Several minutes later, Wilson opened his eyes and looked at Ivanovich with something that approached wonder.
Lee noticed. “What?” she said. “What is it?”
Wilson looked up at Lee blankly, and then back to Ivanovich, and then at the body of Martina Ivanovich.
“Wilson,” Lee said.
“I think we better take back these bodies,” Wilson said.
“Why?” Lee asked, looking at the corpses.
“I’m not sure I can tell you,” Wilson said. “I don’t think you have the clearance.”
Lee looked back at Wilson, annoyed.
“It’s not about you,” Wilson assured her. “I’m pretty confident I don’t have the clearance either.”
Lee, not precisely satisfied, looked back at the Ivanoviches. “So you want us to haul these up to the Tub.”
“You don’t have to bring all of them,” Wilson said.
“Come again?” Lee said.
“You don’t have to bring their entire bodies,” Wilson said. “Their heads will do just fine.”
* * *
“You feel it, too, don’t you,” Abumwe said to Schmidt, during a break in negotiations. The two were in the conference room hallway, drinking the tea Schmidt had gotten them.
“Feel what, ma’am?” Schmidt said.
Abumwe sighed. “Schmidt, if you don’t want me to keep believing that you are entirely useless to me, then you have to actually be useful to me,” she said.
Schmidt nodded. “All right,” he said. “There’s something not right about Sub-Ambassador Ting.”
“That’s right,” Abumwe said. “Now tell me what that something not right is.”
“I don’t know,” Schmidt said. He saw Abumwe get a look on her face and held up his hand peremptorily. This surprised Abumwe into silence. “Sorry,” Schmidt said, hastily. “I say I don’t know because I’m not sure what the cause of it is. But I know what the result is. She’s being too easy on us in the negotiations. We’re getting too many of the things we want from her. We’re getting something close to a rubber stamp.”
“Yes,” Abumwe said. “I’d like to know why.”
“Maybe she’s just a bad negotiator,” Schmidt said.
“The Bula pulled out these parts of the negotiations specifically for more detailed attention,” Abumwe said. “This suggests they are not trivial to the Bula. The Bula also aren’t known for being pushovers in negotiations. I don’t think they’d put a poor negotiator in charge of this part of the process.”
“Do we know anything about Ting?” Schmidt asked.
“Nothing Hillary could find,” Abumwe said. “The Colonial Union files on diplomatic missions focus on the primary diplomats, not the secondary ones. I have her looking for more, but I don’t expect to find too much. In the meantime, what are your suggestions?”
Schmidt took a small moment to internally register surprise that Abumwe was indeed asking for options from him, and then said, “Keep doing what we’re doing. We are getting what we want from her. The thing we have to worry about at this point is getting them too soon, and getting done before the Tubingen finishes her mission.”
“I can come up with some reason to suspend negotiations until tomorrow,” Abumwe said. “I can ask for some more time to research some particular point. That won’t be difficult to do.”
“All right,” Schmidt said.
“On the subject of the Tubingen, any news from your friend?” Abumwe asked.
“I sent him an encrypted note on the next skip drone to the ship,” Schmidt said.
“You shouldn’t trust our encryption,” Abumwe said.
“I don’t,” Schmidt assured her. “But I think it would have been suspicious for me to send him an unencrypted note, considering the mission. The note itself is innocuous blather, which contains a line that says, ‘It was like that time on Phoenix Station.’”
“What does that mean?” Abumwe said.
“Basically it means ‘Tell me if something interesting is going on,’” Schmidt said. “He’ll understand it.”
“Do you want to explain to me how it is the two of you have your own little secret code?” Abumwe said. “Did you make it up together when you were six?”
“Uh,” Schmidt said, uncomfortable. “It just sort of came about.”
“Really,” Abumwe said.
“Harry would see you pissed at me during some negotiation or another and came up with it as a way to let me know he was interested in knowing the details later,” Schmidt said, quickly. He looked away as he said it.
“Are you actually that scared of me, Schmidt?” Abumwe said, after a second.
“I wouldn’t say ‘scared,’” Schmidt said. “I would say I have a healthy respect for your working methods.”
