Law of Survival

by Kristine Smith

  Jani’s voice slowed as her sense memory of that night returned. The sear of pain as she hacked her left arm with a mess knife. The warm flow of her blood, captured with strips torn from a red machinist’s rag, the closest facsimile she could find to a Vynshà soul cloth. The growing numbness in her slashed arm, the rough dampness of the rag between her fingers as she braided the strips into a skein that would house her soul, and shelter it from the actions of her body. The slip of the sand under her boots as she walked down the hill toward the Laumrau encampment. “‘As the twenty-six Laumrau based at the encampment took sacrament in their tents, Kilian crept in under cover of night and shot them one by one.’” That much, the fact-finders nailed perfectly. But then, they’d found it out from the idomeni. Unlike humans, the idomeni always admitted truth freely, no matter how damning the result.

  After that, details muddied quickly. While unofficially, everyone knew that Evan van Reuter had arranged that a bomb be planted on the transport that had been sent to return Jani and the rest of the Twelfth Rovers to Rauta Shèràa, he had never been officially charged with murder. Even though everyone knew that John Shroud had salvaged Jani’s shattered body from the wreckage and rebuilt her with illegally acquired idomeni genetic material, no one wanted to put the details to paper. John could have faced charges of kidnapping and illegal utilization of technology, and John was a powerful man. Evan, meanwhile, though no longer a powerful man, still had his memory and his mouth.

  “You’d spill it all if they tried you for murder, wouldn’t you, Ev? You’d drag all the Family members who conspired with Neumann and your father into the hellhole with you.” Which explained why Evan remained free to nibble on the edges of the idomeni diplomatic pie, a peripheral presence at some of the meetings Jani attended. They took assiduous pains to avoid one another, much to the disappointment of those who hoped for an altercation. “As if it would make a difference.” Maybe someday they would be forced to face their shared past. With any luck, someday would never come.

  Jani broke off her meditation to look once more at the workstation display, and read of her escape from Rauta Shèràa during that final Night of the Blade, when the Vynshàrau asserted their claim to the city. Then came the details of her life on the run. The names she had used. Men she had known. Dirt she had done.

  So they found out about the faked bank transfers in Ville Louis-Phillipe. The altered manifests and receiving documents she had constructed on a score of worlds. And the shipping clerk in New St. Lô must not have been at happy with her cut of the proceeds as she had seemed at the time—she had revealed everything about the scanpack parts skimming operation in which Jani had been involved. No, not involved—it was mine from start to finish. But her scanpack had needed refurbishing, and she had been desperate. I just took a part here, a part there. I never got greedy. Unfortunately, that qualifier hadn’t made it into the report.

  She paged to the top and read through once more. She searched for conclusions. A recommendation for censure or expulsion from Registry. A proposal to convene a grand jury to explore possible criminal charges. She didn’t find them, though, just as she didn’t find mention of certain other salient events. A small gap. One missed stop in her round-the-Commonwealth journey, but it dwarfed the other matters delineated in the security report.

  They’re probably saving that for the next white paper. She pushed the idea to the back of her mind and waited for her nerves to settle enough that she could consider eating.

  Jani adjourned to the kitchen. She dug through the cupboards for a Neoclona prepack meal and tossed it label-unread into the oven, then poured herself coffee from the morning’s dregs. By the time she flushed out the brewer, her breakfast was ready. She popped the lid on the container and stared at reactor-kettle meatloaf and a shredded purple vegetable that the container claimed was beets but that smelled like no vegetable she’d ever encountered. She excavated a fork from her muddled utensil drawer and boosted herself up on the counter. She ate and mulled until the buzz of her comport called her out to the sitting room.

  “Jani.” Colonel Eugene Derringer, adjutant to General Callum Burkett, the head of Service Diplomatic, regarded her with his usual air of impatience. He looked a study in tan—skin, hair, desertweight uniform. Burkett the Younger, with his clipped demeanor and horse face; it was a running argument among the rest of Diplo whether the similarities were happenstance or if Derringer worked at them. “I’m calling from my skimmer. I’ve just left the base. Why don’t I zip by your building and give you a lift to the embassy?”

