“Yes, Ser.”
The boss gestured to the two other men in the room, both burly and wearing what looked like hospital uniforms. They wheeled the gurney away, and the boss left with them. “Don’t doze off, Arne. No breaks. Your relief will be in later.”
Warnings, demands…he did not glare resentfully at the door when it closed, because he was sure the room had surveillance. He had thought—and Len as well—that this job would be both easy and stable, something they could rely on while the children were young, so Len could stay home with them and also work on his sculpture. So even though he had known, vaguely, that Malines & Company was bent as a corkscrew, he had believed that there was a straighter side, hiring ordinary techs and clericals, where he could draw a good salary and keep well away from the harsher activities that gave Malines its reputation.
It hadn’t worked that way. But as long as he kept his head down and said yes, Ser, no, Ser, and right away, Ser, the money came in regularly, sometimes even a bonus. He and Len had a pleasant apartment in the Malines & Company neighborhood, the children were thriving in school, and Len could afford studio space and materials for his work.
He felt vaguely sorry for the old man on the gurney—but that wasn’t his problem. His problem was monitoring all the Rector’s communications, and especially her skullphone calls. And, long-term, doing exactly what he was told, when he was told, so that Len and the children were safe. He had been shown images of what could happen to the children of those who attempted to leave Malines & Company.
Over the next two hours, his mind wandered occasionally to the Rector, the little he knew about her, and the old man on the gurney. She was a Vatta, she was old, she had a bud-grown arm from having the original shot off. That cost a lot, and it had happened before she became Rector. How had she paid for it? What did it look like? He’d never seen her, except on a newsvid, and she was dark, like most of the Vattas, wrinkly, old. That’s all he could remember. This old retired sergeant—was he a friend? Why would a Vatta like her be friends with someone like him? Surely they weren’t really lovers.
Finally, his diligence was rewarded by a light on the console: the Rector was making an outbound skullphone call. Not, unfortunately, where the boss wanted her to make it. He captured the code; his console ran the code against the pre-loaded list. Her home com. He logged the call, and its duration, but was not able to record content. Skullphones had tighter security than ordinary phones, and the boss had told him not to tinker with any of the Rector’s modalities. “Just record, or send the tape if she replies to the call.”
—
Teague answered Grace’s call on the house phone, and listened as she reported what had happened and what she had learned so far.
“He’s not at Joint Services Regional Command. Wasn’t expected, hadn’t arrived, no one had seen him. My assistant says the call supposedly from him was full of static, and that he apologized for it. He thinks it was MacRobert’s voice but he’s not sure now that questions are being asked. All my incoming calls are recorded; I’ve listened to it and I don’t think it’s Mac, but it’s close—it might be a composite recording or they might have an actor capable of sounding like him. I doubt the call came from that far away; it might even have originated from Port Major, but I can’t tell. Would you be able to trace it?”
“Not from here,” Teague said. “I’d need to get into your office system to have a chance. It’ll have to be accessed there, I’m almost certain. You want Rafe; he’s better at that.”
She’d kept Rafe away from her workplace since that first day. She could hardly bring him in now and turn him loose on the communications system without risking his being discovered. So far—she thought and he thought—the cover story of his being an ISC technician sent to work on the system ansibles had held up.
“Problem?” Rafe asked. He sounded less sleepy than she expected.
“Yes,” Grace said. She explained again, adding, “I think someone’s snatched MacRobert. That would take very experienced operatives. I don’t know if it’s our main opposition or something else. He was close to the former Commandant; it could be that other elements have other agendas.”
“Priorities,” Rafe said. “Is it more important to find out where that call came from, or find and retrieve Mac?”
“Can you do one without the other?”
“How much time between when you two parted and the call?”
“Several hours; the meeting started ten minutes after I got there and lasted about two and a half. The call came in shortly after that.”
“My take is he’s here, in Port Major. I’ll put Teague on that. Can you get me a hard-line link to your assistant’s desk com?”
Grace paused. What he wanted was technically illegal. Dangerous, to let someone with Rafe’s skills delve into the headquarters phone system. And yet—what choice did she have? Leaving aside her feelings for Mac, he was a longtime Spaceforce operative with secrets no one outside Spaceforce should know. His implant had an interrogation protocol, but if he’d been drugged, would it work? “Use your disguise. Call for an appointment with me concerning…let me think…your contract to fix the ansibles and my agreement that your work is satisfactory so far. I’ll tell my assistant you called me, that he should squeeze you in.”
“Two hours,” Rafe said. “It takes that long to put all the pads in and be able to clear the scanners. I’ll brief Teague and get him on his way—”
“Not to get caught, I hope.”
“He’s slippery,” Rafe said. “Later.”
Grace explained the need to squeeze Ser Bancroft in for an appointment in two hours—“ISC business, apparently. Something to do with the ansible work he and his associate have done.” She dealt with the other appointments, all of them things people could have figured out for themselves if they’d been thinking. Then Rafe arrived, and came in still talking over his shoulder to her assistant, in a voice that was his, and yet not him.
