The Administration Series (196 page)

When he had gone she switched the light out and lay back in the dark, still seething. The arrogant little worm. How dare he talk about Toreth like that? (She conceded the point about morals, but
he
had no right to say it.)

How could he say that what the resisters had done at I&I was
good
? Of course, he hadn't seen it. He hadn't seen people he knew, dead in a pool of blood. Parsons, screaming as they'd dragged him out of the coffee room along with the other interrogators and the paras . . .

Think about something else.

What the hell was with 'Aren't I a prospect'? Men. They weren't happy if you tried to 'trap them', and they weren't happy if you said you didn't want to. Well he could go to hell. She wasn't going to think about him any more.

She didn't think about him for fifteen minutes or so, until she finally fell asleep.

Working at the weekend was an annoyance made only marginally more bearable for Toreth by the knowledge that Warrick was also working, so he wasn't missing out on the chance of a long, leisurely weekend fuck. Nevertheless, leaving for I&I early on Saturday morning put him in a black mood even before he reached his office and found the stack of messages that had been left overnight.

As he plodded his way through them, he kept thinking of what he ought to be doing on a Saturday. A swim at the university gym first thing, then back to Warrick's flat for breakfast in bed and afters. One of the more enjoyable of the routines that normally made up his life. It would've been nice to have had
something
that hadn't been utterly disrupted by the revolt.

As far as work went, Saturday was hardly better than Friday. The water to the cells had failed totally overnight, and Toreth was ten minutes away from ordering Detention to open all the cell doors when the service crew called to say the pumps were working again. Once they were fixed, power breakers tripped and the air cycling went down. This time he'd already given the order to open everything when the cycling came back on. It was only yet another fault, this time in the cell security overrides, that saved him from a building full of angry and uncooperative paras and interrogators.

The near disasters did nothing for his temper or his nerves. To top it all, Sara crept into his office at lunchtime, and he knew by her expression the news was bad. She offered a screen, hovered for a moment, then left without a word.

A fresh death list. He scanned down the screen and found the highlighted name. Starr, Joel, junior para-investigator, General Criminal.

Starr had joined Toreth's team only last October, fresh from training, and Toreth hadn't been greatly impressed by him so far. However, it was another blow, another part of pre-revolt I&I that could never return to normal. Still no news from B-C or Nagra either, and the idea of having to build an entire team virtually from scratch depressed him.

Toreth opened the associated report file. By the look of the post-mortem report Starr had been caught in the periphery of a grenade blast. Not discovered until today because he'd made it down to the waste recycling level where he'd crawled into a corner and eventually died a couple of days later of blood loss, dehydration and injuries sustained. Toreth wondered for a moment if the body had been found by that morning's repair teams.

When Toreth ventured outside, he found Sara crying at her desk. He went straight back into his office.

By midafternoon, he was desperately hoping that Warrick would turn up again. Regrettably, he'd already put that down as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Payne proved to be only a slight distraction from the stress. Direct flirting would probably scare him off, so Toreth amused himself by playing accidental touching whenever they were in the same office — not often enough to create suspicion, but enough to be sure that there was some spark of response buried down there. It wouldn't take many days before he'd have the lieutenant trained to lean back in his chair whenever Toreth walked past behind him.

Apart from that, the day was generally dismal.

Sunday brought no better news. For every problem solved, two more appeared. Unless things started to improve soon, he'd have to admit to Carnac that he couldn't perform as requested. God only knew what would happen then. I&I closed down and the remnants returned to Justice, or subsumed by another part of Int-Sec or the Service.

Which meant Carnac winning.

That thought kept him at I&I until past midnight, only finally forced back to Warrick's flat by sheer exhaustion.

However, on Monday he began to see some results from his attempts to reallocate resources. Sufficient admin staff had been cajoled back that he had something approaching a skeleton personnel department. He sent Sara to brief them, and get them started on the task of tracking down the missing, checking the list of dead and presumed dead, and drawing a fuller picture of what the final staff complement was likely to be.

Wheeler sent a report an hour after Toreth got in, saying that the water, food and heating systems in the cells had been completely restored. Toreth had read similar reports before, but this one used words like 'guarantee' rather than 'believe', so he was inclined to put more faith in it.

The cells had been emptied of all those who could walk out, except for the interrogators and paras, and the tribunals were beginning to nibble down the numbers of those. Medical was still a disaster, and people were still dying unnecessarily, but even there things were slowly improving. Some supplies had arrived — nowhere near as many as were needed, but enough to raise the morale of the medical staff.

A second pleasant surprise came midmorning, when someone knocked on his office door.

"Come in." Toreth looked up from the screen in time to see Barret-Connor open the door.

"Morning, Para," B-C said. The sudden shock of normality left Toreth speechless.

"Sorry I'm late," B-C added as he crossed to Toreth's desk. "There's hardly any transport running, and then the Service people had trouble with my ID. I thought for a while they were going to throw me into detention."

His team. With Mistry and Sara, and maybe Morehen, who was still hanging on in the face of the shortages of drugs and decent facilities, that made five of them alive. Toreth cleared his throat. "Where the hell have you been? Why didn't you get in touch?"

B-C looked surprised. "Didn't you get my message, Para?"

"No."

"Oh. Sorry about that. I sent it on Friday, as soon as I got the general call for everyone to come back in."

"Must have been lost in the comm problems." How many other, more important, messages were going astray?

"Does that mean you don't know about Nagra either?" B-C asked.

