Angel of Destruction (21 page)

“And we have only your word that you were given the chop.” Vogel was thinking the grim equation through, from all appearances. “It’s a set-up ripe and rectified. Give me the chop, Hilton, and don’t say anything to anybody. I’ve got to brief your aunt, I’ll let her know.”

Hilton pulled the chop out from beneath his inner shirt, jerking at the chain impatiently. “What does it mean, Bench specialist?”

“Until we find more real evidence, it means nothing.” Vogel tucked the wretched thing away in a trouser pocket. Hilton could only hope Vogel’s pockets were in better repair than his own tended to be. “Daigule, keep it short, I need you back to Port Charid before too much longer. Let’s go.”

The midnight meeting he might have mentioned to Vogel had gone out of his mind, the warehouse whispers drowned beneath the crushing impact of this horrible realization.

Set up.

They were using him.

And all this time he’d thought that he’d actually been doing rather well.

He needed some private time to wrestle his emotions to the ground; and then he had to get back to work.

###

Part of the job was being able to do it without getting emotionally involved, but Garol had given up on that almost as soon as this Langsarik trouble had started. It wasn’t getting any easier as he went along.

“I’ve been to Tyrell, and I brought Daigule back with me.” Garol realized that he was skipping the normal courtesy of a greeting; Hilton’s news had rattled him more deeply than he’d realized. Or else it was just that feeling that he got with Walton Agenis, of never actually ending a conversation, just picking up the threads after a longer than usual pause. “Daigule and I know where some of the transport may have come from, but it isn’t enough.”

Walton Agenis eyed Daigule a little sourly, but stood aside to let Modice through from the back of the house. “Come into the parlor,” she suggested. “You can tell me all about it.” It wasn’t so much an offer as a demand, but she had a right. Garol followed her into the house without argument, leaving Daigule to speak to Modice at the front door — or not-speak to Modice. Whatever. Garol didn’t care. He had other problems.

“All of the markers keep pointing back at Langsariks.” Once the door was closed behind him he couldn’t keep his anxiety to himself any longer, talking to Walton’s back as he followed her through the cramped hall into the tiny front room with its three chairs and its one small incidental table. No lamp. There was a fixture overhead, but the dim light was almost worse than no light at all, to someone coming in from the bright sunlight outside. “But Daigule was there. He says fourteen, sixteen people at least, and the raid covered more than half a day’s time. So if it was Langsariks, how’d they make muster?”

There were chairs, but Walton didn’t sit down; nor did she invite Garol to be seated — not because he was unwelcome, Garol sensed, so much as that she was thinking too hard about his question. So he stood. Walton Agenis faced the blank wall at the south side of the small room, talking to the paint.

“We could find a way, Garol. But we haven’t. We agreed to the amnesty, we mean to honor it.” It was good of her to use the present tense, Garol felt; “mean,” not “meant.” The Langsariks hadn’t given up on Jurisdiction. But he was almost ready to. “Is this the first time that any cargo has been intercepted?”

Garol nodded. “Right. There was an anonymous tip.” Such things happened often enough; there was no reason to suspect it. Except that he was suspecting everything just now. “Jils has gone back to Anglace to run it down.”

Someone had recruited Daigule, who knew Hilton. Maybe it had been a setup all along, and the cargo had been sacrificed to get Daigule’s evidence of Langsarik involvement on Record — it wasn’t the most valuable portion of the take that had been intercepted. Daigule’s evidence was not on record; but Garol had the inside line on a forged seal, now, and Hilton had been holding it. The fix was so good.

“So, where’s the other ship. They’ve got to be hiding those cannon somewhere. Probably illegal communications as well, for false positive identification.” She’d spent a lot of time worrying that issue on her own, apparently. “But the traffic in and out of Port Charid is all freighter-driven. Very few craft as small as yours or that Dolgorukij’s.”

Few enough that Agenis had satisfied herself that the raider wasn’t coming and going, apparently. “So the cannon are parked somewhere,” Garol agreed. “We just need to find out where in the Shawl they are. Easy.”

