When the Devil Dances

by John Ringo

  "Yeah," Mosovich replied. "Sheep."

  Mueller knew what he meant. The people of the Sub-Urbs were giving them the sort of look sheep gave sheepdogs. They knew that the dog wouldn't bite them. Probably. This time. But they definitely did not like to see the uniforms or the guns. To sheep, all sheepdogs are wolves.

  "Probably worried about an attack," Mosovich added.

  "I would be," Mueller agreed. The Sub-Urb was an easy drive from the front lines; whatever idiot put it this close should be shot.

  "No way out," Mosovich said. "Stupid."

  "Lots," Mueller contradicted. "All marked. And the armory at the front."

  Mosovich just snorted. If the Posleen ever came up the Gap, the people in the Sub-Urb were so many food animals caught in their pens. And with the Armory on the upper side of the Urb, unless they got the word in very good time, the Posleen would be sitting on their weapons.

  The decision had been made to make the Urbs zero weapons zones and in the eyes of Mosovich and plenty of other people that was just wrong. If everyone in the Urb was armed it would probably mean a higher murder rate. But compared to the one hundred percent loss in the event of an attack, even one by a random landing, a few murders would be worth it. Besides, the improved defenses if everyone was armed might keep the Posleen out.

  Nonetheless, through a combination of politics and Galactic intransigence the Urbs had been disarmed.

  "Stupid." Mueller shook his head.

  Mosovich nodded as he turned down a brightly lit corridor. The walls had murals on them, which was unusual, and each of the doors had the nameplate of a different doctor on it. The sprite stopped in front of a door marked "Dr. Christine Richards, Psy.D."

  Mosovich touched the entry pad and the door chimed.

  "Yes?" a voice asked through the pad.

  "Doctor Richards? It's Sergeant Major Mosovich. I'm here to talk to you about Captain Elgars?" The good doctor was supposed to have received an e-mail, but who knew what was really happening.

  "Could this wait?" the box asked. "I'm preparing a report right now, but it's not complete."

  "Well, you can report all you'd like, doc," Mosovich replied to the speaker. He was getting a bit ticked about talking to a closed door. "But I suspect that the Army is going to pay more attention to me than you. And I'm going from here to run down Elgars. So this is your one chance to convince me that Elgars is crazy."

  The door opened and Dr. Richards sighed. "She's not crazy, she's possessed."

  * * *

  Dr. Richards had spread out all the case files for Annie Elgars on her table, trying to explain why she wasn't crazy. "I want you to look at this," she said, laying down a long strip of paper with squiggly lines on it.

  "Okay, I know my line here," Mosovich said. "I'm supposed to say 'Is this a brain map, doctor?' But Special Forces guys used to get shrunk all the time and I've seen an EEG before."

  "Fine," Richards said, pulling out a textbook. "You're right, that's an EEG and it's Elgars' to be exact." She opened up the book to a marked page and pointed to the lines on the paper. "This is a normal EEG when a person is awake, or not in alpha mode. Look at it."

  Mosovich did and then at Elgar's EEG. There was no comparison. "What are all these extra notches?" he asked, pointing to Elgars'.

  "You tell me," Richards snapped. "And here, look at this." She riffled through the readouts until she came to another one that was marked. "When you do stuff that you've done thousands of times, the sort of stuff that they say 'He can do it in his sleep.' What's really happening is that your brain switches to alpha mode, which really is like you're asleep. It's one of the bases for zen, that 'state of nothingness.' Look, when you're shooting, do you actually think about what you're doing?"

  "I know what you're talking about here," Mueller interjected. "You're talking about like when you're in a shoothouse. No, you have to turn your brain off and let go, let your training do the thinking for you. When you're really clicking we call it 'being in the Zone.' "

  "Exactly," Richards said, pointing a different set of spikes. "This is alpha state. In Elgars' case, she doesn't have many specific memories, but she can perform a remarkable series of actual manual tasks. If a person is that badly injured, you expect them to have to learn to walk and eat and go to the bathroom all over again. When Elgars was wheeled into the recovery room, she was lucid and capable of performing almost all normal daily functions. Furthermore, we have since determined that she has a wide variety of basic skills, including driving and operating a variety of hand weaponry from knives to very large rifles."

