Rules of Conflict (15 page)

“Captain.” Yance nodded sharply. “I think the documents you’re
looking for may prove much more accessible than you’ve been led to believe.” He
brushed past her into the bullpen, all shined shoes and elbows.

Jani glanced at Lucien. “I don’t want to talk to the ranking.”

“They sure as hell don’t want you talking to Duong.” The first
glimmers of attention showed on his face. “Odergaard almost jumped out of his
skin when you started speaking Bandan.”

“
I did not put those there!
”

Jani hurried back into the bullpen, Lucien at her heels. She
recognized Duong’s voice, and the mounting panic she heard in it.

The bullpen residents had swarmed around Duong’s work space. Jani
shouldered through them in time to see Yance pull a thick file from a desk
drawer. Light grey parchment in a light grey folder. Old Service paper.

“What else has he got in there?” Yance craned to look around the
bulky Odergaard, who was down on his knees, pulling more files out of drawers.

“I did not put those there!” Duong rocked from one foot to the
other as though the floor scalded his soles.

One of the techs made a “slow down” motion with her hands. “Mr.
Duong, please—”

“
I did not put those there!
”

Jani thumped Yance on the shoulder. “Lieutenant, what’s going on?”

“Captain, please.” He leaned close. “He’s done this before, ma’am.
He has a problem.”

Odergaard twisted around. “I found some of the van Reuter stuff,
too.”

Jani glanced at the faces surrounding them. Some held surprise,
others, disappointment. One or two sneered. “I don’t like this,” she said to
Lucien.

He held up an open hand in an “oh well” gesture. “But it looks
like you’ve got your records back, so what difference does it make?”

“You would think that, wouldn’t you?” Jani stepped around Yance,
who was busy talking into a handcom, and planted herself between him and the
shaking Duong. “Mr. Duong?”

Duong looked up at her, eyes wide and glistening. “I did not put
those there.”

“You didn’t lock my life away in your drawer?”

“
No!
”

Jani looked into Duong’s stricken face. She had no reason to
believe him—she had known him for all of five minutes.
He’s an archivist.
Archivists had earned a well-deserved reputation for strangeness. Sometimes
they grew jealous of the documents in their charge, resented others touching
them, using them. Sam Duong could just be one of those disturbed few who had
decided that if he couldn’t have them, nobody could.

Do I believe that?
She considered the trembling figure
before her, and tried to get the sense of him. She had lived by her instincts
for eighteen years—they’d served her well. It was only when she disregarded
them that she found herself in trouble.

She touched Duong’s arm. “I believe you.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in. When they did, the
tension drained from Duong as though someone had flipped a release, and he
slumped forward.

Jani snaked her arm around him to keep him from falling. “Get this
man to the infirmary!” She eased him into the arms of two techs, who helped him
out of the room.

“You really shouldn’t have said that, Captain. It only encourages
him.” Yance ran his scanpack over one of the papers, waited for the display to
show green, then repeated the action with the next. Judging from the thickness
of the piles, he had a long night of ID confirmation ahead of him.

Jani fingered a page from her Service record.
My transfer
orders to the Twelfth Rovers.
She could almost feel Rikart Neumann’s
presence in the paper, like a layer of grime. “So he’s done this before?”

“Nothing this blatant. Misfiles that he claimed someone else must
have done.”

“What made you suspect?”

“A tip.”

“Anonymous?”

“
No
, ma’am. A very reliable source.” Yance hesitated in
mid-scan. “I don’t like this either, ma’am. But if he’s a threat to the paper,
we have to shut him down.”

Jani looked at Lucien, who responded with a shrug. “I’d like two
copies of these docs. Send one set to Major Piers Friesian, Defense Command,
this base. Send the other to me at the South Central TOQ.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Yance entered a notation in his handheld, then
returned to his scanning.

Lucien left the bullpen with the light step of a newly released
prisoner. “I didn’t know you spoke Bandan.” He slipped a finger between his
tunic collar and his neck and cursed the uniform designer responsible.

“Enough to get by.” Jani felt a twinge of self-reproach as she
recalled the excitement on Duong’s face as he conversed in his native tongue.
It was pathetic how little it took to win a person over.

She strode ahead of Lucien up the stairs and through the lobby. As
she burst through the lobby door, she barely missed colliding with a man trying
to enter. The red trouser stripe combined with the hardware blared “mainline
colonel.” She was treated to a surprised glare as he brushed past her.

Jani stood in the entry and watched him snap across the lobby and
down the stairs. Typical hard-ass brass, but he had a couple of distinctive
features. Hair the color of bronze, and a long, weathered face cut from edge of
nose to end of mouth by a deep, age-whitened scar.

The incident with Sam Duong nibbled at Jani’s tenuous calm
as she readied for her first day as a reactivated Spacer. After a
scanner-approved breakfast in her rooms, she strode the walkways to Documents
Control, adjusting the tilt of her garrison cap until it mimicked everyone
else’s. She slung her black-leather briefbag over her left shoulder, again in
imitation, and rested her arm across the top.
Everything the same as
everybody else.
Just another way to disappear into the crowd.

The morning air held a metal tang, as though it had been on the
fire too long. The hot wind desiccated everything it touched. She savored the
heat as she followed the signs and markers, finally pulling up in front of a
building that, but for the rimming of hedges, could have twinned the TOQ.

Jani trotted up the Doc Control steps as quickly as her weakened
right leg would allow. She paused in front of the doorscanner, waited for it to
read her retinas, then held her breath as the lock whirred and the door clicked
open and she entered a close-controlled building as Jani Kilian for the first
time in eighteen years. She listened to the echo of her tietops as she strode
across the tiled lobby, and wondered at the firm tone of her oh-so-Service
voice as she asked a passing lieutenant the location of the Foreign
Transactions Department.

