Regenesis (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Trap,” Frank said.

  “When is it going to be better?” Amy asked, which was a good question, in Yanni’s estimation. “We go over to the hotel behind us. Frank and Quentin get the cars, and two other cars go out front, while they go around the block, and we go straight over the bridge; and then we all just go hard as we can for the airport.”

  “Planes aren’t safe,” Yanni said. “They’re shooting missiles lately.”

  “Boats are slower,” she said. She was a gawky kid. She’d begun to grow into the lanky, large-eyed height; but at the moment she looked her youth, scared, but willing to try any damned thing, possibly because she didn’t adequately imagine failing. “Quentin and I will do it; we’ll get the car to the front, if you and Frank can get Councillor Corain to the curb.”

  “Hell,” he said. “I’ve got files to wipe. I’m not ready for this.”

  “She has a point.” Frank said suddenly. “Make a feint toward State. Two cars that way. Two more toward Lynch. One car gets us all to the airport.”

  “We only have four cars,” Yanni said. “And the hotel bus.”

  “Wouldn’t use it at the moment,” Frank said. “Or the cars they know. We take the executive car from the next building’s garage. Safer.”

  “You’re agreeing with this,” Yanni said.

  “The missile strike,” Frank said, “argues they’re fast losing their inhibitions. They’re feeling omnipotent—that, or something’s made them desperate.”

  Yanni cast a glance at the Carnath girl, said, “Stand there,” and went to the bedroom and threw on what he’d been wearing, casuals, two tees under a sweater. His coat was going to be no protection against the chill. When the weather got like this upriver, they headed for the storm tunnels. To do what they proposed to do, they’d have to hold their breath and make a dash for it through open space in the alley, trusting the downpour to wash noxious life down the gutters, this far in among city towers, building connected to building by overhangs spanning some of the alley, but it was sloppy and cold out there.

  He came back to the main room and started putting on the coat. “Frank, what do we do?”

  “Five minutes for me to brief Jack and Carl, you get Corain out of bed, and get downstairs.”

  “Cot it,” he said.

  “Quentin. you take the south stairs. Meet you at the back door.”

  “Yes, ser,” Quentin said.

  “Then go.” Frank said, and it was just that fast. They were into it. Launched. Yanni looked at his watch, then walked over, picked up the briefcase, and laid a hand on young Amy’s shoulder.

  “Here,” he said to her, getting her attention. “You take the official briefcase.”

  He had a gun in his own jacket pocket, courtesy of ReseuneSec. He didn’t plan to use it; he never in his life planned to draw it, but he made sure it was there, all the same.

  He heard a quiet flurry exiting the room adjacent, where ReseuneSec was camped. Whatever orders Frank had given them, they were moving.

  Three minutes. Frank and Quentin would be heading for the stairs. Two minutes.

  One. Their guards had left, somewhere. There wasn’t a sound, anywhere near.

  “You stay with me,” he told Amy and waited the precise last seconds before he opened the door.

  They headed out, then. Himself and the kid, out to rouse out Mikhail Corain, if their security moving into position hadn’t triggered Armageddon.

  It hadn’t. At least that.

  They made it down to Corain’s door, rapped softly, then louder, and there was a soft stir inside. Yanni stood against the door, trying to look casual.

  “Mikhail.” he said. “Mikhail, it’s Yanni. Open up.”

  Corain opened the door. Had on only underwear and the shirt he’d slept in. His hair stood on end. He turned an appalled look at young Carnath, and started to excuse himself.

  “We’re going,” Yanni said, catching Corain’s arm. “Get dressed. Now.”

  Corain just nodded, looked anxiously at Amy Carnath, then grabbed his pants off the fat armchair and pulled them on. “Shoes,” he said, searching.

  “Here,” Amy said, and he found them and grabbed his coat. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else but the coat.

  Down the hall, then, over blue, figured carpet, to the emergency stairs, the same Frank would have used. Hadn’t moved this fast—

  Hadn’t moved this fast, Yanni thought uneasily, since the day Ari had died. Since he’d gotten the advisement, and he’d known every plan he and Ari had ever made was upended, thrown into jeopardy.

