Rules of Conflict

by Kristine Smith

  “I have the right to find out what happened to my ServRec.”

  “No. You have the right to come to me, and say, ‘I wonder what happened to my ServRec.’ To which I would reply, ‘Why do you believe it’s applicable to your case?’ And if I liked your answer, I would contract with a registered legal investigator and have them look into it, so that if something did turn up, it would have been uncovered properly and we will have had a chance to deal with it. Your case is still open, Jani, and that means the rules of discovery are in force. Everything we find, the prosecution gets to see and vice versa. That being the situation, it really isn’t advisable to turn over every rock you find just to see what crawls out!” He covered his face with his hands. “Damn it! You’re a documents examiner. You of all people should know better.”

  Jani folded her arms. The chair rocked some more, but it didn’t upset her stomach as much. She felt stronger. “If it’s the truth, why bury it?”

  “So that we don’t wind up uncovering a mess we can’t deal with!”

  “You mean you don’t want to know what you don’t know.” Jani cocked her head to look him in the eye. “All those things you’ve heard about me. It’s starting to occur to you that they might be true, isn’t it?”

  “Not related to this case. Therefore, not my concern.” Friesian flexed his neck again and returned to his seat. “I don’t think Pimentel would be very happy with me right now. That’s the end of legal talk until you get out of here.”

  Jani picked up her fruit sludge and stirred the melted remains, just to have something to do with her hands. The repetitive motion helped her think. “Sometimes you walk around a big place like Sheridan, you keep seeing the same faces. Makes the place seem smaller somehow.”

  Friesian rocked his head back and forth in a “so-so” nod. “They probably live or work in this area of the base. Makes sense they’d crop up regularly.”

  “Hmm.” Jani gave the spoon another turn. “There’s this one guy who’s popped up a few times. Full colonel. Nasty facial scar.”

  “Oh, him.” Friesian frowned. “Niall Pierce. Special Services.”

  “What, is he famous or something?”

  “No. He’s just the A-G’s right hand.” The frown turned to a grimace of concern. “You haven’t made yourself known to him in any way that I should know about, have you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “No, of course you don’t.” Friesian clasped his hands and slowly twiddled his thumbs. “You remember what Spec Service is?”

  “They’re the hatchet team.”

  “No, they provide special assistance and advice to the commander on technical matters and other O-three situations.”

  “Out of the ordinary?”

  “You remember that? That is reassuring.”

  “I remember lots of things.” Jani grabbed a handful of pajama trouser and hoisted, right leg over left. “That’s a pretty wide gulf between the A-G and a colonel in Spec Service. What’s the deal with Mako and Pierce, they marry sisters or something?”

  “Better than that.” Friesian eyed her thoughtfully. “They served together on the CSS Kensington.”

  “Really? The Kensington flagshipped the evac of Rauta Shèràa’s human enclave.”

  “Yes, it did. Mako was her captain. Sergeant Pierce played an integral role in the ground assault.”

  “Sergeant Pierce?”

  Friesian nodded. “Yeah, that man earned himself a field commission. For that matter, all the members of the Kensington crew have done well over the years. Dr. General Carvalla was Medical Officer. General Gleick, the Sheridan base commander, was Mako’s exec. Aliens, anarchy, hostile fire, a threat to the Commonwealth—that evac had it all. Even the hot water they got into after they returned to Earth added to the aura.”

  Jani uncrossed and recrossed her legs, worked her neck, did her best to seem only mildly interested. “Did they botch the evac?”

  “No, nothing that serious. They mishandled some remains. Problem was that the remains belonged to Family members. Mako had to testify at a Board of Inquiry about what happened. He knew a witch-hunt when he saw one, and went on the offensive. Named names with regard to some of the garbage that went on at Rauta Shèràa. Rumor has it that those records will remain sealed for two hundred years.” He looked at Jani, and stood.

  “That’s it. You look beat, and I don’t want Pimentel coming after me with a bone cutter.” He looked at her with kinder eyes, and smiled. “This is going to work out for you. You just need to get your strength back, listen to your doctor, and stay away from the SIB.” The courtroom light flared. “Promise?”

