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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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
His head jerks up again, snarling, screaming. "Say something, Baneray take you -"
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
no subject
Gatespace. "I don't know how to disable the harness but you've probably at least put some dings in it. And it'll have the best chance on that side."
no subject
Besides, he's willing to go out of his way to do favors for an armsman. Should Jedao happen to go that way. (Gregor is almost certain he will.)
no subject
"I don't want to explain it to you," he mutters, and he sounds oddly young, oddly forlorn in his reluctance, stubborn but not quite petulant. "I don't want - I don't think you'd want to pay the price to control it. But once you know, the possibility is there. Once you know the idea, you can get a few geniuses to work out the details. Once you know, you could trip in the bathroom tomorrow and crack your head and suffer a new personality. And then the screaming starts."
He tips his head back, rests it on the wall, drops his hands into his lap, eyes still closed.
"He called them voidmoths. They're - very strange. They are sentient, but very good at playing dumb. Most of us never knew that it wasn't just an evocative word for a type of engine, a brilliant invention. They can be bred, like any other creature, for size or speed or hardiness. They slip through the gradients - through soft places, without needing a threshold. And we build ships and stations and other things around them. I don't even know if it could be extracted without killing it - imagine neural surgery to remove a pilot's necklin rods by someone who didn't know anything doing brain surgery, or even what a human brain looks like. Or if the rods went through their whole body, and were also wired to an electric shock punishment and control system."
He finally opens his eyes, meets Gregor's gaze.
"It would have been better to let it be destroyed than to tell you, if you were going to use it like we did. But I don't think you will."
no subject
This, more than anything else so far, is a new world unfolding under his eyes and his hands. Something sentient -- but not human? Not descended from humanity? Or is it -- at steps far, far removed from the obsessive tinkering of Cetaganda or the brutal experiments that resulted in the race of quaddies?
"Is it possible to speak with it?" he asks. "Find out what it would prefer?" Gregor's first thought isn't the advantages or disadvantages of something like that -- he leaps straight to the question of communication. Of understanding.
no subject
"They don't, very much. They don't like humans. Understandably. It's probably only refrained from cocooning some of your engineers in the interests of not giving itself away. And they don't - exist in quite the same dimensional angles that we do. But when the mechanical parts of a ship are working, they can use them to talk to the servitors. Sometimes they'd pass messages. Very rarely."
He wants to beg Gregor to be careful, to be quiet, as the chain of command in an Empire can never really be. Too many clever pragmatists must be trusted with the business of difficult tasks. He wants to beg, but it sticks like a burr in his throat; begging is only an invitation for refusal.