Chapter 3
“Evidence”
“I count him braver who overcomes his (own) desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.”
Aristotle
Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA
May 28, 2049
9:30 p.m.
For most Quantum Corps troopers, liberty time at Table Top Mountain was a frantic escape into the snow-capped foothills of the Buffalo Mountains, hiking, fishing, camping and generally drinking and carousing around. For Al Glance, however, liberty time was altogether different. Tense, anxious and furtive, Glance seldom partied with the rest of 1st Nano. More often than not, he spent his liberty hours elsewhere. Lately, that meant clandestine meetings with Red Hammer couriers in Haleyville.
Upon returning to Table Top, both Taj Singh and Glance had been debriefed, with all the other troopers. It was a normal part of completing an after-action report. However, owing to Taj’s suspicions, relayed on to Security Branch and Major Kraft by Winger, Glance was selected for additional debriefings. In fact, it was an interrogation.
Glance was given no personal counsel and admitted nothing. “Corporal Singh simply mistook my normal checks on ANAD for some kind of tampering, that’s all,” he insisted. And there was little corroborating evidence to dispute what Glance had said. Major Lofton, chief of Security Branch, had little recourse but to release Glance and order him to return to duty. But by the time Glance had swung by the Barracks to collect some items, he already had some unsuspected, and certainly, if he had known, unwanted company.
Lofton had gotten permission from CINCQUANT and Colonel Kincade, the base commander, to use TinyEye. The nanoscale surveillance device, in a swarm barely as large as a period on a page, had been released and programmed to follow Glance, wherever he went. It had taken up position in a dark corner of his bunk space in A Barracks. It would keep tabs on the Sergeant no matter what he did or where he went. TinyEye was programmed to sound an alarm to Quantum Corps Security if Glance attempted anything out of the ordinary, such as going anywhere near ANAD's containment system.
And Glance, despite his position in the Battalion, would never know the mech swarm was even there, hiding in the corner of his quarters, seeming for all the world like dust motes in the air. Dust motes with eyes.
Unknown to the Sergeant, Sheila Reaves had not requested liberty. Instead, she had parked herself in the Security Branch command center, with permission from Major Lofton, the Security Chief.
"I've been keeping my eye on the Sergeant for awhile," she explained. "The Detachment and the Sergeant don't always get along too well."
Lofton was skeptical. "I don't usually let enlisted personnel inside the command center, Sergeant. Especially not with active surveillance underway. It tends to lower morale with the officers. But for some reason, CINCQUANT was most insistent. What the hell are you, Reaves…some kind of undercover agent?"
Reaves snorted. "Just a Defense and Protective Systems tech, Major. And I got a good nose for bad news. Ask anybody in 1st Nano."
Lofton showed her the TinyEye feed. A set of monitors flashed data from the device's sensors: EM, acoustic, video and audio, and a dozen other channels.
"If we get close enough, Sergeant, we can even scan gross EEG output. Can't quite read the Sergeant's thoughts, yet. But it may not be long."
Reaves accepted a cup of steaming coffee and situated herself in front of the video feed, streaming back from the virtual 'lens' that TinyEye had formed.
"So where's the Sergeant at the moment?"
Lofton introduced Reaves to Sergeant Mark Finn, the duty tech. Finn highlighted a schematic of the Table Top complex on one screen.
"Sergeant Glance requested liberty from Lieutenant Winger a short time ago and drove off base at 2115 hours, just a few minutes ago. He logged through East Gate in his personal car and headed east on Highway 7."
Reaves studied the plot, and then watched the grainy image of Glance’s shoulders as he negotiated his car along the twisting mountain highway.
"Haleyville?" she wondered out loud.
Finn shrugged. "Hard to say, Sergeant Reaves." Finn was the picture of protocol and formality. His trim black moustache was a perfect rectangle over his lips. "I've taken steps to detach part of TinyEye and embed it in the fibers of Sergeant Glance’s jacket. That required CINCQUANT approval." He looked over at Reaves. "I don't know what the Sergeant’s done but whatever it is, it's got high-level suspicion."
Reaves was noncommittal. "You don't say--"
They both watched the video feed for a few minutes.
Glance drove along a nearly deserted Highway 7 for thirty minutes, eventually pulling into the small town of Haleyville. The main street was a half-mile stretch of bars and clubs and honky-tonks, a common destination for Quantum Corps troopers, but Glance passed by all of them and turned into the parking lot of the Custer Inn.
