Code of Conduct (9 page)

“He's probably the most knowledgeable Vynshàrau where we're concerned,” she said. Experience in dealing with humanish—that had to be the reason the idomeni risked sending him. Even now, the Council must be training his replacement.

“Yeah, he tries to be as human as he can. Always just misses, though.” Steve bared his teeth in an apelike grimace. “I mean, he comes at you with that smile, holding his hand out for you to shake, and it's like—”

“Grim Death with a Deal for You,” Jani said. And what deals he offered.

Someday, nìa, you will be Rauta Haárin. Then you will replace me. As chief propitiator, you will ensure the blending continues. You will guide souls along the Way to the Star
. Tsecha had sounded so sure of himself, as always. He knew the gods were on his side. Fervor. Fanaticism.

They had stood on the Academy veranda after the graduation ceremony had been completed. Nema had awarded Jani a ring, as he had each of his Six. A lovely thing, crimson jasperite set in cagework gold, an exact duplicate of his ring of station. Everyone else's had fit, but hers had been too small. So he had explained what needed to happen in order for hers to fit.

He had been genuinely surprised when Jani handed the ring back to him. Confused. But he thought he could compel her. She told him she didn't liked being forced to play pawn in someone else's game.

This is not a game, nìa. This is life as it must be
.

The sound of Steve's chuckling brought her back to the present. “Grim Death. That's great!” He flipped his spent 'stick into a trashzap and paced up and down the walkway.

Outside, the dusk-darkened sky was laced with orange and purple. In the distance, charge lot lights had activated. Jani looked at the wall clock in surprise. “It's still afternoon. It's getting dark already?”

Steve stopped in his tracks. “Yeah. Bloody winter. Nothin' to look forward to but nothin'.” He looked at her expectantly. “You got plans?”

“Work, for a while. I'm lagged as hell. Probably be asleep
before long.” She made a show of stretching. “You never answered my question about Lyssa.”

“Hmm.” Steve strolled down the walkway. “Where you going now?”

“Executive offices.” She fell into step beside him. “I need to pick up some docs.”

“Anything planned for tomorrow?”

“Not sure. Why?”

Steve looked at her with the sort of grin that drove Earthbound girls to desktops. “You know that saying about one good turn,” he said, disappearing into an unmarked stairwell.

Jani found Evan waiting for her in the Interior executive wing.

“Get settled all right?” He ushered her down the painting-trimmed hallway and into his office. “How's your room?” He had changed into civvies. His blue pullover matched his eyes. Unfortunately, the color also accented the hollows beneath. “Hope you've found everything to your liking.”

Jani watched him close in on the bar. She refused his offer of a drink, noticing glumly that he still opted for straight bourbon. “Why didn't you tell me about Nema?” she asked, following with a quick rundown of her near miss. “I was an eyelash away from being pushed into that room. The physical changes wouldn't have thrown him at all—he would have known me instantly.”

Evan dragged another chair over to the visitor's side of his desk. He sighed and motioned for Jani to sit.

“It caught me by surprise, too.” He lowered his lean frame into his chair as though he feared the cushions had teeth. “Langley doesn't bother to inform me of his visits anymore. I must allow him access to that portion of the Main House whenever he requires it. He seems to require it whenever it causes the most inconvenience.” He scowled and sipped his drink. “What a coincidence.”

“You could have told me.”

“I tried! I called your suite. You didn't answer. Knowing the kind of day you'd had, I assumed you were taking a nap. You always slept like a rock.” He offered a faint, knowing
smile. “I'd been in meetings all afternoon—I had no idea you'd come back here. How did you get into the secured section anyway? I hadn't arranged for your clearance yet.”

“The elevator let me ride, but it wouldn't let me steer.” Jani pressed her fingers to her temples. Her scalp felt two sizes too small.

“Somebody must have overridden the security controls in order to get people up from the subs more quickly. At least we'll know to be on our guard for next time. Langley usually times these little invasions every six to ten days. My staff didn't expect him until early next week. I guess it was just Cao's way of saying, ‘Welcome home.'” Evan rocked his glass back and forth, clinking nonexistent ice. “Do you need me for anything tonight—”

“No—”

“—because I'm busy. Social commitment. A dinner I don't want to eat hosted by people I despise. Welcome to the glamorous world of top-level government.” He set down his drink. “I have what you came here for.” He rose and walked back to his desk. “Don't want to waste your time.”

“You're not.” Jani watched Evan's shoulders work beneath his sweater. He had never been exactly strapping, but he looked bonier than she remembered. “Have you eaten anything today?”

