Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  A week, though, was never going to be enough time for Mister LIA. A decade would not have been sufficient for him to adjust to the idea of completely disarming the Fleet’s most advanced ship and cruising into an enemy port. And in his eyes, the Prisosans, Araki and the rest were just as much an enemy as the Marfikians.

  ‘And we were doing so well…’ Buzz observed, regretfully, as Rangi came out of the cabin having sedated the LIA agent.

  They had been doing well, too. Though still very anxious, Mister had been gradually easing into a routine. He was still spending much of the day shadowing Buzz, but had been persuaded to do a course or two of his own so that he wasn’t just sitting there bored. And his evenings, now, were spent on the interdeck, where Jermane and a few other kindly souls would make sure he wasn’t left moping on his own. Buzz had really been starting to hope that they might get him to X-Base Sentinel without any further major incidents.

  The news about them going to Lundane, however, had well and truly scuppered that.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Buzz told Alex, meeting him privately later in the day, ‘that I do have to say I consider Mister to be a danger to the ship… and to you, specifically.’

  ‘Oh?’ Alex was surprised. Despite the fact that Mister had made two previous attempts to attack him, those had been in the midst of near-frenzied outbursts and had apparently been at the level of wanting very much to punch him in the face.

  ‘Ye-es.’ Buzz sighed. ‘I had to get Rangi to sedate him this morning, he was having a highly aggressive loss of temper and I only just managed to stop him punching the wall. But it was only a four hour dose so he was clear again by lunchtime and very much calmer, too. That worried me, straight off, no way he should have been that calm, even after a sleep and some quiet time by himself. But I’d taken him some lunch and we sat down there…’ he paused, trying to find some way to convey to Alex just how unnerving that situation had been. Mister’s cabin had the usual flip-down little table with fold-out chairs, with just enough room on it for their two plates and the small tray of condiments. So they’d been sitting there, knee-to-knee, in such a cosily domestic, ordinary setting, eating fish pie and salad, while Mister calmly proposed the various methods they might use to murder the commodore.

  He hadn’t said murder, of course. He’d said exclude. But there was no doubt about it; that was LIA jargon for sanctioned assassination.

  ‘He is,’ Buzz said, ‘of the opinion that what you propose to do poses such a threat to the security of the League that you must be stopped at any cost.’ He paused again, looking significantly at Alex. ‘Any cost. And since your soft removal – by which he means abducting and holding you in LIA facilities – is not an option, your exclusion – assassination – is justified under LIA operating policy. Failing that, he is prepared to sabotage the ship in such a way that you will have to take it to X-Base Sentinel where someone, he says, will have the sense to stop you, in the name of sanity.’

  ‘He has had a complete breakdown, then.’ Alex grimaced, but Buzz was already shaking his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ He reached for the cup of tea Simmy had brought him and Alex stared in amazement. In all the years he’d known Buzz, he’d never seen him so shaken by anything. ‘No,’ Buzz said, cradling the mug in his hands for the comforting warmth of it, but making no effort to sip. ‘Alex, he is perfectly sane.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘He had an outburst of temper this morning,’ Buzz confirmed. ‘Ungovernable rage brought on by stress, as we have seen in him before. But he recovered from that and the same evaluation still applies. He is highly stressed, yes. He is a hyper-rigid personality type with paranoid traits and a high capacity for personal violence. We recognise that the situation he is in has put him under enormous strain and we are making allowances all the time for that stress. But he is not having a psychological breakdown, he remains lucid and fully responsible for his own actions. He is calm now because he is relieved, the situation has clarified for him. He is no longer struggling with the confusion of not understanding what is going on and feeling that he is a helpless observer. The IFLS has kicked in, he is an agent with a mission now and knows exactly what’s expected of him.’

  Alex considered this for a moment and reached for his own coffee.

