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CHAPTER 1
The other monster sat at the edge of his cot, staring at the floor of his immaculate white cell. He held his hands clasped between his knees in a manner that might have signified despair in another prisoner, but which in his case seemed to demonstrate an obscene lack of concern instead. He showed no fear, no guilt, no uncertainty. He did seem bored, but not like he was oppressed by that boredom; rather, like he considered his confinement a welcome vacation from his more pressing responsibilities.
The other monster was a pleasant-looking young man, of average height and unremarkable build. He had pale blue eyes, sandy brown hair and a corn-fed complexion. There was nothing about him that suggested hidden depths, of depravity or anything else. There was instead an undeveloped element of charm in his half-smile, and in the way he hummed currently popular love songs as he waited for his hour of judgement.
Andrea Cort stood at the entranceway of a meeting room elsewhere in the Embassy compound, studying the other monster's projected image. Several times life-size, it dominated the space above the long conference table, haunting the forms of two dozen desperately unhappy indentured diplomats who had been haunted by the deeds of the real man for months now. They had reserved a chair for Cort at that table, but she remained the only person in the room still standing. It had been her way, since early in life; as long as there was any way to avoid it, she tried not to sit in the presence of other people. Or eat. Or sleep.
As a monster herself, she was acutely aware that she had more in common with this other monster than she did with them.
The man in the projected image shook his head, as if enjoying Cort's self-consciousness.
Her brown eyes narrowed to slits. "This a real-time image?"
"Linked to his cell," one of the diplomats said.
They all avoided looking at the other monster's image themselves, as if afraid his madness might prove infectious. They also avoided looking at Cort, though whether that was because they'd learned of her own monstrousness, or because they feared catching some of the blame for this particular fiasco, was hard to say.
She hated having to read them; she wanted to be the enigma herself. She wanted them to see her as a whip-lean bureaucrat in black, professional with every breath, human only on occasion and then only by oversight. She wanted them to worry themselves into knots wondering what she was going to do. To this end, she kept her comportment severe. She wore sharp but functional blackclothing; she kept her hair buzzcropped but for a single band that dangled at shoulder-length; she kept her expression blank and her voice distant, eschewing any attempt at charm. If this assignment went like all her others, the locals would soon call her bitch behind her back. That was, of course, exactly the way she needed it: not just on the job but everywhere else.
She gnawed the tip of her thumb, taking herself past the threshold of pain. "Does he know you're monitoring him?"
"Yes."
"Does he know we're watching right now?"
"We monitor him constantly. If you mean, does he know the Advocate ís getting her first look at him right now, the answer's no."
Ambassador Lowrey himself, a dull career man whose true level of expertise was probably inversely proportional to his self-importance, muttered: "Not that he gives a damn."
"You have been holding him in almost complete isolation for six months, Hom. Sap Mercantile," Cort pointed out. I would have been surprised if a certain amount of apathy hadn't set in by now."
"But look at him. That's not apathy — that's not giving a damn."
She conceded the point with a nod. "What was he like before his arrest?"
The indentured diplomats around the table glanced at each other, silently negotiating the appointment of a spokesperson. A slender young woman in her early twenties provided the officially sanctioned shrug. "Polite. Well-behaved. Friendly."
"Dull," another of the diplomats said.
That's it," the young woman said. "Dull. Not the kind of guy you get close to."
"No real personality at all," said another.
Behind that remark was the unspoken thought: Like You.
She appreciated that.
Ambassador Lowrey said: "I've heard his guards say he's put on a little attitude since."
"What kind of attitude?" Cort asked.
"The kind that comes from spending six months in a cell, waiting for the Advocate to arrive from New London."
New London was a wheelworld complex in Hom. Sap space, the home of billions, which happened to house many human communities and the central offices of the Confederacy Dip Corps. An austere apartment in the administrative complex was as close as Cort had ever permitted herself to having a permanent home.
She clicked her thumbnail against her teeth. "He didn't seem upset when he was caught?"
"No," the young woman said, "He was smiling, just like that."
There was a chorus of general agreement, and Cort said: "Is it possible he doesn't comprehend what he did? There's still room in the Protocols for insanity exemptions."
"We thought of that while you were still enroute," said Roman Whalekiller. Whalekiller, her official liaison here on Catarkhus, was despite his fierce-sounding name an innocuous, round-shouldered stuffed animal of a man whose bright round face did not easily accommodate expressions of moral revulsion. His dislike of the other monster was so extreme that he managed it anyway. Aware of Cort's appraisal, he rubbed the back of his neck, sharing with her the degree of his aggravation. "We even promised him his choice of treatment facilities if he just helped us support the claim. But he wouldn't go for it. He said he knew exactly what he was doing, and would do it again in a heartbeat."