“I had lunch,” he replied vaguely as he opened a drawer and withdrew a thick, scuffed binder. “I found these in the parts bins, locked away in a drawer.” He silenced Jani's protest with a look. “I know as a nondoc, I shouldn't be allowed in there. Don't ask me how I gained access—you don't want to know.” He set the files on the table between them.

Jani hefted the binder into her lap and examined the black cover. She flipped the cover open. Her palms felt damp.
Call me Pandora
.

“Please don't read it now.” Evan advanced on the bar again. “Take it out of here.”

“Evan—”

“You don't understand how much it sickens me to know you're going to read that. But you have to, don't you? It's your job. It's what I asked you here to do.” His voice had
taken on a formal tone. Very van Reuter. “So you had better go do it.”

Jani tucked the binder under her arm and headed for the door. “Enjoy your dinner.” She paused in the doorway and looked back at him. “Bicarb lozenges are great for masking liquor breath, by the way.”

Evan reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a half-empty foil-wrapped cylinder. “I've been buying them by the case for years,” he said, raising his glass to her. Jani closed the door before she had to watch him drain it.

 

Against all logic, her stomach started growling as she mounted the Private House's sweeping main stairway and wended through the second-floor hallways toward her room. Her appetite had increased markedly over the past few months.
Must be the cold weather
. She was considering the possibilities her cooler offered when the faint smell of fresh coffee brought her to full alert.

On the table outside her door, she found a tray laden with what apparently constituted the House's version of an evening snack. Next to the swan-necked silver ewer containing the coffee rested a plate of sliced fresh fruit, a keep-warm basket filled with sweetened bread, and a three-tiered dish containing colorful miniature cakelets and cookies.

Jani wrestled through the door with her duffel, the file binder, and the tray, determined to shovel everything into the room at once even though she knew it would go much more smoothly if she'd just put something down. She staggered back-bowed and lopsided to the bed, depositing her burden just before straps slid and binders freed themselves and whomped onto trays.

She popped an anise cookie into her mouth as reward for a job well done, then activated the suite's music system, pressing the pad beside her bed until she found something appropriately calming. Mussorgska, she guessed, as strings swelled and faded. Not the current fashion, but comforting. Judging from Evan's behavior when he turned over the binder to her, she would need some comfort soon.

She pulled off her boots, carried the tray into the kitchenette, and poured and arranged. Soon, she was ensconced in
her office, steaming mug in hand, feet on desk, binder in lap, scanpack within easy reach. She'd closed the curtains to block out the night, but left her office door wide open. She wanted to feel cozy, not trapped.

She opened the binder, glanced over the stripped-down table of contents, then paused to read more carefully as familiar terms caught her eye.
Initial Hopgood Analysis—Page Four. Insertion and Activation—Page Nine
. She set down her coffee and read further.
Dobriej Parameters. Physical Markers. Final Scans—Page Twenty-One
.

Jani thumbed through the hefty binder. “There are a hell of a lot more than twenty-one pages here!” She browsed psych evals, handwritten notes, Neoclona emergency calls, and wound up staring at the Commonwealth Police report of an accident that occurred at the van Reuter summer compound north of Chicago. A boating accident in which three children died.

A blast of woodwinds jerked Jani upright. She hurried into the bedroom and killed the music, then fixed herself a drink. Water. With lots of ice. To quell the burning in her stomach.

She returned to her office. From the recesses of well-stocked drawers, she removed a pad of paper and several colored pens. On the first sheet of the pad, Jani roughed out a three-column grid, then wrote, “Initial Hopgood” and “Insert and Act.” in the first, “Dob,” “PM,” and “Finals” in the second.

The third column, she left blank.

Four hours later, the third column remained blank. Jani stared at the empty space, debated going through the binder one more time, then shook her head. She hadn't found what she sought because it wasn't there to find.

She walked to the window and drew aside the curtain. The night sky was clear, the glitter of city illumination reflecting sharp silver-gold off the lake surface. She cracked the weather seal and let frigid air wash over her. When her face felt the way her left arm always did, she closed the window and massaged the blood back into her cheeks.

After a few minutes, she returned to her desk and wrote, “Augmentation of Martin van Reuter” across the top of the
grid. Every report needed a title, even the ones you couldn't finish.

During her postcrash recovery, she had learned more about her augmentation than she ever wanted to know. The physical reactions it induced had sped her recovery in some ways and hampered it in others, and John Shroud had been adamant she learn its idiosyncrasies along with him.
I can't believe you waited this long
, he had said.
Willful ignorance will only harm you in the long run
. So she forced herself to read the files he purloined for her, memorized the terms, the sequences, the whys and wherefores.

