Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

“She couldn’t have been thrown there,” the first officer said. “The angle–”

  “No, she wasn’t thrown there,” the firefighter said, and pointed again. “That garage. Where we got in. It’s like a slaughterhouse in there. I don’t know what these people got themselves into, but it’s definitely a police matter now.”

  “Yeah,” the first officer admitted grudgingly. “Not much point speculating. We’ll have to wait and see what the medical report says on her and we’ll get the arson guys…” he turned to the firefighter. “Did you find anyone else in there?” he asked.

  The firefighter nodded grimly. “Two so far, but they were deeper inside the building, in the burned area. We’re still working our way through to the undamaged wing, we haven’t had time to check around the side of the property,” she gestured. “They’re … bringing them out now.”

  More firefighters emerged, and more stretchers were taken to the ambulance. The police sighed and added to their case codes, preparing to make this into a multiple-fatality arson investigation … and possibly something much worse than that. Although the police couldn’t see how it could get worse than it already looked.

  The last rays of the sun faded from the sky.

  And Gabriel emerged.

  YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME AGAIN

  She arrived back in Perth on Saturday morning, shortly after midnight on Friday, leapt directly into a car provided by the agency, and had the driver take her straight to the hospital.

  By the time she arrived, it was too late. It had been too late by the time she’d even heard the news and arranged her flight home. She’d known this, on some desolate level of her subconscious that Roon and her endless silent industry had once warmed.

  “I’m so sorry,” the night duty doctor said, leading her through the corridors to the morgue. “By the time we arrived, she’d already lost so much blood … we stabilised her for a short time but she just slipped away in the ambulance. She was dead on arrival. To my knowledge, she didn’t speak before…”

  Ariel smiled faintly. “She wouldn’t have spoken,” she said. “Are the others…?” she stopped for a moment, unable to speak, then gathered around herself the same mantle of lofty calm she used during shoots. “Agñasta, and Jar – Silas?”

  The doctor nodded. “We have them all together,” she said. “I’m afraid the police investigation required some special examination and … well, I understood you had signed a cooperation agreement…”

  Ariel nodded. She’d been communicating with the police, the hospital, her sister. They’d agreed on full disclosure – well, full … neither Ariel nor Ash had mentioned the part about them being secret reincarnations of immortal religious icons in hiding, but they’d done what they could to share what information they had about their enemies and who might be responsible. You didn’t get to be inheritors of a dynasty like the Vandemar name without collecting enemies, secrets … and of course, the spectre of their parents’ deaths once again raised its head in the family history.

  All of this, obviously, immediately put the investigation beyond the pay grade of the local police, and a full ASEAN Union criminal investigation had to be opened. Experts would still be some days – maybe weeks – in gearing up, reading the information as it came in, and relocating to Perth to begin their work. Until then, there would be complete suspension of Vandemar Trust and Vandemar Holdings accounts, and a cessation in all of Roon’s and Ariel’s business dealings. Well, the former would be concluded anyway, as soon as the news was released. Her partnerships with the assorted conglomerates and corporations of the world were at an end. They would be arguing over who owned which patent and who controlled which development rights for another fifty years, but that was a problem for the attorneys to keep themselves busy with.

  Ash would be extracted from her mission in the Floods and sent home. Probably with added security to ensure she didn’t set off on her own personal payback operation, but that depended on how she reacted to the news. Going rogue, or whatever Ash insisted it was called … Ariel knew it was called going rogue. She was also fairly sure Ash’s outward response would be as calm as Ariel’s had been. It was the only sensible course.

  Because all of this cooperation and sharing was a courtesy. The Vandemars had at least as much capital and favours to their name off the books as on. Allowing the Union and the police to tie their hands above the table left plenty of actions available to them away from the watchful eye of the authorities.

  “Yes,” she responded to the doctor’s careful questioning, “we’re taking every step to ensure this investigation runs smoothly and the guilty parties are brought to justice.”

