WeTried Translations

Translator: Coughing Baby

Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Little Prince in the Ossuary

Chapter 121

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April Vengeance (9)

The FBI agent was bearing down on the person at the other end of the radio. The line ran through the destroyer Higgins to an aircraft carrier. The survivors rescued from the funnel were already there.

They had already confirmed the luxury liner's ugly recent past on video. What the female investigator wanted from this survivor was a more detailed statement, and information about the other survivors.

Even learning the group's makeup and tendencies would be a huge help. Friction with armed groups did not always end in a firefight.

"Good, cook. Now tell me about the ingredients you handled."

Joanna Gibson's voice was flat, but her face was full of feeling.

[Uh... You really, really will not hold me responsible?]

The man, who identified himself as a prep cook on the April Pacific, said he used to handle meat in the grand galley.

'In other words, a human butcher...'

Starting with the grand theater, Gyeoul and the investigator quickly reviewed the ship's last few months.

Among the records was slaughter disguised as cooking. If he had prepared ingredients as a junior cook, then his role was turning people into meat.

"Hard to say. It depends on you. If you keep wasting time with useless talk, I do not know when I might change my mind."

You could not give criminals room to breathe in negotiations. The bait was a plea deal.

[A-alright. I will tell you.]

The cook began his statement. The April Pacific had left mainland Australia last summer.

[The original food stock ran out in two months. But everyone was afraid to turn back. We could not trust the Australian government. The Governor said the safest place was at sea.]

Food shortage. He seemed eager to justify dismembering people before anything else. But there was something more concerning in his testimony, and the agent caught it.

"Governor? You are saying the Governor-General of Australia was on that ship?"

Gyeoul, listening nearby, also tilted his head. Commonwealth countries did have a representative of the British monarch, but why would someone at the level of Australia's Governor-General leave the government and come all the way out here? Even if the position was ceremonial and had no real executive power...

[No, not that. He is... no, that person is the Governor of the Pacific Republic.]

"Say it in a way I can understand, unless you want life without parole."

[Ah, sorry. I am sorry.]

Then the cook started rambling. He kept dropping subjects and objects, and kept correcting himself mid-sentence. Agent Gibson frowned and straightened it out for him.

"So the Pacific Republic's territory is the April Pacific, and this man called Governor claims to be the head of state. Is that right?"

[He does not just claim it. The Governor was elected unanimously in a public vote... no, was elected.]

Isolated people changed. The luxury cruise had remained sealed long enough for collective madness to ripen. Long enough for agitators calling for cannibalism as a fix for food shortages to gain support.

[Harvest was about once a week.]

Harvest? At that word, the investigator muttered a curse. Fuck. She released the transmit button in time, so the subject did not hear it. But if the silence dragged on, he would get anxious. Now that he had started talking, they could not let it break off. They needed to save time. The investigator asked:

"Did you really need to harvest that often?"

[Meat (Long pork) is hard to keep fresh any longer than that.]

Long pork. Long pig. The term came from calling people long pig. Even Europe had times when people rationalized cannibalism.

Tragedy began when people stopped seeing other people as human. Humans were never meant to become merchandise.

"...Keep going."

The investigator muttered again that it was messed up. The cook had asked for immunity, which meant he knew what he had done. But his statement carried no guilt. He was numb.

'Of course. He could not have endured it without self-deception.'

The boy thought about human weakness. Self-justification was self-defense, an effort to protect yourself from guilt. Gyeoul had seen parents justify selling their children, so this was easy for him to understand. Strong guilt produced strong rationalization.

People who could not do that were probably already dead. It was a world where conscience killed you. Good people died first. Then and now. If a worldview built by digging up the past looked like this, maybe this was the limit of humanity. Gyeoul kept turning that limit over in his mind.

The statement continued.

[Even so, we did not eat white people. It was horrible. We mostly picked up people coming from Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines. Every time we did one broadcast, several big and small boats would come.]

"Broadcast... Let me guess, you said you would hand out food?"

The investigator hit the mark. The cook answered quickly.

[Yes. It was difficult, so the Governor stepped in personally. He said he would take responsibility as head of state.]

"Wait. If you did it that way, there is no way you avoided pirates."

[Ah, we originally had an escort frigate. They said it used to be a destroyer from some country, and the Governor's son was the captain. It sank recently while fighting pirates.]

An escort warship, a public vote, and a dictator. That explained enough. Power came from the barrel of a gun.

Then what were that warship's crew thinking when they followed the captain? Were they rewarded with pleasure from the cruise ship? Or had they simply gone mad in an ordinary way, inside a world running toward the end?

'Then again, Seventh California struggled with troop management at first too...'

Corporal Elliot had said many soldiers had lost family. Their mental state was unstable, so they could not be deployed. That had also led U.S. forces in contaminated zones to accept refugee volunteers.

After that, the investigator kept questioning him for a while. At last she asked her final question.

"One more thing. Answer honestly. Did you know what was happening in the theater?"

The colosseum of humans and plague. The cook said he did not know. The investigator looked ready to press him, but then frowned and fell silent. Instead, she told them to put someone else on the line. The carrier would have personnel assigned to monitor the survivors.

[Switched.]

The first word was cold and blunt. The investigator said:

"I am FBI Supervisory Special Agent Joanna Gibson. Please state your rank and name."

[...Master-at-arms Sergeant Tory Matson.]

A Master-at-arms handled crime enforcement in the Navy and was responsible for security at facilities and aboard ships. Different organization, but there was overlap with FBI work.

