Angel of Destruction

by Susan R. Matthews

  “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.”

  And Jils was good. Methodical, precise, and much better at details of a certain sort than he was. If Jils said the calculation set was solid, it was solid.

  “Strap yourself in, then, and let’s go.”

  No time like the present.

  He had set the ship’s environmentals to low normal, so there were no artificially generated somatic signals that would indicate a change in their rate of speed; but the forward visual screens were in working order. Excellent working order. Really rather amazingly good working order, and worth almost the entire price the Bench had paid to get them from Combine shipyards.

  Garol hit the sequence initiate instruction, and space on the forward visual screens started to spin, the status markers on the ship’s vital signs creeping upward as the ship gained speed.

  The courier ran for the vector like a child’s playing sphere fired along the lip of a great funnel, gathering momentum as it got closer and closer to the funnel’s mouth. Garol closed his eyes: looking at the forward screens was dizzying. He thought Jils looked a little green, as well, but he was in no shape to mention it.

  With the ship’s gravities set as low as they were, he could begin to feel the approach as pressure in his ears, like the sensation of spinning around in a chair until his head swam. He opened his eyes, swallowing back the sharp acid taste of bile that rose from his stomach as the nausea born of perturbations in the vestibular apparatus in his ears threatened to overwhelm him.

  It was a clear, short approach to the vector transit for Rikavie. It was. Clean, sweet, easy, and nearly overdue, and Garol was anxious in spite of his faith in Jils’s evaluation.

  Any time now, Garol told the courier ship in his mind, trying not to focus on the unnatural whirling of light objects on the screens in front of him. You can make the vector any time you’d like. In fact the sooner the better, for my money at least.

  The mad rotation of stars on-screen tightened and condensed to one bright spot of light that vibrated ever more quickly as the intensity of the light increased. They were close now. The glowing center of the visual display tightened and brightened and tightened moment by moment, gaining in intensity of brilliance as it shrank in size until it was almost too bright to bear; and then the screens blanked.

  There would be nothing more to see until they reached Rikavie, and dropped out of the vector like a stone.

  “We have the Garsite vector.” Garol made the announcement with relief he didn’t mind sharing with Jils. Vector transit was certain and secure enough to move ships by the hundreds of thousands from one end of Jurisdiction space to the other; and yet it was never completely, absolutely, entirely, eight-and-eighty-and-another-eight certain. “Next stop Rikavie. Port Charid. Warehouse asteroids; Langsariks.”

  “Spectacularly beautiful and very young women,” Jils added, unfastening the secures of her harness. “Or at least one spectacularly beautiful and very young woman. Girl. How old would she be by now? Probably married, Garol, she was a looker.”

  What was she talking about?

  Oh.

  Modice Agenis.

  Walton Agenis’s niece.

  All right, so he had noticed Modice — how could anyone have failed to? But it had been so long that Garol could laugh, without resentment. Without much resentment. “Old enough to know her own mind, Jils, now as then. You’re on the wrong process branch about that. The girl was just a really sweet girl.” A really sweet and astonishingly beautiful young girl, but there’d been no mistaking her for a serious prospect of any kind.

  Not really.

  It had been enough of a pleasure just to sit in her company and listen to her voice, and feel fellowship with all the other men who had noticed that she filled the world with her presence and validated their entire lives by just breathing.

  “That’s why you want me to go make the contacts with the Port Authority while you go straight out to the settlement. Right.” But she was just teasing him. He knew it. Wasn’t she?

  “It’s the Flag Captain I really want to see. Agenis the Deep-Minded. Before everybody in Port Charid knows we’re there. She deserves to know right up front about the problem. And I want the straight story, direct from her.”

  He had made the treaty with the Langsariks, and Walton Agenis was their leader, then as now. They had come to terms of mutual understanding, founded on a necessarily qualified degree of trust. She had advised her people to accept the strict terms of the amnesty that the Bench offered through Garol in part on the basis of her evaluation of his personal integrity.

