Authors: Zachary Rawlins
“We have a leak. A leak inside Audits. How is that possible?” he wondered aloud, his tone indicating that an answer from Alistair was expected.
Alistair rolled his eyes.
“I’ve handpicked every single member of the Audits department, Gaul,” he said, his voice profoundly tired. “You know that. If there is someone on the inside, they got past all our screenings, the background checks, everything. You know how powerful an Operator they would have to be to lie to my face?”
“Nonetheless,” Gaul said, shuffling paperwork on his desk, “unless you are suggesting that I am leaking operational information to outside agencies, there is no other way to account for two such debacles in such a short period of time.”
“That’s a bit unfair,” Alistair objected. “It’s not like we failed, in either case. Mitsuru saved that kid, and she killed that target, what’s-his-name…”
“Estelle,” Gaul said coldly. “Have you reviewed the recordings, yet?”
Alistair lowered his head.
“I have,” he said, reluctantly.
“Then I’m certain that you noticed, near the start of the encounter, that Mitsuru allows herself to receive a very serious gunshot wound?”
“I’ve double-checked the probabilities lines,” Alistair said guiltily. “It is as she said. She had no time to take other action.”
“We are talking about a few seconds difference,” Gaul complained. “What exactly did she expect to happen in that time?”
“Perhaps she intuited exactly what did happen, Gaul. You know, if Mitzi hadn’t done what she did, this operation would have failed.”
“I do know that, and I agree with you, actually. Mitsuru’s actions saved the operation. It’s her reasons that bother me.” Gaul came as close to shouting as he ever did – he raised his voice. “She is clearly still using Black Protocols. Her obsession with suffering has cost us all in the past, Alistair.”
Alistair let it pass. He simply smiled and waited. After a few moments silence, Gaul sighed.
“Moving on, then.” He shuffled more papers on his desk. “The other two Operators, Walsh and Young, what about them?”
“They never had a chance,” said Alistair, shaking his head regretfully. “They were too close to the center of the temporal warp when those Witches hit us. I turned around as soon as I felt them porting in, knew they had to be flanking us, knew they’d hit our backup first. Walsh was dead before I could get there – I assume they used balefire, with the sulfur and the charring.”
To Gaul’s eyes, Alistair looked strange. Tired, yes, and battered, but given the circumstances, it was to be expected. Still, something about this operation seemed to have taken something out of Alistair. Gaul wondered what could have thrown his usually unflappable Chief Auditor. After all, it wasn’t as if this was the first time Alistair had lost men under his command.
“But Young, that was the weird part.” Alistair hesitated before continuing, appearing to steel himself. “I saw him get hit, right when I turned the corner. He was cut into a million pieces. It had to have been the Shining Cloud Protocol. I could still see the traces of it, lingering in the Ether.”
Gaul paused for a moment, his head cocked to the side. Alistair stared at his shoes while Gaul consulted the Ether.
“Leaving aside the more important issue, then,” Gaul said, adjusting his glasses, “finish off the encounter for me.”
“I knew at that point that my chances of getting out of there were slim,” Alistair sighed. “And I had to get back to Mitzi, before they got to her. I didn’t have any time for subtlety.”
“You turned their minds off,” Gaul said, with a trace of sympathy.
“No other choice,” Alistair said, shaking his head. “Believe me; I had questions I wanted to ask them, maybe even more than you. But anything that only incapacitated them would have taken more finesse, and more power, than I had to spare at that point. I still had to activate an apport protocol, and that always takes it out of me.”
The two men were silent for a moment while Gaul consulted his uplink.
“You’re right,” Gaul said, robotically. “Preliminary analysis confirms it. Shining Cloud. I will have to inform Young’s wife, later. I see no records of Walsh having any close family.”
Alistair continued to stare at the ground. Gaul wondered how long it had been since his Chief last slept, but couldn’t summon much pity. Gaul’s own sleep cycle had been modified when the uplink was installed, and now he slept for an hour or two every night, at most. When he dreamed, he could feel the vast currents of the Ether, flowing through him, from everywhere and through everywhere. It was not restful.
“In any case,” Gaul asked, in his normal voice, “which is it? Have the Witches learned to operate protocols, or have a group of Operators allied themselves with the Witches?”
Alistair shrugged.
“I don’t even know how to guess. Both are impossible, right?”
There were many qualities that made Gaul such an exemplary Director – and he was almost universally held to be the finest in memory, even by those who opposed him – but his tendency to worry was perhaps the paramount quality.
Thanks to the Etheric computer attached to his forebrain, Gaul could truly multitask, carrying on multiple lines of thought simultaneously. Twenty-two hours a day, on the average. And Gaul spent much of that time worrying.
Not the usual silly stuff – Gaul wasn’t afraid of plane crashes, or serial killers, or being naked in public. Gaul could read probability lines better than almost any Operator that he knew of, and he read them as often as possible, following them from branching to branching, threading his way through alternatives, solutions, dilemmas.
Gaul had a virtually perfect operational and administrative record, because anything that went wrong, he had already worried over that possibility and planned a contingency. Every pitfall, every personal failing, every operational difficulty and unforeseen event was accounted for with mathematical precision and a fetishistic desire for organization. And then, once solved, the solution was shelved for the day when it was needed. It was a tribute to his pessimistic nature that he fully expected to use all of his schemes and fallback plans eventually, were he lucky enough to live that long.
