Angel of Destruction (2 page)

He had his back turned, so he didn’t have to see Dalmoss raise his weapon.

And when the blow came it was so huge and shocking that he completely lost track of what he was doing.

People were dragging him along the ground, why was that?

Lifting, pressing his hands against the console.

Something was wrong with him.

The right side of his body seemed to have disappeared, and yet he could see it well enough — arm, leg, foot, hand.

He was bleeding, and his clothing was torn. Something in his mind noticed that no blood gushed, though it seeped quickly, and took that for an encouraging sign.

He lay against the auxiliary communications console with his face to the panel. Someone moved his hand; and there was a light, there, very close to his eyes. Green. Communication. Sending.

“Help me,” Fisner croaked. He was supposed to say something. What was he supposed to say? He needed help. Yes. Langsariks had attacked the Okidan Yards. “This is Okidan. Feraltz. We’re raided. Dying. Help.”

His hand dropped away from the toggle, then his body followed, sliding slowly to the floor.

He didn’t feel the impact as he fell.

He lay on the floor and stared at the wall stupidly until the room went black on him.

Langsariks.

Langsariks had done this.

It was all the Langsariks’ fault that this had happened.

###

Standing at the aide’s station in the small Combine hospital, Garol Vogel scanned the status report.
Fisner Feraltz, Combine citizen, Givrodnye national. Injuries sustained at the hands of armed pirates at the Okidan Yards in the Shawl of Rikavie, Rikavie system.

Rikavie system: port of departure, Charid — where the Langsariks had been settled by the Bench, just over a year ago, now. Checking the date on the status report Garol made a quick calculation. Twenty days. They’d brought Feraltz here as soon as he could be stabilized for distance transport; Port Charid had a small clinic of its own, and they could handle just about anything there, but Feraltz was Dolgorukij, and Dolgorukij suspected that nobody else really understood the intricacies of a Dolgorukij physique.

And perhaps they were right.

Injuries including but not limited to mass soft tissue laceration, especially of the right portion of the body. Knee joint requiring replacement, ankle may require fusing, biomedical netting wrap on long bones of thigh and lower leg, silica glazing therapy in effect over 85 percent of rightmost surface of hip.

“Lucky to be alive,” Garol said to the patient’s advocate who was serving as his guide and escort. The advocate nodded.

“That’s what the staff says as well, Bench specialist. But since he is alive, the surgical board felt it best to postpone any interviews until he had regained at least some of his mobility. Since his basic evidence had already been read into the record at Port Charid.”

Well, there wasn’t a Record at Port Charid, not in the formal sense. For a Record to be official a Judicial officer qualified for custody was required, and Port Charid didn’t rate any on-site staff, let alone a Record of its own. It was on circuit, yes, but that was it.

So far.

Once traffic started to pick up at Port Charid the Bench would site Chambers there — as well as a fleet detachment, to monitor attempts at unauthorized communication across the Sillume vector with Free Government insurrectionaries outside the pale of Jurisdiction, out in Gonebeyond space.

But first Port Charid had to grow its traffic. It took an on-site tax base to support Chambers and Fleet detachments, and so far Port Charid’s tax base simply did not qualify.

“Langsariks, I heard.” Garol frowned down at the closed medical record. “In fact I’m told there’s been more than one disturbance at Port Charid recently.”

The patient’s advocate shrugged, looking almost bored. “If that’s what they say, Bench specialist. Nothing to me one way or the other, except of course when they start shooting at honest Dolgorukij. No aspersion on the Bench umbrella, of course.”

Of course not. Equal respect in theory for all hominid species under Jurisdiction was an important aspect of good Bench citizenship. And sensible acknowledgment of the fact that people would always favor their own was just common sense, and no offense to it.

“Very properly so, Advocate. Can we go in now?”

The patient’s advocate looked to the medical aide who waited in the doorway; the medical aide nodded, and opened the door. It was a hinged door, here, in a hospital. Dolgorukij knew what was proper: at least what they believed to be proper. This little hospital smelled of money all the way out to the street. And Fisner Feraltz, the patient Garol had come to see, was here at his employer’s expense, heroically wounded in a cowardly attack.

