The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  There were a few personal things she wanted to take care of, but with Lees’s disappearance she couldn’t risk Ormo hearing details from anyone but her, and that meant she needed to tell him now.

  “You scared him off,” he said, by way of greeting.

  Syrina needed to assume he wasn’t happy, even if she couldn’t see his face.

  “As soon as the alarm went off he was gone,” she said. “He must’ve packed weeks ago and been waiting for an excuse to run ever since. I’m wondering how that’s going to affect whichever High Merchant was using him.”

  “And did you find any information pertaining to who that is?”

  “I might’ve found something. You’ll need to tell me. I didn’t want to take anything from the vault and scare Lees off—a lot of good that did—but I had a good look at Ka’id’s records, and there was one financier who’s been sending a lot of tin Lees’s way without getting much in return, at least as far as I could tell. It could be nothing, but it was the only thing that stood out.”

  “Who?” Ormo shifted under the shapeless silken mass of his robes.

  “More like what. An organization of some sort. Something called the Northern Resource Initiative.”

  “Ah. I’m familiar with it.”

  “All of the… donations, I guess you could call them, came from various other companies, but I could eventually trace all of it back to them.” Syrina waited, but nothing else seemed to be forthcoming. “Anything I should know?”

  “It’s an energy collective of fifty or sixty smaller companies. Mostly naphtha production, of course. They also, through their subsidiaries, control three of the five iron mines on Eris. All these companies operate independent of one another, but they’re all controlled by the Northern Resource Initiative. It’s the kind of conglomerate that not many have heard of but has its fingers in everything. An organization that would take an interest in something like the Tidal Works. There is no question that NRI is connected to one of the Fifteen.”

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  Ormo rustled. “That’ll do for now. Look into it. Make sure they’re not paying for something else. Until you’re sure, stay out of trouble. And if you come across Lees, kill him, will you?”

  She didn’t go straight to NRI. She knew she should, and that she shouldn’t do anything behind Ormo’s back, but there was something else she had to check first.

  It could have been a lie. The N’talisan-Kalis could’ve made up anything she wanted, and Syrina knew it. She was going to look for this Doctor Saadasi, anyway. There were too many unanswered questions, and every time she slept, she dreamed of Triglav. Going against Ormo filled her with unfamiliar terror, but she couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to stop.

  Maybe we’ll find something out about me, too, the voice said.

  Syrina pretended not to hear it.

  With a little poking around in the city lists archived in the Aggregate Library, it became clear that Saadasi was at the very least an actual person and not just some creation the N’talisan-Kalis had dreamed up to screw with Syrina. Not only was he real, but he was no ordinary physician. He didn’t keep offices in any of the hospitals or clinics. Instead, he headed a private laboratory funded by something called the Witt Group. Who controlled them was unclear, but the collective seemed focused on inherited traits and maladies in the blood. Syrina would’ve thought all maladies were in the blood, but what did she know? She knew the convoluted business holdings in Skalkaad were giving her a headache.

  Syrina learned little about Cab Saadasi after watching his house thirty hours a day for the next eight days, and she wasn’t sure what she could do with what little she had got.

  Saadasi was thin, on the older side of middle age. He must’ve been just a few years out of school when the N’talisan had encountered him years ago. He had deep-set gray eyes, a hard, pale face, and a thick mop of pure white hair that gave the impression it had been white since he was twenty. He lived alone in one of the marble four-story townhouses along the Central Canal, and he ate out every night at the same place—a little, charming back-alley joint called Fali’s Atrium, though he was adventurous enough to order something different every time. He ate alone while he perused whatever work he brought with him, and he always brought something. From what little Syrina could tell, his focus seemed more on inherited traits and less on maladies, but she was the first to concede that she didn’t know enough about medicine to draw any conclusions from that.

  On two of the evenings she watched him, he met another man after eating. Both times they went back to Saadasi’s townhouse and didn’t come out until the next morning when the doctor headed back to Witt while the other man slept in.

  Syrina found it ironic that someone who’s work seemed focused around reproduction had so little interest in doing it himself. But then, she thought, maybe that said something about reproduction.

  Besides his lover, Doctor Saadasi never broke from the routine, never associated with anyone outside those he worked with. At least, not in the week Syrina watched him.

  It was better than, or at least as good as nothing. She only had another day or two before Ormo started wondering what was going on with NRI, but she wanted to get involved with the Witt Group before she changed her mind.

  “Who did you say you were again?” Doctor Saadasi scowled at the woman in front of him.

  She was diminutive and pudgy, and too young to be a doctor, whatever her papers said.

  The woman brushed a short yellow curl from where it licked at her cheek and scowled. “You heard me the first time, Doctor. My name is Faax. Doctor Sailish Faax. I’ve been sent here to assist you.” She pointed at the small stack of papers in his hand. “They weren’t specific. They told me to show up here and ask what you need help with. As you can see, the Board has already paid me, so if you want me to leave just say so.”

  “You were sent here by whom?”

  Faax nodded at the papers again with an irritated frown that asked, can you read?

