Angel of Destruction (15 page)

If they turned around and went back to Rikavie on Cousin Stanoczk’s offered transport, First Secretary Verlaine would not know where he was and could not query him for progress or status.

It was a tempting proposition.

He could always appropriate the vehicle on emergency loan if he had to. Knowing that was a portion of revenge in and of itself, but it was a real satisfaction for all its petty nature.

“Let’s go.”

He’d report back to Verlaine from Port Charid.

He wouldn’t have anything real to report until he’d seen what had happened at Tyrell for himself anyway.

Chapter Six

Without prior knowledge of what to listen for from which precise direction, with all of space to monitor the odds of any single short data-pulse being intercepted or observed was slim to the point of functional impossibility. It was the great distance between worlds that made transmission secure, not codes and ciphers per se. The Bench made use of every tool science had to offer to keep its sensitive information to itself; the Angel of Destruction put its faith in the Holy Mother and the huge background noise of random signals, and had never been betrayed in its trust.

The message was minute and modest.

Vogel leaves on arrival for Tyrell, with Malcontent. Daigule wears red.

Fisner Feraltz stared at the pulse on his screen, his gut gripped in the acid-sharp talons of a familiar anguish.

It would go wrong. He was worthless. He had failed in everything he had ever put his hand to; he had not even been raised by decent people, but was tainted beyond redemption by his life among the Langsariks.

Vogel leaves on arrival for Tyrell, with Malcontent. Daigule wears red.

It was a disaster.

After all that he had done, and all that he had planned, and all he had arranged so carefully and cleverly, Daigule had failed him. Daigule had not done as he was expected, intended, meant to do, had not told the Bench everything he knew about the Langsarik raid on the Tyrell Yards. Who would have guessed that a Sarvaw, of all people, would do so base a thing?

To protect his friend.

They had gone too far when they had made sure that Daigule would see Shires in the meal-room that morning. It had been a mistake. It had been his mistake. He was responsible for this disaster. But who would have thought it, of a Sarvaw?

Fisner toggled his transmit. “Send to me Dalmoss, Ippolit, if you please.”

The Malcontent.

The greatest enemy that the Angel had, the bastard pervert among the Saints under canopy, not even a saint at all except by popular acclaim — he had no theological claim to the honorific. So what if there were healings, miraculous events, apparently divine interventions? It was all fraud and lies, like everything else about the Malcontent.

Perhaps the Saint himself had been Sarvaw, all along. There was a thought. No decent Dolgorukij could ever have tolerated such perversions as the Malcontent had during his life, and he had been near heretic as well — at least there were stories to that effect.

Health and happiness greater goods than loyalty and piety.

To feed the hungry more blessed than to rule them, schooling them to submission; alleviating suffering more pleasing in the eyes of the Holy Mother than teaching devout acceptance of all the lessons suffering had to offer — even that it was not blasphemy to think of the Holy Mother as a father, as well as mother, and that the Child of the Canopy might have an equal divinity with his Parent.

“You sent for me, Foreman?”

Dalmoss was at the door to the small office Fisner used while he was here at the new construction site. Fisner beckoned for Dalmoss to come in and close the door. It was tiresome to sit behind a desk, in bracing; but the illusion of bodily infirmity had to be maintained to minimize any chance that someone who might happen to see him late at night would make the connection between a dimly glimpsed, but able-bodied stranger going amongst the crates, and the still-disabled foreman Fisner Feraltz.

“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.

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.