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Derelict
The tableaux is disturbing, but he comes quietly.
When the advance team finally cuts through the unknown materials of the little craft's hull and float through the umbilical, instead of the two people promised by the first distress call, there's one person, and one corpse. The man who spoke with a soft, lilting accent and neatly diplomatic phrases has had his skull opened against the floor, and his brain scooped out. They aren't sure what the other passenger did with it. He looks odd, in the helmets' cameras: his black and gold uniform is immaculate, but his cheek his finely misted with blood, and he has darkness under his fingernails. They find him kneeling by the body. For a moment, when the door first opens, the cameras catch a glimpse of something that might be grief on his face, but when he looks up, there's only blank acquiescence.
The computers seem to be wiped, but it's hard to be sure with such unfamiliar systems. The craft has no weapons, and no apparent physical booby traps. Aside from small, neat living spaces, appointed with a tastefully restrained sort of luxury, most of the space is devoted to life support, hydroponics and aquaculture. The fish tanks are woven through the gardens; every piece of vital machinery is also elegant. Jewel-toned fish watch with flickering interest as the team makes its way to and from the bridge.
There is a bustle of confusion about how actually to deal with him; they were sent at least partly as a humanitarian rescue. Their orders were to secure the ship and retrieve the passengers with all reasonable courtesy. They knew something had likely gone wrong, when the man who named himself Nirai Kujen stopped answering any communications, and further when the drifting ship failed to open its hatch. But what to do with the man who remains? Killing his companion on the very verge of rescue is shocking, but he offers no violence to the Barrayaran soldiers.
Nor does he answer any of the questions put to him in the first shocked encounter. When the squad sergeant says, You need to come with us, sir, he rises and follows. The room they put him in isn't specifically intended as a cell, but it's cramped ship quarters, and they do lock him in.
He's not non-responsive - he looks at the people who speak to him, never takes his eyes off them. But he's silent when they ask his name, when they ask where they come from, when they ask why he killed Nirai Kujen. When they ask if he is mute, if he can understand them, he blinks.
"I understand. We deciphered your language together," he says, and his accent is a little broader than Nirai Kujen's, his voice smooth and low. "I'd like to talk to the person in charge."
He doesn't, it eventually becomes clear, mean the commanding officer of the vessel.
He knows the word Emperor, and eventually clarifies, although it sounds particularly stilted in his mouth, more foreign than the rest.
"Or," he adds, with a quirk of his mouth that is almost a smile, a flash of his eyes away from his interlocutor to the concealed camera. "Perhaps his secretary."
The Emperor, he is told, is not available to mysterious, murderous foreigners. Perhaps, if he would be willing to testify to his benign intentions under a truth drug they provide...?
No. He is not willing.
It is at this point that an executive decision is made to dose him anyway.
They don't ever manage to inform him: the first moment a soldier enters his room with the kit, he produces a shank, slim as a knitting needle, slightly curved, precisely the density of human bone, missed by every surreptitious scan. The recording has to be slowed to quarter-speed to follow the speed and exact sequence of events. Blank-faced, straight-backed, the man makes an unflinching attempt to bury the weapon into his own eye, and - presumably, given it's length - his brain.
(Nirai Kujen's brain, a separate report notes, was likely fed to the largest tank of fish, leaving only a greasy residue in their filter and very broken fragments of human DNA.)
The guard accompanying the soldier with the kit immediately draws his stunner at the rapid motion the man drawing the ersatz blade; the man throws himself to the side before he can aim it. The wide beam gets him all down the side, and he scrabbles for the weapon with his other hand, shaking on the floor, before the second burst.
He comes to thoroughly restrained. He begs, with a quiet solemn dignity, to be killed. He tells them they don't want to know what they think they want to know. He does not have a fastpenta allergy.
When the stoic blankness of his expression turns to a hazy, distant blankness, the interrogator quietly reiterates that they would like to be allies, that they rescued him from a derelict. Explains that they just need to know a few things. Per the usual script, the first question is for his name.
"I am the immolation fox," he answers, a soft smile slowly settling on his face.
"Alright. What does that mean?"
"I am the immolation fox," he repeats, as though this were obvious. The interrogator moves on.
"Why did you kill Nirai Kujen?"
The smile disappears.
