The now nervous marine squad escorted their prisoner along the connecting tube to the bus. Jacqueline Couteur sat beside one of the windows, five guns lined up on her. She watched the bare walls of sterile rock impassively as the bus rolled back across the crater and into a downward sloping tunnel that led deep into the asteroid.
First Admiral Samual Aleksandrovich hadn’t set foot on his native Russian-ethnic birth planet Kolomna for the last fifty-three of his seventy-three years; he hadn’t been back for a holiday, nor even his parents’ funeral. Regular visits might have been deemed inappropriate given that Confederation Navy career officers were supposed to renounce any national ties when they walked through the academy entrance; for a First Admiral to display any undue interest would have been a completely unacceptable breach of diplomatic etiquette. People would have understood his attending the funerals, though. So everyone assumed he was applying the same kind of steely discipline to his private affairs that ruled his professional life.
They were all wrong. Samual Aleksandrovich had never been back because there was nothing on the wretched planet with its all-over temperate climate which interested him, not family nor culture nor nostalgic scenery. The reason he left in the first place was because he couldn’t stand the idea of spending a century helping his four brothers and three sisters run the family fruit-farming business. The same geneering which had produced his energetic one metre eighty frame, vivid copper hair, and enhanced metabolism, bestowed a life expectancy of at least a hundred and twenty years.
By the time he was nineteen years old he had come to realize that such a life would be a prison sentence given the vocations available on a planet just emerging from its agrarian phase. A potentially blessed life should not be faced with such finite horizons, for if it was it would turn from being a joy into a terrible burden. Variety was sanity. So on the day after his twentieth birthday he had kissed his parents and siblings goodbye, walked the seventeen kilometres into town through a heavy snowfall, and signed on at the Confederation Navy recruitment office.
Metaphorically, and otherwise, he had never looked back. He had never been anything other than an exemplary officer; he’d seen combat seven times, flown anti-pirate interdictions, commanded a flotilla raiding an illegal antimatter-production station, and gained a substantial number of distinguished service awards. But appointment to the post of First Admiral required a great deal more than an exemplary record. Much as he hated it, Samual Aleksandrovich had to play the political game; appearing before Assembly select committees, giving unofficial briefings to senior diplomats, wielding Fleet Intelligence information with as much skill as he did the rapier (he was year champion at the academy). His ability to pressure member states was admired by the Assembly President’s staffers, as much for its neatness as the millions of fuseodollars saved by circumventing fleet deployment to trouble spots; and their word counted for a great deal more than the Admiralty, who advanced the names of candidates to the Assembly’s Navy Committee.
In the six years he had held the office he had done a good job keeping the peace between sometimes volatile planetary governments and the even more mercurial asteroid settlements. Leaders and politicians respected his toughness and fairness.
A great deal of his renowned even-handed approach was formed when at the age of thirty-two he was serving as a lieutenant on a frigate that had been sent to Jantrit to assist the Edenists in some kind of armed rebellion (however unbelievable it sounded at the time). The frigate crew had watched helplessly while the antimatter was detonated, then spent three days in exhausting and often fruitless manoeuvres to rescue survivors of the tragedy. Samual Aleksandrovich had led one of the recovery teams after they rendezvoused with a broken starscraper. With heroic work that won him a commendation he and his crew-mates saved eighteen Edenists trapped in the tubular honeycomb of polyp. But one of the rooms they forced their way into was filled with corpses. It was a children’s day club that had suffered explosive decompression. As he floated in desolated horror across the grisly chamber, he realized the Edenists were just as human as himself, and just as fallible. After that the persistent snide comments from fellow officers about the tall aloof bitek users annoyed him intensely. From then on he devoted himself body and soul to the ideal of enforcing the peace.
So when the Eurydice had docked at Trafalgar carrying a flek from Lieutenant-Commander Kelven Solanki about the small possibility (and he had been most unwilling to commit himself) that Laton was still alive and stirring from his self-imposed exile, First Admiral Samual Aleksandrovich had taken a highly personal interest in the Lalonde situation.
Where Laton was concerned, Samual Aleksandrovich exhibited neither his usual fairness nor a desire for justice to be done. He just wanted Laton dead. And this time there would be no error.
Even after his staff had edited down Murphy Hewlett’s neural nanonics recording of the marine squad’s fateful jungle mission, to provide just the salient points, there was three hours of sensorium memory to access. When he surfaced from Lalonde’s savage heat and wearying humidity, Samual Aleksandrovich remained lost in thought for quarter of an hour, then took a commuter car down to the Fleet Intelligence laboratories.
Jacqueline Couteur had been isolated in a secure examination room. It was a cell cut into living rock with a transparent wall of metallized silicon whose structure was reinforced with molecular-binding-force generators. On one side it was furnished with a bed, wash-basin, shower, toilet, and a table, while the other side resembled a medical surgery with an adjustable couch and a quantity of analysis equipment.
