They didn’t dare take their guesswork for granted, not until they had their theory confirmed—or not, in which case they had to abort and hope they could patch their way out.
“We found a mistake in your sets,” Hicks said gently at one point, right down the script. “Kyle, you haven’t felt altogether right for some time, and we’ve found the cause. Somebody gave you wrong tape. It’s beta. It was when you were in service, on the lines. Do you remember getting tape then? I’m your Supervisor. I can ask this. Did you get tape when you were on the lines?”
Kyle’s brow contracted. “Sometimes.”
“They gave it more than once?”
“More than once.”
“You know who I am. I’m Adam. I’m your Supervisor. Someone once gave you a beta tape. What was the number? Where does it start? Can you find it for me?”
“Viking. October 13 shiptime, 2320, US Amity.”
“Keep going. Find it.”
A long pause. Then: “Tape sequence B14-2818-6.”
Jordan nodded sharply in Ari’s direction.
She spun around to the console keyboard, called Base One, and made a fast key entry—deep in tape archive, no question. The number enabled retrieval; retrieval enabled an exact excision of what had gone in; and Base One pulled it out past gateways that would have hidden it from any ordinary search.
Let him sleep, Jordan sent to Ivanov, then. They hadn’t been at it thirty minutes, and they dropped the subject back into kat-induced limbo.
But this time they had substance to go on. They had a foundational tape in a sequence that Kyle himself had cobbled into an alpha level routine. They had one piece of a jigsaw of accommodation; but it was a piece with the design on it.
“Hicks, come in on this one.” she said, and that didn’t please Jordan, but Hicks was qualified on beta, he’d made a good go at handling an alpha, and he had the glimmering of a hope of understanding the issue as well as the specific azi they were trying to fix.
He sat with them in an adjacent conference room, and Jordan flipped through what he’d pulled up. They went over it independently. It was short, simple. It gave a line soldier permission to kill without conscience where ordered by the Bureau.
“Conflict,” she said. “The minute he takes it out, he’s got conflict with other programming.”
Jordan nodded. “Insert an exception: he may remember killing or arranging killing in the past. This is gone now. It was a temporary condition. He’s not guilty.”
Hicks looked sharply at Jordan, and Jordan didn’t even look his way. Jordan was as clinical, as detached as an Alpha Supervisor had to be…even when he was talking about the specific crime he’d been sentenced for. Not guilty. No karma.
“He’ll attach to Hicks for any future permissions,” Paul said, and Jordan nodded again and inserted a line.
Ari found her arms tightly folded, as if there’d been a chill. Florian was close by. Catlin was. They’d know what Jordan was doing. Their own alpha tape enabled killing. Readily. They were hair-trigger, both knowing what personal issues Jordan was dealing with, what a dangerous thing Paul was saying, with that “Attach to Hicks.”
But Hicks was ReseuneSec. He was, at least by his provisional certificate, entitled to have that responsibility.
“You’re the Supervisor,” Jordan said then, looking straight at Hicks, and said it in his best clinical voice.
“Agreed,” Hicks said. Hicks had arrested Jordan, in the long ago. Helped send him to Planys. He’d arrested Justin, multiple times.
Jordan gazed at him a moment, then nodded, quietly still, deathly quiet in the room.
“Say;” Ari said, “He also has to respect the authority of Reseune Directors. That won’t conflict.”
“Good idea,” Prang said, and that went in.
“Then we’re go with it,” Jordan said. “We go with heavy kat and unwind it.”
Jordan got up. They all did. They went back to the room, where, for Kyle AK, time had stood still.
Now time started up again with the specific beta tape, and they played it under instructions, relayed via Hicks, to erase it, step by step, from memory.
Reaction. Slow, at first, but Kyle was alpha; cross-referencing told him in the first instant he was going to be in trouble.
“Deeper,” Jordan said, and Ivanov frowned, and deepened the kat.
Kyle was calmer, then. “Come on, Kyle,” Hicks said. “It’s Adam. I’m here. Listen to me.”
