Rules of Conflict

by Kristine Smith

“Pull the other one—it sings ‘Oh, Acadia.’” Jani tossed the newssheets aside and continued her inspection. She found fresh flowers in both the sitting room and bedroom. Val the Bear sat perched against the bedroom vase, a banner pinned to his chest.

  “You’re out of uniform,” she told him as she detached the note. I found the scalpel on your desk—don’t even think about it. This time, Lucien hadn’t even bothered with an initial. Jani crumpled it and tossed it in the trashzap, following with the missive she’d found tucked in her underwear.

  She had made another circuit of the bedroom before she spotted the thick, pale blue envelope lying on her bed. Another slip of white paper had been attached to the closure flap.

  My, aren’t we the colorful personality?

  Jani shredded that note before consigning it to the flash-flame. Messages in underwear were cute, and knowing Lucien had been rummaging through her bedroom had its seductive aspects. “But there’s a line, Mister, and you just crossed it.”

  She hefted her ServRec and adjourned to her sitting room, plucking Val the Bear from his floral roost on the way. “Simyam Baru escaped from his room,” she told him. “I thought I’d locked him down well enough, but he wasn’t as far gone as the other patients, and he figured out how to crack the Laumrau code locks.” She sat on the couch and propped Val against a pillow in the opposite corner. “Only two other patients still lived at this point—he released them from their rooms. Orton was blind—they’d severed her optic nerves so they could input directly into her visual cortex. Fessig could still see. On him, they’d performed a tactile-aural synesthetic reroute.” Jani looked into the bear’s shiny eyes. “He felt everything he heard. Whispering and instrument hum felt like ants crawling over him. Normal speaking voices felt like slaps and punches, depending on their pitch.”

  The three of them jumped Felicio and Stanleigh, who had run down to the garage to secure the exits as soon as they realized patients had escaped. “They had to secure the exits manually because we couldn’t control ingress and egress from central systems. You see, the bombing started right after the Laumrau hospital staff cleared the building and fled to their sect-sharers in the hills.”

  Shatterboxes first, to disable systems and blow infrastructure. “That was when Yolan died, when one of the operating theater walls collapsed on her.”

  Then came pink, the brilliantly hued microbial mist that took up where the explosives left off. “We tried to wash it out of the air with water—within the first half minute after release, it’s still concentrated enough that you can do that—but the shatterboxes had damaged the pumping system, and we couldn’t maintain pressure in the hoses. The pink diffused and got into everything.”

  Instrument cards liquefied. Boards turned to jelly.

  “So we couldn’t control the doors—we had to shut them manually. That was the first mistake I made—I should have guessed the Laumrau would try to pink us. I should have locked down the doors and vents as soon as they’d fled.”

  Val regarded her patiently.

  “I know. I’m digressing.” Jani prodded him with her toe. “So Fel and Stan ran to the garage to check the doors, and Baru, Orton, and Fessig jumped them and stole the control card for the people-mover.” But the vehicle had been damaged by the shatterboxes. “I think the pink got to it, too. I watched it from the roof—it barely made it over the first rise.”

  Then she saw the Laumrau pursuit craft, a sleek, bullet-shaped demiskimmer with bank-and-dive capability. “It flitted over the rise after the ’mover.” She picked up one of the throw pillows and hugged it to her chest. “I heard the explosion. Saw it. A blown battery array emits a very distinctive green-white flash. John confirmed it later.” Granted, over two months passed before he could examine the site, but he’d had a lot of experience in crash investigation by then, and he knew what to look for. “He said from the condition of the wreckage and the human remains he found, no one could have survived.”

  Val the Bear cocked an eyebrow. Well, not really, but it was easy to imagine.

  Jani nodded. “Yes, I know. You could have said the same thing about what happened to me.” She cracked open the envelope and removed her file, shaking and riffling both in case any more communiqués petits awaited discovery. Then she lay back, rested her head against the bolster, and paged through her Service record. Most of the material that covered her time under Neumann was still missing, but what remained still told quite a story.