No, impossible. Locating something as small as a hardened courier with all of the space in the Shawl to cover would take a Fleet sweeps team a year or more, and Garol didn’t have a year.

Walton shrugged, but it wasn’t so much a gesture of dismissal as of frustrated despair. “Port Charid isn’t staffed for long-term investigations, Garol. Everyone knows it’s Langsariks. After a while that’ll be all that matters. What are we going to do?”

She was not merely asking him to suggest a course of action. She was challenging him to make it right.

He’d promised her fair play, and she’d believed him; and based on his promise and her decision to trust his word, she had put the lives of five thousand Langsariks into the hands of the Bench here at Port Charid.

The Bench had other priorities than fair play.

The Bench could afford to sacrifice five thousand people to the rule of Law, especially if the public destruction of five thousand people would preserve civil order and prevent eventual disturbances that could easily cost far more lives over time.

The Langsariks were not very important lives when it came down to that. They had lived apart from their system of origin for more than fifteen years, they had become an embarrassment to the planetary government of Palaam. There would not even be much of an outcry.

Of course that was what the Bench had thought about the Nurail; and that had proved to be a miscalculation . . .

“We have another alternative.”

It wasn’t thinking of Nurail that gave Garol the idea. It was thinking of Langsariks.

Walton turned around to face him. “I’m listening.”

Garol spoke slowly, feeling his way. “If we can find a way to force the enemy out into the open, we don’t need to find the cannon — they’ll bring the cannon to us.”

It wasn’t a very good strategy, but it was all he had. As he spoke, however, Walton’s eyes sparked with a sudden understanding that heartened him.

“Entrapment,” Walton said, with a cheerful bloodlust in her voice. “I like it. It means holding out till frustration gets the better of the enemy, though, and he does something stupid. And if we can’t straighten this out soon, the Bench will conclude that we’ve violated the amnesty, Garol.”

He knew that.

“We’d better get it straightened out, then. I’ll get a target analysis started. You get a list of places at Port Charid where I could hide a hardened sixteen-soul scout with the spine to deploy battle cannon. We don’t have very much time.”

He didn’t know how much time there was. He only knew there couldn’t be much more of it. The fiasco at the Domitt Prison would only increase Chilleau Judiciary’s conviction that a satisfactory ending to the predation at Port Charid had to be demonstrated in a timely manner — whether or not it had any necessary resemblance to reality.

“Not good enough.”

Walton Agenis rejected his facile response. Garol didn’t respect her less for it; she was Flag Captain Walton Agenis, and she was responsible for her people. “Solving the problem is all very well and good, Specialist Vogel, but you’ve been working on it for ten days now and you haven’t solved it yet. I need a contingency plan. What are we going to do if the problem does not get solved? Your suggestions, please.”

He didn’t have any.

If he couldn’t convince First Secretary Verlaine that the Langsariks were not in flagrant and egregious violation of the amnesty agreement, the Bench would send the fleet to collect the entire population for processing: penal servitude at best — a death sentence, for those members of the Langsarik fleet who were no longer young — and the Bond at worst.

He had no contingency plans to offer.

He hated having to admit that.

“What was your contingency plan if the amnesty negotiations had fallen through, back when?”

Why couldn’t he admit it to her, and leave her to factors more powerful than the will of one man to resist them? The rule of Law was the cause to which he had dedicated his life, and the rule of Law was not always fair or just.

But she had trusted him.

The confidence of a leader of the caliber of Flag Captain Walton Agenis was too precious to be allowed to slip away from him without a fight.

She made a show of thinking about it, and maybe she was calling some previously discarded alternative to mind. “Once the planetary government had denounced us we were running out of options fast. I’ll grant you that.”

That had been the death blow, though like many mortal blows its full impact had been felt only gradually.

In the beginning the Langsarik fleet had fought for recognition as a planetary defense fleet, in the face of the Bench’s insistence that the existing fleet of Palaam’s historical economic-competitor worlds be recognized as having lawful jurisdiction over Palaamese commerce. As long as the Langsarik fleet could hope for recognition they could look forward to the day when their cause would be won and they could return home as lawful citizens.

