Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Agreed,” Hicks said. Hicks had arrested Jordan, in the long ago. Helped send him to Planys. He’d arrested Justin, multiple times.

  Jordan gazed at him a moment, then nodded, quietly still, deathly quiet in the room.

  “Say;” Ari said, “He also has to respect the authority of Reseune Directors. That won’t conflict.”

  “Good idea,” Prang said, and that went in.

  “Then we’re go with it,” Jordan said. “We go with heavy kat and unwind it.”

  Jordan got up. They all did. They went back to the room, where, for Kyle AK, time had stood still.

  Now time started up again with the specific beta tape, and they played it under instructions, relayed via Hicks, to erase it, step by step, from memory.

  Reaction. Slow, at first, but Kyle was alpha; cross-referencing told him in the first instant he was going to be in trouble.

  “Deeper,” Jordan said, and Ivanov frowned, and deepened the kat.

  Kyle was calmer, then. “Come on, Kyle,” Hicks said. “It’s Adam. I’m here. Listen to me.”

  Lines on the monitors had spiked all over the place. They sank abruptly. Ticked way up. And down again. That much kat was a risk.

  It took two hours and forty-five minutes to get him stable. And while Ivanov was working, word came from the airport that Councillor Chavez had just come in, with two aides. With her mind strongly elsewhere, but with the assurance nothing was going to happen soon up at the hospital, Ari made the trip down to welcome the Councillor officially, to see him up to Wing One, and for him to meet with deFranco in a conference room and deliver the news from Novgorod as of three days ago. It wasn’t much news, but it wasn’t good, military police were patrolling the streets of Novgorod, to the exclusion of Novgorod police.

  With no declaration of martial law. That was definite, too… because Reseune sheltered the requisite Councillors.

  It was suppertime in the outside world; but her stomach was on a different schedule. She entrusted the two Councillors to a good catered supper ordered up from Jamaica and took herself and Catlin and Florian back to the hospital as fast as she decently could. She had a sandwich from the hospital cafeteria—Catlin got it for her—and then settled in to catch up and hear the report from Ivanov, who’d finally gotten the subject calmed down and stable. Ivanov had had to give Hicks medical help; rapid heartbeat.

  “I can’t give Hicks much more help without putting him to bed,” Ivanov said. “He’s not young, any more than the subject is.”

  “We either leave Kyle in limbo for the night and see he doesn’t dream.” Justin said, “or we go after the block tonight. Stress continues on both of them—even—”

  “Go for it,” Jordan said, “if young sera’s through taking her own sweet—” Paul’s hand landed on Jordan’s shoulder, pressed hard, though Paul didn’t say a thing.

  “We need her concentration here“ Jordan said, “dammit. This isn’t a picnic.”

  “You’ve got it,” she said. “I don’t blame you. You’ve got it. No complaints, no objections.”

  “Let’s just go, then,” Justin said, and Grant got up, and Justin did.

  Hicks, asleep on a cot, took a little rousing. “At this point.” Jordan said, “you don’t have to do anything. Just talk to him occasionally. Tell him what we tell you. Verbatim.”

  Hicks nodded. They took their positions. They’d unraveled the kill-capability. Now they went after the block. Hicks’ job was to let him progress gently, find the block, figure what symbolized it, and encourage Kyle to set it in a neutral position.

  And Kyle seized.

  Machines ticked on, took over, cleaned out the adrenaline surge, supplied a gentler cocktail, and got Kyle breathing on his own again.

  It was past midnight, into the next day.

  Justin leaned over the mike, “Tell him reset. It’s all right.”

  Jordan said, “Tell him—tell him to open the door.”

  Hicks did. Kyle’s face contracted, then relaxed. His breath went out, and came in again.

  “Tell him. Reset,” Jordan said then.

  “Reset,” Hicks said, and Jordan let go a long breath and said, softly, gently into the mike, “It’s usually a door, in some sense or other. You’ll want to put that into his manual. It isn’t broken. He’s keyed on you now, we’re not going to have to break it. Tell him he can clean up, put things to rights. It’s all right. He can trust what comes in if you say he can. Get him to agree.”

