Andrea Cort 03: War of the Marionettes

by Castro, Adam-Troy

  they wanted to kill some species other than human beings Pavel Ania looked ill this reminds me of rabies I’d never heard the word before what’s that a deadly plague once endemic on the home world it’s long extinct now but when it was around it attacked the brain and turned even timid animals savage and aggressive so governed by rage that they no longer followed their instincts of self-preservation they attacked other animals they would normally hide from or even consider family members any direct contact with the saliva of an infected organism say through biting could spread the infection to others I’d never heard of anything quite that monstrous humans included we were vulnerable through contact with family pets who could go from loving to vicious in a matter of days often without anybody noticing until the animal turned violent without warning we could also catch the syndrome from animals so small that their bites inflicted on us while we slept past without notice by the time symptoms appeared it was often too late for medical attention if that’s true Oshin said I’m surprised it didn’t sweep the world it pretty much did in some regions there were entire species considered too dangerous to approach because so many of them had been affected and

  even when a treatment was finally developed the syndrome still killed tens of thousands of human beings every year from the look of things this is a little like that but much more virulent spreading to unaffected Fulani after only a few minutes of contact with infected individuals but I’ve never heard of anything like it appearing on Vaughn before I massage the bridge of my nose it couldn’t at least not if it caused attacks on human beings in particular human beings have only been here for a few decades but it’s not just against human beings Pavel Ania said they’re attacking each other to that one group attacked a nursery

  Oshin added and why did I find that awfully resonant targeting the young even in war was an extreme act for any species we’d done it ourselves at various ugly points in our history but it had always required madness on a societal scale it always required something serious to have gone wrong with us it required a fear of what the enemy’s young represented either as a people or as followers of a belief and there was another thing as a species we were a disorganized mess for all our technology all our pretensions all our illusions of standing at the pinnacle of creation we were still not a thousandth as well organized as Fulani unlike them we had no overriding project to occupy our species for millennia on end all it had ever taken to drive us mad was the right stupid idea at the right moment but what would it take to drive lonny united in their great project almost as old as their species down a path that insane what would have to change now to overcome whatever had stopped something like this from ever happening before anybody who’s ever worked for any length of time taking care of babies in a busy maternity ward has probably diapered a bunch of future rapists and serial killers this all started because human being saved something that never should have been allowed to live egg many kill Vani egg viral never should have been allowed to live councillor this from Pavel Ania are you alright my own voice when it came was hard to hear behind the pounding in my ears should do parks the connection and I think you know it millennia I think you’ve known all along Fox registering the moment but not understanding it came within a millimeter of actually looking perturbed the brief narrowing of her eyes a wild overreaction coming from her gave me a savage satisfaction far out of proportion with the moment explained I turned to pocketful Ania who had turned to shade or two paler and went on her puffs didn’t try very hard to keep us locked up did he I think that if we hadn’t busted out on our own he would have waited until the other embassies were mollified and then found some legal accommodation that would free us with any assistance we needed to do what we needed to do I further think it’s likely that our escape didn’t save all that much more than half an hour which is a net loss given that we had to devote so much time to finding alternative transportation he couldn’t have known we’d try to recruit you in particular villain eeeh but I believe it likely that when we showed up in your clinic armed with teamers and looking for a knowledgeable guide to kidnap your exceptional willingness to come with us was no fluke no all that precious nonsense about not cooperating with us until we said please that was just stalling while you silently contacted your superiors by high-techs and asked what to do while we stood there trying to persuade you you had a whole conversation we didn’t even know about ending when you were ordered to go with us and give us any help needed I watched her closely and you’ve been reporting back to him ever since haven’t you she looked miserable and too fair cough if this was the hidden engine that’s been driving your actions all along and you knew that your bosses had information for us then why the fuck didn’t they just have you tell us rather than let us waste all this time flying blind when there were people dying all over the place she studied her hands and shame and made about three or four false starts before managing to speak because I didn’t know anything all their cough had time to say to me was go with them since then well conditions out in the field have been getting so much worse so quickly that my superiors have been too busy putting out fires to give me much more than brief assurances of further instructions yet to come but I have put together some of it based on what you’ve said and what little I know and I think you’re right about you two pox crime it’s the only thing that makes sense this must have started with what she did but I wasn’t finished with her yet tell me Vilonia if I pointed one of those teamers at your face right now and gave you a flash in the eyes at point-blank range what I find that it had no effect worse than any other bright light she spread her hands palms upward I don’t know but I suspect not the only time I ever saw any at our facility here it was a non-functional model with a harmless light burst for training purposes the next sound was under the circumstances both intensely annoying and wildly reassuring Oceans startled laughter I hated him making light of our time being wasted this way took comfort in knowing that he was even still capable of laughter presented him finding so much amusement in us being played for fools and was so lost in that knot of conflicting emotion that though I tried to just speak over him I never got any further than a stammering syllable or two after a moment I registered Pavel Ania was now averting her eyes and covering her mouth for reasons that had nothing to do with shame and the sheer absurdity if the whole situation got to me too this much is true since losing most of my capacity for laughter at age 8 I’ve more than earned my subsequent reputation as a cold and humorless bitch I don’t chuckle out loud more than once or twice a year but physical and emotional exhaustion the inappropriateness of the moment the tragic circumstances and the overwhelming stakes only made me laugh harder I caught Ocean’s eye or pocketful Enya’s and saw my own ridiculousness reflected there I got sucked in again even Fox fed into it by not participating there’s nothing funnier when you can’t stop laughing than the one deadly serious person beside you who won’t start and her stone face struck me in my giddiness has dropped dead hilarious and of course sad too I remember catching a glimpse of her midway through the whole thing as untouched by any of our madness as a ghost

