Angel of Destruction

by Susan R. Matthews

  Bracelet, bracelet — what bracelet? Garol traded glances with Jils, momentarily confused. He saw realization in her eyes even as he grasped the meaning of the phrase himself. Torture victims, mutilations, bodies cut open before the victim was dead. All right. He could understand “bracelet.”

  “Because there was a Dolgorukij here, and we can’t find him. There was a Dolgorukij at Okidan, wasn’t there? Who survived.”

  “If you mean to accuse — ” Cousin Stanoczk started to say. He was obviously angry again. Kazmer Daigule stood up and held his hands out, petitioning.

  “No accusations, Cousin Stanoczk. Just an observation. But this — ” Daigule spread both hands and opened his arms, to include all of the carnage at the Tyrell Yards — “this is the very type and pattern of the mad dog. Admit it. Why would Langsariks go crazy, in such specific ways?”

  “Not just one Dolgorukij is missing.” Cousin Stanoczk seemed determined to resist whatever conclusion it was. that Daigule was trying to communicate. “A Sarvaw also survived, pilot. I grant you that no Sarvaw ever joined those ranks, that my holy Patron knows of.”

  The suggestion seemed to stagger Daigule, almost literally. It was a moment before he could respond.

  “If you were not my cousin,” Daigule said, only he used one of the dozens of words that Dolgorukij had for cousin, and Garol thought this one was a particularly extreme form of the relationship from a power standpoint. “And I didn’t owe you. You’d take that back, Stanoczk. And beg my mother’s pardon, and her mother’s pardon, and the pardon of my mother’s mother’s mother, sincerely. I would see to it.”

  Mad dogs and bitches. Angels. Dolgorukij and Sarvaw.

  Nobody said anything for a moment or two, as Daigule stared at Stanoczk, who stared back.

  “We’re being rude,” Cousin Stanoczk said finally. “Bench specialists. We are finished here, Kazmer Daigule and I. Let’s please leave this place. I will explain, but I warn you that I do not believe it.”

  It was an admirably restrained sort of thing to say after the fireworks Daigule had just set off. Garol could not bring himself to tarnish its perfection by elaborating or insisting on it.

  “Your ship, Cousin Stanoczk.” And therefore up to Cousin Stanoczk to decide when to leave, by implication. “Your pilot. Yes, we’d be happy to accept transportation to Port Charid, kind of you to offer.”

  Garol’s own courier would be waiting there soon, freighter-ferried from Anglace. It had been relatively easy to arrange ferry transport; there seemed to be a surplus of available freight heading into Port Charid. Wholesalers weren’t feeling very comfortable about the security of goods warehoused in the Shawl of Rikavie, it seemed; the business base at Charid was bound to be suffering. Chilleau Judiciary was going to want to talk to him about that.

  Chilleau Judiciary was going to want to talk to him about a lot of things. An uneasy conviction that things just weren’t adding up was not going to answer questions the Bench had a right to ask him about piracy and murder.

  ###

  The floor manager, Dalmoss, was standing behind his desk as Hilton stepped into the open doorway. It looked as though he were packing. Hilton rapped sharply at the doorjamb with the curled knuckles of his left hand, to alert Dalmoss to his presence.

  “You sent for me, floor manager?”

  Dalmoss raised his head sharply, looking a little startled, then seemed to relax. “Shires. Don’t creep up on a man like that. Come in, close the door.”

  The floor manager’s office was just inside the small administrative area at one end of the new warehouse. Things were still unfinished. There was nobody else in the administrative complex — reception desk, foreman’s office, storeroom and toilet all unoccupied; maybe it was just the draft Dalmoss wanted to shut out. Hilton shrugged mental shoulders and closed the door behind him.

  “Are you leaving, floor manager?” Hilton started to ask the question, but it didn’t quite come out the way he’d thought it might. The situation did seem obvious.

  Nor did Dalmoss seem to take offense at any presumption on Hilton’s part. “I have to go to Geraint for a few days, Shires, something’s come up. I’ve asked the foreman to let you fill in on temporary assignment, and he’s agreed. He’s been very pleased at your progress so far.”