"I am the immolation fox."
Every time, the emphasis is just slightly different. He truly seems to hear and understand the questions, to even be responding to them. But every question has the same answer. After fifteen minutes, he starts to laugh, an awful raw hysterical sound. After twenty minutes, the commanding officer calls a halt, and he is given the antagonist. He's still laughing when it fades, and he slumps exhausted in his bonds.
"Why haven't you asked us for anything?" asks a soft-spoken captain, after the man accepts a sip of water held to his mouth.
"I've asked to speak to the - Emperor," he replies evenly, if slightly raspy.
"But nothing else, no comforts, no questions? We could go one for one."
After a long pause, he says, "I'd like to check on the fish." When the captain raises his eyebrows, he frowns, protests. "They're good stock, they deserve better than wary neglect. They shouldn't starve or be poisoned by their own waste just because they were mine."
A generous arrangement is offered. The man will not be allowed back on his vessel, but a marine with a helmet cam and comm link will tend the aquariums under his direction. One feeding for one answer.
He has no tells in his face, but one of his hands goes just a little bit tense. The Captain volunteers the amount of time it's been since the ship was boarded, though the prisoner has no way of confirming the information. He resists. He wavers.
"What question?"
The same protocol at one hundredth the speed: an easy question, to initiate the habit of answering.
"What's your name?"
"Jedao," says Jedao, after one long beat.
"Nothing else?" The original agreement specified an allowance for clarifications.
His eyes fall to his hands.
"Nothing else I still have the right to. Please show me my fish, now."
He makes no attempt at trickery or sabotage during the aquarium tending. He's close-mouthed about the state of the main filter (samples already taken), except to indicate which bottle in a small kit contains lipidase enzymes and the number of spritzes to apply. The fish are fed; the water is tested for pH and nitrate levels. He actually smiles, as he watches and guides the marine through the small tasks of aquaculture. He coos a few times at the more inquisitive fish. Some of them have names, too. He slumps in his seat afterward, as if deeply relieved.
He eats. He sleeps. He does not protest his constant guard. He sleeps better, in fact, than he did before.
But when the fish are due for another feeding - he still refuses to say why he killed Nirai Kujen, or where they came from, or how their ship works, or what his uniform is for. "Please ask me something else," he says, but again and again, he refuses to answer. "Please, it's not their fault." Eventually, he swallows and turns his face away - the only substantive movement possible, the way his wrists and ankles are chained. He closes his eyes.
"Let me speak to your Emperor, or kill me and stop wasting your time."
He doesn't sound angry. He sounds sad, and very, very tired.
When the advance team finally cuts through the unknown materials of the little craft's hull and float through the umbilical, instead of the two people promised by the first distress call, there's one person, and one corpse. The man who spoke with a soft, lilting accent and neatly diplomatic phrases has had his skull opened against the floor, and his brain scooped out. They aren't sure what the other passenger did with it. He looks odd, in the helmets' cameras: his black and gold uniform is immaculate, but his cheek his finely misted with blood, and he has darkness under his fingernails. They find him kneeling by the body. For a moment, when the door first opens, the cameras catch a glimpse of something that might be grief on his face, but when he looks up, there's only blank acquiescence.
The computers seem to be wiped, but it's hard to be sure with such unfamiliar systems. The craft has no weapons, and no apparent physical booby traps. Aside from small, neat living spaces, appointed with a tastefully restrained sort of luxury, most of the space is devoted to life support, hydroponics and aquaculture. The fish tanks are woven through the gardens; every piece of vital machinery is also elegant. Jewel-toned fish watch with flickering interest as the team makes its way to and from the bridge.
There is a bustle of confusion about how actually to deal with him; they were sent at least partly as a humanitarian rescue. Their orders were to secure the ship and retrieve the passengers with all reasonable courtesy. They knew something had likely gone wrong, when the man who named himself Nirai Kujen stopped answering any communications, and further when the drifting ship failed to open its hatch. But what to do with the man who remains? Killing his companion on the very verge of rescue is shocking, but he offers no violence to the Barrayaran soldiers.
Nor does he answer any of the questions put to him in the first shocked encounter. When the squad sergeant says, You need to come with us, sir, he rises and follows. The room they put him in isn't specifically intended as a cell, but it's cramped ship quarters, and they do lock him in.
