Angel of Destruction (7 page)

“Almost ready to load-out,” she said, reassuringly. “I just saw the boss Langsarik heading for Central Dispatch. He had another Langsarik with him. One from the Tyrell crew. There was an inside man.”

Of course. There had to be.

Noman’s talk about secures would be just talk, after all. They’d placed a man on-site; they already had the secures.

Kazmer was astonished at the depth of his relief.

The engineer came forward to give Kazmer the word, his face flushed with effort and his expression full of a grim sort of satisfaction.

“We’re off,” the engineer said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Kazmer toggled his comm. “Docking bay clear?” he asked the dock-master, or whoever was in Central Dispatch; but he wasn’t too surprised when the voice that answered him had a distinctly Langsarik lilt to it.

“Docking bay clear and sealed for depressurization, all personnel safe and secure. Launch dome opening sequence.”

The Langsarik crew he had brought with him in the decoy cargo stacks would secure the crews, destroy the station’s communications to prevent a premature alarm, and ensure that nothing incriminating was left behind.

“Freighter initiating primary launch sequence. Issue warning order.”

There were no Fleet patrols between him and the Sillume entry vector. Once they had reached the vector they would be safe, because there was no technology that could track a ship across a vector. The authorities would assume that they’d made for the sanctuary of Gonebeyond space.

The ship was fully pressurized; the docking-bay launch dome lay open. Kazmer fired his positioning jets, carefully maneuvering the freighter into the precise angle he wanted for the best — fastest — cleanest departure from Tyrell. They couldn’t actually fire the main thrust until they were far enough from Tyrell to avoid perturbing its orbit, or risk someone at Port Charid noticing and sending up an alarm. That would be a dead giveaway. Whether or not there were any Fleet patrols in the neighborhood, it was idiocy to borrow trouble.

The freighter eased clear of the docking station and began to gain space between it and the Tyrell Yards.

Kazmer watched his power profiles as the freighter slowly picked up speed.

He’d learned that Langsarik raiding was something he simply wasn’t comfortable doing. Not even with Langsariks. Not even with the best — most decent — people he knew, and Hilton Shires was way up toward the top of that list. It had been too tense. It could have gone wrong too easily.

He brought the fuel lines up to maximum feed carefully, gradually, slowly; and the freighter began to really move.

He was never going to get so close to a potential disaster ever again so long as he lived, if he had anything to say about it.

###

Raid leader Dalmoss Chzagul stood in the doorway of the dock-master’s office within the sealed confines of Central Dispatch, rubbing the clear-gum from his face absent-mindedly as he watched the freighter lifting away from the Tyrell Yards on monitor.

It was three days over the Sillume vector to the nearest Fleet detachment, so the freighter was in no danger from Fleet.

Port Charid had some police resources available, three swift cruisers with just enough firepower to stop the freighter short of the exit vector; but so long as no alarm reached Port Charid from Tyrell, the freighter was in no danger from Charid’s own limited police either. No alarm would reach Port Charid until Dalmoss was finished here. He had complete confidence in the effectiveness of his communications intercepts, and for good reason — they had insider information, after all.

So the freighter was free and clear. They had plenty of time to finish up and make their escape.

“All quiet?” Dalmoss asked Pettiche, who sat outside the dock-master’s office, monitoring the master communications board. Pettiche nodded.

“The freighter lifted away during a black slice on the sweeps, ‘Noman.’ Just as you planned. The most we have to watch for is a routine query if anyone at Port notices.”

“Well done, Brother Charil.” The alien name came strangely to his mouth, but they all used Langsarik names during a raid. Attention to detail was an important part of their success: even as it had been for the Langsariks themselves. “Thank you.”

Now that the freighter was gone it was time to move to the next stage in the exercise, and Dalmoss stepped back into the relative privacy of the dock-master’s office, calling to one of the men nearby. “Efons, take over on the panels, I need Charil’s help. Brother Charil?”

The dock-master’s office in Central Dispatch was glassed in along the side that fronted on the main room, so that the dock-master could keep an eye on her employees. Which was humorous, in a sense, because Dalmoss was using the dock-master’s vantage point to keep an eye on the dock-master herself. She was sitting on the floor against the far wall of Central Dispatch with the rest of the station’s crew, with her hands bound behind her back to encourage docility.