  allowing the passage of solid objects you poor woman I thought I don’t know what happened to you to make you want to be what you are but even at my most despairing I always held on to what you’ve thrown in the garbage then as always happens when laughter interrupts moments of gravest import composure returned I remembered that the love of my life was still dying separately and together I remembered that my species was in danger I remembered that another had already been harmed perhaps irreparably by something a foolish human being had done I remembered that people were dying in great numbers and I felt ashamed for laughing and I had to fight my own eyes to keep this moment of hysteria from reversing itself all the way back to tears Pavel Ania rubbing her eyes said I’m sorry I know I’ll relay what I know of your friend’s plight to my people I cannot promise that they’ll be able to spare anybody to look for her under the circumstances they probably can’t but at least they’ll know maybe I
appreciate that Ocean said she offered him a shiny little half-smile before turning back to me I don’t know where chatterbox gone and without speaking to Paul have no idea where to start looking that’s all right I said and took a deep breath I think we can start with the scene of the crime.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Wreckage

  We took Royko skimmer and flew

  east from the humans teeth into a region where the land itself seemed to have buckled and torn from some ancient Cataclysm the mountains grew taller pricier and more jagged the canyons between them deeper and more shrouded in darkness for the most part we stayed below the clouds through storms that swath the landscape in grey unremitting rain and from there into brief islands of sunlight that illuminated forests of rolling orange and green without any prompting on our part Pavel Ania kept explaining what we saw with the reflexive eagerness of a guide who loved this world and wanted to assure us that the ugliness we’d seen in our brief time here was not its representative flavor but a tragic departure from the realm she knew she told us the name of the giant for winget thing with the scoop shaped mouth that we caught flying in circles over one expanse of orange lushness before it saw us coming and darted back beneath the forest canopy she pointed out the cliffside carved into a slit by the ribbon of white water that poured over the precipice and plummeted Selenia said more than two kilometers to a valley floor invisible beneath the shroud of mist and rainbows she showed us a bowl many kilometres across that might have been the remains of volcanic caldera or the site of an ancient Meteor strike and warned us to shield our eyes when our flyover brought us in line with the brilliant reflection of the fuse crater floor in other times I might have informed pock Villa Nia that her attempts to impress me were wasted on a person who had little use for the sights to be found on planets today tired staying close to Ocean in what I knew might turn out at any moment to have been the last time we’d ever spend together I just let her guided tour pass over me like background noise something safe to ignore while the rest of the world burned the land grew flatter duller les fecund with points of interest to be remarked upon from the air so Paco Fellini retreated for a while her last comment words to the effect that we’d be flying back into greener places before we neared the scene of cheetah pox crime she left us and went to sit in the rear grabbing a quick meal of some bready substance that emerged from its rapping glistening with a red goo that might have been sauce but that in context made me think of blood I ate something white and homogeneous from inside a tin insisted that Ocean force himself to eat half and sat there not so much enjoying the silence as taking refuge in it and then our reprieve ended Fox who had been sitting by herself as close to us as a vault hiding all its contents behind a shield of impenetrable steel chose a moment as arbitrary as any other to rise and cross the distance between us I said you want to talk about Marin she offered an imperceptible nod her face is untouched by whatever might have been going on inside as a mountain might seem to be by the sleeping tectonic forces within even as I registered that your promise would not suffice this time Ocean gave my hand a tight squeeze it was a silent prod as persuasive as any impassioned argument would have been I dropped his hand and said alright counselor here’s the thing you opened the door by asking for my help you can’t do that and decide for yourself what questions you’re going to bother answering whether you like it or not mr. shifts character is relevant to this investigation I need to know what he was involved with that was so criminal and why you believe he deserved to die was that a flicker behind those cold distant eyes and what was it anger defiance hope something that didn’t have a name it has nothing to do with Marin let me be the judge of that she stood there for almost a minute not waiting me out but shrouding a deep inner turmoil I could only guess that I thought of battles between predators and prey far below a calm Ocean surface will this be kept confidential I can’t promise that counselor because I’m a prosecutor not a personal advocate but I have promised to use what you tell me to help Marin and if that’s what you really want then it’s about time you started acting like it I half expected her to nod decide my terms irreconcilable and returned to her seat where she could continue to languish in the silence she preferred but her hesitation this time was much shorter than the last her eyes flickered toward Parkville ania who was still sitting apart aware of our conversation and following it but not craning to hear her upon making up their minds to confess criminals often hesitate to speak in the presence of someone not involved in the interrogation it’s all based on the understandable human impulse to hold on to their pretense of unsullied virtue just a little bit longer the psychological quirk that makes unmasking one self palatable as long as the dire secret can still be kept for at least another minute or two from at least one of the people in the room Tara Fox was smart enough and through what had been done to her untouchable enough to recognize the phenomenon even as it affected her and still she seemed to relax the instant I activated my his screen shrouding the words passing between us behind a temporary shield of white noise I said first things first what were the two of you guilty of there were various small crimes related to the business misleading claims fraudulent accounting minor offenses against industrial regulations both local and Confederate it didn’t necessarily mean that any of them were worth talking about