  You did not get to command rank in the Fleet without learning, in all its brutal detail, about the Imperative For League Security legislation. It was that legislation which specified when it was acceptable for an armed police unit to shoot dead a perpetrator in the course of a terrorist attack. It had to be assumed in those circumstances that they had anti-stun gear and anti-personnel suicide grenades as well as weapons which might or might not be visible. What did or did not actually constitute ‘in the course of a terrorist attack’ was a fine line usually debated in the courts and the media after the police had shot someone. People were often told, though, that it was ‘the police’ in those circumstances whereas in fact it might well have been rather less publicly known security services. Fleet Intel, theoretically, had the power to shoot people dead if they were in the course of committing a terrorist act. And the LIA… well, Mister had already admitted that they had interrogation facilities where the kind of questioning went on that would never be allowed in a police station. They had powers of seizure and holding without warrant under which they could remove terror suspects and hold them for months without charge. Their agents were trained, too, in rather more covert methods of eliminating terrorists than dressing up as cops and shooting them in public.

  Alex knew that and suspected that there were elements within the LIA who he really wouldn’t want to meet… black ops units, by any other name. But Mister? They’d been laughing at him at Serenity for being so gormless, thinking he’d taken them in with his fake ID. He’d refused to admit that he’d even heard of any organisation called the LIA for a full week after they’d told him his cover was busted and even now would not openly admit to it, only refer to his employers as ‘The Firm’.

  ‘So…’ Alex said eventually, ‘he believes I am a terrorist?’

  ‘He has come to that conclusion, yes,’ Buzz said. ‘A terrorist or a traitor, a distinction without a difference. Either way he believes that you are deliberately handing this ship over to hostile foreign powers. It is the most advanced warship in space, since we have research teams aboard already working on upgrades to a ship which isn’t a year out of spacedocks yet. If I understand him correctly, he believes that you are handing the ship over at Lundane so that the Prisosans, Araki and the rest can study it, reverse engineer the tech and develop their own Defender class vessels. And whether your intention in that is to enable them to defend their worlds against Marfikian invasion or not, he sees this as an imminent threat to League security, so self-evident it hardly needs to be said, that those worlds are inimically hostile to us, rather more even in some cases than they are to the Marfikians. Given one missile each and the choice of whether to fire it at Marfik or Chartsey, we all know where most of them would go. So handing them, as he sees it, the most advanced warship in our arsenal, on your own recognisance, no authorisation to do so from our government, that makes you a traitor and an imminent threat to League security. He has come to the conclusion that it is his duty under these circumstances to implement IFSL criteria and to prevent you taking this action by any means necessary. He has further come to the conclusion that if you were dead the rest of us would not go through with it. Logically, therefore, you have to be removed.’

  ‘Good lord…’ Alex had had people wanting to kill him before now. One, indeed, had nearly succeeded, with a bullet which had only failed to take his head off thanks to the personal safety system his bodyguard had made him wear. But that guy had been profoundly disturbed, as the courts had eventually determined, and Alex had bunched all the other wannabe-assassins into the same box – extremists, nutters, fanatics.

  It was quite another matter, he found, to have somebody he knew actually, seriously, planning to kill him.r />
  ‘But – Mister?’

  ‘I believe,’ said Buzz, very thoughtfully, ‘that the decision to address and refer to him as ‘Mister LIA’ has had more impact on the way that we perceive him than we’ve realised, until now. He has been, let’s face it, a figure of fun and using a nickname for him like that has only exacerbated our tendency to see him as harmless, our pet LIA agent. I know, I know,’ he said, as Alex would have protested, ‘we have been concerned about his welfare, too. But that’s the point, we started out laughing at him as a joke, then when things got too stressy for him and he was acting aggressively, we felt bad about that, defined him as vulnerable and looked for ways to help him cope. At no point in any of this have we looked at the situation as having allowed a man capable of cold blooded murder onto our ship.’

  Alex was going to object, again, ‘But it’s Mister – we know him! He’s nobody at all important in the LIA hierarchy, certainly no higher ranking than the Sub he was pretending to be. He has these outbursts, yes, but cold blooded murder?’

