Текст книги "Regenesis"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Grant had showed up, at Justin’s shoulder.

Justin started to say something. And then seemed to change his mind. “Come in,” he said somberly. “I’ll get my coat.”

“You said he’s not speaking to you.”

“You’re likely to get the door opened. I want to be there to give him an alternate target. Where’s Florian and Catlin?”

“On an errand,” she said, and that had echoes, way, way back, to the day her predecessor had died. “I can get your Mark and Gerry to come. It’ll be all right. Your father’s not the danger. I think–I don’t know–possibly–possibly Kyle AK is supposed to come after me.”

“God.”

“It’s dead serious, Justin. That’s why I wanted you both on it.”

“And what I read says he’s able to kill, if you want the short summation.” He pulled his coat on. Grant did the same, and Grant took his pocket com and called the downstairs security office, by the sound of it. “Gerry BG,” he said, “Mark. Meet us downstairs.”

She’d been too tired to function. She’d planned to talk to Jordan in the morning. Maybe. If she could talk Justin into it. But now that Justin was in motion, she thought–just do it. Just do it the best way possible, and she went with them, down the hall, down the lift, thinking, How odd, just to walk with somebody, in a safe building. How odd, to trust two people that aren’t staff, that don’t have all safe connections–because Jordan really wasn’t safe.

She did take out her pocket com and call Theo. “If my security asks, I’m with Justin and Grant. I’m going downstairs and over to Wing One. It’s quiet, all’s well, no problems.”

She wasn’t totally surprised when, as they picked up Mark and Gerry, Jory showed up from the lift, out of breath, and added herself to the group; and before they’d reached the security desk at the exit, Florian showed up from the other direction, sweating a little, but perfectly composed.

Then she felt guilty, and touched Florian’s shoulder, and said, “It wasn’t going to be this long or this far.” He was as tired as she was. And it hadn’t been fair.

“Yes, sera,” he said, a little out of breath. And they went on through to Wing One, herself, Florian, Justin, Grant, Mark and Gerry, and Jory, all of them into the dim storm tunnel of Wing One, and into the lift, and up again.

“Let me,” Ari said, and went and pressed the button at Jordan’s door. “Ser. Jordan Warrick.”

There was some delay about it. Then the door opened. Paul was there.

“He says he’s going to take a shower, sera, I’m sorry. Justin–” Seeing Justin and Grant just behind her, and the security, he hesitated.

“He can wait about the shower,” Justin said. “Paul. Now.”

“Come in, sera,” Paul said, and she walked in and all of them walked in. It might not be the best thing to do. It likely wasn’t. But she wasn’t going to tell Florian to stay outside. Ari felt his presence right at her back. And Jory’s. Mark and Gerry were there, the whole lot of them.

They waited. Paul came back again, and this time Jordan walked out, in his bathrobe.

“So?” Jordan said.

“That file I sent you,” Ari said. “I know you’ve got an opinion.”

Jordan drew himself up and folded his arms, staring at her. “This isn’t the way I do consultation. Try tomorrow. Without them.”

“You read the file. You recognized it.”

“I recognize the type.” His voice was edged with anger. But restrained, and he shot a glance past her, full of fury. Then back. “What, did you think I wouldn’t?”

“That set’s older than I am by a bit.” She cast a nod over her shoulder. “Older than Justin is, or Grant. They’ve never worked with the military sets. But you have.”

“I studied the mess the War sent us back. We all did. As I’m sure you know, since you get into every damned thing you like.”

“If I had everything you know, I wouldn’t have to ask. You worked with the Defense sets.”

“As a student. You’re talking about ancient history.”

“You consulted with them. You talked with them. You wrote one very good paper.”

“Several.”

She thought about the next question. Florian and Jory were there, if anything untoward happened. Mark and Gerry were. She didn’t think Justin would side with Jordan if he went for her.

She said, “Did you know an azi named Kyle, who worked with Giraud?”

Brows lilted slightly. “Alpha. Is that who this file is about?”

“Yes. Did you think he’d been axed?”

A little delay. She wasn’t dealing with the son of a bitch Jordan, the opaque stare. Calculation was quick and sharp. “You’re saying he wasn’t. He’s still alive?”

