Authors: C J Cherryh
All
three
. Even while Abban and Seely were still alive—they’d been reconceived. Were weeks along, when Denys and Abban and Seely had died.
The sarcophagus and the womb-tank.
She gave a little shiver. Knew
exactly
the same decision had attended her birth, and Florian’s, and Catlin’s, though they’d all been dead.
Who’d given the order to terminate Florian and Catlin? Not likely Denys.
Giraud.
Full-circle, now. Absolutely full-circle.
Hicks betrayed you, Uncle. Betrayed all of you. Jordan had been conniving with Defense. He was going to break it all open and bring Reseune down—but that wouldn’t have served Defense. If there had been no Reseune in those years, Defense would have been desperate to have one. So Defense just wanted to control Reseune, not bring it down. They already had their man inside Reseune—and they wrote their own script, not Jordan’s. They knew about the psychogenesis project. They knew it, probably, from Jordan, who’d tried it with Justin, and Jordan would have warned them not to go along with it—warned anybody who’d listen, if they’d asked.
But the warnings wouldn’t mean a thing to Defense. They just saw a way to have a re-start on Ari Emory, a quieter, merely potential Ari Emory, who wouldn’t bother them for years, while Reseune kept their contracts, Reseune did the work for Defense, gave them what they wanted…
But, damn! who just authorized Defense to move in on Planys? Who authorized that military base built right next to our labs?
She leaned over the computer and posed the question:
2404. The year the first Ari died. The year Jordan Warrick became the man in the iron mask, the prisoner at Planys.
The military moves in, to keep him quiet. Cooperates—aids and abets—in keeping Ari’s so-called killer and their agreed ally in Reseune…away from any communication with the outside world.
Wasn’t that a window on their real set of priorities?
The first Ari safely dead. The second in planning.
Jordan…silenced.
Their installation set up at Planys, with Giraud’s consent.
And their own man, Hicks, or Abban, with easy, constant access to Giraud’s office.
But there was a problem with that line of reasoning.
Hicks himself had been a victim.
Somebody
put a Rafael type in Hicks’s office—and Hicks—or somebody—put an identical into my security organization.
So whose were they to start with?
Hicks didn’t have the wherewithal—didn’t have the knowledge to create them. He had the authority to order it done. But how did he get it past Giraud?
And how old is that set? When was the first one setted?
2373. Fifty-one years ago.
Fifty-one years ago. On the first Ari’s staff. An azi named Regis. And who could have done that?
How to excavate that much history? Who’d been in a position to do that in those days?
Jordan? Not old enough. Giraud himself…when he first started Operating. He could have.
She’d been down this track before, but mostly
Not old enough
kept coming round and round and round, troubling any conclusion aiming at the people she’d
like
to blame. Chi Prang, head of alpha azi—holding that position a long, long time…that was the best candidate to have created someone to infiltrate the first Ari’s staff.
But why? Whose? Chi Prang had never done a thing on record but do her job.
Shoot off a letter to Chi Prang and just
ask
; did you infiltrate the first Ari’s staff, and Hicks’ staff, and now mine? It just didn’t make sense. And it kept coming down to…
One who had been alive, and in office a hell of a long time. One who played his own side of the board, consistently, and generally not too quietly.
In between the outbursts, you tended to forget.
Yanni. Yanni was what he was, one of the best.
Not necessarily a bad set of motives. But worth questioning.
Maybe Hicks had somehow figured out there was a double agent in his office—one he daren’t touch. But he could bestow the same gift elsewhere. As Giraud had been doing. Spying on the station. Spying on the military.
Two games had been going simultaneously. The military moving in on Planys, and getting a hold on Hicks; and Hicks knowing his own Director, Giraud, was spying on him, but Hicks moving very carefully to get at manuals in that office, so Giraud hadn’t known.
Hell. There was one contrary possibility in that scenario.
“Sera.” Catlin came in. Florian was right there with the coffee—three coffees. Florian knew her.
“Sit down,” she said. “Wait. I’m thinking.”