“Yes, well,” Abumwe said. “For the moment, at least, your terrified obsequiousness is not going to be useful to me. So stop it.”
“I’ll try,” Schmidt said.
“And let me know if you hear from your friend,” Abumwe said. “I don’t know what Sub-Ambassador Ting is up to, either. It’s making me uncomfortable. But I have a worry that somehow that wildcat colony on Wantji is involved. If it is, I want to know how before anyone else.”
* * *
“You want me to do what?” asked Doctor Tomek. They had taken the entire bodies of the Ivanoviches after all, and both of them were now spread out on examination tables. Doctor Tomek was too much of a professional to register displeasure at the sight and smell of the decayed bodies, but she was not notably pleased with Lieutenant Wilson for bringing them into her medical bay unannounced.
“Scan their brains,” Wilson said. “I’m looking for something.”
“What are you looking for?” Tomek asked.
“I’ll tell you if I find it,” Wilson said.
“Sorry, I don’t work that way,” Tomek said. She glanced over to Lieutenant Lee, who had remained after her soldiers had hauled the Ivanoviches into the medical bay. “Who is this guy?” she asked, pointing at Wilson.
“He’s temporarily replacing Mitchusson,” Lee said. “We’re borrowing him from a diplomatic mission. And there’s something else about him.”
“What?” Tomek asked.
Lee motioned with her head to Wilson, who took that as his cue.
“I’ve got top-level security clearance that allows me to order anyone on the ship to do what I want them to do,” Wilson said, to Tomek. “It’s left over from my last mission. They didn’t get around to revoking it from me.”
“I’ve already complained to Captain Augustyn about it,” Lee said. “He agrees it’s a crock of shit but also that there’s nothing we can do about it right now. He’ll send a complaint with the next skip drone. Until then, you’ve got to do what he tells you.”
“It’s still my medical bay,” Tomek said.
“Which is why I’m asking you to do the scan,” Wilson said, and nodded at the body scanner tucked into a cubbyhole in the back of the medical bay. “I’ve serviced those, and have trained on them. I could do the scan myself. But you’d do it better. I’m not trying to shut you out, Doctor. But if what I’m looking for isn’t actually there, then it’s best for everyone if my paranoid delusions are kept to myself.”
“And if it is there?” Tomek asked.
“Then things begin to get really complicated,” Wilson said. “So let’s hope we don’t find it.”
Tomek glanced back over to Lee, who shrugged. Wilson caught the substance of the shrug. Humor this idiot, it said. We’ll be rid of him soon enough. Well, that worked for him.
Tomek walked over to the cubbyhole and retrieved the scanner and the reflection plate, then came back to the examining table that held Vasily Ivanovich. She donned gloves, gently lifted Ivanovich’s head and set the plate behind it.
“Where’s the visual going?” Wilson asked. Tomek motioned with her head to the display above the examination table; Wilson turned it on. “Ready when you are,” he said. Tomek positioned the sca
nner, activated it and after a couple of seconds looked up at the display.
“What the hell?” she asked, after a moment.
“Lovely,” Wilson said, looking at the display. “And by ‘lovely,’ I mean ‘Oh, crap.’”
“What is it?” Lee asked, coming over to get a better look at the thing Wilson and Tomek were looking at.
“I’ll give you a hint,” Wilson said. “We’ve all got one in our head.”
“That’s a BrainPal?” Lee asked, pointing at the screen.
“Got it in one,” Wilson said, and leaned in toward the display. “Looks like a little different design than the version I worked on when I was in CDF Research and Development. But it can’t be anything else.”
“This guy is a civilian,” Tomek said. “What the hell is he doing with a BrainPal?”
“Two possible explanations,” Wilson said. “One, it’s not a BrainPal, and we’re looking at a really coincidentally-arranged tumor. Two, our friend Vasily Ivanovich isn’t really a civilian. One of these is more likely than the other.”
Tomek glanced over at Martina Ivanovich. “What about her?” she asked.
“I suspect they’re a matching set,” Wilson said. “Shall we find out?”
