Warring States Page 4

  “Clean scans.” He would keep his mind on his own business; that was the best bet for staying out of trouble — and keeping his people clear of trouble, besides. “Ask for navigator Dawson, Robert, please.” The reports told him the blood-lines and blood-chemistry, and that information in turn told him what he could use on whom to what effect. Dawson was Nurail without detectible admixture. The Bench had dispersed the Nurail in order to destroy their identity as a people; it was not likely that Dawson’s children would be pure-bred.

  But it was likely that they would be handsome, Andrej decided, watching as Godsalt and Kerenko brought Dawson in. Dawson was a tall young man with a figure rather like Robert’s own, but something had gone wrong with the side of Dawson’s face so that it was pulled to the left around the mouth ever so slightly; and the color of Dawson’s eyes — Andrej noted, as his security sat Dawson down — was unusual.

  “Dawson, that’s your name?” Andrej asked. “My name is Andrej Koscuisko, and I hold the Writ to which you must answer. I have some questions for you.”

  There was nothing on the table between them but doses. The table itself was in the pharmacy prep room; spacious, airy, well-stocked with everything a man might want for healing — but there was no staff to make that healing happen. Depressing.

  “I’m called Chonnie Dawson, yes,” Dawson replied. “ — your Excellency.” The rank address came at the last minute, almost as an afterthought. There was no disrespect in Dawson’s tone, but no particular fear, either. Wariness. Anxiety. No terror. Andrej was glad that Dawson wasn’t afraid of him. It was going to make talking to him much easier.

  “Have we met?” At the same time there was no sense in letting familiarity pass unnoted; too comfortable a relationship created its own difficulties.

  Dawson raised his eyebrows. “Twice, as his Excellency please.” He put out his hand to the tray of doses as he spoke, moving slowly and carefully, leaving plenty of time for Andrej to tell him to keep his hands to himself. “You murdered my father.”

  This convoy claimed to be from Rudistal, so that would logically have been in the Domitt Prison. What was Dawson’s point, reaching for the doses?

  “Hardly a distinguishing characteristic.” Andrej watched Dawson’s hand. Dawson was doing his best to make a deliberate gesture. There was something Andrej was supposed to see. “You’re curious about these doses, I see?”

  “You’re right, I’m sure, your Excellency. About distinguishing characteristics, I mean. It’s only the fact of it being my father makes the connection personally significant to me.” Dawson had reached for one of the doses, apparently at random, and picked it up. “Which of these did you use on him?”

  Distinguishing characteristics, Dawson had repeated. As Dawson raised the dose to eye-level, the oily frayed cuff of Dawson’s sleeve-jacket fell away from his wrist, the fabric pulling against the flexed elbow. Dawson had worn manacles for long enough to scar him. They were old scars, though. He must have been quite young when he had got them, Andrej realized.

  For no particular reason Andrej caught the joke, now. He remembered a boy in transit, on their way to Port Rudistal — a young man, fifteen years Standard, perhaps. That young man had had green-gold eyes with a ring of yellow like a sunburst around the aperture of the pupil. It wasn’t a common eye-color for Nurail, who ran to the black in that area.

  “Well, you must understand that in those days my sense of humor was imperfectly formed.”

  He ignored the ghost of a snort from Stildyne, who had posted himself behind Andrej’s chair. There were men on either side of Dawson already, and Stildyne knew that they were good because Stildyne had trained them. On one memorable occasion more than a year ago Andrej had been forced to defend himself in a knife-fight; Stildyne hadn’t recovered. Andrej had — from his wounds — but Stildyne brooded bitterly over how easily it could all have ended badly.

  “Somebody had said that your father was an important man. I wanted to see what there was to him.”

  Not just an important man. The war-leader of Darmon. Had Andrej realized at the time that he had accidentally abetted the successful escape of the last remaining member of that family at large? How could he have known? He hadn’t met the war-leader until weeks after he’d arrived at the prison. By that time a young man whose wounds Andrej had treated, whose manacles Andrej had absent-mindedly removed and set aside, would surely have been long gone.