  That was a compliment, Hilton supposed, or at least it seemed that Dalmoss intended it as such. “Very kind. I’m sure.” He wasn’t sure, not really, what progress there was to impress anybody. He’d learned to tick boxes in array. That didn’t take much progress.

  Dalmoss grinned. “Not doing you any favors, really, Shires. You get to skip roll call because we expect you to be working early and late, but that’s about it. Corporate practice. We’ll work you for months under pretext of training before we get around to actually paying you for the job you’re doing. Here, take this.”

  Dalmoss tossed something at Hilton, something small and light. Hilton caught it, curious: cylindrical, metallic, and the spider-brain that lived inside of it made its status lights sparkle. An identity chop.

  “What’s it for?”

  It couldn’t be Dalmoss’s chop. Dalmoss was going to Geraint and would probably be needing his signature key. Even if he didn’t, Dalmoss’s chop was no good to anyone but Dalmoss; identity chops were tuned to the genetic markers in a person’s sweat and skin, so that no one but Dalmoss could use his chop, not and get a seal. So it wasn’t Dalmoss’s chop.

  “Backup release marker,” Dalmoss explained. He’d dropped his voice, and was looking past Hilton to the door of his office — to make sure it was closed, Hilton supposed. “I don’t like taking it off-site. Just hang on to it, Shires; you won’t be asked to use it for anything, just make sure you keep track of where it is until I get back.”

  Backup release marker? “I don’t want to be difficult,” Hilton protested. “But I’m a little uncomfortable. My status, and all that. Are you sure it’s a good idea to leave it with me? Why not the foreman?”

  It wasn’t an identity chop, it was a corporate marker, used to sign off on documents releasing ships and cargo. Authorizing movement of freighter tenders from surface to orbit. Clearing a pilot to take a ship and go.

  Langsariks weren’t to have access to such things.

  Dalmoss came around from behind his desk to stand close to Hilton, speaking quietly and quickly. “We had to have the second one made when the foreman was injured at Okidan. But we got busy, I never got around to the documentation, you know how it’s been around here. And the foreman doesn’t want to know about it.”

  Oh, good.

  Not only was it a violation of the amnesty for Hilton to be in possession of a backup release chop.

  It was contraband in its own right, as well.

  “Listen, floor manager, I appreciate the trust reposed and all that, but I really don’t know if I can be comfortable holding on to this.”

  Undocumented backup release marker.

  Black-market value, one full freighter load of dried confer wood, great thick fragrant bales of the stuff. A fortune for any man, let alone a disenfranchised Langsarik.

  “It’ll be all right.” Dalmoss gave Hilton’s shoulder a friendly reassuring shake and turned him toward the door. “The administrative stuff is in process, it’s just a little behind, is all. I’ll make it right with the foreman when I get back. And it’s not a problem for you to have it, so long as you don’t use it, that’s all.”

  Feraltz didn’t want to know about it, Dalmoss said.

  Did that imply that Feraltz knew, and was politely ignoring the whole thing till the documentation was completed?

  Maybe it was all right.

  It wasn’t as if there was any real danger of Hilton using the chop to lay hands on unauthorized transport, after all. And what did the terms of the amnesty say? Not that Langsariks were absolutely forbidden potential access; just that they were not to take advantage.

  At least that was one way to interpret it.

  “Well.” If the f
oreman knew, Hilton felt it would be unnecessarily prudish of him to insist on the letter of the administrative regulations. “So long as the documentation is in work. I suppose.” It couldn’t be a real secret, then, not if the covering documentation was in process. A little irregular, maybe, but trade seldom ran precise to specification. “I’ll hang on to it for you till you get back. What else, floor manager?”

  The whole issue of the backup release marker was apparently so negligible to Dalmoss that Hilton’s agreement was taken in stride, as only natural. Hilton felt himself relax a little bit more. Yes. It was all right. There was no cause for concern, it was just one of those administrative mismatches. That was all.

  “I need you to take the floor meeting at second shift, the assignment matrix is posted to your reader, and I’m loading some notes. They’ll be ready for you by the time you get back from the floor meeting, we can do final tie-in then. You’d better hurry.”