  “I understand your … family attorney, or…” the doctor clearly struggled to express something she was completely uncertain about, while refraining from asking questions she didn’t know how to formulate. “He’s already here. He arrived shortly after eight and threw a lot of weight around … a representative of some kind?”

  “Gabriel?” Ariel asked. She hadn’t contacted Gabriel, or anyone else in the house. The bodies of Jarvis and Aunt Agñasta had been identified, according to the police. That didn’t leave anyone else to talk to.

  “Yes,” the doctor said gratefully. “Gabriel. I wasn’t sure if…” if I’d just hallucinated him, Ariel filled in the gap.

  “He’s a special advisor from the Vandemar Holdings people,” she said. They stepped into the elevator and descended.

  “Yes,” the doctor said, her voice still relieved. “Yes, I think that’s what he said.”

  I’m sure, Ariel thought, feeling – as much as she could feel anything in the vast, cold emptiness that now seemed to be the only thing inside her – a little sympathy for the doctor. The Archangel’s glamour was a difficult thing to take.

  She wondered how many of the emergency services people had passed out in the process of Gabriel’s entrance. She supposed it depended on how many of them were muirosiacs. Sooner or later they all would have gotten woozy, although Ariel had never been quite clear on whether or not everyone would always be knocked out by Gabriel’s presence. Aunt Agñasta hadn’t fainted, but that was Aunt Agñasta…

  She swallowed the thought, let it slide back into the emptiness. She felt like a fragile glass shell, a molecule-thin outline of a woman with a gulf inside her that could not be contained, could not be borne. Like a black hole, it should be making her implode, but the gleaming, so-fragile shell was holding, for now – and protecting, incidentally, everything in her vicinity.

  Oh, Roon.

  Gabriel was waiting in the morgue, bunched in a corner away from the tables and stretchers and storage freezers, his great heap of sooty wings blending into the shadows and courteously allowing the doctor to pretend they didn’t exist. He didn’t speak, avoided her gaze as she walked to the shrouded figures. The doctor started to say something, then stopped as Ariel glanced at her. Ariel felt the crystal shell that she had become tightening, tensing, vibrating on the edge of cracking. Perhaps the doctor felt it too. She’d probably felt it before. She’d done this, many times. Had seen the yawning void – had most likely been drawn into it a time or two, when the shell broke.

  Ariel’s shell was stronger than that. “I shouldn’t look at them,” she guessed, hearing her own voice bright and sharp in her ears. “I should remember them the way they were?”

  To her credit, the doctor didn’t flinch, and when she spoke it was with quiet composure. “That’s what I would advise,” she said, “yes. The two bodies from the fire are unrecognisable, they’re not much more than bones. Your sister has been autopsied and they did what they could…” she spread her hands. “But it’s your decision to make. I’ll leave you alone.”

  The doctor left. The cold inside Ariel gave a slow coil that reeked momentarily of envy. She would have liked to leave now. She would have liked to swap places with the doctor. At that moment, if she could have mastered her Pinian soul-journeying power and moved across into that other woman’s body, possessed her, pretende
d to be her, and hidden herself away for another two thousand years … if she could have done that, she would have.

  She wondered if this was how she’d felt the first time she went into hiding.

  “Do you think I should look at them, Gabriel?” she asked, her words sounding distant and alien. The cold coiled again, a weird rattlesnake curl as she gazed across the shrouded bodies of her loved ones at the hunched shape of the Archangel.

  “Do you want to hear from me right now?” Gabriel asked, his gruff voice sounding small.

  “Oh, I want to hear everything,” Ariel said. If she’d been capable of feeling anything, she might have been worried at the ice in her voice. “Everything.”

  She walked over to the larger, less-skeletal of the three shapes, and peeled away the cover.

