Insidious (10 page)

Four

Bren inhaled deeply, but the thousand-times-recycled air of his quarters couldn’t dispel the fatigue that gripped him. He traded a curse for a gulp of orange juice, then closed his eyes and linked into the meeting.

Reality skipped and found him in a rigid chair at an elegant black table with microphones, laptops, and notes. Virtual meetings didn’t require such accoutrements, but humans reveled in their traditions. Bren opened the folder before him. His meeting notes slid across the pages as he mentally flipped through them. He glanced at the others trying to assess how much enmity awaited him.

Jackson, the
Vigilant
’s ECM officer, sat next to Bren providing a slight psychological boost since Bren and Jackson both focused on the practical rather than the political. Jackson’s wiry frame reflected his recent exposure to the grueling academy regimen. He had curly black locks, dark skin, and a clean-shaven face. Bren knew the officer’s attitude included a fearless aspect that Bren had preserved in himself to get things done.

Colonel Henley’s avatar waited with grim patience, ensconced directly across the circle of seats. Henley’s face held more lines and looked more thickset than Jackson looked. His copper hair lay flat over the weathered face. Bren searched Henley’s visage for any clue of anger. Bren knew the fight with the mysterious Bentra robot had forced Henley’s marines to endure extra punishment with the Circle Four security force. Henley looked calm. Did the colonel have a torpedo for Bren and the ASSAIL team? If he did, Bren knew he might hesitate to defend himself, because he felt guilty about the delay in protecting the marines.

The female avatar next to Henley represented Advisor Isabella Vendrati. Vendrati wore white civilian business clothing and heavy-framed glasses. Bren wondered for the hundredth time what attached her to the obsolete vision correction, especially in a virtual setting. Bren figured Vendrati must be in her fifties or even older, because she kept her glasses, but she looked like she was in her forties. Bren resisted the urge to grind his teeth. The advisor’s arrogance and pontification annoyed Bren. She’d try to claw him down with her skeletal hands just to reinforce her own position.

Admiral Jameson reigned as the senior ranking officer at the meeting. His avatar looked appropriately patriarchal, with gray hair and a severe face with beady eyes. Bren estimated that the admiral would possess the same authoritative aura wearing an ensign’s uniform.

Shortly after Bren arrived, he felt the tabletop shift against the edge of his hand. He watched the table grow in circumference, opening a spot on Henley’s right. The image of another woman materialized to fill it. She wore the same space force uniform with a rank of lieutenant colonel. She wore her medium-length dark hair pulled back.

Bren stared for a moment. He recognized her beautiful face. Nicole Devin. An academy friend of Bren’s and his ex-lover. Her avatar didn’t have any makeup and didn’t need any. She hadn’t changed much. She had flawless skin and a strong, straight nose. She still looked as wholesome and innocent as she had when he’d met first her, a farm girl fresh to the academy.

He felt happy to see her. They’d parted as friends, although they hadn’t kept in touch. He recalled she was in Intelligence.

As soon as Devin arrived, Jameson introduced her.

“Everyone, this is Lieutenant Colonel Devin. She’s attached to our unit from Intelligence. She’s familiar with all of you, so introductions in the other direction aren’t necessary. Let’s start with your impressions of the Thermopylae board and control.”

Vendrati opened with an attack, true to her character.

“It was a disaster,” she said, straightening her archaic glasses. “Sixty percent of the frontline ASSAIL units destroyed in our first raid. What’s wrong with them?”

Everyone looked at Bren.

“Nothing’s wrong with them,” Bren said. “They performed well within the bounds we expected. If anything, better.”

“We didn’t expect to lose six of them. We didn’t expect to lose even one of them!” Vendrati said.

“They handled the Circle Fours flawlessly, when they weren’t fighting the unknown,” Colonel Henley said. “It all comes down to that one super robot. How could one machine be so powerful? I watched the ASSAIL units in action against the Circle Fours; it’s hard to believe that six of them were taken out.”

Bren relaxed a notch, having found another ally in the meeting.

“We handled the humans and known security robots,” Bren said. “No military robots besides our own were expected on Thermopylae. The disaster, as you put it, was due to that one wildcard robot, not any malfunction or underperformance of the ASSAIL units.”

“Is that what that thing was? A military robot? From whose military?” asked Vendrati. Her tone drove Bren’s ire up a notch. Bren knew the question had a score of possible answers, including a few governments and an equal number of corporations. The corporations occasionally fielded sophisticated combat robotics but didn’t typically admit to possessing such forces.

“Bentra may have had a program to develop elite security machines for certain clients. Or maybe they were even keeping something on the back burner to start making bids on military contracts,” Devin said. “The third possibility I’m considering is that it was a personal toy of the CEO.”

“Why are you theorizing? We captured everyone on the base … aren’t they in interrogation yet?” asked Bren.

“No one’s talking,” said Jameson. “We’d go right to the top, but the four main execs who ran the show were dead by the time we got to them.”

“Dead as in … suicide?” Bren asked.

“Unknown. Let us worry about that. We’ll tell you what we find out about the robot,” Jameson said. “Concentrate on getting a more favorable kill ratio next time.”

Bren didn’t let it go. “What about the station databases? A machine that complex has to have maintenance records, testing runs, all sorts of activities should be logged for it.”

Jameson shook his head. “We’re looking at a lot of scorched earth here. A huge amount of data was scoured clean despite our attempts to fragment the system and isolate as many databases as we could. They kept the sensitive records held tight in the high security area and managed to wipe it. All we have is a bunch of mundane medical records, VR time logs, ordinary, low-priority stuff. And most of that is from more than a year ago. They’ve recently cut way back on the record keeping. We don’t know if it’s because of this operation.”

