but there are likely to be unforeseen
security measures and complications.”

  “Very well,” Sloane repeated.

  “I’m sending you an appointment time with the surgeon, your flight details and some final data we’ve collected on the house,” Mister Fagin said. “Your preparation will include the usual identity-protective steps, and will begin immediately. Between phase one and phase two you will need to perform a second surgery, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you your job. The contract begins soon and you cannot miss your first day.”

  “Yes, Mister-” the line went dead with a second soft chime. Sloane disconnected the interface and sighed slightly, looking around the carefully-draped room. It was a good setup and still had a solid two days of usability left in it. As did the slumped body on the reclining chair.

  The information packets came through, heavily encoded. There were lots of them.

  He scanned the material briefly. There was a renovation in the works, as he’d already been told, entailing further security and communications integration into the existing estate-wide network. A truly formidable network, the product of immeasurable family wealth, ASEAN Union Special Forces equipment and permissions, and a genius inventor with the possible aid of an artificial intelligence…

  It was glorious.

  Parts of Fagin’s organisation – departments within departments within departments, layers so deep they didn’t even have names – had been working on a solution to the challenge for some time already. They’d been tracking the Archangel, and as soon as he’d made contact with the Model, the Mechanic and the Murderer, the wheels had begun spinning.