  It wouldn’t do to be late for his first official acting-floor-manager assignment. No.

  Tucking the little token into a shirt pocket absent-mindedly, Hilton hurried out for his meeting, focusing his mind on the new challenges that had just been laid before him.

  ###

  Once Cousin Stanoczk’s sleek little courier had cleared the Tyrell Yards for Port Charid, Cousin Stanoczk sent his relief pilot forward and called for Kazmer Daigule. There were two to three hours of travel time between the Shawl of Rikavie and Port Charid from the Tyrell Yards, at this time of year. Garol supposed Stanoczk wanted to talk in a secure environment.

  When they were all assembled in the courier’s salon Cousin Stanoczk took a deep breath, and started to speak. “To your mother I apologize very humbly, Kazmer. And also to her mother, and her mother’s mother; to the mother of your father, and her father’s mother, as sincerely as I am able. I had no cause to suggest such a thing, but you made me angry, suggesting what you did. I tell you to explain, not to excuse the insult, for which I place myself in humility before your antecedents.”

  “Suggesting what? The Angel of Destruction?” Jils asked. She’d been quiet and self-contained since Daigule’s outburst at Tyrell; Garol was surprised to hear her speak. Jils wasn’t one to open her mouth unless she had something to say, though: and it sounded like she was ahead of him on this one. “I heard horror stories from the forensics team at the Domitt Prison in Port Rudistal. They were Sarvaw, too.”

  Now that she put it into context for him Garol began to make sense of it all. Sarvaw, terrorism, atrocity, the Angel of Destruction. Right,

  “It is an outlaw, and has been for several lives.”

  Cousin Stanoczk was clearly not at all eager to talk about it. He could hardly refuse to discuss the issue once it was raised, however, not unless he wanted to focus their attention on the subject by so doing.

  “Since the time of Chuvishka Kospodar, who was the grandfather of my grandfather’s father. I have the family shame. Yet even at the time of its outlawry, there were questions, within privileged circles, about whether the monster were truly dead, or merely feigning.”

  “Start at the beginning,” Garol suggested. It generally helped him make sense of things. “What’s your angle in all of this, Stanoczk?”

  Stanoczk had started to pace. The Malcontent’s courier ship was considerably more commodious than Garol’s usual transport. There was much more room in which to move.

  “We were as skeptical of the Langsarik settlement as any, Garol Aphon.” Stanoczk used two of his three names, Garol noted. Showing off that he knew them, perhaps? Stanoczk was obviously upset; maybe he was just reverting unconsciously to his natal syntax. Garol hoped Stanoczk regained control of his emotions soon. He’d never cared for his middle name.

  “Therefore, someone was tagged to keep a watch on the progress of the experiment. The Langsariks were efficient predators, you may remember. We had no desire to see them continue to feed off Combine shipping.”

  Old news. Garol settled himself back in his chair, resigned to a long siege. Comfortable chair. The pilot didn’t look very comfortable, though. Pity.

  “Then there were problems, and it could have been youthful high spirits. Perhaps it was at first. The first of the raids where there was killing concerned us.”

  Hit-and-run raids were one thing, characteristic of Langsarik battle tactics. Warehouse invasion was not, nor had killing ever characterized a Langsarik operation. So far, so good.

  “The Combine is in contention with other local interests for commercial ascendancy, here at Port Charid. Was it too convenient that the Combine’s competition has been raided in series? And yet if there was a secret plot on the part of my government, I would know about it. I wouldn’t tell you, of course. But I would know about it.”

  Interesting. Cousin Stanoczk might be a more highly placed player than Garol had realized; or he might be making this part up.

  “Thus if there was no plan that we knew of, and yet events did seem to follow a plan to strengthen Combine interests at the expense of any others, who could be responsible? Raiding takes organization. And in this case murder.”

  “The Bench likes to consider itself responsible for that sort of problem,” Jils noted, in a mild and dispassionate tone of voice. As if she was simply making an abstract and objective observation, not pointing out that the Bench saw no functional difference between lawbreaking and the unauthorized upholding of the Law, the upholding of the Law by persons not properly deputized to do so. “It has Bench intelligence specialists to work issues like raiding at Port Charid.”