Lines on the monitors had spiked all over the place. They sank abruptly. Ticked way up. And down again. That much kat was a risk.
It took two hours and forty-five minutes to get him stable. And while Ivanov was working, word came from the airport that Councillor Chavez had just come in, with two aides. With her mind strongly elsewhere, but with the assurance nothing was going to happen soon up at the hospital, Ari made the trip down to welcome the Councillor officially, to see him up to Wing One, and for him to meet with deFranco in a conference room and deliver the news from Novgorod as of three days ago. It wasn’t much news, but it wasn’t good, military police were patrolling the streets of Novgorod, to the exclusion of Novgorod police.
With no declaration of martial law. That was definite, too…because Reseune sheltered the requisite Councillors.
It was suppertime in the outside world; but her stomach was on a different schedule. She entrusted the two Councillors to a good catered supper ordered up from Jamaica and took herself and Catlin and Florian back to the hospital as fast as she decently could. She had a sandwich from the hospital cafeteria—Catlin got it for her—and then settled in to catch up and hear the report from Ivanov, who’d finally gotten the subject calmed down and stable. Ivanov had had to give Hicks medical help; rapid heartbeat.
“I can’t give Hicks much more help without putting him to bed,” Ivanov said. “He’s not young, any more than the subject is.”
“We either leave Kyle in limbo for the night and see he doesn’t dream.” Justin said, “or we go after the block tonight. Stress continues on both of them—even—”
“Go for it,” Jordan said, “if young sera’s through taking her own sweet—”
Paul’s hand landed on Jordan’s shoulder, pressed hard, though Paul didn’t say a thing.
“We need her concentration here” Jordan said, “dammit. This isn’t a picnic.”
“You’ve got it,” she said. “I don’t blame you. You’ve got it. No complaints, no objections.”
“Let’s just go, then,” Justin said, and Grant got up, and Justin did.
Hicks, asleep on a cot, took a little rousing. “At this point.” Jordan said, “you don’t have to do anything. Just talk to him occasionally. Tell him what we tell you. Verbatim.”
Hicks nodded. They took their positions. They’d unraveled the kill-capability. Now they went after the block. Hicks’ job was to let him progress gently, find the block, figure what symbolized it, and encourage Kyle to set it in a neutral position.
And Kyle seized.
Machines ticked on, took over, cleaned out the adrenaline surge, supplied a gentler cocktail, and got Kyle breathing on his own again.
It was past midnight, into the next day.
Justin leaned over the mike, “Tell him reset. It’s all right.”
Jordan said, “Tell him—tell him to open the door.”
Hicks did. Kyle’s face contracted, then relaxed. His breath went out, and came in again.
“Tell him. Reset,” Jordan said then.
“Reset,” Hicks said, and Jordan let go a long breath and said, softly, gently into the mike, “It’s usually a door, in some sense or other. You’ll want to put that into his manual. It isn’t broken. He’s keyed on you now, we’re not going to have to break it. Tell him he can clean up, put things to rights. It’s all right. He can trust what comes in if you say he can. Get him to agree.”
Hicks did that, quietly rephrasing.
Kyle lay there, breathing deeply. His face was quiet, seeming to have
acquired lines. He had fluids going in and coming out. He had machines doing a lot of the work for him, while he just lay there and breathed on his own, and blinked from time to time. But the storm on the monitors had decidedly quietened.
“Get him to say your name.” Jordan said.
“It’s me,” Hicks said then. “You know me. You know my name.”
“Adam,” Kyle mumbled. “Adam Hicks.”
“Run the code,” Jordan said then, sharply. “Straight into the Contract.”
“You’ll—” Hicks started to protest angrily, and shut himself down, lips bitten to a thin line.
Jordan said, “Go.” And Ari thought so, too. She looked at Justin. Justin said, “Code.”
