Sword of the Lamb

by M. K. Wren

  Wills studied him, then laughed heartily.

  “Not bad. Anything else?”

  “Not on a fast scan.”

  “Alex? Any observations to add?”

  He smiled obliquely. “No. I know when I’m outclassed.”

  Wills said, “That’s always a good thing to know. All right, I’ll tell you more about these items—and show you the ones you missed, Jael.” He straightened and pulled his shirt out of his waistband to display the dark, gleaming fabric underneath. “Not that you missed much. And you were right about the body armor—and the fact that it limits your movements to some extent. Especially in bending over.”

  Jael shrugged. “I’ll admit the finger-slip’s an old gim.”

  “But you’re damned good at it. Anyway, we use spun borasil for body armor; the same stuff we use on our ships as a protective and insulating coating. It’s even more flexible than flexsteel, and there’s no metal to read on detectors.” He stuffed his shirt back under the waistband, but with enough care to alert Jael to what else might be hidden there. But he didn’t comment; he’d done enough flashing off.

  Wills snapped his right arm down, and a small, flat X1 sprang from the sheath under his sleeve into his hand.

  “Jael, you’re probably familiar with the spring sheath. What about you, Alex?”

  “No. That’s not exactly Confleet’s style.”

  “Well, you’ll be issued a sheath and gun, but make sure you practice with it. If you don’t catch the gun when it pops out, you’re in trouble.” He reached inside the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out a thin-bladed silicon knife. “This is a false pocket to make it easier to get at the underarm sheath.”

  Jael hefted the knife, thinking that he’d want more weight behind it if his life were up for stakes.

  Wills continued, “The watch is special, Jael. We have different models for different functions, some with microwave transceivers or conditioning aids.” He touched the rim of the watch face; it flipped up, revealing an empty chamber. “This is handy for hiding things like minicorders or microtape spools. And this earceiver—” he took a tiny disk from his ear, “—is useful for one-way communications, but it has drawbacks. Obviously, it shows up on a close inspection, and it limits your hearing to some degree. We have another earspeaker that’s handy for making contacts. The con-rad. It sets up a signal tone when you get close to another one on the same wavelength. You were right about the shoes, too, Jael.” He hit the back edge of one heel against the floor, and at the toe a sliver of a needle appeared.

  “Another stunner?” Jael asked.

  “Right.” Wills didn’t try to remove the needle, but simply kicked his toe against the floor and broke it off, then leaned down to pick it up, handling it carefully as he put it on the desk. “If you ever have to use one of these, be damned sure you don’t get tangled up in your own feet and stab yourself. The soles of the shoes have hidden compartments, too; we usually use them for MT fixes.” He reached into his pants pocket for his ’com, then flipped the back open to show them a flat chamber. “Another handy hiding place. We also have ’coms equipped with spring-fired stunners, conditioning aids, and some modified for long-range microwave frequencies. Those have built-in sigmod circuits for signal encoding and decoding. You’ll be issued a personal ’com, by the way, and personal call seqs. Those are clear lines keyed to your voice; they can’t be monitored without your knowledge, and no one else can use them.”

  Wills put the ’com down on the desk, then reached under his waistband and pulled out a small cylinder about one centimeter in diameter and four long; one end was slightly flared. He handed it first to Jael.

  “That’s something else you missed. Stunner injector. Careful—don’t put any pressure on the wide end. They’re only good for close-range encounters; they require direct skin contact. But they’re handy on occasion.”

  Jael passed the injector on to Alex while Wills went around to the back of the desk and began pulling various items out of a drawer. “A lot depends on your mission, your location, and your role. If you’re going upper-class Fesh, you can use jewelry—rings or medallions like these. Women have an advantage with jewelry and koyfs and some hair styles. In fact, a lot of our male agents with the build for it prefer to take female roles. That has its problems, too, of course. Some of these things are equipped with transceivers, stunner ejectors, or conditioning aids. This medallion has an imagraph lens.” Next, he took out a handful of small, nearly transparent disks. “These are adhesive minicorders. They’ll stick to almost any surface, and they’re hard to see once they’re in place. We have plants down to half a centimeter in diameter. This sort of thing you can carry whatever your role, and unless you’re assigned duty here in Fina, you’ll be playing a role of one kind or another all the time. But that’s getting into Master Jeans’s department.”

