"It wasn't fair of me. I thought I was saving you having to run back here. I didn't intend to go farther than Justin's apartment. Then it seemed safe. I think it was."

"It scared us." Florian said. Very few things did, but she saw that that was very much the truth.

"The first Ari made that mistake," she said. "I've asked too much, sent you this way and that, asked you and Catlin to do more than you ever ought to have to. I won't send you apart from me again."

"We're not tired," Florian said. He didn't lie often. He didn't do it particularly well, no more than Justin ever did.

"I love you," she said, and hugged his shoulder, which was solid and sure as he was. She rested her head against it for a moment. He put his hand on her head, and stood there.

A long, long time. Until she grew tired of standing.

Chapter xix.

August 24, 2424 1421 H.

" & we will continue to support the Council as elected by the people of Union, and we will continue to provide for family and relatives of the Council who have appealed to us for a safe haven, this in the wake of the murder of one elected Councillor and threats against families of living ones. Two Councillors are with us at Reseune.

"We support the people of Novgorod in resisting the threats of those elements who create civil unrest and we call on them to use their creative energy to sustain the city and its services. Those of you who hold public service jobs, count them of extreme importance and consider your duty critical to the safety of all citizens. Those of you who have sworn or Contracted to defend Union, support the Council in its determination to uphold the law.

"The Council has designated a date for a.s.sembly and will act. We call on all citizens and azi to support the Council in the face of bullying and threat of bodily harm. We call on the loyal armed services of Union to support the Council and to refuse unlawful orders. We call on every citizen to doc.u.ment every act of intimidation, every unlawful demand on the rights of the public, with numbers and vid records where you can secure them safely. These unlawful acts will come to trial and the people of Novgorod will have their day in court.

"Long live the Union."

The little minx, Yanni thought, and shut down the vid. She was that. She'd just appealed to Khalid's own Bureau. She hadn't told the whens and wheres of the Council plan, just that Reseune sheltered two Councillors' families, a Councillor and a Proxy Councillor & she didn't mention that one of the two was herself.

And if Khalid didn't currently know where Edgerton was, any more than they did, she'd just clouded the issue & and maybe thrown off that search.

"Sounded good to me," Frank said.

They sat in a hotel they now shared with Corain, Amy Carnath, and Quentin. They knew d.a.m.ned well the plainclothes watchers across the street weren't civilian police, and the hotel employees were down to a few "Go home," Yanni had told the manager, personally. "Dismiss your staff. Those who stay to maintain the systems will get triple pay: Reseune will see to it if I survive to get back to my office. Those who stay on duty, the same. But it's no longer safe. Go home."

Seven of the staff, including the manager and a.s.sistant manager, the head custodian, two of his people, one sous-chef, and the head of housekeeping, had stayed on, and they kept things running & making them more comfortable than they might have been.

Sit still, and wait. That was what they had to do right now. ReseuneSec had a handful of plainclothes agents throughout the city that made quiet visits to watched areas, and that made tight transmission to receivers here and there, data-squeal that made it quick and thorough. The latter was Frank's expertise more than his. He didn't set it up or critique it: he just knew how to receive it.

And one message had come in which in no way heartened him.

It said, Trying to make contact with Lynch. Not answering last two days. Will continue effort pending outcome of other inquiry. M.

State, Defense, and the city government had police powers, and so, by a trick of history, did Reseune Administrative Territory and its adjunct at Planys. Reseune, with its ability to police azi welfare in every factory and office in Union, had an investigative and enforcement organization in some respects as extensive as that of Defense and the city government.

And Reseune used it & not the way Defense did, with obvious intimidation standing on the curb out there in the rain, no. With a little more finesse, Yanni hoped. Finesse might never have been his strong suit inside Reseune, but out here, with armed Fleet agents with drawn guns scaring h.e.l.l out of the sous-chef when he took a look into the alley, he tried not to offend the people they hoped to contact. He sent quiet queries to certain Defense contacts in other services, and hoped for answerslike the removal of surveillance from his curb.

He didn't reply to the message from M. He just absorbed it and every other tidbit of information that came wafting in. He had dinner scheduled with young Amy, her Quentin, Frank, and Mikhail Corain. They maintained at least some of the comforts of home.

And deFranco had made it safely to Reseune. Chavez and his family were somewhere en route, granted he'd gotten through to the airport. Tien would go there next, solo: his family were safe on remote Viking. Harad, State, commanding another security apparatus, independent of Defense, would be the next to last to leave the capital.