But once the newly installed puppet government of Palaam had formally repudiated the Langsarik resistance, they had no basis for a claim to armed resistance against an unfair and unacceptable imposition.

What else could the Langsarik fleet have done but seek an amnesty?

Walton Agenis politely declined to state the obvious, out of respect for Garol’s position; but Garol knew the answer.

The Langsarik fleet could have continued to operate as an outlawed gang of thieves, facing capture and death on all sides and slowly dying of attrition until they grew too weak to run and could be captured, tried, sentenced.

Or the Langsarik fleet could have made a break for Gonebeyond space and tried to escape from Jurisdiction entirely. Now they could not do even that, desperate though it was.

The Langsariks no longer commanded the transport they would need to escape.

Had it been some subtle form of cruelty to place them at Port Charid, with the Sillume Vector so close — and yet so absolutely inaccessible?

“We’ll find the raiders. We’ve got to. Let me know if someone comes up with a line on anything, anything at all. There are a Langsarik and a Dolgorukij still missing.”

The longer he stood here casting about him for solutions, the more depressingly clear it became that there simply weren’t any.

Walton Agenis nodded. “I will if you will, Specialist Vogel.”

Bowing to take his leave, Garol turned around and left the room.

He had to get back to Port Charid.

If he couldn’t solve this problem, more than just Walton Agenis would have just cause to regret that they had ever trusted in his word.

###

The Bench specialist went into the house with Flag Captain Walton; Hilton made himself scarce. Kazmer stood to one side of the front door with Modice in the doorway, wondering what there was that he could possibly say.

There was no question in his mind that anything he had done to protect her was the right thing, and only what he would do again and again and again if he had to. But the price — which had been difficult enough to accept when he had faced impending disaster at Anglace — was almost intolerable to contemplate now that he stood face-to-face with Modice Agenis, and her looking up into his face with faith and trust and anxious concern in her beautiful dark eyes.

“Hello, Modice, how are you?”

He’d expected never to see her again. He’d reconciled himself to never seeing her again. He could think of nothing intelligent to say. There was so much he had to tell her, and so much more that he dared not so much as hint at.

“I’ve been worried about you, Kazmer. There was the Tyrell raid, and you hadn’t said anything about your cargo.”

Direct and straight to the point. He could hardly bear it; his nerves were already raw with emotion. “But then you heard that there was killing, right? And you knew I’d never do such a thing.”

He was lying to her. To Modice. What did he think he was doing? He was trying anything to escape connection with the raid in her eyes. Coward that he was. He couldn’t lie to Modice. What difference did it make? He belonged to the Malcontent now. Malcontents couldn’t marry, and some of them liked boys. The thought of some trifling liaison with Modice was unthinkable. She was too precious to be anything but a first, an only, a sacred wife.

Modice frowned, but her gaze didn’t waver. “I was afraid you’d gotten mixed up in something that would get you into trouble. Why did you come back to Port Charid, Kazmer?”

Yes, what difference did it make? Her good opinion of him was immaterial now; so what could be the use of trying to maintain that good opinion, by lying to her? Better if he told her the truth, and let her despise him. Maybe that was it. Let Modice despise him; and then it would not make so much difference that he could never marry.

“It’s a long story. But I’ll summarize. I thought Langsariks were hiring me to pilot a freighter with stolen goods. Yes. It was Tyrell. Only one thing, Modice, if you ever loved me. If you ever thought that you could have loved me maybe if I wasn’t so big and clumsy and stupid, and not Langsarik.”

She slapped him.

Hard, and across the face, and there was a surprising amount of force behind the flat of Modice’s beautiful white hand. Her once-white hand, tanned from working in the garden. He caught her hand as she raised it against him for a second time, and stared at it dumbly. Her fingernails were worn from physical labor, her knuckles roughened from work. Modice. Work.

“How dare you say such a thing to me.” She was so angry with him that she almost wept; he heard the quivering in her voice. “How dare you.”

He was at fault for his impertinence. She was right. He could claim some measure of affection from her, as due an acquaintance who adored her; it was improper to even hint at anything more.