  The excerpts she read could be considered hilarious or depressing, depending on the judgment of the reader. She could understand Lucien’s dismay. The role she played in the midnight requisition from Central Supply of several sorely needed parchment imprinters and systems cards had earned her the undying enmity of the Rauta Shèràa Base Supply officer, the threat of a court-martial, and a personal invitation from Colonel Matilda Fitzhugh to eat a shooter.

  “No mention is made, of course, that the reason they kept Documents and Documentation undersupplied was because they’d been shunting equipment into the J-Loop black market for a year and a half.” Jani glanced over the top of the report at Val the Bear. “Instead they dropped the charge against me because of ‘insufficient evidence’ and spread the rumor that Evan used the Family du piston to get me off the hook. Forget the fact we hadn’t spoken in six months.” She straightened the pages and moved on to the next episode.

  “Oh yes. My first run-in with good old Rikart.” Jani could visualize Neumann in his dress blue-greys, the narrower black belt of the older-style uniform squeezing his thick middle like a tourniquet. Broad-beamed. Wide, jovial face cut with a narrow mustache. Father Christmas in middle age. “A personal buddy of Phil Unser, which told one everything one needed to know right there. He started out second-in-command of Base Operations. When he tried to kneecap Documents and Documentation by incorporating us into Ops, I wrote a report.” She leafed through the fiched copy, forty-eight pages of carefully delineated argument as to why a nonindependent documents section would be detrimental to the Service as a whole and Rauta Shèràa Base in particular. Her “fictional examples” had contained everything but the names and dates.

  “There were twenty-three transfers after I submitted it for General Review.” Her commanding officer had reamed her for not clearing the report with him before submission, and yet another notation of “insubordination” was added to her record. “I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t just boot me out.”

  The answer came in a message, which she had found tucked in the outer pocket of her scanpack pouch during an idomeni-Service conclave a few weeks later. The pouch hadn’t left her belt—she’d never been able to figure out who passed the message to her and when.

  Think if this had been a knife, the first line had read. It got better after that, but not much.

  Nice report, Kilian. You think like a crook, but you need seasoning. When you get sick of protecting the litter-runts of the Commonwealth, I’ll be waiting. Rikart.

  “And do you believe he signed that note?” A few weeks later, he had her seconded to the Twelfth Rovers to help her make up her mind.

  Jani reassembled her file and tucked it back into the envelope. Val the Bear had toppled over and lay flat on his face. I know the feeling. She sat back, cradled her head in the crook of her arm, and let her gaze drift. “Piers didn’t answer my question about how Ebben, Unser, and Fitzhugh died. I’d bet ‘on purpose’ myself.” Her eyelids felt heavy. Her stomach growled.

  She stared at her comport message light for a full minute before she realized it blinked. “Lucien, go away.” She struggled to her feet and shuffled to her desk. “I’m mad at you.” She hit the playpad so she wouldn’t have to look at the flickering light anymore—she meant to delete the message immediately, but the face flashed before her fatigue-blunted reflexes could kick in.

  Lieutenant Ischi’s pensive aspect filled the display. “Captain? Ma’am, I know you’re not feeling well. But if there’s any way at all you can manage to stop by the office today, i
t would be greatly appreciated.”

  Jani checked the time-date stamp on the message. Only an hour ago. Odds were good the bodies hadn’t cooled yet, although Ischi’s expression aside, she had no reason to assume Hals and Vespucci had gotten into another fight about her. And if you pull this one again, it sings “The Hymn of the Commonwealth.”

  “All eight bloody verses.” She recovered her garrison cap from its resting place and tottered out the door.

  Jani entered the Foreign Transactions desk pool to find Ischi and several techs clustered by the coffee brewer. Ischi stood fists on hips and head thrust forward—the traditional lecture posture of a frustrated tech wrangler trying to cut the stampede off at the pass.

  “Colonel Hals is a helluva lot more aware than you are of the problems we’re facing, Mister!” he barked, his nose a finger’s breadth away from that of a pasty-faced SFC. “And the sooner you stop bleating your unique blend of garbled fact and outright fiction, the better off we will all be!” He was about to launch into round two when another tech’s eyes rounded, and he turned to follow her stare.