He got out of the car and made his way inside the rambling pine and stucco motel. He stood in the lobby for a few minutes, scanning the light crowd, then made his way into a dimly lit bar at the far end of a large semi-circular atrium that resembled a hunting lodge, with trophy animal heads and Winchester rifles mounted on the walls.
Glance ambled through the bar, obviously looking for someone. Fifteen kilometers away, Sergeant Finn manipulated controls on his interface panel to redeploy TinyEye to capture more photons inside the darkened bar. He overlaid the image with a thermal picture, outlining Glance in a ghostly green radiance.
"Stay with him, Sergeant," Reaves muttered.
"I'm on it…TinyEye can adjust pretty quickly."
Then, the image suddenly jittered slightly. Glance had found who he was looking for.
Finn adjusted TinyEye to pull back and reveal the face of Glance's acquaintance. He had a vaguely Native American appearance, with tousled dark black hair and a few errant locks draped over a high forehead. His eyes were slits. A prominent scar creased his right cheek, forming an exclamation point along the jawbone.
Finn adjusted TinyEye again, reconfigging for better audio.
"--name is Windsinger. You take a great chance coming here like this. What is it you want?"
"There's a problem…I wanted to--" Glance's reply was interrupted. Windsinger had raised a calloused hand.
"Not here. Come--" With no further words, Glance followed the Indian outside, leaving the hotel completely. Finn made hurried adjustments, augmenting TinyEye's autocomp to accommodate the changing light levels.
The two men walked hurriedly across the graveled lot to a pickup truck, parked by a thorny acacia tree. A couple embraced in kisses muttered as they approached and scuttled off into the darkness of the nearby woods.
Finn swore. "Damn…TinyEye's come loose. I've lost embedding…something happened--"
Reaves let her eyes follow the board. It was similar to ANAD, but she was no IC, like Gibbs or Lieutenant Winger. "What's happened?"
Finn pointed to a proximity display. "Part of the swarm was detached to stay embedded in Glance's jacket or shirt. But it's been sloughed off somehow…I'm not in contact anymore. Something pushed me off-" his fingers flew over the keyboard.
Reaves watched the video feed, keeping Finn in the corner of her eyes. The tech was struggling trying to get TinyEye re-grouped, re-embedded. Even as she watched, though, Glance and his contact Windsinger had climbed into the truck. Reaves watched with alarm, as both men climbed into the bed of the truck. An unknown driver was already in the cab.
The truck started up just as Finn was maneuvering the TinyEye swarm to close again with its target.
"Hurry up," Reaves told him. The swarm was still too far away--and the truck was already skidding across the gravel lot, pulling out onto Highway 7. "You're going to lose him--"
"I know, dammit!" Finn's hands flew back and forth across the keyboard. "There was a pulse, something, and the next thing I knew, TinyEye was d
etached."
Reaves' eyes narrowed. "I don't think it was an accident, Sergeant." She watched the video feed with a sinking feeling, as the truck sped off into the distance, the grain of the image dissolving into pixilated murk, until the truck was gone. "That Indian guy did something…we were detected."
Finn looked over at Reaves. "I'd better call Major Lofton."
The truck sped off through the late summer twilight along a lonely stretch of Highway 7, twisting and turning across the Buffalo Ridge, toward the turnoff to Hunt Valley and the test range. A sign flashed by, depicting the tunnel known as the Notch - TEN KILOMETERS - along Hunt Valley Road, but the truck didn't take that turn.
Instead, they continued along Highway 7, deeper into the mountains. Massive, snow-capped flanks abutted the road, as they skidded slightly, switching back and forth through a series of steep descending turns.
Al Glance wondered just where they were going.
Windsinger seemed to read his thoughts. "What you have done," the Indian said, above the wind noise, "is very dangerous. You violated every precaution coming here. You are not following procedure."
Glance pulled his jacket tighter against the breeze. The truck was accelerating downhill now, topping a hundred kilometers an hour.
"I had no choice!" Glance said, raising his voice over the wind. "It was necessary!"
Windsinger pulled back his jacket sleeve and pressed a stud on a wristpad. In seconds, the wind noise died off and the night sky shimmered with iridescent speckles. A camou-shield had been erected around the back of the truck. From any distance greater than ten meters, the shield would resemble the truck bed itself, as uncounted trillions of mechs massaged photons to hide them from view. The mechs finished the shield in several minutes.
