The Administration Series (2 page)

Experimentally, Toreth thumbed the door control, letting the door open a few centimetres before he closed it again. On the monitor, the prisoner jerked upright and pressed his back against the wall, fighting for composure.

"Are you interrogating again today, Para?" the officer beside him asked. "You don't have a room booked."

"No, just passing through. He's all done. Put him on the midmorning transport back to Justice."

When the lift up from the detention level stopped, Toreth almost stepped out before he registered the lemon-yellow walls. Only the third floor above ground level, and with no one ready to get in — someone pressing all the buttons and taking another lift, no doubt. He stabbed impatiently at the control panel until the lift finally resumed its journey.

He should have taken the stairs, except that meant dealing with security doors that were even more irritating.

When the lift doors opened, they revealed a pale blue lobby area with wall screens giving directions to the various sections on the fifth-floor level. The new potted plants that Toreth had noticed on Friday were already beginning to droop sadly beneath the artificial lighting.

More plants had been installed in the long corridor over to the General Criminal section. Predictably enough, several of the more attractive ones had gone missing already. No doubt there'd be a memo.

Toreth's admin, Sara, shared a central open plan area with the admins of the other seniors whose offices opened off it, and for once she was there before him. Seeing him arrive, she waved cheerfully.

When he reached her desk, he said, "'Morning."

"And a good one." Sara spread her arms. "What do you think?"

Trick question, because she was wearing the standard admin uniform of dark grey, with the I&I logo on the shoulder.

He scanned her, letting his professional eye for detail pull out an answer. New hairstyle was a good first guess, but her black, glossy hair — from the same part-Southeast Asian genes that supplied her dark eyes and the golden cast to her skin — was cut in a shoulder-length bob. No change from the last few weeks.

That left one other usual thing to try, so he checked her hands. The new ring stood out at once among the collection that adorned her slim hands. The three diamonds were large enough to classify it as an offensive weapon. Third finger of her left hand, too.

"You're engaged again?"

Her face darkened. "I wish you wouldn't say
again
like that."

"Why not? We both know that finger's just a jumping-off point for one of the others. Have I met this new contributor to the pension plan?"

"No, I don't think so. He's . . ." Rings sparkling, she sketched a vague suggestion of height. "It was a bit of a surprise, really. I've not known him that long. And the stones are synthetic. But it's a nice one, don't you think?"

"Yeah, lovely." Toreth gave him a month, at the most. "Anything for me?"

"Your lucky morning, too — not a thing."

She was right; in his office, Toreth found no messages, no irate notes, and no compulsory summonses to pointless meetings. Not even anything from his boss, who had an almost psychic ability to ruin his day with a well-targeted memo.

It was unusual enough that he checked with Sara. She set to work on the comm, performing her mysterious admin magic. The unofficial administrative assistant network promptly reported Tillotson as unexpectedly called away from the office for the day.

However, after half an hour, he found his good mood evaporating anyway. When Toreth was out in the field, supervising active investigations, he longed for the regular hours and mod cons of the I&I building. Then, when the cases reached the interrogation stage, he missed the excitement and activity of the hunt. However, on balance, he had decided long ago that both phases generated equal amounts of boring paperwork.

Fishing in a drawer, he found a packet of slightly furry sugar-free mints. He sucked one slowly as he flipped through the pages on the screen. They contained the verbatim reports of the interrogation. Toreth sighed around the mint. He'd forgotten how boring checking transcripts could be.

Normally he didn't bother double-checking the transcripts Sara authorised for transmission to Justice. It wasn't that he didn't trust Sara to do this one right — quite the reverse — but it was very important that the investigation went well. It had been his first big case since his return to headquarters and he wanted to make sure he'd missed nothing.

Still uninspiring stuff, though. Toreth decided he'd do the first half of the record, and then reward himself with an extra biscuit with his coffee.

Half an hour passed before someone knocked on the door and opened it without giving him a chance to reply. It proved to be Chevril — wearing his jacket indoors, Toreth noted. Probably still showing off the senior's badge now on his shoulder.

"'Morning, Chev."

"Busy?" Chevril asked.

"Yes." Toreth frowned, and then smoothed the expression away. He wasn't actually averse to the interruption, but he'd left instructions with Sara that he wasn't to be disturbed.

The diminutive senior strode across the office, brandishing a paper copy of the
Journal of the Association of Para-Investigators
like a passport. Chevril tended to stride — it was the only way he could keep up with most people.

"I brought this back. Thanks." He dropped the journal on the desk. "I'm afraid I spilled a bit of coffee on it."

All his coffee, by the look of it. "No jobs you fancy?"

"Absolutely damn-all interesting. Fits the rest of my life. How are you?"

"Fine, actually." Toreth grinned. "Case cracked and on the way back to Justice. Still got a backup prisoner if I need any more details later." Maybe overt cheerfulness would encourage Chevril to go away.

However, he didn't seem inclined to leave. Instead, he wandered over to the window, and peered into the enclosed courtyard five floors below. "Palm trees," he said, sounding surprised.

"They put them in on Friday. Didn't you notice all the plants up here too?"

"Huh. Sprucing the place up for Secretary Turnbull's visit. I bet they take 'em away again the minute she's gone."

"Very probably. If there's a leaf left in the building by then."

"Are they walking already?" Chevril snorted. "Bunch of bloody thieves there are in this place."

There was a brief silence.

"Nothing to do?" Toreth asked. He made a note on the interrogation transcript as a half-hearted suggestion that he, himself, had plenty to do.

Chevril, typically, ignored the hint. "Not really. I'm still waiting to get a full team assigned. What's the point of finally getting promoted to senior if I'm stuck doing the same crap as the bloody juniors? I bet you didn't have to wait for your team, did you? If you can remember that far back."