  Everything since, he’d improvised. Like this, like their escape. Granted they made it.

  There was a man unconscious, at the bottom of the landing. He might be dead. He wasn’t hotel staff. He wasn’t theirs. He was wearing a rain-spattered coat.

  “God,” Corain said. Young Carnath didn’t say a thing, just stepped gingerly over the fallen man’s leg, and held onto the briefcase.

  Chapter iv

  September 4, 2424

  0821 H

  The late Councillor Bogdanovitch’s son, his sister, and Councillor Harad had made it into Reseune Airport together, in an otherwise empty commercial plane out of Moreyville, and took up residence, young Bogdanovitch and his sister in vacant apartments in the Ed wing, Councillor Harad occupying Jordan’s old apartment.

  And beyond that, on following days, things settled back to quiet, much too quiet, in Ari’s estimation. Hicks had transited from close confinement to medical leave, and Ari had assigned a licensed nurse to be living-in, to be sure neither Kyle nor Hicks himself had rejuv issues—if you got supportive treatment fast, so Ivanov had said, you could sometimes prevent a rejuv collapse, so it was important to keep them both under observation while Kyle tried to get his mental bearings and settle down after the shock he’d had.

  Not least—the nurse had a qualification in psych, and kept an eye out for that kind of problem, too. But Kyle couldn’t be questioned as yet. He wasn’t up to it. They had that from the nurse.

  Jordan sent a nice letter saying back pay for the last two decades would be greatly appreciated. Ari wrote back saying there might be tax implications he might want to consider regarding a lump sum payment, but she’d start the procedures and pass it on to Yanni when he got there…

  Yanni. Yanni was her overwhelming worry. Harad had said Yanni was supposed to have left close behind him, and now it was three days after Harad had arrived, with no Yanni, no word from Amy, who should still be in Novgorod. She’d never understood the phrase worried sick.

  Now she did.

  The last she’d heard, Amy and Quentin had been in Yanni’s and Corain’s hotel, and they’d been watched. Nearly under house arrest. She hoped for word from Lynch, of Science, in lieu of Yanni, maybe relaying some word or instruction from Yanni; but that didn’t come. What had come, via Harad and Bogdanovitch, was the news that Yanni had arranged a diversionary move toward Lynch, but that the crew who’d attempted it had swung back to the hotel with three cars cutting them off from that route.

  And that was that—three days since Harad and young Bogdanovitch had been here, safe, and there was no Yanni, no Corain, no Amy, not a ripple out of ReseuneSec in Novgorod, and Amy didn’t answer Maddy’s discreet personal call.

  The situation sent her back to Base One to make sure she understood the constitutional scenario if there was a near-majority vote and there should be a Council seat vacated by disaster.

  Dicey was what it seemed to her. There was a procedure by which the remaining Councillors could unanimously declare a Bureau seat could not be filled within the likely span of an emergency—but the sticky point was that “remaining Councillors” had to include Khalid, who naturally wouldn’t vote to unseat himself… except he hadn’t gotten seated, not officially, and needed a majority of living Councillors to be seated.

  That was an interesting point of law, but it was also a real kink in the situation for Khalid. He’d alienated everybody. He was on a col
lision course with constitutional law—and that wasn’t a major point with most CITs, who didn’t understand it; but it was a nasty situation for Khalid on the one hand and for the constitution on the other.

  You could think it’s just a document, she wrote to her successor, in the small hours of the morning, but it’s more. It represents a real point of consensus we haven’t got now, and a lot of people were willing to give up things they wanted so they could get that agreement. It was a point in human history where all of Union agreed to a set of priorities, and now we’ll either prove that agreement still binds everybody, or we’ll prove somebody with enough guns can run everything at any given moment; and that means no peace, even for them.

  I never got excited about studying law—until we are a few missile launches away from not having any law at all.