He's not non-responsive - he looks at the people who speak to him, never takes his eyes off them. But he's silent when they ask his name, when they ask where they come from, when they ask why he killed Nirai Kujen. When they ask if he is mute, if he can understand them, he blinks.
"I understand. We deciphered your language together," he says, and his accent is a little broader than Nirai Kujen's, his voice smooth and low. "I'd like to talk to the person in charge."
He doesn't, it eventually becomes clear, mean the commanding officer of the vessel.
He knows the word Emperor, and eventually clarifies, although it sounds particularly stilted in his mouth, more foreign than the rest.
"Or," he adds, with a quirk of his mouth that is almost a smile, a flash of his eyes away from his interlocutor to the concealed camera. "Perhaps his secretary."
The Emperor, he is told, is not available to mysterious, murderous foreigners. Perhaps, if he would be willing to testify to his benign intentions under a truth drug they provide...?
No. He is not willing.
It is at this point that an executive decision is made to dose him anyway.
They don't ever manage to inform him: the first moment a soldier enters his room with the kit, he produces a shank, slim as a knitting needle, slightly curved, precisely the density of human bone, missed by every surreptitious scan. The recording has to be slowed to quarter-speed to follow the speed and exact sequence of events. Blank-faced, straight-backed, the man makes an unflinching attempt to bury the weapon into his own eye, and - presumably, given it's length - his brain.
(Nirai Kujen's brain, a separate report notes, was likely fed to the largest tank of fish, leaving only a greasy residue in their filter and very broken fragments of human DNA.)
The guard accompanying the soldier with the kit immediately draws his stunner at the rapid motion the man drawing the ersatz blade; the man throws himself to the side before he can aim it. The wide beam gets him all down the side, and he scrabbles for the weapon with his other hand, shaking on the floor, before the second burst.
He comes to thoroughly restrained. He begs, with a quiet solemn dignity, to be killed. He tells them they don't want to know what they think they want to know. He does not have a fastpenta allergy.
When the stoic blankness of his expression turns to a hazy, distant blankness, the interrogator quietly reiterates that they would like to be allies, that they rescued him from a derelict. Explains that they just need to know a few things. Per the usual script, the first question is for his name.
"I am the immolation fox," he answers, a soft smile slowly settling on his face.
"Alright. What does that mean?"
"I am the immolation fox," he repeats, as though this were obvious. The interrogator moves on.
"Why did you kill Nirai Kujen?"
The smile disappears.
"I am the immolation fox."
Every time, the emphasis is just slightly different. He truly seems to hear and understand the questions, to even be responding to them. But every question has the same answer. After fifteen minutes, he starts to laugh, an awful raw hysterical sound. After twenty minutes, the commanding officer calls a halt, and he is given the antagonist. He's still laughing when it fades, and he slumps exhausted in his bonds.
"Why haven't you asked us for anything?" asks a soft-spoken captain, after the man accepts a sip of water held to his mouth.
"I've asked to speak to the - Emperor," he replies evenly, if slightly raspy.
"But nothing else, no comforts, no questions? We could go one for one."
After a long pause, he says, "I'd like to check on the fish." When the captain raises his eyebrows, he frowns, protests. "They're good stock, they deserve better than wary neglect. They shouldn't starve or be poisoned by their own waste just because they were mine."
A generous arrangement is offered. The man will not be allowed back on his vessel, but a marine with a helmet cam and comm link will tend the aquariums under his direction. One feeding for one answer.
He has no tells in his face, but one of his hands goes just a little bit tense. The Captain volunteers the amount of time it's been since the ship was boarded, though the prisoner has no way of confirming the information. He resists. He wavers.
"What question?"
The same protocol at one hundredth the speed: an easy question, to initiate the habit of answering.
"What's your name?"
"Jedao," says Jedao, after one long beat.
"Nothing else?" The original agreement specified an allowance for clarifications.
His eyes fall to his hands.
"Nothing else I still have the right to. Please show me my fish, now."
