Regenesis (21 page)

That move was underway, via their access to specialized housekeeping over in Admin, which was intended, perhaps, for Ari’s own use. They used it. And it had made Justin Warrick a special problem, Justin and Grant constituting a pair that were supposed to be free to come and go as they chose, but who also had to be protected against certain decidedly unsafe contacts…notably, henceforward, Jordan Warrick. Jordan Warrick was number one on the watch-it list, until sera countermanded that, and by what they heard tonight, they were right. Right now Jordan Warrick was in the same category with a handful of azi who had worked closely with Denys and Giraud Nye, and who ought
not
to be admitted to the administrative wings.

Jordan Warrick did come and go as he pleased, inside Admin and Education, and was only restricted in Library and completely barred from Wing One—a situation which greatly offended him. Justin thought he’d go straight over to Yanni in the morning, complaining, and that would be a disturbance, perhaps provoking an Intervention from Yanni. So things that had happened tonight might grow more complicated in the morning.

They would have to brief sera, once she waked—about the late supper, the meeting, and their preemptive action, and it seemed at least likely she would approve. Sera had previously discussed moving Justin out of convenient range of Jordan. The office Justin and Grant used, previously Jordan’s, had never been outstandingly secure: the staff lacked adequate clearance for reasons of inadequate security training—that situation, exposing Justin to hazard, had never been to their liking, and now they had found an excuse to solve the problem. Catlin personally hoped they had solved it in some lasting fashion. And personally hoped, too, that they could manage something to be rid of Jordan Warrick, even if sera had brought him here.

Florian arrived back in the wing: Catlin noted the flash of ID on the readout as the outer door opened and shut. She sat and waited, checking the monitors. So was a ReseuneSec squad down in Main Security watching, on nightshirt. Hicks’s eyes were technically on the job, but Hicks himself would be abed, his second-in-command Kyle AK probably on duty—and, being azi, Kyle AK would theoretically be accounting for his decisions to Hicks in the morning. Which would give them time, if sera slept late, to inform sera before their actions began to racket through several systems.

Second flash from the console. Florian had deactivated and reactivated the alarm within System as he entered the apartment.

Soft footsteps outside. Florian arrived in the security office doorway, came in, and disposed himself in a chair, booted feet propped luxuriantly in the neighboring seat. He held up a small card between two fingers.

“What is it?” Catlin had seen the handoff—both handoffs.

“A business card. A contact number in Novgorod.” He spun around in the chair, touched a few buttons, put the card in the visual scanner…not the reader, sensible caution, for a card with a reader strip. He looked at the screen, punched more buttons, and retrieved the card. “A professor in Novgorod University. And the card wasn’t printed on any Reseune printer.”

“An educator. Jordan works education tape.”

“We’ll investigate the number on the card—I’m sure Jordan wants us to. Or wants Hicks to. Maybe Jordan’s trying to lead the investigation astray or get someone else in trouble.”

A Novgorod address, from the hand of a man who had no recent contacts outside Planys and Reseune.

Justin, too, had not quite promptly turned it over to sera’s security. But there was that connection to Jordan, a born-man connection, emotional, and difficult to parse. Catlin afforded him a little latitude for that, but not too much.

“We aren’t likely to understand this,” Catlin said. “It seems unreasonable on Jordan’s part. It seems unlikely for him to have such a thing, unless he received it from someone in Reseune.”

“It seems we’ve moved Justin none too soon. Jordan’s action toward Justin seems to be an aggression.”

“Justin knew he was watched. But so did Jordan. Did Justin forget the card when he met you, do you think, or did it take him a moment to make up his mind?”

“Surrendering it would betray Jordan,” Florian said. “That may have taken a moment for him to decide.”

“But Justin knew he was watched. He knew in advance he would be stopped.”

“He could guess he would be stopped, and the end would be the same, whether he turned it over to me, or whether ReseuneSec asked for it. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking of that yet. He’d just argued with Jordan.”

“Perhaps Jordan wanted him to be stopped, to make him angry with Admin.”