  Hicks did that, quietly rephrasing.

  Kyle lay there, breathing deeply. His face was quiet, seeming to have acquired lines. He had fluids going in and coming out. He had machines doing a lot of the work for him, while he just lay there and breathed on his own, and blinked from time to time. But the storm on the monitors had decidedly quietened.

  “Get him to say your name.” Jordan said.

  “It’s me,” Hicks said then. “You know me. You know my name.”

  “Adam,” Kyle mumbled. “Adam Hicks.”

  “Run the code,” Jordan said then, sharply. “Straight into the Contract.”

  “You’ll—” Hicks started to protest angrily, and shut himself down, lips bitten to a thin line.

  Jordan said, “Go.”

  And Ari thought so, too. She looked at Justin.

  Justin said, “Code.”

  Fast as they could, before stress piled up. “Code in,” Paul said, and sent it through with the push of a button. Kyle sucked in a breath as if he’d fallen into icewater. The monitors spiked up, a jagged mountain range of crisis. Then Kyle let the breath go.

  Contract tape followed immediately. “You have an assignment,” it routinely began. “You have a place. You are wanted…”

  Kyle went on breathing. The lines of stress evened out to a steady tick. Strengthened.

  Giraud couldn’t have done this one, Ari thought to herself. No way in hell. That beta tape was ancient history. It had taken Base One to haul it out of storage. It was tape that didn’t belong to any azi living… now that they’d pried it out of Kyle AK.

  They got up from their small table, then, moving quietly, while Ivanov checked and took notes. Jordan moved closer to their patient. Ari did, out of curiosity to see, besides the monitors, how he was doing.

  Then Jordan leaned over Kyle, very close, and said, fast, before anyone could stop him, “Who was your Supervisor before Adam Hicks?”

  Contraction of the brows. Ari tensed. Kyle’s eyes flew open. He was still deeply under.

  “Arbero,” Kyle said. “Captain Vincente Arbero.”

  “Did you ever put Abban under kat?”

  Kyle opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came out. Hicks grabbed Jordan’s shoulder and shoved him back, and Florian had moved in. Florian restrained Jordan gently, just put himself in the way, while Catlin faced Hicks.

  “Yes.” Ari heard Kyle say in the interim, and she touched his pallid face gently and said, “You’re forgiven. It’s all right now. You can rest a bit and wake up later. Adam Hicks won’t leave you. Remember Vincente Arbero. But never listen to him again.”

  She looked toward Hicks, who was still furious, then toward Jordan. “That’s on the record,” she said. “It’s on the record, Jordan, and all of us know it. It was recorded.”

  Jordan wasn’t fighting against Florian, who wasn’t touching him now: he looked on the edge of a collapse, himself. Justin had moved in close, and laid a hand on Jordan’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” Justin said. “Let’s go back next door, let him sleep it off. We did it, Dad. It’s done. Everybody heard.”

  “I did it,” Jordan snapped, jerked his shoulder aside, and looked at Ari. “So what do you propose to do about it?”

  “What I promised I’d do,” she said. “Let’s go next door. Come on. We need to talk. Now. Come on. Everybody.”

  They went to the conference room, then—a window on the outer hall, one on the operating room itself. Petros Ivanov had gotten Hicks back to one of the consoles, to a sta
ble chair with a back on it, was talking to him, probably medical advice. A nurse had come in.

  Jordan didn’t say a word, meanwhile, didn’t sit down. He just stood there, against the wall of the conference room, staring at the windowed view, arms folded, not talking.

  “Arbero,” Catlin said, quietly, having consulted her handheld. “Not on the Defense rolls. No CIT number.”

  “That’s two,” Ari said. She was disappointed, deeply disappointed, but a thought began sliding sideways in her mind, just out of one compartment and into another. “Anton Clavery. Vincente Arbero. Every CIT has a CIT number. But are there people in Defense that don’t? We’ve been assuming the radical underground. Paxers. Rocher Party, everything but somebody in uniform. Kyle’s given us a name that doesn’t exist. And, under deep kat, he says this person was in Defense with a high rank.”

