The Ghost Brigades (4 page)

“Yes, of course,” Cainen said. “That's another reason why Fronig's is so rare; it's not often that an individual will receive two sets of faulty nerve genes
and
two sets of genes that cause later-life hormonal changes in their lymph organ. Tell me where this is going.”

“Administrator, the genetic sample from you when you came on board shows that you code for faulty nerves,” Sagan said.

“But I don't code for hormonal changes,” Cainen said. “Otherwise I'd be dead already. Fronig's expresses in early adulthood.”

“This is true,” Sagan said. “But one can also induce hormonal changes by killing off certain cell bundles within the Rraey lymph organ. Kill off enough of the bundles that generate the correct hormone, and you can still produce lymph. It will simply have different properties. Fatal properties, in your case. One can do it chemically.”

Cainen's attention was drawn to the syringe that had been lying on the table through the entire conversation. “And that's the chemical that can do it, I suppose,” Cainen said.

“That's the antidote,” Sagan said.

 

Jane Sagan found Administrator Cainen Suen Su admirable in his way; he didn't crack easily. He suffered through several hours as his lymphatic organ gradually replaced the lymph in his body with the new, altered fluid, twitching and seizing as concentrations of the electrically-conductive lymph triggered nerve misfires randomly through his body, and the overall conductivity of his entire system heightened with each passing minute. If he hadn't cracked when he did, it was very likely that he wouldn't have been able to tell them that he wanted to talk.

But crack he did, and begged for the antidote. In the end, he wanted to live. Sagan administered the antidote herself (not really an antidote, as those dead cell bundles were dead forever; he'd have to receive daily shots of the stuff for the rest of his life). As the antidote coursed through Cainen's body, Sagan learned of a brewing war against humanity, and a blueprint for the subjugation and eradication of her entire species. A genocide planned in great detail, based on the heretofore unheard of cooperation of three races.

And one human.

Colonel James Robbins gazed down at the rotted, exhumed body on the morgue slab for a minute, taking in the decay of the body from more than one year under the dirt. He noted the ruined skull, fatally misshaped by the shotgun blast that carried away its top third, along with the life of its owner, the man who might have betrayed humanity to three alien races. Then he looked up at Captain Winters, Phoenix Station's medical examiner.

“Tell me this is Dr. Boutin's body,” Colonel Robbins said.

“Well, it is,” said Winters. “And yet it's
not
.”

“You know, Ted, that's exactly the sort of qualified statement that's going to get my ass reamed when I report to General Mattson,” Colonel Robbins said. “I don't suppose you'd like to be more forthcoming.”

“Sorry, Jim,” Captain Winters said, and pointed to the corpse on the table. “Genetically speaking, that's your man,” Winters said. “Dr. Boutin was a colonist, which meant he's never been swapped into a military body. This means that his body has all his original DNA. I did the standard genetics testing. This body has Boutin's DNA—and just for fun I did a mitochondrial RNA test as well. That matched too.”

“So what's the problem?” Robbins asked.

“The problem is with bone growth,” Winters said. “In the real universe, human bone growth fluctuates based on environmental factors, like nutrition or exercise. If you spend time on a high-gravity world and then move to one with lower gravity, that's going to influence how your bones grow. If you break a bone, that's going to show up too. Your entire life history shows up in bone development.”

Winters reached over and picked up part of the corpse's left leg, which had been sheared from the rest of the body, and pointed to the cross-section of the femur visible there. “This body's bone development is
exceptionally
regular. There's no record of environmental or accidental events on its development, just a pattern of bone growth consistent with excellent nutrition and low stress.”

“Boutin was from Phoenix,” Robbins said. “It's been colonized for two hundred years. It's not like he grew up on a backwater colony where they're struggling to feed and protect themselves.”

“Maybe not, but it still doesn't match up,” Winters said. “You can live in the most civilized place in human space and still fall down a flight of stairs or break a bone playing sports. It's possible that you can get through life without even a greenstick fracture, but do you know anyone who's done it?” Robbins shook his head. “This guy did. But actually he didn't, since his medical records show he broke his leg,
this
leg”—Winters shook the chunk of leg—“when he was sixteen. Skiing accident. Collided with a boulder and broke his femur and his tibia. The record of that isn't here.”

“I hear medical technology is good these days,” Robbins said.

“It is excellent, thank you very much,” Winters said. “But it's not magic. You don't snap a femur and not leave a mark. And even getting through life without breaking a bone doesn't explain the consistently regular bone development. The only way you're going to get this sort of bone development is if it develops without environmental stress of any kind. Boutin would have had to live his life in a box.”