  She pointed to the chart, running her finger along the normal rhythms until she got to the alpha rhythm and then pulling the book up alongside. "This is the transition point, where she goes from beta to alpha. And here is a normal transition."

  Mosovich and Mueller both leaned forward and looked. Again, the transition area was completely different than the textbook version. It was somewhat longer and had numerous extraneous spikes. Mosovich pointed to the alpha rhythm on the chart.

  "Her alpha looks almost textbook, though," he noted.

  "Yes, it is," Richards said. "The differences are just those of being a different human. And that's the other scary part; her alpha is absolutely normal."

  "So that's why she's possessed?" Mueller asked with a raised eyebrow.

  "Look," Richards said with a sigh, leaning back in her chair and taking off her glasses to rub her eyes. "None of us are experts at this. I was a damned family counselor before they sent me down here. We have one, repeat, one clinical psych researcher, and he was an expert on sleep disorders. We're all out of our depth on this . . . phenomenon. But . . . yes, we have come to the conclusion that there is more than one . . . person, not just personality, person, living in Elgars' head. And that the primary personality might not be, probably is not, Anne Elgars."

  "Why not Elgars?" Mosovich asked, thinking that Mansfield was really gonna owe him big time.

  "Memories mostly," Richards said, putting her glasses back on and scrabbling through her notes. "Anne Elgars has memories that she really shouldn't have." The doctor finally seemed to find the notes she was looking for and frowned. "Ever seen the movie Top Gun?" she asked.

  "Yeah," Mosovich admitted. "A few times."

  "You're a rejuv though, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Did you see it when it first came out?" Richards asked.

  "I think so," Mosovich said with a shrug. "Probably. That was, what? '82? '84? I think I was at Bad Tölz then. If I saw it, I saw it on post."

  "The movie came out in 1986," Richards said, glancing at her notes. "Elgars has distinct memories of seeing it for the first time in a movie theater then going over to a friend's house, driving herself to a friend's house to, as she put it, 'jump his bones.' "

  "So?" Muller asked.

  "Anne Elgars was two years old in 1986," Richards said, looking up and taking off her glasses again. "Even the most open-minded of parent is going to question her two-year-old driving. At the least. And she has another memory of watching it for the first time on TV in a living room."

  "Oh," Mueller said. "What about . . . what's it called . . . 'implanted memory syndrome'?"

  "Up, got me there," Mosovich said. "Whassat?"

  "We considered classical implanted memory," Richards said, leaning back again. "Implanted memory used to be called 'regression analysis.' It turned out that the process for regression analysis implants a memory that is absolutely true to the person with the memory. I could run you through a little scenario right now and you'd end up with a memory of having been a giraffe. Or a woman. Or that you were sexually abused as a child. Guaranteed. And none of them would be real.

  "It caused huge problems for a while with child molestation cases; I was still dealing with the repercussions when I got moved down here. Still am for that matter. Women that have a distinct memory of having been molested by a parent or a family friend and it's very unlikely that it ever happened. The on
ly way to get them to even consider that the memory is false is to go through the same process with one that is clearly impossible. And then they end up with this really impossible memory. Which has its own problems."

  She shrugged and put her glasses back on. "What can I say? I've dealt with dozens of implanted memories in my time. This one doesn't show any of the classic signs. She recalls small details that are not germane to the memory. That's one sign of a 'true' memory versus implanted. Then there's the EEG." She picked up the alpha rhythm sheet and pointed to the transition. "We think that weird transition is where she is hunting for the right . . . call it 'soul' . . . to manage the action. It only happens the first time she engages a skill, so new examples are getting harder and harder to find. But it's consistent. And she goes alpha when she shouldn't. When she's writing, for example. That's not a normal alpha moment, except when typing."

  "So what's going on here?" Mosovich asked in exasperation.

  "Like I said, we're not experts," Richards answered. "We can only speculate. You want our speculation?"

  "Yes," Mueller said. "Please."

