Insidious. Part 17

She felt the cool caress of a drug sprayer on her deltoid. Interrogation chemicals, she thought.

The front of the machine had a logo on it. Aldriena looked at it for a second and then identified it as the red silhouette of a scorpion.

"What do you know about a project codenamed Insidious?"

Well, might as well see how good the UNSF lie detectors are, she thought.

"Insidious? Nothing."

A red light glittered on the top of the device.

"Oh, so I'm supposed to get all upset that you red-lighted me?" she asked. "Is that supposed to make my heart race? Make me sweat?"

"You do know," the operator said in a neutral voice. "Please elucidate."

She took a deep breath. "No, I don't know."

"You do know. Please consider the danger your silence could pose to Earth."

"Sorry."

"If you don't comply, you will be held indefinitely. The UNSF cannot negotiate with your employer for your eventual return. You will no longer have any means to support yourself above subsistence level."

Aldriena gave a false smile. Subsistence level was a state of utter poverty so severe that sometimes even basic needs weren't met. Anyone on Earth who didn't work for a megacorporation or the world government knew intimately how bad the official subsistence level was.

Sigh. Time for a strategic retreat.

"Project Insidious is an espionage effort directed toward some of the deep s.p.a.ce stations," Aldriena said.

"True," the voice replied evenly. "Thank you for your cooperation. Which s.p.a.ce stations are involved in the project?"

"Synchronicity. Xanadu. Avalon. Thermopylae. Tanelorn. Maybe others, I don't know."

Aldriena's vision fuzzed for a moment and then cleared itself.

Oh, s.h.i.+t. Here we go. I was always better on the other side of coercion.

"What information in particular is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?"

Aldriena hesitated. Then her whole body clenched convulsively like her arm, as if to eject the answer like vomit.

"Technological secrets."

"Whose technological secrets is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?"

A drop of sweat trickled down her neck. Aldriena tried to imagine that it was Martin's lips. Then in a perverse inversion of her imagination, she ended up with the mental image of the hideous technician behind her, gnawing on her neck. She managed to forget the question.

"Whose technological secrets is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?"

d.a.m.n. Just get it over with.

"Captain. Slicer. Claw. Hitler. Red."

"For what company or companies do Captain. Slicer, Claw, Hitler, and Red work?"

"I don't know." The words exploded from her. Finally, a question she didn't have to fight. She tried to marshal her will to sidestep the next question.

"For what company or companies do Captain, Slicer, Claw, Hitler, and Red work?"

"I don't know!"

"Tell me about Captain."

"Captain is ... he is ... it is ... the leader."

"Tell me more about Captain."

Aldriena groaned. She closed her eyes but it made the spinning worse, so she snapped them back open again. She felt the sting of sweat in a cut on her temple.

"Captain is the leader of a group of aliens that made contact with Synchronicity."

Finally, there was some respite. Her statement took the program awhile to dissect. Aldriena tried to breathe deeply. Then she clenched her stomach muscles and opened her mouth trying to puke. When that didn't work, she tried to sleep. Nothing was working.

"What do you mean Captain is an alien? Tell me more about that."

"It is a cyborg that resides in an artificial body that moves in a ... an alien spinning motion. It has enslaved several stations and forces the inhabitants to partic.i.p.ate in virtual contests in order to attain ranks."

"Why haven't you informed the UNSF of this development?"

Aldriena laughed. Then she spat on the logo of the s.h.i.+ny machine.

"That'd be pretty dumb, now wouldn't it? If we did that you'd, oh, say, fly in with a heavily armed s.p.a.ce fleet and shut Insidious down before we could learn anything from them. Before Black Core, Bentra, and Reiss-Marck could a.n.a.lyze their technology and catapult themselves a century ahead of the compet.i.tion."

Ten.

"This is outrageous," Vendrati proclaimed.

Bren barely heard her. His mind had already accepted the report of the Black Core operative and moved on to the repercussions. Aliens! It fit the facts they had; Bren felt that if they'd been up against a rogue AI core they'd have lost already. But a small group of aliens, with technology ahead of that possessed by humans, could well explain past events.

"It makes sense," Bren said.

Everyone stared at him. He realized he must have interrupted the meeting in progress.

"Excuse me? Niachi has probably been suborned by the AI core. We already know it has some kind of mind control," Vendrati said.

"We thought the mind control was related to the suits," Jameson said. "Bren, why are you so willing to believe the Black Core operative?"

"The Reds are superior technology. Plain and simple. They're smaller, faster, and better armed. We only win because of strength of numbers. Yet, other than the superiority of those few machines, our foe is strangely weaker than an AI core would be. They don't fully take over our computers, initiate ma.s.s production of war machines, or anything else we saw before the Ma.r.s.eilles Purge."

"The purge is only one incident. For all we know, these super-AIs are each unique just like people are. This woman has created a ridiculously elaborate story to mislead us," Vendrati said. "Crates of the strange gear that we've seen on these stations were found on Xanadu. I believe this woman has been spreading elements of the rogue core to new stations."

"Yet the rangers on Xanadu have not reported any problem," Jameson said.

"Those rangers may already be lost to us," Vendrati said.

"The woman isn't making it up," Devin said. "She can't be fooling the Scorpion."

"If her brain has been rewired by an AI core, she could have the ability to defeat the Scorpion," Vendrati said. "In fact it's probably not even safe to keep her alive at all. We have no idea what she's capable of."

