And then he’d do anything. Absolutely anything. Catlin would do it even faster, and not need advice and sympathy after; Florian did.
So what sort was AK‑36?
By all she’d read, he’d have been a Catlin sort. Point him at an enemy. He was setted for headquarters security, and that was what he’d been intended to be, in the purest form of his psychset.
But somebody had done something with the secondaries, and he had become, to all intents and purposes, self‑steering ever since, and they’d flung him into Supering combat betas and other alphas. Surviving. Trying to comply with his deep sets. Everybody did. Even born‑men did that, in their own chaotic way.
Ask Florian? There was a level at which she didn’t mess with her security’s working mindsets. Theory was a designer question, and she wasn’t as good yet as she would be. It was, more specifically, a Grant kind of question, if you were going to ask an alpha.
It was a Justin or a Jordan kind of question, if you were going to ask a designer.
She left, thinking about it, and she went into the security office and, in a small conference room with Florian, she called Jordan.
“It’s Ari,” she said. “Do you have a moment, ser?”
No answer, for a long time. Florian had been standing, and in the quiet and the privacy; sat down opposite her, signing, He’s there.
“Jordan? I really need to talk to you. Please answer.”
“Please? There’s a foreign word. Do I recognize that?”
“I need your help. Would you mind if I dropped by?”
“Oh, now this is familiar. ‘Would you mind?’ Try telling the truth and see if I mind!”
“Are we talking about the manual I sent you?”
“I haven’t got time for games.”
“I want your opinion, ser. I need your opinion. You’re one of the few who might know, and I urgently want to talk to you about that manual.”
“Go to hell and take my son with you.”
“That’s not very nice.”
Laughter from the other end. “Fuck you!”
Florian’s face went dangerous. She held up a hand. “Do I take it, ser, that you recognize the case?”
“What is this, a fucking test? I told you, I’m too old for games.”
“Old enough to remember what everybody else has forgotten. I thought you were. I wasn’t sure. Now I know for certain I want you in on this.”
“On what? This isn’t a modern design. This is old history. This is old history; from before I was born, let alone working.”
“You’re good. You just proved that. And I still want you on this case.”
“The hell! It’s a damned trick, and I’m not going with it!”
He broke the contact.
Florian looked at her, questioning, perhaps, whether they were about to do something.
“I can’t force his opinion out of him,” she said. “Not in any useful way. But he knewwhat he was looking at. It made him mad that I didn’t tell him who it was.”
“Many things make Jordan mad,” Florian said. “He’s not that much like Justin, is he?”
It was a good question. She knew things that could make Justin mad. She’d done some of them. But the one that would Get him, above all else, was something happening to Grant; and the one that would Get him, just him, personally–
–if he were in Jordan’s place–
He’d know he’d put his companion in a hell of a place with his actions opposing Ari, that was one; and he’d be damned upset in his career if he was on the outs with Ari.
It was an interesting thought, too, what Jordan would have been, if he’d been lovers with the first Ari long‑term. But that had gone very, very wrong–not because Jordan hadn’t ever loved Ari, she was fairly sure of that, and not because Ari hadn’t likely loved him. What Jordan wanted was being partners with her, learning things, doing things, having that. It wouldn’t have mattered, if he were Justin, whose name was on a published paper; or whether he got official credit; but it had mattered very, very much to Jordan, because–
Switch personae dramatis again–because Jordan was driven, all his life, to be number one, the best, the one who ran things–
And he wasn’t the best. In his view, Ari had turned on him. But she’d seen a danger in him. Seen how thoroughly one hell of a sex drive overlying a god‑complex had blinded what otherwise really was a great mind…
She’d fixed it in the next generation, hadn’t she?
This is it. This is all there is. This is all there’ll ever be.
All there is.
He’d been seventeen, Justin had, and that had to have hurt, because Jordan had always taught him not to trust Ari; but Justin’s own ambition to be the best had driven him to Ari; and afterward–
Afterward he’d had that mantra echoing in his skull, and Grant was the one he could trust, forever after, the way Jordan trusted Paul. Justin had come, finally, to a point he could like her. Just– likeher; and that was a long, long way for that mindset to come.
She’d met Justin on the same territory, hadn’t she? She’d been half afraid of him. And then targeted him for her first adult conquest. And shied off again, bluff called. He’d been scared of her. Grant had been willing to fling himself between. But that had been a dose of ice water, and she’d thought about it later and thought–thank God they hadn’t. Wouldn’t that have made a mess of things?
Liking was good enough.
Jordan hadn’t been that lucky. Neither had the first Ari.
I’ve found two of your mistakes, she thought, addressing Ari. One was ever sleeping with Jordan; the other was letting Giraud run and never just having the fight it would have taken and looking into his competency to do what he was certified to do.
You knew about Denys, didn’t you? Knew damned well he was a genius, and knew Giraud was almostbright enough to handle things. Giraud really wasan Alpha Supervisor. He just wasn’t the best one on the planet. When an alpha gets messed up, it’s a question of who canunwind the tangle he can make of his sets, and that’s probably just very, very few, even among those with the license, isn’t it? It’s hard for me to judge–because I’m good; it was probably hard for you to judge. I wonder how often you ever ran into Kyle, or if you ever looked twice at him.
She looked at Florian, pocketed the com, reached across the table, and laid her hand on his, a little calm‑down.
“I’m not worried about Jordan,” she said. “I’ll Get him. I’ll Get him and not lose Justin in the process. They’ve had a fight about something. But we’ll fix it.”
“We’re worried about Defense,” Florian said somberly. “Sera, we don’t have resources there.”
“We don’t,” she said, “but we’re smarter.”
“They have weapons andnumbers.”
Here and now, Florian meant. Here and now didn’t always figure when she set her thoughts ranging; but trust Florian to pull her back to the real world. Defense, she thought, was her enemy and consequently all Reseune was in danger. Defense was, in the terms of their childhood game, the Enemy, and Vladislaw Khalid…was its modern face.
What have they got? was one thing to ask.