“He was, according to records, a Fleet Alpha Supervisor. And no, the code didn’t take. After which he had access to Abban, among others Giraud had in his office. He was still working for Defense. Defense was talking to you about breaking with Reseune. Ari found out and pulled you home. Defense knew that my existence was a possibility–knew that from you andfrom Giraud’s office. Knew that Ari didn’t have that long anyway. Youwere there with a grudge that was provable. Perfect vector for suspicion. Giraud had been in Novgorod, talking with Defense. So had Abban. So had Kyle, just one of the aides.”

“Bloody hell. This is a fucking setup. Get out of here.” He waved an arm toward Justin. “Get himout of here. Get away from me!”

“No,” Paul said, from over by the bar counter. “ No.”

“The hell” Jordan said, and turned and walked out of the room.

Paul still stood there, facing them, Paul immaculately dressed, very steady. “Sera,” he said, “Justin, Grant.” A little dip of the head, “Jordan and I need to talk. We are goingto talk. If you’d please call him in the morning.”

There was something changed in that equation. She didn’t know what. But Justin said, “Good. –Ari, he will.”

Jordan came back around the doorjamb, stood there, arms folded.

“You’re not welcome here, boy. As for you–” He looked straight at Ari. “You think Kyle murdered Ari?”

“I’m fairly sure there’s a connection between him, Abban, and that event, yes. All that’s in the past. What we’ve got nowis the possibility, the very real possibility of a military operation directed at Reseune, and people getting killed.”

“Notably you.”

“And a lot of innocent people who haven’t the least idea they’re in danger. You won’t be safe here if Defense launches something. You know far too much. Defensewas perfectly content while you were shut up inside Planys. You never heard them complaining about your being yanked away from Novgorod and going home with Ari that session. You never heard them arguing that it was some political set‑up when you got blamed for Ari’s murder. No. And Yanni didn’t send you to Fargone for exile for one very good reason: because you wouldn’t have lasted the week there.”

“You’re saying Kylekilled her.”

“Was behind Abban doing it. But Defense did it. Let you take the blame. And while Denys and Giraud were in charge, Defense was real easy for them to get along with, if nothing else, because they didn’t push the way Ari did. The same day I took on Denys, Ihauled your ass out of Planys to keep anybody from Denys’ staff from doing you in; and I think that same day some faction inside the Defense Bureau got very, very upset that you’d arrived here at Reseune proper, and worse upset by the chance you might finally be talking to me. I don’t know what Yanni knows. I don’t know if he knows all of it, or just suspects and never could prove it. But I think he knew you were in danger back then, and he saved your life…if nothing else, he intervened more than once to put your son on a safer course and to keep him out of Denys’ path. So I don’t think he was ever against you–the same way he didn’t argue against my bringing you back here. So you’ve had friends all along. Noneof them are in Defense.”

He’d drawn up just a little. His face had gone white, just white. The anger was still there. But he might be thinking. Better yet, he might be listening.

“Nice theory,” he said.

“I wasn’t there,” she said. “I haven’t any way to know any of this. No record shows it. I just watch where the pieces moved, and who moved them. And I draw my conclusions.”

He made an impatient gesture. “You want my help? You want–what?”

“I want your help with Kyle, I want your help cracking the block that’s keeping him on the Defense rolls. My doing it’s probably going to kill him and get no information, because I haven’t had the experience. I need your help, ser. I need your expertise, and I need you to help me find out what else Defense has got inside our walls, before they get desperate enough to do something–like kill me, yes. About now, they’d like to see another Ari, who’ll get to grow up until shestarts asking questions, and maybe die again. Always keeping the power together, keeping Reseune together, dying before she gets to be a threat, reborn just to keep the power together–and let Reseune stay under caretakers they can deal with. Well, I’m not ready to die, ser. I don’t intend to. But I don’t think that’s what Khalid’s playing for at the moment. His actions have been too high, too wide. He’s going for a Council that will give him martial law. Control over all of Cyteen. And us.”

“Where’s Yanni?”

