Law of Survival

by Kristine Smith

  Jani entered the lobby to find the night desk waiting for her. The ComPol had been by…several times…they had left messages…this was highly irregular….

  So’s being shot at. Jani left the agitated woman behind for the quiet of the lift. On the way up, she uncased a meal bar. Chocolate-caramel wasn’t her first choice for an early morning snack, but she felt light-headed again and the last thing she needed was another trip to Neoclona to hear John rumble “I told you so.”

  She keyed into her flat, and slipped through the open door and into the path of a redheaded hurricane.

  “Where the hell have you been!” Angevin had returned to her own flat in the interim—she had exchanged her eveningwear for a pullover and trousers in a lived-in shade of yellow. “We’ve been waiting for hours! Don’t you know what a comport is!”

  “How much do you know?” Jani extracted her arm from Angevin’s grasp and headed for the kitchen to find something to wash the taste of meal bar from her mouth.

  “Not a fookin’ thing.” Steve emerged from the kitchen, soft drink dispo in hand, wearing a darker version of Angevin’s outfit. “Fifteen minutes after you leave, we hear sirens. Run down to the lobby just in time to see you tumble into the ambulance after Blondie. Then before you can say Bob’s yer uncle, we’re up the spout with fookin’ ComPol.”

  “We tried to tap friends for news, but nobody knew anything and there was a comlock on calls going in and out of the Ministries.” Angevin wedged herself between Jani and Steve. “Are you all right? How’s Lucien?”

  “I’m fine.” Jani tried to circle around the pair, but they moved as one to block her. “Lucien took a shooter blast in the stomach. He suffered burns and impact injuries. He had just come out of Surgery when I left Neoclona. They wouldn’t let me see him, though—he was too woozy. But he’ll be fine.”

  “So everyone’s fine.” Steve raised the dispo like a toast. “So all’s bright and sunny and we kin go home, then?” He pushed Angevin aside as gently as his temper would allow and stepped up to Jani. She stood taller than he, but that didn’t seem to faze him. “What. Happened?”

  Jani squirted past him and darted into the kitchen. “Robbery attempt. Idiot fired before we could give him what he wanted.” She yanked open the cooler and scrabbled for a dispo of lemon tonic. She cracked the seal and drank half the container, then turned to find Steve standing in the entry, choirboy face clawed by fatigue.

  “I told Ange yer shook and I sent her to bed.” He stepped inside and let the door close. “We’re sleepin’ here, in one of the spares. Brought bedrolls from our flat, until we can order proper furniture. We’re movin’ in—we’re not leavin’ you alone.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You could be leaving yourselves open to some sort of retaliation.”

  “So it warn’t no fookin’ robbery, were it? It’s like what happened to Barry.”

  “It—it’s possible.”

  The unsureness of Jani’s response touched Steve. His anger softened to aggravation—he patted her arm and backed off. “Get some sleep. You look all-in.” He took a final swig of his drink and poured the remainder down the sink.

  Jani trudged to her bedroom. Undressed. Showered. The egg beneath her right knee had shrunk to a marble, and the joint itself didn’t hurt at all when the spray hit it. Her shoulder did, however—if she twisted her neck just so, she could just glimpse the tender, purple-red swelling.

  She carried her trouser suit to her closet to hang it up; as she did, she caught sight of the green holosilk. She felt the release of the seams, the slide of the material down her skin. She stood in the middle of the closet, clutching the trouser suit. Then she hangered it and closed the door.

  She pulled a pair of sleep shorts and a T-shirt out of her dresser. In her effort to avoid the mirror, she found herself looking at the painting of the costumed couple. It proved a more complicated scene than she had initially thought. The gowned woman stood in the center of the ballroom, amid a swirl of dancing couples. She looked toward the veranda where the young officer, clad in brilliant white, stood, but her expression held more worry than welcome. She may have planned a tryst with him for later that evening, but someone had gotten his signals crossed.

