They spared a moment to feel shocked before they fell to speculating over which system was targeted. Some assumed it would be the Terran system, the strongest and principle aggressor in the War on Kaldis. Others flatly denied it, insisting no one would destroy the birthplace of the species. Under cover of all this conversation, Alistair approached Angus.
“What happened to Mar Profundo?”
Angus frowned and shook his head. “Don’t know it.”
“It’s a city on Kaldis.”
Angus shook his head again. “Oh, well then. Kaldis in a bad way. A very bad way. I don’t think much of anythin’ left standin’ thereabouts.”
A tide of interrogators carried Angus away, but Alistair had nothing more to ask. He discredited the notion that little was left standing on Kaldis. That struck him as an exaggerated rumor concocted in the mind of someone with little war experience. What actual condition the city was in he simply could not know, and he left the matter there.
He kept an ear out for Aldran accents, being ravenous for news of his homeworld, but as passenger after passenger filed by, all under the ruddy glow of the Srillium night, his hopes of finding another Aldran faded. The crowd was half processed when he felt someone prod his shoulder and turned to see Taribo standing behind him, and behind the African was someone Alistair took to be Mordecai. A moment later he noticed his clothing, the kind passed out to the new arrivals, and a mild corpulence the toned Mordecai did not have. Then he noticed the face, while remarkably similar, was not identical.
“I think we have your twin brother here,” he said after he finished staring at the man.
“You probably have several of them,” the man replied, his voice and light Mandarin accent matches to Mordecai’s but his buoyantly flippant tone a decided contrast. “At last count I had four hundred and seventy eight siblings still alive. My mother was a Petri dish and my father a spatula.”
Alistair’s lips parted. “Four hundred seventy eight?”
“Maybe less now.”
“And your name?”
“A/175,” he said with a wicked smile. “I like to call myself John.”
“What’s your last name?”
“My mother was a Petri dish and my father was a spatula.”
“You never bothered to find out which company manufactured the spatula?”
The retort made John smile, and he bowed his head back and let out a guffaw. “It was probably Kregel LLC,” he chuckled. “I choose John Kregel, since I’ll never find out for sure.”
Alistair grasped him by the shoulder. “John, why don’t you take a trip back with me? There are a few things I would like to discuss with you.”
Chapter 77
John Kregel took no less delight in the aircraft serving as AS&A’s headquarters than he did in the invention of his last name. Before he could be convinced to take a seat in a small private office, he insisted on wandering around and marveling. A few minutes turned out to be enough to take the edge off his curiosity, and Alistair finally got him and Santiago in his office chamber. John helped himself to a comfortable chair and Alistair sat in another. Santiago, arms folded, leaned against the wall. The office had electric lights, but they dared not waste their limited lifespan on anything trivial. A window allowed the rays of the morning sun, hitting a spot on the wall, to bring some meager luminance to the interior. Specks of dust glinted as they passed through the nearly horizontal column of light; the rest of the room was nestled in soft shadows.
“You want to talk about my hundreds of twin brothers,” John guessed as he cast a scanning glance along the ceiling of the office. He sat back relaxed in his chair, his legs splayed out and his arms resting disordered on the chair’s arms.
“I want to learn more about Mordecai,” said Alistair.
John sat up only a little straighter in his chair, and to the same extent assumed a more serious attitude. “You’d be surprised how good I became at distinguishing my brothers. Small things like the nose: one would grow one way, and another differently, with the same DNA code directing things. These differences become more pronounced over time. A man is more than his DNA code… but that’s a cliché. But it’s true. A man is also his history, and this affects his body. I became interested in the subject for obvious reasons. We still don’t entirely understand it.”
“Who is Mordecai?” asked Alistair, like a tug on a dog’s leash or a horse’s reins.
“I believe he is B/452… that would be my guess. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him. He looks a bit like B/017 too, but I know him to be dead. I watched him die, in fact.”
“Who is he?” Alistair repeated.
Distracted for a moment, John ran his hand through the shaft of light and set the dust motes wildly spinning around.
“He is one of a thousand genetically identical engineered soldiers incubated from January 6, 2733 to February 18 of the next year.” John took his gaze from the dust motes and laid it on Alistair. “You know they incubate us longer than a woman’s womb would? It’s easier to take care of us in an incubator so they keep us in there. Eventually, of course, we must be taken out so our muscles will grow.”
“And you were raised to be soldiers?” asked Santiago.
“Raised to be soldiers, designed to be soldiers, trained to be soldiers… forced to be soldiers.” He pulled aside his new shirt and showed a familiar tattoo to Alistair. He had one star over the points in the circle. “That is what led to my exile here. I escaped from the army. I and a few others… we were on Kaldis and got ourselves smuggled to Tantramon. It’s a newer colony, not a big population… we figured we’d hide in some remote little frontier town or something.” John’s eyes looked into the distance, far past the walls of the office. “A lot of them would mark themselves. Brand themselves, scar themselves, tattoo themselves. Everyone was trying to establish his own identity. Some grew their hair out; some dyed their hair.”
“You didn’t,” observed Santiago.
