by Wil McCarthy
Grigory's very expensive messages to her had gone on about the incident for hours. Like everyone else, he'd expressed the hope that the destruction had been accidental, but from the Waisters themselves there had been no comment, no communication of any sort. “It's so damnably eerie,” Grigory had said. “It's almost as if they were trying to frighten us.”
Well, that might be, but unless the Waisters were formally charged with a violent crime, it was hardly the business of Central Investigations, nor of Malye herself. Kiril Mikhailovot Gostev's case remained her only assignment.
“Open the door, please, Sergeant.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
He slapped a control on the wall behind him, and the metal door eased back a few centimeters and then slid open.
The interrogation room was small and sparsely furnished, just a table and some chairs, all of bare metal, with Kiril Gostev sitting by the far wall, with his wrists firmly manacled to it. An expression of pure hatred graced his features, and he needed a shave and some time alone with a hairbrush.
Malye stepped inside. “Close the door, please, Sergeant.”
An uncomfortable pause, and then: “Yes, Colonel.”
The door sighed closed behind her.
“Good afternoon, Kiril Mikhailovot,” she said brightly. “My name is Malyene. I'm going to ask you a few questions.”
His eyes smoldered. “I know who you are.”
Malye doubted that very much, but when she spoke, her voice was kind. “I understand you are angry with me for some reason, and have made some threats against me.” She waited, and went on: “I've already arranged to move your family into protective custody, and I've taken steps toward giving them a new identity, and a stipend to replace your lost salary. They will not suffer because of your illness, Kiril Mikhailovot.”
As others had suffered, under similar circumstances. Oh, yes.
“Illness?” Gostev looked puzzled, wary. He had embezzled money from the trade guild that employed him, and had eventually killed three people to cover his trail. And when it became clear that the link between these crimes and himself could not be hidden, he had fled.
“Why yes,” Malye said, still brightly. “Abnormalities of the nervous system. Specifically, of the brain's temporal lobe. Didn't you know?” She took a seat at the table, set her flatscreen down in front of her, traced up a set of files. Clucked and shook her head as she examined them. “Fistfight, fistfight, counseled for bullying, another fistfight...” She looked up. “These are your school records, ages fourteen to seventeen. The number of violent incidents is a marker for us, and indeed your adult life seems only slightly less explosive. Until three weeks ago, of course, at which time your symptoms worsened. Kiril Mikhailovot, I don't know how your condition has escaped medical notice for so long, but these are classic symptoms.”
Gostev stared at her uncomprehendingly. Clearly, this was not what he'd expected to hear from her.
“You are easily angered,” Malyene continued, “and when angry you find it difficult to slow down and think. This is when the... incidents occur. Am I correct?”
Uncertainly, Gostev nodded. “Well, yes. It's... like I can't control myself, like I'm watching myself from the outside. That's what it's like for me, like watching a holie.”
Malye smiled her most sympathetic smile. “I've spoken with a medical team already, and they are very eager to examine you, to find out exactly what the problem is and how it may be corrected. We will need your permission, of course.” She paused for a moment, considering, then spoke again with a more genuine candor: “My father suffered from a rare sensory disorder called synesthesia. I often wish he'd seen a doctor about it.”
Of course, Malye herself had seen no end of doctors, had trumped up reasons to have her brain scanned again and again. Normal, always normal. Smell the colors, little Malye... But in a case like this, a detailed examination might turn something up, and at the very least would do no harm.
The hand of Justice would put a bullet through that brain soon enough.
“This is a trick,” Gostev said, his eyes narrowing.
“No,” Malye protested, with utmost sincerity. She rose, showed Gostev the manacle key. “I have no desire to trick you, nor any reason to. I'm going to uncuff you now; I'm sure you must be very uncomfortable, sitting like that.”
Gostev appeared lost in his astonishment. “Why... why are you being so kind? I'm... I...”
I'm a killer? I killed three people?
Almost, Malye thought. Almost, Gostev had confessed to her; almost, he had not caught himself in time. But there were plenty of opportunities ahead. While uncuffing Gostev's wrists, she held him motionless with a gaze, and spoke: “Why would I be other than kind, Kiril Mikhailovot? We are not enemies, you and I, but partners in the search for a... solution to this mess.”
The manacles sprang open, Gostev's hands tumbling out of them. He rubbed his wrists, looking at her, not angry at all anymore, but simply confused.
And the beauty of it was that he would never catch her in a lie, for Malye had spoken nothing but the purest of truth. Any fool could lie, or threaten, or raise the specter of torture and pain. And get lies in return from the suspect, or at best, hedges and half truths. But to win the suspect over, to coax his story out little by little, to build confidence and trust and the illusion of friendship while telling him the truth...
Even among C.I. top silver, not many could do it, and none half as well as Malyene herself. Lead me to your doom, Kiril Mikhailovot Gostev; I promise I will hold your hand all the while. No job could suit the monster better than this one, and no monster could possibly be more perfect for the job. Except maybe Father—in the back of her mind somewhere, she heard his voice, laughing softly with approval and delight.
~~~
A sharp noise.
