“We need to discuss your recent actions,” the Moral Responsibility officer said. Beckett couldn’t remember the man’s name and this, somehow, disturbed him more than the hearing about his fitness for duty. “Some of the reports coming in are disturbing. Your superiors are worried.”
“Stitch is worried?”
“Mr. Stitch is only your direct superior. The people that I work for are superior to him,” the man said with a quiet sneer. He had a sheaf of papers in front of him. Beckett stopped listening. His mind wandered back to the last night’s raid. It was vivid in his imagination, Bluewater in all its rotten, sagging, destitute glory.
Bluewater was where the poor indige lived. The wealthy hetmen of the indige clans had mansions and townhouses lining the streets of Indigae, where imported gullah-trees and glowing phlogishrubs were maintained at great effort and expense. Indigae was a safe, clean neighborhood, well-patrolled by gendarmes, well-tended to by the city’s many civil services, and far from the poison-smoke-spewing factories at the west end of the river Stark. Indigae was so lovely a neighborhood, in fact, that if it were not for the immense social shame incurred by being seen amongst the indige, even the Esteemed Families would have maintained residences there.
Bluewater was not any of those things. The wide boulevards of Indigae were narrow, crowded streets in Bluewater. The little gardens were patches of dead grass or shimmering blue slime-mould on the cobblestones. There were no gendarmes in Bluewater, and if order was kept by the gangs of thugs and criminals that ruled it, it was only by accident. The neighborhood dissolved from warehouses full of cheap imports, warehouses converted to densely-inhabited, multi-family barracks, and warehouses that were too rickety and unsound even to support squatters, into factories that spewed black smoke, blue smoke, green smoke. Factories that dumped brightly-colored heavy metals into the rivers White and Crook, which had long been covered over by Trowth’s incessant development. The two swift and underground tributaries took the bright-colored and psychoactively charged mud into the Stark, where it sank to the bottom and bred strange species of fish and lizard.
Bluewater was a wretched place, a place whose inhabitants had yet to see the runoff of wealth from their more successful cousins in Indigae. The indige there were easy prey for Anonymous John and his men, for Dockside Boys and River Rats, for Starkies and the Old Trows. Bluewater was as thoroughly villainous a neighborhood as Trowth had known, and who could blame the indige for choosing gang life, smuggling, drugs, and robbery over the meager existence that they might be fortunate enough to eke out in this disused corner of the city?
“Your violent behaviors…Mr. Beckett?”
Beckett snapped back to himself, looked around the room, recollected the situation. “What?”
“You’ve always had a reputation for brutality, of course, but recently…some people are concerned that you’ve become a danger to the organization.”
“Which people?”
After Beckett’s hasty report, and eager to distract attention from their heretical experiments, the War Powers Ministry detached a unit of Lobstermen to serve in the coroners’ raid in Bluewater. These marines, nearing the ends of their terms of service, and therefore doomed, in a few short years, to a slow and painful death, were deployed at strategic locations throughout the neighborhood. Beckett’s plan was to take a handful of his own men and a squad of gendarmes directly to the address, and to leave the Lobstermen to cut off any potential escape routes. His fear was that the men in their blood-slick bone armor would frighten the black market dealers into doing something stupid, which the Lobstermen would then respond to with characteristic deadly force.
Dead black market dealers would likely yield up little information, so the Lobstermen were kept in reserve. He and his men approached an unassuming warehouse-fully as unassuming a warehouse as any of the other warehouses in Bluewater, and provoking a hurried conference as to whether or not they were sure that this was the correct address. Beckett glared sullenly until he’d obtained the attention of the gendarmes, and then ordered them into positions surrounding the site. Telerhythmic tapping-in the form of a very specific, very simple signal-indicated that the Lobstermen were all in position, lurking dangerously in the dark.
“Your confederate, Mr. Vie-Gorgon? Claims that you unnecessarily killed, and excessively beat a suspect in order to obtain information.”
Beckett blinked. “Valentine? Valentine said that?” He shook his head, then winced at the pain this provoked. “Why would he say that?”
“Did you beat the man at Small Ash Abbey?”
“He had information. I got the information. I don’t see what the problem is.”
The man shifted in his seat, and shuffled his papers again. “I also have some notes here about the raid that you conducted last night.”