  Jael smiled. “We’ve already had a taste of Jeans’s department.”

  Wills nodded, meeting his eye with an answering smile.

  “He’s a real bastard for detail—right? Well, just see that you don’t miss any of it. The disguise angle—the plasimask, wigs, iris lenses, costume—all that’s part of it, but his talent, and I should probably say his genius, is acting. A disguise isn’t worth a damn unless you can play the role that goes with it.” He took a flat, black rectangular object small enough to fit in the palm of his hand from the drawer. “Here’s another handy item. A jambler. Good insurance for private conversations. And this—” he brought out a similar box-like object, slightly larger, with a thin loop antenna at one end, “—this is a montector. Any monitor puts out an emission on some wavelength, no matter how weak it might be. This thing can locate any plant we’ve come up with, and certainly anything the SSB has to offer.” He paused, and for a moment studied the equipment scattered on the desk, then looked up, first at Jael, then at Alex.

  “Quite an array, right? And this is only a sampling. But the most important item in our arsenal is conditioning.” He picked up the ring he’d worn for the initial test, slipped it on, then stood with his arms folded, the ring turned upward.

  The light was barely visible, the flash frequency so fast it didn’t even read as a flicker, but it was aimed directly at Jael’s right eye, and what he felt in his head ran a chill down his spine. He looked away from the ring, but felt the drag in it; his eyes didn’t want to move.

  Wills turned his hand slightly and let Alex have a feel of it, and he obviously didn’t like it either. Then Wills’s thumb moved under his palm, against the shank of the ring, Jael realized, and he became aware of a high whine that was more a sensation than a sound. He didn’t like the feel of that, either, and he couldn’t turn his ears away.

  Wills switched off both the light and sound, smiling faintly.

  “I’m not trying to condition you. Anyway, you’re both resistants. If you weren’t, I’d have you close to a Level 1 by now. Of course, Erica put you through conditioning, but she always starts with low intensities and works up to something like this. If you ever have to use conditioning in a working situation, you won’t have time for that.” He took off the ring and put it down on the desk. “We call these mod-stim devices. That’s for ‘modulated frequency stimulus.’ What these visual or audio frequencies do is induce synergistic resonances with the subject’s brainwaves. That creates the receptivity state, then you set up the conditioning verbally. There’s an art to that, but you’ll have plenty of practice on it later. And you’ll learn more about the different types of conditioning. Some of it you’re the subject for; that’s the basic conditioning Erica gave you. Sec-con, for instance; security conditioning. That covers everything associated with the Phoenix. The memory-lapse phenomenon. You probably haven’t experienced it yet, but if you tried to tell an outsider—” He stopped, and with a wry glance at Jael amended, “I mean a non-Phoenix member where our main HQ is, you’d find that every time you tried to say the word ‘Fina,’ you just wouldn’t be able to remember it.
You’ve also been given a set for contingency conditioning, which means that if any Phoenix member asks consent and you grant it, they can set up a conditioned command.”

  “But it takes consent,” Alex put in.

  “Yes, and there are safeguards. We don’t make any member vulnerable to nonconsent conditioning; not from anyone. Another type SI agents use a lot is recognition conditioning. For instance, if you’re trying to make an initial contact with an agent you don’t know, and electronic contact devices aren’t feasible, then you can be conditioned to recognize a voice. It’s as sure as VP ident. Then, of course, there’s the TAB. That’s the one all of us hope we never have to use. It goes into effect automatically if you’re arrested. Actually, it’s not literally a total memory block; it leaves you with the memory you need to function. Essentially, it strips you of personal identity. Anything pertaining to you, past, present, or future, is gone. That includes everything you know about the Phoenix. Sometimes the TAB is modified for various reasons so it won’t go into effect unless you’re interrogated. Fortunately, arrest doesn’t always mean interrogation. The SSB knows Phoenix conditioning when they see it, and generally they won’t waste time trying to break it. But the PCs give it a try occasionally. All we can do is get prisoners out of their hands as fast as possible. We’ve got agents in the SSB and we’re usually successful at that. One thing you can count on: we take care of our people.”

