David Weber - Torch of Freedom

Which, it probably was. Everyone in the room was very familiar with treecats and their abilities.

Van Hale continued. "It was enough for me to bring the matter to Harper's attention, and he set an inquiry into motion."

"Nothing special," said Harper. "Just the sort of routine double-check we launch any time there's anything that appears to be possibly amiss. Still, it's my fault that I forgot the matter and didn't follow up on it. And, unfortunately, the clerk who handled the inquiry didn't notify me immediately when an anomaly turned up. Instead, she just launched a routine double-check herself."

"Strip her damn hide off, when you get the chance," Jeremy growled.

"Don't think I'm not tempted. But I won't, beyond making sure she understands her mistake, because the responsibility was ultimately mine." Harper made a face. "By the time Judson reminded me of the case—which was just this morning—weeks had gone by. Allen had gotten a job as a roustabout with one of the pharmaceutical companies—they're almost always hiring, with the boom we're having—and wasn't residing in the capital any longer."

"What was the anomaly?" asked the queen.

"As I believe you know, Your Majesty—"

"We're in private, here," she reminded him just a bit tartly. "Please call me Berry."

"Ah . . . Berry. As I think you know, we scan every ex-slave immigrant's tongue marker as soon as they arrive. Partly as a security device, but mostly as a health measure. A lot of Manpower's genetic lines are subject to medical problems, some of which are severe. Many of those conditions are susceptible to preventive or ameliorative treatment. But it's often the case that the person in question isn't even aware of their medical problem. By doing the automatic scans, we give our medical services a leg up."

She nodded. "Yes, I knew that. But what was the anomaly?"

"Ronald Allen's number turned out to be a duplicate. Another immigrant named Tim Zeiger, who'd arrived a year earlier, has the same number."

Berry looked puzzled. "But . . . how is that kind of mistake possible?"

"It's not , " Jeremy said flatly. "Those bar codes are genetically programmed into the slave at fertilization, Berry, and the process used to assign them is about as close to fool-proof as human endeavors get. This isn't the kind of situation where ' mistakes ' happen."

"Then how . . ." The young queen's face, pale by nature, turned even paler. "Oh . . . my . . . God. That means Manpower had to have deliberately violated their own procedures. And the only reason they would have done that was in order to . . ."

She looked at Jeremy, seeming in that moment to be even younger than she was. "They've been penetrating the Ballroom, Jeremy."

"All too true. And Torch, now. This Ronald Allen never claimed to be a Ballroom member, nor do we have any indication that he's ever joined."

For a moment, Jeremy's expression lightened. "Mind you, it's still possible he had. For reasons I presume are obvious, it's never been the Ballroom's custom to maintain precise and readily accessible membership records."

A nervous little titter went around the table. But it was over very quickly.

"Sending in counter agents to penetrate revolutionary regimes is a tactic at least as old as the Tsarist Okhrana," Jeremy went on after a moment, "and that's because, properly done, it's as effective as hell. But, of course, there are always those little problems, as well, aren't there? Like this one."

He nodded to Harper, who worked briefly at the display controls, and a hologram sprang up in the open center of the table. It was a crude hologram, with peculiar lacunae in the imagery. Hugh recognized what he was seeing immediately. As was true of police officials most places in the modern universe—or even people whose jobs involved at least some policing functions—Harper S. Ferry and Judson Van Hale had been legally required to carry vid-recording equipment at all times and turned on whenever they were functioning in an official capacity. That was partly for the purpose of protecting suspects from possible police misconduct, but mostly because such records had proven time and again to assist the police themselves.

The crudity and sometime raggedness of this particular hologram was caused by the fact that it was a computer composite of only two vid-recorders—both of them located on the officers' shoulders, from the apparent height of the viewpoints, and both of which had been subject to violent motions during the critical last period.

Still, the record was clear enough. Whatever motives or incentives might have been driving the man named Ronald Allen, they'd been powerful enough to lead him to commit suicide, after only a moment's thought. Even though he'd only seen it second-hand, Hugh knew he'd never forget that image of Allen starring into the trees for two or three seconds, before he clenched down on his poison tooth. A man taking one last brief look at the world, before he deliberately and consciously ended his own life. Hugh wouldn't be surprised if either Harper or Judson—maybe both—would need some psychological treatment in the near future. That sort of vivid and gut-wrenching image—never mind that Harper was a hardened Ballroom killer and the man who died worked for Manpower—was exactly the sort of thing that could trigger post-traumatic stress disorder.

The final image was of a dead man's mouth, pried open with a stick to show the bar code on his tongue. There was something particularly horrifying and gruesome about the sight, and the expression of everyone sitting around the table was a bit haggard when it finally faded In fact, Berry's complexion was almost completely white when Jeremy spoke again, harshly.

"There's no way known for that kind of genetic tongue-marker to be faked cosmetically," he saidhis voice flat and hard. "Not against the kind of scanning we do, at least. There's no way to remove it that isn't both difficult and damned expensive—Manpower made sure of that, the bastards—and the thing will grow back even if you simply amputate the tongue and use regen to grow it back again. Trust me, we've already determined that both the codes in this instance are as genuine as genuine can be. Duplicates, yes; fakes, no."

"But why?" Berry asked in the tone of someone just as happy to have something to distract her drom the memory of a dead man's poison-frothed tongue. "Why bother to use a duplicated number? After all, Manpower designs the numbers in the first place. Why not just use new numbers altogether, set aside for the purpose?"

Jeremy shook his head. "The process used to assign and imprint numbers isn't all that complicated, really, Berry—not for someone who's designing complete human genotypes! Trust me, we know how it works—and from too many independent sources—to doubt that Manpower can, and does, make damned certain there aren't going to be any accidentally duplicated numbers. They've got a lot of reasons to want to be sure of that, including their own security concerns and the need tobe able to positively and absolutely identify any individual slave's specific batch in case some genetic anomaly turns up and they need to track down anyone else who may have it. Keeping the numbers straight—both before and after a slave is decanted—isn't a minor consideration, given that they produce slaves at so many different breeding sites, andthey've put a lot of effort into developing procedures to do just that.

"If they started screwing around with those procedures, they might poke a hole in them they don't want. Oh, they could set aside the occasional batch number. In fact, I think they probably do, if they need lots of them. But they'd have to set aside the entire batch each time, given their procedures, so I doubt they do it very often. If they did, the barcodes would have to 'clump,' and there'd always be the chance—probably a pretty good one, actually—that somebody might notice an association between batch mates doing suspicious things. It might not be too likely in any single agent's case, but statistics play no favorites. Sooner or later, somebody would be likely to notice the clumping—or, for that matter, just notice an age spread, or a genetic variation, or any number of little differences batch mates shouldn't have. And if that happened, then those agents would be sitting ducks. Manpower might as well have their tongues marked shoot me now."