Pettiche stopped a respectful half a pace behind his superior, and bent his head in token of salute. A gesture small enough to avoid drawing attention to itself — Langsariks didn’t salute — but Dalmoss knew that the respectful submission was genuine and heartfelt.

“Yes, Noman.”

Dalmoss nodded in the direction of the station’s crew, in turn. “This is everybody, Brother Charil? We need to be sure.” That was Pettiche’s job: to be sure. Pettiche had been placed here at Tyrell for months, just waiting for the time to come when he would be needed.

“I’ve cross-verified with Sumner, Noman. Everyone is here. No soul has been overlooked.”

Good. “We’d best get on with it, then, Charil. Start with the dock-master. We had to get her security codes, after all.”

It was therefore necessary that her corpse present clear evidence of the extraction process through which the station’s security codes had been presumably obtained from her assumedly reluctant lips. Pettiche bent his head once more, a swift gesture of acknowledgment; but he didn’t turn immediately to leave. What? Something was wrong? “Talk to me, Charil.”

“Out of respect for hospitality, Noman. I have taken bread from her hands. I ask to be excused the letting of her blood.”

Well, of course. Hospitality was Holy ordinance; it could not be set aside. The moment Pettiche said it Dalmoss realized the propriety of the objection, and was ashamed of himself for not taking it into account. “Truly I deserve rebuke, Charil. Tell Sumner, then. You take Parken and secure him on board the courier, yes?”

It was necessary for Tyrell’s one Langsarik employee, Parken, to leave the station alive. There would be more than enough physical evidence to indict the Langsariks for this raid; but a bloodstain of the wrong type, if they were unfortunate enough to have it come to someone’s attention, could conceivably raise questions in someone’s mind. So the Langsarik would walk out. They’d dump his body somewhere it could be used to further incriminate the Langsariks. Later.

Pettiche’s body wouldn’t be found here either.

But they’d find a way to cover for that: and negative evidence was always so much less obvious and persuasive than the positive evidence that they meant to provide.

Once Charil had left Central Dispatch, Silves — whom they called Efons when they were raiding — spoke from his station on monitor. “Noman. In the name.”

Silves did not complete the formula, maintaining discipline as Pettiche had. Dalmoss watched Pettiche walk across the warehouse floor to give Sumner his orders.

“I’m listening.”

The formula was the one they used when someone wanted to gain a deeper understanding of a senior’s orders, and as such it was Dalmoss’s duty to submit to questioning.

“It soils the soul, Noman. Is this really necessary?”

Silves’s voice certainly held only respectful desire for understanding. There was no challenge there; and it was a reasonable question.

“The dock-master at least must suffer before she dies, Efons.” They could expect an autopsy, to support Charges; the Bench made a clear distinction between the unlawful physical abuse of a living being and the much lesser crime of incidental mutilation of a corpse. “We can expect the most attention to be focused on her. The others — well. We’ll see how the timing goes.”

They might not have to torture more than three or four of the others to convince the Bench that an atrocity exceeding mere murder had taken place. But it was truly necessary to convince the Bench that murder had been wantonly committed in full knowledge of the crime as it was being done. The Angel would settle for nothing less than the destruction of the Langsariks as a people, for the insult they had given the Holy Mother in preying on Dolgorukij shipping and to take the blame for a systematic destruction of the physical assets of other trading interests at Port Charid.

Sumner came into Central Dispatch with the dock-master and two of Dalmoss’s other men; Dalmoss pointed them through to the safe room, the place inside Central Dispatch where the small-heavies had been. Sumner closed the door. Sound would not carry far from inside the room.

He could start to compose his after action report — in his head, of course, it was never to be written or recorded.

They were very near their goal.

After just a few more Langsarik raids there would be no mercantile interests left in Port Charid with the resources to contest with the Dolgorukij Combine for primacy.

The Dolgorukij Combine could afford to rebuild infrastructure. The Dolgorukij Combine could afford to purchase and rebuild the damaged warehouses of its fellow mercantile interests, leasing them back at a reasonable premium to cover its expenses.

