Contact Imminent, page 3
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yeah.”
Jani returned to her seat. Sipped her coffee, and winced at the taste of the sour machine brew. “So what was a live and kicking Slager doing buried on the grounds of the Haárin enclave?”
Niall tried his coffee. He swallowed it without a change in expression. Either he was made of hardier stuff than she or he was simply too numb to taste. “You remember the drill. Sometimes the demo techs play it too smart and put the real stuff out there to practice on.” He scratched at the dried mud on his face, then stared at the dirt under his nails. “That’s against procedure, however, because, well, people can get hurt. So they fudge the records, which then means that they can’t always depend on them to tell them what’s out there. The old hands know that. But they didn’t send an old hand—fresh-out-of-the-box Wode got the call. By the time they got someone out of bed who realized what that could mean, it was too late.” He rose and walked to the vend area, still scratching at his muddy cheek. He grabbed a dispo napkin from the dispenser next to the machines, then soaked it in the stream from the water fountain. “Not to change the subject, but what are you doing here?” He leaned against the wall as he cleaned his face. “I thought you’d stay with Tsecha.”
“I wanted to find out about Pull.” Jani peeled an advertising sticker from her cup, a pass good for two free tickets to a midweek showing at the base Veedrome. “Tsecha and Dathim are administering to the injured Haárin.”
“I thought that was the sort of thing he’d been teaching you over the last few months. How to act as a priest.”
Jani nodded. “I’ve learned some of the ceremonies and protocols. But there are a few Haárin who haven’t adjusted to me yet. One of them was among the injured—Tsecha and I both figured that the last thing she wanted to see was my face bending over her, muttering prayers.”
Niall finished cleaning his face, then checked the results in the smooth metal surface of one of the coolers. “I wouldn’t have expected Tsecha to give in like that. He’s a great one for shoving things down people’s throats.”
“He’s starting to feel discouraged.”
“Welcome to the damned club.” Niall tossed back the last of his coffee, then crumpled the cup into a ball and banked it off the wall into the trash. “Not to change the subject again, but how do you feel? My augmentation’s activated. People keep backing away when I try to ask them questions.”
Jani watched Niall kick at the floor like a restless horse pawing the ground. She couldn’t imagine backing away from him for any reason, but she nursed the same Service-made gland in her head that he did, and the synthetic neurotransmitters it pumped out had much the same effect on her as they did on him. “I feel—focused. Like I have things to do, and I can’t rest until I get them done. Colors are sharper. Sounds seem louder. Everyone else moves too slowly. The usual.”
“Started to come down yet?”
“No.” Jani paused and tried to get a sense of herself. “Maybe a little. The hybridization has made it less predictable than it used to be.” Or rather, less predictable in its unpredictability. At one time, her augie caused her senses to jumble. Sounds became aromas, while touch and scent sang to her in a range of tones. Now she simply grew tired and jittery as her brain and body said “Enough” and battlefield alert gave way to moody exhaustion.
“Sometimes I think I should take all that medical advice I’ve received over the years and have the thing taken out. I feel like hell.” Niall gathered his coat. “If you contact Special Services, one of them can see you home. I have to check on Pull. Then I need to contact his parents.”
Jani watched her friend move with the heavy-footed gait that spoke of exhaustion and the emotional bottoming-out that in his case went along for the ride. “Niall, stop hammering yourself. Pull will be all right.”
Niall looked at her and nodded, his predator’s face reddened from rough washing, his poet’s eyes dull. “Yes. I can tell his folks with complete confidence that the Service is up the spout with the finest medical staff in existence anywhere.” He walked out into the hallway in the direction of the nurses station, shoulders bowed. “And idiots aplenty to ensure they keep in practice.”
Jani walked out into the night to find the rain had finally stopped. The sky had cleared as well; only some fast-moving clouds remained to obscure Luna, and hide the few stars that could be seen through Fort Sheridan’s blaze of outdoor lighting.
