Angel of Destruction

by Susan R. Matthews

  There were other pieces of paper, fragments apparently abraded or torn while the drunken singer had beaten his friend in his unsuccessful attempt to rouse him. Hilton could read what was there, though. It was unquestionably a vector calculation of some sort, but it was maddeningly incomplete: the angle of approach was not specified, nor the point of departure. The only thing Hilton could tell with confidence was that the calculation was for an approach that started no closer to Port Charid than the Shawl of Rikavie.

  Exactly where, in the Shawl of Rikavie?

  A dead man, a drunk companion with a handful of notes. Too much celebration, perhaps. Celebrating what? Finalization of plans for the next “Langsarik” raid on warehouses in the Shawl of Rikavie?

  This was not evidence which reflected well on Langsarik claims of innocence.

  Until he had consulted his elders, he could not call in the Port Authority. It was too risky.

  Hilton gathered the scraps of paper up and folded them into his blouse. The dead man could wait. Hilton dragged the corpse into a dark and very narrow space between cargo crates and marked his position with the hand-beam so that he could be sure of finding it again.

  His duty was clear: He needed to go see Aunt Walton and let her know. About the overheard conversation that he had happened to interrupt. About this.

  Then she and he could go together to put these findings before Bench specialist Garol Vogel, in Port Charid.

  ###

  Garol Vogel woke up in the middle of the night because there was someone at the window coming in, and it was cold.

  Startled awake, his physical twitch was enough only to shake his brain into consciousness — not enough to alert the intruder, apparently. The window was still on its way open. Garol sat immobile, listening, watching; he’d fallen asleep in the room’s one armchair, rather than lying down on the bed, so he was ahead of the game.

  He heard whispers.

  This is not a good idea, he’s a Bench intelligence specialist, he can probably shoot to kill in his sleep and not even wake up until morning.

  Garol thought he recognized the voice. He couldn’t be quite certain; voices were different when a man was whispering. The window was open enough to admit a body, now, and the intruder angled himself through the gap awkwardly, a little too tall for a high-bay bandit — or just unschooled in his art.

  Vogel. Hey. Wake up. Don’t shoot me. I’m friendly. Are you here?

  The intruder was silhouetted against the ambient light from the night sky outside the rooming house. It wasn’t bright, in the street, but there were clouds, and the airfield outside of town ran around the clock, so there was plenty of light hitting the clouds from the working beams on the airfield. It was enough. Garol knew his visitor, once he could put body and voice together. Hilton Shires. Walton Agenis’s nephew and once-lieutenant.

  And behind him?

  Walton Agenis.

  For a moment the idea of Flag Captain Walton Agenis breaking into his bedroom in the middle of the night was almost too poignant for Garol to bear, but he put the irrelevant fantasy away immediately. For future reference.

  Maybe he’s not even here, the bed doesn’t look particularly occupied to me. Damn. We’ll have to wait.

  Walton Agenis, all right. Garol stirred where he sat slumped in his chair so that they would not be startled when he spoke. “That’s just a rumor, about me shooting in my sleep. Bad idea, keeping loaded weapons under the pillow.” If for no other reason than that was the first place people looked. “What can I do for you, Flag Captain?”

  Shires had been visibly startled at the first sound of Garol’s voice, his body language evident even in the low light of the darkened room. Agenis took it all in stride, however.

  “First you can not turn on any lights; we’d rather stay secret till you’ve heard the news.”

  Fair enough. “No problem on this side. You might want to close the window. And the light-drape, while you’re at it.”

  She kept to the wall, where the shadows were deepest. Shires shut the window and closed the light-drape carefully over it; Garol was happy to see that he used the drapes as his cover. Thinking every minute, that Shires. Agenis’s nephew for a fact.

  “Right,” Walton said, once the room was safely shuttered against the night. “Have a seat, Shires. Talk to the Bench specialist. Tell him what we’ve been doing tonight.”

  Was this something he really wanted to hear? Garol wasn’t sure.

  But Walton hadn’t asked him.