"Cocky little bastard is right, then," Cort said.
"And why not? He knows nothing's going to happen to him. — Frankly, Counsellor, I think he considers this situation he's put us in half the fun."
Cort, who suspected the same thing, worried her thumb a little bit more. "You think that might have been the point? Embarrassing us in front of all the alien delegations?"
"That occurred to me, too; it wouldn't be the first time. But the slug doesn't have a political bone in his body. He's just having a good time watching us run around in circles trying to clean up the mess he made."
To Whalekiller, who at least seemed to know what he was doing: "And what about all the alien delegations? What have they been saying about this?"
"Unofficially? They think he's right. He is going to get away with murder. They're not stupid; they understand the locals have limitations; they know why handing him over to them won't work. But that hasn't stopped them from painting us as co-conspirators trying to cover up the latest in a long series of atrocities."
Cort grimaced at the thought. The long history of human relations with alien civilizations, both within and outside the species, had always been a study in trying to live down the crimes of the past. Crimes like those committed by the man in the cell — among others — provided plenty of ammunition to those who said the Hom Saps had squandered the last of its second chances. Feeling tired, she murmured: "Are they at least going to give me enough room to work?"
"They'll make a show of it," said Whalekiller. "But they'll be on your back before you've been here twenty-four hours. Not much longer after that they'll be portraying you like you're as big a monster as he is."
Cort remembered a night filled with warring shrieks, and thought: I am.
It just didn't make the task ahead of her any less impossible.
CHAPTER 2
Catarkhus was just another lumpy rock, dominated by deserts but seasoned with a mixture of inland seas and rainforests that formed a verdant belt around its equator. Andrea Cort had seen enough to sate her before leaving orbit. The skimmer tour Whalekiller had insisted on providing her on the way to the briefing hadn't served to endear the place to her any further. Nor did the scent of the air, which was neither acrid nor perfumed, but the kind of instantly noticeable tinge that every new biosphere manufactured for its very own. Folks who liked worldhopping cooed that such grace notes gave each new planet a special signature. Cort had always found that they gave her a headache.
She couldn't help it. She hated worlds. Having spent all but the first few years of her childhood in a safe wheelworld habitat, and having devoted the majority of her legal career to constantly untangling the disasters that inevitably took place wherever human beings were allowed to interact with naturally evolving life-systems, she far preferred artificial environments. They at least could be forced to make sense. Worlds, by contrast, repelled her — and first contact nexus or not, this one seemed more repugnant than most. As far as she was concerned, the other monster had lent it what little distinction it had by murdering several of the natives.
His name was Emil Sandburg. The file she'd been provided contained all the empty facts about his life without explaining why he would decide to start slicing up alien sentients as a hobby. He'd lived twenty-four years Old Earth Standard, an economic refugee from some failed industrial cooperative on the edge of Confederate Space. His indenture screening had listed him low normal in empathy, low normal in charisma, low normal in imagination; a determined nonentity who just happened to score extremely high normal in inductive thinking. He had been on Catarkhus for three years, forming distant but entirely cordial relationships with the rest of the Embassy staff; he was reported to be reasonably competent at cooperative relations with the representatives of the seven other spacefaring species maintaining first-contact Embassies here.
Everybody had liked him, in the sense that everybody always likes people who don't get in the way. Nobody could claim to know him. They had called him bland, forgettable, free of personality. Dull. They had seen no indications that he was in any way deranged. But now it seemed that on at least six separate occasions during his tour of duty here, he had descended into the underground colonies of the native sentients, isolated random individuals among the population, and taken his time cutting them to pieces. He might have indulged this hobby indefinitely if a representative from the Riirgaan delegation hadn't discovered one of Sandburg's murders in progress.
Cort was scheduled to talk to the Riirgaan in question later this afternoon, and she was supposed to have a meeting with the local interspecies council as soon as she produced her recommendations; if she was lucky, and the council was feeling sufficiently charitable, she might be able to establish some moral distance between this one demented human and the rest of the species that had spawned him. But it was going to be tough. After the Hossti debacle, and the (*Tone*)-Shtok crisis, and the embassy massacre on Vlhan — (three spectacular diplomatic incidents that had within the past couple of decades left interspecies confidence in the good faith of human beings at an all-time low) — the diplomatic community wasn't exactly motivated to give the perpetually bumbling Hom.Saps the benefit of the doubt again.
CHAPTER 3
The Hom. Sap Embassy had no jail facilities, so Sandburg's cell was a hastily-converted quarantine booth tucked away in the Embassy's on-site clinic. The one guard was a skinny, and somewhat sheepish, first-year indenture armed with nothing but a cryogenic foamer; even so, he wasn't trained for security work, and the pretense at high security rendered him almost apologetic as he dampened the door field to allow her admittance. Having won her argument with her security-minded escort Whalekiller, she went in alone, noting a handful of realbooks and a scan-only hytex before the figure on the bed had time to demonstrate how he was going to react to her arrival.
