by David Weber
“Ray doesn’t exactly scare easy!” Maighread chuckled and shook her head. “He and Malachi are both Southern boys, and if counter-grav hadn’t come along, they’d probably have both been busted for drag racing. Of course, that wouldn’t have been as much fun as illegal aerobatics, now would it? And putting the two of them into the same chain of command—” She shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t know what the Marines were thinking when the Corps put both of them into the same company!”
“Perhaps you should take that up with your uncle?”
“Oh, that’d be a wonderful idea!” She snorted. “You do realize they’re both just like Uncle Rob, don’t you? Or rather, he’s just like them. Trust me, he doesn’t see anything wrong with giving an overgrown pair of juvenile delinquents matches and then turning them loose in the dynamite plant!”
“Matches?” Ushakov repeated quizzically, and she snorted again, harder.
“What would you call making them junior project officers on Project Heinlein and giving them the first two suits fitted with the new, improved booster system to play with? Trust me, it’s a good thing we noble healers can put almost anybody back together these days, no matter how thoroughly they’ve managed to shatter the bits and pieces!”
“Oh, my!” Ushakov shook his head. “Malachi is playing with the new boosters?”
“No, Malachi and Raymond are playing with the new boosters. I expect to see my beloved brother and fiancé rolled in here on matching gurneys any day now.”
“I’m sure you’re unduly pessimistic,” he reassured her. “The Heinlein suits are really very good at protecting people, you know.”
“Nothing’s good enough to ‘protect’ my baby brother when his enthusiasm’s fully engaged.”
“Perhaps you’re right. But, as you say, modern medicine can do wonders.” He cocked his head at her. “And, I’m sure modern medicine has many questions for me. It was very kind of Hosea and Doctor Kaufman to let you come in and put me at my ease first, but they’re probably getting tired of standing in the hall.”
“Actually,” she acknowledged, “they’re sitting in Hosea’s office down the hall until I give them the high sign. So, have I succeeded in putting you at your ease?” She grinned. “To be honest, I’m the one who suggested letting me handle the greetings, but it wasn’t because I was worried about your state of mind. It was because I haven’t seen you in a while, and it probably would’ve seemed unprofessional to run up and hug you in a more … structured setting.”
“Perhaps,” he replied. From her body language and her pulse—which his hearing detected easily when he focused on it—she was being truthful with him, not just diplomatic. Mostly, at least.
“It probably is time we were getting started, though,” she said, “so, if you’re ready to face the Inquisition, I guess we should go.” She tucked one arm through his as he stood and leaned her head briefly against his shoulder. “I know you don’t want to do this,” she said more quietly, “and I don’t blame you any more than Dad would. And I really do want you to be sure you’re among friends while it happens.”
“Trust me, Lyubyy,” he said, “I know that. I knew it even before you walked in to hug me. So, let’s go get this done.”
* * *
“WELL,” HOSEA MACMURDO said, “this is mildly irritating.”
He and Doctor Nancy Kaufman stood at one end of the large examination room which contained the comfortable chair in which Pieter Ushakov sat.
“Nothing?” Kaufman asked, green eyes narrow.
“Not a damned thing!” MacMurdo thumped the microscope—which looked very little like a traditional human microscope—disgustedly. The tridee display above the microscope housing showed a hugely magnified view of a hollow rod. The actual “rod” was an extremely thin needle, although the casual observer might have been excused for not realizing that from a glance at the display.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kaufman protested.
“You think you’re telling me something I don’t already know?” MacMurdo retorted just a bit caustically.
“Is there a problem?” Ushakov asked mildly, looking up over his shoulder at Maighread Dvorak where she stood behind his chair, one hand on his shoulder, while she gazed at the senior physicians with a quizzical expression.
“Well, yes.” She sounded a bit amused, he noticed. “You know that tissue sample they were taking?” He nodded. “Well, apparently it’s not there.”
“Indeed?” He frowned. “That seems … odd.”
“One way to put it, I guess,” she agreed. “On the other hand, they’re trying to conduct a physical exam of a vampire, Uncle Pieter. Not too surprising if we hit a few bumps in the road.”