He makes no attempt at trickery or sabotage during the aquarium tending. He's close-mouthed about the state of the main filter (samples already taken), except to indicate which bottle in a small kit contains lipidase enzymes and the number of spritzes to apply. The fish are fed; the water is tested for pH and nitrate levels. He actually smiles, as he watches and guides the marine through the small tasks of aquaculture. He coos a few times at the more inquisitive fish. Some of them have names, too. He slumps in his seat afterward, as if deeply relieved.
He eats. He sleeps. He does not protest his constant guard. He sleeps better, in fact, than he did before.
But when the fish are due for another feeding - he still refuses to say why he killed Nirai Kujen, or where they came from, or how their ship works, or what his uniform is for. "Please ask me something else," he says, but again and again, he refuses to answer. "Please, it's not their fault." Eventually, he swallows and turns his face away - the only substantive movement possible, the way his wrists and ankles are chained. He closes his eyes.
"Let me speak to your Emperor, or kill me and stop wasting your time."
He doesn't sound angry. He sounds sad, and very, very tired.
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Not the bait, Gregor thinks. The hook.
But he's... satisfied, in a sense. (Unsatisfied, in another.) He thinks happiness is a better way to control people, in general, than threats or confinement. He is still wary of Jedao's actions, wary of Jedao's stability, wary of his abilities. But wary isn't good enough.
Gregor lifts his chin, making a subtle shift into his official role. "As far as Barrayar is concerned," he tells Jedao, "you are a refugee. You may stay and apply for citizenship. You may leave. But the ship you came on stays." And there is a soft threat there, that if Jedao goes and tries to use some other faction to come get the ship, by force, then there will be consequences. But he doesn't think that Jedao wants that kind of conflict. He thinks Jedao would rather the ship were destroyed completely.
"You're free of obligation," he says, a little gentler, but with a voice that doesn't just make the law, it is the law. "The next time you're tied to it, it'll be your choice."
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"Maybe I'll take a fucking vow of silence. Do people do those, here?"
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He rests his elbow on the armrest of the chair, rests his chin on the backs of his fingers.
"What I believe," he says, slowly, "is that, unless I push you away, you'll come back to me." I know how to be a gun, is what Jedao said. Expressio unius est exclusio alterius. -- Say I know how to be a gun and what you mean is that you don't know how to be anything else. "I don't think you'll go anywhere else, because the people here understand what it is to be someone's gun. But I accept that this is a gamble."
If Jedao is looking, Gregor meets his eyes. Squarely.
"I'm not pushing you away," he says. "Just opening the doors of this cage."
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(They told me about Colonel Gized, I don't understand - why I would hurt her -)
(Lie.)
He does meet Gregor's eyes, then, and he smiles, a strange alchemy of sad and bemused.
"How the stars did I convince you that having me in the cabinet was winning your gamble?"
Not that he doesn't have some ideas. But it's still a question he'd like an answer to.
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Gregor pauses.
"You didn't," he says, finally. "You convinced me that what you want is to serve." A hard look. Perhaps Jedao can conclude the rest -- that when Gregor stumbles across irresistible bait, what he does is place it where he needs it. The game is rigged, not particularly subtly.
"An Emperor must be ruthless," he murmurs. "He makes use of all resources. Every weapon." And he is sure he can use Jedao. Why hold someone captive in ImpSec when they would walk in the door, every day, of their own volition?
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He laughs a little, soft and rueful. "What I want. I suppose. Service was a good fairy tale to get me through what I needed to do."
Which is the farthest thing from disparaging it. And yet - Jedao has always be a gun with a poison grip. He isn't entirely sure he's capable of doing it the right way, even if Gregor does deserve it.
"To what end, your majesty?"
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"I do what I do for the people of Barrayar," he says, somberly but unhelpfully. His phrasing is particular; it hints that he believes Barrayar is not quite the same thing as its people.
He eyes Jedao. "What have you learned of the Cetagandan occupation?"
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"That's a good fairy tale, too. Spark-sparrows and painted cats. And while you were burning your feathers at both ends trying to smoke out creatures with larger lungs than you, you managed to flick an ember into the maw between the ghem and the haut without even knowing it was there."
The haut don't know what the fuck they're doing with the future, and they barely pay attention to their own legs in the present. A tiger coming apart between his stripes. Jedao should take the out Gregor offered him, run off and flip the ghem on them just out of principle.