  Jani nodded. “Whose remains?”

  Friesian sighed. “Oh, no one important. Just the members of Rauta Shèràa Base Command who died during the evac. You probably knew them—Ebben, Unser, and Fitzhugh.”

  What do you know—those three bastards didn’t make it offworld alive. “Think they died accidentally or on purpose?”

  “Not your problem. Do you promise?”

  Jani nodded in the here and now as, meanwhile, a part of her returned home to Ville Acadie. Her father had meted out her punishment, and explained to her that it was for her own good. And that part of her sat on the couch, head hung low, and murmured agreement as she planned her next escapade. Mais oui, Papa. “Promise.”

  Pimentel fingered his workstation touchpad once. Twice. “The augmentation scan does show some low-level stimulation in the regions around your primary insert.” He spun the desk display so Jani could see it. “See.” He pointed at a multicolored blob that pulsed in the lower middle area of the translucent overlay of her brain. “We’re seeing moderate hyperactivity in your thalamus and in the area of the insert nearest to your amygdala. Now, your tendency toward vivid dreaming is indicated by your elevated Dobriej values”—he tapped a row of numbers that scrolled along the top of the display—“and combining that with the excitation in your limbic system and diencephalon—”

  “Roger!”

  “Fight or flight and sensory areas,” he said, switching to lay-speak without missing a beat. “Memory.” He snatched a dispo out of a box on his desk and wiped a smudge from the surface of the display. “I don’t think I’m telling you things you don’t already know. You’re one of those augments who tends to hallucinate under stress. The porphyria may be aggravating this tendency. The usual monitoring we perform may need to be stepped up in your case.” He shredded a corner of the dispo.

  Jani thought back to Pierce’s post-takedown expression. The bewilderment. The desolation. Is that what you’re offering me, Roger? “What do you recommend?”

  Pimentel shrugged. “Well, my first suggestion is always to remove the augmentation. Your records show you were a borderline case. We have ample justification.” He rested his elbow on his desk and tapped a finger along his jaw. “Of course, even the most challenged augment is reluctant to give up the benefits. I don’t believe I need to explain those to you.”

  “No.” Augie had saved Jani’s life too many times for her to give him up now. Like most men, you’re trouble, but I still think I’ll keep you. “Next option.”

  “Hmm.” Pimentel’s jaw-tapping slowed. “We’d be entering to experimental areas.”

  “Roger, my entire adult medical history has been an experimental area.”

  Pimentel gave a snort of laughter. “Quite.” The tapping stopped. “I’d like to try to take you back.”

  “Take me back where?”

  “To what you were before Shroud got his hands on you. I’ve been consulting with some researchers in our Gene Therapeutics lab. To say they’re itching to get their hands on you doesn’t do their enthusiasm justice.” He smiled like he had a present for her hidden in his pocket. “I’d like to try to make you human again. One hundred percent.”

  Jani pulled her robe closer around her and looked past Pimentel to the sunlit scene outside his window. She longed to sit in the dry heat and let it bake her to the bone. Always c
old . . . always sick. And what if she developed a bacterial infection and the bug did things to her that it wouldn’t do to someone normal? Someone human?

  I’m one of a kind. And a damned lonely one, at that.

  Nema will be devastated. But then, he wasn’t the one passing out on the bathroom floor, was he?

  She wouldn’t have even considered the option if Friesian hadn’t told her about the deal. Odd feeling, having a future to worry about again.

  What do you want to be when you grow up, Jani Moragh? To be left alone. And the best way to guarantee that was to be like everyone else. “I think I’d like to give it a try.” She shoved her hands into her sleeves to try to warm them.

  “It won’t be pleasant.”

  “I’m used to that.”

  “I know.” Pimentel tapped an entry into his workstation. “Like I said, I’d be turning you over to the Gene Therapeutics group. I wouldn’t even think of treating you myself. I know my limitations, unlike some.” He eyed her sharply. “I’d like to wait until you get this legal mess behind you. Piers feels it may be wrapped up in a week or two. I’ll set up the first appointment for you for month’s end.”