Startled, Malye awoke to darkness. The noise repeated, an insistent beeping, and she traced it this time to the flatscreen she'd left on her night table. She could see it there, glowing ever so faintly with the starfield pattern she'd been using for an idle mode. The constellation Orion was just visible at the edge of it, the three stars of the hunter's waist standing out more sharply than the rest.
“Those stars are blue supergiants,” Grigory had told her in one of his many urgent messages, “brightly visible even at twelve hundred light years' distance, twice as hot as Aye and many thousands of times larger. In fact you could squeeze Aye and Bee together, along with Sol and all the other colony stars, and they would hardly make a splash on the surface of one of these titans. If we dropped Alnilam, the center star, in the middle of Sol system, its surface would reach nearly to the orbit of Jupiter. Its flares might well disturb the atmospheres of Pluto and Neptune. Can you imagine what it must be like, living in proximity to such a star?”
In fact, Malye could not. What did she know of Sol system? Of stars in general? She had not bothered to reply to that message. Nor the one after it, nor probably the one after that. She'd wanted to tell him to stop it, to just shut up until she got the case wrapped up and came back home again. But thanks to orbital geometries, the round-trip light lag between Tyumen and their home at Pinega was now very nearly a full minute, and she hadn't relished the prospect of an argument drawn out so ridiculously, as if they were children passing notes in class. Better that the delay were an hour, time enough to conceive and dictate great monologues at one another. But of course, she had no time for that, either.
The flatscreen bleeped again, managing somehow to sound desperate and frantic and lost. It was giving the signal, she realized, for personal messages of the utmost priority. She had only heard that sound once before in her life, on the day C.I. had come to take her father away.
She fumbled for the screen, picked it up, thumbed it, traced up the message.
Grigory's face appeared, light spilling in around it from a room she did not recognize. She squinted against the brightness.
“Come home, Malyene,” Grigory said, his face looking pinche
d and frightened. “I know you believe your work too important for any interruption whatever, but hear me out. You've been very brave, very stoic, sticking to your duty. I love you for it, I truly do—it's stupid of you, but it shows such strength, and strength is something I've always admired.
“Now listen closely. Almost a thousand Waister ships, of enormous size, have crossed into the outer reaches of Sirius system. The destruction of Yessey and Ikarka was no accident, my dearest; the Waisters are moving much more slowly this time, more methodically, and they are destroying everything they pass.
“Do you hear me, dearest? I think a million people may have died in the past few hours, and the Waisters are only just inside the outmost Kuiper belt. Our own geometry is not favorable, either—on their current course the Waisters will reach Tyumen in four hours, and will be here at Pinega in just over twelve. If we are separated...
“I know a lot more than you've ever suspected of me. I know, for example, which Andrei was your real father. Ialah, such a past you have! But Andrei Brakanov would have come home at a time like this, yes? You try so hard not to be like him; you resist even his sense of humor. Even that. But this is different, Malyene Andreivne—do not let his ghost constrain you this time. Come home now, for the children's sake if not for mine.”
The image froze, then winked off.
Malyene stared once more at the flatscreen's idle-mode starscape. Waisters will reach Tyumen in four hours. The thought seemed to bounce around inside her, as a rubber ball might bounce around inside a hollow metal shell, ringing against its sides but leaving no impression.
She sat up, calmly sliding the sheet to the foot of the bed. She rose, then, and dressed slowly, her mind cycling over and over on the same information, like the broken instrument she so often thought it was.
Crowds buffeted her as she left the tiny guest quarters behind. Angry, fearful people, milling about to no apparent purpose. The trip through the corridors of Tyumen's Capital Warren was all a blur to her, a vague dream of walking—or perhaps floating—through turns and crossings and level changes which seemed random and yet which carried her back swiftly to the police station. And still she wandered, just as aimlessly, and in no time at all she had come to the detention area.
Finding herself there, in the presence of an unfamiliar and nervous-looking greenbar guard, she blinked like a sleeper awakening. The corridor was all of white-painted metal, long and straight and brightly lit, blocked at the end with a gate of steel bars, also painted. Beyond it, she could see the holding cells, four of them, only one of which was occupied. By Kiril Mikhailovot Gostev.
“What time is it?” she snapped at the greenbar.
With quick, tight movements he checked his palm chronometer, then looked back up at her. “Four hundred hours, Colonel!” he said, then paused, eyeing her expectantly. Give me orders; tell me what I should be doing to mitigate this terrible crisis. Waisters in four hours! Or perhaps, frightened as he seemed to be, he hadn't been told that much. As a reflex, fear was best stimulated by the absence of clear information.
“Open the gate,” she said to him.
Wide-eyed and wordless, he complied.
She stepped through, moved purposefully toward Gostev's cell.
“Should I close it now, Colonel?” the greenbar called in after her.
“No,” she said without turning.
Reaching Gostev's cell, she stopped. He lay asleep on his bunk, curled up among cheap, sturdy furnishings at least as comfortable as those in Malyene's own guest quarters. Except for the bars, of course, and the fact that everything was fastened firmly to the floor and walls. People were often surprised by the look of prisons and jails, functional and practical and above all inexpensive. No special effort was made to discomfort the prisoner, and yet no energy was wasted on entertainments or conveniences or fancy confinement mechanisms, so that the overall effect was at once spartan, primitive, and disconcertingly humane—the purity and simplicity of the basic, physical needs. The lights were never off, and yet never bright enough to disturb a sleeper.