Garol had a notion that they’d made Feraltz very comfortable indeed, here.

The patient was in plain clothes, resting on an incline-board and doing a slow lift with his right leg. Physical therapy; Garol recognized the apparatus, and he could sympathize deeply with the look of carefully screened pain and concentration on Feraltz’s face.

Even with the brace, it wasn’t fun.

Feraltz wore bracing all over his right side, but Garol knew how little of the load the bracing really took off injured limbs and joints — not nearly enough. Feraltz would be wearing pieces of that body-bracing for months, if not years.

Personally Garol had always preferred to discard such aids as quickly as possible and pay the price of mobility in pain.

Garol stopped a pace or two from where Fisner Feraltz pursued his physical rehabilitation with grim determination and nodded a polite greeting.

“Thank you for seeing me, Feraltz. I’m Vogel, Bench specialist Garol Aphon Vogel. Doing your exercises I see.”

Feraltz was middling tall but well made, to look at him, more bone than flesh but adequately muscled by his hands and shoulders, fair-skinned and blue-eyed and very nearly blond. It was a type more general than some Dolgorukij Garol had met, who could have never been mistaken for Dynad or Jekrab, Nurail, or any other similar ethnicity; still, it was a type. Garol was a mixed category hominid himself, and his family generally tended toward a muddier complexion and less lithely limber a frame.

Feraltz lowered his eyes in acknowledgment. “Yes, thank you, Bench specialist. — Not at all, my pleasure, sir, as well as my duty.” Well-spoken young man, and no trace of an accent that Garol could detect offhand. He noticed that. Dolgorukij generally had an accent, in part because of the basic conviction of the superiority of their blood and culture, in part because as a result of that conviction Dolgorukij who spoke Standard had very seldom learned to do so as children.

Nor had they taken it quite seriously as adults.

There almost wasn’t any such thing as an unaccented Standard. The only people who spoke Standard as their native tongue were wards of the Bench raised at public expense; those, or the crèche-bred Command Branch officers the Bench was experimenting with, the orphaned children of the Bench’s enemies raised by the Bench in strict indoctrination to serve the Bench and uphold the rule of Law.

“I’m concerned that the evidence I gave the Clerk of Court could be too liberally interpreted,” Feraltz added, while Garol mused, distracted, on Feraltz’s lack of an accent. “So I hope you haven’t come on a misunderstanding, Bench specialist. But I’m glad to answer any questions you might have, sir.”

Polite, as well as a well-spoken man. “How do you mean, ‘liberally interpreted’?” It was an interesting thing to say, and could serve to ease in to the questions Garol had come to ask. “If you would care to elaborate.”

The statements that had been forwarded to him said Langsariks. If there was going to be any trouble with the Langsarik settlement at Port Charid, Garol needed to cut it out quickly and quietly, before Chilleau Judiciary got any creative ideas about revising the amnesty.

Feraltz was very willing to elaborate, apparently. “If I can say so without reproach, Bench specialist, the Clerk of Court who came to see me seemed to be determined that she already knew exactly what had happened. She kept on helping me out, you know the kind of thing I mean, and I think she recorded things I didn’t actually say. I really think she did. There’s no real reason to blame the Langsariks for that raid, it’s just circumstantial evidence, from start to finish.”

Well, that was a start on what Garol wanted to hear; so it was that much more important to be careful about it, accordingly. “I’ve reviewed the evidence certified by the Clerk of Court who interviewed you, but it’s been a few days since then. I do seem to recall a positive identification attributed to you. Langsariks, in the raiding party.”

Difficult to tell whether Feraltz’s pained expression resulted from psychological distress over a potentially serious misunderstanding, or just reflected physical pain. “I never made any such assertion, Bench specialist, I’d swear to it. I might not have been as coherent as I would have liked to be, though.”

The statement had been taken only days after the Okidan Yards had been raided and its crew left for dead. Feraltz’s statement had been taken at Port Charid while Feraltz had been waiting for transport to the private hospital here at Nisherre, and thus given while Feraltz had been surrounded by Langsariks — figuratively if not literally, the Langsarik labor force having relatively few technically proficient medical practitioners to spare from the clinic in the settlement for hire out to the port.