  “You may remember that I’ve been filling in for my floor manager at the new warehouse, Specialist Vogel.” Shires had sat down on Garol’s bed; just as well it was still made up from the morning. Climbing up exterior walls in the middle of the night was frequently a messy business. “About five days ago I overheard an interesting conversation, or part of it. I hadn’t told you because I hadn’t told anybody.”

  He’d get to the details when the time came. Garol let him talk.

  “Then tonight I heard a pair of drunks. Well, really only one drunk. There were two of them in the warehouse stacks, and one of them ran away. The other one was dead. There are incriminating but fragmentary documents. But the really interesting thing is that the body got up and walked off while I was briefing my aunt Agenis.”

  Quite a lot of information. Succinctly presented.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance he wasn’t exactly dead when you left him?”

  Movement in the shadows, vague and ill defined. Garol turned his head away to let his peripheral vision work; Shires was shaking his head. “Body was cold, skin clammy to the touch, face and hands bloodless. Apart from that he wasn’t breathing. And had no pulse. Nobody’s gone missing tonight that we know of, Specialist Vogel, we checked.”

  Garol knew what he would think in Shires’s place. At least approximately. “Your analysis, please, Lieutenant.”

  Shires took a moment to reply. Apparently he wasn’t as sure of this next bit as he would have liked to be. “Well. You can call me paranoid, Specialist Vogel.”

  No, Garol had called him Lieutenant.

  “But I’m clearly meant to think that I’m picking up intelligence by lucky chance. There’s that other thing to consider, I already know I’m being set up.” The forged chop, he meant, Garol supposed. “But they don’t necessarily know that I know that I’m being set up. If whoever the enemy is was usually so clumsy as to let either incident occur, they’d never have succeeded in staying unidentified for so long.”

  Garol had to agree. Shires’s reasoning was sound; in retrospect, happening on the detail of the chop had put them ahead of the game — because Shires had trusted him enough to tell him about it, when Garol had mentioned the problem.

  Suspicion was highly subjective. However, Hilton Shires could be expected to be highly motivated to believe that he was privy to evidence that might clear the Langsarik name and save the Langsarik settlement. He might be excused if he didn’t examine the lucky chance that gave him such valuable information too closely.

  “Let’s hear some of the details of your experiences. It won’t be sun-up for hours, take your time.”

  Nobody would wonder if they heard noises coming from his room in the middle of the night. This was a decent rooming house, but it was a rooming house, and not all of its transient guests were reliable sober people or never wanted company at night. That was a part of the reason Garol was here, instead of insulated from the life of the port either on the Malcontent’s courier or in one of the few more expensive lodgings Port Charid had to offer; he liked to be in the middle of life.

  He was also much more easily approachable, here, if anyone needed to come and tell him something and didn’t particularly care to be observed.

  “All right. First. Days ago. I was working late, doing cargo reconciliation.”

  Still, Port Charid did have a curfew; it was a common tactic for a port with limited police resources. A curfew, and the bars were all closed; so who was making that racket, on
the stairs? The bars closed well before curfew, so that people had time to get off the street. But whoever it was who was just coming home was very drunk indeed, to go by the shouts and exaggerated hushes Garol could hear coming through from the stairwell down the hall.

  “Checking in the stacks. I started to hear voices. Nobody should have been in that part of the warehouse.”

  Oh good, the drunk was on this floor. And had a friend with him. Annoying; but no more than a petty irritation — the drunk would pass out, his friend would do the same, and things would be quiet again soon.

  “I wanted to know who it was and what they were talking about. I snuck up on them. Two men, or two people anyway, talking. I wrote down the exact words I heard as well as I could remember them. But it was about fencing a cargo. Someone may have mentioned Honan-gung, but I’m not sure anymore about that.”

  No, the drunk wasn’t in another room on this floor, the drunk was at his door. Hammering on the wall and calling to be let in. “Oh, let me in, friend, comrade, cousin, come on, I know you’re in there.”

  Drunks made mistakes like that all the time.

  But this drunk had a Dolgorukij accent; and — drunk as he seemed to be — he still spoke a dialect of High Aznir that was pure and sweet and beautiful.

  Garol stood up.

  “Company,” Garol said. “Cousin Stanoczk. Malcontent. And, logically, Kazmer Daigule with him. What do you want me to do, Flag Captain?”

