Angel of Destruction

dedicated to absent friends

Special thanks to Sylvia Kelso for her assistance in preparing the OCR scan of this document for publication. Any remaining errors are mine and mine alone!

Prologue

Garol Vogel stood in the wheelhouse of the flagship as the Langsarik fleet came off the exit vector and dropped to sub-tactical speed. The Langsarik commander stood beside him; together they watched the massed ships of the Jurisdiction’s Second Fleet come to position, flanking the Langsariks as they progressed toward Port Charid and their new home.

Their prison.

The Langsarik commander — Flag Captain Walton Agenis — stared impassively, her expression so flatly neutral that Garol knew it was a struggle for her to contain her emotion. The Langsarik fleet surrendered under escort with full military honors, true enough, but surrender was surrender nonetheless, and now they were wards of Jurisdiction.

The terms of their probation were not punitively strict. Port Charid was a small tightly knit community dominated by the Dolgorukij Combine, people among whom the Langsariks would stand out by virtue of their accent and their non-Combine blood. The Bench was counting on Port Charid to deny the Langsariks access to space transport and to provide a certain basic level of population monitoring — roll call, head count, attendance reconciliation.

In return Port Charid received the Langsariks, a population of five thousand souls with sophisticated technical skills, proven adaptability, and nowhere for them to work but as cheap labor to fuel Port Charid’s commercial expansion in cargo management and freight handling.

“Are we clear?” Agenis asked; and one of her lieutenants stood to answer. Hilton Shires was actually her nephew as well as her lieutenant, though Garol didn’t think there was more than twelve years between them; and Agenis had yet to see forty years, Standard. She and Garol himself were almost the same age.

“Reports are complete, Captain, the fleet has cleared the vector. Standing by.”

Walton Agenis had been a lieutenant herself when the Jurisdiction had annexed the Langsariks’ home system. She had risen to command over the fifteen years of the Langsarik fleet’s stubborn if futile resistance, forging what had been a local commerce patrol fleet into mercantile raiders whose continued evasion of Fleet’s best efforts to locate and contain them had become a scandal from one end of the Bench to the other.

She’d seen her family either ostracized on her home world — where it was no longer expedient to admit to having kin with the Langsarik fleet — or lost in battle; and now she stood witness to the final loss of the fleet itself.

Still, it was only the ships that they were losing.

The Langsariks themselves — people who had made the Langsarik fleet a challenge and a reproach to Jurisdiction — would live; and someday yet be free. Eight years of probation as Port Charid’s labor pool was not so terrible a price to pay for reconciliation with the Bench; and once eight years had passed the Langsariks could go home.

“Specialist Vogel,” Flag Captain Agenis said, not looking at him. Garol bowed in salute at her side.

“Ma’am.”

“The fleet is assembled in good order and ready to surrender the controls as agreed. Your action, Bench specialist.”

Langsariks didn’t salute. It wasn’t the Langsarik way. “Thank you, Flag Captain. Lieutenant Shires, if you would hail the
Margitov
, please.”

Jils Ivers was on the Jurisdiction Fleet Flagship
Margitov
, waiting. She had worked as hard as Garol himself to see this happen: a peaceful solution to the Langsarik problem, one that avoided the crying waste that simple annihilation would have been. Lieutenant Shires made the call; and piped Jils Ivers’s voice over the public address in the wheelhouse.

“Jurisdiction Fleet Flagship
Margitov
, standing by. Prepared to assume direction.”

It was tactful of Jils to say “direction,” and not “command” or “control.” The reality of it was hard enough for those proud people to accept. They were under no illusions as to the impact of the change in status waiting for them. It was to their credit that they went forward into a sort of bondage as bravely as they ever had confronted the Bench in sortie.

“By direction from Flag Captain Walton Agenis,” Garol said, choosing his words carefully. “Properly delegated by the Langsarik fleet to do so on its behalf. The Langsarik fleet surrenders the motivational controls to remote direction. Now.”

Lieutenant Shires sat back at his post and folded his arms.

The images on the panoramic screens that lined the wheelhouse walls, the picture of space on monitor, faltered; then steadied again.

“The ship is on remote direction,” Lieutenant Shires said, looking over his shoulder at Flag Captain Agenis. “They’ve got us, Captain.”

