Chapter 202
Now it was time to drive in the last wedge.
The soldiers were screaming themselves hoarse, weapons leveled at their leader. I stepped out in front of them. The moment I started forward, the crowd split to either side and opened a path. No one tried to bar me. That was a relief.
So I walked straight up to him, and I said:
"Tell me who ordered this, and you can live."
The Harvesters' power had already left him unable to use any strength at all. The leader was completely sealed off. A few had stood with him, but they couldn't overcome the ones who had turned to my side — not when those people had a second life to spare, and a power that could nullify whatever strength their opponents brought to bear. There was a righteous cause here, too. And there was life.
The larger a faction grows, the more people peel away from the losing side to join the winning one. I watched the corporate spies in particular.
If the leader confessed, then at least for now he would live. If the corporations simply stood by and let him confess, every scrap of guilt would slide onto them. I herded them in, little by little. Preferring, if I could, that the corporations be the ones to lose, I took my place directly in front of the leader.
And instead of speaking, I held out my hand.
He looked at me with badly unsteady eyes. Something strange seemed tangled up in the feeling there, but the situation was what it was. Nothing to be done about it.
"I— I—"
Stammering, he let the staff fall from the hand that held it and reached toward me. Very good. Behind him, someone was creeping into motion, weapon in hand, moving to kill him. Those were the eyes of a man killing an enemy.
Good. I'd draw the gaze, and make the thrust an easy one.
"Take my hand."
He took one step forward. The man who had been waiting for his opening burst out and stabbed him before anyone nearby could so much as move.
Hehe.
Thank you.
An instant later a weapon came flying in from behind me and killed the assassin. I went to the leader where he had collapsed, a knife buried in his abdomen, bleeding out. And I recited the words of the contract.
The man said he would. I got the information.
But the moment he came back to life, one of the Harvesters snatched up a weapon, charged, and tried to stab him. The attempt failed. Too many people were already on their guard.
The leader stared at the Harvester who had tried to kill him, his face wretched. In his own way, it had been a subordinate who listened to him well.
"Whose orders were you following?"
"The chairman of Rocketmobile..."
Yes. I know. But what mattered here was that the people in this place heard it.
"What did he order you to do?"
"Turn the protest in Berne City — the one demanding the truth — into a riot, and put it down... For two years. Hold the line that long, he said, and he'd make me Marquis Gaston."
This man belonged to the house of Marquis Gaston. He was the half-brother of the man killed yesterday.
"When did he tell you that?"
"At dawn. Today."
"So it was after Marquis Gaston died."
A murmur spread. It meant there was some suspicious intent in this. It meant there was a culprit who had made Berne City what it was.
Yes.
Most of the soldiers here had families living in Berne City. They had already been wondering why they were attacking a city they were supposed to protect. Let the truth run into that doubt, and certainty would follow. The protesters were not the villains. The true enemy was someone else. All the more so because what they themselves had done had become an evil act.
They would try to erase that true enemy. Only then could they run from their own wrongdoing. For people like that, I called the enemy's names one by one.
"Pride Industry. Rocketmobile Company. Gun & Lefou Company. What, exactly, did these three companies do all this for?"
"That... I don't know. My brother... the head of the house said he never heard that part either."
Hearing him say two years, I doubted they meant to keep it hidden all the way to the end. Even so, the murmuring only grew louder.
That was when Victoria walked over. Setting the petty titles aside, she seized the man who could be summed up as Richard Gaston by the collar and hauled him up.
"You're telling me you wrecked the town for some reason you don't even understand?"
"It was my only chance to become a real noble! Who wouldn't take a chance like that! You too! The moment a chance to become a noble came your way, you did the exact same thing!"
Hehe.
Blurting out his thoughts like a fool. The faces of the soldiers looking down on him were growing colder by the moment, and Richard Gaston, oblivious, went on peddling his sob story — that a bastard could never enter noble society no matter what he did, that a chance which would never come again had arrived and he had seized it.
None of that mattered to me. I took the hand Victoria had locked around Richard Gaston's collar and loosened it. Once she had set him down, I put the question to Gaston.
"Even so, there's something you suspect, isn't there?"
I had this man's memories. He was not someone who simply listened to what they told him and did as he was bid. He knew that if he only listened, he would be thrown away the moment the work was finished. He had climbed by that very method, so he did not foolishly trust a promise. A promise is something you make with people who can stab you back. It is not something you make with someone who can discard you at will.
