Rules of Conflict (43 page)

Neumann spun around. “Hey, Kilian, look what I can do!” He tugged
at his right arm, gasping in fake surprise as it came away in his hand. “Wave
bye-bye to Aunt Jani.” He held it by the wrist the way a father would his son’s
arm, and worked it up and down. The limp hand flopped like a dying fish.

“Are you all right?” Lucien glanced at the monitors. “I don’t want
to be the one to tell Nema you look really sick.”

“I’m fine.”

“I heard you’re going to a party tomorrow night.”

“From whom?”

“Ischi. I stopped by FT to hear what happened. He wouldn’t shut up
about you, either.” Lucien’s peeved look altered to angel innocence. “You know,
that invitation says you can bring a guest.”

“Boy, that’s a friend.” Neumann had given up waving bye-bye, and
now played one-sided patty-cake. “You’re lying there half-dead, and all he can
think about is trolling for new victims at Mako’s shindig.”

Jani watched Neumann toy with his limb. “Stop by during morning
vis and I’ll let you know.”

Lucien eyed her sourly. “Is that a hint?” Something banged against
the door, and he hunkered down as if to dive under her bed. “I better get
going. After what I heard about Pimentel, I don’t want him to be the one to
find me.” After an obvious pause, he leaned down and gave her a brotherly kiss
on the cheek before slipping out of the room.

“Isn’t that sweet?” Neumann tossed his arm onto the top of a
metal-frame table, and struggled to adjust his leg. Judging from the balletlike
turn-out of his foot, it must have slipped from its tenuous mooring. “Well,
Kilian, it’s been lousy as ever. I’ll leave you alone. Let you
digest
it
all.” He limped to the door, empty right sleeve soaked and dripping. Then he
slapped his forehead, returned to the chair, and picked up the limb. “Forget my
head next.” He waved good-bye with the detached arm. “’Course, I’d have to give
you a chance to blow it off first.” He exited through the door, literally, the
blood from his blown leg squelching in his shoe.

Pimentel visited toward nightfall. He wore summerweights. Dress
“B” shirt. Creases sharp enough to shave with. Eminently suitable for reaming
North Lakeside ass.

We’ll see,
he said, when Jani asked him about Mako’s party.
He transferred data from the monitors to the recording board containing Jani’s
chart and gingerly examined her right arm. He seemed distracted. He asked her
questions about Cal Montoya’s diagnosis, and about John, and left without
saying good night.

Morley brought her a snack. Not fruit sludge, but nutritional
broth. Chicken-flavored. Spicy. With crackers, even. Jani savored it like a
meal from Gaetan’s.

Wonder if Neumann will come back.
The prospect angered
rather than scared her.
He’s part of me.
Like Cray, and Borgie. She’d
seen them the last time she visited Chicago.
They helped me solve a murder,
too.

Her door had opened wide before she realized it had opened at all.

“Captain?” Sam Duong slipped in, then skirted to one side so no
one in the hall could spot him before the door closed. “Shh. I don’t want
Pimentel to see me.”

Jani looked him over. He wore civvie summerweights. No sign of an
outpatient bracelet. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” He eyed her in bafflement. “I’m on dinner break. I just
stopped by to visit. See if you needed anything.”

“A working brain.”

“What?”

“Sit down, Sam.” Jani watched him as he walked to Lucien’s
recently vacated seat. He looked a little wobbly himself—he gripped the chair
arms the way she did, as though he’d fall off if he didn’t hang on tight. “I’ve
been thinking about Pierce.”

Sam shot her the same aggravated look Friesian and Pimentel had
been bestowing on her since her arrival. “You shouldn’t be thinking about him.
You should rest. Get better.” He looked at her arms. “You fought. Now you
should recover.”

“Pierce and I have a lot in common. He told me so himself.”

Sam chuffed. “You have nothing in common with him! You’re lovely
and he’s—” His face darkened with embarrassment. “He’s not.”

“You shepherded the paper, Sam. Do you remember why I’m here?”

“Stupid reasons. No proof.”

“I was wanted in connection with the death of my commanding
officer.” Jani knew Sam admired her, and it pained her to destroy it. But
better he should know her for what she was. Better she should tell him things
he couldn’t remember. “I killed him.”