"You were under surveillance," Windsinger said. "My own mechs detected it…you carried nano on you."
"Impossible," Glance said. "I swept myself several times before I left Table Top."
Windsinger was unimpressed. His weathered face was a map of lines and creases. "You were bugged." He turned slightly in Glance's direction, inclining his massive head. "All of us have a halo. Even you have one. A personal shield that goes wherever we go. Makes sure we do what we're supposed to do. When you came into the hotel, my halo told me you weren't clean. That's why we ride in the back of this truck."
Glance indicated the shield around the truck bed. "Your halo, too?"
Windsinger shrugged. "I think and my halo acts. Like the great spirit of the mountains, always watching over me. My shadow, my armor…even my soul." Windsinger smiled faintly. "The price of membership in Red Hammer. Why did you send for me…against all warnings to avoid personal contact?"
Glance's throat was dry. He told Windsinger about the failed attempts to corrupt ANAD during the Quantum Detour mission. "There was little I could do. I'm only a sergeant in Quantum Corps. I can't work miracles."
"You’re not being paid for miracles…only results. And after that, when the Corps came to the mountains of Tibet…when your armies assaulted our sacred grounds in the Paryang valley…what of that?"
Glance was quick to reply. "What do you expect? Your lasers fired on a UNISPACE ship in orbit. We were almost killed. You cut the ground right out from under me."
"You could have stopped the assault. You could have damaged ANAD enough so the asteroid couldn’t have been diverted.”
"No I couldn't! Like I said, I can't work miracles. You've got to give me a chance to help you. Stop blowing up things behind my back."
"You have failed at everything," Windsinger said matter-of-factly.
Glance's heart was beating faster. "I'm telling you--like I've told the others--I can work for you inside Quantum Corps. I can mess with ANAD…steer them in the wrong direction. I can get you secret information…that's what I'm best at." He suddenly realized the camou-shield was as much prison cell as protection. The humps of mountains streamed by in a sparkling blur, as the mechs stayed attached to the truck, maintaining the shield. "Work with me…that's all I'm asking. Hell, I know what happened at Hicks-Newman. I was there, remember? But Red Hammer jumped the gun. When you do that, it undercuts everything I've done. This will only work if you give me time…and space to do what I can."
"We don't have much time," Windsinger said.
"Why do you say that?"
Windsinger sighed. His face seemed to change. The lines and creases were molding themselves like molten clay, into what? Glance watched from the corner of his eye. Was it natural…a facial twitch? Or something else? Red Hammer couriers loved nanoderm…every last one of them had a thousand faces, a thousand looks. All of them were shot through with nano…walking, talking, breathing symbionts with precise, programmable control of everything at the level of atoms and molecules. It was eerie…and unnerving.
Even as he watched, the Indian’s face morphed into something—a face vaguely familiar—the pitched eyebrows, the alabaster cheeks—it wasn’t…but it was…it was Wei Ming.
Glance felt a chill run down his spine.
"You must act now." Windsinger/Wei Ming told him. His face…her face?... slowly returned to a leathery Arapahoe countenance. Which was real? It was impossible to say. Somehow, Glance was relieved to see the Indian again. "The Project is at a critical stage."
Glance was by now completely unnerved. He stared openly at the courier. "This Project…other handlers mentioned it. What exactly is this Project?"
Windsinger stared through the coruscating flux of the camou-shield at something unseen, something thousands of kilometers away, his eyes steel-hard. "You’ll know when it’s time for you to know." Windsinger turned to face Glance. His face was in motion again. "You must disable Quantum Corps, permanently."
"Disable Quantum Corps? How the hell am I supposed to do that? I'm one man--"
Windsinger was insistent. "Destroy their ability to interfere. You agreed to do this. Do we not have an understanding? You’ve promised me a lot, Glance and I’ve paid you well enough based on those promises…now I expect results. You have the means. You have agents in place, no?"
Glance told Windsinger he did. "So far, they’re undetected. I think….”
Windsinger removed a bracelet from his other wrist and pressed it into Glance's hands. "With this bracelet, you have short-range control of ANAD mechs."
Glance fingered the bracelet delicately. It was a heavy band of gold and silver, with inlaid stones. Each stone was a control stud. "How does it work?"