  That was a straight say; something in Wills’s eyes put muscle into the words. Jael looked down at the desk.

  “What if a member gets pulled down carrying any of this? Some of it might look tice to the Shads.”

  Wills gave a short laugh. “Yes, but most of our equipment has self-destruct mechanisms. If anyone tries to open it up to see how it works, all they’ll get is a handful of dust and singed fingers.” Then he frowned and glanced at his watch. “You probably have more questions, but I’ll have to leave it to Marg to answer them. Come on, I’ll take you to the supply room. That’s her department.”

  Jael noted that Wills put all the equipment back in the desk and set the print locks before he left the room; he also locked the doorscreens behind them. A careful man, and it was all habit; he didn’t have to think about it.

  As they started down the hall, Jael said, “Willie, if they give me a say, I’ll opt for SI. Will I get a choice?”

  “You always get a choice, but I’m glad to hear you’re leaning toward SI; we can use a man with your—uh, unusual training.” Then, as if he thought Alex might feel excluded, “I’m afraid your training will make you more useful in another department, Alex.”

  Alex only nodded and said, “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  Jael was giving Wills a close eye. He was talking about Alex’s Confleet training. Nothing more. He was lined in on that, which was standard stat for his department, but he wasn’t lined in beyond it.

  And he hadn’t read a glim of it in Alex Ransom’s face. Wills was a careful, ready man with a quick eye, but even he didn’t tally the gim.

  PERSONAL FILE: E. RADEK CASE NOTES: 13 AUGUS 3253

  SUBJECT: ALEX RANSOM

  Alex has been in GT two weeks, and he continues to demand more of himself than his instructors ever could. Ben tells me both our new recruits are adept with Security and Intelligence devices and techniques, especially Jael. In fact, SI has picked up a few pointers from our Outsider. Alex has shown particular skill with conditioning techniques and even achieved a Level 3 on one of the volunteer subjects. This is in consent, of course, but still remarkable.

  I saw Edgar Jeans yesterday, and he’s fairly dancing with frustration over his new students. He calls them natural talents, which isn’t entirely true in either case; they’ve both had stringent training of one sort or another in the art of acting. Master Jeans wants both of them for his theater group, but neither has shown any interest in it. Jael will undoubtedly be assigned outside Fina, and Alex is too goal-fixated to indulge in the frivolities so vital to the sanity of less single-minded mortals. His only recreation is a nightly session in the gym. Jobe apparently backed him into a corner on the fencing, but perhaps I’m being overanxious about that. Certainly it’s a useful identity reference and probably should be encouraged if the Lord Alexand isn’t to be completely buried.

  Ben and Andreas and I discussed the Ransom Alternative last night. Andreas is still reluctant to believe that Predis would put his personal ambition before the best interests of the Phoenix, but Ben is, of course, more pragmatic. He’s been watching Predis closely. And Predis has been watching Alex. But so far he’s made no overt moves.

  4.

  When Jael left the dressing room, it was nearly 23:00, and that surprised him. He’d stayed in the pool longer than he intended. But he’d had good company there. Val Severin had a way of making time slip.

  At the open door of the gym he stopped, hearing the clash of foils echoing in the cave chamber. He relaxed against the doorjamb to watch. He didn’t know the rules of this game, nor did he care; he found it interesting enough without knowing the fine points.