“Or a cloning crèche,” Robbins said.

“Or a cloning crèche,” Winters agreed. “The other possible explanation is that your friend here had his leg amputated at some point and had a new one grown, but I checked his records; that didn't happen. But just to be sure I took bone samples from his ribs, his pelvis, his arm and his skull—the undamaged portion, anyway. All these samples showed unnaturally consistent, regular bone growth. You've got yourself a cloned body here, Jim.”

“Then Charles Boutin is still alive,” Robbins said.

“That I don't know,” Winters said. “But this isn't him. The only good news here is that by all physical indications, this clone was vatted right up until just before it died. It's extremely unlikely it was ever awake, or even if it was that it was conscious and aware. Imagine waking up and finding your first and last view of the world was a shotgun barrel. That'd be a hell of a life.”

“So if Boutin's still alive, he's also a murderer,” Robbins said.

Winters shrugged and set down the leg. “You tell me, Jim,” he said. “The Colonial Defense Forces make bodies all time—we create modified superbodies to give to our new recruits, and then when their service is through we give them new normal bodies cloned from their original DNA. Do those bodies really have rights before we put consciousness into them? Each time we transfer their consciousness, we leave a body behind—a body that used to have a mind. Do
those
bodies have rights? If they do, we're all in trouble, because we dispose of them pretty damn quick. Do you know what we do with all those used bodies, Jim?”

“I don't,” Robbins admitted.

“We mulch them,” Winters said. “There are too many to bury. So we grind them up, sterilize the remains and turn them into plant fertilizer. Then we send the fertilizer to new colonies. Helps to acclimate the soil to the crops humans plant. You could say our new colonies live off the bodies of the dead. Only they're not
really
the bodies of the dead. They're just the cast-off bodies of the living. The only time we actually bury a body is when a mind dies inside of it.”

“Think about taking some time off, Ted,” Robbins said. “Your job is making you morbid.”

“It's not the job that makes me morbid,” Winters said, and pointed to the remains of not–Charles Boutin. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“I want you to have it reinterred,” Robbins said.

“But it's not Charles Boutin,” Winters said.

“No, it's not,” Robbins agreed. “But if Charles Boutin is still alive, I don't want him to know
we
know that.” He looked back at the body on the slab. “And whether this body knew what was happening to it or not, it deserved better than what it got. A burial is the least we can do.”

 

“Goddamn Charles Boutin,” General Greg Mattson said, and kicked up his feet on his desk.

Colonel Robbins stood at the other side of the desk and said nothing. General Mattson disconcerted him, as he always had. Mattson had been the head of the Colonial Defense Forces Military Research arm for almost thirty years, but like all CDF military personnel had a military issued body that resisted aging; he looked—as did all CDF personnel—no more than twenty-five years old. Colonel Robbins was of the opinion that as people advanced in rank through the CDF they should be made to appear to age slightly; a general who looked twenty-five years old lacked a certain gravitas.

Robbins briefly imagined Mattson appearing to be his true age, which had to be somewhere in the vicinity of 125 years old; his mind's eye saw something like a scrotal wrinkle in a uniform. This would be amusing to Robbins, save for the fact that at ninety years of age himself, he wouldn't look all that much better.

Then there was the matter of the other general in the room, who if his body showed his real age would almost certainly look younger than he already did. Special Forces disconcerted Robbins even more than regular CDF. There was something not quite right about people being three years old, fully grown and totally lethal.

Not that this general was three. He was probably a teenager.

“So our Rraey friend told us the truth,” General Szilard said, from his own seat in front of the desk. “Your former head of consciousness research is still alive.”

“Blowing the head off his own clone, now, that was a
nice
touch,” General Mattson said, sarcasm dripping out his voice. “Those poor bastards were picking brains out of the lab equipment for a week afterward.” He glanced up at Robbins. “Do we know how he did that? Grow a clone? That's something you shouldn't be able to do without someone noticing. He couldn't have just whipped one up in the closet.”

“As near as we can tell, he introduced code into the clone vat monitoring software,” Robbins said. “Made it look like one of the clone vats was out of service to the monitors. It was taken out to be serviced; Boutin had it decommissioned, and then put it in his private lab storage area and ran it off its own server and power supply. The server wasn't hooked into the system and the vat was decommissioned, and only Boutin had access to the storage area.”

“So he
did
whip one up in the closet,” Mattson said. “That little fucker.”