  We’ve got to get that consensus back. That means we’ve got to be able to tell people the constitution still works, and make them believe it. That’s why the forms matter. People have to see things done by the rules. We’ve got to make people feel safe again and make them believe that compromises are going to be binding.

  Unfortunately people in Khalid’s own Bureau haven’t done anything to stop him.

  His Bureau was taking his orders—or, at least, took them far enough to launch that missile. There hasn’t been another. Maybe that means that’s all they had, or all they can get to.

  Maybe it means it even shocked people in Defense.

  It should have. I hope it did.

  She put in a once-a-day meeting with the reporters at the airport, who said the broadcasts were having a lot of trouble getting out at Novgorod and they weren’t sure about Planys; but they were still getting out intermittently there and fairly consistently in other places. People were sending bits all over the net, and Defense was trying to block it, but Defense couldn’t stop what other Bureaus ran. So that was doing some good.

  She tried to improve her sleep patterns; she still found herself awake at night and napping on her arms on her desk, after being up at 0500h. She finally took to her proper bed in the thought that if she could sleep at all, at any time, she ought to, no matter what else was going on in the world, and no matter how worried she was about Yanni. But she wouldn’t take a sleeping pill.

  She’d just about gotten to that nowhere state, all the same, when Florian’s voice said, “Sera. Sera, forgive me, but there’s a report Defense has just moved in on Planys. They’ve shut down all communication. We terminated accesses.”

  Damn, she thought.

  But she wasn’t wholly surprised.

  And she had no doubt they’d be after whatever they could get, Library, all of it—but they hadn’t likely gotten anything. System had taken measures, that fast. They had it set up for Planys, for particular operations inside Reseune, for Strassenberg, for ReseuneSec offices in Novgorod: one System-level irregularity, and System needed to be reset from Reseune Admin. One code, out of Base One, and it nuked accesses at any other given base until codes were reset.

  That had happened, probably at the first probe they made into System. She was ahead of them that far.

  She shoved herself up on one arm, and the other, and found the edge of the bed, raking hair out of her eyes and trying simultaneously to ask herself if there was any other thing she needed to think of, if they’d just lost Planys.

  There wasn’t anything to do, was there? They’d known they could lose it, that fast, because a Defense installation was snuggled up against it, and Defense installations had guns and a lot of electronics, and they’d probably spent years preparing themselves to crack System.

  That part hadn’t worked. She felt good about that.

  “Tell Admin,” she said, and Florian called Catlin on com and told her to tell Chloe, while Ari was pulling on her boots. “Tell the Councillors,” she added. That was a new priority on their notification list, but they kept the Council, such as it was, as informed as Admin, where it regarded move’s by Defense. “I’ll be over there. I’ll go talk to the reporters. I’ll take calls from anybody on the ‘notify’ list.” She took a twist in her hair and jammed the skewer in slantwise. Which hurt, but she was in a hurry.

  Joyesse showed up. “Coat,” Ari said. “Please.” And, “Florian? How did they do it?”

  “There were already Defense personnel inside the labs. Fifty more Defense personnel arrived about midnight local. they took armed possession of the administrative offices and that was that. Most people go offshift at 1600.”

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “ReseuneSec in uniform we’re roughed up,” Florian said as they entered the hall. Joyesse brought the coat and Ari turned and slipped it on. “That’s the last information we have. It may have gotten worse, but they have their standing orders.” Go to plainclothes, offer no resistence, destroy any records you can, those were the instructions. “Physical records they’ve undoubtedly got, undoubtedly some manuals. And the prior codes. They’ll be going over those with every expert they have, looking for some forgotten app they can still get into. They won’t find one.”

  “Good. Then that’s gone by the book.” They reached the front door and Theo let them out.

  “Catlin is talking with Chloe in Admin,” Florian said, and then pressed the com into his ear, intent on something for an instant. He suddenly stopped walking—and nothing distracted Florian. She stopped, there in the hall, among the paintings.

  “Sera,” he said, “there’s a plane requesting a landing.”

  Her heart leapt up in hope.