  “Is that what happened, Lucien?” She sketched an outline around the young officer with her finger. “Niall thinks you tried to set me up. John and Val think something’s up, too. They sure don’t want me talking to you.” She flicked her finger against his painted brim, as if to knock it off.

  Then, for the first time, Jani noted the man with whom the woman had been dancing before the officer made his appearance. A dour, older sort in a staid evening suit, he watched the woman with the same intensity with which she studied the officer. “What do you know that I don’t, John?” Jani asked the figure. “Hard fact? Rumor? Or just jealousy?”

  She piled into bed. Sleep came eventually. At one point, she dreamed a shooter crack. The imagined sound shook her awake—she opened her eyes to find herself clutching her T-shirt over her pounding heart. She managed to fall asleep again, but it took time. Her head ached, and she flinched at every sound.

  CHAPTER 16

  “And the plan fer the day is what, then?” Steve sat opposite Jani on the sitting room floor near the window, the remains of a makeshift breakfast scattered between them—tea, bread and jam for Steve, coffee and a meal bar for her. “Talk to the ComPol, get them off yer back?”

  Jani braced against the wall and struggled to her feet. “I need to go to Sheridan.” She picked a fleck of chocolate from the sleeve of her dark brown trouser suit and massaged away the miniscule smear. “Besides, I have a lawyer. His name is Joaquin Loiaza—let him talk to the ComPol.”

  “Ah, yeah?” Steve locked his hands around his knee and rocked back. “This is what you want me to tell the green-and-whites when they call for the eighty-seventh time, or better yet, stop by in person?”

  “I’ll talk to them.” Angevin sat at Jani’s desk and screened through comport listings for furniture companies. “I know exactly what to say.”

  “You know exactly what to say to get us all arrested.” Steve expelled a healthy billow of smoke. “Ange and I will get started on your paper mail,” he said to Jani as he rose, “just to kill time before the ComPol rounds us all up.”

  “I’m ordering furniture first.” Angevin hit the comport pad. “If I have to sit in this chair for one more hour, I’m going to get a nosebleed.”

  “You found any catalogs?” Steve planted himself in front of the desk. “So’s we know what we’re orderin’? So’s we don’t wind up with three purple couches?”

  “I know how to furnish a flat.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, I remember—”

  “Have fun, kids.” Jani pulled her duffel from beneath the desk and waved good-bye as she slipped out the door.

  “Foreign Transactions, please.” Jani held out her Fort Sheridan ID to the front gate check-in desk.

  “Yes, ma’am. Wait here please.” The desk corporal disappeared with the ID into the communications alcove.

  Jani wandered the tiny lobby. Outside the front window, the main archway of the Shenandoah Gate glistened in the morning sun, its whitestone surface etched with the names of those killed in the Greatest War, the conflict that defined the Commonwealth and her colonies generations before. Tens of thousands of Earthbound names.

  Along with a few colonial. Her ever-remembered dead, inscribed in the only memorial they would ever have. Borgie. Yolan. Felicio. Stanleigh. Eleven others. Their names didn’t belong in the Gate—Jani reentered them by means various after the Gate monitors excised them during their weekly checks. It was a losing battle on her part, she knew—sooner or later, implacability and cryptography would triumph over guile and bloody-mindedness. But until it does, I’ll keep plugging them in. All the dead merited remembrance, especially those everyone wished forgotten.

  “Ma’am?”

  Jani turned.<
br />
  “Colonel Hals is expecting you.” The corporal held out Jani’s ID, along with a day pass to clip to her jacket. “She says you know the way.”

  “Lt. Ischi, of course, knew almost immediately it happened. That young man has connections from Base Command to the vehicle pool. He called me at home. ‘I hope you don’t mind, ma’am,’ he said.” Frances Hals turned away from her office window and frowned at Jani. She looked prim and collected in her fallweights, wavy brown hair tucked into a tight french roll. “I’m disappointed that you didn’t call me yourself.”

  “I didn’t have the time.” Jani had settled into her regular place in the visitor’s chair near Frances’s desk. “I spent most of the night at Neoclona. When I finally got back to my place, it was all I could do to fall into bed.”

