A Dark and Hungry God Arises

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Then she seemed to hear the muted hull-roar of the drive as the shuttle fired braking thrust. It, too, was imprecisely audible. Unlike the wail, however, it was real. She could feel the same resonance when she touched one of the bulkheads.

  Despite the soundless protests of the crew, she unbelted herself from her g-seat and drifted weightlessly toward the airlock. She wanted to disembark the minute the shuttle finished docking.

  One of the crew touched her arm; she turned toward him and watched him speak. From somewhere beyond the wail, behind the hull-roar, she heard him—a voice like the whisper of fabric when her arm brushed her side. “Director Donner, this isn’t safe.”

  “If I wanted to be safe”—her voice buzzed in the bones of her skull—“I would choose another line of work.” A moment later she ordered, “Flare Director Dios.” “Flare” was UMCP slang for “contact urgently.” “Tell him I want to see him. Tell him I want to see him now.”

  She would have sent that message earlier if she could have trusted her voice through her deafness.

  The crewman saluted and went back to his duties.

  Her handgun was back in its familiar place on her hip. She’d restored it as soon as she’d gained the relative privacy of the shuttle. Pains filled her body and her head: the residual throbbing in her sinuses, which persisted although her nose no longer bled; the deeper ache of contusions and bruises. But she ignored them. Other hurts were more important.

  She wondered if she would be able to hear Warden Dios answer when she asked him questions.

  Hints of noises which might have been dock-alerts reached her. That was a good sign. On the other hand, the crews’ routine explanations and announcements were wrapped in silence; baffled by old grief.

  When station g pulled her feet to the floor, she keyed open the airlock, equalized the pressure, and cycled the outer doors. By the time the crew had given the other passengers permission to leave their g-seats, she was face-to-face with the nearest guard, telling him to take her to the director.

  For all she knew, the familiar authority of her voice came out as hysteria.

  Warden Dios must have been expecting her message. Whatever he was doing, he dropped it. No more than five minutes after she left the shuttle, she was with him in one of his secure offices; out of circulation; off the record. Again she temporarily ceased to exist.

  Seated behind the desk with a blank data terminal in front of him, he studied her gravely. His human eye and his prosthesis seemed to search her inside and out. Broadly speaking, he must have known what had happened: reports from GCES Security, as well as from his own personnel on Suka Bator, would have reached him faster than any shuttle. But no one except Captain Vertigus could have told him that Min Donner had set off the kaze herself; and she doubted that the captain and the UMCP director had been in contact with each other.

  So Warden also had no idea what the outcome of her meeting with the Senior Member was.

  Nevertheless he didn’t rush her. No matter what he’d dropped to answer her flare, he seemed to offer her all the time and attention she needed. After he’d studied her for a moment, he pointed her toward a chair. As she eased her sore limbs into it he asked, “How badly are you hurt?”

  His voice murmured against a keening background. If she hadn’t noticed the tension in the cords of his neck, she wouldn’t have realized that he was nearly shouting.

  She shrugged. “Nothing serious. Bruises. I had a bloody nose. And I can’t hear very well—concussion deafness.”

  “That’s obvious.” Unexpected strain underlined his whisper. “I’ve been talking steadily, but you didn’t react until you looked at my face. This can wait, you know. I can live with my impatience while you see the medtechs.”

  “I can’t.” Heard through her skull, her voice was coarse, almost guttural. “A crazy man killed an innocent woman.” She had Marthe’s blood on her hands, if not her conscience. “If he’d arrived a couple of minutes earlier—or if I hadn’t set him off—he would have killed Captain Vertigus as well as me. I can’t wait. I want to know what’s going on.”

  Warden spread his hands. They looked strong in the light over his desk; as steady as stones. “All right. Let’s start with this kaze. That’s your department—tell me about him.”

  “A human bomb,” she reported automatically. As she spoke she stopped monitoring the modulation of her voice. The director would tell her if she didn’t speak clearly. “A terrorist on a suicide mission. We haven’t had much trouble with them recently. Most of the fringe groups are in disarray—they can’t decide who they hate enough to kill themselves for. Forbidden space scares them too much. About the only group that regularly tries to blow up GCES policy is the native Earthers. But this kaze didn’t come from them.”

  “How do you know?” Warden asked.

  “Because he got through Security. He had legitimate Maintenance id. That’s not easy to come by—especially for a group like the native Earthers, with an established history of—her mouth twisted—“‘opposition’ to the GCES. Security is using all kinds of embedded verifications in the id tags of everyone who belongs on Suka Bator. And we”—she meant Data Acquisition—“supply CMOS-SOD chips for GCES function id. Those chips can’t be counterfeited, the same way datacores can’t be altered.”

  Dios knew all this, but he gave no hint of impatience. “What does that prove?”

  Min did her best to explain details and perceptions which came to her intuitively. “Assuming it’s possible to steal or fabricate the chip to fake that Maintenance id—which I don’t assume—you can’t get the job done overnight. You have to prepare for it. And even if you have the chip, you can’t just stamp out that kind of id. You need too much specific information about how GCES Security works—for instance, how they rotate their pass codes. For the native Earthers to pull off something like this, they must have started getting it ready months ago.