He had the short straw. His people were armed and spread throughout the cityin plain clothes. He hoped to h.e.l.l the agents that had seared the chef had been vastly exceeding their orders. But they were prepared to fight their way to the airport if they had to.

Chapter xx.

August 27, 2424 1430 H.

Hicks had had a heavy dose of trankhe wasn't happy that the Warricks, father and son, with Grant and Paul, were involved in Kyle's case at all; but he was a little glazed, and sat having a little fruit juice during prep, eyeing them all the while with distrust. Chi Prang was there, with her a.s.sistant. Ivanov took the medical end of things, with two psych nurses, a cardiovascular surgeon and her two surgical nurses on call. Supportive machinery was in the roomit was Ivanov's suggestion, and Ari took the advice, even if it crowded the immediate area.

The Admin clinic couldn't remotely handle an operation of this complexity, so they set up in the hospital's A wing, a real surgery, with specialized monitors brought up from the psych labs, plus the other options, if that was what it took. It had needed two days to set it up.

Today finally involved Hicks. And the rest of them. And the monitors. And Kyle.

Kyle, for his peace of mind, didn't know a thing about ithe arrived tranked out, though he seemed robust enough, once the monitors started telling what they knew. they lit up, one miniaturized bank alter another.

"We're being careful.'' Ari said to Hicks, who looked increasingly anxious as the moments went on and the monitors came up. "You'll be right by him when he starts to wake up. Just keep him calmyou can touch him, but only say, 'I'm here.' Say your name and say, 'I'm here." Nothing else outside the script."

"I understand you," Hicks said. He was, at the moment, scared as all h.e.l.l, determined not to get thrown out of the operation, Ari thought. But that wouldn't happen. That would be the worst thing for Kyle AK: if they lost Hicks' active partic.i.p.ation, they might lose Kyle, or lose him, mentally for good and all. If Hicks folded, they'd have to put Kyle back under, fast.

She went over to the rest of her group, who were going through the procedures book and script, a physical printout, with notes. Florian and Catlin attended her and kept to the background; Mark and Gerry were there with Justin and Grantthey weren't short of security if they encountered a problem, but at the moment security meant four more bodies in not much s.p.a.ce for the operators, just behind the heart-lung apparatus.

Jordan was team leader: Jordan and Prang had worked together before, Jordan had said they were the two who'd actually done this kind of intervention once and a long time ago, and he bluntly wanted to be in charge. There wasn't to be any freehand, just carefully planned branches: if Kyle did this, then that; if Kyle branched in another direction, .something else. All possible paths were mapped, all with more care than any operation Ari had ever read; Prang had come into the conferences, and she and Jordan had laid down the increasingly complex map. with Ari's partic.i.p.ation and Justin's, and they'd done it in three marathon meetingsfascinating, under any other circ.u.mstances. Fascinating, too, when Jordan was on business, talking about this branch and the other, and what the trigger might be. He was fast in his decisions, and focused only on the problem. The one point where he and Prang differed was about where the block actually sat, and exactly where a not-very-adept military operator had put in something and just told Kyle to protect it.

"Here," Jordan had said, and pointed to the same area Grant had indicated, down in the secondariesbut then he'd linked it to a second item. Kyle had programming from back in the first days of the azi partic.i.p.ation in the Wara routine about defending what his Contract-holder set him to defend. That was fine, Ari thought, but to an alpha that defend went metaphysical real fast, and they didn't do that kind of thing: that had stood out, to her eyes. She found that kind of generality in the programming at four other points she could see. things they didn't do with alphas or even betas nowadays, because things had gone wrong. She had those circled on her own copy, and Justin and Grant both had tagged them as inappropriate from the start. Old-style programming. Old as the azi in question.

Kyle being, himself an Alpha Supervisor by the military's make-do procedures of the day, had considerably reworked his own programming by the time Defense sent him back to Reseune as a spy & that clearly had happened.

Prang had said, regarding the initials on the file: "IC. Carnath, maybe."

"Huh," Jordan snorted. "That's Charles. Ivan Charles, not Carnath."

"Him," Prang had said, and when Ari asked who Ivan Charles was. Prang said simply: "He worked on the military sets."