Windsinger tapped the center stud. "This one…press this one when you are near your target. The device will do the rest. I promise that your victim will be begging for death in less than an hour. Direct link to the target's limbic system; he will whimper like a wounded wolf."
The truck had somehow made a great circle and was now speeding back along Highway 7, back toward the distant glow of Haleyville.
"Use this tool," Windsinger warned him. "You must disrupt Quantum Corps operations for at least three more months. That will give us time to regain control. Re-build links to our…friends… in the sky." The truck slowed, pulling off the road just short of the gravel lot in front of the Custer Inn. "Do whatever you have to. But don't fail."
Glance didn't even notice when the camou-shield was deactivated. He climbed out of the truck bed and the truck sped off.
Three more months. Do whatever you have to….
Windsinger's meaning was unmistakable. Or had it been Wei Ming?
Glance suddenly felt thirsty and trudged along the darkened road, through the gravel and into the bar at the Custer Hotel.
He decided he needed a little liquid fortification before he went back to Table Top base. He just hoped his own halo didn’t go off.
Evidence from TinyEye was all that Major Lofton and the Judge Advocate General of the Corps needed to summon Glance back to Security the next day and order a memory trace session be initiated.
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Word spread around the Detachment offices quickly and scuttlebutt was thicker than snow on top of the Buffalo range.
“It’s a witch hunt,” said Lucy Hiroshi. “Pure and simple.”
“You’re innocent until proven guilty,” said Nicole Simonet. “Aren’t you?”
“What’s going to happen to the CC2, Lieutenant?” asked Mighty Mite Barnes, of Johnny Winger.
"I don't know," Winger replied. "Major Lofton said he had been taken to the stockade for now. General Kincade's already scheduled a hearing for 1100 hours. Rumor has it CINCQUANT himself is coming in."
"Whatever happens," Taj Singh said, "he deserves it."
Before they could make their way to Mission prep, Winger got a call on his talker. It was Major Kraft. The Major's face was grim and hollow; it had been a long few days for everybody.
"Report to the Ops Center at once, Lieutenant. There's a pre-hearing investigation going on right now. General Kincade wants all the facts laid out before the charges against Sergeant Glance are made. Security Branch needs a statement from you."
"On my way, Major." Winger peeled off and headed briskly across the quadrangle now humming with packbots and troopers hauling equipment and materials needed to reactivate the base.
Johnny Winger wondered what would happen to Al Glance now.
Sergeant Mark Finn tapped a short sequence of instructions on the keyboard. Inside the containment cylinder, ANAD responded to the command, readying itself for launch.
"ANAD reports ready in all respects," came the high-pitched voice.
Finn suppressed a slight smile. Nanotroopers and their bots…really. "The little guy sounds like a teenager on his first date."
"Sounds pretty eager to me," Johnny Winger admitted. Winger was alongside the interface controls, watching everything Finn did.
General Alexander Kincade, commanding general of Quantum Corps' Western Command, rubbed a hand across morning stubble on his chin. "More eager than I am. You sure this'll work, Sergeant?"
Finn nodded. "It is a new technique but we've proven it at the lab many times. I've trained Lieutenant Winger here in all the details. Shall we get started?"
He moved aside, indicating that Winger should take his position at the controls.
"Gives me the creeps, I don't mind telling you," Major Kraft admitted. "Invading someone's mind like this--"
"It's just a high-powered lie detector," said Major Lofton, Security Branch chief.
"Let's get going," Kincade growled. "If Glance's got anything about Red Hammer, I want to know it. It's too late for legal niceties now. Permission to launch."
Strapped to a gurney next to the containment cylinder, Al Glance had been sedated and prepped for ANAD insertion. His body was surrounded by a fine mesh of sensors--the vascular grid--that would precisely locate ANAD inside the sergeant's body, once the mech was inserted.
Finn handled the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment cylinder. Inside, ANAD ticked over, ready to be launched.
"Steady even suction, Lieutenant," Finn reminded Winger. "ANAD, report status--"
The teenager's voice crackled over the circuit. "ANAD effectors safed for launch. All parameters normal. Internal bonds and states are stable. Sensors primed and registered. Core functions initialized…I'm ready to fly, fellows--"
Finn glanced up at General Kincade, an embarrassed smile on his lips. "The assembler uses a small percentage of his computational ability to simulate emotional states…sometimes, it correlates, er, inappropriately."