Chevril's promotion had happened shortly after Toreth's return from Mars, and the Saga of the Team Assignment had been in progress since. Despite the generous sprinkling of silver in Chevril's dark hair, he was only a month or two older than Toreth — they'd joined the Interrogation Division in the same year and later trained together as paras. The disparity between Toreth's notably early promotion and Chevril's much delayed one was yet another of Chevril's regular complaints.

Not one that Toreth felt like going over again today. He looked for a diversion. "So what are you doing?"

"Filling out request forms for an m-f. The prisoner isn't even here yet, so I don't know why I'm bothering."

"Or not bothering, as the case might be."

"Too bloody right." Chevril pulled a hand screen from his back pocket, expanded the screen and laid it flat on Toreth's desk. He paged disconsolately through the half-completed form. "I mean, just look at this.
Estimated Value of Information Expected
.
I
don't bloody know, do I? If I knew what information she had I wouldn't need to interrogate her, would I?"

Toreth sighed. "Look, put 'high strategic value'. Works for me."

"I've tried that. Mindfuck bounced the last one as insufficiently detailed."

"Well, maybe you should call them Psychoprogramming — it puts them in a better mood. Anyway, don't worry. It's a new quarter now, remember? They're always more relaxed at the start of a budget."

"They'll bounce it anyway. They're just looking for excuses. They're booked solid with fast-track re-education for resisters, or at least that's what Ange claimed when I asked her. Even Tillotson's favourite blond, blue-eyed boy didn't get a place for his star turn, did he?"

Toreth tried to recall the disciplinary penalty for punching a fellow senior para. He didn't know who'd started the rumour that he fucked Tillotson in order to get the best cases, but he'd given up bothering with denials. Like all the best rumours, the truth — that Tillotson was chronically heterosexual — had done nothing to dispel it.

"I was ordered not to apply," Toreth said. "They wanted him on his feet and making sense for the trial. When the m-f screws up, it screws up big time." Toreth unwrapped another mint. They aren't the answer to everything, you know. They won't be putting Interrogation out of work for a long while yet."

Stoic philosophy clearly wasn't what Chevril was looking for.

"How can they expect us to do a decent job if they won't make the resources available?" he demanded.

"M-fs are expensive bits of equipment, especially the new ones." Ostensible reasonableness would be sure to annoy Chevril even further. "And they need trained operators."

"So they should train 'em. Instead of wasting their money on designing yet another bloody interdivision request form with yet another set of bloody boxes to fill in."

"Write that down and put it in the suggestions file," Toreth said, adding a malicious smile.

Chevril rolled his eyes. "Oh, good idea. And then there'd be a machine free tomorrow and I'd be getting
my
mind fucked. No, thanks. I'd rather have the bloody paperwork. Just about."

He snapped the screen closed and left, stealing a mint from Toreth's desk on the way.

Toreth picked up the coffee-stained journal and flicked through it, delaying getting back to work. He was one of the few paras who paid the extra subscription for a paper copy of the
JAPI
, although he didn't usually read it. The technical articles weren't up to much, and he wasn't interested in the job adverts.

Despite this, the adverts were the reason he subscribed. There were always discontented paras looking for a way out of I&I who didn't fancy laying their extradivisional interest open to management scrutiny by reading the
JAPI
on the system. The paper copy was anonymous, unless you were actually caught with it.

As everyone knew that Toreth was there for life, it didn't matter if he had it around. Every week, as soon as the magazine arrived in his office, it was immediately borrowed and circulated until everyone who wanted to see it had done so. The more recent copies made an unread pile near his desk before they migrated to an unread pile by the window and were finally filed by Sara into the recycling system.

So he knew, in a general way, which paras were happy and which were looking for something new. Which ones, like Chevril, were long-term whingers who were no more likely to leave than he was himself, and which had developed a new interest in life outside I&I. He had a word with people when they picked up the journal and another word when they brought it back, keeping his finger on the pulse of the division. Very occasionally, he even found things out before they reached Sara via the admin gossip network. In addition, a selection of paras from various sections owed him a low-grade favour, which was always useful.

He ran his eye down the coffee-stained pages: I&I postings at sections across Europe, other branches of Int-Sec offering openings for retraining, an assortment of corporate positions of various kinds. Chevril went on endlessly about the joys of corporate contracts, although Toreth had never liked the idea. Nothing, in fact, appealed to him more than where he was right now, boring paperwork or not.

Unable to delay any longer, he pushed the journal to one side and dutifully returned his attention to his screen. At least he had the afternoon off to look forward to.

Toreth leaned back in his chair and listened to the lecture with half-closed eyes. From his seat three-quarters of the way back in the spacious auditorium, he couldn't make out much detail of the speaker beyond dark hair and a smart dark suit. However, he could see most of the rest of the audience: computer scientists, games manufacturers, stock market speculators, and God knew what others, but certainly including — he had no doubt — people in his line of work. A cross-section of the Administration's New London elite: corporate, research, government, and military Service representatives. Of course, the speaker was one of the leading authorities on the breaking new techniques of fully immersive computer simulations; SimTech was a small corporation, but it was considered the best in the field.

The technology was causing excitement in parts of Int-Sec — Toreth had heard about the seminar from a colleague with an acquaintance in Psychoprogramming. Something to do with machines that might, among other things, end up putting the personnel in Interrogation out of business altogether. However, Toreth doubted it. Machines could never replace humans in some fields, not even highly sophisticated machines with full-sensorium, interactive sim programs that could convince even the most sceptical and paranoid prisoner of their reality. They'd still need people to run them — the personal touch, you could call it.