  “Hmm.” Frances walked slowly back to her desk. “All our regularly scheduled dealings with the idomeni embassy have been cancelled until further notice.” She lowered into her chair. “Looks like Shai’s using this little misfortune as an excuse to reel in Tsecha’s lead.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” Jani crossed her legs with care. Her right knee no longer hurt, and she wanted to keep it that way. “I think she wants to shut him out completely.”

  “Are they allowed to do that?”

  “I think they’ve started listening to their xenobehaviorists too. I also think the term ‘loose shooter’ has been explained to them ad nauseum.”

  “Hmm.” Frances’s round face turned a study in downward curves. She didn’t appear as eager to discuss Nema and his quirks as she normally was. “So.” She sat forward, cupping her chin in her hands. “What happened?”

  “Everybody keeps asking me that.”

  “You were shot at! Lucien was gravely wounded. Heaven forbid we should care.”

  Jani picked at the thin band of upholstery covering the chair arm. “I don’t know for sure. I think it was a blown robbery attempt, but I just don’t know.” She held back a “damn it!” One thing she missed about her former life was that she had never let anyone get close enough to ask questions she didn’t want to answer. The fact that she lacked a complete answer to this particular question aggravated her even more.

  “You’ll tell us when you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.” Frances held up her hands in surrender, then toyed with the edge of her leather desk pad. “I hate to admit this, but I do have a selfish reason for bugging you.” She gave the pad a last, irritated shove. “We’ve become quite involved with the doings at the embassy since your discharge. In just a few short months, Foreign Transactions has gone from being a glorified colonial shipping office to playing a major role in the determination of Commonwealth–Shèrá policy.”

  Jani nodded. “You put your bird on the line to make that happen. It was a gutsy move, and you pulled it off.”

  “You helped.” Frances’s brown eyes flared a “don’t give me that” warning. “The problem is, now that we’re perceived as an arm of Diplomatic, we no longer handle the sort of work we performed during your short but eventful stay here. In other words, without the idomeni, we don’t have anything to do. And you know what happens when the Service finds out some of its own don’t have anything to do?”

  Jani tugged her duffel onto her lap. “Reassignment.”

  “It’s not a given, but it has crossed my mind.” Frances smiled knowingly. “So, given that I know how much you dislike having people fuss after you, consider my inquiry into your affairs completely self-serving.”

  Jani let her head drop back against the headrest. “I appreciate it, really.”

  “No, you don’t—you hate it. You’re a born lone operator. You prefer that people disappear until you need them.”

  Jani lifted her head and stared into a quietly attractive face softened with weary humor. She enjoyed Frances’s spot-on character assessments…except when they were directed at her. “You’re the second person to tell me that in the past two days.”

  “Who was the other one?”

  “Dolly Aryton. I went to see her yesterday about some…stuff.”

  Frances had paused to take a sip of tea. She held a hand over her mouth as she grabbed for her napkin. “Dorothea—?” She coughed, then tried again. “The Registry Inspector General?”

  “I went to school with her.”

  “I know that.” Frances dabbed at her shirtfront. “Which one was she again?”

  “Five of Six. Earthly Might. Family connections.” Jani eyed her timepiece as surreptitiously as she could. “Mind if I ask a question?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Jani.” Frances’s face tightened with aggravation.

  Why do I seem to possess such talent in that regard? “Do you think I’m immature?”

  “Immature? My word, what did Aryton say to you?” Frances folded the napkin into a neat square and set it next to her cup. “If it makes you feel better, no. My take on the Kilian psyche is that you don’t have much use for the social details other people think are important. No one’s going to get a ‘Good morning, and how are the kids?’ from you—you just jump right into the business and that tends to ruffle folks. You’re also intensely private, and when someone probes, the walls fly up. Sometimes, that knocks people off-guard, and sometimes it makes them angry.” She shrugged. “And sometimes they find it attractive.” She studied the folded napkin, her lips pursing. “Like your fine Lt. Pascal. I can’t think of another man of my acquaintance who has less interest in the everyday, and he follows you like a moth follows a flame.”