  “The Board.” She let out an irritated sigh, rolling her green eyes.

  Saadasi considered. The Witt Board of Directors—and the Eye only knew who was pulling their strings—had been saying they would send him some extra help for months, and he’d been asking for it, but he didn’t like the way she’d just shown up like this. Still, since Kaandri had disappeared three days before, the research department had been grossly understaffed. He’d be a fool to turn anyone away. Her papers checked out, and since she was contracted by the Director’s Panel, she wouldn’t even be around all the time. They liked to keep their temps busy. If she didn’t work out, she’d be easier to get rid of than most of the buffoons that cluttered his lab.

  “All right.” He gave the documents in his hands one last glance before handing them back to her. “Head down to the FHASyL and see what Stefaan needs to have done. Don’t bother me again unless you’re quitting or you have something useful to say.”

  “Suit yourself.” She turned and left.

  Saadasi watched her go until the door clicked shut, and caught himself smiling. He decided there must be something about her he liked.

  Syrina reflected on whether she was in over her head. She could fake her way through pretty much every situation she got herself into, but it took her almost half an hour just to figure out that FHASyL stood for Fetal Health and Safety Lab while still looking like she knew what she was doing. The act would get thin fast.

  The FHASyL, once she found it, was a series of four large rooms, lined with bookshelves and wooden cabinets filled with small, unlabeled glass jars and vials, which were filled with sharp-scented liquids and powders. Test subjects were brought to an adjacent waiting room where they filled out questionnaires before a nurse escorted them to the first room, where doctors took various blood and fluid samples.

  Syrina was sharp enough to mimic Stefaan—a portly, disgruntled man with a mop of thin, blond hair and a lazy eye—when he showed her how to draw the specific samples they n
eeded from the women. Apparently, he made the opposite sex uncomfortable, so at least he was glad to have Faax there. He didn’t make Syrina uncomfortable, but she had the urge kill him for no particular reason, so she thought maybe for her that was the same thing.

  He watched her mix the blood of five different pregnant women with various chemicals and showed her how to look for whatever they were looking for. She had no idea what he was talking about and was relieved when he left her to go about his own business. She would need to spend all her free time studying if she was going to learn enough to lie her way to the bottom of the programs that the N’talisan-Kalis had told her about.

  On the bright side, after her visit to Witt, she was pretty sure those programs existed. Unless, of course, the other Kalis had sent her on this mad personal quest with a few well-placed lies amid the truths. In which case, Syrina needed to admit she’d be impressed, professionally speaking.

  In the meantime, she was just a liability at Witt, and she couldn’t keep Ormo waiting any longer. So that night, she scraped up everything she could on the Northern Resource Initiative. And just as Ormo said, it was one of those nebulous, omniscient collectives that only a few people had heard of. Among those who had, most were unable to say what NRI did or who they did it to. Nevertheless, their tendrils stretched all the way across Skalkaad.

  She learned from dusty public records that NRI leased out hundreds of navaras farms as well as nickel, copper, and tin mines, all under different names, and owned hundreds of other locations where seed farms and mines might be leased in the future. In fact, they provided almost a quarter of the resources that fueled the wealth of Skalkaad without the liability of having their name on any of it. And that didn’t even include the iron Ormo had told her about.

  They were just as amorphous as far as leadership went. It should’ve been there with the other records, but Syrina couldn’t find one name on the governing board, just general references to the Directors Association. They managed the conglomerate through either unanimous decision or majority vote, depending on which record she was looking at and when it was dated. It was frustrating but not surprising. The Syndicate kept terrible public records on all the big companies because they were the ones at the top of them.

  NRI had several offices in Eheene, but their main building was in Aado, a town a few hours west, not much more than a fishing village until they’d built their complex along the water, where they could keep their own port without needing to deal with pesky bureaucratic things like Syndicate Customs forms. That explained how Lees had been able to ship stuff to Fom for so long before anyone got suspicious.

  The conglomerate facilitated its habits by running—once again, under different names—several shipping companies. Most of those kept their headquarters in Valez’Mui so they wouldn’t be subject to Skalkaad taxes or trade regulations. Others didn’t list any port at all. In the legal forms, they had just written International under the space allotted for the home harbor. None of them, at least on paper, ported in Skalkaad.

  Syrina decided she’d head out to Aado early in the morning and try to get back to the city in time to put in a few hours at Witt. She didn’t want Saadasi to think his new doctor was slacking before she’d even begun.

  She let herself have a nap for an hour and spent the rest of the night in the shadows under the dome of the Syndicate Library, reading about biology so she might at least be able to pretend she knew what she was doing in the lab.

  Aado was still just a fishing village. Homes of wood were built on a steep hill that drooped into the sea, which became an expanse of mud flats sixty spans wide during low tide. The NRI building was further west of town, but it was visible long before the little jumble of houses was. It crawled down the slope with arms of rough, speckled granite that reached across the mudflats, embracing its own private bay.

