Angel of Destruction

by Susan R. Matthews

  “The Sarvaw freighter pilot returns to Rikavie, next born and second eldest. To Tyrell, and will almost certainly come back to Port Charid.” It was the clear implication of the message. The Malcontent would go to Tyrell with the Bench intelligence specialist and had the Sarvaw with him; from there they would quite naturally return to Port Charid to make a report, think, discuss, strategize. Investigate. “We can’t risk him realizing that he has seen you before. This was not planned.”

  He had no allowances for any such setback in any of his contingency plans.

  He had been sure of the Sarvaw.

  Dalmoss stood humbly waiting for direction, saying only, “What do you want me to do, firstborn and eldest?”

  A test of his faith in Divine providence, perhaps, a gentle reminder that it was through the will of the Holy Mother — and through Her will alone — that the Angel triumphed over the enemies of the Church. A mark of loving admonition.

  If only he could be secure in that.

  “Go tell Hilton Shires that you have been called to the factory at Geraint for a few days. Tell him you have asked that he step up to supervise the work crews on construction in your absence. As a temporary duty, and in light of his previous experience, Langsarik supervising Langsariks.”

  Fisner spoke slowly, but gained confidence as he spoke. Yes. Something was coming together. “We’ll think of something to plant the seed of Honan-gung in his mind. We’ll let him think that he has stumbled on information. Let him warn the Bench specialist.”

  The Honan-gung raid had been intended to force the Bench’s hand, to ensure that the momentum they were building up would not flag. Shires could help. He could warn Vogel about a raid, send Vogel into an ambush. If they took Vogel out, there would be no one for Chilleau Judiciary to send as a troubleshooter, and no further question about Langsarik involvement. The Bench would have no choice but to send troops to arrest the Langsariks instead. No more hesitations, qualifications, cautious investigation.

  It could work.

  The Holy Mother was merciful. She had sent this to show him the way. He was not a failure. He was the Angel of Destruction in Port Charid. She had as much as reached out Her hand to shadow his forehead in benediction. Fisner’s relief as he realized it was so immense that Dalmoss — looking at him with a quizzical if very small frown — would wonder about it, unless he distracted Dalmoss. Opening his heart to a subordinate was out of the question.

  “Come up with a pretext, and speak to Shires. We will send Pettiche to Geraint in your place.” He couldn’t afford to let Dalmoss actually leave; Dalmoss was his raid leader. Dalmoss had to remain on-site, if hidden; and they needed to get Pettiche out of the way, as well. Though there was only a relatively small, if real, danger of the Sarvaw recognizing Dalmoss if he saw him, there was a much greater danger that the Sarvaw would realize that he had seen Pettiche before, at Tyrell. “You will have to stay out of sight, after that. It will be tedious. But it should not be for long.”

  Brilliant.

  Dalmoss was right to salute him with undisguised admiration. “It shall be done, firstborn and eldest. I’ll send you my formal request for Shires’s temporary promotion within the day.”

  His mind had never worked so well, so quickly.

  Surely the hand of the Holy Mother Herself was guiding him, to the complete fulfillment of Her purpose.

  ###

  Kazmer Daigule stood at the side of Cousin Stanoczk in mute misery, his eyes fixed to the ground. The main docking bay at Tyrell Yards was splashed and stained with blood; he should have realized that it would still stink.

  It had been nearly two weeks.

  But the site had been secured and its atmosphere inerted, so that the bodies would be as fresh — their evidence as bald and horrible — when the autopsy specialists arrived as when they had been discovered, and they had been discovered a scant twelve hours after the killing had begun. Kazmer knew that, though he had not been told — the forensics people would fix the time well enough for Bench purposes.

  Still, Kazmer knew. Twelve hours.

  Three hours from Port Charid to the Shawl of Rikavie, traveling slowly in a freighter meant to present the appearance of being already almost fully loaded. Three hours on station. These people had all been alive when he had left, the alarm had been planned for ten hours after that, so the rescue party had arrived within two hours of the alarm and secured the site. He knew. Fourteen hours, at the absolute maximum.

