Angel of Destruction (16 page)

Fourteen people simply shot, five people tortured, at least five killed who knew how and then blown up with a percussion grenade — Kazmer hoped they had been killed and then blown up, and not been killed by the grenade itself —

That brought the total up to twenty-four.

There had been twenty-seven people. He remembered counting them. Three were unaccounted for. One of those three Kazmer could understand not being there, at least if he didn’t think too hard about it; if it had been a Langsarik raid the inside man — the Langsarik — would naturally have left, and not been murdered.

It hadn’t been a Langsarik raid, so where was the Langsarik?

But he had thought it was a Langsarik raid. Everything he’d heard or seen had only supported that assumption. They’d worn Langsarik colors. They’d used Langsarik names. Langsarik habits. Someone had gone to a bit of trouble to make it look like a Langsarik raid: so the Langsarik was dead, even if he wasn’t among the bodies.

Kazmer hadn’t been mistaken.

He’d been set up.

Where was the Dolgorukij?

Kazmer stared helplessly at the bodies of tortured dead, half-blind with confusion. It simply didn’t add up. It made no sense. And they could not find the body of their countryman. Or of Cousin Stanoczk’s countryman, because Kazmer himself was Sarvaw, and no Dolgorukij would claim kinship with a Sarvaw except in opposition to other people of even more alien blood.

What kind of monster committed such crimes?

Killing could be clean, when done by luck against an armed opponent in active resistance. Murder could be swift and simple, a quick knifing, a shot to the head, the snap of a neck.

These killings had been done against people already disarmed, already helpless to protest against atrocity. Twisted rope. The slow cut. Blows from a club, a stick, a weighted baton. The mutilation of a living body, making grotesque sport with a man’s own gizzard and guts —

Kazmer stared.

There was no earthly explanation for such horror.

And yet he knew where he’d seen it before, very exact, very precise.

There was no Dolgorukij body.

He opened his mouth to scream; but what came out was an animal sound, a wordless roar of outrage and blind fury.

###

“Naturally it is of concern, who is responsible,” the Malcontent Cousin Stanoczk was saying. Garol and the Malcontent stood together with Jils Ivers in the dock-master’s office; Stanoczk had left Kazmer Daigule to consider the tortured dead. “But first one must find one’s countryman, and set his family’s anxiety at rest. Who knows? If he cannot be found, perhaps he’s still alive somewhere.”

A slim enough chance, Garol thought, given what they were seeing. It was not merely grotesque. It was thorough. He never would have dreamed Langsariks could be capable of mass atrocity, but who was he to say?

Could something have gone this wrong, this quickly, in a population trapped and despairing? Was he ultimately to blame for having trapped the Langsariks into an amnesty settlement at Port Charid?

Then Kazmer Daigule, the Malcontent pilot who had brought them there, came roaring out of the inner chamber where the torture victims were; and flung himself headlong at Cousin Stanoczk, knocking him to the ground. Screaming.

Shock froze Garol in his place for just long enough to hear some of what Daigule was saying — he thought. His Dolgorukij was passable, but his Sarvaw was shaky. Though the Dolgorukij dialect he’d been taught had been High Aznir, the swear words were less dissimilar than some of the other elements of the dialects might be. Kazmer Daigule was howling about a bitch and a mad dog; then Cousin Stanoczk — who had struggled onto his back on the floor in the moments it took Garol to react — planted his boot in Daigule’s belly and pushed, hard.

Garol stepped out of the way and Daigule went up and then back down again. Cousin Stanoczk was up and on the pilot in one swift predatory lunge, shaking Daigule ferociously with his hands gripping Daigule’s shirt at the throat and shouting in turn. Cousin Stanoczk spoke High Aznir in his fury. Garol could tell exactly what Cousin Stanoczk was saying.

Profane as well as mad, shit-eating Sarvaw, no one protects the blasphemer. Shut your filthy mouth.

Daigule wasn’t shutting up.

He had his hands up to Stanoczk’s hands now, though he wasn’t trying to get up. There was a wrenching note in his tone of voice that told Garol that Daigule wasn’t raving, as Cousin Stanoczk’s curse had seemed to imply; just insisting on something. There was the mad dog again, though Garol heard no more about bitches. Mad dogs, murderers, and a missal or devotional book of some sort. Maybe a counting string, it was hard to tell.

Cousin Stanoczk seemed to be in control of the situation.