  “Different from here and now in what way?” Dawson asked, politely. Dawson wasn’t Dawson. Dawson was Chonnie, the son of the war-leader of Darmon. Chonniskot Sillerbanes — Chonnie’s got silver bones — he was that precious to his people, at least as an idea.

  Andrej’s sense of humor was different now in a number of interesting ways. “For one, this person at my shoulder was a woman of striking physical beauty. For another, we had a great many questions to ask, while here and now there are only two or three questions that interest me at all.”

  Twice, Dawson had said. Dawson was eyeing Stildyne with an expression of awed horror on his face, but Dawson had companions as beautiful. Didn’t he? There’d been a man with a great long livid gash across his face. Andrej had seen the two of them, Dawson and Beauty, in a dream in Port Burkhayden on the night that he’d killed Captain Lowden. Maybe it hadn’t been a dream.

  “Questions,” Stildyne snarled at Dawson, who fell back, dropping the dose to the tray with a clatter. “Pay attention.”

  Andrej stood up. It was going to be harder than he had realized, this sitting and asking questions. Of course it almost always started with asking questions. But then it had almost always gotten a little bit extreme from there, and there was a blood-eyed beast in him that wanted to hear this perfectly harmless — or relatively innocent, anyway — young man speak to him in tones of anguished fear.

  “Window,” he said, gesturing to explain himself, yes, in case anybody was wondering. “Wouldn’t normally have one for this business. People don’t like to have to see. Unless they’re the kind who likes to watch, of course.”

  Captain Lowden had liked to watch. Lowden had done more; he’d violated the trust and confidence of Fleet by trading on markets that Andrej didn’t even want to think about, using illegal copies of interrogation records — torture — as currency. And the Malcontent, the secret service of the Dolgorukij church, had told him that the market was too vigorous to be shut down; Andrej would not put it past the Malcontent to be actually trafficking in the name of the Saint himself.

  What would happen when the time came that his son should chance on such a record, and see with his own eyes the things of which Andrej was capable?

  “Questions, your Excellency?” The tone in which the young man asked was interesting. It was cautious and wary; but there was the smallest hint of forbearance — even encouragement. You can do this. Of course it was in Dawson’s best interest to get questions out and over with. Dawson would be eager to be getting away.

  “It has not been eleven days since horror was visited upon Port Ghan and those who live there by some enemy of order and civil law. The Connaught vector is only two or three days off from Ghan. And your party cleared the entry vector from Port Ghan to Connaught nine days ago.”

  It was quiet in the room behind him. He could almost hear people breathing. The Security troops he had with him were bond-involuntaries; they knew how to be as silent as the dead, or more so, since the dead were frequently surprisingly loud in the first few hours at any rate.

  “We heard,” Dawson said. There was an echo in his voice of a man much older, and accustomed to duty. A war-leader. The son of his father. “And we were there. But we were on vector before the news started to come out.”

  Which meant nothing, of course, since any reasonable maniac would take care to arrange things just so as to be well clear before the city started to die. “Come here to me,” Andrej said. He had to know, and he didn’t want to sit down. He knew how to get answers. He knew all too well. “And tell me that you had no hand in vengeanc
e upon Pyana.”

  Most, if by no means all, of the dead had been from that genetic group, the ancestral enemy of Nurail everywhere and the party that had convinced Chilleau Judiciary that the Nurail were dangerous and had to be put down. It might have been a coincidence, all the same.

  There was the sound of the chair’s brace sliding over the floor, and Dawson came up behind him. “All right, we’d nothing to do with it. There. I’ll be going now, it’s been very interesting, but there are people waiting for supplies at Bell.”

  “You’re not going to Bell,” Andrej said, firmly. “Or at least you’re not stopping there.” No, a small commercial fleet of Nurail headed into Emandis space was more likely to be seeking the vector for Gonebeyond. What was it? Dar-Nevan? “Mister Kerenko. If I might have those doses, please.”