"Get on with it," Kincade ordered.
"Vascular grid?" Finn asked.
"Tracking," said Winger. He tuned the grid to pick up the mech as soon as it was inserted.
"Let's go, then."
The insert went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the master replicant into Glance's capillary network at high pressure. Winger watched his board and quickly got an acoustic pulse seconds later. He selected Fly-by-Stick to test out the controls. A few minutes' run on propulsors brought ANAD to a dense mat of capillary tissue.
Finn studied the sounder image. "Looks like you're ready for transit, Lieutenant. You can force those cell membranes any time."
Winger told ANAD to probe for weak spots in a clump of lipids, clinging like a bunch of grapes in the middle of the wall. "I'll try there first--"
He steered ANAD toward a cleft in the membrane lipids, pulsing one of the carbene grabbers to twist a nearby molecule just so, then released the lipid and slingshot himself forward through the gap. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes visible off in the distance. He tweaked the picowatt propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the grid.
"Aortic cavity, Lieutenant. Just past the Islet of Duchin, I'd say. Looks like we're in. Where do you want to go now?"
Start Fourier Transform;
Start Delacroix Transform;
Start Trace Matching….
Windsinger pulls back his jacket sleeve and presses a stud on a wristpad. The wind noise dies off and the night sky shimmers with iridescent speckles. A camou-shield has been erected around the back of the truck.
"You were under surveillance," Windsinger says. "My own mechs detected it…you carried nano on you."
"Impossible. I swept myself several times before I left Table Top."
Windsinger is not impressed. His weathered face is a map of lines and creases. "You were bugged." He turns slightly, inclining his massive head. "All of us have a halo. A personal shield that goes wherever we go. You have one too. Makes sure we do what we're supposed to do. When you came into the hotel, my halo told me you weren't clean. That's why we ride in the back of the truck."
Hands reach out and sweep around the truck bed. "Your halo, too?"
Windsinger shrugs. "I think and my halo acts. Like the great spirit of the mountains, always watching over me. My shadow, my armor…even my soul." Windsinger smiles faintly. "The price of membership in Red Hammer. Why did you send for me…against all warnings to avoid--"
(The imager blurs, shot through with streaks of light, peculiar starbursts and fragments of hazy, out of focus visuals, all jumbled up. The speaker crackles with static--)
Johnny Winger fiddled with his joystick, tried tweaking the gain on the signal. "Looks like we lost that trace, Sergeant. Just fizzled out."
Major Kraft glared in disgust at the IC panel. "Can you get it back, Lieutenant?"
Winger shook his head. "Faded out, Major…we didn't have a good gradient to follow. I'll backtrack--"
Lofton was there too, standing beside Kraft. "Eerie, isn't it? Seeing things through another man's eyes."
"Gives me the creeps," Kraft admitted.
"It seems to work well enough," Lofton said. "Couldn't tell you the theory behind it."
"It's a damn circus trick," General Kincade growled. "We can really play back someone's memories like a recording?"
"Not exactly, sir," said Winger. He was helping Finn sniff out new traces for ANAD to follow. "We just put ANAD inside the suspect and replicate a few trillion times. Then we put the whole herd in 'bloodhound' mode and go hunting."
"What exactly are you hunting for?"
"Everybody makes memories the same way. It's called Long-term Potentiation. One of the chemical signatures of LTP is a molecule called glutamate…helps open a second voltage-gated channel inside the post-synaptic membrane--"
Finn intervened. "Allow me, Lieutenant. In plain English, General, what it boils down to is that we can construct crude renditions of memory traces existent in the subject's brain, up to ten to fifteen days after the memory trace is laid down. We've been doing it experimentally here for the last six months. ANAD shuttles around inside the subject's head like a bunch of bees, sniffing out calcium sinks in every neuron, looking for equal concentrations, down to the parts per trillion. Everywhere that concentration is equal is a pathway
, burned in, a memory trace. ANAD follows it, sends back data on whatever it finds--calcium levels, sodium levels, activation times, lots of stuff. We can re-construct a very crude version of what originally laid down that track. Then we put it on the imager, cobbled out of visual and auditory sensory traces in this particular case. They're the easiest."
"It's sort of like painting somebody's portrait from their shadow," added Major Lofton. "I've been to the Northgate lab. They actually used me as a guinea pig too. Kind of an echo of a memory, if you like."