“I’m not calling Special Services,” she said to herself. She’d never tell Niall, but his regard didn’t buy her much in the way of acceptance—except for Pullman, no one else on his staff liked her very much. A silent ride into the city lacked appeal under the best of circumstances. With humanish-idomeni tensions now thick on the ground, the word best did not apply.
Instead, she followed the walkways from the hospital to a less-traveled area of the base. On the way, she passed office buildings in the semidark of graveyard shift. Maintenance sheds. Rolling landscape buried beneath melting snow, broken up by stands of bare trees and winter-stripped shrubs.
Before long South Central Bachelor Officers Quarters came into view, a multistory cement block devoted to the housing of male officers in various stages of transition. Jani walked in the front entry, ready to avert her eyes on the off chance she encountered anyone in the halls or the stairwell. I should have applied film to them. But her identity as a human-idomeni hybrid was well-known—all of Chicago knew what her eyes looked liked. What good did it do to apply a film to make them appear human, when everyone knew what lay beneath?
She keyed into the stairwell, took the steps two at a time. Stopped at the fifth floor. Negotiated the familiar twist of hallways before coming to a stop in front of the door marked WEST-1, the name L. PASCAL etched into the metal nameplate.
Jani reached for the buzzer, but the panel slid open before she had a chance to press the doorpad.
Lucien Pascal stood in the doorway, a disheveled vision in Service blue pajama bottoms, white-blond burr diffusing the backlight to a pale aura around his head. “I’ve been trying to track you down for the last hour.” He stepped back to allow her to pass. “You have a real talent for falling off the map.”
“A talent I worked at for years. Nice to know I’m still in practice.” Jani caught the barest whiff of cologne as she entered the spare three-room flat. A peppery scent, lighter than the throaty musk Lucien favored. She looked toward the bedroom. The door was open, the corner of the bed that she could see was rumpled. “How much have you heard?”
“Good morning. It is officially morning now.” Lucien stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the bedroom. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt. Tsecha is fine. So is Dathim. Everyone you know is all right. If any of those comments are incorrect, could you tell me now so that I’m not caught by surprise later.” He moved closer. The light fell across his neck and chest, accenting scattered red blotches, along with several fresh bruises that formed a characteristic pattern.
Jani touched a red mark near the hollow of Lucien’s throat. “I’m fine. Tsecha is fine. Dathim. Everyone you know.” She pressed her fingertips against the bruises, gauging them—yes, they had been left by someone who had gripped far harder than they had to. “You, on the other hand, look a little roughed up.”
Lucien gripped Jani’s wrist and eased her hand away. In contrast to Niall, his face was the poet’s, fine-boned and full-lipped, with just enough softness about the jaw to imply a vulnerability that in truth had never existed. Again in contrast to Niall, his eyes were the predator’s, chill brown and calculating, windows to a mind that saw life as a gameboard and all others as pawns, to be played, or sacrificed, as the situation demanded.
“You want to know how much I’ve heard?” He backed away and walked about the sparsely furnished sitting room, picking up clothes, straightening couch cushions. “Demiskimmer on lake patrol flew too close to the Haárin enclave. Picked up a choppy transmission that spelled ‘one of our mines.’ They informed Ordnance, who said ‘oops’ and informed the world, who converged on the enclave. The demolitions tech they sent to pull the mine misread the signal, killed himself and a Vynshàrau.” He stopped in mid-pillow fluff and looked at Jani. “Anyone you knew?”
“Feres. One of Elon’s security suborns.”
“One of the hardcore elite. That should play well back on Shèrá.” Lucien resumed his housekeeping. “Have I missed any of the high points?”
“Not really. Except that they thought the mine was a trainer, but it turned out to be live and fully armed.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.” Jani started her own walkabout, poking through the places Lucien had yet to straighten. “For someone who looks like he just rolled out of bed, you sure do know a lot.” She arrived at a chair one step ahead of him, grabbing for the object that lay in a small heap beneath.
“That’s not yours.” Lucien bumped her and tried to pull the thing from her hand as she reached down for it.
