We Only Need the Heads

  “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 checked 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.

  “A wildcat colony with CDF soldiers in it,” Abumwe said. The skepticism in her voice was impossible to miss.

  “Yes,” Rigney said. “Since the Conclave has restricted us and other unaffiliated species from colonizing, we’ve been dropping a few CDF members into wildcat colonies. The rest of the colonists don’t know. We modify their bodies to look and act like natural human bodies, but keep their BrainPals in. They record data and send it along occasionally. We recruit CDF members with a background in technical work so they usually end up being in control of their colonies’ communications systems.”

  “To what end?” Abumwe asked.

  “We want to see how the Conclave responds to wildcat colonies,” Rigney said. “Whether it sees them as a threat, whether they respond to them the same way as an official colony, and whether ultimately wildcat colonies—or colonies that give the appearance of being wildcat colonies—are a way we can keep expanding our presence without having a conflict with the Conclave.”

  “And you thought colonizing a planet already claimed by another species was a smart thing to do,” Abumwe said.

  Rigney spread his hands. “We don’t pick the planets,” he said. “We just put our people into the colony undercover.”

  “How many of your people were on Wantji?” Abumwe asked.

  “We typically put in a couple of people,” Rigney said. “Most wildcat colonies are small. We’ll put in one for every fifty colonists or so.” He turned to Schmidt. “How many did your friend Wilson wash up?”

  Schmidt glanced over at Abumwe, who nodded. “Two, sir,” he said.

  “That sounds about right,” Rigney said. He settled back in his chair.

  “What do we do about this?” Abumwe asked.

  “And by ‘we,’ you mean ‘you,’” Rigney said.

  “Yes,” Abumwe said.

  “We don’t do anything,” Egan said. “The Bula haven’t brought it up to us.”

  “We’re not going to be the ones to bring it up to them,” Rodabaugh said. “If they do ask about the wildcat colony, then we tell them that as soon as we found out about it, we moved to remove them—so quickly that we didn’t ask permission first, so sorry. We’ll be out of there before then.”

  “And if they find out about the CDF members among them?” Abumwe asked.

  Rigney pointed at Schmidt. “We have them,” he said. “We have them both. More specifically, we have their heads, where their BrainPals are.”

  Abumwe gawked at the three of them. “You’re joking, right?” she said. “The Bula are not that stupid.”

  “No one said they are stupid,” Rigney said. “But all our intelligence suggests that the Bula don’t know the wildcat colony was there, and they weren’t the ones who attacked it. We’re going to proceed with the negotiations as they are.”

  “And if they ask me directly about it? Contrary to all expectation they might,” Abumwe said.

  “Then you don’t know anything about it,” Rodabaugh said.

  “To be clear, you’re asking me to lie to the Bula,” Abumwe said, to Rodabaugh.

  “Yes,” Rodabaugh said.

  “You understand I think this is a bad idea,” Abumwe said.

  Rodabaugh looked annoyed with Abumwe, but it was Egan who answered. “The directive for this is coming from over all of our heads, Ambassador,” she said. “And none of us have the luxury of arguing with it.”

  “Right,” Abumwe said. She got up and walked out of the room without uttering another word.

  From their side of the table, Rodabaugh, Egan and Rigney looked over at Schmidt.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said, tried to smile, and failed.

  Harry Wilson entered the bridge of the Tubingen; a surprised Captain Jack Augustyn looked up, along with his executive officer and other bridge crew. He gave them a couple of seconds for their BrainPals to register and label him. Then he said, “I think we’re in trouble.”

  Wilson saw Captain Augustyn have an internal debate whether to jump on him for his unconventional entrance and then make a choice, in the space of half a second. “Explain,” he said.

  “We have a couple of CDF corpses in the meat locker right now,” Wilson said.

  “Yes,” Augustyn said. “So what?”

  “I think there should be another one in there,” Wilson said.

  “Excuse me?” Augustyn said.

  “We have two dead CDF,” Wilson said. “I think there was another one on the colony. I’ve been going through Vasily Ivanovich’s data. It’s where I found the data stored in a BrainPal-readable format. But some of the documents aren’t originally Vasily’s. Some of them are from Martina Ivanovich, who forwarded them to Vasily using a BrainPal-to-BrainPal protocol. And some of them are from a guy named Drew Talford. Who also sent them BrainPal to BrainPal.”

  “We have our people on the planet now, identifying the dead,” Augustyn said. “They’ll find him.”

  “They have found him,” Wilson said. “I wouldn’t be bothering you with this if I hadn’t already checked.”

  “If they found him, then what’s the problem?” asked Selena Yuan, the Tubingen’s executive officer.

  “They didn’t find all of him,” Wilson said. “He’s missing his head.”

  “I would imagine a lot of the colonists are missing limbs and body parts,” Augustyn said. “They were attacked. And it’s been a week since the attack, so scavengers have been at them.”

  “Lots of them are missing body parts,” Wilson agreed, and then sent Augustyn and Yuan an image through his BrainPal. “None of the rest of them are missing a body part that’s been cleanly separated from the rest of their body.”

  There was a moment while Augustyn and Yuan examined the picture. “No one’s found the head,” Augustyn asked, after a minute.

  “No,” Wilson said. “I’ve been having them look intensively for a couple of hours. There are bodies missing heads, but the heads are usually found not too far away, or the separation is ragged. This guy’s head isn’t near the body. It isn’t anywhere.”

  “Some animal could have run off with it,” Yuan suggested.

  “I
t’s possible,” Wilson said. “On the other hand, when the head of a CDF soldier has been cut cleanly from his body and his head is nowhere to be found, I’d suggest it’s not prudent to assume some animal is making a snack of it.”

  “You assume it’s been taken by whoever attacked the colony,” Augustyn said.

  “Yes,” Wilson said. “And while I’m at it, I think that whoever told us that the Bula didn’t know the colony was here guessed really badly wrong. I think not only did the Bula know it was here, I’d be guessing they’re the ones who made the raid. If they didn’t know it was here, I’m willing to bet whoever attacked it took that head to the Bula, because evidence of a CDF presence on one of their planets is worth more than a little bit of cash.”

  “But they couldn’t have known about the CDF presence here,” Yuan said. “We didn’t.”

  “At this point, I don’t think it matters if they did before,” Wilson said. “I think it matters that they do now. And if they do now—”

  “Then they know we’re here now,” Augustyn said.

  “Right,” Wilson said. “In which case it’s not the colony that’s the CU’s biggest diplomatic problem at the moment. It’s us.”

  Augustyn was already ignoring Wilson to focus on contacting his ground forces to get them off the planet.

  They’d gotten only about half of them up before six Bula warships skipped above Wantji and trained their weapons, already hot, on the Tubingen.

  Abumwe’s negotiations with Sub-Ambassador Ting were winding down when Schmidt heard a pleasant ping from the sub-ambassador’s PDA. Ting excused herself for a moment, picked up the device, appeared to read a note there and performed the Bula equivalent of a smile.

  “Good news?” Abumwe asked.

  “It might be,” Ting said, and set the PDA down. She turned to her assistant, leaned over and spoke quietly into his closest ear. The assistant got up and walked out of the room.

  “I apologize, but there are things I will need to conclude our negotiations, and I don’t have them with me at the moment,” Ting said. “I hope you don’t mind waiting a moment while my assistant retrieves them.”