Kincade was dubious. "Sounds pretty nebulous to me. Why did we just now lose the trace?"
"Unknown," said Winger. His fingers were flying over the keyboard, managing ANAD's configuration, checking its parameters. "Somehow, we lost the trace…just petered out. It happens. All you can do is backtrack to a known point and start sniffing again."
Kincade stared from the imager display to Glance's still body, lightly breathing, and back again. He half expected to see the traitor twitch or move a leg or something. "So where is ANAD now?"
Major Kraft was keen to keep the upper hand in this demo. Winger and Finn occasionally drifted off into outer space with all their explanations. It took an old infantryman to keep their feet planted firmly on Earth. "Here's the vascular grid, General--" he fingered the IC display to the side of the imager. The grid was a 3-D iconic image of Glance’s skull. "--I'd say…right about here…basal hippocampus region. Most of the swarm's about a hundred thousand microns anterior to the lateral septum."
"We're picking up something," Winger muttered. As Kraft watched over his shoulder, hoping to learn something more to impress the General with, Winger steered through a dense bog of dendrites. Thickets of axon fibers clouded the imager, now slaved to ANAD's electromagnetic sounder. "--strong trace…this one's holding, looks like--"
"Stay with it, sir," Finn encouraged him. He leaned over across Winger, to massage ANAD's configuration, souping up the sensors.
"I'm altering config--" Winger said in a low voice. "It'll help us sort out the traffic--lots of chem around here--"
Glance stirred lightly on the gurney, until a nearby tech steadied his body. "He's coming back through Level 4," the tech muttered. "We'd better hurry, if we're going to get anything out of this--"
"I'm trying, I’m trying.” Winger glared at the imager, flexed his fingers around the hand controllers. He let ANAD finish changing config, noting that all the other trillion mechs slaved to the master had done likewise, then maneuvered the device into the lee of a dendritic 'breakwater'…sniffing for calcium, sodium, anything it could follow, grabbing molecules left and right, until at last, Winger cracked the barest hint of a smile. Deep inside the unconscious brain of Al Glance, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler blazed away at incredible speed, spasmodically sorting and advancing along the barest whiff of a chemical highway.
Seconds later, a green light illuminated alongside the screen. The sparky haze began to part--ANAD sent back a signal indicating readiness--
Start Trace Matching….
Wei Ming's face hardens. "What happened at Lion's Rock? You were supposed to have stopped them--"
Hands twitch nervously, kneading fingers so tightly they hurt. "You don't understand…there were factors beyond my control…Lieutenant Winger--
Wei Ming interrupts with a wave of her hand. Her face has changed again…morphed into something hard and impassive, an angry clown. Was it the light…or maybe the nanoderm patches again?
"This is no good." The undulations on her cheeks and forehead seem to settle down, taking on a new firmness. She frowns. "With one of our mechs, they will surely develop countermeasures."
"But it'll take some time--"
Now she is visibly angry. Her face kneads itself into a hard fist. Her cheeks bulge slightly, a lioness with a fresh kill in her mouth.
"They're not stupid, Glance. Don't make that mistake. You've made enough already." Her cheeks then return to normal planes, sleek and alabaster. "Just do your job. The Project depends on it."
"Maybe if I knew more about--"
But she isn't listening. "You're being well-paid for your services, Sergeant. Yet you continue to fail us."
"I can't work miracles."
"Leave the miracles to us. Just do your part." Her voice deepens, combining new frequencies, new tones, now multiple echoes overlapping. "You must sabotage any more efforts to develop countermeasures. ANAD must not be allowed to interfere with the Project. This is a critical time now."
A hot flash of nerves. Throat constriction….
"That's not the agreement…I only agreed to provide intelligence, not sabotage. It's too dangerous--"
"Your mission is changed…as of now. You'll be--"
Johnny Winger tweaked ANAD again, but the trace was gone.
"What happened?" Kincade asked. He was growing more and more annoyed with this harebrained stunt.
"ANAD lost the trail, sir," Winger said. "I'm trying to get it back now…"
Finn changed ANAD's config slightly. "I'll see if dropping a radical off this arm helps--"
Lofton was thoughtful. "I'd say we have enough right now to charge Sergeant Glance. Conspiracy to commit espionage, sabotage, treason, for starters."
Kraft was uneasy with the whole technique. "Even in the Corps, a man accused has a right to counsel."