“Possible.”

“Neither of them is stupid,” Catlin said.

“The same geneset. One won’t easily get the better of the other. But Jordan has lost something tonight. Justin won’t be in his reach. He won’t like that. I wonder if this card is worth it.”

“How did Justin seem?”

“You heard the exchange.”

“I didn’t see Justin’s face.”

“He expressed distress at disturbance to his work—which I’m sure he knows is being copied. He showed no particular reluctance to be separated from Jordan. He had warned Grant to avoid being alone with Jordan.”

“I heard that part. He thought there was a physical danger. To Grant, did he mean, or to him?”

“To Grant, likely. But anything that would harm Grant would harm him. They’re partners.”

“No choice but get them out tonight,” she said with a shake of her head. “Well that we did it. Can Section Three handle the transfer top to bottom? Will they bring it over in time, or do we have to go through Hicks’s office?”

“They indicate yes, they will. I put it through as an emergency. I think that’s accurate. They’ll tell Hicks in the morning, likely. Hicks will get the copies they make in Justin’s office. I’m not happy about Hicks’s access, but the alternative is much worse. Meanwhile we need to put through Justin’s address change. Inside sera’s wing he won’t be having his files copied again.”

“Easily done.” She spun her chair about, her fingers flew for a moment, and she sent, registering Justin Warrick’s new office address with Yanni’s office and incidentally with ReseuneSec.

That handled details that might have inconvenienced Justin in the morning—just to keep him calm in the transfer. For Jordan Warrick’s imminent inconvenience, or state of mind in the morning, she had no great concern at all.

One thing did worn her. “Sera’s papers are in that safe.”

“Not now.” Florian said. “Marco took them before Section Three could arrive. They’ll be in the office sera uses.”

They trusted no one completely, she and Florian…and that, on certain levels, meant they
didn’t
trust Hicks’s office, or Yanni’s, to run things, or to hold information that might bear on Ari’s security. Their predecessors had failed, by all outside accounts, and died—deservedly so, because they had let their Ari die, and let Denys Nye take over Reseune. They took that event as a personal failure, a fault committed by their genesets, and they were absolutely determined to better the record in their tenure. They were not about to lose
their
Ari to Jordan Warrick—if it had been Jordan that murdered Ari One, as the public records officially said had happened…though that certainly wasn’t the whole story, and sera agreed they had had every reason to blame Denys Nye’s staff for the crime.

It didn’t matter. Denys Nye and his personal guard were dead and past. They guarded against Jordan, knowing he
could
have killed the first Ari—that he had wanted to kill her, that was the salient point. They didn’t altogether understand Jordan Warrick: his actions sat deep in a very complex CIT psychology, a man so brilliant he was a Special, all but immune to the law. Sera said the long exile had made him angry, and the focus of that anger might be her existence, which had defined the term of his exile.

For their part, not understanding the man simply meant being on their guard against him. And they constantly were.

They didn’t understand Justin Warrick, either, though they knew him better—knew, for instance, that Justin Warrick had initially welcomed his father back to Reseune, and had disagreements with him. Justin himself had not been the one to apply for Jordan’s release from detention. It had been, in fact, sera herself who had brought Jordan back from exile, which brought a very dangerous man back into a place where he could be more dangerous, in their estimation. But sera had moved fast to get Jordan out of military reach, and out of the reach of any dissident attempt to contact him. There was a leak in Planys: they knew that. A leak could turn into an access for all sorts of mischief, from assassination to rescue: sera had been right.

But letting Jordan stay in Reseune now that things were tranquil had taken turns into CIT politics: a decision on sera’s part, possibly to avoid upsetting Justin.

Just wait, Ari had said, in discussing the matter. He’s not Justin. It’s the same geneset, but the first Ari changed Justin’s psychset. Jordan hated her for that.

Jordan had hated the first Ari well before she’d taken Justin. That was true, too. Jordan had briefly been the first Ari’s working partner, sharing ideas, sharing power.