  "Okay," Richards said, taking off the glasses and setting them on the table. "Anne Elgars sustained a massive head wound in the battle of Washington. The damage was extensive and large portions of her brain showed no normal function. She was in a coma, effectively a permanent one, for nearly five years.

  "The Tch . . . Tchfe . . ." she paused.

  "We usually just say Crabs, doc," Mosovich said. "Although the best pronouncement a human can get along with is Tch-fet." He smiled. "I'm one of the few people I know who has ever had to try to speak Crab. And even I don't try when I don't have to."

  "Very well, the . . . the Crabs approached the therapy team, us that is, with an offer to try to heal her. They noted that she might die in the process, but that if it worked it would permit various others who had sustained damage to be recovered as well.

  "We had . . . authorization to do whatever we liked, except cut off her lifeline, so we acquiesced. She disappeared with the . . . Crabs and reappeared . . . as she is. In less than a week, with significant muscular improvement. 'Miraculous' was the most minor word we used."

  Richards paused and shrugged. "From there on out, it's speculation." She frowned and shook her head. "Crazy speculation if you don't mind my using the word.

  "Say you have a computer that is broken. You pull out the broken parts, clear out the memory and load on new software. We think that's what the Crabs did. . . . All of it."

  "Shit," Mueller whispered. "You mean they . . ."

  "They probably had to cut portions of the brain away," Richards said. "Or something just as radical. The damage was extensive and not just a result of bruising; she had some comintuated fractures in her tissue. Repairing that would require cutting and regeneration in, say, your liver. At least for us humans. But whatever the Crabs did, it was just as extensive. And when you finish that, you still have a 'dead' computer. So we think they took a . . . personality, a person if you will, that they had . . . hanging around, and loaded it in Elgars. And the memory stuff that we're seeing is the result of the sort of little fragments of code you just have . . . hanging around. You rarely can get rid of all of it in a computer, much less a human."

  "So, Anne Elgars the person is dead," Mosovich said. "This is a different person entirely."

  "Sort of," Richards said with another sigh. "Don't ask me about souls. Who or what a person is is a religious debate as much as a psychological one. For one thing, nature does have some influence on it; that's been repeatedly proven. People seem to tend to . . . fill a mold that is somewhat prepared. They're not locked in deterministically, but it is unlikely that the person Anne Elgars eventually becomes is either Anne Elgars or the person that the Crabs apparently 'loaded into her.' "

  "What about the thing with the alpha waves?" Mueller asked.

  "Ah, that's different," she answered. "Anne not only seems to have been loaded with a person, but also, separately, loaded with skills. And we think that some of them are 'integral' to the base personality, or even the original Elgars, and others are separate. So when she runs across a new situation, she has to 'hunt' for the right file so to speak. It's quite unconscious on her part; she has no idea what she is doing. But that's the reason for the odd transition."

  "Well, I don't know who she is," Mosovich said. "But the question is, can she do her job? Right now we need every rifle we can get. Can she soldier or not?"

  "She can do a job," Richards answered. "Quite easily. She's programmed to be a soldier, arguably a 'supersoldier.' She has skills ranging from advanced marksmanship to field expedient demolitions. She can certainly soldier. The question is, what else is she programmed for?"

  * * *

  Wendy opened the door at the buzz, tucked a squirming Amber under one arm and frowned at the figure in camouflage filling the door. "We gave at the office."

  Mueller frowned. "I'd think this was your office."

  "It is, but we already contributed," Wendy answered. "In other words, what are you here for?"

  "Ah, we were told we could find Captain Anne Elgars here," Mueller said. "From the picture, you are not Captain Elgars. However, it is nice to make your acquaintance Miz . . . ?"

  "Cummings," Wendy said, wincing at the anticipated joke. She had lived with her name her whole life. "Wendy Cummings."

  "Master Sergeant Mueller," Mueller said. "Charmed. And is Captain Elgars available?" he continued as the baby let out a howl like a fire engine.

  "Sure, I'll get her," Wendy said. "Come on in."

  She stepped around Kelly, who had chosen the middle of the floor as the obvious place to do a life-sized Tigger puzzle, and walked towards the back.