  The building or wall—Syrina couldn’t tell from outside if it was roofed or just a high rampart around a courtyard—was eight stories high and windowless except for a series of narrow slits along the top which extended all the way around. The front gate was wood, painted red, and wide enough to let two camel wagons through abreast if it ever opened, which it never did in the few hours Syrina watched it. A dozen mercenaries guarded the complex, along with four full-grown tundra hounds and a karakh.

  Nothing labeled it as NRI, and the locals, all non-citizens anyway, had long ago learned to stop asking what went on inside. A trio of high stacks jutted from near the back of the compound. The air above two, which otherwise would have looked dormant, shimmered with heat from the naphtha generators. The last spewed white steam in a long, thin cloud that stretched off to the northeast in the light wind.

  The karakh bothered Syrina a lot more than the hounds did. It lingered above the huge red doors most of the time, whistling and clicking to the shepherd perched on its back, making everyone nervous. Well, it made Syrina nervous, and she didn’t imagine the mercenaries stationed below could ever get used to that thing wheezing and leering over them.

  Its fur was reddish brown, shaggier than the ones in the Fom arena had been. She wondered if it had grown the thicker coat since coming to Skalkaad or if it was just a different breed. Its eyes were huge, luminous yellow, and reminded her of Triglav with a jolt of sadness she wasn’t prepared for. It hung onto the roof with its giant six-fingered hands, and the tops of the walls were scuffed and cracked from its claws. Its tusks—at least nine hands long, unless the shepherd was tiny and she got her scale all wrong—were sheathed in leather, but Syrina could see the knobs blooming underneath where they’d been reinforced with sharpened brass bolts. The shepherd wore a woolen parka over his shoulders, against the bite of the wind, but the chains that connected to the brass rings in the karakh’s cheeks were uninsulated. She wondered if his hands were cold.

  She’d heard that the shepherds sometimes hired themselves out to organizations besides the Church, but she’d never seen it until now. That thing could smell her a mile away and probably see her, too. If Syrina ever had to break into the NRI compound, she was screwed.

  That was as far as she got on her first trip to Aado, and her evening at Witt was just as uneventful. Everyone let her do her thing, and she was glad they were all kind enough not to ask her what that thing was because she still wouldn’t have come up with much of an answer. She tried to look busy and soak in as much of what everyone else was doing as she could. She still didn’t know what was going on, but she knew more than she did a week ago, and she supposed that was something.

  Ormo sent for her before she’d come up with anything useful enough to bother him with. Even more surprising, it wasn’t even noon yet, and the Fifteen almost never wore their masks during the day. That was when they were off living their unassuming, normal lives as regular, if wildly successful, citizens.

  Syrina told him what she’d learned about NRI. When she misread his sigh, she got defensive.

  “I wasn’t going to come to you until I figured out a way in.”

  Ormo nodded. The motion was almost indiscernible, but his hood rustled with movement. “No, no, my impatience isn’t with you this time. It’s with myself. I think I may have let things go too far. The karakh is new to me. It makes me think they know someone is nosing around, or at least they’re worried someone might start.”

  “So you already knew NRI was involved?”

  She sounded more annoyed than she’d meant to, but Ormo let it slide.

  He sighed again. “The Northern Resource Initiative is a pet project of Ma’is Kavik. I’ve had my eye on them for years, suspected them of having dealings contrary to the greater good of Skalkaad. Kavik and I have never gotten along, even when they were their previous incarnation. The current Kavik is relatively new. They’re as careful with facts as any Ma’is, though—and as you know, the Fifteen try to keep out of each other’s business—as long as it’s business and not the affairs of the nation. I’ve never found a reason to act against them, nor NRI. Not until now.”

 
; He looked at Syrina like he was waiting for her to add something.

  “So you think Ma’is Kavik is the one at the top of this?” she said.

  Ormo shifted under his robes. “Right now, it doesn’t matter if they are or not. We still don’t even know what this is. Not enough to bring to the other Thirteen. Even if I were willing to act on my own, choices are limited. I can’t send you to deal with Kavik directly. It would be a civil war, taking down a full Member in their Hall like that, and you’d fail anyway. And I don’t have any more idea who they are than you do. The old Kavik died of natural causes, and they were able to pick their own successor, taking what they knew of their replacement to sea on their pyre ship twelve years ago.”

  “You want me to drop it?”

  “No. I can pull some favors. I don’t have anyone in NRI, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get you a job there. Give me a few weeks to see what I can work out.”

  “Sure.” But Syrina grimaced.

  The last thing she wanted was the stress of a second fake job.

  14

  The Northern Resource Initiative

  The Northern Resource Initiative wasn’t the kind of outfit that just hired off the street, but Ormo had done some legwork. Or rather, he had someone else do it, and he’d scraped up an alias Syrina could use.

  Cairnsworth Menns had been a N’naradin engineer working under N’talisan back in Fom. He’d disappeared a few weeks after the death of his boss but had been, by all accounts, loyal to the Merchant’s Syndicate to the brink of fanaticism. Ormo was certain Menns had never been to Skalkaad to meet anyone at NRI, nor they to Fom to meet him. He was positive Menns wouldn’t show up now to prove Syrina a fraud. She didn’t bother asking how he could be so sure.