  “But nobody got that kaze ready. He was in pain when he moved. The surgery was too recent—a day or two ago at most. Why do the land of long-range work you need to produce fake GCES function id without preparing your kaze at the same time? That part of the job is a hell of a lot easier.”

  Warden shrugged. “They didn’t think they were going to need him so soon.” The muffling of his voice made him sound abstract. “The original plan was to use him later, in some other situation. The decision to act now was made suddenly. In response to the events of the past twenty-four hours.”

  A tingle ran through Min’s palms. The muscles at the base of her spine tightened. Without warning the atmosphere in the office seemed to take on threats; obscure implications gathered at the edges of the light. The UMCP director gave her an opening to ask questions—questions which had swarmed like pain through her head ever since she’d taken her seat on the shuttle. Because she needed so much to believe in him, the prospect of challenging him scared her.

  But her questions scared her more.

  “Then why attack Captain Vertigus?” she countered. “The native Earthers consider him a hero.”

  “To make him a martyr?” Warden offered impassively. Maybe he couldn’t feel her challenge in the air; maybe he couldn’t guess where she was headed. The only strain in his demeanor came from the effort of speaking loudly enough to be heard. “To prove that the enemies of the native Earthers are evil?”

  Her voice felt like a snarl in the bones behind her ears. “And what has that got to do with ‘the events of the past twenty-four hours’? If the native Earthers are involved, why is today different than any other day? Where does the need to attack so suddenly come from?”

  His single eye held her gaze. His IR vision must have told him that her nerves were burning.

  “This is a crucial time for the Council,” he answered. “Issues have come up concerning everything we do in space—and they’ve certainly come up suddenly. Precisely because Captain Vertigus is a hero to the native Earthers, the attack on him validates his convictions. I mean it validates his oppos
ition to Holt Fasner and the UMC. Remember the captain has always backed us up—and fought Fasner. He doesn’t reject our function, he rejects UMC policy. Terrorists have always attacked their enemies—but sometimes they attack their friends in an effort to make their enemies look bad.”

  Min fought an impulse to lower her head. She wanted to drop her eyes; but the pressure to look away, to fix her attention on anything except the man she served, didn’t come from him. It came from inside her: from what she was thinking; from what she feared. The weakness was hers. For that reason she refused to give in to it.

  Facing Warden Dios straight, she took a step closer to what she believed was the heart of the matter.

  “I’ve got another idea,” she rasped, “one that doesn’t require us to assume the native Earthers are capable of faking that kaze’s id. We have a high-level traitor—someone so high up he has access to genuine chips, so high up he knows or can get all the pass codes and verifications. Producing valid Maintenance id was easy for him. But he didn’t have a kaze ready because until today he had no intention of attacking Captain Vertigus.”

  “Interesting.” Warden didn’t sound surprised. Aside from his obvious concentration, his face was expressionless. “Then let me ask your question. Why was Captain Vertigus attacked now? Why does this traitor suddenly want to get rid of him?”

  Shock and keening still occluded Min’s hearing. Nevertheless the fact that he hadn’t asked who she thought the traitor might be was as loud as a shout.

  “Because,” she answered past a dryness like ashes in her throat, “we chose him. This traitor wanted to kill him so that he couldn’t introduce your Bill of Severance.”

  Maybe I’m not the only one you talked to about it. And maybe whoever that was leaked the information.

  Or maybe you leaked the information.

  “Alternatively,” the UMCP director replied as if she’d engaged him in an exercise of pure speculation, “this traitor may have wanted Captain Vertigus dead for the same kind of reason I ascribed to the native Earthers. Martyr him in order to solidify support for the bill.”

  Calmly, without apparent premeditation, Dios gave her a reason to think that he might be to blame.

  He may have been trying to steer her away from her own ideas.

  Without warning, she felt a rush of loathing for him. She hated his calm, his strength, his secrets: she hated this game he was playing, a game which corroded the convictions that made the UMCP valuable—not to mention viable. She was his ED director because she believed in what cops were for. And she’d always been sure he shared her beliefs. But since Morn Hyland’s return to Com-Mine Station with Angus Thermopyle—no, before that, since Warden had assented to the quashing of Intertech’s mutagen immunity research—he’d given her more and more reason to question the nature of his beliefs; more reason to wonder whether he’d finally sold his soul to the Dragon. Facing him now, with his complex intentions and his subtleties, she burned for the simple service she loved, the clean dedication that kept her whole. And she hated him for taking those things away from her.

  Making no effort to mask her anger—she couldn’t have concealed it from him anyway—she retorted, “I’m glad you mentioned that possibility. It brings me to your video conference with the Council. While I was talking to Captain Vertigus, I kept asking myself why. Why did you do that? Why did you do it now? You’ve never let the GCES”—or me—“see you in that light before. And I was only able to come up with one answer.

  “You did it so the bill would have some prayer of passing.

  “But now you’ve given me another idea.” She balanced herself, kept her poise, as if she were a gun aimed at his head. “Maybe you did it so I would be sure to go see Captain Vertigus as soon as possible—so you would have a chance to get rid of the only people who really believe in that bill.”