"Good, Sergeant Matson. Since you have been listening, I trust you understand the situation."

[What exactly are you asking?]

"I want to request witness protection from the Navy."

[Witness protection? You want us to protect trash like this? Ha. This ship has no place for human garbage.]

"Is that so? Then what do you plan to do?"

[Beat him until he is almost dead, then throw him into the sea.]

"Wow."

She sounded surprised with her mouth only, without changing expression, then continued.

"Sergeant, you are rejecting a lawful FBI request without grounds. I assume you know the interagency cooperation rules in contaminated zones during the Quarantine War. You could face consequences over this matter. Do you still refuse?"

[Nice threat. So what will you do?]

"I will report it up the chain and file a formal complaint with the Navy. I still have unresolved assignments, so that will probably happen in a few months... Hmm, I should try not to forget. Ever since I turned thirty, my memory has gotten worse. It worries me."

[Huh.]

The sergeant gave a dumbfounded laugh. Someone else's scream mixed in, saying that was not what they had agreed to. The line cut for a moment. The investigator waited for reconnection with a prim look that did not fit her age. When communication resumed, the noisy background had vanished cleanly.

[That was some funny bullshit. Any other requests? Want me to route you to Combat Information Center?]

"No. It is fine. I will contact you again if I need help."

[Understood. Ending transmission. Matson out.]

After ending comms, Gyeoul looked at her. The investigator started explaining herself before he even asked.

"Field investigations need flexibility. And if the other side refuses, there is not much you can do. I did not think this was worth escalating into a formal issue."

"I understand. It made sense. He said he was just following orders... but the crime is too grave."

Throughout his testimony, the cook had insisted he was innocent. But how many people had he butchered? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Gibson sighed.

"Even soldiers, who are taught obedience is a virtue, have a duty to refuse immoral orders. I am not in a position to be proud of myself either."

Gyeoul understood her. As she had said, an investigator's job needed flexibility. Rules were not always followed. There had probably been immoral choices, too.

'To begin with, plea bargaining itself is not exactly righteous.'

It was the second-worst option chosen to avoid the worst one.

Gyeoul remembered a movie he watched with his sister as a child. A man lost his wife and daughter to murder. There were two perpetrators, but only one was punished through a plea deal. Enraged, the man began taking revenge not only on the killers but on everyone involved in the plea arrangement.

It was an old movie, not even 3D, so it was free. But free did not mean boring. After watching it, the still-young boy thought deeply about his own hatred.

How far was he supposed to hate?

Truthfully, Gyeoul did not think killing the cook was right. Did he really have any way to resist? Life sentence without parole. Yes, that felt about right.

Still, he did not object, because he knew this was one of reality's limits. The world people lived in did not run that ideally.

'No, more accurately, it cannot.'

Gyeoul let go of his lingering attachment. Then he pointed.

"Should we take that call now?"

One internal line had been blinking for a while. Blink, blink. A contact request from the management office on Deck 3. The grand galley was on the same deck too, the place where the human butchery had happened.

When the ship changed course, everyone would have known someone was on the bridge. Maybe the one sending the signal was that so-called Governor of the Pacific Republic.

The investigator reached out with a reluctant expression. Gyeoul stopped her.

"I will take it. You must be stressed."

"Sorry, Lieutenant, but your negotiating ability is... no, never mind."

When Gyeoul smiled, Agent Gibson finally said what she had been avoiding.

"Do not worry. If the other side is insane, logic will not work anyway. In that case, it may be better for you to handle it, Lieutenant. You are world-famous. A ship this size could have received satellite broadcasts. Whoever it is will be nervous."

"World-famous? And satellite broadcasts?"

"Yes. Propaganda broadcasts are sent worldwide through satellite. Your share in them is quite large."

"Why would they do that... no, I get it."

The female investigator nodded.

"As you guessed, it is to show the U.S. is successfully overcoming the disaster. A tool to gain leverage in negotiations with other countries."

In the end, it was part of a civilian psychological operation. After weighing its effects, Gyeoul picked up the receiver.

============================ Author's Afterword ============================

#Five Months, Five Volumes

It has been five months since serialization began. We are getting close to 800,000 characters.

By volume count, that is about five volumes.

I wrote at a pace of one volume per month, but on Noblesse that is snail-slow serialization...

I truly respect the authors who put out two to three volumes every month.

Noblesse is a brutal place.

#Q&A

Q. optatum: @You already use subtitles in the main story, but could you sort things by subtitle order? All the chapter titles are the same, so it is hard when I want to go back to a specific scene... If you use subtitles, it would stand out more and be easier.

A. I actually avoided that because this novel already pairs subtitles with locations, and then intermissions and chat segments cut in, so I thought it would get messy... But since this request keeps coming up, I will revise it little by little.

Q. Pirque: @Finished the full run, great read. I paid expecting it to take three days, but I finished it in under 24 hours. You are still an author full of childlike innocence. The way you share that innocence is beautiful. The piracy issue is serious. Lost income is a problem, but more than that, it is a major reason writers lose motivation. I hope you keep writing well.

A. Thank you for the support. But reading all of this in one day... that is impressive...

Q. DoomOfHumanity: If this happened in Korea, would the smell be weaker?..

A. That is what people say. The development of apocrine glands that cause body odor is generally Black > White > East Asian, and for Koreans, about half are said not to have those glands. It seems to be genetic.

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