  Walton Agenis spoke from the shadows, and her voice was clear and calm and confident.

  “I want you to stop calling me Flag Captain, Garol; after all we’ve been through together it’s insulting. Let the Dolgorukij in. All right, let the Sarvaw in, too.”

  Well, if she was going to be that way about it.

  He’d better get Cousin Stanoczk out of the hall before he woke the entire hostelry.

  Garol turned on the overhead light. It didn’t shed all that much light, but it would be a noticeable anomaly if he opened the door with the lights still out. Out in the hallway Cousin Stanoczk was singing a song so purely obscene that it made Garol blush to hear it.

  “Can’t you quiet him down?” Garol hissed, checking the securities, opening the door. “People are trying to sleep.”

  Cousin Stanoczk fell against the door as Garol opened it, toppling into the room to fall flat on his face. He was carrying a full flask of something; Garol was grateful that it didn’t break as Stanoczk fell — even while he registered suspicion in his mind over the fact that it didn’t seem to so much as spill.

  “Come on, come on.” Hurrying Daigule into the room, Garol checked the hallway with a quick scan. No heads poked out of the other rooms. At least one door was ajar, though, signaling the interest of someone within who was listening — but reluctant to be caught at it. “Sorry about the noise,” Garol said. “I’ll take care of things from here. Thank you for your concern, good night.”

  He waited.

  The door that was ajar fluttered, wavered, and finally closed; but with a very adept air of having been on the way to closed anyway, no thanks to you, sir or madam.

  Cousin Stanoczk was sitting on the floor at the far end of the room with his back leaned up against the bed, his knees splayed widely in front of him and an expression of utter stupidity on his face. Walton Agenis had taken the chair, with Shires behind her for protection. Who was protecting whom? Garol wondered. Perhaps the point was simply that they wouldn’t be visible from the street or across the street in that position, should there be any gap in the light-drape across the window.

  “To what do we owe the pleasure,” Garol asked Stanoczk. Stanoczk waved the flask at him cheerfully.

  “Little drink?” he asked. “Good clean stuff. Well. Stuff, anyway.”

  Speaking Standard. Garol raised an eyebrow at Kazmer Daigule, who had leaned his back up against the door after Garol had closed it. Daigule looked ready to collapse. “He sent me off on an errand to the Port Authority,” Daigule said. “Some communications clearances he wanted. By the time I got back he was halfway into a bottle of wodac. That was hours ago. Now he decides it’s time to come and see you, and I can’t out-wrestle him, he’s drunk. I could hurt him.”

  If anybody could out-wrestle a Combine hominid, it would be another. It would insult both men to suggest that Sarvaw and Aznir Dolgorukij were evenly matched, however. Daigule’s point was perhaps simply that men who got too drunk didn’t give the right cues when they were being pulled too far in the wrong direction; so a man could cause actual harm by accident. Stanoczk being too drunk to say “that hurts,” for instance.

  The truly interesting thing about Daigule’s recitation, however, was that Stanoczk felt perfectly at ease sending him on errands without apparent concern that Daigule might not come back. Stanoczk had to be very sure of Daigule — one way or another. “Any idea what might have brought this on?”

  Walton and Shires sat quietly, observing. Daigule shook his head, though.

  “ ‘Pologies.”

  It was Cousin Stanoczk speaking. He was enunciating very very carefully. “ ‘Pologies all ‘round. Especially you, Kazmer. I like you, you know? You’ll make a lousy Malcontent. But I like you. Anyway.”

  Garol tried again. “Maybe there was a delivery while you were out. Maybe he wanted you out of the way for some reason. Where did he get the liquor, do we know?”

  There were vague humming sounds from the Stanoczk direction of the room. Garol was beginning to worry. Stanoczk was speaking in plain Standard. If he started to sing that song in plain Standard, and in front of Walton Agenis — hell, in front of young Hilton Shires —

  “Found your body,” Stanoczk said.

  He sounded very pleased with himself about it, too. The reference was too apposite to be coincidental, surely. How could Cousin Stanoczk possibly know anything about that? Had he been visited by informers? But surely Daigule had been with him all evening, and Shires had only just arrived.