  “Fine.” Jani tried to scoot out of the visitor’s chair, a task made more difficult since she didn’t want to remove her chilled hands from her sleeves. “Can I leave?”

  “Hang around for another hour and make an appointment to come in tomorrow for a follow-up. Then you can go.” Pimentel raised his hand. “There is one more very small thing. Sam Duong.”

  Jani sat back. “That man from the SIB. The archivist.”

  “Yes.” Pimentel’s shoulders sagged as his bright mood evaporated. “How well do you know him?”

  “I don’t, really. I’d never met him before two days ago.”

  “Never met him before.” Pimentel picked up his recording board and entered a notation. “The reason I ask is, he has no relatives. Up until this morning, he had no friends, either. None he’d admit to, anyway.” He massaged the back of his neck. Talking about Sam Duong seemed to tighten him up. “He authorized a change to his MedRec a few short hours ago. He named you as his next of kin.”

  “What?” Jani slumped in her chair—the ergoworks whined in their effort to keep up. “Did he say why?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I was there when he fainted. His supervisors were pulling missing documents out of his desk and he was yelling that he hadn’t put them there . . . .” Oh. “And I told him I believed him.”

  Pimentel knocked the back of his head against the headrest of his chair. “Jani, why did you tell him that?”

  “Because I didn’t like what was happening. His supervisors were taking him apart in front of his coworkers, which you do not do, I’m sorry, and he was in a state. I tried to calm him down.” Pierce’s face appeared in her mind again. Mako’s right hand. “Thinking back, I don’t consider it outside the realm of possibility that Sam Duong was framed.”

  “Framed?” Pimentel’s massaging action moved to his forehead. “Jani, if you knew his medical condition, I think you’d change your mind.”

  “So tell me.” Jani crossed her left leg over her right—the left felt stronger and she didn’t need to hoist. “If I’m his official next of kin, I have the right to know.”

  Pimentel rapped his work station touchboard; the image of her brain splintered into oblivion. “Sam Duong first visited me about six months ago. It was at about that time that papers in his charge began disappearing, and his supervisor was concerned that perhaps Sam was having some problem he didn’t want to talk to an on-site counselor about. Encephaloscan revealed the presence of a tumor in the paramedian posterior region of Sam’s thalamus—”

  “Roger.”

  “—and you need to know where it is, because the location defines the clinical symptoms. He suffers memory defects, amnesia. Immediate memory is especially affected.”

  Oh. “So if he did something this morning, he’d forget it by this afternoon.” Like putting papers in his desk.

  “Yes.” Pimentel reached into the front pocket of his short-sleeve and removed a small packet. “He will also work to fill in those missing memories. In addition to distortions of fact and outright lies he has shown the tendency to adopt the lives of those in his archives as his own.” He stood up and walked to his bookcase, atop which a watercooler rested. “Two months ago, he brought me a book. I don’t recall the title, but the subject was geology. Not popular geology, either. This was a university-level textbook.” He tore open the packet, dumped the contents into a glass, and added water. “He said he wrote it.” Pimentel stirred the resulting pale yellow liquid with his finger, then tossed it back.

  “Maybe he did.”

  Pimentel set down the empty glass. “The book had been written by a man named Simyam Baru.”

  Jani’s mind blanked. She had to consciously make the effort to not cry out. To breathe. “Did—” She stopped, and tried again. “Did he say he was Simyam Baru?”

  Pimentel shook his head. “Not outright. But he insisted he’d written the Baru book, as well as another written with a woman, a fellow professor—”

  “Eva Yatni.”

  “Yes.” Pimentel walked back to his desk and sat on the edge near Jani’s chair. “To complicate matters even further, he consistently refuses treatment because he claims removal of the tumor will kill him. Then along you come, telling him you believe him when he says he didn’t take your files. He probably figured you’d believe the rest of his story, too.” He touched her shoulder. “You don’t know how much it pains me to tell you this.”