  Jordan had unfolded his arms. Justin and Grant sat looking at her. So did Mark and Gerry, Florian and Catlin, who weren’t going to talk, not in front of the rest.

  “Florian,” she said. “Catlin. What are you thinking?”

  “That CITs in other places are supposed to have numbers,” Florian said. “But we can’t get into Defense to find out if the rules are different there.”

  “If they made hollow men,” Catlin said, “they’d have all sorts of resources to do that. People died in the War. Some die in training. And they’d be hard to track. Hollow men with all sorts of identities available.”

  “We assumed a whole Bureau is going to observe the law,” she said. “We assume if they were breaking the law somebody would talk about it.”

  “Well, somebody didn’t,” Jordan said, “until he went under deep kat.” A muscle jumped in Jordan’s jaw. “Khalid runs Intelligence. Covert operations. I said I’d met him. Bastard. Thorough arrogant bastard. Asked me questions I declined to answer. The man collects bits and pieces of everybody. Gets real pissed when you don’t react when he gives you that look. I didn’t know who he was at the time. I found out, the second meeting. People tried to hint to me you didn’t cross him. I probably went down in his book as a potential problem. Maybe it had something to do with their decision, the way they handled my case… they didn’t have a handle on me; they wanted more information and I wouldn’t give it to them, if you want the bloody truth. You all assumed I told them any damned thing they wanted to hear, and I didn’t. I told them what Ari was doing—there was a dark little history, nasty little secrets left over from the War, the azi designs that didn’t work, that she put down and wouldn’t give me fucking access to try to fix them… you want to know where you can get any human material you want? Ask about her deals with Defense, ask what kind of spies she could create that never would have a CIT number…” He drew breath, waved a hand. Said, in a quiet voice, “It doesn’t matter. If they exist, we can’t get at them.”

  “An honest Defense Councillor could,” she said.

  “Naive,” Jordan said.

  “You say Khalid did it, ultimately. We’ll never attach things to him. If we take it to the media and can’t prove it, ultimately that’s a problem, because he’ll deny it, and we’ve damaged our credibility with everybody. I’m not that naive, ser, to try to prove anything yet. I’m thinking what we can do now to get him stopped.”

  “Well, first you find an honest Defense representative and then you get his electorate to put your honest Councillor in. Spurlin wasn’t likely it—just somebody who wouldn’t kiss ass with Khalid, which is why he’s dead and you’re probably right. You’re a target, I am, everybody who’s heard this is, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think having a Council meeting on the quadrangle out there is going to make Defense run for cover. You’re thinking he’ll observe civilized limits. He’s already out of civilized limits.”

  “It’s a problem,” Ari said.

  “It’s a problem,” Jordan echoed her nastily. “Damned right it’s a problem. So I’m innocent. The world’s going to hell anyway and a Council vote isn’t going to fix it.”

  “I may need you again,” she said. It was scary, being told by a very bright Special that he was out of answers, and that there was no fix for the problem. It was particularly scary, because at the moment she didn’t see a fix, either, and whatever was wrong inside Defense had been going on for sixty years. Their problem had had a lot of time to build an infrastructure in that Bureau. “Go get some rest. Thank you, especially, Jordan. Thank you for doing this.”

  “The hell,” he muttered. “You go prove I’m innocent. Get me my license back.”

  “We should get on back to the Wing,” Justin said. “We’re all exhausted.”

  Jordan didn’t move.

  “You’ll get your not-guilty,” Ari said.

  “Promises, promises.”

  She stood up, leaned on a chair back with both hands. “We’ll figure things out,” she said. “Yanni will get back, we’ll hold a vote, and we’ll see what the Council actually can do.”

  “Hold a vote. Hell.” Jordan shoved away from the wall and walked out.

  Paul lingered a moment, looking distressed.

  “It’s all right,” she said to Paul. “He could be right, you know. But I hope not. Good night, Paul. Tell him good night. —Justin, Grant, Sera Prang… Justin, you can—”

  The overhead lights flashed.

  Then the storm siren sounded.

