Angel of Destruction (24 page)

“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, sounding 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.”

Stanoczk was disgusted at him, now, but basically simply disgusted, and ready to take it out on the world. “Pettiche at Geraint, but traveling as Dalmoss, against which there is no law either beneath the Canopy or before the Bench. But between the time of confirming the identity of the man who was not Dalmoss, and matching him to Pettiche, he has gone. We cannot find him. We only knew that he was there, at Geraint, days after the Tyrell raid, as Dalmoss.”

Garol gathered his knees to his chest and stared at the worn carpeting, thinking hard.

His feelings of intense frustration over the loss of the interrogatory he could manage; since there was no way to tell whether Dalmoss would have provided useful information, there was no sense in worrying that bone.

He had thought that Cousin Stanoczk brought him hard evidence and a brief that would solve his problems at Port Charid, but Cousin Stanoczk had not brought him nothing, Cousin Stanoczk had brought him evidence that could be used — though it was indirect. Hearsay. It only meant that more steps would be required to transmute Cousin Stanoczk’s information into salvation for the Langsariks.

“Found the body, lost the body, there is still no body, Cousin Stanoczk.” Cousin Stanoczk knew that. The Malcontent was an irritation and had been nothing but an obstacle, but he was neither stupid nor willfully obstructionary. “So what’s the point.”

Cousin Stanoczk started to stand up. He didn’t seem to be managing it very well; Daigule came forward to help him, and once Cousin Stanoczk was on his feet he faced Walton Agenis — of all people — and bowed very politely. But with apparent sincerity.

“It means that you are victimized by plots against you done by my countrymen, Flag Captain. Excuse me that I have not presented myself before now, my name is Stanoczk. I am a Malcontent, and responsible to the Saint my master for the good government of the children of the Holy Mother as they go out into the world. That you are wronged by Combine interests is no longer in dispute. We fear the worst. To Garol Vogel we ask: can we be of any help at all, to make atonement on behalf of the Holy Mother’s Church for wrong done you by Her own wayward children?”

Long speech. Unusually coherent, for a drunk; so maybe Stanoczk meant it. Walton Agenis shifted a little to one side in the chair; looking at Garol.

Oh, bloody hell.

“He’s got resources we’re going to need.” He was already unhappy about his role in having brought the Langsariks to Port Charid in the first place, worried and anxious about whether Walton Agenis’s trust in him was ultimately to mean her destruction.

He didn’t need to be reminded.

But he couldn’t refuse Walton’s implicit request either, just because it emphasized that she had not yet decided that it was time to begin to cease to trust him. “You’re short access to computing power to run the traffic analysis. I’ve seen his comps. He can probably do things with them that I don’t even want to know about.” Because they were likely to be illegal, that was to say. “Send someone to the docks tomorrow as soon as you can. And assume that we’re being watched at every moment.”

Straightening up, Cousin Stanoczk spun drunkenly on his heel and staggered sideways, managing miraculously to land on his back on Garol’s bed.

“One does assume so. Naturally,” he said.

Daigule turned the light out, and Garol stood in the middle of his small room in the rooming house with Kazmer Daigule at the door, Cousin Stanoczk on the bed, Walton Agenis in his chair, and Hilton Shires standing calmly and quietly in a modified position of attention-rest behind her.

There was a way to get all of this sorted out, he knew it; but for a moment the insanity of the situation was almost too much.

“So, does anybody know any good jokes?” Hilton Shires asked. Garol shook his head vigorously, to clear it: he was losing his track.

“We’ll probably have to wait for morning before we can disperse.” They could take advantage of shift change, things got busy.

Agenis and Shires Garol trusted to have arrived unobserved, but getting away again was going to be a little different. Cousin Stanoczk’s arrival had unfortunately probably focused the attention of the night watchman; if anyone was watching Stanoczk, they could be watching the window. “There are a few hours. Talk. Let’s all get on the same vector transit. Shires. You first.”

Maybe nobody was watching. It was probably a good idea to minimize any chance of their quarry noticing that they were getting closer . . . if they were getting closer.