I hope we’re doing the right thing.

Shires didn’t have to say it for the message to be clear, and Agenis didn’t need to answer.

The Langsariks had made their decision.

They had agreed to accept amnesty and terms.

Not all of the Langsariks had agreed that it was their last best chance for survival under Jurisdiction: but the entire Langsarik fleet had sworn to be honor-bound by the majority vote, and Langsariks kept their promises. Sometimes all too well.

“Your ship, Bench specialist.” Captain Agenis bowed her head and stepped back half a pace. “What are they going to do with it, may I ask?”

After the obvious, of course, repossession, disarmament, and evacuation of all Langsarik personnel on arrival at Port Charid. The Bench had hired transport from the mercantile resources in port to ferry the Langsariks from orbit to Port and from there to the nearby settlement that had been prepared for them.

Under the terms of the amnesty no Langsarik was to own, lease, direct, or appropriate space transport for the duration of the probationary period, unless under immediate and direct supervision by non-Langsarik employers. And these ships, the ships of the Langsarik fleet, the ships whose computing systems had just been surrendered to remote control, these ships had been home to the Langsariks for more than fifteen years.

“I believe they’re to be taken back to Palaam.” The Langsarik system of origin had a technical claim on the ships. Once the planetary government — the puppet government — of Palaam had formally repudiated them, the Langsariks had become pirates in the eyes of the law, and the hulls they fought with and lived on belonged to Palaam. “I don’t know what the Palaamese government will do with them.”

Agenis made a sour face, but it was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared. In a sense it was no hardship for the Langsariks to be forbidden to return to Palaam for eight years, Garol knew. As far as the Langsariks were concerned they had been betrayed by their own government, their families, their communities all turning their backs under pressure from the Bench. Maybe after eight years the Langsariks would come to forgive their home world for bowing to pressure. They were about to gain first-hand knowledge of how dispiriting life under Jurisdiction could be.

“Well. I hope they get some good maintenance people in. The condition of quarters, really, Bench specialist. It’s shocking.”

But her forced humor could not cover up her grief; and Garol could offer no help. He had already done everything he could for the Langsariks, not only to get the amnesty approved, but to structure the amnesty so that it would not become intolerable to the Langsariks. He felt responsible for them now; it was his doing that they were to accept probation here, his and Jils’s. It had to work. Criminals by Bench definition, no question, but they were brave, smart, stubborn, strong-willed people, and the Bench could not afford to waste the resource they represented for the sake of mere vengeance, or ego-gratification on the part of Palaam’s Bench-appointed puppet government.

Since he could not change the hard facts of the matter, Garol attempted to provide reassurance of another sort, instead.

“I’ve inspected the settlement, Flag Captain. All new construction.” Put up in a hurry, and not the best quality. Fleet contracting, let to the lowest bidder, but Garol had been given the authority to demand some of the less satisfactory elements be upgraded and improved.

It wasn’t luxury.

But it would keep weather out and heat in; and the Langsariks would be able to make changes themselves, as time went on. “Paint job all one color, more or less, but at least it’s clean. Funny thing, though. Not a trace of rose gold to be seen in the entire settlement.”

She smiled, as if despite herself, and glanced down at the front of the uniform that she wore. Rose gold. The colors of the Langsarik fleet. “Do we surrender our clothing as well, then, Garol?”

Negotiations had gone on for months, and they’d been intense. In all that time, she’d never used his personal name. Garol was pleased and honored by her grant of intimacy, formal though it was, and at the same time grieved by the depth of her personal distress.

“You’ll remove all rank and insignia on the ferry shuttle between the ships in orbit and Port Charid. But no. You keep your clothing.” The Langsariks didn’t have any other clothing, not after fifteen years. For all Garol knew they slept in uniform. “There’ll be a concession store to serve your needs at the settlement, but they haven’t selected a vendor yet. Food service and clinic and utilities, yes.”

There were five thousand people in the Langsarik fleet, men, women, and even children born to a people at war with the civilized worlds and the Bench that governed them.

There were many logistical details yet unresolved, but Chilleau Judiciary would do the best it could for the Langsariks.

Chilleau Judiciary had no choice.