She hit the keyboard again. Pulled up Hicks’s age as 102. Not that old. But old
enough
fifty years ago. He’d taken his alpha certs when he’d acquired his assistant, who’d been from Giraud’s office—
—AK-36, Kyle,
alpha
, for God’s sake…military alpha.
She stared at the history on the screen.
Could she be so blind? Contracted first at eighteen to the military, military intelligence, no information available, reverted to Reseune, assigned to ReseuneSec after restructuring. The law said—decommissioned alphas had to come home to Reseune. This one had come to the most natural home for his abilities. Straight from the War, year of the Treaty of Pell being 2353, to Reseune, with the decommissioning of his unit in 2358.
Put into labs at Reseune for retraining. The routine was supposed to require the axe code, partial wipe, re-Contracting. She looked for that specific date, that specific session.
Didn’t turn up until 2362.
God.
Who
hadn’t given the code early on? Why not?
Somebody wanting to debrief Kyle AK-36, and learn what he’d been into, and what he’d done for the military? Somebody who thought they’d just ask questions and mine him for all kinds of information—somebody who was an expert interrogator—and who might have reason to suspect the military?
Somebody who wouldn’t leave traces and records in the system? Base One could do that. Up to a certain limit, Base Two or Three could do it.
The first Ari could do that. So could Yanni. So could Giraud. So could Jane Strassen and Wendy Peterson, in those days…when the relationship with Defense, in the last days of the War, with the whole Gehenna situation, had been going quietly unpleasant.
AK-36 himself had specialized in security. And he was alpha. He was one of those the military had used to analyze azi behaviors, to actually serve as Supervisors, before Reseune had pitched a fit about the practice and demanded that mentally damaged azi be taken out of action and returned to Reseune, no matter the inconvenience to the military In 2350 Ari had gotten that measure through Council and snatched back azi who were routinely being mentally and physically patched together and sent back into combat. She’d had a famous row with Admiral Azov. But she’d won, which had outraged the military and set the stage for years of uneasy relations between Science and Defense…so long as Azov was in office.
And Kyle AK-36 had been with the military for a number of years after the Treaty of Pell. Served in a classified function from which there were no records accessible. Then in 2358, by law, all remaining alpha and beta azi had come back to Reseune. Reseune, namely Giraud, must have tried to unravel him for four more years after that, learning things, maybe, maybe just trying to understand what his history really was. It was worth looking for those sessions, of which there was no readily available record. That period had ended in 2362.
After the axe-code that ended his Contract to the military, Kyle AK-36 had been with Giraud, a skilled psych operator, skilled interrogator, trusted aide until—around 2404, when Ari died, Giraud had passed the ReseuneSec office to Adam Hicks…and passed Kyle along with it, as the one, maybe, to keep the office on an even keel under a much weaker administrator…and who could keep on reporting to Giraud.
And who
had
ordered production on the Rafael types from the outset, in those years between 2358 and 2404?
Search failed
. But one of them had ended up in Ari’s household. And another in Hicks’s staff.
Who’d
setted
the other B-28’s?
No signature
. That could mean Ari herself. It could mean anybody down to Giraud…or somebody working for him. Once AK-36 had finally had the axe code and become, allegedly, a Reseune azi, he’d been Giraud’s specialist assistant, between 2362 and 2404. The axe code, designed to revoke a Contract—could be a wide-ranging wipe, but wasn’t, if the azi was well setted. Ideally it just reset the Contract to None and erased specific areas of knowledge and belief, an organized amnesia. You wanted an azi to know things he could later completely forget: you linked them to the axe code. But the military theoretically couldn’t do that on his level—because they theoretically didn’t have military Supervisors at his level.
An axe code was rough, emotionally rough, physiologically rough on an azi. And without operators like AK-36 to manage it, the military couldn’t do that anymore, and when AK-36 was sent home, he certainly couldn’t do it for himself, could he?
So he’d have held the last secrets the military hadn’t erased. And he’d have waited, waited four years for somebody to do it for him. Giraud didn’t even try to do it—for several years of a miserable limbo, and finally did, maybe with help from Prang.