“No—!”

And Pierce
—She gasped as Neumann’s words hit her like a
punch. “And Pierce did me two better.” She slumped forward and pounded the
mattress with her fists. “Two better. Two better. Two better!”

“Captain?” Sam leaned forward, bracing his hands on the edge of
the bed for support. “You look like you did under the awning. I don’t think you
should look like that now.”

Jani thumped the bed, her right arm singing in time. “Pierce
killed them, Sam.”

“Keep your voice down!”

“For the good that thereof would spring. Then he stole the
documents connected with my case because they could lead back to him. And he
stole other documents and put them back and set you up to take the blame.”

Sam stared. Then he clapped his hand over his mouth to muffle his
cry. “I did not put them there!”

“No.” Jani massaged her aching arms. “Pierce was sent to do a very
important job. Doing that job would have been the first step in saving the
Service, the Service he’d come to love, thanks to Mako. The Service he’d come
to see as his life.” She held out her hand, as Pierce had. “It was night. The
air reeked of panic and the stench of burning bodies. The Haárin had
constructed the Ring of Souls around Rauta Shèràa—he was one of the happy few
who witnessed the Laum line up to be slaughtered and tossed on the burning
piles.”

Sam closed his eyes.

“The base was a shambles, I’ll bet. Partly from the Haárin
bombing, partly from the efforts of Ebben, Unser, Fitzhugh and the rest trying
to cover their tracks. But that was all right. Pierce was a weapons runner in
the life he’s left behind. He was used to thinking on his feet. Improvising.”
Her voice dropped. “Up to a point. I’ll bet he was just supposed to arrest
them. But they ran. Toward the city. The shuttleport. He’d never find them
then.” She looked at the stricken Sam, who still held his hand over his mouth.
“What do you do? They’re human and you’re human and it’s all going to hell and
they’re running. What do you do?”

Sam spoke through his fingers. “I yell for them to stop. The MPs
always yell—”

“They
don’t
stop, Sam! They keep running. A few more
seconds, and they’ll be gone. What do you do?”

Sam had raised his hand to object, but the protest caught in his
throat. Instead, he raised his arm higher, straightened it, squeezed off. “I . . .
shoot them.”

“You shoot them.” Kilian nodded. “And you know that no one can die
by shooter on the Night of the Blade. So you shove the bodies in agers to rot
them and hide the cause of death. Call it an awful mistake if anyone complains.
Then you spend the next two decades building a career and trying to forget that
one night when it all went to hell, when you became the thing you’d been sent
to destroy.”

“But Caldor—?”

“Not involved. She was only put into one of the agers to make it
look like an accident.” Jani thought back to Pierce on the day of the match,
wound to snapping with anxiety, bursting with all the things he wanted to tell
her because they had so much in common. “Could you stop by the hospital library
and get me a copy of
Paradise Lost
?”

Sam eyed her strangely. “I suppose so.” He took his handheld from
his shirt pocket and entered a notation. “I’ll go right now.”

“Wait. Is there someplace you can spend the night?”

“Well.” Sam frowned. “Tory invited me to her eighteenth birthday
party. She feels
sorry
for me.” He moaned in pain. “The music alone will
kill me.”

“You should go. You should pretend to get very drunk. Make someone
put you up for the night. It should all be over after tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

Jani forced a smile. “You’re not the only social butterfly around
here. I’ve been invited to a party, too.”

It took Evan several days to work out what must have
happened. He ransacked the Family records that he’d been allowed to keep,
searching for any references to Rauta Shèràa Base from the early days of the
civil war through the evacuation and the long journey home.

Bless you, Mother.
Since Carolina van Reuter was an Abascal
by birth, she had persuaded her brother—the then-Exterior Minister—to copy her
on the Mistys he received from both Rauta Shèràa and Ville Louis-Philippe, the
colonial port nearest Shèrá. The fraternal generosity should have ceased for
security reasons as soon as conditions in Rauta Shèràa became dangerous, but
owing to the pressure applied by the frantic Carolina, they never had.