  “Complete jumble,” one of the forensics people was saying to Cousin Stanoczk. “Here, have a look. At least five individuals, though we haven’t really bothered with the detail, at least not yet. One percussion grenade. Result, meat paste, with bone and bits of clothing. Sorry, had you eaten?”

  Forensics people saw horrors day to day, or at least they had too often in the Shawl of Rikavie. There had been Okidan, and one survivor. Kazmer thought he could remember hearing stories of at least two, possibly three raids, prior to that. He’d ignored the horror stories at the time, his mind full of Modice Agenis and his heart sure of Langsarik innocence — or had it been the other way around?

  “But you can type for hominid at a gross level,” Cousin Stanoczk insisted, after mastering an apparent wave of nausea. Of revulsion. “And I am responsible to the Church for it. Dolgorukij. Class two hominid. No?”

  Kazmer could not stop himself.

  He had to look around.

  There was the dock-master’s office, where torture had been done. Why? They’d had the security keys. There had been an inside man. Why had torture been done?

  “No Dolgorukij.” The forensics worker shook her head with emphatic conviction. “Nothing like anywhere near a Combine genotype, and the way the tissue got blended by that grenade we’d catch it if there had been any. Any at all. Maybe your Dolgorukij got away. There was a survivor at Okidan, wasn’t there?”

  She knew perfectly well that there had been no survivors here. She was just making conversation. Cousin Stanoczk shook his head in turn.

  “I don’t know what to say. Pilot. Let’s go have a look at the others, he must be here. The rosters all confirm his presence.”

  Cousin Stanoczk had called him only “pilot” since the Bench intelligence specialists had come on board the courier Cousin Stanoczk had secured for this trip. Kazmer didn’t think the Bench specialists were misled in the least, or that Cousin Stanoczk even cared if they were. Kazmer was grateful enough to be mere “pilot,” even so. As horrible as it was to be there, to see these brutalized and murdered bodies, and know that he had had a hand in it — howsoever indirectly — Kazmer could not imagine being able to stand if the others knew that he had been part of the raid. Part of the murders.

  He hadn’t really been able to believe it before. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. The Bench’s propaganda was as reliable as the word of a Dolgorukij; they could have been making it all up.

  He knew better now.

  These people had been done to death cruelly, atrociously, and for absolutely no good purpose. He shared the blame for it, because whether or not it had been his idea, he had been part of the raid. If he hadn’t been so sure that it was a Langsarik raid when he’d met the others at Port Charid, he might not have convinced them to go along with it. So he was more to blame than they.

  They’d believed him when he’d said it was Langsariks and that there would be no murder.

  He, and not any of them, was to blame for their guilt by association. It was just and judicious that he become the slave of the Malcontent, fit and fair that he give up his life to the Saint in partial atonement for his crime.

  He followed Cousin Stanoczk in silent anguish as his mentor, guide, master crossed the load-in dock around the corner behind the dock-master’s office. There were bodies there that had been checked and cataloged, laid out and arrayed for transport as evidence once the on-site processing was done; Cousin Stanoczk paced the long row thoughtfully, looking at the faces.

  Fourteen people.

&nbs
p; None of them the man Cousin Stanoczk was looking for.

  None of them Langsarik either, and Kazmer clearly remembered seeing a Langsarik on staff — the inside man. It had been part of why he hadn’t minded leaving with the raiding party still there. There had been a Langsarik. Kazmer had seen him. That meant that there could have been no cause for any force to be used to get at secure codes — any inside man worth his wages would have that information at the ready.

  No Langsarik.

  No Dolgorukij.

  Kazmer had seen the Dolgorukij, as well. Had recognized the man’s ethnicity. He wasn’t there.

  There was only one more place to look.

  Cousin Stanoczk looked up into Kazmer’s face. His expression was sympathetic and supportive, but not sympathetic enough. Kazmer heard no “You stay here and wait for me,” no “I’ll just go have a look by myself” from Cousin Stanoczk. That meant that he was going with Cousin Stanoczk to look at the last of the dead.

  It was part of his punishment, perhaps.

  Kazmer hadn’t elected the Malcontent to escape punishment — merely to escape becoming the instrument of unjust punishment of innocent parties. He couldn’t quarrel with Cousin Stanoczk about that.

