Rules of Conflict (22 page)

“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
Lucien’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.

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?

“Pull the other one—it sings ‘Oh, Acadia.’” Jani tossed the
newssheets aside and continued her inspection. She found fresh flowers in both
the sitting room and bedroom. Val the Bear sat perched against the bedroom
vase, a banner pinned to his chest.

“You’re out of uniform,” she told him as she detached the note.
I
found the scalpel on your desk—don’t even think about it.
This time, Lucien
hadn’t even bothered with an initial. Jani crumpled it and tossed it in the
trashzap, following with the missive she’d found tucked in her underwear.

She had made another circuit of the bedroom before she spotted the
thick, pale blue envelope lying on her bed. Another slip of white paper had
been attached to the closure flap.

My, aren’t we the colorful personality?

Jani shredded that note before consigning it to the flash-flame.
Messages in underwear were cute, and knowing Lucien had been rummaging through
her bedroom had its seductive aspects. “But there’s a line, Mister, and you
just crossed it.”

She hefted her ServRec and adjourned to her sitting room, plucking
Val the Bear from his floral roost on the way. “Simyam Baru escaped from his
room,” she told him. “I thought I’d locked him down well enough, but he wasn’t
as far gone as the other patients, and he figured out how to crack the Laumrau
code locks.” She sat on the couch and propped Val against a pillow in the
opposite corner. “Only two other patients still lived at this point—he released
them from their rooms. Orton was blind—they’d severed her optic nerves so they
could input directly into her visual cortex. Fessig could still see. On him,
they’d performed a tactile-aural synesthetic reroute.” Jani looked into the
bear’s shiny eyes. “He felt everything he heard. Whispering and instrument hum
felt like ants crawling over him. Normal speaking voices felt like slaps and
punches, depending on their pitch.”

The three of them jumped Felicio and Stanleigh, who had run down
to the garage to secure the exits as soon as they realized patients had
escaped. “They had to secure the exits manually because we couldn’t control
ingress and egress from central systems. You see, the bombing started right
after the Laumrau hospital staff cleared the building and fled to their
sect-sharers in the hills.”

Shatterboxes first, to disable systems and blow infrastructure.
“That was when Yolan died, when one of the operating theater walls collapsed on
her.”

Then came pink, the brilliantly hued microbial mist that took up
where the explosives left off. “We tried to wash it out of the air with
water—within the first half minute after release, it’s still concentrated
enough that you can do that—but the shatterboxes had damaged the pumping
system, and we couldn’t maintain pressure in the hoses. The pink diffused and got
into everything.”

Instrument cards liquefied. Boards turned to jelly.

“So we couldn’t control the doors—we had to shut them manually.
That was the first mistake I made—I should have guessed the Laumrau would try
to pink us. I should have locked down the doors and vents as soon as they’d
fled.”

Val regarded her patiently.

“I know. I’m digressing.” Jani prodded him with her toe. “So Fel
and Stan ran to the garage to check the doors, and Baru, Orton, and Fessig
jumped them and stole the control card for the people-mover.” But the vehicle
had been damaged by the shatterboxes. “I think the pink got to it, too. I
watched it from the roof—it barely made it over the first rise.”

Then she saw the Laumrau pursuit craft, a sleek, bullet-shaped
demiskimmer with bank-and-dive capability. “It flitted over the rise after the
’mover.” She picked up one of the throw pillows and hugged it to her chest. “I
heard the explosion. Saw it. A blown battery array emits a very distinctive
green-white flash. John confirmed it later.” Granted, over two months passed
before he could examine the site, but he’d had a lot of experience in crash
investigation by then, and he knew what to look for. “He said from the
condition of the wreckage and the human remains he found, no one could have survived.”

Val the Bear cocked an eyebrow. Well, not really, but it was easy
to imagine.

Jani nodded. “Yes, I know. You could have said the same thing
about what happened to me.” She cracked open the envelope and removed her file,
shaking and riffling both in case any more
communiqués petits
awaited
discovery. Then she lay back, rested her head against the bolster, and paged
through her Service record. Most of the material that covered her time under
Neumann was still missing, but what remained still told quite a story.

The excerpts she read could be considered hilarious or depressing,
depending on the judgment of the reader. She could understand Lucien’s dismay.
The role she played in the midnight requisition from Central Supply of several
sorely needed parchment imprinters and systems cards had earned her the undying
enmity of the Rauta Shèràa Base Supply officer, the threat of a court-martial,
and a personal invitation from Colonel Matilda Fitzhugh to eat a shooter.

“No mention is made, of course, that the reason they kept
Documents and Documentation undersupplied was because they’d been shunting
equipment into the J-Loop black market for a year and a half.” Jani glanced
over the top of the report at Val the Bear. “Instead they dropped the charge
against me because of ‘insufficient evidence’ and spread the rumor that Evan
used the Family
du piston
to get me off the hook. Forget the fact we
hadn’t spoken in six months.” She straightened the pages and moved on to the
next episode.

“Oh yes. My first run-in with good old Rikart.” Jani could
visualize Neumann in his dress blue-greys, the narrower black belt of the
older-style uniform squeezing his thick middle like a tourniquet. Broad-beamed.
Wide, jovial face cut with a narrow mustache. Father Christmas in middle age.
“A personal buddy of Phil Unser, which told one everything one needed to know
right there. He started out second-in-command of Base Operations. When he tried
to kneecap Documents and Documentation by incorporating us into Ops, I wrote a
report.” She leafed through the fiched copy, forty-eight pages of carefully
delineated argument as to why a nonindependent documents section would be
detrimental to the Service as a whole and Rauta Shèràa Base in particular. Her
“fictional examples” had contained everything but the names and dates.

“There were twenty-three transfers after I submitted it for
General Review.” Her commanding officer had reamed her for not clearing the
report with him before submission, and yet another notation of
“insubordination” was added to her record. “I couldn’t figure out why they
didn’t just boot me out.”

The answer came in a message, which she had found tucked in the
outer pocket of her scanpack pouch during an idomeni-Service conclave a few
weeks later. The pouch hadn’t left her belt—she’d never been able to figure out
who passed the message to her and when.