  and with no place left to retreat she now presented no resistance at all mass murder given Fox’s characteristic reluctance to speak more than she absolutely had to it took another ten minutes of stops and starts for her to provide the details one of the few laws the Confederacy had always enforced upon its member worlds dictated that no concerted action could ever be taken against any indigenous species until an independent investigation ruled out sentience or pre sentient the process could take years and gave targeted species such a strong benefit of the doubt that the same laws had they been enforced on the home world in historical times would have prohibited the habitat destruction that doomed the cetaceans and the great apes this was not because we claim to be any more enlightened than the idiots of mankind’s first technological millennium if anything we were just as stupid and selfish as our species had always been but we’d also gone out into space met our rivals among the Stars and realized that for the first time in our long and bloody history there were now Outsiders watching whose opinions affected our own destiny no longer could we get away with deciding it convenient to wipe out some sentient or semi sentient species which might have touchy cousins so we now erred on the side of caution

  we continue to kill each other off when it suited us proved our depravity in a thousand other ways when we found profit in it but didn’t commence shooting some strange bird-like thing that insisted on stealing our crops until we knew for damn sure that it was just some idiot local scavenger and not the equivalent of a hominid a stone’s throw from being able to build its own civilization this didn’t stop abuses from continuing in shifts case the two races targeted by local human governments had not been borderline cases easy to mistake for environmental pests one had already progressed to using tools and the other while a few years from that threshold had developed a number of identifiable regional languages they were both few in number both straddling the edge of extinction in the kind of hostile environment that gives proto sentience the choice of developing adaptive intelligence or sinking back into the dust both had been in the way when pushy humans moved into the neighborhood and staked a claim to their natural resources on both occasions Derek Schiff had accepted the contract to provide tactical support for environmental engineering without honouring his obligation to vet the details it was the kind of sloppy cost-cutting maneuver that every corporation pulls from time to time on the grounds that fixing any inadvertent messes is cheaper than going to the trouble of making sure that there’s no mess in the first place in each case he’d learned the truth at a point so far into the resulting slaughter that his involvement already constituted a crime of depraved indifference and in each case he’d finished his bloody work because stopping
and thus risking exposure if any surviving indigenes were ever discovered by others would have meant his personal ruination you could almost feel sorry for him most of history’s greatest monsters committed mass murder on purpose it must be preferable for the monster at least to Derick shifts situation finding out that he had joined their ranks by accident but even so the failure of conscience involved in not calling a halt to it in time might have given even the baitul hein munitions corporation pause the degree of negligence it must have taken to make that mistake once and then not learn from it causing the same kind of tragedy to happen a second time was worse antara fox his trusted right-hand shifts highest legal counselor at the corporation they ran as partners head twice helped him by the time she finished we were still another 15 minutes from our destination by then we’d flown over another chain of volcanic mountains and had returned to wetter and Rainier regions the rains buffeted are ionic shielding without ever touching us but it was hard not to feel their anger appropriate I told her you’re right counselor he did deserve to die