  “Were we missing a body, Cousin?” Garol asked. He selected an appropriately respectful version of the word “cousin,” out of common courtesy; but child of unknown birth order born to the eldest daughter of the younger brother of a mutual grandparent was as far as he was willing to go. The man was drunk.

  Stanoczk nodded emphatically, his brown hair falling into his face as he rocked his head. “Terrible thing. Nothing to tell the parents. Aged mother. Infirm father. Um. Except that his father’s dead and his mother’s gone to work for a stables, but who are we to judge. A man must ride.”

  It was very good. But Garol was getting suspicious. “You are not as drunk as you seem,” he said. “So stop playing games. What’s this all about?”

  Stanoczk raised his eyebrows, both of them, and stared at Garol owlishly. Then took a drink. “But I wish to be drunk.” As though he believed that was a genuine explanation. “I very sincerely wish to be drunk. We have found the body, and he is not dead, and that the Angel might walk is a horror that no outlander can truly fathom.”

  “From the Tyrell Yards.” Daigule broke in, sounding as confident as he was surprised. “There’s been no identification from the forensic team, though, he sent me for results yesterday.”

  “Not from the forensic team.” Stanoczk looked at the flask in his hand, and set it aside. Garol marked its location carefully. If it should spill, there was no telling what it might do to the floor — let alone anyone who might be sleeping in the room beneath this. “From Geraint. Going by Dalmoss. But he’s not Dalmoss, which is why we noticed, you’d asked us to see about Dalmoss.”

  Garol decided to sit down. There was only one chair, and Walton Agenis was in it, watching and waiting for sense to begin to surface. There was a perfectly good floor, however; so Garol sank down to sit cross-legged on the modestly nondescript carpeting in the middle of the room, where he could engage Stanoczk one to one, at eye level.

  “Interesting.” It was at least that. “Tell me more.”

  “It’s perfectly clear,” Stanoczk said, s
ounding irritated. Petulant. Garol revised his working assessment: while he still felt that Stanoczk was not as drunk as he’d wished to appear to be, he was clearly more drunk than Garol had suspected, at first.

  “We couldn’t find him at Tyrell. Maybe he wasn’t there. You asked after Dalmoss, we sent a trace to Geraint. Pettiche from the Tyrell Yards at Geraint. Going by Dalmoss. The foreman at the Combine Yards, and you would have heard about Feraltz by now.”

  Heard what? Feraltz’s previous association with Langsariks? Whether or not Garol had “heard about” Feraltz, he would have expected Stanoczk to have told him if there was something Stanoczk thought Garol might need to know. Maybe there were allowances to be made for whatever twisted procedures Malcontents observed when dealing with Dolgorukij malefactors and off-world law enforcement, but Garol wasn’t interested in cultural niceties when they started to jeopardize other people’s lives. If Cousin Stanoczk could break the case for him, of course, he’d be inclined to let it go this once —

  “So when do we get an interrogatory from Geraint?” He could be patient. At least until he got his interrogatory. “And where is Dalmoss?”

  He didn’t like the way Cousin Stanoczk had dropped his head to stare at the floor, though. It looked too much like the prelude to a plea for understanding in the case of a monumental mismanagement of resources.

  “Found the body,” Cousin Stanoczk said. “Didn’t say we had the body.” Reaching for his flask, Stanoczk took a deep pull from the lip, tilting the flask toward the ceiling. Emptying it, then flinging the flask against the far wall with a furious grimace of disgust.

  Garol had been half-expecting such a gesture. He caught the flask out of its path, setting it down quietly beside him. Couldn’t have people breaking flasks against the walls of rooming houses in the middle of the night. Tended to wake people up. Again.

  “I explain,” Stanoczk said. Garol was all in favor. “We were looking for Pettiche, and if Pettiche, who was not found at the Tyrell Yards, was on unplanned leave, he would logically only have gone in sixteen or twenty-four directions. So the description was circulated. Also we like to oblige Bench intelligence specialists whenever possible, so when Geraint received Dalmoss we went to see how he was looking and faring directly, but he was not Dalmoss, he was Pettiche.”