“Gostev,” she said, in a firm, loud voice.
The prisoner stirred.
“Gostev! Wake up.”
Grunting in displeasure at having been so disturbed, Gostev rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, which immediately widened in surprise at the sight of the monster, holding a hard-projectile weapon aimed directly at him.
“Colonel?” he said, too groggy and confused yet to feel any fear.
“Gostev,” she said to him, “it seems we've entered a time of crisis. I do not know what's going to happen, and consequently I cannot guarantee your inability to escape. Opportunities may arise.”
Now his fear came forth, in bright, singing waves. He said nothing, but his eyes were wide with sudden comprehension.
Now you see, she thought at him. Now you see what murder truly means. Now, at last, you understand what it is you have done.
She pulled the trigger and held it for a moment. The weapon coughed four times in her hand. Gostev jerked, twitched, sprayed dark fluid, and finally gasped, drawing in and then releasing the last bit of decent people's air he would ever have the opportunity to breathe. The eyes widened further, and then relaxed.
When Malye was five or six and they had lived in Valna, the garden levels there had suffered a plague of insects. “Let us learn a thing or two about spiders,” her father had said one day, laying one under his desktop magnifier. Gently, with his tiniest tweezers, he'd removed the legs, and then plucked the jeweled eyes out one by one. “To let the soul escape,” he'd said, but instead the spider's body had disgorged a clot of webbing from its other end, like a gossamer turd, and his laughter was bright with surprise.
She heard that laughter again now, echoing inside her. See, Papa, what your little girl can do?
Without pausing, she reholstered the weapon, turned, and strode calmly to the exit.
“You may close the gate now,” she said to the greenbar when she'd got to the other side.
And then she went out the way she had come, down the long corridor and out through the police station, into the milling crowds once more. Only later did it occur to her that she should have dismissed the greenbar, absolved him of duty and permitted or even ordered him to seek what comfort he could among family or friends. She could have done the same for every man and woman in the station. Certainly she had the authority, and anyway, what possible difference could it make? Those on corridor shift would be keeping what little peace there was to keep, and the others, who had not thought to join them in this task or who had been ordered not to, were merely superfluous.
But by the time these thoughts had come to her, it was much too late to go back. The issue would become a source of tremendous guilt for her in later times, far out of proportion, in fact, to any actual harm she may have caused, for who, she thought, would leave an innocent young man to stand guard in a white, empty corridor for the last few hours of his life?
Who, indeed, but a monster?
CHAPTER FIVE
213::16
PINEGA, GATE SYSTEM:
CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON
It was all Malye could do to keep from grabbing Sasha as he stalked back and forth across the cryo ward's floor, the thin white robe flapping about his knees with every step. Grabbing and restraining him—he was driving her insane. Once informed of his true circumstances, the place and time of his revival, he had gone utterly to pieces.
“Everything's gone,” he said yet again. He had stopped crying, at least, but could not seem to shut up or calm down. “Everything. Everyone I know, every place I've ever been... My sisters are dead, and you tell me the Waisters are coming back? Names of Ialah, you... damned evil woman. Why did you even revive me?”
“You can go back to being dead,” Malye snapped at him. “It isn't difficult to arrange.”
Immediately, she regretted her words. Impulse control, Malyene. Without that...
“Perhaps you should think o
f this in the other direction,” suggested Viktor Slavanovot, putting a bare leg out in Sasha's path to stop his pacing. “Our survival seems nothing short of miraculous. The Waisters came, yeah, and for everyone else that was the end of it. For us...” he spread his hands wide. “Who can say?”
Malye eyed Viktor curiously. She hadn't spoken with him before... before a few minutes ago, but he seemed a solid fellow, the sort Grigory would have liked. He'd taken the news better than Malye herself had, and while he looked as lost and unhappy as she felt, he was also radiant with curiosity, and with a strange alertness. “The gravity's not right,” had been almost the first words out of his mouth, and Plate had jumped in to explain that Pinega's size and shape had been altered by the ferocity of the Waister attack, pieces of it literally boiling away, and its spin rate had slowed, the axis moving and reorienting as a result of the lost mass.
How a solid ball of rock and metal 650 kilometers across could be so affected Malye could not imagine, but indeed, once it was pointed out she could feel a slight tilt to the floor, and perhaps a lightness in her head and feet as well, though it was difficult to be sure. Inhabitants of the Lesser Worlds learned to deal with wide ranges of spin and natural gravity, particularly if they traveled as much as Malye did.
An astute observation, then, under—to put it mildly—less than ideal circumstances. Viktor Slavanovot would probably have made a good criminal investigator. She was pretty sure he'd been a repairman or technician of some kind, though, and she supposed that was not really so different. Except for the methods of interrogation: You, valve! What's wrong with you?
In spite of everything, her dead husband and her frozen children and her Thousand Worlds gone to dust, this thought tugged at the corners of her mouth, almost enough to make her smile.