The First Judge — the single most powerful individual under Jurisdiction, the woman who held the tiebreaking vote on the Bench — was old; the Second Judge at Chilleau Judiciary was ambitious, and well placed to mount a bid for the First Judge’s position when it became vacant. But there were nine Judges in all, several with their own ambitions with respect to the ultimate position of influence under Jurisdiction, and the Second Judge had suffered a staggering humiliation within the past year.

Chilleau Judiciary’s political rivals had made full use of the lurid details of torture, murder, and waste of lives and property that had been taken into evidence during the trial of the Domitt Prison’s administration for failure to uphold the rule of Law.

If the Second Judge was to reclaim her honor from the blow it had received in the court of public opinion after the scandals at the Domitt Prison, the Langsarik settlement could not be allowed to fail.

Chapter One

“Okidan Yards, this is the freighter
Sevior
, requesting docking protocol. Please respond.”

In the year since the Bench had settled the Langsariks at Port Charid, Port Charid itself had prospered, through its unequal partnership with its captive labor pool. Traffic was up more than thirty-five percent overall, and the arrival of a freighter at a warehouse yards excited much less notice these days than it might have done a year and a half gone by.

Fisner Feraltz stood in the dock-master’s office on the asteroid warehouse complex of the Okidan Yards, watching the freighter’s approach on monitor.

He could remember.

He’d been fifteen years old, interning on a Combine ship carrying a shipment of garments from the manufactory in Berin, in Givrodnye — where he’d been born — to the clearing-house at Corcorum, outside Combine space. They’d been attacked by Langsariks, ordered to stand by for boarding and prepare to surrender goods on demand. Someone — no one had ever claimed to know who it might have been — had fired the ship’s signal guns, which weren’t designed for offensive purposes.

So it hadn’t even been Langsarik fire that had destroyed the ship. It had been an accident. The signal guns had never been used before, and somebody under the stress of the event hadn’t unshipped the barrel shunts. Or had used the wrong rounds. Or something; and it didn’t really matter, in the end. The entire crew but one had been lost in the explosion.

The Langsariks had never hinted at suspecting him, and no one else who might have accused him had survived.

But he lived with shame that never ended.

The dock-master spoke from her post at her master-board. “We have you, freighter
Sevior
, Okidan Yards confirms. Stand by for transmission of docking protocol.”

The Langsariks had boarded the crippled freighter and found him barricaded in the cargo holds, trembling in terror. They’d taken him with them, because the ship had been too badly damaged to hold its atmosphere for long enough for rescuers to reach him from any other source.

He had been the only survivor.

And how could he have gone home to his family, after that? How could he explain the fact that he was alive while his brothers, uncles, cousins were dead? How could he have hoped to tell the truth — that the Langsariks had offered threats, but no violence; and had cared for him with creditable charity until they could see him safely on neutral ground — without raising questions in people’s minds that he could not bear to face?

No.

There was no hope of any such homecoming, not for him, not forever.

He had stayed with the Langsariks for almost a full year, Standard, until they found a way to smuggle him back into friendly hands. That had been at Markov, as it had happened, and Fisner had never gone home.

The freighter on-screen,
Sevior
, turned its great bulk slowly to sink down between the signal markers on Okidan’s flat side and come to ground. The Shawl of Rikavie was full of asteroids like Okidan; large enough to site warehouses and docks, small enough to maneuver out of the way of other asteroids in orbit if need arose. There was plenty of room to maneuver in the Shawl — the asteroid belt halfway between the planet Rikavie and the Sillume vector, entry and exit, the space-lane terminals that gave Rikavie system its place in the web of transport under Jurisdiction.

The Jurisdiction had failed to take revenge for Fisner’s family. After fruitless attempts to bring the pirates to account, the Bench had cravenly made peace with them instead, and left the crime unpunished to burn in Fisner’s heart.

He had found work where he could, ending up at last within the Combine’s mercantile authority, the oversight agency that coordinated trade on behalf of Combine interests within Jurisdiction as a whole.

It had been chance that had brought him to Port Charid, to work in the warehouses on-planet and oversee the Combine’s yards on its own asteroid base in the Shawl.

But once the Jurisdiction had brought the Langsariks to settle at Port Charid and be its labor pool, Fisner Feraltz had understood the hand of the Holy Mother in his life, and known what he had to do.

If there had been no Langsariks, there would have been no accident.

