“That’s our style. The idomeni don’t operate that way.”
“I think they’re starting to learn.”
Dolly appeared to stare at the floor indicator, but Jani could detect the far-off look in her eyes, the telltale sign of a wicked turn of thought. “You think Nema’s in danger.”
“Yes, I do—” The lift decelerated, and Jani grabbed the railing as her head rocked and a wave of chills shook her. What the hell’s wrong now! Maybe she should have eaten at the mall. Maybe her second dance with augie neared its finale, signaling the end to her ability to concentrate. Or maybe yet another new wrinkle had developed in her everchanging physical state.
“Are you all right?” Dolly moved toward her, voice mellow with concern.
Jani hurried out of the lift as soon as the door opened and ducked into a furnished alcove. “Dolly, I may not have much time.” She lowered into a chair and dropped her bag over the side. “I need a vacuumbox, a full set of tools, and access to paper and chips. I need…a copier.”
Dolly crouched in front of her. She pressed a hand to Jani’s forehead, then to her cheek. “You’re freezing. You need a doctor.”
“I’m used to it—it will pass!” Jani grabbed Dolly’s wrist and yanked her hand away from her face. She didn’t think she squeezed that hard—why did Dolly wince? “I have a lot to do and not much time in which to do it. Someone is depending on me—I need to get started now.”
Dolly straightened smoothly, like the athlete she was. “You want to copy a document, then alter the copy.” Her dulcet voice hardened. “You want to fake—”
“The thing I’ve got is a fake. I just want to make another fake with a few differences. Then I want to feed it back into play and watch where the alarms sound.”
Dolly turned away and walked across the alcove to the picture window behind them. She considered the view as precious seconds ticked by. “I look out this window, eighty floors above the streets of Chicago, but what I see is the Rauta Shèràa Consulate courtyard. I can feel the summer’s raw heat through the glass. I expect to see Laumrau skimmers float into view, and watch the Laumrau walk and gesture again. Hear their loopy voices.” She pressed her palms against the pane. “All because you show up in rough clothes with a bag on your shoulder and a wild story about Nema. You look different, yet the same, and anyone who doubted your identity would know you as soon as you opened your mouth. Always scamming. Always feeding back. Always looking for alarms.” She turned. Her face held sadness and frustration. “That war is over, and this one, if this is indeed one, is none of your business.”
Jani hoisted her duffel onto her lap. It dragged like lead. “I need your help.”
“This is Registry. We’re supposed to stop what you want to do.”
“I only have a few hours.”
“You’re not listening.”
“Neither are you. I want to replace what I believe to be a fake with another fake. A double-reverse. Registry investigators do it all the time when they suspect documents fraud and they want to trace-back.”
“You have no jurisdiction.”
Jani tried to stand. Her head rocked. “Maybe Carson will help me. You said he’s down the street at NUVA-SCAN?” She tried to grab the chair arms for balance, missed, and fell back.
Dolly’s hands flew to her face. “You never grew up, did you? You just got older!” She cut around furniture and hurried to her side. “What is the matter with you!”
Jani struggled to a half-crouch, then slowly rose. “I need a vacuumbox, tools, a copier, and access to supplies. I came here because I knew that you’d have it all at the ready.”
Dolly grabbed her arm to help support her. “You’re in no condition—”
Jani pressed a hand to her stomach, and felt as well as heard the grumble. “Get me food. Chili. Curry. Something spicy. No milk or cheese. Bread—bread is good, but no butter. And coffee.” She looked into her old schoolmate’s eyes, and saw the anger and the aggravation. “Dolly. Please.” She tried to get the sense of the sailracer, to find the wedge that would win her the opening she needed. “One thing you must admit, Dorothea Aryton, grubby, raving thing that I was—”
“I never said grubby or—”
“—is that on those hot summer days at the Rauta Shèràa Consulate, the one thing I never did was waste your time.”