  Then he looked into Buzz’s eyes and remembered that Buzz was not merely his friend and trusted second, but a qualified and experienced psychologist. So the objection remained unvoiced. And that part of him trying to convince him that this had to be a joke, some kind of wind-up, that was silenced, too.

  ‘Hard to take, I know,’ Buzz said, after a while. ‘It’s one thing to know that the profile the LIA recruits to includes a higher capacity for personal violence than the Fleet will tolerate, but quite another to see the reality of what that involves.’

  Alex nodded. The Fleet drew two lines when assessing potential recruits. They wanted people who had sufficient innate aggression in them to be trained to use laser cannon and to fight when they had to. On the other hand, they did not want crew on their ships so handy with their fists and their tempers that there were punch-ups.

  The LIA, on the other hand, wanted – needed – people with the ruthless qualities required to take part in what Mister euphemistically referred to as ‘hot questioning’. Their field agents might well snatch someone in the night, hooded, handcuffed, bundled into a van… and you had to be a particular kind of ruthless to do that kind of thing and then go home for a take-away meal and a chill-out in front of the holly.

  ‘I knew, really,’ Buzz admitted. ‘I’ve been trying to play it low key, thinking I could keep it contained, but that incident at the lecture really alarmed me. The first time, well, I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. We’d just been through Turnaround and that’s disorienting even for those of us who’ve been trained for and experienced it. And finding ourselves parked on a planet, well, that was out there even by our standards. So an outburst where he came rushing at you with the evident intention of getting physical was, perhaps, understandable. But then,’ he shook his head, ‘he did it again.’

  Alex thought back. The LIA agent had leapt to his feet, fists clenched, rage suffusing his features, but had only taken one step towards him before others had intervened. He’d been shouting accusations of treachery then, Alex recalled. What kind of Fleet officer are you? An uber-patriot, Alex had recognised, unable to stomach anything he saw as insulting to the honour of the League.

  ‘It was a high impact briefing,’ he observed.

  ‘Yes and he hadn’t engaged with the build-up process, either,’ Buzz said. ‘So we knew it would be extremely difficult information for him to process and that he would almost certainly reject it angrily. But what I mean is the physical violence, Alex. Even if one of our own Subs, any of them, was so stressed that they were reduced to shouting, raging, what do you think the chances are that they would rush across the room and try to punch someone’s face in or grab them by the throat?’

  ‘I would hope, zero,’ Alex said. ‘And yes, I see what you mean – not the kind of behaviour you expect from a professional person.’

  ‘No, exactly,’ Buzz said. ‘His instincts were exposed there and it was not pretty. And from his body language, too, it was apparent to me that he is no stranger to personal violence, that he’s hit people in temper before. I would expect, if we knew his identity and could run a thorough background on him, to find a string of incidents in his past, going right back to childhood, where he’s lashed out in anger. There was no hesitation in him, see, none of the wavering between his impulse to strike out and the restraint of feeling that that is a behavioural line he mustn’t cross. When things get to a certain pitch with him, he feels himself to be fully justified in lashing out at whoever is annoying him. He will blame them for that, too, their fault, for making him so angry. It is purely speculative, of course, but I would expect to find at least one close friend or domestic partner who has broken off with him after an incident in which he hit them. And even those who still consider themselves to be his friends would say he has a temper, a ‘side’ to him, not a man you’d want to cross. And they’d be right. We took him in, this pet LIA guy, first we thought he was funny and then we thought he was vulnerable, cute pet, poor pet. It never occurred to us he was vicious. And when you couple that naturally vicious streak with training to kill in a noble cause… well, it’s not without some reason that it’s said in psych circles that the only difference between terrorists and LIA agents is that the LIA agents get paid. Psych joke, sorry. But it’s true enough that when you profile them they come up with alarmingly similar qualities, that single-minded hyper-rigid mindset, fanatically dedicated to a cause which they believe is so noble and of such overriding importance that it justifies anything, even murder, even atrocity. I truly believe, I really do, that if it came to it, if he could see no other way to prevent this ship falling into the hands of the enemy, Mister would destroy it. And yes, of course, I know, of course I know, it isn’t ‘falling into the hands of the enemy.’ We know that. He believes it is, though, he believes you are intending to hand it over at Lundane, or at the very least allow the Prisosans and Araki to crawl all over it making notes. He is absolutely fixed on that belief, there will be no shaking him on that. And you’d be wasting your time trying to convince him that Prisos and Arak are not our enemies, too. He knows they are, he knows it. Prisos and Arak are the chief targets of LIA activity over the border and they are not there looking to see how we might forge stronger relationships with them, they are there to evaluate the threat the LIA is and always has been convinced that they pose to us, themselves. So Mister has been trained to see them as the enemy and he will not listen to any filthy treacherous talk trying to persuade him to the contrary.’