But Jordan had said: "Emory Senior used to take his c.r.a.ppy work and just shove it through. It made money. they were turning out azi by the hundreds, same type, same geneset. You could have a whole d.a.m.n company the officers couldn't tell apart, no attempt to do a sociology set on the unit, you just shoved them out the door and they went out to some G.o.dforsaken operation and died by the hundreds; and then they'd patch up the survivors out there on the lines and send them back to the War. Emory Senior had some d.a.m.ned idiot staff writing broad-based tape back during the War. Defense wanted to control everything, every d.a.m.ned subclause and dot, a routine to do this, a routine to do thatthe client wanted certain things, they got them."

Ari had been a little offended at that a.s.sessment. Then she realized Emory Senior, in that context, meant Olga Emory.

Way, way back, then.

"Certificates weren't specific either," Prang had said. "The higher-end operators handled both the betas and the alphas, and there wasn't any certification in the sense we use now."

"We're not teaching a d.a.m.ned history lesson," Jordan had said. "Kyle's alpha. He got a c.r.a.p initial set. They all did."

"He was supposed to serve in headquarters," Prang had said, "no nearer the front than Alpha Station."

"His military record is nowhere in file and we don't know where the h.e.l.l he was," Jordan had said. "We weren't around for Olga's goings-on. We a.s.sume what we have to a.s.sume. But we're not a.s.suming when we say he's kill-capable. The axe code didn't take, did it? That means, alpha or not, he came back to us with it, and n.o.body could have installed it on him in ReseuneSec unless the axe code worked. But somebody did it. That meant he was near the lines, and my guess is he got c.r.a.p-work patched in to shape him up to work in a combat zone. Sure, Defense swore they didn't ever do that. But they swore to a lot of things that were a flat lie."

"Why," Ari had askedand she hadn't wanted to interrupt the train of thought, but it was an important question, "why, if he got back to Reseune in '62, why didn't the first Ari ever look at him? Why didn't she catch it?"

Prang had said. "I checked the timeline. Your predecessor had resigned the directorship to take up the Council seat. Yanni was taking over the Directorate. Giraud was running Security. Those two didn't see eye to eye. Giraud handled his department; and Giraud got Kyle. Ari wasn't even at Reseune when that was going on. She came back and Kyle was Giraud's ongoing pet datasource."

"Giraud was a d.a.m.ned fool," Jordan had said. "Ari had gotten Defense to turn over every alpha they had and most of them were over in technical. But this onethis special oneI'm betting he was handling azi line troops, and if he was, it's a d.a.m.n certainty he got beta tape and got shoved out there to patch them up, because they didn't ever ship betas back to some nice safe hospital ship. We never sent out any alphas suited for combat. So what else do you think they did, to get alphas that could take the hammering, on the lines? Beta tape. Next most applicable, and they had a pile of it."

It had been hours. Hours of Prang and Jordan arguing, and then Justin arguing with Jordan: "You don't have to touch the tertiary sets at all. If he's self-modified, they're irrelevant."

"What are we suggesting?" Jordan had snapped. "Go straight after the deep sets?"

"I'm saying it's linked back to that secondary you named, and at least &"

"Oh, let's just do deep sets and go for an early lunch." Justin hadn't flared. He'd said, as calm as Grant: "One sharp stress and a calm-down."

"You'll kill him. That thing in tertiary will have a trap on it like you haven't seen. And remember he's built off it for decades. It's got all sorts of embellishments hung on it."

"We do have him supported," Ivanov said.

The talk had gone way deep into medical jargon at that point, and Ari had just sat with her chin on her fist, fascinated, and listened to four of the best there'd ever been going at it line by linePrang was clearly outcla.s.sed; Grant and Paul got into it, and Justin stuck to his argument that they needed to do a preliminary fix in the secondaries.

Then she said, after listening to all of it, and flipping back through the lines of programming, the original lines of programming, that Kyle had started with: "The self-defense ethic. That's where."

Jordan had given her a sharp, hard look.

"Support it," she'd said, "don't attack it. That's part of his original deep set."

"Who said attack it?" Jordan had said peevishly.

She said: "We support the deep set, right where this beta tape's taken hold. We say an enemy's gotten inside his defenses, and we know it's beta, and he has to find this enemy for us. So he'll identify that tape and shove it outside his safe perimeter. If you're right, he's wired everything off that startso he's the safest one to unwire it. Isn't he? He trusts Hicks. If we get I licks to say he has to get ID on the beta section, can't he do it? Convince him it doesn't belong. And then we tell him to erase the intruderso he just starts taking out the secondary level, unwiring the combat ethic the block relies on. Doesn't he? Everything the military's done is going to be based on the tape they put in. They aren't us. they can't work on secondary, and the tape they know best is the tape they put in."