Fast as they could, before stress piled up. “Code in,” Paul said, and sent it through with the push of a button. Kyle sucked in a breath as if he’d fallen into icewater. The monitors spiked up, a jagged mountain range of crisis. Then Kyle let the breath go.
Contract tape followed immediately. “You have an assignment,” it routinely began. “You have a place. You are wanted…”
Kyle went on breathing. The lines of stress evened out to a steady tick. Strengthened.
Giraud couldn’t have done this one, Ari thought to herself. No way in hell. That beta tape was ancient history. It had taken Base One to haul it out of storage. It was tape that didn’t belong to any azi living…now that they’d pried it out of Kyle AK.
They got up from their small table, then, moving quietly, while Ivanov checked and took notes. Jordan moved closer to their patient. Ari did, out of curiosity to see, besides the monitors, how he was doing.
Then Jordan leaned over Kyle, very close, and said, fast, before anyone could stop him, “Who was your Supervisor before Adam Hicks?”
Contraction of the brows. Ari tensed. Kyle’s eyes flew open. He was still deeply under.
“Arbero,” Kyle said. “Captain Vincente Arbero.”
“Did you ever put Abban under kat?”
Kyle opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came out. Hicks grabbed Jordan’s shoulder and shoved him back, and Florian had moved in. Florian restrained Jordan gently, just put himself in the way, while Catlin faced Hicks.
“Yes.” Ari heard Kyle say in the interim, and she touched his pallid face gently and said, “You’re forgiven. It’s all right now. You can rest a bit and wake up later. Adam Hicks won’t leave you. Remember Vincente Arbero. But never listen to him again.”
She looked toward Hicks, who was still furious, then toward Jordan. “That’s on the record,” she said. “It’s on the record, Jordan, and all of us know it. It was recorded.”
Jordan wasn’t fighting against Florian, who wasn’t touching him now: he looked on the edge of a collapse, himself. Justin had moved in close, and laid a hand on Jordan’s shoulder.
“Let’s go,” Justin said. “Let’s go back next door, let him sleep it off. We did it, Dad. It’s done. Everybody heard.”
“I did it,” Jordan snapped, jerked his shoulder aside, and looked at Ari. “So what do you propose to do about it?”
“What I promised I’d do,” she said. “Let’s go next door. Come on. We need to talk. Now. Come on. Everybody.”
They went to the conference room, then—a window on the outer hall, one on the operating room itself. Petros Ivanov had gotten Hicks back to one of the consoles, to a stable chair with a back on it, was talking to him, probably medical advice. A nurse had come in.
Jordan didn’t say a word, meanwhile, didn’t sit down. He just stood there, against the wall of the conference room, staring at the windowed view, arms folded, not talking.
“Arbero,” Catlin said, quietly, having consulted her handheld. “Not on the Defense rolls. No CIT number.”
“That’s two,” Ari said. She was disappointed, deeply disappointed, but a thought began sliding sideways in her mind, just out of one compartment and into another. “Anton Clavery. Vincente Arbero. Every CIT has a CIT number. But are there people in Defense that don’t? We’ve been assuming the radical underground. Paxers. Rocher Party, everything but somebody in uniform. Kyle’s given us a name that doesn’t exist. And, under deep kat, he says this person was in Defense with a high rank.”
Jordan had unfolded his arms. Justin and Grant sat looking at her. So did Mark and Gerry, Florian and Catlin, who weren’t going to talk, not in front of the rest.
“Florian,” she said. “Catlin. What are you thinking?”
“That CITs in other places are supposed to have numbers,” Florian said. “But we can’t get into Defense to find out if the rules are different there.”
“If they made hollow men,” Catlin said, “they’d have all sorts of resources to do that. People died in the War. Some die in training. And they’d be hard to track. Hollow men with all sorts of identities available.”
“We assumed a whole Bureau is going to observe the law,” she said. “We assume if they were breaking the law somebody would talk about it.”