"The tissue we found inside the Reds is not an indication of bio AI technology," Bren said. "It was an alien brain. The Reds are cyborgs. Open your eyes."

Vendrati leaned forward as if she intended to continue the argument, but then she sat back. She frowned.

"Well, unless these aliens are the vanguard of a full-scale invasion, this is actually good news," Jameson said. "We can handle a small group of them much easier than a runaway core."

"I don't know what's really happening," Vendrati said. "But whether it's a core or aliens, luckily our course of action is about the same: isolate the stations from the net and bring more fleets out here to mop up the deep s.p.a.ce stations as fast as we can."

"True. For now, we're sticking with the official story of a rogue core," Jameson said. "That story gets the right level of concern from the megacorporations and makes them offer to help."

"So ... what will we do with the Black Core operative?" asked Devin.

"She needs to be isolated from the net," Vendrati said. "Until we're sure of this alien story, it would be foolish not to keep her under constant observation with severe restrictions on her activities. Her link should be disabled."

"I think we should bring her here," Bren said.

Everyone looked at him.

"She's allowed on these stations. She knows all about the Reds. We need to find out more."

"More than that; we can use her skills," Devin said. "She's used to infiltrating these stations, and they expect her to show up carrying special materials and information. We can send her in ahead of our next board and control deployment."

"Could be useful," Jameson said.

"Extremely so," Henley chimed in. "Imagine if she could disable their short range radar. We can keep ourselves off the public radar buoys with their local detection systems in our pocket, their warning would be reduced to nothing. They'd be oblivious to our BCP until we attached to the station."

"My people need to examine her longer," Vendrati said. "We could be sending an enemy ahead to warn the others. She may be suborned by the enemy, be it AI or a group of aliens."

"Then you have one week. Unless you can come up with some evidence that she's been compromised, I'll see if she can rendezvous with us before we hit Avalon," Jameson said.

"Then our plans remain the same?" Henley asked.

"If you really believe they're aliens, then we should consider opening a dialogue with them," Vendrati said.

"That would just serve to further warn them," Henley said.

"High Command believes if there really are aliens on these stations, then they may leave altogether," Jameson said. "We have orders to attempt capturing one alive. Even at the risk of our lives and hardware."

Everyone fell silent.

We could barely defeat them in open combat. How could we possibly capture one alive? Bren didn't have to say it aloud.

"I'd advise against that. We've been leaving marines behind on the bases," Henley said. "I don't have as much manpower as we started with." Jameson nodded. "We have a troop transport rendezvousing with us at Avalon, our next stop. They have two more battalions ready to a.s.sist. We need to come up with some nonlethal options for the Reds."

"With due respect, it's dangerous even to try. What are we going to do? Net them? They move so fast, it's hard to hit them even with the a.s.sAIL guns," Henley said.

"We could use poison gas," Devin suggested. "If they have biological components, then we could take advantage of that."

"Maybe some kind of electromagnetic weapon to burn out some of its cyblocs, or whatever they use for their computers," Jackson said.

"I suspect if we burn out a cyborg's electronics, then the bio component would eventually die as well," Bren said. "I don't know about their design, but if we had a human brain in a box, it would need the system working to provide oxygen, glucose, whatever. If you fried the system, then the brain would probably die in a minute or two."

Jameson waited until no one else had spoken for a while.

"We have a lot of glue at our disposal," Jameson said. "We found last time that the gear had been treated to defeat our run-of-the-mill glue weapons. But we have other compounds designed for heavier targets. We have a limited supply of a hardening foam grenade that is deemed too dangerous to use on infantry targets. But it will freeze a security robot in place. Given that these creatures are so small and light, it seems reasonable to expect that they may not be very physically strong."

"Distribute them among my men," Henley said.

"No," Bren said. "No, better to give them to the a.s.sAIL units, the machines will know the best time to deploy the grenades."

"We don't have any kind of launchers for them on board," Jameson said. "They're packaged as hand-thrown grenades."

"Clip them to the front of the a.s.sAILs," Bren maintained. "The throat tentacle is more than agile enough to throw a grenade. The machines will be able to combine the use of the grenades with their other weapons with preternatural foresight." Bren winced. Preternatural foresight? Why can't I talk like a normal person?

No one objected. Jameson nodded. "Very well. I'll have the grenades brought to the Guts."

"I can allocate some resources to communicating with the aliens," Vendrati said.

"No. Advisor Vendrati, we need you to focus on a.n.a.lyzing the bio residue of the alien ... flesh or brains, or whatever is inside those machines. Your new orders are to come up with weapons we can use now that we know they're cyborgs. Do we even know if they're carbon-based life? Can we poison them? Try to find out if their bodies do gas exchange with the outside air. Figure out what weaknesses they have that robot's don't."

"Yes, sir," Vendrati said.

Bren stared at Vendrati. She accepted those orders calmly. Considering all she has to work with is some burnt residue, it sounds like a tall order.

"If we succeed in capturing one alive, then we can attempt to communicate with it," Jameson said. "Until then, we have to make sure we take control of these bases."

A link signal woke Bren from a half sleep full of work anxieties and non sequitur s.e.xual forays involving Nicole Devin. He suspected that few woman had ever ridden an a.s.sAIL into battle, much less while completely naked. He checked the message. It was Lieutenant Hoffman transmitting from the Guts.

"Yeah?" Bren responded without opening his eyes. Anyone watching him lying twisted on his bed would believe him still asleep.

"I've sterilized the data from Meridian's ... from what we did."