“You’re very like your father, you know,” he observed. Then he pondered for a moment. “And like your mother, too. God, I hadn’t realized what a frightening thought that could be!”
“You’re just saying that because you’re jealous of my good looks, wit, and charm.”
“Very like your parents,” he murmured, his own eyes going to MacMurdo and Kaufman. “I don’t understand why they didn’t get their specimen, though.”
“Neither do they, obviously.” Maighread shook her head, then raised her voice. “Doctors?”
“Umph!” MacMurdo looked up from his conversation with Kaufman. “Sorry, Maighread—and you too, Pieter. It’s just that we’re a tiny bit baffled.”
“Why?”
“Because there ought to be a sample of your tissue in this needle, and there isn’t.”
“I see. How is it supposed to work?”
“Well, the biopsy needle that we inserted actually has two main parts.” He lifted the device in question from the tray at his elbow as he spoke. A long, thin needle protruded from an ergonomic grip with a button on its end. “It’s a bit fancier than anything we had before the invasion, but it still works basically the same way. This outer shaft is the guide needle. It’s hollow, and normally we’d insert it through a small incision. Incisions don’t work very well on vampires, though, so we had to forgo that, just like we had to forgo anesthesia. Fortunately, you don’t feel pain, so—”
“That’s not precisely correct,” Ushakov interrupted in a polite tone, and MacMurdo paused.
“It’s not?” the doctor asked, one eyebrow raised.
“Our nervous system seems to work just the way it used to in terms of our ability to see or feel or smell,” Ushakov said. “Unless we choose for it not to, that is.”
“‘Choose’ not to?” MacMurdo repeated.
“Yes. It’s a conscious decision on our part.”
“So that’s why it doesn’t hurt when you get shot?” Kaufman asked, frowning intently.
“I suppose, although there appears to be a certain degree of automatic response involved there. The handful of times someone has shot me when I wasn’t expecting it, it … stung, I suppose, is the best way to put it. It’s a very brief sensation, which leads me to conclude that some subconscious instinct shuts down the pain sensors. I have not—” he smiled dryly “—attempted to overrule that instinct, if it exists, in order to experience the full pleasure of being shot, you understand, so I’m not positive I’ve described what happens correctly.”
“That’s interesting,” MacMurdo mused. “I never realized you could still feel things normally. Or, if you could, that you could choose not to feel them.”
“Actually, we can boost sensory data, as well,” Ushakov told him. The doctor’s other eyebrow joined its raised companion, and Ushakov shrugged. “The purpose of this examination is supposed to be the exploration of my abilities and nature. There are many questions we haven’t been asked, and a number of self-observations we haven’t previously shared with you. In fact, I can hear your pulse beat quite clearly, Hosea.”
“You can?” MacMurdo frowned. He was over six meters away from Ushakov at the moment. “You can hear something that faint from that far away? And even separate it out of the ambient noise?”
“
I can isolate anything I choose to focus upon,” Ushakov said flatly. “Nor, before you ask, does it have to be an organic sound, as I suppose might be appropriate in a predator. Wind, sleet—even snowflakes.” He shrugged. “The symphony about us is quite lovely if you can truly hear it all.”
“Fascinating,” MacMurdo murmured. He stood in thought for a handful of seconds, then shook himself. “That really is fascinating, Pieter, but getting back to the biopsy. The guide needle is actually the shaft down which an even thinner core needle travels. When I push the button here,” he pointed at the button on the end of the sturdy housing, “the core needle extends from the end of the guide shaft. There’s a section cut out of it to create a channel in its side, and when it retracts into the guide shaft again, that channel is supposed to carry a specimen with it. You could think of it as a thin strand of tissue, sort of like a very thin strand of angel hair pasta.”
“Now there’s an appetizing simile,” Maighread murmured, and MacMurdo gave her a quick smile.
“Just trying to put it into layman’s terms, Maighread.”
“And this particular layman appreciates it,” Ushakov said. “But, obviously, it failed to work that way in my case?”