“Don’t underestimate the security discipline of Bentra or any of the other corporations,” Devin added. “They’ve been locked in a vicious game of espionage and counterespionage for decades now, and they know how to keep secrets. The UNSF is an information sieve by comparison.”

“Any evidence of a full-blown AI core?” asked Vendrati.

“Nothing obvious,” said Jameson. “Of course, we have everything in quarantine for a lengthy analysis in case there was one and it tried to persist itself somewhere.” He sighed. “No, what we have looks more like mind control.”

“What?” Vendrati voiced everyone’s reaction.

“None of those suited freaks we herded in even remember what the suits are for. At least that’s what they claim. So far, our doctors are saying the detainees really don’t remember. Some kind of amnesia from an unknown cause. We found a few booklets saying that the outfits are part of a team-building exercise, a kind of special offsite meeting activity that involves breaking down the current social structure and creating a new one on the station. At first I thought it was crap, but now I’m wondering if they really were doing some heavy duty social experiments.”

“Keep in mind these are still the early stages,” Devin added. “I think we’ll be able to piece something together soon. There’ll be more traces of what’s going on somewhere.”

The group went through a summary of the hardware confiscated by Henley’s forces. They had seized several Circle Fours that had been down for repairs at the time of the raid, a small arsenal of nonlethal weapons, and a long list of data storage devices. UNSF marines still scavenged through the base looking for hidden caches of data and equipment. The Bentra personnel had strong privacy rights on the data in their links, but the threat of a persisted AI core overrode those rights, so the UNSF had the link memory of every individual on the base, living and dead, who had a link.

Bren bristled at the thought. He deeply hated the link scans he had to submit to as part of a team that dealt with the AI cores routinely. He wondered if there were technicians back on Earth that got a kick out of poring through his link memory every week.

A voice interrupted his thought stream.

“Major Marcken?”

“Yes? Ah, sorry, I didn’t catch that?”

Bren had lost track of the meeting conversation. The others exchanged looks that said,
not again
. That part irritated him the most. They figured that because he often lost the thread of conversation, he couldn’t interpret the looks they shared with one another. They mistook him for a total social idiot, not just an engineer with link bias.

Being able to concentrate and block out everything else is an advantage in my job
, he wanted to protest.

“I said … do you have any further recommendations?” Jameson asked.

“Can we make it a priority to look for the hardware support for the robot?” Bren asked. “There should be spare parts or a maintenance room. The equivalent of our ASSAIL nexus.”

“I ordered that already, and we came up empty so far,” Vendrati said.

“I’ll make sure we don’t miss anything,” Henley said. “Ms. Vendrati’s people told us what to look for.”

“Very well, you have another week to find everything you can,” Jameson said. “Marcken is concentrating on improving the ASSAILs given that we may encounter more automated resistance in the other stations. Ms. Vendrati is handling our lab support back home for all aspects of this. Jackson is still looking at the storage unit ghosting we did during the raid to see if we captured some data they erased at the time of the incursion. Devin is heading up the interrogations and investigating the Bentra personnel, including the slaves.”

Jameson paused for further comments, but none came.

“I’ll schedule another meeting when we have some more pieces of the puzzle,” Jameson finished. “As I said, barring incident, we’re moving on in a week, so get whatever you need from Thermopylae now.”

Bren switched out of the virtual meeting and opened his eyes back in his quarters. He tried to sweep away the foul mood that always followed one of his communications incidents. He knew the others were used to it by now, but it disturbed him anyway.

He recalled a conversation he had heard once:

“What’s wrong with Marcken today? Is his link messed up or something?”

“He’s got link bias,” said the reply. “Just repeat yourself if he doesn’t hear you.”

“How did that happen? All the core work screw up his brain?”

“Heh. Maybe one of them rewrote his software.”

They meant Bren suffered from source bias that tended toward his link. The links were designed to mimic the brain’s own natural data sources, and most people could use their links in a source-agnostic way. A change in the data on either side could distract them to one source or another, like a loud noise distracted someone from a book they were reading.

Bren’s glitch was rare. It usually came up with high-bandwidth link users. Someone with source bias could be hard to distract from one source to another. Bren had a link source bias that could prevent him from noticing data on other channels or from his own eyes and ears. Polite people just called him distracted. He knew that Nicole didn’t like it. She had said that it would hold him back in the space force. He’d done well enough, though. This job was suited to him. It had a lot more technical involvement and less politics than an Earthside assignment. He wondered if Nicole would keep her distance this time.

Bren called in his handlers to help sanitize the ASSAILs and transfer their logs over for analysis. He spent the evening in the Guts going over the video from the raid. He stepped through the images slavishly, concentrating on the mysterious robot whenever it appeared in the footage.

Glimpses of the enemy machine revealed a foe that maneuvered with deadly prescience. Bren learned nothing of the weapon system that had destroyed much of his ASSAIL team. As he watched a clip of the thing retreating, he realized that its movement disturbed him.

“Something is wrong with the way it moves,” he said aloud.

Hoffman snapped out of a virtual interface over by his station and joined Bren.

“Yes, it moves too fast,” he said.

“More than that. Here in the pool area, watch it swirl away after the exchange of fire. When I saw it had spider legs and a spherical body, I assumed it walked like a spider or an insect. But it doesn’t walk … it
spins
. I can see a line of its footprints in a couple of these images, and I really do mean a line: it spins and places the next counterclockwise foot on the ground. It only has one or two feet on the ground at any given time.”

“That makes no sense,” Hoffman said. “No animal walks like that, and with good reason. There’s no way it could be that fast without using all those legs to push off the ground in various directions.”