Before she entered the anteroom leading to Lieutenant Colonel
Hals’s office, Jani dug her orders out of her briefbag and checked the date and
time against a wall clock.
Right day?
Check.
Right time?
Check.
So
where is everybody?
All of the office areas she had passed on the way had
been empty. She scanned the doorways and desktops for clues to explain the lack
of human occupation, but no scrawled note informing all that the department
meeting had been moved or that someone down the hall had brought in doughnuts
surfaced to clarify the situation.

At the sound of the half hour, she stepped up to the adjutant’s
desk, positioned just outside the colonel’s door. Lieutenant Ischi, who according
to the nameplate should have been manning same, was nowhere to be seen.

Then Jani heard sounds emerge from the inner office. Sharp rises.
Sudden falls. The cadences of argument. Either the voices were very loud, or
the office soundshielding very poor. She’d have bet her ’pack the quality of
the shielding was just fine.

She knocked on the door, and the voices cut off abruptly. One beat
later, a woman called out, “Come in.”

Jani touched the entry pad. The door swept aside to reveal two men
and one woman standing around a large goldwood desk. The woman stood on the
business side, hands braced on the edge. The men, one older, one younger, stood
opposite her. The older man looked angry. The younger looked like he wished he
were somewhere else.

“Colonel Hals?” Jani remained in the open doorway, looking from
one worn face to another. “Captain Kilian reporting, ma’am.”
What the hell
have they been doing?
Their summerweights were sweat-stained and rumpled,
their hair, matted, the older man’s face alarmingly flushed.

“Do we look that bad, Captain?” Hals asked. Her voice held tired
humor, along with the barest trace of New Indiesian singsong. She was shorter,
heavier, and lighter-skinned than Jani, her curly, dark brown hair twisted in a
tight bun. Pleasant-looking, if you ignored her heavy-lidded eyes and
fatigue-drained complexion. “Please. Come in.”

The younger man gestured toward the older. “This is Major
Vespucci, ma’am,” he said to Jani. “Our Procedural specialist.”

Vespucci nodded. He was dark-haired and fleshy, his small eyes set
in a permanent squint. It was Procedural’s job to make sure a department had
access to the latest form revisions—Vespucci had the humorless look of a man
who liked controlling the codes.

“And I’m Lieutenant Ischi,” the young man added with a smile.
“Tech wrangler and department dogsbody.” He was Eurasian, tall and trim, with
big, bright eyes and good bones.

Jani removed her orders from her briefbag and walked across the
office to hand them to Hals. “Ma’am.”

Hals accepted the documents with a small smile. “We’ll start you
off by having Lieutenant Ischi show you to your office, Captain. I’d like to
see you back here at oh-ten.” She acknowledged Jani’s “good morning, ma’am,”
with an absent nod, and resumed her conversation with Vespucci, this time at a
lower volume.

Ischi bounded out of Hals’s office, his relief at escaping evident
in his wider grin and expansive gestures. “This way, ma’am.” He led Jani down
one short hall, then another, finally pulling up in front of an unmarked door.
“I’m expecting your doorplate in this afternoon’s delivery from Office Supply.
They drop off three times a week—let me know what you need, and I’ll add it to
the next list.”

Jani stepped past him into her office, close enough to catch a
whiff of deodorant on the cusp of failure.
If an A&S-hole catches sight
or scent of you, Lieutenant, you’re a goner.
What had he and Hals and
Vespucci been up to?

The office was long and narrow. No furniture except for a desk and
couple of chairs. Inset bookcases, so at least she had shelves. A single-pane
window centered the far wall. Through the portion not blocked by tree branches,
she could see the edge of a charge lot. Pimentel was right—Sheridan did have
windows to spare.

“Sorry about the view, ma’am.”

“At least I’m not looking through bars.”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing.” Jani wandered over to her desk. The workstation,
comport, and parchment imprinter all looked like they’d just been removed from
their cartons—the workstation touchboard still bore its protective plastic
wrapping. “Has Systems initiated this yet?”

“This afternoon, ma’am.” Ischi’s grin tightened. “My apologies.”

“Hmm.” Having an uninitiated system meant she’d be spending the
morning straightening her desk. She walked to the window, looked out at her
tree, then turned back to Ischi. “Do you mind if I ask . . . ?”
She gestured toward his unkempt uniform.

The light left Ischi’s eyes. “We spent last night at the idomeni
embassy, ma’am. They keep it pretty warm in there.”

“The
whole
night?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What time did you arrive?”

“Nineteen-up, ma’am.”

Jani counted. “You spent over twelve hours there? Doing what?”

“Verifying and cataloging instruments of negotiation, ma’am.
Concerning the Lake Michigan Strip.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“You will,” Ischi replied flatly. He nodded sharply and turned to
leave. “By your leave, ma’am. I’ll nudge Systems about getting you up and
running.”

Jani watched the door close. Her door. In her old department. In a
close-controlled building. On a Service base.
And everyone’s fighting, they
look hot and confused, and the idomeni have them back on their heels.
Almost two decades and six GateWays removed . . . and nothing
had changed a bit.

“Come in, Captain. Have a seat.”

Jani walked slowly across Hals’s office to disguise her residual
limp, and lowered into the visitor’s chair.

Across the desk, Hals continued to page through her ServRec. She
had showered and changed her uniform. The ends of her bound hair were tightly
curled from damp, the creases of her short-sleeve sharp enough to cut parchment.

Jani tensed each time the woman’s gaze was arrested, then raked
her memory to recall which item could have claimed her attention. The
SIB-decimated file held little useful information. Jani’s Rauta Shèràa job
history. Her specs. Her education and training. She knew it didn’t contain what
Hals no doubt most wanted to know.