  MERCY AND FURY

  By two in the morning Ariel was behind the wheel of the car she’d taken from the airport to the hospital, Gabriel folded uncomfortably into the low-slung back seat. He didn’t dare complain, even if he’d felt in a position to do so. He couldn’t remember feeling so afraid since the uncertain days after the veil had covered the world and the Angels had fallen from the skies. He had never expected to feel so frightened of Ariel – smiling, joking Ariel, who kept the other two centred – and that made it even worse.

  She’d given her driver the rest of the night off and arranged a ride home for him. This much, at least, was unchanged about her – she cared, she did the right thing by others, and that was why she was so loved. Then she’d gotten into the driver’s seat, barely waiting for Gabriel to pile himself into the back, and they’d accelerated into the bright orange-lit witching-hour streets of Perth, and that Ariel had vanished once more. The one from the morgue came back.

  They drove to the ruins of the Vandemar estate, silence between the front and back seats like the silence between stars. Finally, though, it was Ariel who broke it.

  “She’s not dead, is she? If what you say is true, she’s probably been reborn already. Or re-conceived. Whatever.”

  “Probably,” Gabriel said, after giving this a long moment’s reflection. “I don’t know how long it takes. I think there can be some length of time when there’s one Disciple between incarnations, sort of just … suspended, like a ghost between the remaining Firstmades. Before she goes into the new body. Sort of … temporary storage, before a new body shows up. Out of contact, of course, but still … present, in a sense.”

  “Yes,” Ariel said. “It … feels like that, I think. Although of course I could just be imagining it because of what you’ve told us and out of wishful thinking. Couldn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Gabriel agreed heavily. “Yes, that’s possible too.”

  “But I might also still be feeling her presence because she’s found a new human to be.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel repeated. He paused again, then went on unwillingly. “If she has begun her next life, and if she hasn’t come into full focus, then she won’t remember you. All of these intermediate human lives should come back to you when you’re full Pinian – aside from a lifetime that got cut out of the Second Disciple in the Fourth Century due to a soul-journeying incident … probably. I just don’t know.”

  “But to get us all to reincarnate together, and focus and remember everything, Ash and I need to die within … how soon?”

  Gabriel gave this question even longer consideration. “A week,” he said, “two weeks, maximum.”

  “You know that’s not going to happen.”

  “I know,” Gabriel said, surprised at how relieved he felt. “I don’t want it to happen. The whole idea was … well, it was fine as a very distant theoretical thing, but … no. No, it’s not going to happen, of course.”

  “What is going to happen, Gabriel?”

  “You tell me,” Gabriel replied cautiously.

  They drove in silence for an agonisingly drawn-out thirty seconds, the low purr of the sports car’s engine and the hiss of its tyres the only sound as Ariel accelerated not-quite-recklessly.

  “She’ll never be my sister again, will she?” Ariel said, distantly. “Even if we all die and start over. She’ll be born somewhere, and I’ll be born somewhere else. Maybe close by, but not from the same mother.”

  “She’ll always be your sister,” Gabriel said, and this time he felt no hesitation or uncertainty. “And more. Firstmades are separate extensions of a single being. I’ve never even had siblings – not that I can remember, anyway, although it’s possible I did, once upon a time … but I know it’s nothing compared to the Firstmade bond. She will always be your Sister. Or your Brother. Always.”

  Ariel drove again, silently absorbing this. This time the silence extended until they reached the taped-off and police-patrolled boundary of the estate. She pulled up, identified herself to the police, and Gabriel wound down his window and gave them a polite grimace as well. These were different police officers to the ones that had been here the night before – there were even some uniformed military and plainclothes specialists in attendance now – but word had clearly gotten around. He had to admit that his appearance, bursting from the smouldering entrance to the chapel wing slathered in fire retardant foam, had been … memorable.

  Ariel parked out of the way, and they sat looking at the wreckage, the pair of once-relatively-low extensions – chapel and carports – now the only parts still standing.

  “Looks like the upgraded fire prevention system worked well,” Ariel finally said, nodding towards the chapel.