  “It’s a little out of your way, Eugene. And it’s almost two hours early.”

  “We can use the extra time. There’s something you and I need to discuss.”

  “What?”

  Derringer smiled coolly. “See you in a few.” His face fractured and faded.

  Jani poked her fork into the remains of her meal. She suspected a bout of on-the-road reeducation in the offing. Derringer felt her behavior toward the idomeni too familiar, her relationship to the ambassador too close—

  The comport buzzed again. She hit the receive pad harder than she should have, and the unit screeched.

  “I heard that.” Niall sat at his desk in his Base Command office. He paused to partake of his soldier’s breakfast—a swig of coffee, a pull on a nicstick. “Things not going well?” He made no reference to which things he talked about. Neither of them trusted comports, even ones like his and Jani’s that were supposed to be secured.

  “Eugene just called.” Jani rolled her eyes. “He’s picking me up in person to take me to the embassy.”

  “Well, well. Fixing to pop the question, is he?”

  Jani forced a laugh. “Yeah, I think he has the ring and the date all picked out. Right after I say yes, he’s going to ask Nema to be best man.”

  Smoke puffed from Niall’s nose and mouth as he laughed. “Has the esteemed representative of the Shèrá worldskein pulled anything since the Pokegrass Episode? Any more vegetation-stuffed chair cushions for our dear Eugene to sit on?”

  “No.” Jani smiled more easily, the memory of Derringer twitching about in his booby-trapped seat over the course of one memorable four-hour conclave replaying in her mind. “Nema’s moved on to other torments. I keep telling him, ‘You’re humiliating a Service diplomat—stop it.’ But he won’t listen.”

  “He’s idomeni. He knows Derringer doesn’t like him, and he enjoys tweaking him.” Niall sat back, nicstick clenched between his teeth at a jaunty angle. “So what’s happened lately?”

  Jani pressed a hand to her forehead. “They met in Nema’s rooms last week—I forget what about. Somehow, Nema arranged to have an audio track of the Commonwealth anthem piped in, at a very, very low volume. So they’re talking, and Eugene’s just barely hearing this music—”

  “And wondering if he should stand at attention or check into the Neuro ward.”

  “Nema said the look on his face was ‘a sight to behold, and truly.’ I keep waiting for Eugene to retaliate. Somehow, I don’t think that will prove nearly as humorous.” Jani sighed heavily and sat up. “That being so, I shouldn’t aggravate him by making him wait. I better get ready.”

  Niall’s eyes narrowed. “You OK?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded once, then again.

  “You don’t seem too sure.”

  “Just a feeling. Just—” She braced her hands on her chair arms and boosted to her feet. “We’ll talk later.”

  “All right.” Niall frowned. “Later.”

  Jani waited for the display to blank. Then she carted the remains of her meal to the kitchen for disposal. Washed her fork and coffee cup and stored them away. Wiped down the counter. Thought.

  Here’s my feeling, Niall—the white paper contains one important gap. Two serial events in the same botched scenario, the discovery of either one of which could result in her imprisonment for life.

  Jani returned to her desk and stuffed her scanpack and a few pertinent files into her battered
Service surplus duffel. How could they uncover my one-week stint as a deckhand on a Phillipan cruise shuttle, and miss those two things? She put the duffel aside and sat down, burying her face in her hands as the past returned, an unwelcome shadow in the doorway that said, Hello, remember me?

  Document forgery as a whole was a crime, of course, but under the general heading came three classifications with steadily increasing penalty in proportion to the adjudged severity. Simple forgery, the construction of a unique document that had no legal right to exist, was the least grave—such objects were bastard children, embarrassing to the putative relatives but easily dealt with. Wipe them out, lock them up, take steps to make sure that particular avenue of deceit was closed and remained so. Second came alteration of existing paper. That misdeed carried heftier fines and sentences because something once pure had been sullied, something once reliable had been rendered untrustworthy.