“Funny that you should mention a vector transit, Bench specialist. I have these documents. And one of them may say ‘Honan,’ and another may say ‘gung.’ ” Garol stooped to the floor to retrieve the empty flask he’d intercepted on its journey to the far wall.

He was almost regretful to find it truly empty.

It was going to be a long wait, till morning.

Chapter Nine

Fisner Feraltz had come to work in the Combine offices in Port Charid proper this morning for two or three reasons. One of them was the desirability of being close to Factor Madlev’s office, so that if the Bench specialist arrived to call through to Chilleau Judiciary he could find an immediate pretext to be there by the time Vogel was announced — or at least be on-site to talk to Factor Madlev immediately afterward, to see if he could get some hints on what had been said.

Another was to be away from the warehouse construction site in order to minimize chance contacts with Hilton Shires — in case some subconscious connection should be made in Shires’s mind between the drunk in the warehouse the previous night and his foreman. There was no accounting for the leaps of comprehension that could occur at the most inopportune times even in the brain of the outlander; so it was prudent for Fisner to keep his distance more carefully while the experience was still fresh in Shires’s mind.

But mostly Fisner came to work in Combine offices at Port Charid that morning because he had been out late last night helping Dalmoss with the body, and was too tired to force himself into his medical bracing fast enough to get out to his branch office in time.

The trick with the documents and the body had gone off beautifully: they had passed the information about a planned raid on Honan-gung to Shires, and escaped without being exposed as anyone other than Langsariks.

But had it worked?

Shires had gone; Shires had come back, with some of his Langsarik fellows. By that time Fisner and Dalmoss had moved the body, because if someone recognized the Langsarik as Parken from the Tyrell Yards, it would queer the setup.

The presence of the corpse had served its purpose in representing a genuine Langsarik to Shires while startling him out of any potential analysis and suspicions up front. With the corpse missing it was only Shires’s word that there had been a dead man there at all, and Shires might well be distracted enough by that issue to neglect to think too deeply on any other aspect of the incident.

It was early yet for gossip to have gotten out. He’d be hearing all about it soon enough, Fisner was sure. The people on his crew — including his agents, of course, but even the balance of his crew, the majority of whom were innocent of any involvement with the Angel of Destruction — were encouraged to come to him with rumors. It was a management-communications issue. Open-door policy. Free intelligence.

It was with pleasant expectations that Fisner looked up as someone knocked at his open office door. Rather than a report from one of his people or a bit of tasty gossip, however, it was his receptionist Hariv at the door with a frown on his face, and a man behind him that Fisner thought he’d seen in town before.

“Excuse me, Foreman, a Malcontent to see you. Cousin Stanoczk.”

Oh, this was interesting.

The Malcontent had been the Angel’s bitter enemy from the birth of their holy Order. The opposition that the Malcontent had offered to the Angel at every step had traditionally been requited by the heartfelt hatred of the loyal sons of the Holy Mother for the degenerate offspring of bastard Saints. The Angel rejoiced in the grace and blessing of the Holy Mother; the Malcontent had to content itself with the patronage of a drunk, a failure, an irreligious and impotent man whose every action during his lifetime had ultimately failed to achieve its purpose.

With the arrogance characteristic of a Malcontent’s inflated opinion of himself and his mission, Cousin Stanoczk hadn’t even had the common courtesy to present himself to Factor Madlev — the senior Combine official at Port Charid, and surely a man worthy of respect — upon his arrival. His appearance here now would have some purpose behind it. Fisner was curious to know what that might be.

“Thank you, Hariv. Cousin. Come in. A very great honor.” Fisner rose slowly to his feet, careful neither to exaggerate the difficulties the medical bracing placed in his way nor seem too comfortable with it. One was in no way obliged to rise for a Malcontent.

He was deliberately showing greater respect than the bastard Saint had any right to expect; but Cousin Stanoczk, true to the mindless and deluded misapprehensions common to the Malcontent, merely accepted the courtesy as due to him by right, and bowed with gracious condescension.

“Too kind, Foreman. Is it permitted to call you Feraltz? Yes, thank you, Foreman Feraltz. If I may be seated, by your kind permission.”