  “There’s no weather,” Ari said, and then thought of the pile of papers and manuals in the surgery, at that back table. “The records. Kyle.”

  “Our territory,” Prang said. “We have enough help. I’ll help Petros with the patient. Go! Get her downstairs!”

  “Damn,” Ari said, and by then Florian had her one arm and Catlin had the other, and Prang was headed for the surgery.

  “I’ll get the manuals,” Justin said, and he and Grant headed out of the room, headed the same direction, Mark and Gerry close behind them, while the siren howled.

  “Sera, come on,” Florian said, and she surrendered. She had to. Florian and Catlin pulled her out into the hall and down the nearest stairs.

  They were on the next flight down when something screamed overhead, the walls rattled and the ground heaved up, like a blanket toss.

  Section 6

  Chapter i

  August 27, 2424

  1927 H

  Giraud blinked, flinched, moved wildly, first at an unprecedented jolt, then at the abrupt cessation of everything in his world.

  Then the rocking and the sounds started up again, regular as the heartbeat that ruled it, and he, and Abban, and Seely, all slowly settled and relaxed. They all had something approaching a memory for the first real event they had ever experienced, knit together for the first time in one experience, at one specific age. They couldn’t define it. But they had all been in the same situation.

  They were too old, however, to be seriously inconvenienced by a glitch, They each weighed about a kilo—still none of them carrying the weight they needed for that unruly world that had just intruded. They were adding neurons as fast as they could grow them. Their brains were organizing so one day they would be able to remember things. They were packing on body fat, storing it up, not anticipating any other such disturbance, though hormones had surged and they remained unsettled for some un-thought reason.

  They didn’t plan. They didn’t anticipate. they just did things their DNA told them to do, and right now, with all the nutrients they could get, they just filled out their skins and grew eyelashes, because their DNA said it was time to do that.

  Chapter ii

  August 27, 2424

  2011 H

  The drills in underpopulated Alpha Wing hadn’t remotely conveyed the urgency of a populated area or the fear in a gathered crowd who’d felt that shock. They’d possibly had a tower fall. That was the image Justin framed in his mind; one of the big precip towers on the cliff must have come down, and of all disasters in his life, of all things that had ever happened to him and Grant—that imagination was the worst; atmospheric b
reach. Death, if you got caught outside.

  Traffic in the tunnels had slowed to a general milling movement… slowed, and slowed, until they reached a concourse where people, now in one of the most reinforced areas of the system, generally stood about waiting for information, speculating grimly on what had blown up, talking about the inadequacy of the recent drills, wondering about the whereabouts of relatives and cursing the overloaded communications system, which had flatly shut down all non-official accounts.

  Mark and Gerry had kept up with them. They all four had briefcases full of classified papers and the manual they’d rescued—they’d managed that coherent task, amid everything else. But they didn’t know what had happened up on the surface, nobody else did, so they made their way generally toward Alpha Wing, with hundreds of other people caught out at restaurants, in residences, working night shift. And, Justin thought, he might get through on Base One, on his handheld, but he didn’t want to make himself a target of questions from everybody else who was missing a relative. They didn’t have a place where they could do it in any privacy.

  “Can you gather anything?” he asked Gerry, pausing to let those two overtake them. “Is your com working?”

  “Just ops and tracking, ser,” Gerry said. “They aren’t saying, except there’s an emergency channel, and our group’s not authorized on it while we’re detached, ser. Sera’s security, sera’s security is saying just stay—”

  Then a familiar young voice said, over the general address: “This is Ariane Emory, in ReseuneSec Admin, Defenses have brought down a device on the grounds. There’s no significant damage to Reseune facilities, just a hole in the ground where it hit. Please stay in the tunnels until an all-clear, but it looks as if we’re all right for the moment. Section doors will now open, but they may close again if there should be another alarm, so be alert. Upper doors will remain shut for a while yet, so you can’t get back home yet anyway. Don’t cross a section line once the lights start blinking, observe the drills and remember, everybody stop moving if the lights flash red. We’ll provide further information as we get it. No one is to go outside except authorized agents at the moment. Thank you.”