  It had made him uncomfortable at the time, even while the personal if unspoken understanding between them had been what made the amnesty possible. If there was a problem, she would tell him. And if something had really gone wrong, he had to let her know that amnesty violation could mean an end to the amnesty, and slavery — death, and dispersal — for the Langsariks.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Jils’s singsong rejection of his claims of disinterestedness was not entirely serious, if admittedly sharp. Not because she didn’t believe him, but because if she admitted to understanding his motives, she’d have nothing to tease him about. “I’ll take the first watch, Garol. You go catch up on your fantasy life.”

  He was a Bench intelligence specialist.

  He didn’t even have a fantasy life.

  But if he had —

  If he had a fantasy, it was that the Langsarik amnesty would work. That the Langsariks would prove their merit to the Bench in Port Charid and survive the test of years to be fully integrated as respected citizens of a benevolent Bench. That Modice Agenis would marry and be happy and secure . . . and that Walton Agenis would never have cause to decide that she’d been wrong when she’d trusted him with the future of the people who looked to her for leadership.

  That was his fantasy. He could never admit it, though.

  If he admitted that it was a fantasy, even to himself, he would have to acknowledge the fact that he was deeply worried about them all — the brave, proud, honorable people that he, himself, Garol Vogel, had essentially forced into settlement at Port Charid.

  ###

  Kazmer Daigule stood in front of the receiving officer’s desk at Anglace Port Authority, doing everything in his power to keep calm as she examined his forged cargo documentation. The contraband from the Tyrell Yards was fully accounted for, of course; the cargo manifest was one of the most beautiful works of art Kazmer could remember having seen.

  It would have been much easier for him to feel confident about the validity of the counter-endorsements on his documentation if there hadn’t been four fully armed representatives from Fleet’s shore patrol with him in the office, along with the receiving officer; but there was no reason to fear that this unusually aggressive presence was in any way related to the potential weaknesses in his documentation.

  No reason.

  He had to stay calm.

  “Grain, medicinal botanicals, and luxury fabrics from Shilling,” the receiving officer read aloud. “Interesting mix, pilot.”

  Kazmer bowed. “Yes, ma’am. We had to piece a cargo together from odd lots to get a full load.” Otherwise, grain and luxury textiles wouldn’t normally be traveling together — the margins were all off.
Without the grain they’d carried with them from Port Charid, however, it would have been too easy for a suspicious mind to match their cargo to a list of goods misappropriated in a raid on a warehouse at Rikavie.

  There was obvious risk of arousing suspicion even with the camouflage the grain provided the cargo, but that was what they were being paid for — to run the risk of getting caught with stolen merchandise.

  It went without saying that there was nothing in the documentation to indicate that the freighter had been anywhere near Rikavie recently.

  “H’mm.” She handed the documentation back to him, but she hadn’t stopped to seal it for release. Maybe she’d just forgotten. Yes. Surely she’d just forgotten. It would be so embarrassing to be caught with irregular documentation. It had never happened to him. “Well, everything looks unobjectionable, pilot. But Fleet wants every freighter in your gross weight category off-loaded and searched. It’ll be half a day, and Port Anglace apologizes for the inconvenience. Quarantine. These people will escort you.”

  It didn’t have to be a problem. It didn’t have to be. Ships were off-loaded from time to time as a check on blatant cargo fraud, but the ports resisted it, because it was a time-consuming inconvenience and discouraged traffic. Kazmer stalled, hoping for reassurance.

  “Of course, receiving officer. I hadn’t realized there was a new policy in place at Anglace, though. I have to admit I’d have gone to Isener, I’d have been able to pay the crew off that much sooner.”

  And since the chartering company he was claiming to represent was responsible for wages until the crew was released, and since Kazmer was representing himself as a joint owner of the small cargo-carrying venture, it was a direct hit to his very own personal profits.

  The receiving officer’s mouth twisted in a sour grimace. “So would everybody. But it wouldn’t have done you any good.”