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Chapter Seven
"I think you are in trouble, Little One," Tisiphone observed as Major Gateau's left leg scythed viciously for Alicia's ankles.
She levitated above its arc, and her own foot lashed out. Ta
"How about it, Sarge?" Ta
"Yes, Little One," Tisiphone asked interestedly, "how about it?"
"Oh, shut up!" Alicia snapped back, and went limp with a groan.
"Uncle," she said.
"Damn, that feels good." Gateau's grin sparkled, and she rose, then leaned forward to help Alicia to her feet.
"For one of us," Alicia muttered, massaging the small of her back cautiously. She and Ta
"Out of shape, that's your problem," the major jibed. "You used to take me three falls out of five, and now you're letting a pill-pusher throw you around the salle? Dear me, whatever would Sergeant Delacroix say?"
"Nothing. He'd just take both us uppity bitches round to the advanced class and lay us out cold."
"Ah, for the good old days!" Ta
She knew her friend had shut down her own augmentation to make their sparring even. Not, she admitted, with another groan, that Ta
She got herself fully upright and pushed her non-reg bangs out of her eyes, knowing she looked a wreck and wondering where the vid sensors were. All her military rights had been scrupulously observed, and Keita himself, as regs prescribed, had formally notified her (not without an unusual, wooden embarrassment) that she would be kept under observation at all times. She was carried on the sick list, and—technically—she wasn't a prisoner, which gave her full run of the transport, but they couldn't take a chance on her vanishing again. And, if she did, they wanted a complete readout with every instrument they had on precisely how she'd managed it.
Which was an excruciatingly polite way of saying they couldn't let her run around unwatched when they were no longer confident she could count to twenty with her shoes on.
As much as she'd expected—and, yes, worked for it— it hurt, and it had wounded more than her alone. Keita could have let Ta
Of course, he didn't know Tisiphone had run her own tests since and demonstrated that the "unbreakable" reactivation codes were as effective as so much smoke against her.
"'Nother fall, Sarge?" Gateau inquired lazily. Alicia backed away with a shudder that was only half-feigned, but the glint in those brown eyes was a great relief. She'd worried over Ta
"Between you and Pablo, I'll be back in sickbay by the time we hit Soissons. Damn it, woman! I've only been back in shape for this for a week! Give me a break, will you?"
"Which vertebra?" Ta
"Oh?" Alicia gave her a sidelong, measuring glance, then curled her lip in a vulpine smile. "Why, that's very wise of you, Major. It's two more weeks to Soissons, after all." Bared teeth glinted pearl-white at her friend. "Care for a little side bet on who's going to be kicking whose tail by the time we get there, ma'am?"
-=0=-***-=0=
Inspector Ben Belkassem sipped coffee and slid the folder of record chips aside. The ventilators sucked a rope of fragrance away from Sir Arthur's pipe, and he sniffed appreciatively, but his face was serious.
"She seems so convinced I sometimes find myself believing it," he said at last, and Keita grunted agreement. "There don't seem to be any loose ends, either. It's all internally consistent, however bizarre it sounds."
"That's what worries me," Keita admitted. "She sounds convincing because she believes it—I knew that even before she went under the verifier. There's absolutely no question in her mind, no doubts, and it's not like Alicia to accept things unquestioningly. She wouldn't, unless there really were something 'speaking to her,' so either she's truly broken down into some sort of multiple personality disorder, or else some external force has convinced her of the complete accuracy of everything she's told us."
Ben Belkassem straightened in his chair, eyebrows rising. "Are you seriously suggesting that there actually is something else, some sort of entity or puppeteer, living inside her head, Sir Arthur?"
"There's certainly an entity, even if it's a product of her own delusions." Keita busied himself relighting his pipe. "And she certainly believes it's a foreign one."
"Granted, but surely it's far more probable that she's slipped into some kind of delusionary pattern. My understanding from Major Gateau is that this high degree of internal consistency and absolute self-belief is normal in such cases, and Captain DeVries has certainly been through more than enough to produce a breakdown. I had no idea how traumatic her military service had been, but when you add that to the brutal way her family was massacred and her own wounds ..." His voice trailed off, and he shrugged.
"Um." Keita got his pipe drawing and squinted through its smoke. "How much do you know about Cadre selection criteria, Inspector?"
"Very little, other than that they're quite rigorous and demanding."
"Not surprising, I suppose. Still, you do know the Cadre is the only arm of the military whose strength is limited by Senate statute, correct?"
"Of course. And, with all due respect, it's not hard to understand why, given that the Cadre answers directly to the Emperor in his own person. Everyone knows you're a corps d'elite, but you're also the Emperor's personal liegemen, and he has enough power without giving him that big a stick."
"I won't disagree with you, Inspector." Keita chuckled around his pipe stem as Ben Belkassem's right eyebrow curved politely. "Every emperor since Terrence the First has known the Empire's stability ultimately depends on the balance of its dynamic tensions. There has to be a centralized authority, but when unchecked power becomes too concentrated in one body or clique you've got real trouble. You may survive for a generation or two, but eventually the inheritors of that concentration turn out to be incompetents or self-serving careerists—or both— and the whole system goes into the toilet. A sufficient outside threat may slow the process, but the gradual destruction is inevitable. However, I wasn't referring to concerns over praetorianism on our part. What I meant to point out is that the Imperial Cadre is limited to forty thousand perso
"No?" Ben Belkassem watched Keita over the rim of his coffee cup.
"No. Keeping us small keeps us aware of our 'elite' status, of course—you know, 'The Few, the Proud, the Cadre' sort of thing—and maintains a sort of familial relationship among us, but there are more mundane reasons. Four out of five Cadremen are drop commandos; the rest are basically their support structure, and by the time you allow for augmentation, training, combat armor, and weaponry, you could just about buy a corvette for what a drop commando costs. There are senators who suggest we ought to do just that, too. Unfortunately, you couldn't use that same corvette to take out a bunch of terrorists without killing their hostages or stage a reco