"There is. The clockwork runaway in Berne City. The machines have a fatal flaw built into them from the root, and it finally blew. The companies figure two years is enough to fix it. Until then, they mean to make the whole thing as if it never happened."
Corporations are pure, if you can call it purity. For the sake of their own profit, other people's losses are neither here nor there. They do not care if people die. It is what corporations always do. They dump toxins into a river in secret. They bury waste that ought to be specially treated straight in the ground. When the people living around a factory fall ill, they shrug and say it isn't their responsibility. Even faced with a problem that could end the human world, they bring every means they have to bear and erase it, so long as there is profit in the erasing.
There is something famous in the world of my faded memories. Leaded gasoline. Tetraethyl gasoline. If one person had not fought with everything they had, the next generation would have breathed an atmosphere steeped in lead, and every living thing would have died of lead poisoning. The corporations that tried to drive all of humanity into that poisoning had no special malice in them, no particular wish to commit a slaughter and shove everyone into suffering. They simply wanted to make the problem go away, because the money was good.
So a corporation cannot help but be evil. They live in a world where profit requires that someone be exploited, and so they are indifferent to using other people up. Even when it comes full circle and tightens around their own throats, they pretend not to notice until they are dying of it. Do otherwise, and they are the ones who fall out, while someone even more indifferent climbs past them.
"For a reason like that? You'd kill people?"
I caught the speechless Victoria and pulled her along. As if I were leaving this place because of her, I used Victoria as my excuse to get clear. The corporate spies were working hard just then. They were feeding something into the clockwork machines, and the result showed itself at once.
Whump!
Without warning, a clockwork machine blew the head off the soldier beside it.
"What are you doing!"
"It wasn't me! Troion's moving on its own!"
"Stop! Stop, I said!"
"Caballus isn't answering the controls either!"
"Pull the emergency stop!"
"I already pulled it! It isn't listening at all!"
Troion and Caballus were the names of the clockwork machines they rode. Troion was a mount like a reinforced exoskeleton; Caballus, a mount like a robot. Both of them war machines.
The army came completely apart. If the people inside the machines had been enemies outright, it would have been simple. But the people riding them were victims. In the space of that hesitation, the machines seized the gap and killed. Still, an army is an army. The confusion did not last. The soldiers set about destroying the clockwork machines one by one.
From inside, some screamed that they didn't want to die. Some begged to be let out. And some, their limbs twisted because the machine had moved as it pleased, asked to simply be killed. Harvesters and those who were not Harvesters alike turned on people who had been their comrades, faces blotched with despair. Screams ran wild. The dead multiplied. And at the same time, warmth gathered.
At a moment like this, even the cold was not cold so much as cool. Holding on to Victoria, I made for Polaris, who was holding her breath and hiding down below. I had seen everything I needed to see here. The account had become the truth — because the fact that the clockwork machines had moved on their own to hide it was, paradoxically, proof that it was true. This was not the usual business of fighting monsters, nor of killing riotous villains with shellfire from a distance. Even now, with people who were still their comrades riding inside, the machines were too hard to disable, and so the riders had to be killed along with them. It was a time for minds to break.
After that, it would be easy. The blood that had spilled would go on to wound other people. PTSD, wasn't that what they called it? Of course, with someone to look after them properly, they could recover. But this was that kind of world. An age when even the concept of mental illness was still wanting. Who was going to care about them?
As always, once the war ended, the soldiers who had fought would become society's trash and be cast out. Only the commanders would receive medals that carried any honor. Broken soldiers would soon sink into being a social ill. Which is to say, Harvesters would come into being who could yield warmth easily, and quickly.
My purpose was accomplished, so I turned back toward the west. The Purple Twilight Society of Berne City was creeping in from the east — people who saw Victoria as an enemy who had to be struck down. It would pain her, but I needed to meet them and give things a shake if the Harvesters were to spread in every direction. Spread, and become a cancer on society.
Hehe.
Which is to say, the production of warmth would speed up. If the Harvesters had existed only here, I would not have left them alone; their image would have soured, the way it did in the second world. But there were already many Harvesters in the capital, and there was the princess the royal family loved. Aurora. I no longer needed to worry about the Harvesters' image.
All I had to do was keep up the look of someone who meant well enough, yet was too stupid to know how the world worked and only wanted to save people — so they would go on treating me as a vending machine that dispensed Harvesters.
I took Victoria with me, followed the way she had come, and went down to where Polaris was waiting. Then I pointed west, and said we should go back.