  ‘Ohhh,’ Alex sighed. ‘You do have to wonder, sometimes,’ he said, ‘if the LIA really is working in the best interests of the League. I mean, yes, obviously, we need security services to keep a cautious eye on situations, but if they are actively working against the Diplomatic Corps’ efforts to build relationships, that’s just wrong. And this isn’t the first time they’ve tried to block us on a mission, either. But at least the last lot weren’t planning to kill me. At least, I don’t think they were.’ He was trying to be humorous, but realised himself that it was not convincing. ‘And – you’re really sure that he has serious intention to kill me?’

  ‘Alex, he told me so,’ Buzz said. ‘Over lunch. He told me – in LIA jargon but this is what he said, that if I could get him a gun he would shoot you multiple times in the head so that not even Simon could save you. Failing that, his options are quite limited – domestic and vehicle ‘accidents’ would be their usual fallback, but neither of those will play with all the safeguards we have aboard ship. So he’d be looking at some kind of poisoning and one, again, from which Simon could not recover you.’

  ‘But…’ Alex was incredulous. ‘He told you? You?’

  ‘Ah.’ Buzz scratched an ear reflectively. ‘There might,’ he said, ‘be just a little difficulty with process… thing is, he is under the impression that I am, myself, an undercover LIA agent.’

  ‘Oh, Buzz,’ Alex said, in a tone of reproach very rarely directed at Buzz and never before so seriously
, either.

  ‘Yes, I know, sorry, ethically questionable,’ Buzz confessed. ‘But I thought it for the best in the circumstances, both for his sake and for ours. It made him feel that he wasn’t on his own, that he was under the care of a supervisor. And he obeyed my orders then too, which I hoped would hold the situation stable till we could get him off the ship.’

  ‘Well, I knew you’d done something like that,’ Alex admitted, ‘just didn’t want to know. So fair enough.’ He nodded. ‘But it does, as you say, complicate things…’ as he thought about how it complicated things, he looked wry. Hetty Leavam was not going to be happy.

  Nor was she. Called in to be told that the LIA agent had decided to assassinate Alex, she listened without interruption to Buzz’s report. Only the increasing set of her lips betrayed her feelings on the matter. By the time Buzz had finished, her lips were like steel and her jaw set like concrete.

  ‘So,’ she said, very carefully, ‘you presented yourself as an LIA agent… presumably with a valid means of identifying yourself as such?’

  Buzz nodded.

  ‘Then since he was not at that time under intelligence investigation with the necessary paperwork for covert operations,’ Hetty said, ‘anything he has told you in confidence in the belief that you are an LIA agent is evidentially compromised. It is information obtained under false pretences and as such, would be robustly challenged by the defence as inadmissible in court. No.’ She held up her hand at him in a flat stop gesture. ‘Do not attempt to convince me of your good intentions,’ she said. ‘I am concerned only with how a court of law would view the status of that evidence and my professional opinion is that it is compromised. Which makes any action we take on the basis of that evidence subject to challenge, also.’ She glanced down at the notes she had been making, while he talked. ‘My recommendation,’ she said, ‘is that no action is taken on the basis of that evidence. There is – fortunately – sufficient basis for process without it.’