“Still in Novgorod. Hicks is under arrest and we’re on shaky ground with ReseuneSec. The department heads are all mad at me because I’m insisting on security drills and upsetting their routine. Somebody murdered Patil, somebody murdered Thieu, they probably had you on their list to make sure that what you knew didn’t get out–but didn’t want to stir up the old murder case and get questions asked. They were doing just fine as things were–until you came back here. They lost the election and they murdered Spurlin before he could take office in Defense–never mind they hadn’t read the results yet, they had the polls. They could work math. And they moved. That’s a faction at work. Somebody blew up a tower upriver, and it wasn’t the Paxers. It was a diversion of our energies. Or a signal to somebody. Lao’s dead. Khalid’s trying to force martial law. He’s getting very frustrated by now, because Council can’t muster a special decrees quorum if it wanted to, and I don’t know at what hour he’s going to get tired of reporters down at our airport sending out bulletins about Councillors’ families taking shelter here, which is what’s happening. Pretty soon he’ll figure out he’s got to do something about the reporters, and me, and maybe you. I’m due down at the airport in a few hours to talk to them so Councillors in Novgorod know their families aresafe, and more to the point, so Khalid can’t lie to his own Bureau about what’s going on here. But if we make a mistake here at Reseune, the whole of Union is in for Khalid in charge of the government, and that’s not going to be good, so, no, ser, Yanni isn’t here, I’m doing the best I can with not too many people left alive who know what’s going on or even what it’s about, and I need you to tell me what your deal was with Defense, because you’re the cause the Paxers have taken up, while they’re bombing subways, and because you’re the one the first Ari hauled home because you’d been dealing with Defense. And you’ll notice Defense moved fairly fast once you came home to Reseune.”

“My dealwith Defense was to get me the hell out of Reseune.”

“They didthat part of it,” Justin muttered, and drew a black scowl from Jordan.

Then that stare snapped back to her. “If Kyle was theirs, I never knew it. I absolutely never knew it.”

“Who were you dealing with in that Bureau? Was Khalid any part of that group?”

“You want me to come clean? Then I’ll tell you my conditions. My name cleared. Cleared. Freedom to leave. Freedom to write and say what I want– anything. And I’ll tell you about Khalid. Yes, I knowKhalid. There are questions I’ve got, too, with this azi you’ve got, plentyof them.”

“We’ve got a few days,” she said, “maybe a few days to figure out how to get through to him. And I want bothof you working on this.”

“The hell,” Jordan said. “He can stay out of it.”

“Jordan and I will talk about it,” Paul said quietly.

Curiously, then, Jordan glanced aside, didn’t look at any of them, shrugged, and walked back into the inner apartment.

“In the morning,” Paul said to them. “We’ll talk.”

Family, she thought. Family more complicated, in its way, than her dealings with Denys. But it was somehow functioning. She had the feeling something was moving. Maybe it was something Jordan had finally believed. Maybe there’d been some other change in the atmosphere. Paul. Paul had never said a word before. And now Paul had an opinion.

And Justin had asked about Paul’s manual. Hadn’t he? She’d been distracted. Nowshe knew what the latest fight was about.

She walked with Justin and Grant back to Alpha Wing and back to their mutual parting, all their security in attendance, and didn’t say anything but, “Thank you, Justin. Thank you, Grant. Try to work with him. Please.”

“I intend to,” Justin said. “I fully intend to.” After which he and Grant went inside.

She went into her own place, with Jory, with Florian, and felt like asking for a vodka, but she still had to go down to the airport. She still had to talk to the reporters.

She went into her office. Only Florian went that far with her.

She turned then, and looked at him.

“Please don’t do that again,” he said.

“It wasn’t fair of me. I thought I was saving you having to run back here. I didn’t intend to go farther than Justin’s apartment. Then it seemed safe. I think it was.”

“It scared us.” Florian said. Very few things did, but she saw that that was very much the truth.

“The first Ari made that mistake,” she said. “I’ve asked too much, sent you this way and that, asked you and Catlin to do more than you ever ought to have to. I won’t send you apart from me again.”

“We’re not tired,” Florian said. He didn’t lie often. He didn’t do it particularly well, no more than Justin ever did.

“I love you,” she said, and hugged his shoulder, which was solid and sure as he was. She rested her head against it for a moment. He put his hand on her head, and stood there.

A long, long time. Until she grew tired of standing.

BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter xix

AUGUST 24, 2424

1421H

“…we will continue to support the Council as elected by the people of Union, and we will continue to provide for family and relatives of the Council who have appealed to us for a safe haven, this in the wake of the murder of one elected Councillor and threats against families of living ones. Two Councillors are with us at Reseune.

“We support the people of Novgorod in resisting the threats of those elements who create civil unrest and we call on them to use their creative energy to sustain the city and its services. Those of you who hold public service jobs, count them of extreme importance and consider your duty critical to the safety of all citizens. Those of you who have sworn or Contracted to defend Union, support the Council in its determination to uphold the law.