They were indeed a matching set.
“You know what this means,” Tomek said, after she shut off the scanner.
Wilson nodded. “I told you this would get complicated.”
Lee looked over at the two of them. “I’m not following.”
“We’ve got BrainPals in the heads of two apparent civilians,” Wilson said. “Which means they’re probably not civilians. Which suggests this wildcat colony might not be the freelance colonization effort that it’s been advertised as being. And now we know why all the computers and records were destroyed by the colonists.”
“Except for the data chip you found in this guy,” Lee said, pointing to Vasily Ivanovich.
“I don’t think he swallowed it to save it,” Wilson said. “I think he swallowed it because they were being overrun and he didn’t have time to destroy it any other way.”
“What was on the chip?” Tomek said.
“A bunch of daily status reports,” Wilson said. Lee frowned at this, clearly not seeing how that would matter. “It’s not what data were on the chip that was important,” Wilson continued. “It was the fact that data were saved in a memory structure that’s proprietary to BrainPals. The fact it exists implies someone was using a BrainPal. The fact the BrainPal exists implies this is more than just a wildcat colony.”
“We need to tell Captain Augustyn about this,” Lee said.
“He’s the captain,” Tomek said. “He probably already knows.”
“If he already knew, he probably wouldn’t have let me order you to examine these two,” Wilson said. “No matter what my security level. No, I think this is going to be as much of a surprise to him as it is to us.”
“So we tell him,” Lee said. “We tell him, right?”
“Yes,” Wilson said. “He’ll send a skip drone detailing what we’ve found. And I expect that immediately thereafter we’ll get new orders, telling us that it’s no longer just an extraction job.”
“What will it be now?” Lee asked.
“A cover-up,” Tomek said, and Wilson nodded. “Destroy any evidence this was anything but a wildcat colony.”
“We’re supposed to be destroying all the evidence anyway,” Lee said.
“Not just down there,” Wilson said. He pointed to the Ivanoviches. “I mean turning these two—and their BrainPals—into a fine powder. Not to mention obliterating any information on what we just found out, and that data card we found. And if these two really were still active in the CDF, I suspect they’ll be posthumously demoted for not blowing their own heads off with a shotgun.”
Lee went to speak with Captain Augustyn; Tomek stored the bodies. Wilson wandered toward the officers mess to get a cup of coffee. As he did so, he pinged his BrainPal’s message queue and found there was a message there from Hart Schmidt. Wilson smiled and prepared for a delightful dose of Schmidt’s special brand of wan neuroticism. He stopped smiling when Hart noted he’d been assigned to be Ambassador Abumwe’s right-hand man for the Bula negotiations and that Sub-Ambassador Ting’s personality was like that one time on Phoenix Station he and Wilson had met up with that other Bula.
“Shit,” Wilson said. There’s no way that Hart put that phrasing in that sentence coincidentally.
Wilson thought about it for several minutes before muttering, “Fuck it,” composing a note and encrypting it. Then with his BrainPal he took an image of his coffee, created a steganographic picture with it and the encoded note, addressed it to Hart and sent it off to the data queue for transmission on the next skip drone, which given the bombshell Lee was dropping into Captain Augustyn’s lap at the moment would probably go out almost instantly.
Wilson wasn’t under the impression that his sleight-of-hand encoding of the message into the image of the coffee would stay unnoticed forever. What he was hoping for was that it would stay encrypted long enough that Hart could do whatever he needed with the information before it got found out.
“Hopefully that won’t take too long,” Wilson said, to his coffee. His coffee was mute on the subject. Wilson slurped some of it and then called up the data he’d transferred from Vasily Ivanovich’s data card into his BrainPal. They were indeed entirely pedestrian reports on colony life, but Wilson had already found something important in there. He didn’t want to miss anything else. He suspected he didn’t have all that much time left to go through the data before he was ordered to delete all of it.