  Both combatants were stripped to the waist, open-mouthed and pulling for air. Behind the clear plasex mask, Jobe Howe was grinning exuberantly, showing amazing quickness for all his heft and fifty-on years. Alex Ransom didn’t have his heft, but he had reach on him. And he was a dancer. The term was ambivalent in the Outside, but in this case it was no insult. The play was too fast for the eye, the blades throwing off blurred showers of sparks. Jael saw Jobe’s foil strike home against Alex’s ribs, and Jobe was jubilant as they disengaged.

  Alex said, “A point, Jobe, and accepted.” He touched the guard of his foil to his mask, then brought the blade down to his side in a flashing arc.

  “And that gives me one to your two,” Jobe replied, making an absent imitation of the salute, “and a fighting chance. Ready? Garde!”

  Alex laughed and brought his foil up. “Garde and allon!”

  The mock battle resumed, and Jael was thinking that this would be an eye-lifter for the Brothers. They nosed up at the Sport of Lords; the knife was the weapon of choice and honor in the Outside. But if they thought the foils too dainty, it was because they hadn’t seen them properly used. This face-off was less than lethal only by mutual consent and because of the soft tips and low charges. But Alex was holding back—Jobe would never get a point otherwise—and maybe he thought that was enough to turn any long looks. For most of the tooks here, it would be. Jobe had supplied the gim line himself: Alex had been training for a SportsMaster’s spot. If Jobe swallowed it, then it would it would go down with most of the members, and Alex Ransom was no dodder; he kept a side eye out and never indulged himself or Jobe except at late hours when the gym was deserted.

  Jael didn’t hear the hall doorscreens open—the sound was lost in the clash of blades—but he felt a change in the emptiness of the vault-like room. He turned his head slightly to look along the wall to the door, and perhaps it was only habit that made him adopt that attitude of inner stillness learned from childhood, a process of melting into the background. The man entering the gym wouldn’t even be aware of him unless he moved.

  Jael searched his memory as the man paused, then folded his arms, settling himself to watch the fencing match. Alex had his back to him, and if Jobe saw him, he gave no indication of it; he was too intent.

  A tall man, who would have weight and power behind him, but not quickness. For age, that had to be somewhere just past forty. The features were Noreuropan: a high forehead, long, chiseled nose, strong mouth, a little thin-lipped, and eyes of dark, brilliant blue.

  A name came to mind now. For some reason Jael considered warning Alex, but satisfied himself with watching the man and trying to analyze why he felt it necessary to give Alex a backup eye.

  Predis Ussher, Chief of Communications.

  Jael knew nothing about Ussher except what was in the memfiles, and he wasted no mental energy sorting that information. His uneasiness wouldn’t be
explained by facts. In the Outside, they called it reading a man’s shadow.

  Predis Ussher had the power; he was a mover. Imagraphs and holograms never caught it; a vitality that couldn’t be computed. Such men needed watching.

  And Ussher wasn’t here on an idle pass-through. His attitude might be that of a man briefly attracted by an interesting phenomenon, but he didn’t know he was being watched, and his face was slipping. He was only interested in one thing: Alex Ransom. And his interest wasn’t friendly.

  Jael let himself be distracted by a change in the pace of the blades and saw Alex’s foil make a spiraling loop, then spring into an arch against Jobe’s chest.

  “Point!” Jobe stepped back with a wry grin and saluted him. “And match. Next time let me see that last maneuver again, but slow so I can tell what’s happening.”

  Alex laughed as he took off his mask. “The old feint to the eyes. I learned that one the hard way. A good match, Jobe. Thanks.” He wiped his forehead, pushing back the wet strands of black hair, and as he turned toward the dressing room, he saw Jael.

  But Jael didn’t smile; his head moved in a quick nod toward Ussher, and he thought again that Alex Ransom picked up fast. His gaze moved smoothly past Jael on to Predis Ussher. But there, a tensing, a narrowing of his eyes.

  Jobe took Alex’s foil and mask with his own and started for the case on the wall.

  “I’m the one to give out the thanks, Alex. These foils have been waiting—” He stopped, his smile fading to be replaced by another that was set and polite. “Hello, Predis.”