So in a sense Feraltz’s continued survival argued against any Langsarik involvement in the Okidan raid: if Feraltz had been in a position to give credible evidence against Langsariks, to positively implicate Langsariks, the Langsariks in danger had had perfectly good opportunities to silence him before his evidence went anywhere.

And they hadn’t.

So Feraltz wasn’t and couldn’t, and therefore hadn’t needed to be silenced. Unless Feraltz’s prior association with Langsariks, a detail Garol had found buried in the intelligence analysis, hinted at collusion; but if there was collusion, surely they would have managed a way to arrange Feraltz’s survival without the risky cover of the physical injuries Feraltz had sustained?

“Without reference to your earlier testimony.” Garol knew he could challenge that testimony, which had not been taken under appropriate controls, potential drug interactions compromising quality of evidence, and so forth. And he would, if he needed to; but first he needed to be sure of the facts. To the extent that there were facts. To the extent that objective truths even existed. “How about telling me what you remember that could be used to identify the raiders. Don’t worry about anything you said before, for now. Just talk to me.”

Feraltz let his leg rest, frowning. “That’s probably the problem right there, Bench specialist. I don’t have much to offer. I was in the dock-master’s office doing inventory audit for the tax assessment, and I heard her talking to them on the comms, but I don’t remember anything the least unusual about the conversation. I only barely remember hearing her talking to them at all.“

He probably hadn’t been paying attention. Dock-masters talked to inbound freighters all the time. A Langsarik accent was one of the more subtle ones — as if a Langsarik wouldn’t have disguised his or her voice anyway. As if any pirate wouldn’t have done that, out of baseline prudence.

As if Langsariks could have come up with a ship to mount a raid in the first place: unfortunately fifteen years of successful commerce raiding had created a belief in the public mind that the Langsariks could work miracles before breakfast, when it came to their ships.

“She went out, she shut the door; I remember thinking she might have some unrecorded transaction going with the freighter. And it’s none of my business; I audit to the record, there are specialists who audit for unrecorded transactions. So I minded my own business.”

It had just been bad luck for Feraltz that he’d even been there in the first place. But inventory audit was supposed to be unannounced, and the raiders wouldn’t have expected him to be in the dock-master’s office.

“I heard the door, it was pushed open with a crash. Startled me. There were three men, and the dock-master. She made a break for the master communications panel. They shot her. Into pieces.”

The surprise of finding the dock-master’s office occupied would explain it; otherwise, it would have been hard to understand the dock-master getting away from her escort, even for a short dash across the room. They’d probably meant to force her to open her safe room. If so, the death she’d won by resisting might well have been one infinitely to be preferred to the manner in which she might have died — except that Langsariks had never gone for torture in any big way. Nor massacre, come to that.

“And I think they were wearing that color, the yellow-pink. Langsarik colors. What is it called? Rose gold. It’s a familiar color, Bench specialist, I should tell you that I spent some time as the guest of the Langsarik fleet, when I was younger.” Garol made a mental note; Feraltz’s candid confession simplified things a bit. “But that doesn’t make them Langsariks. I could wear a Bench intelligence specialist’s uniform if I wanted, but it wouldn’t make me a Bench intelligence specialist.”

No, it would make him a criminal. It was against the law to wear a uniform to which one was not legally entitled — or bound, in the case of the bond-involuntaries. The point was well taken, all the same.

“What do you remember about their appearance apart from the color of their clothing?” Garol prompted. “Anybody you may have thought you recognized, for instance. Cut of the garment. Hair color. Size and shape. Accent.”

But Feraltz frowned, with apparent perplexity. “I’m sorry, Bench specialist. I didn’t recognize anybody. They were all men, I think. I remember the color very vividly. But about the people themselves — not much.”

Disappointing; but predictable. Feraltz had only seen them moments before he was shot, and then only under conditions of deep emotional shock and horror.

The Bench couldn’t pin a Langsarik crime on the settlement on the basis of this evidence. Feraltz knew Langsariks, had lived with Langsariks, and refused to say that they were Langsariks; but the strength of the evidence went both ways. Maybe he was protecting someone.