“The Council has designated a date for assembly and will act. We call on all citizens and azi to support the Council in the face of bullying and threat of bodily harm. We call on the loyal armed services of Union to support the Council and to refuse unlawful orders. We call on every citizen to document every act of intimidation, every unlawful demand on the rights of the public, with numbers and vid records where you can secure them safely. These unlawful acts will come to trial and the people of Novgorod will have their day in court.

“Long live the Union.”

The little minx, Yanni thought, and shut down the vid. She was that. She’d just appealed to Khalid’s own Bureau. She hadn’t told the whens and wheres of the Council plan, just that Reseune sheltered two Councillors’ families, a Councillor and a Proxy Councillor…she didn’t mention that one of the two was herself.

And if Khalid didn’t currently know where Edgerton was, any more than they did, she’d just clouded the issue…and maybe thrown off that search.

“Sounded good to me,” Frank said.

They sat in a hotel they now shared with Corain, Amy Carnath, and Quentin. They knew damned well the plainclothes watchers across the street weren’t civilian police, and the hotel employees were down to a few–

“Go home,” Yanni had told the manager, personally. “Dismiss your staff. Those who stay to maintain the systems will get triple pay. Reseune will see to it if I survive to get back to my office. Those who stay on duty, the same. But it’s no longer safe. Go home.”

Seven of the staff, including the manager and assistant manager, the head custodian, two of his people, one sous‑chef, and the head of housekeeping, had stayed on, and they kept things running…making them more comfortable than they might have been.

Sit still, and wait. That was what they had to do right now. ReseuneSec had a handful of plainclothes agents throughout the city that made quiet visits to watched areas, and that made tight transmission to receivers here and there, data‑squeal that made it quick and thorough. The latter was Frank’s expertise more than his. He didn’t set it up or critique it: he just knew how to receive it.

And one message had come in which in no way heartened him.

It said, Trying to make contact with Lynch. Not answering last two days. Will continue effort pending outcome of other inquiry. M.

State, Defense, and the city government had police powers, and so, by a trick of history, did Reseune Administrative Territory and its adjunct at Planys. Reseune, with its ability to police azi welfare in every factory and office in Union, had an investigative and enforcement organization in some respects as extensive as that of Defense and the city government.

And Reseune used it…not the way Defense did, with obvious intimidation standing on the curb out there in the rain, no. With a little more finesse, Yanni hoped. Finesse might never have been his strong suit inside Reseune, but out here, with armed Fleet agents with drawn guns scaring hell out of the sous‑chef when he took a look into the alley, he tried not to offend the people they hoped to contact. He sent quiet queries to certain Defense contacts in other services, and hoped for answers–like the removal of surveillance from his curb.

He didn’t reply to the message from M. He just absorbed it and every other tidbit of information that came wafting in. He had dinner scheduled with young Amy, her Quentin, Frank, and Mikhail Corain. They maintained at least some of the comforts of home.

And deFranco had made it safely to Reseune. Chavez and his family were somewhere en route, granted he’d gotten through to the airport. Tien would go there next, solo; his family were safe on remote Viking. Harad, State, commanding another security apparatus, independent of Defense, would be the next to last to leave the capital.

He had the short straw. His people were armed and spread throughout the city–in plain clothes. He hoped to hell the agents that had scared the chef had been vastly exceeding their orders. But they were prepared to fight their way to the airport if they had to.

BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter xx

AUGUST 27, 2424

1430H

Hicks had had a heavy dose of trank–he wasn’t happy that the Warricks, father and son, with Grant and Paul, were involved in Kyle’s case at all; but he was a little glazed, and sat having a little fruit juice during prep, eyeing them all the while with distrust. Chi Prang was there, with her assistant. Ivanov took the medical end of things, with two psych nurses, a cardiovascular surgeon and her two surgical nurses on call. Supportive machinery was in the room–it was Ivanov’s suggestion, and Ari took the advice, even if it crowded the immediate area.

The Admin clinic couldn’t remotely handle an operation of this complexity, so they set up in the hospital’s A wing, a real surgery, with specialized monitors brought up from the psych labs, plus the other options, if that was what it took. It had needed two days to set it up.

Today finally involved Hicks. And the rest of them. And the monitors. And Kyle.

Kyle, for his peace of mind, didn’t know a thing about it–he arrived tranked out, though he seemed robust enough, once the monitors started telling what they knew. They lit up, one miniaturized bank alter another.