“According to the microscope, yes,” Kaufman said.
“Interesting.” Both of them looked at Ushakov, and he shook his head quickly. “I have no more idea why it failed than you do, Doctors.”
“Well, if you don’t object, I guess the next step is to try again,” MacMurdo said, and Ushakov nodded.
* * *
“OKAY,” MACMURDO SAID thirty-five minutes later. “I think I’ve gone from ‘mildly irritated’ to ‘acutely pissed off.’”
“I assure you—” Ushakov began, but MacMurdo’s waved hand cut him off.
“Not at you, Pieter! At this.” He jabbed a finger at the microscope. “It’s not your fault, but if we can’t even take a tissue sample, this examination of ours isn’t going to get very far.”
Maighread Dvorak stood with one hand shoved into her lab coat pocket while the other held her long braid. Her hair fell almost to her hips when it was loose, which meant that braid was long enough she could nibble on its end to help herself think. It was a habit she’d had since childhood, despite her parents’ every effort to break her of it, and at the moment, she was thinking rather furiously.
Every attempt to take a needle biopsy had failed. After the sixth attempt, MacMurdo had suggested—and Ushakov had agreed—that they might take a small sample with a scalpel. That had failed, as well. The scalpel passed through the tissue easily, but the cut closed behind it instantly. There was never time to actually take the sample, and examination of the scalpel blade under the microscope showed that none of Ushakov’s cells—assuming vampires still had cells—had adhered to the blade on its way through. After that, they’d attempted a vacuum biopsy, with a powerful vacuum sucking the tissue sample through a hollow needle. That had failed, too. In fact.…
“I’m out of bright ideas,” Doctor Kaufman sighed. “I suppose we can just stick Pieter’s hand under the microscope, but that’s only going to give us a topical examination, and we’ve already done that.”
She tapped the magnifying lenses she’d laid aside. They weren’t as powerful as the microscope, although they were considerably more powerful than a pre-invasion human would have judged looking at them. All they’d demonstrated, however, was that Ushakov’s skin, hair, and nails appeared completely normal.
“We haven’t looked at the cellular level, of course,” she continued, “but I’ll be very surprised if—”
“Um, excuse me, Doctor Kaufman,” Maighread heard herself interrupt politely. Kaufman paused, head cocked, and looked at her. “I’ve just had what my dad would call a sort of crazy, off-the-wall thought.”
“Which is?” MacMurdo asked with the wary expression of someone who had experienced his fair share of Dave Dvorak’s “crazy, off-the-wall” thoughts.
“Well, Pieter says he has control over his nervous system. Over his ability to feel sensations and hear sounds. What if he has control over more of his body? And what if there are even more of those ‘subconscious’ prompts of his at work?”
“Where are you taking this, Maighread?” Ushakov asked, gazing at her intently.
“We’re trying to take tissue samples so we can analyze them,” she said. “Now, what if there’s a … call it a survival mechanism, for want of a better word, built into a vampire. The same sort of survival mechanism that lets bullets only sting briefly on their way through your liver or lungs, for example. If I were a secretive creature of the night, and if that meant the human beings around me might want to know more about me and maybe even figure out how to kill something like me, I don’t think I’d like them being able to take samples of my tissues. What if there’s something like that at work here? Something working on a deep enough level that you’re not aware of it yourself, Pieter?”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Ushakov said slowly. “I’ve never actually considered it, but Vlad did say—and it matches my own experience—that the very thought of being examined was enough to make him acutely uneasy. He couldn’t define precisely why, although he certainly had any number of conscious reasons to avoid such an examination, and neither can I. My Dasha—” his eyes darkened briefly as he spoke the diminutive form of his murdered daughter’s name “—was always afraid of needles, of being poked and prodded. But I never was. Until now, when it can’t possibly hurt me. That does seem … odd, doesn’t it?”
“That’s one way to put it,” Maighread agreed. “But what if that’s because something deep inside you is … resisting exposure? Wouldn’t that explain it?”
“It might,” Ushakov acknowledged.