John shrugged, brought back to the present by Santiago’s interruption. “What’s the point? A tattoo doesn’t change anything but the surface. I’m my own man.” The last bit he insisted with some heat.
“And they found you and condemned you to life on Srillium,” Alistair guessed.
“Yeah.”
“Are any other of your brothers here?” asked Santiago.
John shrugged again and stared at the floor. “I don’t know if they caught them or not. I was alone when they took me.”
“Which government was it?” asked Alistair. “That carried out the project?”
John’s head popped up. “Terra. We were incubated in Hong Kong, trained in Beijing. Then shipped out to Kaldis. Over half of us died there before I decided to desert. How many are left in all, I don’t know.”
Alistair and Santiago shared a glance.
“Have you met with Giselle, yet?” he asked.
“Just this morning. I start orientation later today.”
“Welcome to Ashley Security & Arbitration.”
“Thank you.” He grinned from ear to ear and shook his head, as if he still couldn’t quite believe what was happening. “It’s a… funny little system you have here.”
“We think it works well.”
John shook their hands and left, whistling some unidentifiable tune. Santiago and Alistair were left to ponder the meeting for a bit before Santiago stirred and roused Alistair from his reverie.
“Time to go?” asked Santiago.
“Time for a verdict,” Alistair confirmed.
***
Alistair could greet the multitude gathered around the tent that was to serve as a courthouse with no better than a grimace. Standing at the edge of a downslope giving into a wide open valley fenced in by rolling hills and distant mountain peaks, he gazed at the multifarious camps that sprouted up around a large, circular tent. The anxious crowd spread out over the valley and up the slopes of many hills, and he felt a powerful foreboding.
Santiago stood at his left an
d Giselle at his right. Behind him were Greg and Layla. Taribo, Ryan and Miklos wanted to come, but Alistair, citing the potential for a crime spree and doubling the strength of his patrols, placed the three disappointed men on duty during the trial. Seeing the many groups of men gathered, some former warriors, others former slaves, and listening to their frenzied chanting back and forth, he regretted the paltry number of guards he assigned to the location.
“This is worse than I expected,” he muttered.
A few of the men camped on the slope noticed him, and they shouted encouragement. Warriors and slaves both, they applauded, a contest to curry his favor. He blushed like the planet Mars and tucked his chin into his chest.
“Santiago, would you please go say something nice to them,” growled the ex marine, and then he plunged forward, giving the impression of a man walking headfirst into a gale.
If Alistair was interested in something other than throwing out a distraction, he might have thought for a moment and chosen someone other than Santiago to perform a neutral dance for the crowd. The gruff Argentinean had proven himself a keen businessman, but had never been one for pep talks. His first reaction to Alistair’s request was to frown, his second was to wonder what exactly Alistair wanted him to say, and his third was to pass by the men and deliver a few extemporaneous phrases that carried all the charm and inspiration of mildew. Nevertheless, a strong enough fire can use almost any fuel, and his damp words were snatched up and consumed.
No sooner did Alistair put the first wave behind him than he ran into the second, which grabbed the notice of the third, fourth and fifth, and soon a throng gathered along his route to chant and cheer, each side equally convinced he would take their part. Duke, Wei Bai and Mordecai, having arrived a few minutes earlier, received the same greeting. They and their retinue were already seated in the tent when Alistair, desperate, finally arrived at the flap serving as the front door.
He was met there by two men who had stopped Duke and Wei Bai a few minutes earlier. One was large with multiple scars on his barrel of a chest. The other was much slighter, though no less indelicate. Neither was in possession of a full set of teeth, nor had seen the inside of a bathtub for a long time. They both sought to grab Alistair’s attention first. Alistair, who was as uncomfortable as if a drill were brought to bear on one of his teeth, looked at neither, but halted with a sigh of impatience when they interposed themselves between him and the tent.
“I have nothing to do with the matter any more,” he informed them, before they could complete their simultaneous hailing.
“We are confident justice will be done today,” said the man, obviously a former slave.
“We were all placed in a difficult situation,” proclaimed the former warrior. “We all did what we could, given the circumstances.”
“I have nothing to do with the matter any more. Duke, Wei Bai and I agreed on the composition of the jury, we agreed on the instructions they would be given. It’s in their hands now.”
“If I could, just for a moment…”
“Mr. Alistair, I think that if you listen…”
They talked on top of one another, but Alistair was saved by Giselle, who grabbed him by the arm and thrust him, inasmuch as she could actually manipulate his bulk, into the tent. The two delegates did not turn off their spouts, but rather redirected at each other, without so much as an instant’s pause, the message they had prepared for Alistair and with no more of a persuasive effect.
The great tent was Odin’s when he was a chieftain. It had a diameter of approximately forty feet, and the ceiling rose to a central point at least the same distance above the ground with a wooden pillar in the center. At the far end of the tent was a long, rectangular table behind which sat the members of the jury, eight men and one woman of varying ages but none young. There were a few chairs and stools in front of the table, and on these sat Duke, Wei Bai, Mordecai and their retinue, as well as the accused and his counsel, who faced the jury quite removed from the rest. There were a couple dozen others in the tent, but these were forced to sit on the ground behind the wooden chairs and stools. There were two torches in the tent, placed directly under flaps pulled aside to create an exit for the smoke. The open flaps did not carry out the smoke as efficiently as a chimney, so the air carried a hint of murk in it, and the smell of smoke was thick, partly from the accumulated soot of years of gatherings just like the present one.