“We’re being careful.” Ari said to Hicks, who looked increasingly anxious as the moments went on and the monitors came up. “You’ll be right by him when he starts to wake up. Just keep him calm–you can touch him, but only say, ‘I’m here.’ Say your name and say, ‘I’m here.’ Nothing else outside the script.”

“I understand you,” Hicks said. He was, at the moment, scared as all hell, determined not to get thrown out of the operation, Ari thought. But that wouldn’t happen. That would be the worst thing for Kyle AK; if they lost Hicks’ active participation, they might lose Kyle, or lose him, mentally for good and all. If Hicks folded, they’d have to put Kyle back under, fast.

She went over to the rest of her group, who were going through the procedures book and script, a physical printout, with notes. Florian and Catlin attended her and kept to the background; Mark and Gerry were there with Justin and Grant–they weren’t short of security if they encountered a problem, but at the moment security meant four more bodies in not much space for the operators, just behind the heart‑lung apparatus.

Jordan was team leader. Jordan and Prang had worked together before, Jordan had said they were the two who’d actually done this kind of intervention once and a long time ago, and he bluntly wanted to be in charge. There wasn’t to be any freehand, just carefully planned branches: if Kyle did this, then that; if Kyle branched in another direction, something else. All possible paths were mapped, all with more care than any operation Ari had ever read; Prang had come into the conferences, and she and Jordan had laid down the increasingly complex map, with Ari’s participation and Justin’s, and they’d done it in three marathon meetings–fascinating, under any other circumstances. Fascinating, too, when Jordan was on business, talking about this branch and the other, and what the trigger might be. He was fast in his decisions, and focused only on the problem. The one point where he and Prang differed was about where the block actually sat, and exactly where a not‑very‑adept military operator had put in something and just told Kyle to protect it.

“Here,” Jordan had said, and pointed to the same area Grant had indicated, down in the secondaries–but then he’d linked it to a second item. Kyle had programming from back in the first days of the azi participation in the War–a routine about defending what his Contract‑holder set him to defend. That was fine, Ari thought, but to an alpha that defendwent metaphysical real fast, and they didn’t do that kind of thing; that had stood out, to her eyes. She found that kind of generality in the programming at four other points she could see, things they didn’t dowith alphas or even betas nowadays, because things hadgone wrong. She had those circled on her own copy, and Justin and Grant both had tagged them as inappropriate from the start. Old‑style programming. Old as the azi in question.

Kyle being, himself an Alpha Supervisor by the military’s make‑do procedures of the day, had considerably reworked his own programming by the time Defense sent him back to Reseune as a spy…that clearly had happened.

Prang had said, regarding the initials on the file, “IC. Carnath, maybe.”

“Huh,” Jordan snorted. “That’s Charles. Ivan Charles, not Carnath.”

“Him,” Prang had said, and when Ari asked who Ivan Charles was. Prang said simply, “He worked on the military sets.”

But Jordan had said, “Emory Senior used to take his crappy work and just shove it through. It made money. They were turning out azi by the hundreds, same type, same geneset. You could have a whole damn company the officers couldn’t tell apart, no attempt to do a sociology set on the unit, you just shoved them out the door and they went out to some godforsaken operation and died by the hundreds; and then they’d patch up the survivors out there on the lines and send them back to the War. Emory Senior had some damned idiot staff writing broad‑based tape back during the War. Defense wanted to control everything, every damned subclause and dot, a routine to do this, a routine to do that–the client wanted certain things, they got them.”

Ari had been a little offended at that assessment. Then she realized Emory Senior, in that context, meant OlgaEmory.

Way, way back, then.

“Certificates weren’t specific either,” Prang had said. “The higher‑end operators handled both the betas and the alphas, and there wasn’t any certification in the sense we use now.”

“We’re not teaching a damned history lesson,” Jordan had said. “Kyle’s alpha. He got a crap initial set. They all did.”

“He was supposed to serve in headquarters,” Prang had said, “no nearer the front than Alpha Station.”

“His military record is nowhere in file and we don’t know where the hell he was,” Jordan had said. “We weren’t around for Olga’s goings‑on. We assume what we have to assume. But we’re notassuming when we say he’s kill‑capable. The axe code didn’t take, did it? That means, alpha or not, he came back to us with it, and nobody could have installed it on him in ReseuneSec unless the axe code worked. But somebodydid it. That meant he was near the lines, and myguess is he got crap‑work patched in to shape him up to work in a combat zone. Sure, Defense swore they didn’t ever do that. But they swore to a lot of things that were a flat lie.”