  Cousin Stanoczk seemed to be trying to nod and shake his head at the same time, and ended up describing a sort of a figure eight with his chin. “But if this was Combine business, Bench specialist, it is our responsibility. We can’t ask the Bench to intervene in family discipline.”

  Begging the question rather neatly. “Go on,” Garol said. Maybe Jils had drawn her conclusions and filed her mental report, but he still wanted to hear Stanoczk’s take. “Responsible.”

  “We are not so familiar as you with the Langsariks, Specialist Vogel. It could be that their styles had changed. What reason could Langsariks have to promote Combine interests, though, especially at the risk of their own lives and freedom? And then there were more raids. We began to see a pattern. One with potential historical precedent.”

  At that the pilot raised his head, staring at Cousin Stanoczk with black despair in his brown eyes.

  “You knew all along it wasn’t Langsariks.” Daigule’s claim was not so much an accusation as a flat statement. “And you let me give it all away. Knowing all along.”

  He seemed to hit a nerve with Cousin Stanoczk, even so. “We knew no such thing. I still don’t know. There is potential evidence. Is it good enough for the Bench? Certainly not. What would have happened had I denied you, in violation of my sacred duty?”

  Good question, Garol thought. “That’s what I’d like to know.” With Stanoczk here, it couldn’t be said that he was going behind anyone’s back. “If your evidence could divert suspicion, pilot, you logically would have wanted to give it.” Which could presumably be exactly what Kazmer Daigule was doing even now, his utmost to divert attention from the Langsariks. “Apart from any personal vulnerability, your only likely reason for bolting has to be that your evidence would have indicted Langsariks.”

  “Because I thought it was Langsariks,” Daigule said flatly.

  Cousin Stanoczk started to raise his hand, as if to silence Daigule.

  Lowering his head — so that he would be unable to see any such signal, Garol supposed — Daigule forged on. “I didn’t know what to make of the rumors of killing; but I knew that if anyone got serious with questions, I was bound to mention Langsariks sooner or later. And I’d seen a friend of mine in the street the day I arrived to meet with the rest of the crew. If it really was a Langsarik raid, he almost had to be part of it, whether or not I ever saw him after that. If it wasn’t a Langsarik raid, it was that much more vital to keep hi
s name out of it. His, and that of any other Langsarik, including the name ‘Langsarik.’ ”

  Hilton Shires had known that Daigule had been in Port Charid, though he’d not wanted to say so. Garol understood. “And now you’re sure it wasn’t. Your evidence, please. If Cousin Stanoczk permits, of course.”

  Cousin Stanoczk had ceased his pacing to lean up against the bulkhead behind Daigule, folding his arms. Stanoczk said nothing, so Daigule answered, with evident eagerness.

  “Everything points to Langsariks, don’t you see? I was recruited anonymously, but there were hints. At every step, clues and indications. The raid party all wore pieces of Langsarik colors, nothing too obvious or overdone, just what you would expect. The Langsarik body is missing. But so is another body, and there’s no sense in the murders. Especially not in torture.”

  Daigule’s point presumably being that nobody could have so consistently given signs of being Langsarik and not been Langsarik unless they had been deliberately intent on presenting the impression that they were Langsariks.

  First Secretary Verlaine was not likely to be convinced.

  “It isn’t evidence.” Jils said the unpleasant truth for him, and Garol thanked her with a grateful glance. “As it stands it’s just a coincidence. We can’t even say if it’s a real coincidence. The missing Dolgorukij may turn up somewhere alive and healthy. We need more to go on.”

  Garol didn’t know exactly what would do it. But he agreed with Jils that what they had was not enough.

  “If you blame Langsariks for these raids, the public may be appeased.” Straightening, Cousin Stanoczk stood with his hands on his hips and a very determined expression on his face. “But it will neither effect the punishment of the guilty nor necessarily put a stop to the criminal activity if we do not correctly identify the criminals.”