In three seats on the left, next to one of the torches, sat Giselle, Santiago and Alistair, only just recovering his ease after bearing the assault of public scrutiny. Gregory and Layla were privileged to witness the proceedings but took their places on the ground behind the seated attendees. Having returned a few nods of greeting, Alistair gave one last one to the jury foreman, signaling they were ready for the verdict. As the foreman stood, Alistair’s glance fell on Mordecai, seated on the opposite end of the row of chairs, and darkened. News of the destruction of Ansacroy and Issicroy had spread, and it was no secret who was responsible. Few expressed outrage at what occurred, and many, especially of the former slave class, spoke well of Mordecai. Alistair, however, could only picture crushed bodies rotting in collapsed caves.
The jury foreman who now stood before them was an aging man of Hindu descent. His roughened skin and knotted knuckles were just beginning to show the first signs of slipping from vigor into hoary decrepitude, which likely made him one of the oldest men on the moon and conferred upon him an estimation of wisdom from his younger fellows. Alistair’s revolution had come just in time, no doubt, to save him from a swift decline and early demise. It was a testament to his robust corpus that he survived long enough to venture a few steps into elderliness.
“The heads of the security firms have asked me to request no one leave the tent and spread the news of the verdict until such a time as we decide how best to disseminate the information.” The speaker’s English was excellent, slightly accented with British and Hindu. His voice was in the same condition as his body: still serviceably strong but fraught with hints of blemishes and unsteadiness. “Therefore, as you can see behind you we are posting two guards at the exit. If you do not wish to be held in here past the reading of the verdict, you should take the opportunity to leave now.”
The privilege of being among the first to hear the verdict proved to be well worth the inconvenience of remaining, at least as those present adjudged it. Not a man or woman so much as leaned towards the exit.
“We met in private to determine the guilt or innocence of a man who admits to having committed manslaughter. Our decision today will reverberate throughout the entirety of our society. We are not blind and deaf to the crowd waiting outside this tent, but our purpose here today, as given to us by the two parties who hired us, is to search for justice, not expedience and not convenience. If a wrong has been committed, we are to require the guilty party to make amends. If no wrong has been committed, we recognize we have no right to commit a wrong ourselves simply to placate an angry crowd.
“The facts of the case are not disputed. Iñaki Etxeberria, formerly of Bilbao, Earth, killed François da Silva Dos Santos, formerly of Beltrán, Trillian. François da Silva Dos Santos was a warrior and second in command under Zeus, while Iñaki was a serf in the same tribe. Iñaki’s wife, Raquel Etxeberria, formerly of Madrid, Earth, was François’ concubine, during which time Iñaki and Raquel were prohibited from living as man and wife.
“Iñaki’s defense is that it was a justifiable killing in retribution for the crimes François committed against both him and his wife, involuntary servitude and white slavery. The prosecution contends that a killing in retribution for a rape is too extreme, and that François was simply surviving in a system he had no control over.”
The foreman paused to draw breath and collect his thoughts, while the audience shifted in their places, eager to hear the verdict. Only Iñaki did not look at the foreman, instead folding his arms and glowering at the floor.
“A man may do damage to another man’s pr
operty without criminal intent or negligence. He is not a criminal, but must make the injured party whole again. He may also do intentional damage, and so he is not only obliged to make the other party whole, but the other party has the option, even after compensation has been paid, to repay the aggression in kind. For instance, a man may accidentally elbow another man in the face. Unless the injured party be found at fault of negligence that led to the elbowing, the first party is responsible to the second. The first party must pay any medical bills as well as an amount to compensate for the injured party’s suffering, an amount a jury considers reasonable. However, the elbowing may have been an intentional act of aggression, in which case the guilty party is still obliged to make the injured party whole, but in this case, after compensation, the injured party also has the option to commit the same act against the guilty party, or to hire someone else to do it for him, or to accept further compensation from the guilty party in exchange for forgoing his physical retribution.
“This right to retribution we base on so firm a foundation as reason itself. If a man does not respect the rights of another, then he is left without objection if others do not respect his rights. He gives permission to do unto him by embracing that very code of conduct. If a man commits theft, then to that same degree his property can be taken from him. If a man commits an act of unjustified violence, then to the same degree may violence be done to him.
“In the case of Iñaki and François, there are four possibilities. The first is that François was within his rights to take Raquel as a concubine and condemn Iñaki to serfdom, in which case Iñaki has committed an unjustifiable homicide. The second case is that François, to one extent or another, has violated someone’s rights, but Iñaki has gone farther in his retribution than justice permits. The third case is that Iñaki’s retribution is commensurate with the crime or crimes committed and the matter may be dismissed from the courts. The fourth and final possibility is that François’ crime has still not been satisfactorily punished, and Iñaki may take further steps to bring justice to the issue.
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