  Mueller looked over his shoulder at Mosovich and shrugged, then stepped through the door. The room was filled with the sort of happy bedlam you get with any group of children, but the noise was dying as the kids noticed the visitors. Before too long Mosovich and Mueller found themselves in a semicircle of kids.

  "Are you a real soldier?" one of the little girls asked. Her eyes were brown and just about as big around as saucers.

  Mueller squatted down to where he wasn't much over their height and nodded his head. "Yep. Are you a real little girl?"

  The girl giggled as one of the boys leaned forward. "Is that a real gun?"

  "Yes," Mosovich said with a growl. "And if you touch it you'll get a swat."

  "Guns aren't toys, son," Mueller added. "What's your name?"

  "Nathan," the kid said. "I'm gonna be a soldier when I grow up and kill Posleen."

  "And that's a fine thing to want to do," Mueller opined. "But you don't start off with a big gun. You learn on little guns first. And someday, if you eat your vegetables, you'll be big like me. And you can kill Posleen all day long."

  "Without getting tired?" one of the girls asked.

  "Well . . ." Mueller said, flipping a surreptitious finger at Mosovich for laughing, "you do get tired."

  "Okay, let's start getting ready for lunch, children," Shari said, coming out of the back with Elgars and Wendy. "Leave these gentlemen alone. Wash hands then sit down for grace."

  "I'm Elgars," said the captain, ignoring the children. She had white powder on her hands and a cheek.

  "Captain, I'm Sergeant Major Mosovich with Fleet Recon and this is my senior NCO Master Sergeant Mueller." He paused and then nodded as if he'd done some sort of a mental checklist. "Your commander, Colonel Cutprice, sent a message to one of my troops asking him to come down here and find out if you needed rescuing from the shrinks. I don't know if you remember Nichols, but you two went through sniper school together. He got banged up on our last op and is still down in the body-and-fender so I came down here with Mueller instead. Anyway, here I am."

  "Okay," Elgars said, with a nod. "So am I being rescued from the shrinks?"

  "Is there someplace we can talk, ma'am?" Mosovich temporized. "Someplace quieter?" he added as the children trooped back from the ba
throom.

  "Not really," Elgars said, raising her voice slightly over the children. "The kitchen isn't much better. We'd have to go to my quarters and I can't really afford the time for that."

  "Is this where . . . Do you work here, ma'am?" Mosovich asked.

  "Sort of," she answered. "I help out. I'm following Wendy around, getting my bearings again."

  "Well," Mosovich frowned. "Okay, the question, ma'am, is, how do you feel about going back on active duty?"

  "I feel okay about it," Elgars said. "Can I ask a question?"

  "Of course, ma'am."

  "Are you here to evaluate me?"

  It was this question that had made Mosovich pause early in the discussion. The question was whether to answer honestly or do the two-step. He finally decided that honesty was the right policy even if it wasn't the best.

  "I guess you could say that, ma'am," the sergeant major admitted. "I got told to come down here and check you out then report back to your commander in writing as to your perceived fitness. You don't normally use a sergeant major to report on an officer and I'm not a psychologist. But I've been beating around this war for quite a while and I guess the powers that be trust my judgement."

  "Okay," Elgars said. "In that case I'll be honest too. I don't know what the hell a captain does. I can shoot, I know that. I can do other stuff. But I keep finding holes. And I have no idea what the job of a captain even is. So being a captain would be tough."

  Mueller tapped Mosovich on the shoulder and whispered in his ear. Mosovich turned and looked at him with a quizzical expression and held a finger up to Elgars. "Captain, could you excuse me for just a moment."

  He and Mueller went over into a corner of the daycare center and spoke for a moment. Elgars could see Mosovich shaking his head and Mueller gesturing. After a moment, Wendy came over to ask Elgars what was going on.

  "I dunno," the captain replied. "But I don't think I'm gonna like it."

  Mosovich came back over and looked at both of them. He opened his mouth for a moment, stopped, glanced over his shoulder at Mueller. Looked at Wendy for a second then looked at Elgars.