She sat at the table, dressed in a green clinical robe. Five marines were in the cell with her, four of them carrying chemical-projectile guns, the fifth a TIP carbine.
Samual Aleksandrovich stood in front of the transparent wall looking at the drab woman. The monitoring room he was in resembled a warship’s bridge, a white composite cube with a curved rank of consoles, all facing the transparent wall. The impersonality disturbed him slightly, an outsized vivarium.
Jacqueline Couteur returned his stare levelly. She should never have been able to do that, not a simple farmer’s wife from a backwoods colony world. There were diplomats with eighty years of experienced duplicity behind them who broke into a sweat when Samual Aleksandrovich turned his gaze on them.
He likened the experience to looking into the eyes of an Edenist habitat mayor at some formal event, when the consensus intellect of every adult in the habitat looked back at him. Judging.
Whatever you are, he thought, you are not Jacqueline Couteur. This is the moment I’ve dreaded since I took my oath of office. A new threat, one beyond anything we know. And the burden of how to deal with it will inevitably fall heaviest on my navy.
“Do you understand the method of sequestration yet?” He asked Dr Gilmore, who was heading the research team.
The doctor made a penitent gesture. “Not as yet. She’s certainly under the control of some outside agency, but so far we haven’t been able to locate the point where it interfaces with her nervous system. I’m a neural nanonics expert, and we’ve got several physicists on the team. But I’m not entirely sure we even have a specialization to cover this phenomenon.”
“Tell me what you can.”
“We ran a full body and neural scan on her, looking for implants. You saw what she and the other sequestrated colonists could do back on Lalonde?”
“Yes.”
“That ability to produce the white fireballs and electronic warfare impulses must logically have some kind of focusing mechanism. We found nothing. If it’s there it’s smaller than our nanonics, a lot smaller. Atomic sized, at least, maybe even sub-atomic.”
“Could it be biological? A virus?”
“You’re thinking of Laton’s proteanic virus? No, nothing like that.” He turned and beckoned to Euru.
The tall black-skinned Edenist left the monitor console he was working at and came over. “Laton’s virus attacked cells,” he explained. “Specifically neural cells, altering their composition and DNA. This woman’s brain structure remains perfectly normal, as far as we can tell.”
“If she can knock out a marine’s combat electronics at over a hundred metres, how do you know your analysis equipment is giving you genuine readings?” Samual Aleksandrovich asked.
The two scientists exchanged a glance.
“Interference is a possibility we’ve considered,” Euru admitted. “The next stage of our investigation will be to acquire tissue samples and subject them to analysis outside the range of her influence—if she lets us take them. It would require a great deal of effort if she refused to cooperate.”
“Has she been cooperative so far?”
“For most of the time, yes. We’ve witnessed two instances of visual pattern distortion,” Dr Gilmore said. “When her jeans and shirt were removed she assumed the image of an apelike creature. It was shocking, but only because it was so unusual and unexpected. Then later on she tried to entice the marines to let her out by appearing as an adolescent girl with highly developed secondary sexual characteristics. We have AV recordings of both occasions; she can somehow change her body’s photonic-emission spectrum. It’s definitely not an induced hallucination, more like a chameleon suit’s camouflage.”
“What we don’t understand is where she gets the energy to produce these effects,” Euru said. “The cell’s environment is strictly controlled and monitored, so she can’t be tapping Trafalgar’s electrical power circuits. And when we ran tests on her urine and faeces we found nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly there’s no unusual chemical activity going on inside her.”
“Lori and Darcy claimed Laton warned them of an energy virus,” Samual Aleksandrovich said. “Is such a thing possible?”
“It may well be,” Euru said. His eyes darkened with emotion. “If that creature was telling the truth he would probably have been attaching the nearest linguistic equivalents to a totally new phenomenon. An organized energy pattern which can sustain itself outside a physical matrix is a popular thesis with physicists. Electronics companies have been interested in the idea for a long time. It would bring about a radical transformation in our ability to store and manipulate data. But there has never been any practical demonstration of such an incorporeal matrix.”
Samual Aleksandrovich switched his glance back to the woman behind the transparent wall. “Perhaps you are looking at the first.”
“It would be an extraordinary advance from our present knowledge base,” Dr Gilmore said.
“Have you asked the Kiint if it is possible?”
“No,” Dr Gilmore admitted.
“Then do so. They may tell us, they may not. Who understands how their minds work? But if anyone knows, they will.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about her?” Samual Aleksandrovich asked. “Has she said anything?”
“She is not very communicative,” Euru said.
The First Admiral grunted, and activated the intercom beside the cell’s door. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.
The marines inside the cell stiffened. Jacqueline Couteur’s expression never changed; she looked him up and down slowly.
“I know,” she said.
“Who exactly am I talking to?”
“Me.”
“Are you part of Laton’s schemes?”
Was there the faintest twitch of a smile on her lips? “No.”
“What do you hope to achieve on Lalonde?”