“It’s not yours, either.” Jani held the article up for inspection. It proved to be a man’s Service-issue T-shirt. “Wrong size.” She sniffed the neck and detected the same spicy odor she had when she entered the flat. “Wrong scent, too. Besides, you don’t fling your clothes around the room.”
“Not unless someone asks me to.” Lucien plucked the shirt from her grasp and folded it. “He works for the Public Affairs Office. When the first calls came in, his admin tracked him here. It’s his job to head up damage control, which in turn means he has to know what damage needs to be controlled.” He glanced at her beneath his lashes. “I can be very persuasive when I want to be.” He lay the shirt over his arm. “Another memento to add to the others,” he said as he smoothed his hand over it. “Are you even a little jealous?”
“Of what? Those lovely bruises?”
“Sometimes you have to give a little to get a lot in return.”
Jani patted a chair cushion into place, then slipped off her coat and sat. The standard issue ergoworks braced her back and legs, but not well enough to ease the growing aches that signaled the need for sleep. “You played him. It’s a talent you’ve worked at for years. You’re still in practice, too.” She tried to stifle a yawn and failed. “If we were both dropped in the middle of a strange city, I daresay we’d manage pretty well. But we’re both in Chicago, and the natives know our footprints. We need to take care.”
Lucien strolled to the couch and sat. “You’re not making much sense, you do realize that?”
“I’m leaving for Elyas the day after tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be gone awhile.”
“I know that, too.” Lucien lay the T-shirt on the cushion beside him and stroked it like a cat.
Jani followed the smooth flow of his muscles, the play of light across his chest and stomach. An hypnotic sight, marred only by the bruises that had blued and darkened in the time since her arrival. Mr. Public Affairs plays rough. She toyed with the idea of tracking down the man and giving him a little of what he dished out, except…It’s none of my business. Lucien lived most of his life outside her purview, and he never did anything without a reason. If he felt that what Mr. PA offered was worth the knockabout, the best favor she could do him was to stay out of it.
He does what he feels he has to. Circumstances had compelled Jani to live the same way once. Maybe it was the memory of that time that touched the anger in her now, a vein of hostility that opened more and more frequently as her hybridization advanced and the idomeni aspects of her personality emerged.
So much rage. Jani struggled to focus on the present. What do I have to work with? Look at the situation as it is, not as I think it should be. “Seeing as you’re in Intelligence, how difficult would it be for you to attach yourself to the mine investigation?”
Lucien’s hand stilled atop his souvenir shirt. “Officially, my spec is communications. Weapons interface falls roughly under that header, but there are people in Ordnance who know a lot more about the subject than I do, and they’re the ones who will be called in to answer questions.”
Jani examined the back of her right hand. She had cut it sometime during her run through the woods—a thin line of dried blood traced along her knuckles. “Unofficially, your spec is killing inconvenient people.” She flexed her fingers, felt the wound sting. “Apply yourself in that direction for a bit.”
Lucien’s hand moved to his thigh, the T-shirt forgotten. “You think that mine was put there deliberately?”
“I heard a whole truckload of reasonable explanations during the return ride across the lake. Now I’d like to hear the unreasonable ones.” Jani gazed at the sitting room walls, flat white and as bare as the day they were finished, without even a tacked-up holo to indicate the personality of the man who lived within their bounds. “The Haárin took up residence in the enclave four months ago. At first, things seemed peaceful. The Holland area wasn’t populated by humanish, so no one lost their property. The Haárin had less reason to go into Chicago, so they didn’t rattle the natives by turning up in odd places, as they had been wont to do when they lived on the embassy grounds.”
“Dathim used to enjoy doing that.” Lucien grinned. He nursed an infatuation for the Haárin that had led to the development of one of the Commonwealth’s stranger friendships.
“Yes, he did. The people who looked up to find two meters worth of long-faced Vynshàrau looming over them didn’t find it so enjoyable, however.” Jani smiled anyway. The tales of Dathim’s exploits had made for an evening’s entertainment on more than one occasion. Then she sobered. “As I said, things seemed peaceful at first. The honeymoon lasted for about three weeks. Then one morning an Haárin security suborn found one of the enclave food repositories broken into and humanish excrement smeared over the bins.”