  But copying a document, divesting it of its unique identity by sending a twin out into the world as if it were the original, was considered the worst of the three. Simple forgeries were more sporting—a contest between the forger’s skill and the investigator’s ability to detect. But executing a copy of an existing document, down to the weave of the paper and the position of the insets, took that competition and warped it. Worse than a bastard, such an object was a changeling that subverted the rightful document’s place in the paper world, and robbed it of its inheritance. It shook the stability of the paper system, a construct in which every document played a role, had a history, promoted order.

  Jani lifted her head and rested her chin on her arm.

  “I made a copy once.” Five years before, in Hamish City, a dreary town as off the beaten path as a colonial capital could be. The capital of Jersey, the hind end of the Channel Worlds. She tried not to think of Jersey too much.

  Jani could see out her sitting room windows to the bright sunny morning on the other side. Bright sun didn’t evoke memories of Hamish City. For those one needed grey skies, grimy streets, the stinging odor of battery hyperacid mixing with the rank of desperation.

  “Sasha needed my help.” But then, Sasha had always needed somebody’s help. Short and spindly, a shaggy brune with bitten fingernails and a nervous smile, he was a member of the loose-knit group of techs and clerks to which Jani belonged during her Jersey stay. Another member of the group had labeled Sasha clumsy, which was a shorthand way of saying that he missed warning signs and never listened.

  “He decided one day that he wanted to pull out of Hamish.” Jani rose, twisted back and forth to stretch her back, then walked to the window. “But he needed money.” And someone offered him some, Sasha had told Jani, the excitement pitching his voice high like a young boy’s. All he had to do was figure out a way to obstruct an investigation into the true ownership of a parcel of land on which someone wanted to build a fuel depot. “I should have known as soon as he told me about it that a Family was involved. The Families had a vise grip on fuel services in the Channel.” But she was working as an inventory hack and going mad from the boredom, and the idea of throwing a wrench in somebody else’s works appealed.

  So when Sasha brought Jani the original deed of ownership and asked what she could do, she pulled out her scanpack and the best documents training extant and went to work. It had taken her a week to diagram the original, then two more to steal the necessary components and assemble the backdated copy. It was a sound piece of work, she knew, the best that could be done without a Registry copying device. It even got past her scanpack analysis, if she ignored some of the dodgier variances.

  “But I warned Sasha that it wouldn’t get past a Family examiner.” Jani watched the well-dressed midmorning bustle on the sunny street below and envisioned a gloomier scene: the pedestrians bundled in weatheralls and field coats, late fall wind driving the cold mist like smoke. “I told him to arrange for a fifty-fifty drop.” The buyer would leave half the money at a prearranged site; Sasha would take the money and leave the copied deed. “The next step would be for the buyer to pick up the copy and leave the rest of the money. A sucker bet, yes, but it didn’t matter because I had told Sasha not to wait. The half payment was enough to get him off Jersey. I told him to take it and go. He took too great a risk if he hung around.”

  She still didn’t know why she followed him the day he made the drop. Guilt, maybe, that she’d helped him get in well over his head. Shooter in hand, she tailed him to an alley behind some warehouses, watched him pluck the documents slipcase containing the first half of the payment from a space behind some empty crates, then insert the copy into the same niche. “I rousted him then, made him come with me, told him to get offworld now.” She should have escorted him to the shuttleport herself and seen him aboard the next merchant vessel out, but he had promised her he’d leave, and she’d believed him for the ten minutes it took him to disappear from her sight.

  By then, the realization hit. That Jani had asked Sasha to leave a great deal of money behind, and that Sasha never listened. By the time she reached the drop site, she found him felled like a tree. A man stood over him, shooter in hand. A man like Niall. A coiled spring. A professional. But even professionals could be surprised—he spotted her an instant after she saw him. An instant too late. She had earned an Expert marksmanship badge in the Service and never lost the eye.