It had at least gotten their attention, and made a silence, and made Jordan frown at her.

"Maybe," Jordan had said. "Dangerous as h.e.l.l."

"She's got a point," Justin had said.

"She's been studying f.u.c.king Emory.''

"You know I have," she'd said calmly. "For more than half my life."

Prang had just kept her mouth shut, but Paul had said, echoing Justin, "She has a point. Avoiding fighting it out down on tertiary would be safer, because tertiary may be a lower charge, but it's just that much wider. Whatever they did creating that block just spreads out into territory he knows and we can't map. And maybe, if he can ID the tape, we've got it on file. maybe they didn't risk anything they'd written or modded and it will turn out to be Reseune tape."

Jordan hadn't said anything about it for the rest of the session, not until the next meeting, when he'd said, "All right, Ari Junior, Justin, Grant. Elaborate. How are you preventing a breakdown if we go into this operation with the happy theory they didn't write their own beta routineand maybe didn't even write their own block?"

"We ask Dr. Ivanov to keep the physiology stable," Ari said. "Just keep shooting him full of the same feel-good juice the compliance ethic, which we're triggering, naturally manufactures; and we just let Hicks argue him into erasing the beta tape."

"Too risky," Jordan had said then. "I want this man to live to talk."

"So do the rest of us," Ari had said, as gently, as reasonably as she could, even when she wanted to jerk Jordan sideways. "Honestly, Jordan."

And she said it before Justin, drawing a deep breath to argue, could say anything.

"Well, let's look at it," Jordan had said, then, in the same reasonable way, and with a dark glance at Justin, who kept his mouth shut. "How fast can Library cough up a tape, if we can ID it?"

They'd kept from each other's throats today. they got Hicks calm, and instructed: "We're going at this in a way that will protect him from stress," she'd said to I licks at the outset, "and we're not going to lose him. We have an idea what the problem is. But to make our fix work, we have to have you do it."

That had gotten Hicks' attention. He'd been angry, he'd been scared, he'd figured out she was dead serious, and he'd listened to the program.

"You can do it," she told him now, in the room with Kyle, and she laid an encouraging hand on his back. "Just go sit down by him, take his hand, tell him you're here. Ivanov will give you specific signals, and have the script on the monitor. We're here, we're all here if we have to improvise. We don't want to. But if we do, those lines will be in red, so you'll know. You're high beta. We trust you to know how to do what you need to. For his sake. That's all we're asking of you."

They drew far off from Hicks and Kyle, who lay on a white-sheeted table, under restraint for his protection and theirs. There was lighting in Kyle's area, none in the observation postjust the soft light from the vid screen and the readouts. Ivanov was right at hand with Kyle, with the same readouts, and HicksHicks sat on a tall stool and set his hand on Kyle's shoulder, talking to him, just giving him legitimate rea.s.surances, while the machines, flashing with lights, scrubbed the trank out of Kyle's bloodstream and fed in a mild dose of kat.

Kyle came awake slightly. "Weak," he complained.

"You're fine," Hicks said. "Kyle, are you hearing me all right?"

"Yes," Kyle said. "Where are we?"

"Stronger dose," Jordan said to Ivanov sharply, through his earpiece.

Ari thought she would have waited for Hicks to calm him down, but that was all right: Hicks had deviated just a hair off the permissions they'd given him, they were taking Kyle right under again, and it wasn't going to hurt him: it was just going to prevent him taking closer notice of his surroundings. He'd hear. He'd see. For the first half hour they'd just run his base sets, primer tape, from way, way back in his childhood. they had a list of what his intermediate base had been, and of what the military had had access to, therefore what they might have illicitly used. Their best guess was a conversion of beta tape from the best of the marine units, something to instill aggression into the alpha that had to be patching them up and advising them, doing the work a Reseune-trained born-man should have been doing.

They didn't dare take their guesswork for granted, not until they had their theory confirmedor not, in which case they had to abort and hope they could patch their way out.

"We found a mistake in your sets," Hicks said gently at one point, right down the script. "Kyle, you haven't felt altogether right for some time, and we've found the cause. Somebody gave you wrong tape. It's beta. It was when you were in service, on the lines. Do you remember getting tape then? I'm your Supervisor. I can ask this. Did you get tape when you were on the lines?"

Kyle's brow contracted. "Sometimes."

"They gave it more than once?"

"More than once."