Part Nine, Chapter Six - Row Row, Fight the Power!

Soltan Gris is on the rebound. His theme music is blaring, and the camera is backpedaling while focusing on his expression of determined purpose as he strides to work, leaving his coworkers shocked at his vitality and confidence. He grabs Bawtch's cup of morning jolt right out of his hand and slurps down the leftovers, not even stopping to enjoy the look on the old clerk's face, which could almost make up for the backwash.

Gris hits the office's forgery unit in the basement, whose staff he of course has leverage on... huh. I'm suddenly imagining what Battlefield Earth would have been like if Terl had been replaced with Gris. Anyway, Gris orders his coworkers to do a very special forgery, requiring very specific paper and seals and stamps. They slave over their work for two whole hours, out of both professional pride and necessity. But "At last, sweating, sort of proud and terrified at the same time, they were blowing the waxes dry."

These are the mother of all forgeries - false documents with the forged signature of royalty itself, a crime grounds for immediate torture and execution if you're caught so much as holding such papers. And as forgeries go they're kind of useless - yes, they'd never end up in computer banks, but the documents would be checked against the Royal Issue Log as a matter of course, making discovery (and punishment) inevitable.

Of course, Gris has been using counterfeits to get other people into trouble. He goes back to his aircar and gets Ske to double-time it to Spiteos.

He was doing two hundred in the thick, midmorning traffic. "Who the Hells do you think I am?" he said crossly. "I can't drive like Heller and you know it."

Yes you can, Ske! If you can't believe in yourself, then believe in me who believes in you!


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