Nice safe azi after that. So Giraud must have thought. An alpha, recovered from the military, and so helpful that Giraud had him doing things he’d used to do, skilled things. She’d bet on it.
Or maybe Prang hadn’t been in on the actual operation…because of Giraud’s own paranoia. She wouldn’t be allowed that much window into security psychsets.
Did the creation of the B-28’s fit into Kyle AK’s term of service? One of them had arrived on the first Ari’s staff, young, good-looking—the first Ari liked good-looking young men, no fault, as her successor saw it.
And that one, Regis, had arrived, oh, some two decades on. So had the one in what was, at the time, Giraud’s office, in ReseuneSec. And others, elsewhere.
Not Giraud’s doing. Kyle’s. Reporting to
him
, just conceivably; or, in the case of those outside Reseune, reporting to anybody who had the key.
Oh, Uncle. You created me a hell of a mess. Was AK-36 actually doing all the work with alphas that I forever was a little surprised you could really do?
And when the B-28 went into your own staff and the other into Ari’s, was it AK-36 who was running him? Or was it you, ordering all of it?
Spying on Ari. Spying on your own staff. On people outside Reseune, out at Beta, up on Alpha Station. That would be like you. And you left ReseuneSec, and left the B-28, and AK-36 was still running him. AK-36 was probably still reporting to you—just to keep you happy.
Maybe for the same reason, you let AK-36 go with Hicks every time he went to Novgorod, every time he visited. Defense, just the silent presence, your nice, trustable azi who remembered things like a human recorder.
And of course he was all yours, all the time, all yours.
Did you run the axe code without Prang’s help? Maybe you did. And it didn’t damned well work, Uncle, and you didn’t spot it—because you weren’t that good and you shouldn’t have been operating like that on an alpha. Terrible thing, vanity. Your mother wanted to make you a genius. Maybe it still stung—that you weren’t all that good, never mind the license.
Who killed my predecessor? You did. You didn’t ever plan it. Yon didn’t want it to happen. You really loved her. But it didn’t take Abban going to Novgorod to have his head restructured. You could have been as careful as you liked where Abban was when you were visiting Defense—but you weren’t so careful where AK-36 was, or what he was doing at home, were you?
Defense planted Kyle on you. A Trojan horse. An axe code that didn’t work, possibly because they’d messed with it, or possibly because they’d just forged the personal manual…and everything in it was right except that code. Is it possible—is it remotely possible you didn’t crosscheck that manual with the original set, or look up that axe code in archive? That would have been unconscionably careless, Uncle. Maybe you did everything right, and somewhere in the military system they messed with that code and somehow kept him sane.
With you, he had total office access, access to Abban’s personal manual, probably Seely’s, too, since I’ll bet you were supervising Seely; definitely to as much kat as he needed, on any day of the week. Abban might have made one mistake in his life, just one mistake, and taken a cup of coffee in the lunchroom. Easy at certain hours to have a little seclusion—and if AK-36 was really good, he wouldn’t have, conflicted Abban at all, would he, or taken too long to do the job? Nothing you could spot. Just one hell of a deep initial dose, reassurance, need to contact him again regarding a problem. Then verbal work. Everything couched in benefitting Giraud. Doing good. Giraud being secretly threatened by spies inside the office… Abban could help. Abban could protect him. Abban could get Seely’s manual. They could go on protecting Giraud if they just worked together.
Who else, besides you and Denys, could operate Base Two with authority? Abban. Abban could tiptoe through System with not a trace left. Azi could he created. Setted. Records forged without a trace. Any of those things. When Hicks took over, and when Hicks went with Giraud to Novgorod, AK-36 went with Hicks—and ultimately got more specific instructions, didn’t he?
AK-36’s still in Hicks’s office, the whole reason Hicks has a provisional alpha certificate. AK-36 is 122 years old.
Kinder if we killed him. A hundred and twenty-two is old to be given an axe code. Real old. And especially if the military messed with it and put a block in that we’ll have to break.
If we give it, he could die on the table. Then we lose all he might know.
It won’t be pretty, what needs to be done. We can try to be kind.