Except, sera had said further, that neither of those two was of a nature to share anything. So the partnership had dissolved into a feud—more bitter on Jordan’s side than on Ari’s, in terms of overt anger, sera said; but not in terms of who had gotten in the first strike. The first Ari had converted Justin to her own design, appropriated Grant along with him.

Jordan wanted Justin and Grant back—two assets their own Ari very much wanted for herself.

That implied that there would inevitably be trouble in that quarter. And their Ari had chosen to live right beside Justin—kept him in her wing, all except his office staff, which he had clung to, and that was the reason Justin maintained his office over in Education.

Well, as of now, sera’s wing had Justin’s office, too, and the staff was gone. Now there was no actual reason for Justin ever to leave her highly secure perimeter and cross Jordan’s path…unless Justin chose to do that, which would be many fewer opportunities, and ones they could watch.

First on the list, they had to be sure Justin was comfortable in his new office, to keep him and sera happy.

And they could expect that Jordan was going to be furious when he found out in the morning that that office was shut and empty—and it could be all his, for what they cared. They had even left a request for Hicks to officially allow Jordan possession of that office, with staff, if he asked, a request it was likely for several reasons might go through. They smoothed things over, not willing to provoke the man by their own action: sera might not approve that.

Catlin keyed a screen up, saw Jordan and Paul standing in the living room of their apartment, Jordan with a drink in hand. There would be a record of that conversation. She could scan it visually faster than she could listen to it.

“
They’ve gotten to him
,” was the only thing that truly leapt out of the current transcript. She took the reference as applying to Justin, and understood “they” to mean sera and her whole apparatus.

It was true. There was also nothing Jordan could do about it.

There was no reference to the card with the Novgorod number. Florian had set the card on the console and looked at the screen.

“Patil,” he said. “Dr. Sandur Patil, University at Novgorod.”

Catlin focused in on that. Sharply. “One of Yanni’s meetings in Novgorod-was with that person. Sera has a list. I have Patil’s CIT number. I asked System for a bio.”

“Call it.”

She located the file.

Professor of Science, but under the Defense Bureau’s Secrecy Act. Lecturer in the Franklin Series, whatever that was. Expert in nanistics, and Catlin did know about that. It meant micro tags, stable and self-mutating nanostructures. It meant a whole class of contraband for customs, and it was a bioweapon, besides its commercial uses in medicine and manufacture, which she had never looked up, but she sent out a search.

“Nanistics. I’m calling up references.”

Florian copied her screen to his console.

Nanistics, the information came back, was a course of study not banned from theoretical research or commercial use on Cyteen’s surface and on Cyteen Alpha Station, but all actual experimental work was done out at Beta Station, at the deep end of the solar system. There was a lab at Beta serving both Defense and Science. The science was used on Cyteen, in Reseune, mostly in medical or agricultural research, or in the manufacture of carefully selected exotics, particularly in replication of Earth or Pell goods.

And a cross-search with Patil involved university offerings, lectures, Paxer and Abolitionist attendance. Nanistics and Patil had been a major part of the terraforming project, now canceled: the Preservation Act had excluded certain types of bionanistics from Cyteen surface. Bionanistics and Patil wound through the list.

The inquiry rapidly developed side branches. A lot of them.

Right now the words of interest were clearly nanistics, Patil, Planys, and Warrick, any two of those words in association, and that search had produced one other warning flag:

More information is available from 1381 sources requiring higher base. 142382 sources are in Library behind gateway access. Proceed? Y/N…

Base One, sera’s base, could cross that threshold. It warned when it was about to go somewhere securitied, and it didn’t leave footprints in System. But it would draw a lot of securitied information into their office, and that was worth a little hesitation.

No, Catlin decided. But: “Interesting,” Catlin said. “Patil is someone Yanni was talking to. He told sera they were going to terraform a world called Eversnow, and it’s not public knowledge. He was talking to Dr. Patil.”

And Florian asked: “How did
Jordan
know Yanni was meeting with her?”

A
PRIL
26, 2424
0500
H

Giraud and his two companions grew fast this week.