  When she stopped, her heart was hammering as if she feared she would be struck down for saying those words aloud. Her hands felt full of killing fire. Yet her eyes never wavered; the muzzle of her accusation held steady.

  Just for an instant the muscles of his face tightened; he may have been wincing. Almost immediately, however, he smoothed out his expression. Only a hint of grief around his eye undermined his impassivity.

  “I like to think,” he articulated slowly, “that if I wanted you dead—if I were the kind of man who solved his problems by butchering subordinates and politicians—I would choose something more honest than a kaze to kill you.”

  She had trouble hearing him: he was no longer making the effort to speak loudly. Only the slow recovery of her eardrums enabled her to distinguish the blurred vibrations of his voice.

  More honest than a kaze.

  As soon as he said that, she believed him. That was the Warden Dios she admired; the Warden Dios to whom she’d given her devotion. She couldn’t have been so wrong about him for so many years. The whole idea that he might have had something to do with the kaze was smoke.

  It was all meant to distract her.

  For a moment she was so angry that she couldn’t speak.

  But he hadn’t stopped talking. As if he were still on the same subject, he asked rhetorically, “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe we—I mean all of us, the cops—are responsible for the existence of places like Billingate? That maybe humankind would be better off if we hadn’t made ourselves so powerful, or so necessary?”

  Min swallowed convulsively. She knew him well enough to know that he didn’t expect an answer. Because she was furious, however, she rasped, “That’s absurd. We didn’t create Angus Thermopyle. We didn’t create the Amnion. But if we weren’t here, the rest of humanity would have no defense.”

  A grimace pulled at the corners of his mouth. “I’m not so sure. Human history is full of—I guess you could call them enforcement mistakes. Using muscle to control people seems to make them more determined. Angus and the Amnion are probably a good example.

  “Before we got our hands on him, he was caught between two dangers, two enemies. The Amnion and us. They want to change him, take away his humanity. We want to kill him, or at least lock him up. What would you do in his position? We try to get what we want by gunfire. The Amnion trade for it. And they always keep their bargains because they know that otherwise they won’t be trusted, which means they won’t be able to trade effectively. What would you do?”

  She stared at him as if she could see mutagens chewing at his genes, changing the structure of his bones.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” he went on. “If you had to choose between being shot by us and risking your humanity with the Amnion, you would be crazy not to choose them. They’re the lesser danger because they leave you a chance to survive. Once you have us for enemies, piracy is your only sane alternative.

  “And we make the rules. We create the restrictions which define illegality. We put Angus in the position where he had to choose between us and the Amnion.

  “You can’t expect a man like that to have a sense of perspective. You can’t ask him to understand that the Amnion are a threat to all humanity, while we’re only a threat to people who increase the risks for humankind. He takes everything personally. He has to—he’s on the run, and his life depends on it.

  “The Amnion look good to a man like Angus because from his point of view we’re worse. In other words, we created him. We created every individual human being on Billingate, on every illegal shipyard, on every outpost or installation that does business with the Amnion. If we didn’t work so hard to control piracy—or if we weren’t so self-righteous about it—pirates wouldn’t be such a danger to the people we’re supposed to serve.”

  As she listened, Min’s anger curdled to sorrow. Despite her need to believe in him, he had changed. This wasn’t how he’d explained her function—and his own—the last time she’d heard him talk about it.

  She gritted her teeth to control her sadness. “Then why do it? Why do we work so hard for something we don’t believe in?”

  No
w his voice was no more than a whisper. If she hadn’t seen his lips moving, she might have thought the words came from the shadows around her.

  “Because the people we’re supposed to serve and the people we do serve aren’t the same. We don’t serve humankind. We serve the United Mining Companies. And the United Mining Companies profits from piracy. Piracy reinforces the UMC’s hold on its markets.”

  Is that it? she thought. Is that the truth at last? Or is it just another distraction?

  Was he casting doubt on the UMCP, questioning the integrity of his own life’s work, so that she might believe him capable of aiming a kaze at Captain Vertigus in order to consolidate support for a Bill of Severance?

  No, that didn’t make sense. If the captain had been killed, no one on the Council would have heard of the bill. It would have been blown up along with its intended sponsor.

  And she was morally certain that the kaze had been surprised to see her in Captain Vertigus’ doorway.

  The video conference may have been a ploy on Warden Dios’ part to lend his bill authority, credibility. The kaze was something else entirely.

  Clenching her jaws so hard that her head throbbed, she demanded, “Why are you telling me this?”

  What makes you think I want to go on serving Holt Fasner, instead of my own species?

  What are you trying to distract me from?

  Abruptly Warden leaned forward, planted his palms on the bare surface of the desk. His voice was soft, but he pitched it to reach her. His single eye glittered with intensity.

  “Min, I want you to survive this. If it can be done, I want you to be the next director of the police.”

  With those words he bound her to him; caught her in a grip she would never be able to break. Implications came into focus in the light as if his strong fingers held them down on the desktop for her to see. Without transition he restored her convictions; remade himself into the man to whom she’d fixed her heart.