Something flickered in Dolly’s eyes. Not a softening—never that, not between them. A touch of memory, maybe. Of jobs done well, and more importantly, of those left undone. She gripped Jani’s arm more firmly, positioning herself so that they could walk side-by-side. “The Registry cannot support you if this backfires.”
Jani almost sagged with relief, but stopped herself. Dolly wouldn’t be a sure sale until the job was done, and she couldn’t allow her any excuse to back out. “Of course not.”
They started down the hall toward the workrooms. As they passed a sealed door, Jani caught the sulfurous rank of the nutrient tanks, where the new scanpack brains grew and developed. Her empty stomach turned.
With moves practiced on sailboards throughout the Commonwealth, Dolly countered her sag and struggled to hold her steady. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“Fine. But not until I’m done.”
Jani braced her feet on her lab chair crossbar and balanced her plate on her knees. The curried chicken with peanut sauce had cleared her head marvelously. She sopped up the remains of the sauce with bread, then washed it down with coffee that rivaled John Shroud’s for punch and depth. She looked down to the far end of the lab bench, where Dolly leaned in skeptical examination, and raised her cup. “My compliments to your kitchen.”
“Thank you.” Dolly straightened as the door opened and two techs entered pushing laden skimcarts. “Put them here.” She led them to benches on the opposite side of the large laboratory, and helped them unload the cart contents onto the benchtops.
Jani set her plate aside and eased off the seat. Her internal choppy seas had calmed—no more lightheadedness, and she felt stronger. She picked up her duffel and walked across the lab to where Dolly oversaw the unloading. “Got anything that can scan idomeni paper?”
Dolly shrugged halfheartedly. “We have some prototypes, but nothing I’d stake my rating on. Every document we get from them self-destructs when we try to crack it.” She gave Jani a look of calculated disinterest. “We’ve begun to work with Neoclona to develop a scanpack that can read both types of chips. John’s been very helpful.”
“Has he?”
“Yes. We talk about you on occasion. I’m surprised you have trouble with him—I’ve always found him quite easy to work with.”
He doesn’t perceive you as a professional threat and he doesn’t love you. Congrats—you’ve got the best of both worlds. Jani dropped her duffel onto a benchtop and opened it. She removed The Nema Letter, but left it in its slipcase as the techs unloaded the last of the equipment, killing time by leafing through the other documents Roni had given her in the hope they might prove interesting. Unfortunately, they turned out to be face pages and forewords from unrelated reports, dross and decoy only.
After the techs departed, she slid the heavy parchment out of the protective cover and lay it on the counter. “Some factions in Service and the government think Nema composed this document, which warns us against allowing the Haárin to continue to infiltrate the colonies. They take it as a sign that he’d like to serve as our agent.”
“I gather I should keep this information to myself?” Dolly removed an elegant pair of wire-rimmed magnispecs from the pocket of her wrapshirt and put them on. “I don’t believe it. Nema couldn’t keep his mouth shut long enough to pull off a subterfuge like that.” She picked up the document by the barest edges and eyed it from all angles. “Humans did this.”
“Agreed. I’m worried, though, that if Shai and Cèel learn this letter exists, they’ll use it as an excuse to recall Nema whether they think he compiled it or not. If they choose to regard it as a Laum–Knevçet Shèràa-sc
ale treachery, they may take a more drastic step than mere recall. They may just kill him and be done with it.” Jani removed the letter from Dolly’s grasp, then moved down the bench toward a large rectangular instrument that looked like a handscanner with a lid. “So this is the devil’s device?”
“The latest iteration.” Dolly pushed her magnispecs atop her head, then slid aside the copier lid and pondered her reflection in the black glass surface. “Officially, it doesn’t exist. Unofficially, we don’t talk about it.” She cast Jani a hard look. “And you treat it like just another tool in the tray.”
“That’s because it is.” Jani nudged Dolly aside and laid the letter ink-side down on the copier surface. “How long does the duplication take?”
“Anywhere from fifteen minutes to five hours, depending on the complexity of the document.” Dolly lowered the lid, then touched the side panel. Slivers of white light shone through hairline gaps in the seal. “First pass, it types the paper strata. Then it moves to inks, then foils. Those are easy—five minutes, tops.”
