charm.”
Dr. Irwin Frost 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.
Frost suppressed a slight smile. "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 the Northgate University professor did.
General Alexander Kincade, commanding general of Quantum Corps' Western Command base at Table Top, rubbed a hand across morning stubble on his chin. "More eager than I am. You sure this'll work, Doctor?"
Frost nodded. "It is a new technique but we've proven it at the Northgate lab many times. I've trained Lieutenant Winger here in many of 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 Souvranamh's got anything about HNRIV swarms or 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, Theo Souvranamh 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 his body, once the mech was inserted.
Johnny Winger patted down the incision that had been made in Souvranamh's neck. "Okay, Doc, subject's prepped and ready."
Dr. Frost handed him the injector tube. Inside, ANAD ticked over, ready to be launched.
"Steady even suction, Lieutenant," Frost reminded him. "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--"
Frost 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?" Frost asked.
"Tracking, Doctor," 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.
Frost 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. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark shapes visible off in the distance. He tweaked the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the grid.
"Aortic cavity, Doc. Looks like we're in. Where are we going now?"
Start Fourier Transform;
Start Delacroix Transform;
Start Trace Matching…
Souvranamh is florid and furious at the unannounced visit. He seethes at Winger.
"Quantum Corps seems to have a bad habit of interrupting vital work, Lieutenant. First, Bangkok…now up here. Maybe we should just hire you on…you spend enough time snooping around, don't you?"
Winger bounds past Souvranamh in the half-g gravity and slips into the central passageway of Alpha compartment, one end of the dumbbell-shaped station. "Don't blame Quantum Corps for this one, pal. We're just along for the ride." He checks with Gibby, who is right behind him, monitoring ANAD status. Gibby gives him a thumbs up. "UNISPACE and Captain Revel are running the show."
Souvranamh finds Revel just inside Alpha Compartment, studying the controls of a containment chamber inside one of the labs.
Revel snaps a finger and four space raiders instantly appear. "Take this man into custody." He waggles a finger at two Pharmex techs tending some equipment nearby. "These two as well."
Souvranamh protests, resisting the efforts of the raider troops and pulls free.
"What is the meaning of this out--"
Revel cuts him off. "By authority of the United Nations Security Affairs Commissioner, I am taking control of this facility. This lab is in probable violation of public health protocols and mandates on harboring dangerous organisms. Search the rest of the compartment--" he directs two of the soldiers. They spin about and shove their way past Souvranamh into the central passageway.
The station commander is a Norwegian named Rolf Holweg. Holweg is incredulous. "You can't be serious…we're doing critical research here…we're already working with WHO…and others…to combat HNRIV infections."
Souvranamh is adamant. "This lab is fully licensed by WHO--check the files, Captain. We've complied with all mandates. This is nothing but harassment…a fishing expedition."
Revel is unmoved. "I have my orders." Before Souvranamh and Holweg can argue any further, they are restrained and hustled out of the compartment, then taken back to Archimede under guard.
(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, Doc. 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 Dr. Frost 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--"
Dr. Frost 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 at Northgate 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 keyboa
rd, 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 Souvranamh's still body, lightly breathing, and back again. He half expected to see the bastard 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 Doc Frost 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 Souvranamh'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," Dr. Frost 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 crap around here--"
Souvranamh stirred lightly on the gurney, until Frost steadied his body. "He's coming back through Level 4," Frost muttered. "We'd better hurry, if we're going to get