Garol waited, to see what would happen.

Slowly the Malcontent straightened up, releasing his grip on Daigule’s collar with what seemed to be a stern effort of will. It was hard to tell with Dolgorukij, but Garol thought that Stanoczk had paled. Turning his back on Daigule, Stanoczk raised his eyes to some point located halfway across the top of the doorway out into the load-in area; and when he spoke again, it was in plain Standard.

“You allow your imagination to run away with you, pilot. The mad dog of which you speak has been dead for more than one hundred years. You are grasping at smoke, to divert suspicion.”

This was interesting. Garol sat down, deliberately drawing attention to himself with the action, just to be sure that they realized he was listening. He and Jils. He wanted to get through to Daigule very badly, but he wasn’t about to steal access after having made a deal — howsoever unsatisfactory — with Cousin Stanoczk.

Daigule gathered himself to sit cross-legged, slumped at the floor and staring at the ground. “You say. But we know. They just went underground, Cousin Stanoczk, they’ve always been there. Waiting. Grant me at least the expert’s eye in the matter.”

The story was beginning to sort itself out to Garol’s satisfaction. Whether or not he believed it was another matter.

“Nobody is going to take such a thing the least bit seriously.” Oddly enough it seemed that Daigule had gotten through to Cousin Stanoczk, at least in some sense; Stanoczk sounded genuinely shaken. “You are afraid it was Langsariks, you wish to divert suspicion, you invent. What would the Angel be doing in Port Charid, what reason imaginable could there be? It’s too forced, pilot, it won’t do.”

Daigule was shaking his head, though, rocking gently back and forth where he sat on the floor as if to give his insistence additional emphasis. “No Langsarik in the history of Langsariks ever did such a thing, but the mad dog was always accustomed to. For piety. This was not a Langsarik raid. This was a raid done by people wishing to be taken for Langsariks but betrayed by habit. Let me talk to the Bench specialists, Cousin Stanoczk. I can tell them things they need to know.”

All of the time in transit between Anglace and Tyrell Yards the pilot had kept strictly to himself, neither speaking nor responding when spoken to by anyone but Cousin Stanoczk, but it had been perfectly obvious to Garol that the pilot was Kazmer Daigule. He’d even felt a little sorry for the man; it had to be an awkward position to be in.

“Out of the question,” Cousin Stanoczk snapped, angrily. “You have your oath taken on it already. I will not allow it. Still.” He seemed to run out of irate energy as he spoke, as if forced to entertain an alien and unpleasant concept. “Still. It doesn’t fit the Langsarik model. There is the bracelet, I saw it. Why invoke the Angel, though, pilot?”

Bracelet, bracelet — what bracelet? Garol traded glances with Jils, momentarily confused. He saw realization in her eyes even as he grasped the meaning of the phrase himself. Torture victims, mutilations, bodies cut open before the victim was dead. All right. He could understand “bracelet.”

“Because there was a Dolgorukij here, and we can’t find him. There was a Dolgorukij at Okidan, wasn’t there? Who survived.”

“If you mean to accuse — ” Cousin Stanoczk started to say. He was obviously angry again. Kazmer Daigule stood up and held his hands out, petitioning.

“No accusations, Cousin Stanoczk. Just an observation. But this — ” Daigule spread both hands and opened his arms, to include all of the carnage at the Tyrell Yards — “this is the very type and pattern of the mad dog. Admit it. Why would Langsariks go crazy, in such specific ways?”

“Not just one Dolgorukij is missing.” Cousin Stanoczk seemed determined to resist whatever conclusion it was. that Daigule was trying to communicate. “A Sarvaw also survived, pilot. I grant you that no Sarvaw ever joined those ranks, that my holy Patron knows of.”

The suggestion seemed to stagger Daigule, almost literally. It was a moment before he could respond.

“If you were not my cousin,” Daigule said, only he used one of the dozens of words that Dolgorukij had for cousin, and Garol thought this one was a particularly extreme form of the relationship from a power standpoint. “And I didn’t owe you. You’d take that back, Stanoczk. And beg my mother’s pardon, and her mother’s pardon, and the pardon of my mother’s mother’s mother, sincerely. I would see to it.”

Mad dogs and bitches. Angels. Dolgorukij and Sarvaw.

Nobody said anything for a moment or two, as Daigule stared at Stanoczk, who stared back.