  “It’s Defense, sera.” Florian was still listening. “General Awei, Klaus Awei, requesting permission to land, courier jet. Air Traffic Control requests Admin advice.”

  “Permission granted,” she said. There was little else they could do; let automated defenses kick in and start something, or let that plane land. Military courier. If it landed instead of shooting, Defense was talking, and talking—that, she could do something with, even if it delivered a threat. “How far off?”

  “How far off?” Florian asked ATC, having relayed her prior instruction; and he reported: “Fifteen minutes, sera.”

  “Get a bus.”

  “Sera, it’s dangerous.”

  “The airport has tunnels, if they’re lying.” Her pulse had kicked up, a level of aggression she had to watch in herself, and question her own decisions. “If they’re going to talk, I’ll talk to them.”

  “Yes, sera,” he said, and started relaying that information to Catlin and then to the Transport Office, which ran the buses.

  Chapter v

  September 8, 2424

  0932 H

  The bus had gotten to the Wing One doors by the time they met Catlin there—Catlin carrying a rifle/launcher and Florian with only a small pistol. The two exchanged nods, a signal of some kind, the bus door opened, and Ari started to board. Florian interposed an arm between her and the door, saying, “The plane is coming in now, sera. Wait a moment.”

  She stopped, and stood beside the bus, looking where Florian and Catlin looked. In a moment she saw a black dot in the east, across the river, coming in on the course most planes from Novgorod used.

  “Landing to the north,” Catlin said as it banked, and it followed that route, rapidly becoming a distinct, swept-winged shape.

  “Gear down,” Florian noted in some relief, and leapt up to the bus deck in two strides. Ari climbed up, Catlin behind her.

  “Field gate,” Ari said before she’d done more than grasp a seat back for support. “Onto the field to meet it. Go!”

  The driver said, “Yes, sera,” and the bus hummed forward and gathered speed down the drive.

  They veered onto the airport road, and Ari didn’t bother sitting down; neither did Catlin or Florian, and the bus wasted no time, heading down to the airport road, past where the crater in the lawn had been… work crews had righted the damaged lamp, earthmovers and bots had restored the area and put back sod, so there was very little but the seams in the new sod to say where th
e missile had been. The warehouses nearby, which had taken some damage, were getting new facing; those panels were a little brighter than the rest. Reseune didn’t admit its wounds. It fixed things, fast, all back to normal… on her orders, for morale. On principle.

  And if Khalid had something to say, and sent some messenger to deliver threats, she’d hear what he had to say. The media could hear it, as far as she was concerned. And it could equally well hear her answer.

  “The media can come out to the landing area if they want to,” she said. “This isn’t going to be off the record, whatever it is. We’re not playing that game.”

  “Sera,” Catlin said, “you know this bus is no cover against what they have.”

  “Reseune itself isn’t cover against what they have.” If they killed her, if they meant to kill her, it was for one reason; to get a new Reseune administration in charge of a new infant Ari—she sincerely believed it; and to get that, if it was war, Khalid would peel back layers of Reseune until they got what they wanted, with missile after missile, with a landing on that broad, bot-defended shore, and killing anybody in their path.

  She couldn’t win a war only on defense. Not against all the hardware Defense commanded.

  She got one com call from Councillor deFranco as the bus was passing the gate—likely the landing was being carried on Reseune’s operations channel, not kept secret from the population; and she had someone else simultaneously trying to call her, probably Chavez or Harad. Either Florian or Catlin could have taken that call, but it wasn’t the moment to distract them from their contact with ReseuneSec.

  “It’s a General Klaus Awei,” she said to deFranco.

  “Awei” DeFranco sounded surprised. “He hasn’t been Khalid’s.”

  In a bleak landscape, that was interesting information. “I’m there.” she said, because the plane was stopped, and opening up, and their bus was pulling into its vicinity. “Call the others, sera. Tell them follow this on the news. I’m there. Got to go.”

  She thumbed off, pocketed the com, grabbed the seat back for balance as the bus braked. Florian and Catlin were right with her as she handed her way to the bus steps, with the black, foreign shape of the military craft in the right side windows.