“Go,” Beckett whispered. James heard, and he, presumably, was sending out the tap-tap-tap that would transmit the order. Beckett and his men moved towards the front door. “Coroners!” Beckett shouted. “We’re coming in!” He did not wait for a reply, but let the two gendarmes with him break the rotten wooden door down.
In the dark, inside, there were ten or fifteen indige, glowing faintly blue. They wore tattered clothes, and were huddled together, speaking quietly to themselves. When Beckett and his men crashed through the door, the indige leapt to their feet and began shouting.
“Where are they?” Beckett demanded. “The men, where are Anonymous John’s men?” He was answered with a babble of pidgin Trowth and Indt. One particularly bold indige youth stepped forward and shouted directly in Beckett’s face.
“No more! No more here! No more here!” The indige said, his face glowing brighter as his choler increased. “No more, us! Just us!” The indige swarmed around the gendarmes, repeating this mantra.
“What do you mean, no more? They’re gone?” Beckett asked, his heart sinking.
“Gone, all gone! Just-”
A sudden commotion broke through the shouts. Two Trowthi men in shirtsleeves and worn trousers, burst from a door in the dark. They were being pursued by more gendarmes, who waved cudgels and fiercely blew their whistles. Beckett shoved the indige aside and raised his revolver. “Stop! You two men, stop where you are!”
“No more, gone!” The indige insisted, grabbing at Beckett’s shoulder.
The old coroner shrugged him off. “Stop, I said!” The two men had crossed the interior expanse of the warehouse, and were fumbling in the dark with something. A weapon, a secret door? “Stop!” The indige grabbed at his gun arm. Beckett snatched his hand away and struck the youth across the face. The indige collapsed, bleeding hot blood from his cheek. The coroner fired two bullets into the air. “FUCKING STOP!”
“You struck a young man who had no relationship to the case, is that correct?” The Moral Officer asked.
Why can’t I remember his name? “He…he was interfering. He was trying to help the suspects escape. I had…he was interfering.”
“You didn’t feel that eight gendarmes, and a contingent of Lobstermen, would be sufficient to prevent the suspects’ escape?”
“What is this about?” Beckett demanded. “What is this really about? I’ve never…no ministry has ever done this before. My fitness for work has never been questioned before.” Why the hell can’t I remember his name? “I obtained information, I used it to apprehend two men engaged in the sale of heretical instruments. That is my mandate, that’s my duty, and I performed it. What the fuck else do you want from me?”
The men froze. The indige froze to see their fallen comrade. The gendarmes, many of whom had never known a moment of fear in the lives-and if they had, joining the gendarmerie had been a means to permanently escape the need for that fear-fell upon the two fleeing men like rabid dogs, beat them, dragged them away from the wall, roughly shackled them. The indige family, or clan, or however they arranged themselves, had knelt around their fallen member and were all whispering softly to him in Indt.
“You,” Beckett snapped at the fallen indige. “You, get up.” The youth didn’t move. The boy, Beckett thought. He can’t be more than fifteen. Beckett kicked him in the ribs. “Get up!” The indige sat up, leaning against one of his fellows. “You lied to me. You told me they were gone. Why?”
The indige, sulking, seemed disinclined to speak. Beckett very nearly lost his temper and hit him again. One more person that was refusing to help, one more person that didn’t want to talk. Didn’t the boy see that it was keeping quiet that was causing the problem? That they could fix everything if people would just cooperate? “Why?” Beckett rasped again.
“He paid,” the indige replied at last, shrugging. “He paid.”
“Who did?” Though Beckett suspected he knew the answer. Yet another Trowthi selling out their family and their city for a few crowns. And if someone was selling themselves into treason, only one man was paying.
“Anonymous John.”
The Moral Officer was silent for a very long moment. Then he put his papers away and stood up. “We’re done here. I will contact you if I need any further information.” The man left, closing the door behind him. Beckett stayed in his chair, rubbing his eyes, craving a veneine injection. He wanted to yell, to scream his frustration at the Moral Rectitude Commission, at the stupid indige that didn’t know he was trying to help him, but most of all at the dangerous amoral bastard whose involvement in Trowth’s heretical and criminal operations Beckett was coming to suspect was nearly universal. The indige’s voice echoed in his head.
“Anonymous John.”