Which Fisner had neither volunteered nor agreed to extend; that was the Malcontent to the life. Fisner sat back down. “How may I put the purpose of your patron forward, Cousin Stanoczk?” he asked politely. The Malcontent had brought Kazmer Daigule back to Port Charid with him. It could well be that Cousin Stanoczk would reveal some interesting information if his ego was stroked agreeably enough.

Cousin Stanoczk smiled in what he apparently believed to be an ingratiating fashion, though it merely turned Fisner’s stomach. He was glad he’d not had time for first-meal.

“You can do me very great service, in fact, Foreman. I have instructions to expedite handling of a freight cargo expected for Finiury, and we are particularly anxious that the freighter be processed as quickly as possible. It is awkward that I cannot say exactly when the freighter is expected, but our principal apparently has doubts about the security of the Finiury Yards in the Shawl and wishes us most particularly to shepherd the cargo ourselves through the Combine warehouses here at Port Charid.”

Oh, this
was
interesting. Had the fish-eating Malcontent gone into trade in illegal armaments?

Did the Bench know?

“And in what way may we assist, Cousin Stanoczk,” Fisner said, to remind the Malcontent that he had not answered the question.

The general outline of Cousin Stanoczk’s request was clear enough:
I have an arms shipment coming in, it can’t go to Finiury because there would be too much to explain to the Bench if Finiury were raided by Langsariks and the cargo discovered. I therefore need your help in getting the cargo hidden safely away as soon as possible at Port Charid.

Maximizing the off-load in order to minimize the time that the freighter with its ever-so-emphatically illegal cargo would be tied up in the process, to minimize the window in which a representative of what passed for the Port Authority in Port Charid might ask to have a look at the cargo for routine spot check.

And relying upon the extralegal position of the Malcontent within the Dolgorukij church to ensure that the Combine Yards would gladly accept its role as transfer-man, without questioning Cousin Stanoczk’s motives or cargo.

“Procure for me freighter tenders on standby,” Cousin Stanoczk replied. He apparently did not feel as confident as he would have liked to be; he seemed to be choosing his words carefully, as though feeling his way. “To be ready to off-load on two hours’ advance notice. I will, of course, pay a reasonable holding charge, but eight freighter tenders empty and fueled are most sincerely desired, and as soon as possible.”

Fisner pushed himself away from his desk in the chair and out at an arm’s length from the near edge, staring at the desk furniture as he thought.

Eight freighter tenders.

It was not a small favor to ask, what with the increasing traffic that was coming through Port Charid these days rather than off-loading in the Shawl, where the freighters could dock directly.

Eight freighter tenders?

But, oh, if he could only pull it off. To suck an extra premium out of the pocket of the hated Malcontent to fund the Angel’s own agendas, and gain the leverage that having the secret knowledge would grant — Cousin Stanoczk had made no incriminating statements, but Fisner knew things about Finiury that Cousin Stanoczk could not imagine he knew —

There would be troops in Port Charid once the Angel wrought its final raid. The new warehouse would be searched for contraband; some pretext to examine the Malcontent’s crates from Finiury could easily be arranged while Fleet was on-site. It would be a scandal of monumental proportions. It would discredit the Malcontent in the eyes of the Autocrat’s court at least, if not Combine-wide; not for trafficking in illegal arms, but for having done so clumsily, for having permitted themselves to be caught at it.

Beautiful.

“It will not be easy to arrange. Or to explain.” Making his decision, Fisner gave his consent to Cousin Stanoczk’s proposal in such a way as to assure that the premium to be offered would be adequate to account for the trouble the requirement would entail. “I only have five tenders idle even now, and the lull is only temporary. I could come up with some excuse for off-lining the tenders, but nothing I can think of will be good for very long, and we will lose money if we have to leave goods in orbit waiting for off-load.”

Cousin Stanoczk was frowning, in a servile and overanxious sort of way. “It is very distressing, Foreman, but we cannot permit any traffic to be made to wait. It would draw attention to the priority off-load of our Finiury cargo. That is contrary to the modest and public-spirited desire of our client.”

Good point. Fisner hadn’t thought about it, but it was obvious once Cousin Stanoczk brought it up. If traffic was on hold while a Finiury cargo got priority handling, it would only draw attention. People would naturally be interested in what the Finiury cargo was and why someone was willing to pay the clearly implied premiums to get the cargo unshipped.