He feels yellow eyes on the back of his neck, heat on his forehead, even though he hasn't seen the signifier since he opened Kujen's head.
His face pinches, and for a moment he isn't looking at the world in front of him anymore. No, he thinks, fuck you with a stingray, I did what you asked of me, I was everything you made me. It's done it's done it's supposed to be done.
His hands tighten on the wounded bird, and it shrieks and claws him. Jedao's hands move automatically to snap its neck, so fast, almost faster than the eye can follow, but the raven explodes out of his grip, twisting in the air on powerful strokes of its good wing, settling in a far corner, shrieking and croaking, the raucous reprimand pulling Jedao back before he slips fully into the grey away where he loses time. His hands hover in the air, still ready to kill.
"I'm sorry," he gasps, less at Gregor or even the raven than - to the room, to the world. His head dips, and he looks at the sliced and knotted sling that was his expensive shirt, the saucer of milk and crumbs. "I'm sorry," he mumbles again. He picks up the saucer and stands, undaunted as the raven screams louder as he approaches, sitting on the floor and then sliding it over. He loses a chunk of index finger when the raven pecks him, which is when his shoulders relax a little, when he blinks through a rueful, momentary smile. He scoots back still in his crouch, then leans against the opposite wall, looking back up at Gregor without bothering to wipe away the blood welling slowly from his hand.
"I'm sorry," he says again, but in a very different tone, the kind of mild, cordial befuddlement best seen forgetting someone's name at a party. "Where were we?"
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"You were having a post-traumatic episode," says Gregor, frankly. "And I was offering you a collar and a leash." Collar and leash as a reward, as a prize.
He shifts, slightly, moving from lean-and-sprawled to lean-and-focused. "If you would like to swear to me," he says, "then I'm willing to be convinced to take your hands between mine." He says this knowing Jedao's focus on gloves, on hands. This is not something that his analysts or interrogators missed. It's not something Cordelia missed, either.
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Suggestively, but while contemplating.
He's tired; he's happy: he's restless. He has so many old aches, and the offer - even without the implications he dusts onto it - is tempting. He tries to remember the last time he was tempted. But he is also tired.
He stops sucking his finger and strokes the Raven's head. It's a test, to see if he's forgiven, but there's nothing tentative about it, nothing that suggests wariness. As gentle as he was before.
"And you were giving me partial answers to my questions," he adds, warm rather than accusing.
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And bulldozing your way in only works for MIles, he thinks. No, he doesn't react the same way at all when anyone else tries to force their way in.
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"I'd say you can't ask me to hand my soul over without making a few disclosures. But of course it was an offer." He doesn't quite sound bitter. He just sounds weary. "Of course you're right about me. I want a war like a dog wants meat. But I try not to be ruled by my appetites." His mouth twists in terrible, involuntary amusement; as opposed to certain others' appetites.
"I'm tired of conniving against the people I'm kneeling for. And I don't need you to use me. So there's got to be more."
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He lets a full breath pass. Lets Jedao hear him.
"I have been that anchor for very many people, since I was almost too young to remember," he tells Jedao. "I have never achieved worthiness. I have found that it's not an accomplishment that can be done and forgotten -- it's in every decision, every day. In every breath."
Gregor has never been allowed to be ruled by his appetites. Still, sometimes they have broken through.
He shakes his head. "No, you're not a dog. And yet, I don't think the metaphor of a leash is ill-conceived. You say you try not to be ruled by your appetites. But do you fear them? Do you wish yourself bound, checked? Is safety, for you, about being restrained from destruction?"
He doesn't wait for an answer. "I don't ask for your soul." Softer. "But if you gave that, too, I would strive to honor it."
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"The present is endurable, and the past is irretrievable. My loyalty has always been with the future." The conviction of it is almost swallowed up by the old horror. What a mercy, that most men do not wrestle with infinity. What a gift it would be trust and obey, and not feel the yellow eyes of children yet to come hot on his neck. "It has a funny tendency to set me against rulers. Even the one who made me love him."
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Gregor is not the sort of monarch who would destroy the future for the sake of the present. In fact, building the future is what he does -- it is who he is. No, he doesn't really understand Jedao's outlook.
"And what's your vision of the future?" he asks. "What were you building? Or were you just murdering threats to it, one at a time?" Which, in Gregor's opinion, is just about as bad as only living for the present.