  The Langsariks were innocent of any involvement in this raid, whether or not they’d found any Langsarik dead. These were brutalities possible only for hardened criminals to commit. The Langsariks had been pirates and commerce raiders and thieves, but never so criminal as to be capable of this. Whatever else Kazmer didn’t understand, he knew that one thing to be the truth.

  Kazmer followed Cousin Stanoczk into the dock-master’s office, where the bodies of the people who had been slowly murdered were segregated. Where they could be hidden safely away from any chance glance or encounter.

  The dock-master was there.

  He could not tear his eyes away from her face for a long moment. She had been so unwary. She had been confident, comfortable with her crew, in control.

  And had died so horribly —

  “No,” Cousin Stanoczk said, from the other side of the grim line of bodies. “I don’t see any Dolgorukij. Do you, pilot? Do you recognize any of these people?”

  He was to look at each and everyone. There was no particular note of gloating or sadistic pleasure in Cousin Stanoczk’s voice, but Cousin Stanoczk clearly meant for Kazmer to see each element of this atrocity as individual and plumb the depths of his indirect guilt as part of the price for the protection that the Malcontent had granted to him. Cousin Stanoczk himself did not tarry; he had turned away to engage the Bench specialists in the outer office, with his back to the torture room with its plundered safe and mutilated corpses.

  Fourteen people simply shot, five people tortured, at least five killed who knew how and then blown up with a percussion grenade — Kazmer hoped they had been killed and then blown up, and not been killed by the grenade itself —

  That brought the total up to twenty-four.

  There had been twenty-seven people. He remembered counting them. Three were unaccounted for. One of those three Kazmer could understand not being there, at least if he didn’t think too hard about it; if it had been a Langsarik raid the inside man — the Langsarik — would naturally have left, and not been murdered.

  It hadn’t been a Langsarik raid, so where was the Langsarik?

  But he had thought it was a Langsarik raid. Everything he’d heard or seen had only supported that assumption. They’d worn Langsarik colors. They’d used Langsarik names. Langsarik habits. Someone had gone to a bit of trouble to make it look like a Langsarik raid: so the Langsarik was dead, even if he wasn’t among the bodies.

  Kazmer hadn’t been mistaken.

  He’d been set up.

  Where was the Dolgorukij?

  Kazmer stared helplessly at the bodies of tortured dead, half-blind with confusion. It simply didn’t add up. It made no sense. And they could not find the body of their countryman. Or of Cousin Stanoczk’s countryman, because Kazmer himself was Sarvaw, and no Dolgorukij would claim kinship with a Sarvaw except in opposition to other people of even more alien blood.

  What kind of monster committed such crimes?

  Killing could be clean, when done by luck against an armed opponent in active resistance. Murder could be swift and simple, a quick knifing, a shot to the head, the snap of a neck.

  These killings had been done against people already disarmed, already helpless to protest against atrocity. Twisted rope. The slow cut. Blows from a club, a stick, a weighted baton. The mutilation of a living body, making grotesque sport with a man’s own gizzard and guts —

  Kazmer stared.

  There was no earthly explanation for such horror.

  And yet he knew where he’d seen it before, very exact, very precise.

  There was no Dolgorukij body.

  He opened his mouth to scream; but what came out was an animal sound, a wordless roar of outrage and blind fury.

  ###

  “Naturally it is of concern, who is responsible,” the Malcontent Cousin Stanoczk was saying. Garol and the Malcontent stood together with Jils Ivers in the dock-master’s office; Stanoczk had left Kazmer Daigule to consider the tortured dead. “But first one must find one’s countryman, and set his family’s anxiety at rest. Who knows? If he cannot be found, perhaps he’s still alive somewhere.”

  A slim enough chance, Garol thought, given what they were seeing. It was not merely grotesque. It was thorough. He never would have dreamed Langsariks could be capable of mass atrocity, but who was he to say?

  Could something have gone this wrong, this quickly, in a population trapped and despairing? Was he ultimately to blame for having trapped the Langsariks into an amnesty settlement at Port Charid?

  Then Kazmer Daigule, the Malcontent pilot who had brought them there, came roaring out of the inner chamber where the torture victims were; and flung himself headlong at Cousin Stanoczk, knocking him to the ground. Screaming.