And the Holy Mother would grant Her blessings to Her faithful servitors forever, after they made Her Queen in Port Charid.

###

Chilleau Judiciary sat at the node of one of the most powerful vectors under Jurisdiction. The Chilleau vector gave access and egress to dozens of systems, but Port Charid wasn’t one of them.

The easiest way from Chilleau Judiciary to Port Charid was through Renicks via Omot, but Garol was in a hurry, and the easy way took a good two days Standard more than the transit in through Garsite. Garsite was small and relatively out of the way, as vector nodes went, so there was a risk — if something went wrong in flight, the wait at Garsite for replacement parts could be tedious.

So nothing would go wrong in flight: and that was all there was to it.

The Chilleau vector was one that Garol traveled all the time. But if he’d ever jumped Garsite, it had been so long that he’d forgotten; and that meant taking advantage of Jils’s presence to cross-check his setup stats, just for extra assurance. Once he was clear of the exit vector from Chilleau to Garsite and on arc toward the Garsite entry vector, Garol called back from the wheelhouse of the courier ship to the aft compartment for her.

“Hey, Jils.” She was in the rear compartment of the courier, reviewing, he assumed, the intelligence reports they’d brought with them from Port Charid. She probably wouldn’t mind a break. “Would you come give me your once-over on this?”

The angle of approach, rate of acceleration, and path of the courier had to be calculated to create a transit funnel that would drop them out of the figurative flume of the vector at the desired destination.

People made mistakes in vector calculations.

Some of those mistakes led to the discovery of new termini on a previously identified vector; but most of the time ships and crews simply vanished, leaving no sign of what might ultimately have happened to them.

Garol wasn’t interested in finding out.

Garol wanted to go to Port Charid, not off into the unknown on an adventure.

Jils came forward slowly, rubbing her forehead. “Sure, Garol, let’s have a look.”

He hadn’t been surprised when she’d expressed an interest in going to Rikavie with him; the Langsarik settlement was too important to the Second Judge’s prestige and public opinion to take any chances. He didn’t mind having her present, either, for moral support if for nothing else.

He angled the navigation calculation screen carefully toward her to minimize any glare, but Jils wasn’t looking at his calculations, she was staring at the forward observation screens instead. Some things Garol didn’t mind obtaining by virtue of rank. This courier had full-sweep screens. It was a new model out of the Arakcheyek shipyards — Dolgorukij Combine, absolutely state-of-the-art, and priced accordingly. All in support of the rule of Law.

“Hey,” Jils said. “Space is pretty, out here.”

Garsite space was pretty. She was right. The light bent softly around the flat almond-shaped boundaries of the vector, creating a subtle sort of back lighting. The vector had a halo.

“Yeah, and I’d like to be reasonably sure of seeing it again someday. So would you check the vector calculations please.”

Jils shook herself slightly. “Oh. Right. Sorry, Garol. I’ll do a scan on them. You go stow for vector transit, why don’t you.”

Undivided attention on vector calculations was a good thing. Garol was all in favor of enabling it on Jils’s part, so he went off to lock things down. It wasn’t that a ship risked losing its gravity during a vector transit, or at least not usually; but it was easier to recover from an accidental lapse in gravity if a person had taken measures to minimize the potential mess beforehand.

Jils had documents strewn from one end of the aft cabin to the other. Incident reports on raids at Sonder, Penyff, Tershid, Okidan, Tyrell. Forensic manifests, where available. Cause of death. Body counts.

Garol didn’t like the picture that was forming. It didn’t fit the Langsarik pattern; and how could the Langsariks have managed?

He’d have to get Jils’s thoughts about it. Once they had the vector, maybe.

After the aft cabin was as thoroughly stowed as it could get, Garol went back forward. Jils was finishing a countercheck reconciliation, but everything looked pretty stable. He didn’t see where she’d had to correct anything he’d done.

He waited until she’d completed the countercheck before speaking to her. “How’s it look?”

Scanning the calculation set from start to finish one last time, Jils nodded. “You’re solid, Garol, you can calculate vector transits for me anytime. Good to go. Let’s do it.”