“Why,” Ari had asked–and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt the train of thought, but it was an important question, “why, if he got back to Reseune in ‘62, why didn’t the first Ari ever look at him? Why didn’t she catch it?”

Prang had said. “I checked the timeline. Your predecessor had resigned the directorship to take up the Council seat. Yanni was taking over the Directorate. Giraud was running Security. Those two didn’t see eye to eye. Giraud handled his department; and Giraud got Kyle. Ari wasn’t even at Reseune when that was going on. She came back and Kyle was Giraud’s ongoing pet datasource.”

“Giraud was a damned fool,” Jordan had said. “Ari had gotten Defense to turn over every alpha they had and most of them were over in technical. But this one–this special one–I’m betting he was handling azi line troops, and if he was, it’s a damn certainty he got beta tape and got shoved out thereto patch them up, because they didn’t ever ship betas back to some nice safe hospital ship. We never sent out any alphas suited for combat. So what else do you think they did, to get alphas that could take the hammering, on the lines? Beta tape. Next most applicable, and they had a pile of it.”

It had been hours. Hours of Prang and Jordan arguing, and then Justin arguing with Jordan, “You don’t have to touch the tertiary sets at all. If he’s self‑modified, they’re irrelevant.”

“What are we suggesting?” Jordan had snapped. “Go straight after the deep sets?”

“I’m saying it’s linked back to that secondary you named, and at least…”

“Oh, let’s just do deep sets and go for an early lunch.”

Justin hadn’t flared. He’d said, as calm as Grant, “One sharp stress and a calm‑down.”

“You’ll kill him. That thing in tertiary will have a trap on it like you haven’t seen. And remember he’s built off it for decades. It’s got all sorts of embellishments hung on it.”

“We do have him supported,” Ivanov said.

The talk had gone way deep into medical jargon at that point, and Ari had just sat with her chin on her fist, fascinated, and listened to four of the best there’d ever been going at it line by line–Prang was clearly outclassed; Grant and Paul got into it, and Justin stuck to his argument that they needed to do a preliminary fix in the secondaries.

Then she said, after listening to all of it, and flipping back through the lines of programming, the originallines of programming, that Kyle had started with. “The self‑defense ethic. That’s where.”

Jordan had given her a sharp, hard look.

“Support it,” she’d said, “don’t attack it. That’s part of his original deep set.”

“Who said attack it?” Jordan had said peevishly.

She said, “We support the deep set, right where this beta tape’s taken hold. We say an enemy’s gotten inside his defenses, and we know it’s beta, and he has to find this enemy for us. So he’ll identify that tape and shove it outside his safe perimeter. If you’re right, he’s wired everything off that start–so he’s the safest one to unwire it. Isn’t he? He trusts Hicks. If we get Hicks to say he has to get ID on the beta section, can’t he do it? Convince him it doesn’t belong. And then we tell him to erase the intruder–so he just starts taking out the secondary level, unwiring the combat ethic the block relies on. Doesn’t he? Everythingthe military’s done is going to be based on the tape they put in. They aren’t us. They can’t workon secondary, and the tape they know best is the tape they put in.”

It had at least gotten their attention, and made a silence, and made Jordan frown at her.

“Maybe,” Jordan had said. “Dangerous as hell.”

“She’s got a point,” Justin had said.

“She’s been studying fucking Emory.”

“You know I have,” she’d said calmly. “For more than half my life.”

Prang had just kept her mouth shut, but Paul had said, echoing Justin, “She has a point. Avoiding fighting it out down on tertiary would be safer, because tertiary may be a lower charge, but it’s just that much wider. Whatever they did creating that block just spreads out into territory he knows and we can’t map. And maybe, if he can ID the tape, we’ve got it on file. Maybe they didn’t risk anything they’d written or modded and it will turn out to be Reseune tape.”

Jordan hadn’t said anything about it for the rest of the session, not until the next meeting, when he’d said, “All right, Ari Junior, Justin, Grant. Elaborate. How are you preventing a breakdown if we go into this operation with the happy theory they didn’t write their own beta routine–and maybe didn’t even write their own block?”

“We ask Dr. Ivanov to keep the physiology stable,” Ari said. “Just keep shooting him full of the same feel‑good juice the compliance ethic, which we’re triggering, naturally manufactures; and we just let Hicks argue him into erasing the beta tape.”