But it left Yanni, Hicks, Jordan Warrick, Justin Warrick. And, postscript, there was also grim old Chi Prang, the head of Alpha section in the azi labs. Prang couldhave done it, at someone’s orders, or in collusion with someone, and she didn’t know the woman.
Fast computer search said Prang was one hundred thirty‑seven years old and had, yes, worked in that capacity during the first Ari’s regime and Denys’ and now Yanni’s. That was a wide range of potential allegiances. Prang had five assistants, any one of which was provisionally alpha‑licensed, which meant they had the skills, but had to have Prang’s oversight. Thatspread the search wider afield, and led, very probably, further and further from the culprit, because subordinates wouldn’t have as immediate a motive. So she was wrong about there being just five people. But the list of original suspects was still the primary list. Yanni, she was relatively sure, could have done a better job, Justin wouldn’t have done it in the first place, Jordan hadn’t had access, and that…
That left the fingerprints of the Director of ReseuneSec, Hicks, who had the rating to handle his own assistant, but who didn’t practice on a wider scale– hiscommand was beta, in the main. Very, very few alphas, and those notsocialized into the general society–specialists, technicals–they’d report their own personal problems to Hicks, but being purely technicals, they weren’t in a position, in their ivory tower, to encounter much angst. That meant Hicks wouldn’t be often in practice. A provisionally licensed, only‑occasional kind of operator wasn’t really up to finesse, unless he’d been shown how to do it, and was following a sort of recipe.
There were two styles of dealing with azi difficulties. One was the meticulous route that figured a Supervisor couldmake a mistake. You searched and researched the files until there was a theory, and a treatment. It was a very soft, very gentle method of going after the problem and fixing it–which didn’t always work at optimum, unless you were as good as Justin; but at least it didn’t generally go badly. If you weregood, you could eventually lay a finger on the specific line in the set that was causing the conflict and change it, with proper annotations on the record. That was very much Justin.
The other was the brute force method–when you wanted something and knew the basic architecture of the set, you could ignore most of the subsequent manual and go right after the primal sets, gut level. You could do that if you didn’t, ultimately, care about the result long‑term, or you could also do it if you were that good, that you couldwork at primary level in a subject, and if you had a clear vision how it could make everything subsequent settle into place.
I’m that good, she thought. She’d taken a chance with it. Was still taking a chance with it, in the sense that she now believed Rafael was clear–because she’d set his Contract very tightly, very exclusively on her, as the resolver of all conflicts, the source of all orders. She’d been brought up on the first Ari’s tapes. She’d been working with two alpha sets for years; and, being the born‑man equivalent of an alpha, what she read in the manuals resonated at gut level; and the differences between an alpha and a theta resonated that way, and, once she got into the manuals, beta level made sense–the same with gamma, zeta, and eta–each with their own constellation of needs and satisfactions. Even for a born‑man…it made sense.
Whywas the key. Whyindividuals did things, even when they had consistently negative outcomes… whypeople had to do things…she’d been asking thatquestion of the universe for years. And born‑men got the worst of it, all their lives.
Why did they have to take Maman away?
Why was Denys nice to me sometimes?
Why is Jordan what he is?
Why does Yanni bring me presents?
Who is Hicks working for?
Those were all, all important questions, and she’d fairly well gotten the answer to all but the last one–which might lie somewhere tangled with the cruel thing someone had done to Rafael.
She was very, very thankful Catlin hadn’t had to shoot Rafael, or that she herself hadn’t broken him down and not been able to fix it.
Typical of the really big problems in the azi world, the fix was actually simple, because the layers were so clean. Born‑men–born‑men were a muddled mess, as if someone had stirred a layered pudding with a knife. But when an azi was in primary conflict, his earliest, most basic self‑protective rule was, “Appeal to a Supervisor.” Second was, “The Contract is the ultimate right.” And when Rafael had been drugged‑down and wide open, she’d laid hands right on the conflict. She’d given him the Contract at the beginning, and that was all right: he’d taken it in, and immediately his reservations had attached, and he’d arranged his safe loophole. And then she’d hit him with the deep set changes, and a reiteration of the Contract, which had torn it all wide open, and set it up for healing.
He’d sleep once he’d carried out her orders to arrange the barracks. He’d work until he dropped, sleep like the dead, and wake up clear and sure of himself and with all his layers in good order.
The compulsion for a dual loyalty had to have been planted way back, from when he was a child; or it had to have been planted fairly near term by someone with the ability to plant it. Which again said Alpha Supervisor.
But say that the compulsion hadbeen there for his whole life.
Fingers flew. Base One slithered quietly across departmental lines and nabbed another azi record, this one from a very young trainee designated for ReseuneSec–another B‑28, BA‑289, to be precise, which meant there were as many as seven more B‑28’s already out there, somewhere.
It took a computer comparison to wade through that training record, proving it was identical to BR‑283’s, and a little research to determine that that particular azi, BA‑289, had been born and started on that path in 2412, before BR‑283 had proved out, so there were three others old enough to be in place somewhere, and, after 283, four more theoretically in the system, younger than 289. You didn’t start proliferating a new routine through a geneset like that until you’d proved it out…not if you were operating by the book.
Was BR‑283 the first of his kind?
Joyesse came in to ask if sera would want supper delayed.
“Ten minutes,” she said, because she was close, and she had an idea exactly what she was looking for.
And there they were. One B‑28 in ReseuneSpace, up on Beta Station. One in Novgorod, in the ReseuneSec Special Operations office. One, oh, delightful! was in ReseuneSpace on Fargone, in Ollie’s service. BR‑280, named Regis, an operations agent, had been born in 2373, and had been in service–in her predecessor’s service, no less–when she died. The first Ari’s security staff had been reassigned–scattered to the edge of space, evidently, when Giraud took over.
Oh, damned right they had scattered them. That staff, if questioned, knew things. And there was no damned reason her predecessor would have created an off‑the‑books routine in this Regis–who was in hersecurity group–unless she hadn’t trusted the security group itself. And that was too many layers to be sane, especially when the first Ari could have peeled any of that group like an onion it she had any suspicion.
No. Someone had actually infiltrated Ari’s staff. And Denys, putatively, had been the agency of her death–which Giraud had pinned on Jordan–and Yanni had shipped Jordan to Planys to avoid a trial. While the original Florian and Catlin had died, and the security detail had been shipped out, scattered to all points of Union space, not one of them left on Cyteen.