“Then comes the fun.” Jani watched as the color and intensity of the light slivers changed. Blazing blue. Dark red. An almost invisible green. “Reading the types of imbedded chips and identifying their settings.”
“Assuming they’ll let themselves be read.” Dolly dragged over a lab chair and sat. “Proprietary paper locks this thing up like a dream. It knows a chip is there, but it can’t read it, and it pitches a fit. Buzzes. Jams. Lights start blinkin’.” She smoothed a well-manicured hand over the sleeve of her shirt. “I christened it ‘Jani’ some time ago.”
“Thanks.” Jani pulled over a chair, positioning it so she could watch the copier’s every flash and flutter. “What would you say if I told you that the chips embedded in this document contain seventeen separate discrepancies, all of which make scanpacks scream aloud?”
“This copier is capable of error analysis. It should be able to untangle the snarl and define the problem when all a scanpack can do is tell you you’re outside variance. What that implies to me is that whoever constructed this document never believed it would see the inside of Registry, which I find interesting considering the magnitude of the matter.” Dolly plucked a pair of pinch-grips from the tool tray, and regarded them thoughtfully. “If you were out…in the field, how long would it take you to manufacture a copy like this?”
Euphemisms, euphemisms. “The class of criminal I worked with—” Jani stopped as Sasha’s face formed in her mind. You were never better than you had to be, Kilian—never forget that. “I wouldn’t have been able to. I couldn’t access gear like this. I didn’t work at the organized crime level. An exact copy of even a simple deed could take me weeks. Exact placement of chips and inserts is a bitch without a 3-D field array marking the positions. I’d have to do my best with my scanpack and a handheld measuring device. That’s why low-level scams involve altering existing paper. Building a document from scratch is hard enough. Making an identical copy is beyond the capacity of most forgers unless they have access to something like this copier.”
“Interesting.” Dolly still concentrated her attention on the pinch-grips. “Carson mentioned to me just last week that your varied experiences made you a valuable resource. He asked that if I ran into you first, I should tell you that there’s a position at NUVA-SCAN with your name on it.”
Jani tried to visualize herself in a staid corporate conference room, surrounded by Family types. “Hmm.”
“Here, too.”
That brought Jani up short. She turned to Dolly to find her still enraptured by the pinch-grips. “Really?”
“We here at Registry nurse a fondness for the criminal mind. Saves training.” Dolly looked up as the colored lights dimmed and a length of tissue-thin fiche spun out of the copier. “Well, that was fast. It’s already time for the second act.” She picked up the fiche and studied it. “Colony-sourced paper.” She glanced at Jani. “Does Acadia tie into this at all?”
The home of L’araignée. “It might.” She joined Dolly benchside. “Commercial or government-class?”
“Commercial. Fairly recent dating—early summer.” Dolly walked across the lab to one of the wall-spanning cabinets, fiche in hand, and opened it to reveal shelf upon shelf filled with niche after niche of virgin paperstock. She pulled down her magnispecs so she could read the printed labels on the topmost shelves, then reached up and removed a single piece of parchment from one of the niches. “I doubt it would be government. Even if a Ministry is behind this, you wouldn’t expect them to play quite so obvious a hand as to use their own paper, would you?”
“I would have expected them to cut to the chase and use idomeni paper. Nema would have used idomeni paper. Whoever planned this tried to be too clever.” Jani stood up to watch as Dolly fed the sheet into a slot on the copier’s side.
“The chips and foils are stored inside—saves on oxidative wear and tear.” Dolly watched the paper disappear into the slot. Then she handed Jani the fiche with the air of a stern teacher returning a below-average grade. “In a few minutes, you will have an exact copy of your not-very-complicated letter.” Her voice dropped an accusing half-tone. “Then it will be your turn, to do whatever it is that you do.”
Jani perused the discrepancies the copier had listed. “Looks like Jani Junior had problems with the initiator chip, just like my scanpack did. Can’t define the error, though. Same with the others.”