  He was going to have to step away from the window, and that was too bad. But whether or not something horrible was going to befall to Dawson, anybody outside the window who saw anybody at the window would be likely to conclude that something very unfortunate was happening to somebody, and Andrej didn’t wish that experience on anyone.

  “Your scans indicate a subcategory six hominid of very strong definition.” Nurail, and Pyana. When it came down to it Nurail were Pyana, and vice versa, but there was no sense in being insulting. “Here are three doses for Nurail, designed to disable your internal editors and deprive you of your natural ability to dissemble.”

  He knew these drugs. He’d purchased the life of Robert St. Clare from the Bench with one of them, years and years ago. “Naturally there are ways to beat it, but it doesn’t have to overwhelm you to be effective. It only needs to make it difficult enough for you to dissemble that I will know. You will sit down.”

  Dawson was a brave young man, but not stupid. Only a stupid man would feel no fear in the presence of a torturer with drugs. There were drugs that did much more than loosen tongues — Dawson sat, but could not quite keep still. His eyes when he met Andrej’s gaze were defiant and still hopeful, as though he were doing his best to believe that nothing was going to happen to him. When Andrej approached him with the doses in hand Dawson struggled, but not for long; as soon as the first dose went through Dawson froze, and suddenly started to grin, going rather limp and boneless against the restraining hands of Security as he did so.

  “Damn,” Dawson said. “This is good stuff, Uncle. Mixmox, isn’t it? I had some once. Only once. Can’t afford it. There was a woman –-”

  Uncle. A Nurail authority figure; Andrej had been called that by Nurail before. Standing at the table in front of the seated and now-intoxicated man Andrej put his head back, staring at the ceiling, taking deep and calming breaths. He was not going to hurt Dawson. He didn’t have to, and nobody could make him. He wanted to hurt Dawson. He wanted very much to make Dawson suffer, but he was not going to. And Stildyne, standing at his back, Stildyne would not let him hurt Dawson, either.

  “I’m happy for you,” Andrej said at last, and sat down with the chair pulled away from the table. “What were you doing in Port Ghan? Tell me.”

  “Port Ghan,” Dawson said, and seemed to stop and think.

  Although he all but crossed his eyes in concentration Andrej could sense no cues that would tell him that there were hidden secrets here; he had already told Dawson that he knew Dawson was not taking a convoy to Bell, not exactly, so it was not as though that could be said to be a secret.

  “Solar cells. It took months to collect the load, couldn’t buy too many at once, people might remember you and get suspicious.”

  One set of cells might be needed by any prudent person as a back-up, but not twenty. Unless a person had twenty buildings to power, or a person was taking them out beyond the reach of Jurisdiction into an environment in which there were no solar cells to be had unless one had brought one’s own.

  “Did you get them?”

  Dawson was very drunk on the drug now, and snorted with unfeigned derision. “Did we? Who do you think you’re talking to? We got them. And then we left.”

  No, not entirely unfeigned. There was the very small shade of a wrong note in Dawson’s voice. Dawson would like him to believe that Dawson was more drunk than he actually was. He could increase the dose; but why? It was just as effective for him if Dawson thought he didn’t know.

  “It would be difficult to blame a man for seeking to be revenged on an enemy who had served his entire people so villainously,” Andrej said, to be saying something. “Especially if a man felt more responsible, perhaps, because of a traditional family position, for instance.”

  Dawson had started to shake his head before Andrej had finished speaking, but was yet polite enough to wait to raise his voice. When he did it was a denial as emphatic as that which Andrej had expected, but the direction in which Dawson took the denial was surprising.

  “Yes, and then their people must take revenge for their hurt, and your people for the hurt that their people will do if they can in response to the hurt that you have done them for the hurt that they did you. Let me tell you a thing or two about the law, Uncle.”