“Well, somebody didn’t,” Jordan said, “until he went under deep kat.” A muscle jumped in Jordan’s jaw. “Khalid runs Intelligence. Covert operations. I said I’d met him. Bastard. Thorough arrogant bastard. Asked me questions I declined to answer. The man collects bits and pieces of everybody. Gets real pissed when you don’t react when he gives you that look. I didn’t know who he was at the time. I found out, the second meeting. People tried to hint to me you didn’t cross him. I probably went down in his book as a potential problem. Maybe it had something to do with their decision, the way they handled my case…they didn’t have a handle on me; they wanted more information and I wouldn’t give it to them, if you want the bloody truth. You all assumed I told them any damned thing they wanted to hear, and I didn’t. I told them what Ari was doing—there was a dark little history, nasty little secrets left over from the War, the azi designs that didn’t work, that she put down and wouldn’t give me fucking access to try to fix them…you want to know where you can get any human material you want? Ask about her deals with Defense, ask what kind of spies she could create that never would have a CIT number…” He drew breath, waved a hand. Said, in a quiet voice, “It doesn’t matter. If they exist, we can’t get at them.”
“An honest Defense Councillor could,” she said.
“Naive,” Jordan said.
“You say Khalid did it, ultimately. We’ll never attach things to him. If we take it to the media and can’t prove it, ultimately that’s a problem, because he’ll deny it, and we’ve damaged our credibility with everybody. I’m not that naive, ser, to try to prove anything yet. I’m thinking what we can do now to get him stopped.”
“Well, first you find an honest Defense representative and then you get his electorate to put your honest Councillor in. Spurlin wasn’t likely it—just somebody who wouldn’t kiss ass with Khalid, which is why he’s dead and you’re probably right. You’re a target, I am, everybody who’s heard this is, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think having a Council meeting on the quadrangle out there is going to make Defense run for cover. You’re thinking he’ll observe civilized limits. He’s already out of civilized limits.”
“It’s a problem,” Ari said.
“It’s a problem,” Jordan echoed her nastily. “Damned right it’s a problem. So I’m innocent. The world’s going to hell anyway and a Council vote isn’t going to fix it.”
“I may need you again,” she said. It was scary, being told by a very bright Special that he was out of answers, and that there was no fix for the problem. It was particularly scary, because at the moment she didn’t see a fix, either, and whatever was wrong inside Defense had been going on for sixty years. Their problem had had a lot of time to build an infrastructure in that Bureau. “Go get some rest. Thank you, especially, Jordan. Thank you for doing this.”
“The hell,” he muttered. “You go prove I’m innocent. Get me my license back.”
“We should get on back to the Wing,” Justin said. “We’re all exhausted.”
r /> Jordan didn’t move.
“You’ll get your not-guilty,” Ari said.
“Promises, promises.”
She stood up, leaned on a chair back with both hands. “We’ll figure things out,” she said. “Yanni will get back, we’ll hold a vote, and we’ll see what the Council actually can do.”
“Hold a vote. Hell.” Jordan shoved away from the wall and walked out.
Paul lingered a moment, looking distressed.
“It’s all right,” she said to Paul. “He could be right, you know. But I hope not. Good night, Paul. Tell him good night. —Justin, Grant, Sera Prang… Justin, you can—”
The overhead lights flashed.
Then the storm siren sounded.
“There’s no weather,” Ari said, and then thought of the pile of papers and manuals in the surgery, at that back table. “The records. Kyle.”
“Our territory,” Prang said. “We have enough help. I’ll help Petros with the patient. Go! Get her downstairs!”
“Damn,” Ari said, and by then Florian had her one arm and Catlin had the other, and Prang was headed for the surgery.
“I’ll get the manuals,” Justin said, and he and Grant headed out of the room, headed the same direction, Mark and Gerry close behind them, while the siren howled.
“Sera, come on,” Florian said, and she surrendered. She had to. Florian and Catlin pulled her out into the hall and down the nearest stairs.
They were on the next flight down when something screamed overhead, the walls rattled and the ground heaved up, like a blanket toss.