Then Fisner had an idea.

There were to be no Combine freighters within the next two weeks; Factor Madlev had rerouted some of the Combine shipping to maximize the extra revenue available from other firms wishing to use the Combine facilities.

“Very well, Cousin Stanoczk.” He would call the reserve ships in for maintenance. There were two of those; he had five on the ground in the normal course of the day’s traffic, that made seven; he would only have to reserve his raid ship itself on standby. The conduct of the raid could occupy the freighter tender for a day and a half, with everything taken into account, but he would so shuffle his freighter tenders that normal traffic would cover it. Brilliant.

“You shall have eight freighter tenders, all empty, all fueled, all ready at your word. We will direct your cargo to the new facility, There will be no excess and burdensome oversight; you may confidently rely upon our discretion.”

It would leave them without any emergency capacity, but he could do it without attracting any particular attention. If he scheduled things cleverly enough, he need not declare any of Cousin Stanoczk’s offered premium to Factor Madlev. It would be additional income to fund the Angel’s work, on top of the generous proceeds from the raids themselves.

Cousin Stanoczk bowed politely, but the reality of his relief was unquestionable. “Thank you, Foreman, I am very much in your debt. May the Holy Mother prosper all lawful purposes.”

“Thank you, Cousin Stanoczk. It is our pleasure to oblige.”

The Angel of Destruction was above the law of men, be it the Autocrat’s code or the Jurisdiction’s Bench.

What more telling evidence of the Holy Mother’s blessing, than that She turned even the Malcontent to serve the Angel’s purpose?

###

Suppressing a yawn, Hilton marked off another hull on his list and reset the temperature sensor. He hadn’t been getting his beauty sleep. He hadn’t gotten any sleep at all since early yesterday morning, but who was counting? He wouldn’t have traded the all-night staff meeting Aunt Walton had held in Garol Vogel’s bedroom for money.

“Three more and we’re out.” Kazmer’s voice came quietly over the earpiece. Hilton was on receive, not transmit, because if he had been hiding battle cannon in a warehouse, he certainly would have a monitor on communications transmissions in the area. “Next.”

Kazmer didn’t have to say much on his end. Kazmer was eights away in a little closet on his Cousin Stanoczk’s courier at Port Charid, tapped into the warehouse’s employee-location grid. As acting floor manager, Hilton carried a trace so that the foreman could find him at any time; Kazmer knew exactly where Hilton was. Also that Hilton hadn’t found anything yet, because he meant to do his super-special secret version of the Hilton Happy Dance when he did, and there had been no dance activity on the warehouse floor so far that morning.

Someone had cannon hidden at Port Charid. If not cannon, at least a small courier hardened to take the deployment of battle cannon; when Kazmer had taken the freighter tender to rendezvous for the Tyrell raid, the courier had been on the freighter tender.

Hilton had a manifest list for each freighter tender at the warehouse, and the gross weights of each component part and total cargo were part of his records. Kazmer and Vogel had a rough estimate of weight for the courier Kazmer had helped to unload at Tyrell. Nothing on Hilton’s docks would tip the scale at such a mass as that.

The warehouse floor was load-rated for freighter tenders with heavy ore cargoes. It flexed. There was a correlation between the thermal stress involved with flexing beneath the weight of the five freighter tenders currently parked at the new warehouse and the adjusted weight of the freighter tenders’ cargoes, less fuel reserves. Hilton strolled casually down the line of parked freighter tenders with his tally screen and his thermal sensor, whistling to himself.

Let me help your expert gunnery, promise I’ll max your trajectory.

The warehouse floor was warmer there than it had been beneath the prior freighter tender.

But was it because of the cargo load this freighter tender was carrying?

Or — Hilton asked himself with mounting excitement, strolling past the nose of the next freighter tender to scan the floor beneath the one after that from a distance — was it because there was something really, really heavy in the last freighter tender but one?

Frowning at his tally screen Hilton started down the pedestrian aisle between freighter tenders, his temperature probe casually aimed at the floor to his left.

Not the last in line, the first to be suspected, too easily moved in and out.