It was their fault his family was dead, and he was exiled. No amount of self-serving charity on their part could wash away their guilt, or ease his suffering. Blood called for blood. Nor could he afford to forgive and forget in his heart, whatever the requirements of social discourse. The Holy Mother herself expected vengeance of him: The Angel had told him so.

On-screen, Fisner could see that the freighter
Sevior
had settled into its berth. Its umbilicus had completed its initial handshake, pressurized environment to pressurized environment. It was bright on the surface where the freighter lay, and the small sun of Rikavie shone like a beacon over the shoulder of the beast. The dock-master sat at her station, however, her fingers drumming the console absentmindedly.

“Funny,” she said, and Fisner thought it was maybe only to herself — idle curiosity, but no alarm. “That doesn’t look like the specs it sent. Didn’t they say it was a dray? That looks like a distance carrier, to me.”

“Hard to say,” Fisner replied politely, just in case she was talking to him. “But it does seem a little other than one would expect. Maybe we could ask the captain about it. Get a tour. You never know what’s coming out of shipyards these days.”

He was lying, in a way, because he knew quite well that it was a heavy transport freighter. It hadn’t come to deliver stores to Okidan. It was here to take the Okidan Yards for everything it could plunder.

The dock-master clearly didn’t have a clue, not yet — just the germ of a suspicion. She pivoted slowly around in her seat and stood up, frowning slightly. “Good manners to go say something, either way. Coming?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got finishing up to do.”

Inventory validation was a chore, but it had to be done. Since the Combine Yards were the largest in system, it had quite naturally fallen to the Combine Yards to oversee and facilitate, to manage all of the administrative details required to keep the flow of traffic moving, to provide insurers and contract holders alike with assurances as to the quality and condition of goods, to collect and remit fees and taxes, and generally to act as the Bench proxy in Port Charid.

The dock-master left Fisner to his task. He was alone; and after a moment he locked the office door, secure in the knowledge that the observation ports — which were proof against unplanned decompression — would not be easy to break in, should someone on staff try to find shelter in the office from what was to come.

On the station’s master monitor screens Fisner could see the dock-master cross the load-in apron to where the freighter’s cargo umbilicus debouched into the load-in docks. No one had appeared from the freighter yet. Abandoning his task for more pressing concerns, Fisner moved to the dock-master’s master-board to cut the video feeds between the docks and the rest of the warehouse complex.

The dock-master’s chair was still warm from her body heat. Fisner hefted it to test the weight, and smashed it down across the master communications nexus board. The auxiliary fail-safe panel was on a subsidiary board some paces removed, and he left that intact. He had no intention of dying here.

There were people coming out of the freighter’s umbilicus now, the cheerful color of their Langsarik blouses clearly visible even at a distance. They had the dock-master, but she had yet to panic — at least to judge by appearances. Was it his imagination, or was she looking up into the monitor, up into the screens?

She knew he was in the office. She might be hoping for some quick-witted action on his part.

Fisner bore her no ill will. It wasn’t her fault. It was the fault of the Bench, the Jurisdiction’s fault for suffering Langsarik predation to go unpunished. Fisner set off the station alarms: standard emergency procedure, and it would bring everyone on station running to the load-in docks. The freighter’s crew had had enough time to get themselves into position by now, and were lying in wait.

The Bench had said that he had no claim against Bench or Langsariks for damages, that the loss he had suffered had been through misadventure. An accident.

The Angel of Destruction said differently.

The Angel of Destruction said that it was an offense against the Holy Mother herself that an ungodly and alien hand had been permitted to steal from Dolgorukij, and with impunity; an amnesty was no punishment for such a crime. The Angel of Destruction had sought him out and recruited him, sounded him out and tested him, tried his mettle and his faith — but at the end of it all the Angel had opened its arms to him and welcomed him, granted him membership in its sacred fellowship and made him the agent of the vengeance of the Holy Mother against the Langsariks at Port Charid.

The warehouse staff were unarmed; the slaughter was quick and efficient, over almost as soon as it had begun. Fisner scanned the load-in docks outside the dock-master’s office with the remote monitors, counting the bodies.

Everyone seemed to be accounted for.

