Curt Clark - Anarchaos

But not exclusively his own people. Just as Kemistek had spies at Wolmak, so Wolmak had spies at Kemistek, and these spies at last became aware of some corners and edges of what had been going on. Additionally, the UC request for information on a man named Rolf Malone had piqued Wolmak’s interest. Colonel Whistler and his people did not yet fully understand what was going on, but they knew that something was afoot and that Phail was involved in it. Wolmak was currently trying everything in its power to learn Phail’s whereabouts.

So. The simple facts that I had been seeking were now mine. Gar had been betrayed by Lastus into the hands of Phail, who killed him out of irritation. This murder was aided and condoned by Triss and Elman and General Ingor. The trails back from Gar’s murder led one way to the woman on another world who had been abrasive with Phail’s emotions, and led another way to the rivalry of two mining and chemical corporations for new caches of raw materials.

No one had gone out to murder Gar Malone for being Gar Malone.

It was with the same impersonality that I snuffed the life from Triss.

I wanted to be angry; it would make it much easier to do what I had to do. I thought about the uselessness and stupidity of Gar’s death, about the bungling and panic that had cost me years from my life and led to the loss of my hand, about the lost opportunity that Gar had been offering me, I thought about it all and I couldn’t be angry. I could only feel a heavy regret, a weighted nostalgia and remorse.

Everything was much more difficult this way. Without the blessed blindness of fury, I had to do everything coldly, impersonally, watching myself every step of the way.

Violence done of duty weighs more heavily than violence done out of passion.

I moved through the ship light and quick and silent and unseen, armed with nothing but my hand. From Triss I had learned the location of Phail’s quarters and there I hurried; this first part had to be gotten over with as quickly as possible.

I saw no one. According to the artificial time by which everyone on Anarchaos lived it was now late at night, so that only a few crew members were up and about. These I avoided easily, and soon came to Phail’s quarters.

The door wasn’t even locked. I entered a darkened room, stood silent in the darkness for a while, and finally determined that I was alone; there was no sound of breathing here. I felt my way around the room, touched furniture which indicated it was a parlor or sitting room, and came at last to another doorway, in which the door stood ajar. I paused here, listening, and heard the sound of regular breathing I’d been hoping for.

I moved through the dark to that sound, and reached my hand out, and promptly found his throat. I closed my hand around it.

How the pulse beat against my palm! He woke up at once, thrashing and waving his arms around, but I stood and waited and after a time his struggles weakened. I released him when he was lying limp but the pulse was still beating; I didn’t want him to die without being sure who was doing it to him, and why.

I left him, and found a light, and switched it on. His face was so altered by lack of breath that for one bad instant I thought I’d come to the wrong room. But it was him, Phail, with his arrogant face and dry sandy hair. He slept nude, and in his thrashings had kicked the covers off; his body was surprisingly pale and thin.

I brought water from the bath and sloshed it on him, then slapped his face until he returned to consciousness. When his eyes opened, and I saw that he recognized me, I put my hand on his throat again.

He didn’t move. He lay there unblinking, and stared up at me.

I said, “You murdered Gar Malone. I came to Anarchaos to find you and punish you.”

Then I dosed my hand.

The rest did not require individual attention. What did I have to say to General Ingor or Elman or Davus or Malik and Rose?

From the kitchens I obtained the knife with which I disposed of the crewmen on duty, beginning with the mate on watch at the wheel and ending with the two engineers on duty in the engine room. All told, seven men.

I smashed the radio equipment. There were six lifeboats and I punched holes in all of them. I damaged the engines with pliers and a hammer, then punctured the great fuel tank and led a trail of flammable objects down the flight of stairs into the pool of it at the bottom.

The ship was no longer moving through absolute blackness. Far ahead of us, and a bit to the left, there was a red glow on the horizon. As I moved about the ship, sometimes having to travel along the deck, I glanced at the horizon and from it got a feeling of urgency, as though it indicated an actual dawn coming up. It seemed to me as though I must be finished with what I had to do before that dawn.

At last everything was ready. The ship still moved forward from its own momentum, but with increased sluggishness. I dressed myself warmly in clothing taken from the dead crewmen, set the fire which would eventually lead itself to the spilled fuel and from there to the fuel tank itself, and went on down to the opening in the hull through which I’d first been brought into the ship.

There were three small motorboats down here, tied to the metal platform, and I scuttled two of them. I found the way to open the hole in the hull, started the engine of the remaining motorboat, and steered my way carefully out to the open sea.

I had taken the mate’s watch with me, and it read three-twenty a.m. when I started out in the small boat. I maintained course in the same direction the ship had taken, guiding myself by the light on the horizon far ahead and just slightly to the left, and as I went I looked back from time to time at the faintly seen ship, its yellow lights outlining it in the blackness behind me. For the longest while it seemed to sit motionless and eternal back there, an angular black silhouette in a halo of dim light surrounded by the blackness, but at precisely three-thirty by the mate’s watch I saw the first jet of flame. Blight red, shooting upward, it illuminated the ship and the bit of ocean just around it in miniature imitation of the noon light of Hell.

So long as I could still see it, the ship never exploded and it never sank. It merely burned and burned and burned, flaming away like a torch back there in the night. I moved away from it at a good speed, sitting in the stern of the small boat, huddled against the cold wind of my passage, and behind me the red beacon silently roared.

I was finished. After four years, I had done what I had come to Anarchaos to do: learn the truth about my brother’s slaying and choose an appropriate vengeance. It seemed that I had lost every battle, and then won the war.

How should I have felt? I felt cold, and empty. I no longer wanted antizone, any more than I still wanted revenge. There was nothing I wanted. Not even the oblivion of the black water rushing by below my elbow had any appeal for me.

I was heading toward Cannemuss, but only because life requires motion. So long as one breathes, it is necessary to move. In a map on the bridge of the ship I had seen where this place Cannemuss was: at the far south-easterly tip of the Sea of Morning, at the mouth of the Black River. Triss had told me it was a frontier town, a trapper’s village, a way station for supplies going out to the rim and raw materials coming back.

The last time I looked behind me, when the flaming ship had now receded completely out of sight, the mate’s watch read nearly four o’clock. From then on I looked only forward.

Five hours later I reached the coast, barren and snowbound, and two hours after that, by traveling southward along the shoreline, I came at last to Cannemuss. And on the pier at Cannemuss was standing Jenna Guild.