  Jani knew she’d killed him—she could tell by the way he lay, like a rag crumpled and tossed to the ground. She left him and saw to Sasha, dragging him into the open as carefully as she could, then watching from a safe distance as the first passerby found him and called for help. Then she fled, the need to reach the shuttleport and nab a billet on the next ship out overwhelming the desire to remain behind and discover whether Sasha survived. Clumsy Sasha, who had needed a mentor but had been given a changeling instead.

  “Copying. Murder.” Of a Family agent, most likely. “How did they miss it?” Jani stood at the window, watching but not seeing. Then thoughts of Derringer intruded, and she trudged to her bathroom to brush her teeth. She did so twice, in deference to Vynshàrau sensibilities. All idomeni considered the act of eating a private communion between the worshipper and their gods, food and drink the links that forged that sacred bond, but the Vynshàrau were the most rigid in their beliefs. Even Nema, as audacious as he was, adhered to his sect’s dietary laws, and Jani didn’t want a whiff of coffee breath to further aggravate already tense relations.

  By the time Hodge called her from the lobby to tell her that the colonel’s skimmer had arrived, she felt prepared to face whatever Derringer had to throw at her. Before she left her flat, she removed Niall’s wafer from the workstation reader, returned it to the slipcase, and tucked it into the safety of her inner tunic pocket.

  CHAPTER 4

  Derringer’s steel-blue double-length hugged the curb in front of the apartment house. As soon as Jani hit the sidewalk, the doorman and Derringer’s driver engaged in a footrace to see who would play the gentleman. The point was declared moot when Derringer popped the door open himself and stepped out of the vehicle.

  “Jani.” Even though the red stripe had been removed from his desertweight trousers in deference to the Vynshàrau’s color protocols, no one would ever mistake him for anything but highly polished mainline brass.

  “Eugene.” Jani brushed past him and bent low to climb into the jump seat across from him. “What did you need to see me—” She fell silent when she saw a young man already sitting where she wanted to sit. “Who are you?” She could hear the sharpness in her voice, but she didn’t savor being forced to sit next to Derringer. She scooted down the bench seat, as far away from the colonel as possible.

  Derringer doffed his garrison cap and eased in beside her. “This is Peter Lescaux.” He nodded to the intruder, who smoothed the neckpiece of his somber brown daysuit. “Exterior Minister Ulanova’s new Chief of Staff.”

  “The storied Jani Kilian.” Lescaux smiled shyly and extended his hand. “I’m thrilled to meet you at last.
”

  Jani took in the brilliant blondness offset by brown eyes. The sharp bones, slim fitness, vague, indefinable accent. So you’re Anais’s new Lucien. His skin felt cool and smooth; he’d buffed his nails until they shone like glass. She likened him to a snake that had just shed its skin, then pushed the thought from her mind before it showed in her face.

  “I thought we’d stop at a place I know nearby, grab some lunch.” Derringer nodded to his driver; the skimmer pulled away from the curb. “Lord knows how long we’ll be holed up at the embassy—we better stoke up while we can.”

  “Excellent thought, Colonel,” Lescaux nodded as though someone had spring-loaded his neck.

  Oh brother! Jani knocked the back of her head against the seat bolster.

  “Fancy setup you’ve got.” Derringer cast a sideways glance in her general direction. “I’d heard you’d taken a flat near the Parkway, but Armour Place? Now I know what happens to all those consultant fees we pay you.”

  Jani counted to three before answering. “The Registry employment adviser advised my renting at the best address I could afford. It instills confidence in the client.” She wanted to add that since her flat overlooked the alley and commanded views of neither the Chicago skyline or the lake, she paid half the rent of her more scenically gifted neighbors, but she’d be damned if she’d justify her living arrangements to Derringer.

  “It is a good address,” Lescaux said, nodding knowingly. “All the Families have residences nearby.”

  Jani watched the passing city views, and waited. And waited some more. “Are you two going to tell me what’s going on”—she swung around and glared at Derringer—“or are you going to make me guess?”

  Derringer nodded again to his driver, who raised the privacy shield between his seat and the passenger cabin. “How much do you know about problems on Elyas?”