Six survivors? "No, I don't. Is she okay?"

"Yes. When it all happened, we started back here from Justice, but we couldn't get onto Int-Sec grounds and pretty soon after that we realised we didn't want to. We both laid low at my mother's place until the troopers appeared, then Nagra took off. She's gone up north somewhere, she didn't say exactly where. I got a note to say she was safe, though, and I sent it in the message to you."

Toreth realised he was grinning, but couldn't squash the delight. Six of them. God, maybe things
could
be normal again one day.

In the meantime, B-C provided a skilled and reliable pair of hands, although even he looked dismayed by the time Toreth had finished delegating. To make up for it, Toreth gave him Hepburn's office. The senior wouldn't be needing it — his name had shown up on the death list yesterday.

As the morning drew to a close, Toreth found himself with no desperately urgent life-or-death tasks to complete for the first time in four days. Given the chance to sit back and look at the situation as a whole, he found himself beginning to worry — not because things weren't now going better but, oddly, because they were. When Sara returned, sounding optimistic about the new admin arrangements, he left her in charge and went off to have a coffee and a think.

As he reached the corridor he heard Sara's delighted cry of, "B-C!" followed shortly by, "Toreth, why didn't you
tell
me?"

Without looking back, he waved and walked on.

Toreth sat in Tillotson's office, with his heels scuffing the section head's desk, sipping section head grade coffee, and thought about the bigger picture. He'd been too preoccupied by the chaos and problems to give much thought to Carnac's ultimate plans, and perhaps that had been part of them. Trying to second-guess Carnac's motives was simply a waste of time, so he considered only what he knew had happened so far.

Carnac had stayed in Warrick's flat until Monday morning. That was three full days after the start of the revolt and two and a half days after the resisters had control of Int-Sec.

On Friday (and he smiled without noticing) Warrick had come here to see Carnac in his capacity as new Administration higher-up with special interest in I&I.

And something Toreth had said to Payne on the first day back: if Carnac had made it to I&I a day or two earlier, Sedanioni might not have died.

Why had Carnac been hiding at Warrick's flat when he should have been directing the revolt and taking charge here? No doubt he'd laid his plans carefully, but it wasn't like Carnac to trust the lesser mortals to carry out his directions unsupervised. Payne might know more, and seemed amenable to questioning.

Payne's presence was something else that might bear closer consideration. Carnac wouldn't have chosen him at random. The reason Payne had offered seemed a thin connection, but it might make sense if Carnac was looking for someone favourably predisposed towards I&I. He was reasonably certain that Payne was telling the truth as he knew it, but a chance conversation with Carnac had a ring of plausible coincidence that made him certain that the socioanalyst had set it up. The question was why, and he doubted he could find out from Payne.

When he left the office, he took Tillotson's chair with him. Handy as the armless admin chair had been for Warrick's surprise visit, he thought he deserved something more comfortable.

Back in his office, he found Payne waiting for him with good news — he had somehow managed to divert some technical supplies to I&I from some unspecified alternate destination. There was a strong suggestion that it was better not to ask how or where, so Toreth didn't.

Instead he said, "If only Carnac had pulled his finger out and got here sooner in the first place, we'd be a lot better off."

"Yes, there was some trouble about that," Payne said.

He'd struck gold. "Really? Where?"

"At headquarters. As I understand it, Socioanalyst Carnac decided to direct the operations at Int-Sec in person. There was some confusion, I believe, and the, uh, irregular forces involved in the original uprising were allowed to run out of control here for longer than planned."

He didn't say it, but it didn't take a trained investigator to spot the subtext: involving civilians in military matters was a mistake. "You got here before Carnac?"

"Yes — not me personally, but the Service. Not by long, but Major Bell took control on Monday morning and the socioanalyst arrived later in the day. This is all what I've heard since, though, so it could be wrong."

It certainly fitted in with what he knew. "Nice to know even Carnac can fuck things up."

"I know what you mean — he is a bit unnerving, isn't he? But it was a pity for I&I. By the time we arrived, I'm afraid most of the damage had been done."

"I didn't think you'd care that much."

Payne looked slightly offended. "I won't pretend that there aren't some pretty unflattering views within the Service about the status of some Int-Sec departments, I&I included. But you're Administration, just like us. Or that's how I see it."

After Payne had gone, Toreth sat in his newly acquired chair and thought about what he'd said.

There didn't seem to be any doubt that Carnac had deliberately delayed getting to I&I. Maybe he'd been hoping that the mob would kill enough of the staff that the Division would be destroyed at that stage. That made sense, because not rebuilding I&I would be politically easier than persuading the new Administration to eliminate it. I&I wasn't loved, but it was useful.

It seemed sound enough, except that Carnac had then given Toreth operational authority and let him use it, knowing full well that he would never let Carnac close I&I if there was any way to prevent it. Carnac had backed him up against the Service, both over Bevan and over the medical supplies. He'd given him Payne, who was both useful and sympathetic to I&I. He'd appointed an embarrassingly soft-hearted tribunal panel.

First he'd left I&I to be torn apart, now he seemed to be doing his best to put it back together.

Over the last couple of days, the interview panels had been set up and trained, ready to start processing interrogators and paras at full speed tomorrow. If Carnac genuinely wanted to see I&I blood, then the tribunals were perhaps the strangest thing of all. Why go to the trouble of legitimising the reemployment of the interrogation staff by the new Administration?