  Shock froze Garol in his place for just long enough to hear some of what Daigule was saying — he thought. His Dolgorukij was passable, but his Sarvaw was shaky. Though the Dolgorukij dialect he’d been taught had been High Aznir, the swear words were less dissimilar than some of the other elements of the dialects might be. Kazmer Daigule was howling about a bitch and a mad dog; then Cousin Stanoczk — who had struggled onto his back on the floor in the moments it took Garol to react — planted his boot in Daigule’s belly and pushed, hard.

  Garol stepped out of the way and Daigule went up and then back down again. Cousin Stanoczk was up and on the pilot in one swift predatory lunge, shaking Daigule ferociously with his hands gripping Daigule’s shirt at the throat and shouting in turn. Cousin Stanoczk spoke High Aznir in his fury. Garol could tell exactly what Cousin Stanoczk was saying.

  Profane as well as mad, shit-eating Sarvaw, no one protects the blasphemer. Shut your filthy mouth.

  Daigule wasn’t shutting up.

  He had his hands up to Stanoczk’s hands now, though he wasn’t trying to get up. There was a wrenching note in his tone of voice that told Garol that Daigule wasn’t raving, as Cousin Stanoczk’s curse had seemed to imply; just insisting on something. There was the mad dog again, though Garol heard no more about bitches. Mad dogs, murderers, and a missal or devotional book of some sort. Maybe a counting string, it was hard to tell.

  Cousin Stanoczk seemed to be in control of the situation.

  Garol waited, to see what would happen.

  Slowly the Malcontent straightened up, releasing his grip on Daigule’s collar with what seemed to be a stern effort of will. It was hard to tell with Dolgorukij, but Garol thought that Stanoczk had paled. Turning his back on Daigule, Stanoczk raised his eyes to some point located halfway across the top of the doorway out into the load-in area; and when he spoke again, it was in plain Standard.

  “You allow your imagination to run away with you, pilot. The mad dog of which you speak has been dead for more than one hundred years. You are grasping at smok
e, to divert suspicion.”

  This was interesting. Garol sat down, deliberately drawing attention to himself with the action, just to be sure that they realized he was listening. He and Jils. He wanted to get through to Daigule very badly, but he wasn’t about to steal access after having made a deal — howsoever unsatisfactory — with Cousin Stanoczk.

  Daigule gathered himself to sit cross-legged, slumped at the floor and staring at the ground. “You say. But we know. They just went underground, Cousin Stanoczk, they’ve always been there. Waiting. Grant me at least the expert’s eye in the matter.”

  The story was beginning to sort itself out to Garol’s satisfaction. Whether or not he believed it was another matter.

  “Nobody is going to take such a thing the least bit seriously.” Oddly enough it seemed that Daigule had gotten through to Cousin Stanoczk, at least in some sense; Stanoczk sounded genuinely shaken. “You are afraid it was Langsariks, you wish to divert suspicion, you invent. What would the Angel be doing in Port Charid, what reason imaginable could there be? It’s too forced, pilot, it won’t do.”

  Daigule was shaking his head, though, rocking gently back and forth where he sat on the floor as if to give his insistence additional emphasis. “No Langsarik in the history of Langsariks ever did such a thing, but the mad dog was always accustomed to. For piety. This was not a Langsarik raid. This was a raid done by people wishing to be taken for Langsariks but betrayed by habit. Let me talk to the Bench specialists, Cousin Stanoczk. I can tell them things they need to know.”

  All of the time in transit between Anglace and Tyrell Yards the pilot had kept strictly to himself, neither speaking nor responding when spoken to by anyone but Cousin Stanoczk, but it had been perfectly obvious to Garol that the pilot was Kazmer Daigule. He’d even felt a little sorry for the man; it had to be an awkward position to be in.

  “Out of the question,” Cousin Stanoczk snapped, angrily. “You have your oath taken on it already. I will not allow it. Still.” He seemed to run out of irate energy as he spoke, as if forced to entertain an alien and unpleasant concept. “Still. It doesn’t fit the Langsarik model. There is the bracelet, I saw it. Why invoke the Angel, though, pilot?”