“And that’s the choice I’ve been authorized to give the Rector—a full-service contract, or onsite training for— Oh, good afternoon, Rector. I was just saying—”
“Do come in, Ser Bancroft. I’m afraid I don’t have that long, but I understand you’ve a message from ISC headquarters?”
She shut the door behind him and let him take her seat at her desk. His briefcase, full of an array of instruments, opened at a touch.
“Yes, Rector,” he went on. He picked up her desk com, tipped it upside down, and loosened screws as he talked. “There’s a new policy on maintenance, as I suspected there might be, and it saved a trip back here to wait and see…as you know, your local repair of your system ansible was sufficient for it to work, but not at 100 percent speed and efficiency, because your local technicians did not understand the finer points of its construction.” He went on talking what sounded like a typical sales presentation as he took the outer case off, disemboweled the innards, and spread them on the desktop. Tiny pincers attached here and there to various bits, with leads back into his case.
Without a change in his voice—in the same prissy Cascadian accent—Rafe went on even as he glanced up and winked, his hands moving confidently among the instruments. “My assistant, Ser Teague, has been looking for a suitable site, and suppliers, in anticipation that your government may choose the onsite education option. You may not know that he is a certified technical instructor for ISC, as am I, and either one of us might be assigned here for the instructional period—” He nodded to her, pointed a finger. Your turn.
Grace took up the conversation smoothly. “Ser Bancroft, you surely know that as Rector of Defense I cannot speak for the entire government—” She winked.
He took over again, another spate of glib verbiage, and they continued to exchange speaker and listener roles until he mentioned “system security” and that provided an excuse for her to turn her privacy cylinder to full.
They grinned at each other.
“I’m reading your system and your system’s call r
ecord,” Rafe said, in his normal voice. “Thank you for getting that call-time for me before I arrived. Your assistant said there was static—that can be artificially induced, of course. Ah. That call did not match any satellite record, so if it was at a distance, it was through local wireless or landline. There’s a local wireless call—”
“You’re sucking all the phone records?”
“Luckily for me, Slotter Key’s communications are ninety-nine percent government-owned. A hundred percent here in Port Major. I’m into your system; I’m into everything. Let’s see. Comparison…two matches. Wireless; transfer nexus number 84—that’s Bolt and Fifty-Seventh. The other is a landline, both to this office within a few seconds of each other. Landline…15 Bolt Street, commercial account, Malines Shipping and Handling.”
“I was only told of one.”
“Right. The landline call came in first.”
“Where’s Teague?”
“Somewhere in the warehouse district. Do you know that area?”
“Malines is organized crime,” Grace said. “They own several blocks, and control an area larger than that.”
“I’ll contact Teague. Just let me reconstruct this; won’t take long.” Rafe’s fingers seemed to flicker in Grace’s gaze as he pulled connections, replaced components, reassembled her desk com. “Thing is, your assistant’s bent. How long have you had him?”
“Quarter year, a little more. Olwen’s husband got a job at Dalmouth—it’s only about seventy kilometers, but she has children in school and didn’t want the long commute.”
“Around the time of Ky’s arrival?”
“No, about—let me think—ninety days or so after the crash. You think there’s a connection?”
“No reason you should. Who did her husband get a job with, and does Malines have enough influence to sway an employer without her husband knowing?”
“Probably. He’s not street-smart, nor was Olwen. But Derek—he’s done a good job until now.”
“A good job keeping an eye on you. All right. The topic is a possible maintenance contract. Kill the privacy.”
Grace reached for the cylinder, starting to talk before she turned it off. “That’s my opinion, Ser Bancroft [click] but I can’t promise that the Council or the President will have the same.” Slick as wet seals, she thought, as she and Rafe finished up what would seem like the same conversation, eventually passing the question of which imaginary maintenance scheme to choose off to another branch of government, and finishing with polite social comments.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
PORT MAJOR, HARBOR SECTOR
DAY 219
Teague eased his way along the crowded streets of the shopping district, eastward toward the port area. The shopping district extended a tongue of attractive gentility all the way to the waterfront, providing reasonable access for a tourist while taking him within a short distance of warehouses, transport depots, and eventually the working docks. Occasional whiffs of fish and spoilage eddied along the pretty sidewalks with their cafés and shops. He had been here before; he was certain some of the people would recognize him. His transformation had matured; he felt comfortable now with the different length of leg and arm, with the color of his skin, the texture of his hair, how he looked in the mirror, and how he felt moving around.
Lines had formed at street vendor carts; he opted for the quick-serve window of a café tucked into the side of a street so narrow it might have been an alley. “Whitefish wrap,” he said, just like the man ahead of him, and he had the correct change ready for the hand that reached for it. His wrap, fish and vegetables in a spicy sauce wrapped in a flatbread, matched half the food pedestrians were carrying. Instead of turning back to the street he’d left, he moved on, not hurrying but not loitering, either.