“We’re being rude,” Cousin Stanoczk said finally. “Bench specialists. We are finished here, Kazmer Daigule and I. Let’s please leave this place. I will explain, but I warn you that I do not believe it.”

It was an admirably restrained sort of thing to say after the fireworks Daigule had just set off. Garol could not bring himself to tarnish its perfection by elaborating or insisting on it.

“Your ship, Cousin Stanoczk.” And therefore up to Cousin Stanoczk to decide when to leave, by implication. “Your pilot. Yes, we’d be happy to accept transportation to Port Charid, kind of you to offer.”

Garol’s own courier would be waiting there soon, freighter-ferried from Anglace. It had been relatively easy to arrange ferry transport; there seemed to be a surplus of available freight heading into Port Charid. Wholesalers weren’t feeling very comfortable about the security of goods warehoused in the Shawl of Rikavie, it seemed; the business base at Charid was bound to be suffering. Chilleau Judiciary was going to want to talk to him about that.

Chilleau Judiciary was going to want to talk to him about a lot of things. An uneasy conviction that things just weren’t adding up was not going to answer questions the Bench had a right to ask him about piracy and murder.

###

The floor manager, Dalmoss, was standing behind his desk as Hilton stepped into the open doorway. It looked as though he were packing. Hilton rapped sharply at the doorjamb with the curled knuckles of his left hand, to alert Dalmoss to his presence.

“You sent for me, floor manager?”

Dalmoss raised his head sharply, looking a little startled, then seemed to relax. “Shires. Don’t creep up on a man like that. Come in, close the door.”

The floor manager’s office was just inside the small administrative area at one end of the new warehouse. Things were still unfinished. There was nobody else in the administrative complex — reception desk, foreman’s office, storeroom and toilet all unoccupied; maybe it was just the draft Dalmoss wanted to shut out. Hilton shrugged mental shoulders and closed the door behind him.

“Are you leaving, floor manager?” Hilton started to ask the question, but it didn’t quite come out the way he’d thought it might. The situation did seem obvious.

Nor did Dalmoss seem to take offense at any presumption on Hilton’s part. “I have to go to Geraint for a few days, Shires, something’s come up. I’ve asked the foreman to let you fill in on temporary assignment, and he’s agreed. He’s been very pleased at your progress so far.”

That was a compliment, Hilton supposed, or at least it seemed that Dalmoss intended it as such. “Very kind. I’m sure.” He wasn’t sure, not really, what progress there was to impress anybody. He’d learned to tick boxes in array. That didn’t take much progress.

Dalmoss grinned. “Not doing you any favors, really, Shires. You get to skip roll call because we expect you to be working early and late, but that’s about it. Corporate practice. We’ll work you for months under pretext of training before we get around to actually paying you for the job you’re doing. Here, take this.”

Dalmoss tossed something at Hilton, something small and light. Hilton caught it, curious: cylindrical, metallic, and the spider-brain that lived inside of it made its status lights sparkle. An identity chop.

“What’s it for?”

It couldn’t be Dalmoss’s chop. Dalmoss was going to Geraint and would probably be needing his signature key. Even if he didn’t, Dalmoss’s chop was no good to anyone but Dalmoss; identity chops were tuned to the genetic markers in a person’s sweat and skin, so that no one but Dalmoss could use his chop, not and get a seal. So it wasn’t Dalmoss’s chop.

“Backup release marker,” Dalmoss explained. He’d dropped his voice, and was looking past Hilton to the door of his office — to make sure it was closed, Hilton supposed. “I don’t like taking it off-site. Just hang on to it, Shires; you won’t be asked to use it for anything, just make sure you keep track of where it is until I get back.”

Backup release marker? “I don’t want to be difficult,” Hilton protested. “But I’m a little uncomfortable. My status, and all that. Are you sure it’s a good idea to leave it with me? Why not the foreman?”

It wasn’t an identity chop, it was a corporate marker, used to sign off on documents releasing ships and cargo. Authorizing movement of freighter tenders from surface to orbit. Clearing a pilot to take a ship and go.

Langsariks weren’t to have access to such things.

Dalmoss came around from behind his desk to stand close to Hilton, speaking quietly and quickly. “We had to have the second one made when the foreman was injured at Okidan. But we got busy, I never got around to the documentation, you know how it’s been around here. And the foreman doesn’t want to know about it.”

Oh, good
.

Not only was it a violation of the amnesty for Hilton to be in possession of a backup release chop.