The dock-master was to be shot over her boards, as if in the act of trying to call for help. She was still alive, standing under guard with two raiders in Langsarik dress as the plunder of the warehouse commenced. The hand of the Holy Mother was clearly discernible in the fortunate circumstance that had brought the Langsariks to Port Charid. They were a perfect cover for the Angel’s fund-raising activities, and once they were shown guilty — too guilty for the Bench to overlook their faults and let them live free, this time — Port Charid would go begging for labor once more.

Labor that the Combine was in a position to provide, at a premium, of course.

Labor that would only solidify the hold the Holy Mother held over trade at Port Charid and access to the Sillume vector alike.

Meanwhile the Angel stood in need of goods to convert into funds, because the righteous were not welcome in the debased Church of the Autocrat’s court. The Angel of Destruction had been outlawed through the malice of its enemies and the weak-spirited failings of the Autocrat himself octaves ago, when even Chuvishka Kospodar — the man who more than any other had nurtured their holy order, and welcomed it as the hand of the Holy Mother on Sarvaw — had been forced publicly to repudiate the Angel and its fearless defense of Her honor.

The money had to come from somewhere.

Just now it was coming out of the Okidan Yards, and the Langsariks would be blamed — two blessings in one devotion.

After a while the raiders in Langsarik dress came to the door of the dock-master’s office, and Fisner opened the door. They had the dock-master with them, and her eyes brightened with sudden hope when she saw him.

Hadn’t she figured it out yet?

No, for they had been coached very carefully, Langsarik phrases, Langsarik swear words, Langsarik songs. Langsariks were responsible for the slaughter here, not honest Dolgorukij.

“Here?” raid leader Dalmoss asked Fisner, gesturing toward the broken master console with a tilt of his chin. A shot could serve to disguise the previous damage that had been deliberately inflicted on the communications console; with enough blood, people would be discouraged from looking very closely. It wouldn’t be a problem. There were good reasons for the Langsariks to have first smashed the console and then shot the dock-master, if anyone felt honor-bound to establish a precise sequence of events.

Fisner nodded.

Dalmoss bowed his head and glanced toward his people. They pulled the dock-master over to her console and turned her so that she faced Fisner and the raid leader alike; but the venom in her expression, the hatred in her eyes, the acid in her voice was all for Fisner.

“You. I should have known better.”

It was as if she no longer even saw the others, staring at Fisner with baffled rage. “Sharing spit with Langsariks, you might as well have been one of them all along. Imagine you working for the Combine. I guess you must have grown to like the life, is that what happened?”

He could snatch Dalmoss’s weapon and kill her himself.

But that would have been a gesture of anger, an act of violence done with a resentful heart. The Angel killed without mercy, but without malice. The Angel was only the humble tool of the Holy Mother, blessed by Her toward the furtherance of Her sacred plan; and therefore when the Angel killed it was without anger, without fear, without hatred or joy in cruelty.

It was for that reason that the Angel could kill, and not sin in doing so.

Therefore, Fisner simply nodded to Dalmoss. The raiders in Langsarik dress who had brought the dock-master to her console backed away; she was so focused on Fisner that there was no need to watch for any sudden moves on her part. She was paralyzed with hatred as surely as though it had been fear.

Dalmoss shot her in the middle of her body, and her shoulders and head fell backwards over the top edge of the communications console while her legs fell in opposite directions, to each side of her shattered pelvis, as her arms flew wide.

What a mess
, Fisner thought. And Dalmoss had prudently used his sidearm. Had he used one of the others’ more powerful weapons — it didn’t bear thinking on.

Just as well that the false Langsarik colors didn’t have to be particularly clean to be recognizable for what they were.

“And now you, firstborn and eldest brother,” Dalmoss said respectfully.

This was the most challenging part of this raid; but Fisner almost welcomed it. He would put any lingering doubts about his courage to rest, he would bear witness to his devotion to the Holy Mother with his body. And not least of all, he would bear witness with his words as well, damning witness against the Langsariks — so long as he survived, and his testimony was properly handled.

“I’m going over here to the auxiliary call,” Fisner explained, setting the scene, proud of himself for being able to speak so calmly. He was afraid. But he would not falter. “You shoot me down, I fall, you leave. Near miss, but there must be enough damage to make it convincing.” They’d been over all that already. They’d carefully chosen the angle of the shot, and where Dalmoss should aim. “Here I go — to reach the auxiliary call, and give the alarm — ”