“But you said you can override the sensory cutout when it happens automatically,” Maighread went on, brown eyes intent. “What if you tried that while Doctor MacMurdo tries to take a specimen?”
“You mean concentrate on the fact that I consciously wish for him to succeed?”
“Exactly!”
“I don’t see where it could hurt,” MacMurdo said with a shrug. “We’ve certainly tried everything else!”
“Very well,” Ushakov said. He sat back, eyes closed, frowning faintly in concentration.
“Try now,” he said in a slightly distant voice, and MacMurdo inserted the core needle again. He withdrew it, crossed back to the microscope, and slid the needle into the viewing receptacle. He looked up at the display, and smiled suddenly.
“Worked!” he said exuberantly. “At least this time we got something.” He tapped a control, zooming the image even farther. “In fact, it looks like—Jesus Christ!”
* * *
“YOU’RE JOKING,” JUDSON Howell said.
“No, I most certainly am not, Mister President,” Hosea MacMurdo said from the smart wall tridee. “There’s no question. And I had Warren’s people backcheck me on this.” He twitched his head at Warren Jackson, who stood next to him in his own office. “There’s no question,” he repeated.
“Jesus,” Howell said, looking across his desk at Dave Dvorak and Jolasun Olatunji. “Nanotech? Vampires are built out of nanotech?”
“Not ‘just’ nanotech, Mister President,” Jackson said. “This is really advanced stuff. It’s more nanobots than nanites, actually. We’re only just starting to scratch the surface, but I can already tell you this is a lot more advanced than anything we’ve found in the Hegemony tech base as of yet. As nearly as we can tell—of course, like I say, we’re at a very early stage—these nanobots are completely … labile, for want of a better word. In essence, they’re Captain Ushakov’s cells, and that’s how tiny they are, but they aren’t programmed to be a specific sort of cell. When you manage to separate them from the rest of him, they go … blank. They seem to be transparent, clear as water, and completely quiescent. Until you put them back, at least. We’ve actually put Captain Ushakov’s hand under the microscope and returned the sample by applying it to his skin,
and the instant the sample comes in contact with him, it changes from its transparent state. In fact, in the brief window in which we can continue to observe it, it seems to transform into additional skin cells.”
“Shades of Terminator 3!” Howell muttered, and Johnson chuckled.
“Not really that bad a simile, Mister President. It’s too early to say this for certain, but based on what we’ve been able to observe so far, I’d guess these nanobots can configure themselves into whatever kind of cell he needs them to be—skin cell, hair cell, bone, cartilage.”
He shrugged.
“It gets even better, Mister President,” MacMurdo put in. Howell looked at him, and the surgeon shrugged. “After we began to realize that things were even weirder than we’d expected, we got Pieter to agree to turn himself into smoke for us while we watched. Under sufficient magnification, what he does is apparent now, although figuring out how he does it is likely to take a little longer. Those ‘nanobots’ of Warren’s … disassociate themselves. It’s like they transform into a dispersed array of some sort, but even dispersed, Pieter’s completely conscious and has complete control over where that array moves, and it moves using what appears to be something like counter-grav but doesn’t register on our sensors.”
“That sounds ridiculous,” Howell said slowly.
“Maybe not,” Dvorak said, and there was something very odd about his voice. And about his expression, Howell realized, when he looked at the Secretary of State. In fact, he’d never seen quite that expression on Dvorak.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I’ve been digging even more deeply into the history, and especially the diplomatic history, of the Hegemony ever since you shared your brainstorm about contacting other species,” Dvorak said. “And the deeper I’ve dug, the more I’ve become aware of the holes in the historical record, not just the scientific record. It’s not anything I can pin down, you understand. It’s more of an itch I haven’t been able to scratch. A sense that somebody’s not telling me something, if you know what I mean. I’ve told myself it was only my nasty, suspicious imagination, because if I’m right about that, it’s not something that could’ve happened by accident. Not on this scale. Whatever they aren’t telling us was carefully expunged from the record. Or, at least, from the record the Shongairi had. I don’t know what might be in the Hegemony’s ‘secret Vatican archives,’ you understand.”