* * *
Schmidt didn’t know what strings Ambassador Abumwe had to pull to get her way, but she pulled them. Across the table from her and Schmidt were Anissa Rodabaugh, chief of the mission for the Bula negotiations, Colonel Liz Egan, the liaison between the Colonial Defense Forces and the Department of State, and Colonel Abel Rigney, whose exact position was not known to Hart but whose presence here was nevertheless slightly unsettling. The three of them eyed Abumwe coolly; she returned the favor. No one was paying attention to Schmidt, and he was fine with that.
“We’re here,” Egan said, to Abumwe. “You have five minutes before you and Ambassador Rodabaugh have to get back to it. So tell us why you so urgently needed to see us all.”
“You haven’t been entirely forthcoming with me about this wildcat colony on Wantji,” Abumwe said. Schmidt noted the clipped tone that Abumwe’s voice took on when she was especially irritated; he wondered if it was noticeable to anyone else at the table.
“In what way?” Egan asked.
“In that it’s not a wildcat colony at all, it’s an under-the-radar Colonial Defense Forces outpost,” Abumwe said.
This received about ten seconds of silence, with Rodabaugh, Egan and Rigney studiously not looking at one another. “I’m not entirely sure why you think that is,” Egan said.
“Are we going to waste the next five minutes with this sort of bullshit, Colonel?” Abumwe said. “Or are we actually going to talk about how this is going to affect our negotiations?”
“It’s not going to affect the negotiations at all—,” Rodabaugh said.
“Really,” Abumwe said, cutting her off. Schmidt noted the chagrin on Rodabaugh’s face at this, but she and Abumwe were technically of the same diplomatic rank, so there was little she could do about it. “Because, Anissa, I have a Bula sub-ambassador I’ve been talking to for the last day who I am almost entirely certain knows more about this so-called colony than I do. I think as a result I’m being led down a very short pier. I think when I get pushed off, the entire negotiation is going to go down with me. If I fail at a negotiation because of my own failures, I accept that. If I fail because I’m being screwed by my own side, that I will not accept.”
Colonel Rigney, who had been silent to this point, turned to Schmidt. “Your friend Harry Wilson’s on the Tubingen,” he said, to Schmidt. “I just checke
d through my BrainPal. He’s the one who’s feeding you information.”
Schmidt opened his mouth, but Abumwe reached out to touch Schmidt on the shoulder. This as much as anything else shocked Schmidt into silence; he couldn’t remember another time Abumwe had physically touched him before. “If Hart or Harry Wilson have done anything, it’s been on my orders,” she said.
“You ordered him and Wilson to essentially spy on a Colonial Defense Forces mission,” Rigney said.
“I reminded them of their obligation to help me achieve our goals as diplomats,” Abumwe said.
“By spying on the Colonial Defense Forces mission,” Rigney repeated.
“I appreciate the attempt to run out the clock by distracting me into a side discussion, Colonel Rigney, but let’s not,” Abumwe said. “I repeat: We have a military mission on a Bula world. I’m almost certain the Bula we are negotiating with are aware of it.”
“What’s your proof of that?” Rodabaugh asked.
“Nothing hard,” Abumwe said. “But I know when people aren’t negotiating in good faith.”
“That’s it?” Rodabaugh said. “You have a feeling? You’re dealing with an alien species, for Christ’s sake. Their whole psychology is entirely different.”
“And that doesn’t matter at all, because in fact we have an illegal military outpost on this alien species’ planet,” Abumwe said. “If I am wrong, then we lose nothing. If I am right, however, then we risk the failure of the entire process.”
“What do you want from us, Ambassador?” Egan asked Abumwe.
“I want to know what’s really going on,” Abumwe said. “It’s bad enough that I went into negotiations having to deal with the possibility that the Bula would discover we snuck a military ship into their territory to remove an attacked wildcat colony, but at least I could spin that if I had to. There is no way to spin a CDF ship coming to the aid of a covert military installation.”
“It wasn’t a covert military operation,” Rigney said, leaning forward.
This got Egan’s attention. “Are you really going to do this, Abel?” she asked, turning to Rigney.
“She already knows more than she should, Liz,” Rigney said. “I don’t think a little context is going to matter at this point.” He turned back to Abumwe. “It really is a wildcat colony,” he said.