It turned out to be with a shy smile and an extended hand. "Hello."
"Hello," she said, without returning either.
Sandburg let his hand remained extended for five full seconds before dropping it with a fatalistic shrug. "You're a new one."
"Just landed." There was no place to sit other than the cot, which she wouldn't have wanted to share with him, so she remained standing. "I've travelled a long way to see you, Emil."
He flashed a tentative grin, forcing her to upgrade her upgrade her assessment of the smile. It was not warm so much as insolent. "Oooh. Officialdom."
"Andrea Cort. Legal Counsel for the Dip Corps Judge Advocate."
"Big-time officialdom," he said, his grin acquiring several additional degrees of off-center tilt. "Took you long enough to get here, ma'am."
Cort, who had spent the last two subjective months of her life being sick to her stomach at high g, didn't particularly need to be reminded. "Well, I'm here now."
He appraised her. "I don't know whether I ought to be real happy about that, ma'am. I mean, you are a pretty lady and all, and I love your legs, but you were sent here to make sure I get a proper lynching, weren't you?" This was the man cited as bereft of personality? His current persona was obnoxious, but that was as far from bland as he could get. "I'm not your prosecutor, Emil."
"Maybe not, but I can sure as hell see in your eyes that you wish you were part of the jury." He chuckled without bitterness at that, thus establishing himself as a man who expected to be hated but didn't give a shit. He patted the mattress beside him. "It's not a sexual overture, pretty lady, but I'm really do wish you'd sit down. Otherwise, I'm going to get a crick in my neck just talking to you."
He meant it to be disarming, but just being in the same room with him was enough to raise the acid levels in her belly. "There's a solution to that, Bondsman. You can stand. In fact, I'm going to require you to."
Sandburg rolled his eyes, but clapped his hands against his knees and rose to his feet with the air of a long-suffering martyr. "Yes, ma'am."
Cort wished she had a paper to look at, a doc-reader to scan, even a colleague to pull off to one side and consult; anything to delay the rest of the interview by the two or three beats she needed to compose myself. "I'm told that you were caught in the act of disemboweling a Catarkhan whose limbs you had already amputated; that in the time since your initial arrest you have confessed to committing the same crime at least half a dozen times in the past. I have also been told that you say you did this for no reason other than your own personal recreation. "Is all of this accurate, Emil?"
"They've briefed you real well, ma'am."
She went nose-to-nose, so her words could burst against his skin in puffs of breath. "You enjoy killing things, Emil?"
His eyes remained amused. "Sometimes."
"Torturing them?"
"That's the fun part."
"You tortured the Catarkhans?"
"Not sure the word applies in this case, ma'am. Not with this species."
Neither was she, damn him. That was part of the problem.
"For the sake of the argument: you enjoy slow kills."
"Sometimes, Ma'am."
"Do you only do it to Catarkhans? Or have you ever practiced this particular hobby on other sentients?"
He showed teeth. "None of your damn business. Ma'am."
She knew then, as she was meant to know, that he had; that somewhere in his past, on some other world he'd known, there'd been other bodies left behind in dark places. He had probably enjoyed the usual childhood experimentation on animals, and might have taken down a few human beings before hitching his star to the Dip Corps gave him the opportunity to indulge himself with a wider variety of sentients. Maybe she could link him to some unsolved crimes in his past, wrest jurisdiction from the locals, and resolve her current dilemma that way — but somehow, she already knew that she would find nothing. A monster like Sandburg wouldn't be so playful if he thought the game was going to be that easy for her. So she smiled back at him, with equal unpleasantness. "All right. This is a Catarkhan matter. I'll confine my inquiries to the matter of the dead Catarkhans."
He nodded. "That should save us some time, ma'am."
"Why did you do it, Emil?"
"You ever stomp on bugs, ma'am?"
(She remembered a shattered and bleeding alien form, unable to rise, trying to ward her off with imploring hands: the face behind those hands so swollen from previous beating that it was nearly unrecognizable, the eyes still clearly close of a being she had once considered a second father.)
"You find that an appropriate description of what you've done?"
"Pretty much, yeah. Watch them for a while and tell me it's not."
"These so-called bugs were sentient beings."
That's what you people keep telling me," he said, without any particular heat. The crooked smile came back. "Personally, I don't see it."
"Is that your defense? That they weren't sentient?"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Unseen Demons"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Adam-Troy Castro.
Excerpted by permission of Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc..
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