He’d been told, two tendays ago, that down here was “Malines’ place,” a rough quarter to stay away from if he didn’t want trouble. He’d walked down that other street once, straight to the end, briskly, as if he had business at the docks at the end. He had in fact gone into a wholesale hardware dealer, inquiring about a possible job. Now he headed in a different direction, one block over, his electronic kit active, feeding data into his implant, and in his hand a black business folder with an ISC logo on the front. Inside were instructions from a “Region IV Maintenance Education Upgrade Center” directing him to find potential locations for training local technicians to ansible work at ISC’s standards, including the requirements by square meters, electrical service, environmental quality, and so on.
On his own, on the basis of prior trips into the city, he had decided that somewhere in the neighborhood of Malines & Company was the nearest place MacRobert could have been taken for interrogation. But which of the blocks, and which building on that block?
—
MacRobert, inert and apparently unconscious, listened to the voices discussing what would be done with him. He did not approve, but he did not show—by a flicker of eyelid or a change in heart rate, breathing, or blood pressure—that he was no longer fully under the drug they had used. He’d had just enough time to trigger his implant’s safety mode.
“Dead to the world,” said one of the voices. “The monitors say he’s still deep in.”
“He’s old,” said the other. “Takes longer. Let him be another hour, maybe two. Then the antidote’ll wake him up quick. Now, his heart might give out.”
The sound of feet moved away; a door opened and closed. MacRobert lay still. He assumed the room had surveillance, and he was probably still hooked up to whatever life signs monitor they used. He might not have the two hours—they might return in ten minutes to make sure—but for the moment, he was better off playing dead, or nearly.
Why had they grabbed him today? He assumed whoever had done it was in league with those who’d sabotaged the shuttle, but who, and why? Had someone detected Teague’s and Rafe’s intrusion into their data center? Or his own poking around in Spaceforce assignments? Or was it a general attack on the Rector and those known to be on her staff?
All would be clear later, he reminded himself; he had more to do to make his implant secure in case they probed it. He triggered the next phase of his implant’s safety mode. Certain information disappeared from his access; the top level—the first a probe would find, and what he now believed to be the implant itself—proclaimed itself a replacement module, with a date of placement a year and two tendays before. Its data tree included “Medical History: Current Treatment Plan” and informed him that he was entering Stage 2b Age-Related Dementia with memory loss, speech disinhibition with confabulation, fine motor tremor (stage one), and gross motor discoordination not affecting locomotion; that he also had early-stage cardiac insufficiency, moderate hypertension, and an enlarged prostate, being treated with a variety of medications administered once daily under supervision.
When he queried for more, he found a set of simple instructions: a morning alarm meant get up, then shower, clean his teeth, depilate his face, use deodorant, put on specified clothes in the specified order, check that all fastenings were fastened, to the kitchen, eat breakfast, take the medications he was offered, go to the car, and get in. He could access graphics that walked him to and from approved nearby stores and guided him to appropriate selections inside, then to checkout. In case he wandered, he had access to graphics that would guide him back to Grace’s city residence or automatically call for medical aid if he fell.
The door opened. He lay still. “No change. I told you—it’ll be another couple of hours.”
“Have you made the call?”
“Not yet. She’s in a meeting: no messages.”
So they were going to use him as a hostage against Grace? Good luck with that. He wanted to chuckle at the thought, but knew better. He was old, sick, senile, and helpless under the drug’s control. He felt a sting on the side of his neck, but did not react. A dull scraping, as the probe tried for the emergency implant port, the one that would let them download without damaging his brain.
A flood of curse words, some he’d never heard before but knew by the tone were curses.
“What?”
“It’s a replacement. He must’ve failed a psych eval at his annual physical last year. They pulled his implant and put in a medical message: diagnosis, treatment plan, medications. Next layer’s all the kind of thing these people need. Step by step through the day, help getting to a store, finding what to buy, and so on.”
“How can he be that bad? Why’s he not in care?”
“Rector, probably. She likes him. Maybe she doesn’t mind sleeping with a half-wit; she’s old herself.”
They laughed. MacRobert thought of killing each one slowly, but did not allow himself to move.
“So he’s no use to us? Interrogation won’t work on him?”
“It might. Or he might remember his childhood, his mummy kissing him good night, and nothing since he was five. And he’s of use to us because the Rector cares about him, has kept him with her for a year since he failed the psych eval. That’s our lever. We keep him alive and healthy—well, healthy enough—and see if she’ll cooperate. If not—the ocean is deep.”
“The ocean is deep, and the fish are hungry,” said the other, as if it was a ritual. It probably was. Footsteps moved away; the door opened and closed again.
Two hours to wait. Maybe. Maybe longer. Maybe they’d decide to dose him again, or maybe they’d let him wake up and try questioning him, seeing if he was really impaired. He felt impaired, with the main data banks of his implant closed to him. He put so much in there, and—like anyone used to an implant—didn’t bother remembering what wasn’t needed short-term. That was a daunting thought. He couldn’t now remember the name of the continent Ky was on—he remembered Ky on her last day as a cadet, and something—something important she’d done—but the rest was hazy. He knew, in a vague way, where Spaceforce Academy was, but he couldn’t remember his access code or the phone number. Maybe the Miznarii had a point about implants being a form of humodification.
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