  But Niall would tell you that he had his reasons. Jani heard a mild bumping against the office entry, like someone moving furniture.

  Frances sighed. “That’s Ischi’s latest version of a ten-minute warning. He thinks it’s less rude. I wish he’d use the intercom like everyone else.” She tapped her workstation touchboard and checked her calendar. “And I do have a meeting in twenty minutes at North Lakeside, so I had better get my tail in gear.” She gathered some files from a slotted rack. “Did you come here for a reason, or was this an actual social call?”

  “I felt restless.” Jani forced a smile in an effort to practice one of those disregarded details. “I just wanted to talk.” She fingered the day pass, which would allow her to walk unimpeded anywhere in the South Central area of the base. Not that a visit to her former CO had been an onerous price to pay to obtain it. She liked Frances, and enjoyed her company. She called her a friend. That made it OK. No harm, no foul.

  South Central Bachelor Officers’ Quarters were situated atop the highest in the series of rises that served as an informal boundary between the business side of the base region and the sports facilities that took up most of the West Central area. Twelve floors of white cement, unadorned and sparsely landscaped, it seemed designed with the intent to persuade its tenants to either marry or move out as soon as possible. An interim place for the newly commissioned, it contained nothing to recommend it as a long-term domicile.

  Lucien’s lived here for four years. Jani entered the empty lobby. Officially. In reality, he had spent most of the time on Anais Ulanova’s Security team, and had lived where her orders demanded. A good part of that time, he had offered during one pillow confession, had been spent running down rumors of Jani’s existence. And Jani had believed him. That’s how they had met, after all, when Lucien served undercover on the Interior ship that ferried her to Earth for the first time.

  But did he spend all his time looking for me? Or had he worked double-duty laying the groundwork for L’araignée? Are you Monsieur Le Blond, Lucien?

  She darted past the open entry of the rec room, from which the raucous sounds of a Cup match emanated. Up the stairs to the mezzanine. Down the hall to the lift.

  Fifth floor, Number 5W1. Jani watched the floor indicator flick upward. She had obtained the address months before from the Base Directory. She had never visited Lucien’s rooms, though—he had never invited her and she felt that there were some things about him s
he didn’t want to know.

  My mistake. She disembarked the lift. Turned left. Right. Left. Stopped before the middle door in the short hallway.

  L. Pascal. The name had been etched on a rectangle of unpolished metal, the sort of seat-of-the-pants doorplate meant to be disposed of in a few months. Jani gave the door a sharp rap, because no one ever heard loud sounds, only quiet ones. Hit the entry buzzer twice. Knocked again.

  Then she dug into her duffel for Lucien’s wallet and picked the meager contents, looking for a key card. Although God knows what good it will do. The lockmech consisted of a handpad as well as a card reader, and since Jani had never visited, Lucien had never had a chance to key in her print. She dug out the key card and ran it through the reader anyway, then touched her hand to the plate with a sigh of acknowledged defeat. I should have asked Niall to crib me access, but then he’d know I suspect Lucien of something and he’d take that ball and run with it—

  She froze as she heard the whirr of the lock. The slide of a bolt. The whisper of polywood surfaces sliding over one another as the door swept aside.

  Jani stared dumbly at the opened door, hopped over the threshold as the sound of approaching footsteps startled her, then damned herself for her stupidity as the door slid closed behind her.

  He’s trapped me. He had rigged a system that let people in, but didn’t let them out. Base Security was no doubt bearing down on her location at that very moment.

  Then I had better get a move on, hadn’t I?

  Jani looked around. The sitting room contained a couch along the near wall, a table with two chairs along the windowed far wall. A narrow desk stood in the near corner by the door, its work surface filled by a comport and a stylus holder.

  Jani walked to the desk. The comport’s incoming message indicator showed still and dark. She hit the command pad anyway, in case it malfunctioned, but the device remained silent.