  “Captain Kilian, ma’am!” His turnabout-and-present was so quick, the object of his ire barely ducked an elbow in the nose. “The colonel will see you shortly. Please follow me.”

  Jani fell in behind Ischi in the best Officer’s Guide manner, waiting to draw alongside until they had passed into the anteroom. “Having a bad day, Corporal Coffee Cup?” That got a smile out of him. “Ah, the joys of personnel.”

  “Doylen’s an idiot. He listens at doors, catches half the words, and rearranges them in the worst order possible.” Ischi stopped at his desk and paged through the assorted stacks. “The problem is, it’s hit the fan, everyone knows it, and they’re diving for cover.”

  “So what’s the latest?”

  “Hals is being relieved and FT split up. Some of us will be shipped to colonial postings and the rest shoved back in the main pool.”

  “What? What brought that on?”

  “A complaint by Hantìa. She claimed Colonel Hals is incompetent and that her mistakes have hampered negotiations.” Ischi kept his eyes fixed on his paper rearranging. “All the errors are Hantìa’s fault. She held back vital data, waiting for the colonel to ask for it. But she wasn’t allowed.”

  Sounds like the Hantìa I knew and hated. Jani jerked her head toward Hals’s door. “Who’s in there now?”

  “The colonel, Major Vespucci, and Colonel Derringer from Diplo.” Ischi exhaled with a rumble. “Come over to explain the situation.”

  “Right.” Jani circled around the distracted lieutenant and punched Hals’s doorpad. She ducked into the office and forced the panel closed on Ischi’s wailing “Ma’am, not yet—”

  Hals sat at her desk, face drawn. Vespucci sat across from her, the look he directed at Jani suffused with outrage.

  Derringer sat on the short side of the desk between the two, his mainline stripe drawing the eye like a warning flare. He stiffened when he saw Jani—the leg that had been crossed ankle over knee slowly lowered until foot hit floor. His was the rangy build and sun-battered face that came from a bin labeled “middle-aged officer-standard issue.” He looked like he knew the answers. Jani would have bet her ’pack he didn’t understand half the questions.

  “Ma’am.” She snapped to attention as well as her weakened right leg would allow. “Captain Kilian reporting as ordered.”

  Vespucci’s voice emerged level and hard. “You don’t have an appointment scheduled, Cap—” He had twisted so his back faced Hals, but they must have worked together for so long, they’d developed psychic communication. Hals’s stare bored through the back of his head—he turned to face her slowly, as though in a trance, and fell silent.

  “Captain, it’s obvious some mistake has been made,” Derringer said sharply. “Please leave us.”

  Jani clasped her hands behind her back. Lifted her chin. Dug her heels into the carpet. Just like old times—ready, steady, into the deep end. “I know what this meeting is about, sir. I find it alarming that Diplo has taken it upon themselves to decide a course of action without consulting the one officer in Foreign Transactions who is a known authority on idomeni affairs.”

  Derringer stared past Jani at the door, as though waiting for Ischi to make an appearance. “And who would that be, Captain?”

  “That would be me, sir.”

  His gaze shifted to her. Even Vespucci’s had held more warmth. “Captain, I realize sideline conducts itself more loosely than mainline, and I also realize documents examiners as a whole pride themselves on their unmilitary behavior. But you are out of line here, and I am ordering you to leave this room.”

  “Captain Kilian is my direct report, Colonel, and we are in my physical jurisdiction.” Hals’s soft Indiesian accent contrasted sharply with Derringer’s twangy Michigan provincial. “If we are indeed so concerned about proper military behavior, I believe those two points give me the deciding vote as to whether she stays or leaves.” The look she directed at Jani said, OK expert, this better work.” “Carry on, Captain.”

  Jani heard voices outside. She reached behind her and pressed down on the doorpad—the doormech scraped as Ischi tried to open it from the other side.

  “Sir.” The scuffling outside the door grew louder, and she leaned harder on the pad. “It is my informed opinion, as a Service officer experienced in dealing with the idomeni, that removing Colonel Hals from any further contact with this matter is not a sound decision. It will prove detrimental not only to immediate Service dealings with the idomeni, but to future Service and Commonwealth dealings with them as well.”