“You must have had access to the storage area after he was presumed dead,” Szilard said. “Are you saying that no one thought it odd he had a clone vat in storage?”

Robbins opened his mouth but Mattson answered. “If he was a good research head—and he was—he'd have a lot of decommissioned and surplus equipment in storage, in order to tinker and optimize it without interfering with equipment that we were actually using. And I would assume that when we got to the vat it was drained and sterilized and disconnected from the server and the power supply.”

“That's right,” Robbins said. “It wasn't until we got your report that we put two and two together, General Szilard.”

“I'm glad the information was useful,” Szilard said. “I wish you had put two and two together earlier. I find the idea that Military Research had a traitor in its ranks—and as the head of an extremely sensitive division—appalling. You should have known.”

Robbins said nothing to this; to the extent that Special Forces had any reputation at all beyond its military prowess, it was that its members were profoundly lacking in tact and patience. Being three-year-old killing machines didn't leave much time for social graces.

“What was to know?” Mattson said. “Boutin never gave any indication he was turning traitor. One day he's doing his work, the next we find him a suicide in his lab, or so we thought. No note. No anything that suggests he had anything on his mind but his work.”

“You told me earlier that Boutin hated you,” Szilard said to Mattson.

“Boutin
did
hate me, and for good reason,” Mattson said. “And the feeling was mutual. But just because a man thinks his superior officer is a son of a bitch doesn't mean he's a traitor to his species.” Mattson pointed to Robbins. “The colonel here doesn't particularly like me, either, and he's my adjutant. But he's not going to go running to the Rraey or the Enesha with top-secret information.”

Szilard looked over at Robbins. “Is it true?” he said.

“Which part, sir?” Robbins said.

“That you don't like General Mattson,” Szilard said.

“He can take some getting used to, sir,” Robbins said.

“By which he means I'm an asshole,” Mattson said, with a chuckle. “And that's fine. I'm not here to win popularity contests. I'm here to deliver weapons and technology. But whatever was going through Boutin's head, I don't think I had much to do with it.”

“So what was it then?” Szilard said.

“You'd know better than we would, Szi,” Mattson said. “You're the one with the pet Rraey scientist that you've taught to squeal.”

“Administrator Cainen never met Boutin personally, or so he says,” Szilard said. “He doesn't know anything about his motivations, just that Boutin gave the Rraey information on the most recent BrainPal hardware. That's part of what Administrator Cainen's group was working on—trying to integrate BrainPal technology with Rraey brains.”

“Just what we need,” Mattson said. “Rraey with supercomputers in their heads.”

“He didn't seem to be very successful with the integration,” Robbins said, and looked over to Szilard. “At least not from the data your people recovered from his lab. Rraey brain structure is too different.”

“Small favors,” Mattson said. “Szi, you have to have gotten something else out of your guy.”

“Outside of his specific work and situation, Administrator Cainen hasn't been terribly useful,” Szilard said. “And the few Eneshans we captured alive were resistant to conversation, to use a euphemism. We know the Rraey, the Enesha and the Obin are allied to attack us. But we don't know why, how or when, or what Boutin brings into the equation. We need your people to figure that one out, Mattson.”

Mattson nodded to Robbins. “Where are we with that?” he asked.

“Boutin was in charge of a lot of sensitive information,” Robbins said, pitching his answer to Szilard. “His groups handled consciousness transfer, BrainPal development and body-generation techniques. Any of that could be useful to an enemy, either to help it develop its own technology or to find weaknesses in ours. Boutin himself was probably the leading expert on getting minds out of one body and into another. But there's a limit to how much of that information he could carry. Boutin was a civilian scientist. He didn't have a BrainPal. His clone had all his registered brain prostheses on him, and he's not likely to have gotten a spare. Prostheses are tightly monitored and he'd have to spend several weeks training it. We don't have any network record of Boutin using anything but his registered prosthesis.”

“We're talking about a man who got a cloning vat past you,” Szilard said.

“It's not impossible that he walked out of the lab with a store of information,” Robbins said. “But it's very unlikely. It's more likely he left only with the knowledge in his head.”

“And his motivations,” Szilard said. “Not knowing those is the most dangerous thing for us.”

“I'm more worried about what he knows,” Mattson said. “Even with just what's naturally in his head, that's still too much. I have teams pulled off their own projects to work on updating BrainPal security. Whatever Boutin does know we're going to make obsolete. And Robbins here is in charge of combing through the data Boutin left behind. If there's anything in there, we'll find it.”