  “Yes,” Gabriel agreed. “Everything is in one piece in there. Well … it was pretty hot, some of the electronics got fried, but most of it was in protective casing so–”

  “Would Jarvis and Aunt Agñasta have survived if they’d come to the chapel?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gabriel said. “The heat was a lot for a body to bear, and there wasn’t much air, even if the foamers and the seals kept the smoke down. And besides…” he paused.

  “The police said the intruders probably killed them while planting the bombs,” Ariel said for him.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said quietly. “That too. I called for them, for a long time before the fire started. Not that I think they would have heard even if they’d been–”

  “I didn’t think the garage had much safety stuff installed,” Ariel went on. “Roon’s workshop probably had some custom setup we weren’t even aware of, and she was always expanding into the next carport over. We were going to have to build a new one soon.”

  “The machine, Osrai, probably saved the workshop,” Gabriel said. “Although there were probably a lot of safety features Roon had put in there as well.”

  “Osrai?”

  “Sort of a master computer Roon apparently built,” Gabriel replied, inexplicably uncomfortable. “Artificial intelligence stuff, I don’t know. It sent me some messages in the chapel, told me everything was locked out – it was Osrai that got in touch with you, apparently.”

  “My handler said something garbled about a text-only message coming through on the jet computer,” Ariel said, sounding almost like herself for a moment in her surprise. “That was an artificial intelligence Roon had made?”

  “It might not have been a full artificial intelligence. It seemed a bit limited,” Gabriel said, then felt surreally uncharitable. “It said a lot of its network access was sealed off on purpose, because it wasn’t ready yet and Roon wanted to make sure it was safe. It seemed … sort of okay with that.”

  “It seemed okay with it?” Ariel glanced over her shoulder at Gabriel.

  He shrugged awkwardly. “It was also cut off by whatever the intruders did to prevent us calling out, getting the police over, all of that,” he said. “But I suppose it protected itself from the fire. I don’t know – I wasn’t in this chapel today. I went back to Lord John’s in the eastern sprawl, in case…”

  “In case we didn’t want you here,” Ariel turned back to the window, her voice going cold again.

  “Yes.”

  “Do
n’t worry,” she said. “This is still your home. And we’ll repair the rest. What about the intruders?”

  “The – sorry?”

  “The ones who came in here, planted firebombs all over the place, murdered my aunt and dear family friend, and then partially dissected my sister in the process of torturing her to death,” Ariel said. “Those intruders. Tell me everything.”

  “I – I did,” Gabriel stammered. “Ariel, I don’t know anything. The–”

  “They were humans, though,” she said, “not Demons? The chapel is still holy ground?”

  “Yes, it’s – no, they weren’t Demons–”

  “And not Vampires? Imago, whatever? They wouldn’t have been able to operate during the day, right?”

  “Right–”

  “What about Laetitia? What has she found?”

  “Ariel, she hasn’t found anything,” Gabriel said as firmly as he could bring himself to. “We know at the highest level who was responsible for this – it was the Demons, but of course they couldn’t operate directly – but as to who actually did it, who was doing the Demons’ dirty work for them, the police and special units have a much better chance of answering–”

  “Why not the Demons directly?” Ariel demanded, turning back around. Gabriel was unsettled by the stranger staring at him from Ariel’s lovely eyes.

  “Because Mercy doesn’t do this sort of thing himself,” Gabriel said, “and Fury … I don’t think Fury even can anymore. Fury is … not able to do this sort of thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Fury, last I heard, was pretty much entirely broken down by the whole teleportation thing they do,” Gabriel explained. “Technically alive, but barely mobile. I told you about that.”

  “Yes, you did,” Ariel said thoughtfully. “Alright. Where are they?”

  “What–”

  “I know, you also said they were too well-protected and well-hidden for you to find,” Ariel said. “Well, that’s changed, but our plan hasn’t, right? The plan was to burn the Demons and their organisation to the ground? Well guess what, that’s happening.”