“I don’t need the recent history lesson.” Lucien dragged the T-shirt onto his lap and picked at the hem. “I spend as much time there as you do, if not more. I know all about it.”
“Did you know that whoever got in there destroyed kettles containing experimental media? Thanks to some urging by ná Feyó and the other Elyan Haárin, Tsecha had sanctioned research into synthetic foods. When Shai found out…my old teacher barely managed to talk himself out of a one-way trip on a fast cruiser back to Shèrá.” Jani fought the urge to rest her head on the seatback. If she did that, she’d drift to sleep, Lucien’s soft voice serving as lullaby. “Then came that sniper attack. Skimmer sabotage. Add the mine, and we’ve got people who not only know what they’re doing but have access to very nasty things.”
Lucien locked his hands behind his head and sprawled back, a pose that displayed his naked torso to its best advantage. No matter how serious a discussion turned, he never forgot what he considered the essential argument. “Do you think the Service is responsible?”
Jani admired the view, however calculated. “The mines and weapons are manufactured by Family companies. They fear the Haárin’s economic competition just as the Service fears their impact on Commonwealth security. If you assume the Family supplied the means, then the question becomes whether they do the dirty themselves or hire it out. I’d say the field is pretty wide open.”
“Given that, I’m surprised you’re still planning on leaving tomorrow.”
Jani shrugged. “I have no choice.” She felt Lucien’s stare, knew he expected her to tell him why she had to leave, and knew just as surely that the less she told him, the better. That won’t be difficult—I don’t know much. “Ná Feyó has told Tsecha very little—she doesn’t trust the security of the Haárin communications linkages. All he can determine is that she’s enmeshed in some sort of power struggle. An Haárin version of a bornsect fallout. He can help her by throwing his support her way—most Haárin still consider him their religious dominant even though he’s no longer Chief Propitiator of the ruling bornsect. The ideal solution would be for him to visit the Elyan enclave himself, but he’s afraid to leave Earth. He thinks he’ll draw unwelcome attention down on Feyó. He also thinks that once he’s left Earth, Oligarch Cèel won’t allow him to return.”
“So he’s sending you as his emissary?” Lucien eyed her skeptically. “I’ve watched you train in bladework with Dathim. He’s told me enough about your religious instruction to know that it will take years to learn all you need to. You’ve only been at this a few months.”
“I know.” Jani shifted in her seat. She nursed her own bruises thanks to Dathim’s enthusiastic teaching. A sword in his hand worked like a metal-plated fist. “But I didn’t come into this wholly unprepared, and I’ve helped the Elyan Haárin before. If Tsecha tells them, through me, to support Feyó, they will.”
“Is she that important?”
“To him, she is.” Jani fielded Lucien’s smirk. “It’s not just that he esteems her. Feyó’s a radical by any measure, and she has a revolutionary’s personality. She knows how to work idomeni and humanish alike. If she loses her position, there’s no one of her caliber to replace her. Considering how thoroughly Haárin shipping lines and trade routes have integrated with their Commonwealth counterparts, her ouster could destabilize the entire Outer Circle.”
Lucien lowered his arms and sat up. “If she’s so magnetic, why has she lost influence?”
“That’s what I have to find out.” Jani once more fought the urge to close her eyes. Like Niall, she knew what she’d see when next she dreamed. Pullman’s raw-boned vitality, reduced to pools of blood in the snow. Wode’s slow fingerings as he maneuvered the biobot over the mine. “I don’t want to leave now, but I don’t have a choice. That’s why I’m asking you to plug yourself into the mine inquiry.”
Lucien stood, purloined T-shirt in hand. “Someone is going to wonder why I’m interested.” He padded across the carpeted floor and disappeared into the bedroom. “The fact that I’m information-gathering for you isn’t going to fly. I’m not supposed to feed classified data to Haárin intermediaries.”