"It won't help," Lofton told him. "He's just admitted working with Red Hammer, receiving payment to sabotage ANAD."
"Admitted under duress," Kraft reminded him.
"Now is not the time to be splitting legal hairs," Kincade told them. "If what we're seeing is half of what really happened, Mr. Glance's in a mountain of trouble. Sergeant Finn, just how reliable is this stunt? How do you know this isn't something out of the man's imagination?"
"That would take some explaining, General, but the basic answer is in the details of the glutamate molecule, and the trail it lays down. There are subtle differences when the long-term potentiation is activated from direct sensory input--from external events, as it were--and when it's internally generated. We've tuned ANAD pretty finely to be able to detect the differences."
Kincade gave that some thought. "How much further can you go with this? Can you reconstruct everything?"
Finn shrugged. "Practically speaking, no. The more convoluted the traces become--the more they become abstracted into higher levels of the brain--the harder it is to follow them. There's a practical limit on the concentrations of glutamate that ANAD can follow. Usually memory traces older than a few weeks are pretty much impossible to follow consistently. And there is the matter of damage as well."
"Damage? What kind of damage?"
Finn wanted to be precise in what he said. "Every time ANAD follows a trail of glutamate molecules, he slightly damages the molecules in the process of examining them. We call it a fragmentation trail. The subject's memories are slightly altered with each probe."
"So this can't be done accurately again, after this probe?"
Finn nodded imperceptibly, admitting the truth of what the General was saying. "Let's say the accuracy of the reconstruction suffers with each 'reading' of the trail."
Major Lofton was anxious to continue to exam. "General, every bit of evidence helps the investigation. May I remind the General that this man holds information vital to defeating Red Hammer. Now is not the time to be squeamish--begging the General's pardon--about molecule fragments."
Kincade glared at Lofton as if he were some kind of slug to be stepped on. "Actually, I agree with you, Major. Continue the exam."
ANAD sniffed for the better part of three hours. When Finn and Winger both became convinced that Glance's hippocampal tissues were scrambled enough to prevent any further accurate readings, Kincade ordered the examination terminated.
That’s when Al Glance’s halo went off.
It was Finn who saw it first.
“What the--?”
Monitors and imagers and the vascular grid started going haywire. “Losing comms with ANAD…the grid’s offline…detecting high thermals….”
Winger twisted his hand controller. “Got to get ANAD out of there! It’s a Bang, right inside his skull! Got to be a halo—“
Kraft was instantly alert. “Winger, what the hell’s happening?”
“Glance must have a halo inside his brain…it’s a common Red Hammer tactic. It keeps their people in line. ANAD must have tripped it—“
Kraft snapped his fingers at the other tech. “Bromley…the beam injectors…get ‘em primed! Get ‘em charged up!”
Bromley swung around to his own console alongside the bed. “Priming now sir…charging…charging…we’ll be ready in ten seconds—“
Kraft grabbed General Kincade’s arm. “Evacuate now! Everybody out…you too, Winger! Finn, get your butt in gear—I don’t want to lose anybody else to a Bang!”
“But, sir…ANAD--!” Winger said. “We can’t leave him…he could stop this—“
Kraft’s voice boomed out, brooking no dissent. “NOW, Winger! Get out of here now!”
The four of them evacuated the med suite just as the first blast of electron beams swept the chamber, ripping atoms from molecules, stripping electrons off atoms, frying everything inside. An intense white light blinded anyone who peered in through the hatch porthole.
Finn swallowed hard. “Jesus H. Christ…”
The halo eruption inside Al Glance’s head was stopped in its tracks. It was like blasting a gnat with a howitzer. Trillions of electron volts scoured the med suite from one end to another.
Before the halo had squeezed off all blood flow to Glance’s brain, inducing a massive stroke, his body had already been eviscerated and French-fried into a smoking ash heap by the electron guns.
It would take recovery and containment teams nearly two days to restore the chamber to full operating condition.
Worse, because of what Glance had done, Johnny Winger knew that every ANAD master inside the Corps was now suspect. All of them would have to be vetted, tested by analyzing their processor kernels line by line. The process would ultimately take several weeks of around-the clock effort by all nanotroopers.
But that was still to come. As he left the Ops complex with Major Kraft, Winger wondered if perhaps, the platoon’s newest member, Doc II, might be able to help.
***
Nanotroopers Episode 15: A Black Hole Page 10