  Derringer looked from Hals to Vespucci, then back at Jani. He hadn’t expected this. He had no fallback position, no support, and no idea what to do next. “It has not been officially determined that you outstrip everyone in the Diplomatic Corps with respect to idomeni experience, Captain.”

  “Fair enough, sir—in that case, I have two questions for you. One, how many years did the senior Service negotiator attached to this matter live on Shèrá and two, how many idomeni languages do they speak and is High Vynshàrau one of them?”

  “That’s three questions.” Hals’s expression was bland, but tiny embers of rebellion glowed in her eyes.

  “My mistake, ma’am,” Jani replied with equal flatness. “I do apologize.” She looked at Derringer. “Sir?”

  Derringer shifted in his chair. He wanted to refuse to answer, but three pairs of sideline eyes let him know that wasn’t an option. “General Burkett spent one year at Language School and a six-month stint at our embassy in Rauta Shèràa.”

  “Is he a colonial? Some colonials have had a great deal of day-to-day experience dealing with the Haárin.”

  “No, he is Earthbound by birth. However, he did do a ten-year stint in the J-Loop, where large populations of Haárin do reside. He tells stories.” The corner of Derringer’s mouth twitched as the gauntlet hit the floor.

  Jani nodded. “I began my course of study in documents examination at the Rauta Shèràa Academy at the age of seventeen. Four and a half years to degree, with my final year spent under direct tutelage of the being who currently serves as idomeni ambassador. After that, two and a half years at Rauta Shèràa Base, the majority of that time spent as a Food Services Liaison and an Import-Export Registrar. After that, eighteen years—”

  Derringer held up his hands. “Captain, no one is denying your expertise—”

  “Only my loyalty?” She stared at him until he looked away. “I am fully aware of the low opinion any member of the traditional Service would hold of me. But your opinion of me is not the primary consideration here. The primary consideration here is the continued lack of regard being shown the documents examiners assigned to this matter and the confusion this engenders in the idomeni, who consider examiners as qualified to negotiate and determine policy as any diplomat.”

  Derringer sucked his teeth. “Captain, we have discussed this with the ambassador at length, and whi
le he questions our reasoning at times, he has shown himself willing to see the human side of things.”

  “Sir, FT isn’t dealing directly with the ambassador, who is an exception to almost every rule regarding traditional Vynshàrau behavior. FT is dealing with the documents examiners, who have been reared from birth to operate in the diplomatic sphere.” Except for Hantìa, but I’ll worry about that inconsistency later.

  Derringer glanced at his timepiece. “Captain Kilian, negotiations for the Lake Michigan Strip have grown more and more heated over the past several days. The Prime Minister and members of her Cabinet are currently attending at the embassy, and we have been called in as well. There is no time to waste.” He stood. “The decision on how to proceed has been made.”

  Jani leaned against the doorpad. The voices and scrabblings had stopped long ago. All she could hear was the voice in her head that whispered gotcha. “NìaRauta Hantìa issued the complaint against Colonel Hals and the Vynshàrau demanded FT presence all this afternoon?”

  Derringer hesitated. He’d grown sick of answering her questions—that was obvious—but he knew alarm when he heard it. “Yes.”

  Hantìa, you witch, you set me up. “Sir, they know I’m here. They want me to attend. They’ve issued the sort of challenge they know will flush me out.” They know me.

  Vespucci screwed up the nerve to open his mouth again. “Aren’t you taking a lot on yourself, Captain? You’d think the outcome of these negotiations hinged on you.”

  Jani worked her neck. Her back hurt. Pimentel would strangle her if he knew where she was and what she did. I wish I had never checked that comport light. “Sir, I’m sure I sound arrogant, but I know them. They’ve always acknowledged the actions I took at Knevçet Shèràa. This is their way of formally recognizing me. Everyone here wishes I’d dry up and blow away, but ignoring the unpleasant in the hope it will disappear is not their way. I’m anathema to them, but I’m the devil they’ve always known. In a culture that values open disputation and the concept of the esteemed enemy, the thought that you could be hiding me is as repugnant to them as a food hoarder during time of famine is to us. They want to see me. Let’s get it over with.”