The evaluations had begun during her first month in OCS. She'd been a borderline case. Hopgood analysis confirmed her tendency toward vivid dreams. One Service physician had expressed grave concern over the activity seen in certain regions of her thalamus during Dobriej sensory-input testing.

But when the war came, the Service augmented Jani for the same reason they did all their eligible personnel—as a precaution. The enclave should have bugged out as soon as the fighting began.
But we had a GateWay station to protect, commercial interests to oversee
. Besides, the opportunity to observe the orderly idomeni at war proved too great a temptation.
To walk ignored past battles like figurines in bell jars. To be protected by the simple fact it wasn't our war
.

Of course, it couldn't last.
We watched with our faces pressed against the glass. Before we could stop ourselves, we'd broken through
. Learned names. Become involved.

Jani escaped to her sitting room. Desperate for voices, she activated her holoVee, flipping through the channels until she found a broadcast of a soccer match. The Gold Round of the last Commonwealth Cup. She watched bright blue Serran and red-and-gold-striped Phillipan jerseys dash up and down the field as the crowd roiled and roared.

I shouldn't have been augmented, but at least I was old enough to adapt
. She sat on the couch, watched the colors flicker, listened to the ebb and flow of noise. She ate a balanced diet. Kept hydrated. Avoided conflict whenever possible.
I haven't had a precautionary take-down in almost twenty years
. And she'd never need one.
I know the difference be
tween right and wrong—no altered neurochemical cascade is going to push me over the edge
.

Someone like her was supposed to be the worst-case scenario, the absolute limit to which a dodgy technology could be pushed.

So, whose decision was it to test a prototype personality augment on a three-year-old boy?

What did they think they were doing
? When they enhanced what they believed to be Martin's authoritative tendencies, were they surprised when he fought with playmates and flew into tantrums when his wishes were thwarted? Were they astonished when he attacked his father with a lazor at the age of six, or when he pushed his little brother down stairs at eight. Repeatedly tried to force himself on his mother, then his sister, beginning at age eleven?

When they did everything they could to enhance Martin's feeling that he, and only he, was the van Reuter heir, were they shocked that he planned the murders of his brother and sister?

But the storm got you before your parents could
. Given the justifications for Martin's behavior she found in the psych evals, it would have been interesting to see how
la famille
van Reuter would have worked out from under that one. And they would have. The pattern had been set.

Jani pondered Martin's blank third column. She had constructed the same sort of chart during her hospital stay, filling her own third column with the terms for post-augie analysis and counseling. In her case, they led to the conclusion that a mistake had been made, but that Captain Kilian, an Academy-trained documents examiner in whom the Service had invested so much, would just have to be taught how to adjust.

Poor Marty—they just turned you loose on an unsuspecting world
. Then buried the evidence and prevented the unsuspecting world from figuring out what the hell had happened.
Evan didn't even allow an autopsy
. The miniscule masses, buried next to Martin's amygdala, would have shown up during the examination of his brain. They had formed from the components injected into his ventricular system, produced all those neurotransmitter analogues whose names Jani had managed to forget. Tried to forget. Would forget, eventually.

She worked a finger beneath her hair at the place where skull met spine, and felt the tiny, raised, round scar. The secondary depositions near her thyroid and adrenal glands had been minor discomforts compared to the insertion of the primary augmentation. Having her head immobilized in the stereotaxic restraint had shaken her up, and she'd been a grown woman. How would that damned skull-cage have affected a toddler?

And the headache afterward…

She fixed her attention upon the soccer match. Phillipi's star right wing had just scored what would prove to be the winning goal. The screen filled with the raucous tumble of a red-and-gold pile-on.

Jani switched channels, flicking past serials, documentaries, and travelogues before coming to rest on a real-time news transmit.
Live—from the palazzo of Treasury Main
! She watched the florid-faced Treasury Minister, the stark Exterior Minister, and several tightly wrapped colonial governors approach the eager throng of reporters like hikers nearing the edge of a cliff. The governors kept their replies short, while Treasury Minister Abascal entoned the antisecession line in which Prime Minister Cao believed so firmly.

But Exterior Minister Ulanova held sway as always. As soon as she approached the Veephones, the governors fell silent and Abascal's mouth contorted in a dyspeptic smile. No, the PM's views on colonial autonomy did not alarm Exterior, Ulanova said in her warm alto, nor did Cao's unwillingness to entertain opposing views mean all talks on the subject would cease.

Then Ulanova relinquished the spotlight, and Evan sauntered to the fore, his clear eyes and healthy color a testament to the liberal ingestion of both black coffee and dehydro boosters. He ignored a question concerning Lyssa's death and launched into a point-by-point disassembly of Ulanova's views.