Evan had found the messages, encased in parchment slipcases and
bound with dark blue cord, in a set of silver brocade boxes stashed in the
closet-sized spare bedroom. Well, that explained why Joaquin hadn’t claimed
them. He must have taken one look at the containers, assumed Carolina’s
personal missives, and allowed his sense of gallantry to overwhelm his lawyerly
reason.

Good old Quino.
Evan arranged the most important messages
in a neat row atop his desk and reread them. In a court of law, they’d be
considered insufficient evidence. Too many gaps that needed to be filled in by
Evan’s memory and his gut instinct.

“That’s where the court of public opinion comes in.” Or rather,
the court of public opinion that mattered.

The first marker on the trail was a communication from J-Loop
Regional Command to the Consul-General, who had relocated his offices to Rauta
Shèràa Base after the Haárin started shelling the city. A timetable, informing
him that three cruisers, the CSS
Hilfington
, the CSS
Warburg
, and
their flagship, the CSS
Kensington
, were being sent from Station Ville
Louis-Philippe to evacuate the human enclave.

The ships would take on additional supplies in preparation for the
evacuees. They would also take on additional weapons. T-40 shooters, both short
and long-range. Screech bombs. Smoke screens. No blades of any sort, however.
Regional Command didn’t want the Haárin to think humans wanted to challenge
them with their ritual weapons of choice.

Evan underlined the sentence about the blades, and continued
reading.

Since the ships would be fully outfitted prior to their arrival,
no stops would be made on the way back to Earth. Most of the evacuees were
Family members and affiliates, highly placed officials with heads crammed with
sensitive information. They needed to be returned to the mother world as soon
as possible for debriefing.

Evan underlined that sentence twice. “So why the detour back to
Station Ville Louis-Philippe, Roshi?” That could be discerned from the next
two documents.

The defense Mako assembled to justify the return trip had been
carefully assembled, with enough basis in fact to withstand examination. His
argument, combined with his proof of Family criminal wrongdoing and his threat
to make it all public, had allowed him to keep his career.

Facilities and Environmental were taxed to the limit,
Mako
had written.
Space was at a premium
. Therefore, there was no room to
house “exceptional cases,” those who could batter already-tenuous morale and
endanger other passengers and crew. One evacuee who suffered from
claustrophobia was put ashore at the Station, as was an odd case who had taken
to lurking in the women’s showers.

It surprised Evan to see that he had been one of the examples
cited in Mako’s defense of his sidetrip.

Mister van Reuter refuses to eat. He sleeps fitfully, and has
been found wandering in restricted areas of the ship. If his condition does not
improve soon, it’s the recommendation of my medical officer that we put him
ashore at Station Ville Louis-Philippe, since it is her belief that he poses a
danger both to himself and the other passengers and crew of the Hilfington.

The name of the
Kensington
medical officer turned out to be
Sophia Carvalla.
So she was in on it, too.
Evan didn’t meet her during
the journey, although he did recall meeting her at a party several years back.
Seemed a sound woman. Just the sort her frazzled colleague from the
Hilfington
would consult with concerning his highborn problem patient.

And Mother got to read this fresh from the receiver.
No
wonder she had fallen apart at the sight of him. “I wasn’t that much of a
problem.” True, he refused to eat. And he had trouble sleeping. But his
appetite had never been the sturdiest, he had always suffered from insomnia,
and the lack of liquor had made both situations worse.

Yes, I infiltrated a restricted area
. Suicide had crossed
his mind, and he wanted to see what the weapons lockers had to help him along.
But that only happened once. At the start of the trip. When the memories were
still fresh.

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and unearthed a bottle.

“So they put two people offship, and topped off supplies.” Took on
prepack rations. Medical goods. And two meatfilled objects referred to only as
TD4J1
and
TD4J2
. Evan’s intuitive leap with the decomp bags had led him to ask
Halvor to make a special trip to question their grocer. Yes, the model numbers
were old, but she recognized them. Agers. Meat-curing chambers.

Or meat-rotting chambers, if a person wasn’t careful about the
settings.

Which led to the fourth document, a handwritten communiqué from
the unlucky clerk who had been the first to crack the
Kensington
hold
seals at Luna Station.