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Then he snorts softly, a huff of breath through his nose.
"Vision. I am plagued with vision. I had a vision of a world not choked with poison, and I spent more lives that I deserved pulling up poison roots. There's a seed on that ship. He would have given it to you."
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Another shake of his head. "I would never divide it so cleanly," he muses. "The integrity of the present rests on the past; the future is built in the present. Ignoring any part of that is a betrayal of all of it." Not to mention: making real change depends on understanding the lessons of the past, but he'll skip over that part, for now.
Funny to be the one arguing in favor of the past, as it were. Given his noted liberal stance.
"I think you'd find Barrayar rejects poison and medicine alike, if it isn't what they've always done." A little wry. But, he does take this seriously, and he shows it, in the way he listens. He considers the fact that one culture's poison could be another's saving grace -- but that isn't the right thing to say, here. Some things are, in the end, just poison. Nothing better. Nothing more. And he believes Jedao believes that this was one of those things.
Really would have liked the opportunity to decide for himself, but... can't have everything.
"If you were one of mine," Gregor tells him, "when plagued by the future, I would expect you to come to me first. I do not spend lives like bits of currency, but if I put Barrayarans on the line, the decision is mine, and the blood is on my hands." Gregor can only promise to listen.
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Or old ones. The past -
He never thinks about it. He never thinks about why he doesn't think about it. His own voice, turning aside, there's no victory there, implacable and inevitable. He lowers his face into his hands with a slightly wrong deliberation; there's an emotion to it that should set his shoulders shaking, but he's too much a sniper for the motion to be anything but smooth.
"He liked to take my memory," he confesses hoarsely. "To play with it like a boy with blocks. Build me up, pull out pieces, scatter everything. A man with his pet, a king with his people. He erased so much of our history. I searched and searched and I found so little, but that's how he found me. The perfect trap."
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The thought is so deeply, truly appalling, that Gregor's affect shifts to something even stonier, even more contained than he was before. The concrete, blocky, blank facade of ImpSec shows more emotion than Gregor does, on Jedao's words.
He is silent. His silence is invitation, if Jedao wants to keep speaking, or acceptance, if Jedao does not.
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His head jerks up again, snarling, screaming. "Say something, Baneray take you -"
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He wishes, as he has before, that he could promise not to hurt the people who swear to him. He can't promise that. In fact, when they swear, they open themselves to suffering for the sake of Barrayar. It is the purpose of that kind of loyalty.
All he can promise is that they'll see it coming. That it will have been their choice.
Is that good enough?
It has to be.
"Thank you," says Gregor, soft and smooth, not clever-smoothness but the cool, polished, fluid kind, like stones worn flat by a river's current. "For doing your best to protect Barrayar, before you even knew us."
Violent as it was, shocking as it was, Jedao had his reasons. But he also had reasons to abstain, to follow blindly and let the man he murdered run amok in this corner of the galaxy. Jedao had no reason to care for Barrayar. But he did, anyhow.
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"I didn't go to all the trouble of uprooting him just to let him loose on anyone else," he says mulishly, almost defensively, voice low and grating, like a shovel dragged through gravel.
He doesn't really know what to do with thanks.
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Gregor wants to comfort Jedao.
No; wants isn't the right word. He feels it as a pulse of desperate longing, something rooted uncomfortably just over his rib cage. He is torn between caution and between the disorienting certainty that he could help, he could give Jedao the right support to put himself back together. He wishes for Jedao's loyalty, because it wouldn't be inherited, wouldn't be forced, wouldn't be about anything but Gregor.
He can see now that Jedao is... intoxicating.
He judges that he can control himself, but resolves to pay attention and ensure that remains true.
"I'd listen to that story, if you want to tell it, someday," says Gregor. "But I don't need to know any more." As ever: invitation, not ultimatum.
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"It's a long story," he says softly, instead of anything more bitter and more revealing, a little of the air falling out of his chest, a little of the hard tension falling out of his shoulders.
He sits back on his heels a little, closes his eyes.
"When you're done stripping it for interesting materials, you should have our ship towed back into the gate and left there."
A raw little sliver of honesty. It explains little but exposes much; it is a real thing he wants.
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