  Jani stared past him out the window. “I visited Banda about fifteen years ago.” She’d arrived during the summer. Just as hot as Chicago, but more humid. She’d spent the first three months of her visit indoors—she didn’t possess the heat tolerance that she did now. “I wanted to know them. What they had done, how they had lived. I studied their work, what I could understand of it. Talked to their friends.” The view blurred—she blinked it clear. “The tumor’s in his thalamus?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had been able to get hold of the Knevçet Shèràa patient files, but I didn’t understand most of what I read. I knew the Laum researchers were experimenting with altering perceptions. Sensation. And I remember Service Medical tested my thalamus repeatedly before they augmented me. So the thalamus is involved in those functions.”

  Pimentel nodded. “Very much so.”

  “Then the Laum would have implanted there.”

  “Oh, Jani . . . There is no reason for you to have to go through this. I can have someone from MedRec bring up a waiver of rights. You sign it, and your name will be removed—”

  “No.” She stood up slowly. Her left leg felt strong, but her right was still wobbly. “Not until I talk to him.”

  Pimentel held out his hands in exasperated plea. “He has an explanation for everything. He will tie you in knots.”

  “Then I’ll bring an all-purpose knife.” She shuffled to the door. “I’ll explain to him why I can’t act as his next of kin, then I’ll come back and sign your waiver.” She waved good-bye without turning around. “Promise.”

  Jani returned to her room to find Morley bustling in an unusually bubbly fashion. Lucien had stopped by to see his favorite captain, she said, and he had brought her some clothes, wasn’t that nice of him?

  “He’s a peach.” Jani waited for the nurse to leave, then picked through the small duffel Lucien had packed for her. Wonder how he got in my room in the first place? Had he broken through a panel? Jazzed the lock? Charmed the building manager into giving him the code?

  She pulled her panties out of the bag. As she shook them out, a small piece of paper fluttered to the floor. Handwriting of calligraphic neatness, written by someone who placed a grid sheet beneath his notepaper to keep the lines straight.

  Call me at I-Com Four West-7. L

  “Signing our name with an initial now, are we?” Jani tucked Luci
en’s note into the pocket of her summerweight trousers. “Intelligence, Communications branch.” Hell, if he’d wanted her room code, he probably just brute-forced it out of systems.

  She finished dressing. Styled her hair. Put on makeup. Tried to avoid consciously thinking the thought that skirted the edges of her mind.

  What if someone else got out? What if I’m not the only one anymore?

  “No.” She checked her badges, packed her gear. “I’ll talk to him. That’s all. I’ll explain to him why I can’t do what he wants me to do.” And if she slipped in a few questions about life on Banda, or the university, or the best place to buy kimchee, or the Great Boiled Shrimp Debate, well, that was fair. Her questions deserved answers, same as anyone else’s. And she’d get them. Not wanting to know what she didn’t know was a philosophy she wasn’t familiar with.

  Chapter 13

  Jani walked into her TOQ suite, tossed her cap and duffel on the chair, and walked from room to room looking for signs of Lucien. He had replaced her old newssheets. Not with the Tribune-Times or the Commonwealth Herald, however, but with colonial sheets. Weeks-old issues of the Ville Acadie Partisan and the Felix Majora Vox Nacional, transmitted to Service Intelligence via Misty and printed out on fiche.

  The Vox was littered with editorials demanding the shuttering of Fort Constanza, interspersed with the usual calls to secede. The Partisan reported the presence of the Acadian governor in Chicago to discuss matters related to “colonial rights.” The article mentioned “an incident involving an Acadian colonial in Felix Majora that remains shrouded in mystery.”

  “Nothing mysterious about it. I was shanghaied.” For the express purpose of being coddled and petted while the Judge Advocate tore apart the Service Code looking for an excuse to let her go. “After that, they’re going to make me human again.” Then what? A civilian consultancy? An extravagant flat in the city? The social whirl, capped off by her favorite lieutenant sunny-side up whenever his schedule allowed?