And, still in flux‑state, back to Yanni’s file, as large as Denys’, in Base One.
Was there a connection? Did one temporary authority equal the other? Was Yanni on the level with her?
Denys might have killed her predecessor, and then made it look as if Jordan had done it, so Jordan was exiled for it. Or at least–Giraud had dug up the evidence. Giraud had hated the Warricks with a passion.
But it had been Yanni who had actually brokered the Family deal that got Jordan into Planys, close and protected. There was a lot more security at Planys for several reasons–the military base, the isolation of oceans you couldn’t even fly across without decon; the fact that Planys worked on a lot of military projects and every communication that went out of there went through security. If they’d sent Jordan to space for exile, there’d have been ship‑calls, people coming and going. Not at Planys.
So it was both a closer arrest, and a safer one–nobody was going to assassinate Jordan inside PlanysLabs, where visitors were so closely tracked. Giraud had been perfectly capable of arranging an accident, wherever else Jordan might have ended up, inside some Reseune facility. Yanni had saved Jordan from that.
Giraud had had power, a great deal of power just after the first Ari had died. And he had used it. A lot. So you could say he’d benefitted from Ari dying, and that was a motive. You could almost suspect him of killing the first Ari.
But in all his communications and even messages to Denys, he’d really been upset by Ari’s death. He’d seemed to view it as a tremendous loss to Reseune–worse, a premature one, before they’d gotten the psychogenesis project really organized. They’d taken a whole year getting her started. So for one reason or another, they really hadn’t been ready.
And once she’d started looking and sounding like her predecessor, Giraud had warmed up to her, and started doing her favors in a very fond way. She hadn’t wanted to like him. But she’d ended up liking him, and still did, even knowing what he’d done to the Warricks.
The hour the first Ari had died, she’d arranged for the first Florian and the first Catlin not to be with her–she’d sent Florian and Catlin each off on an errand. She’d been alone, then. Jordan had come in. The sniffer at least proved that. Jordan admitted they’d had an argument, which no monitor had picked up–again, some device had broken, and nobody knew how. She’d died. But the crime scene had been muddled up because Denys argued they should call in the Moreyville police, not to have it investigated only by ReseuneSec, so as not to have any political accusations of a coverup. And in that process there’d been a lot of people going in and out, which they never should have been allowed to do, that was Yanni’s note on the case. The sniffers’ evidence was muddled for the same reason there were fingerprints all over–a lot of people used that lab, and a lot of people had been in and out in the immediate furor over Ari’s death before the Moreyville investigators ever got there.
Should she take that at face value, as just the confusion of a bad, bad moment in Reseune’s history? Maybe. The authority that ran everything had died, and for an hour or so nobody had been running things. Departments were all running at their own admin levels, no coordination, nobody to call or appeal to, until Giraud and Yanni had stepped in.
And Ari sending Florian and Catlin away…had she known she’d never see them again? Had she known she was killing them? Had she kept that cold a face and not given anything away to them, who’d have read her the way her Florian and her Catlin could read her? Some people thought the first Ari had killed herself. But she didn’t know how the first Ari could have ever gotten that intention past her Florian and Catlin, if they were anything like hers.
She scanned Ari’s notes from immediately before she died. She had, a hundred times. She searched administrative comments on Jordan, and bastard was about the sum of comments from Giraud and no few others, plus a note that Jordan had found out about Ari having run an intervention on Justin, and that Jordan was madder than hell.
But Ari’s records stopped with the lab notes, right at the end of a sentence. Period. Was it significant that Ari had finished her last sentence? She would finish a sentence, herself, even if somebody came in while she was writing. It was just the way she was.
Base One had apparently shut down the instant Ari’s death was logged. Base One had gone into an entirely different mode, truncated its wide information‑gathering to a single, computer‑driven thread, all but shut down–for so many years some people must haw thought Denys’s base in the house system had actually become Base One, even if it called itself Base Two. But Denys had known better. Denys had gotten her to log onto Base One when she was old enough. And maybe he’d hoped he could get his own access on it. But it hadn’t done a lot when Denys was there.
And then Base One had said, Hello, Ari. In her predecessor’s voice. In her room. She’d gained her secret friend. Her childhood advisor. Denys had been aware she used Base One to a certain extent, after that, but his Base continued as the dominantly active one in System. Maybe he knew Base One would be pegged to her age, and that she wouldn’t be able to use it until she was the right age. But Base One had always treated her as two years older than she really was.
Denys had been safe until she’d gotten the keys to open Base One wide and set it back to work at full stretch, as it had been in the first Ari’s day, assembling and collating all the log notes from the years it had been asleep–and it suddenly took priority.
She sped through the mundane records. Being prime in System, nearly identical with System, Base One left no footprints where it went. She’d asked it to bring up remarks in which she or her predecessor or Maman had figured. It found those. And later, it found Justin’s.
She felt abraded, rubbed raw, when she read Denys’s message to Giraud, saying, “Strassen spoiled the little bitch. Systematically.”
Her eyes stung. She backed off, mentally, and just scanned it–she could read very, very last–and picked out keywords that were highlighted in colors. She got vocal records and listened to tone of voice, reserving judgement. It didn’t come out better for Denys or Giraud. She heard Abban’s remarks, that cold, distinct voice that sent chills through her. Abban had been near the labs when Ari died.
But Abban had been Giraud’s bodyguard in those years, before Giraud died and Abban joined Seely in Denys’ household.
Curious. Companion azi went in ones. Bodyguards went in twos. And neither Abban nor Seely had been companion azi, not if you really knew them. They’d been like Florian and Catlin, products of the training down in Green Barracks, and deadly dangerous. Giraud had been born, and seven years later, Denys had been born, and Abban and Seely had been in the household with Giraud. When Giraud was sixteen and making his first trip to Novgorod with his mother, leaving nine‑year‑old Denys at Reseune. Abban had gone with Giraud, and Seely had stayed with Denys. Which was the way it had been, forever after, when they set up separate domiciles. That was the way it had been until Giraud died.
Had it started out a partnership, Abban with Seely? It wasn’t in the manuals, which had been maintained by Giraud’s mother, for starters. It would have been Giraud’s mother who had failed to record that small detaiclass="underline" she was the expert that had run them, at the start.
A weird arrangement between the brothers–seven years separated in birth, but so, so close lifelong that they were part of each other and neither ever married or had a relationship…and a mother who didn’t keep complete records of azi under her management, who had, possibly, a secret few pages to those manuals that she didn’t enter into the record. For what logical reason?
Some furtive sense of protection of her boys, a layer of security’ that would always tie them together?
To judge by the rest of the world, Reseune had some real odd family connections, things that weren’t ordinary. For one thing, people who ran birthlabs could do pretty much as they pleased–Jordan wanted a Parental Replicate, and the first Ari had encouraged it, and so there was Justin. Ari wanted a tag on Justin, so she created Grant–especially for Justin, and one of a kind.