  Very strange. Andrej could sense the amusement and confusion with which his Security heard this outburst, but only because of long acquaintance. The self-discipline of a bond-involuntary was terrible to contemplate. Andrej was counting on that self-discipline to see them all safely through, but he couldn’t afford to think about it, because Stildyne might hear him and he hadn’t had a chance to talk to Stildyne about what he had planned, not yet.

  “Tell me,” he agreed, encouragingly. “I would have thought that you would have no interest in speaking of the rule of law.”

  Dawson hadn’t said “the rule of law.” He apparently decided that no correction was needed, however. “It’s there to stand between us and our own annihilation. Not here, maybe, no.” “Here,” under Jurisdiction, the law had been used by Pyana against the Nurail to obtain the annihilation of Dawson’s folk. So Dawson wasn’t speaking of the rule of law under Jurisdiction.

  “There has to be an agreement,” Dawson said, “Or there’s no community. There must be an end to vengeance once and for all. We got together and talked about it, and we decided. Unless we share our hearths we’ll all die, and the weaves with us.”

  At this particular moment Dawson did not sound drunk at all. Andrej frowned. “Brachi,” he said; then he remembered that he did not call Stildyne by his name in public, but could not call it back. “Remind me to check the pull dates on these doses. Something is not right. A Nurail speaks to me of abandoning feud.”

  And yet he knew one particular Nurail whose capacity to return resignation for great wrong permitted him to live a happy life, if any bond-involuntary could be said to have a happy life. Robert was considerably happier than Andrej himself in some respects; but Andrej felt it was almost insulting to Robert to even think such a thing in light of what Robert had suffered, and put the thought away.

  It was just that Robert had no particular rank, that was all — bond-involuntaries could lead even the smallest work-units only when the group was entirely comprised of other bond-involuntaries, under most circumstances. It meant that there were many more women on board the Ragnarok with whom Robert could hide in a store-room for a few moments than were available to senior officers. Yes. That was the way to approach it. Robert had lost his family and his freedom, but at least Robert could go fishing, every day if he liked.

  “Is it only fear of consequence that has kept your life so long, Uncle?” Dawson asked. “Do you believe that? I held your life in my hand not two years gone, in Burkhayden.”

  It was not something Andrej had ever felt comfortable thinking about. No, there had been few assassination attempts against him; yes, he was visible and notorious. Stildyne was growling in a sort of sub-vocal way, however, so Andrej moved to forestall loss of control over the situation.

  “You mustn’t ask such questions in front of Security,” he said, so that Stildyne would know that he had noticed. “I always thought it on
ly reasonable that you should hate me, though. All of you. There are so many of you.” In the general sense, at least.

  “We may hate you yet.” From the tone of Dawson’s voice his personal feelings were far from dispassionate. “Don’t mean to kill you for it, that’s all. Because if Nurail continue to kill other Nurail they have good reason to hate, there won’t be any Nurail left for our children to hate. No children.”

  Andrej had to stand up again. Something was profoundly disturbing him here, and he could not afford to stop and think it through. He nodded to Security to have Dawson stand up; Dawson kept his balance very well, for a man on drugs. Maybe there was something wrong with the dose-lot.

  “Now you are making me nervous,” he said. It was only the truth, however mocking it might sound. “But I almost believe you, now. About Port Ghan, if nothing else. Give me your hand and swear to me on your father’s death and the manner of his dying that you and your people are not to blame for it, and I will be satisfied.”

  Dawson had gone white in the face; was the drug catching up with him? He seemed to be feeling some sharp discomfort beneath his skin. As Andrej watched, Dawson’s face cleared of hatred and contempt, and the ferocious anger in his eyes was replaced with something much more disturbing. Hope. Hope, and distance, of a sort.

  “I so swear,” Dawson said, and put out his hand. Left-hand dominant, Andrej noted. That was almost funny. He was left-hand dominant as well, but if Dawson’s father had been left-handed Andrej did not remember even noticing. “On my father’s death, and the burning of his corpse in the furnaces. And on the manner in which you killed him, torturer. There is no one among these people who has had any part in horror at Port Ghan. Not even if they were Pyana, there.”