Dolly leaned back against her seat and folded her arms. “If those are idomeni chips loaded in that paper, then Jani Junior won’t be able to read them. It will know that something is awry with the coding, but because of the differences between the idomeni proteins and ours, it won’t be able to define the differences. I have no idomeni standards to load into Junior—I can’t give it anything to compare to.”
“That’s been the problem with this all along.” Jani picked through the UV styli scattered throughout the assorted trays. “The only way to prove this is indeed an idomeni document is to have an idomeni documents examiner scan it, and no one I’ve been working with wants that to happen because they don’t want Shèrá to know what’s going on.”
“Convenient, that. You can construct as loopy a document as you want because no one who knows which end is up is ever going to get their hands on it to check it out.” Dolly shifted restlessly. “So what are you going to do?”
“It shouldn’t take long.” Jani held the styli in her fist like a child gripping her coloring pens, and waited for the freshly imprinted document to emerge from the copier. “A shot here. A shot there.” She let the paper slide onto her open palm, then walked down the bench to the vacuumbox. “The time-date stamp is still untouched. So’s the counter chip that records the number of scans.” Jani glanced at Dolly. “Would it count the copy as a scan?”
Dolly nodded. “Possibly.”
“Then it fries.” Jani slipped the document into the vacuumbox slot, tucked the styli in the box’s access drawer, then stuck her hands in the gloves that would allow her to manipulate the materials in the vacuum. “And I bake the Environmental Variant.”
Dolly’s eyes slowly widened. “You’re going to make the discrepancies look like a Brandenburg Progession.”
“Yup.” Jani positioned the document in the center of the vacuumbox platform, then looked through the lens array so she could visualize both the chips she needed to hit and the beams of UV light she needed to hit them with. “A prionic mutation that’s initiated by broad-spectrum UV damage and eventually spreads throughout the document, rendering it unscanable.”
“Those are extremely rare.” Dolly closed in beside her. “And the mutation proceeds at a well-defined rate, hence the name.”
“How many dexxies have seen one, do you think?” Jani chose one of the styli and activated it. “A real Progression, not the idealized deterioration they teach in school.” She directed the thread-thin beam at the time-date chip. Light…hit! “After this gets out, you may get a few panicked calls. Professional repu
tations at stake, and all that.” She activated the second stylus and directed it at the counter chip. Light…hit!
“I can stall, I suppose.” Dolly’s voice held a dubious edge.
“They’ll fall all over themselves for a few days in the excitement of it all, before one of them cottons on that they may have been had.” Jani zeroed in on the environmental chip. Light…hit! “And a few days should be more time than I need.”
“For?”
“For ‘Gotcha.’” Jani pulled out of the vacuumbox, then removed the styli and documents from the transfer drawers. “That special moment that we who have never grown up enjoy so much.” She slid the faked Nema Letter into the smooth Exterior slipcase with the other documents and tucked the slipcase into her duffel. She felt wonderfully vigorous and alive now, in a way that seemed improbable only a half-hour before.
Then she turned to Dolly, found that grave countenance regarding her sadly, and felt the joy crack.
“I think I should keep this. It’ll give me a chance to run some of the hybrid prototypes through their paces.” Dolly slid the original letter into a Registry slipcase. The silvery surface caught the room light and flashed back stars. “Unless I find something, we won’t be able to prove beyond doubt that those chips are not idomeni in origin. Nema may have worked out something like this to make sure all roads led back to him—are you willing to bet your ’pack that he isn’t involved?”
Jani shouldered her bag. “I think…” The new letter felt as heavy as the old—she imagined Roni’s growing panic weighing it down. “I think that if Nema realized how Shai and Cèel are working to cut him off, he would try something like this. And he’d fail. And he’d be executed by year’s end.” She checked her timepiece—she needed to go. But an explanation was owed, and she needed to provide it. “He suspects something is wrong. That’s one reason I’m working so fast. I’ve made him promise to behave until I tell him it’s all clear, but you remember how he was.”
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