Witches were at the top of a number of his ‘Things to Worry About’ lists. That was only natural. Witches were smart, for one thing, not like the ravening packs of Weir or the mindless Horrors. They made long-range plans, and they had inhuman patience when carrying them out, spinning their webs over centuries. To some extent, and Gaul didn’t know exactly how much, they had a kind of precognitive ability, and they could manipulate energy and mass in a crude but effective manner totally distinct from an Operator’s protocols. Witches could also manipulate people, and they seemed to take a certain perverse satisfaction in doing so.
They were impossible to negotiate with, because they had never bothered to tell anyone what it was they wanted in the first place. After centuries of war, Central wasn’t even sure if forcing the Witches to surrender was possible, or if only extermination would end the conflict.
So, yes, Gaul had done a great deal of worrying about the Witches.
What he had not worried about was the possibility of Witches learning to use protocols, given that it was thought to be completely impossible. Activation, performed by a skilled telepath or preferably an empath, was required, in addition to the initial infusion of nanomachinery. Since he controlled the only source for said nanites, Gaul was almost certain that it was an Operator who had used the Shining Cloud Protocol.
Which meant that, however unlikely, only the second scenario could be true. Operators in league with Witches.
“This might interest you.”
Gaul handed a folder over to Alistair, who opened it and scanned the contents, looked up briefly in surprise, and then gave them a second, more thorough reading.
“This means…”
Gaul nodded.
“Multiple parties pursuing different agendas. It has to be.”
“So our reality hackers didn’t intervene in today’s incident,” Alistair mused. “I was almost certain that they would. The circumstances even seem similar – I’ve been thinking about it, Gaul. Mitzi said that the silver Weir she bumped into hid its Etheric signature until it was close. I didn’t put too much stock in it when she first told me, but the same thing happened here today. Doesn’t it seem like someone is changing the rules?”
“That’s been bothering me, too. If the Witches have learned to hide their Etheric signatures, every Operator is put at risk. But if they have learned something this critical, why reveal it to us in such a minor skirmish? Why not wait until they could use it to do some real damage?” Gaul looked moodily at Alistair. “There was no tampering in today’s incident, and the meddling in the earlier incident was apparently to our benefit. So someone tried to help us that night, but not today.”
“Who? And why?” Alistair demanded.
“I don’t know,” Gaul admitted. “And it bothers me very much to say that, but I can’t even guess as to who would benefit from all this. But I will tell you this much.”
Gaul stood abruptly and walked to the window. He spoke softly, watching the reflection of the trees waving in the wind.
“There’s no way we’re dealing with only one party. Too much of this conflicts to have a single motivation behind it. So it’s not that someone has decided to start attacking my Operators,” he said venomously, surprising Alistair, “but that someone is using Central itself as a pawn in their game. More than anything, I hate,” Gaul snarled, turning his furious red eyes on Alistair, “being a pawn for anyone. There is one game, Alistair, and we are the players, not the pieces. And someone needs to be reminded of that.”
“What are you going to do?” Alistair asked quietly, a bit taken aback by Gaul’s sudden display of emotion.
“We will find out exactly who is responsible, and exactly how they have done these things – and yes, it may take some time, but that will only give them more time to think that they’ve made an impact, that they’ve rattled us. We’ll let them think they have a greater advantage than they actually do, until we can mitigate the real one. If we play our cards right,” Gaul grinned evilly, a ghastly expression that Alistair had not, in the decades he had known him, ever seen, “they may even decide to make a move here in Central, where we are strong.”
Gaul folded up the smile and his face reverted to its normal dour expression, much to Alistair’s relief.
“We will draw them out, Alistair. We will draw them out and then we will destroy them utterly. We will make an example of them, whoever they are, and any cartel or faction that objects, well, they will also become part of the example. There is no other way forward,” Gaul said, calmly.
“What are your orders, Director?”
Gaul raised an eyebrow at the formality, but made no immediate reply. He pushed another file folder forward on his desk with a pencil. Alistair took it without looking at it.
“You will conduct an Audit into this matter,” Gaul said crisply. “You will settle all outstanding accounts, in full. You will act in this matter under my authority, and will use whatever personnel or resources you deem fit in order to bring a close to this matter, within certain constraints.”
“Those being?” Alistair asked, flipping through the file.
“You will continue to use Mitsuru. At the end of this matter, she will be evaluated as a candidate for Audits, or she will be officially declined and reassigned.” Gaul’s voice was light, dismissive. “And you can’t use the rest of the Auditors.”
Alistair snapped his head up.
“What’s that?” he snarled, his lip quivering. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Gaul. All that big talk and then you’re going to send me out with Mitzi to take care of it? Be reasonable, Gaul.”
“I am being reasonable.” Gaul took his glasses off and began polishing the lenses with a rag. “I need Rebecca here, and the other two will be off making enough trouble to keep everyone from noticing that you’re not out there, Alistair. Get your head on right, Chief Auditor. You know full well what would happen if the cartels found out that all the Auditors were occupied.”