The Spies That Bind

by Diane Henders

  Chow muttered, “Oh, Jesus, not again.”

  The man rose and turned, revealing familiar-looking features reminiscent of a basset hound, complete with jowls and mournful eyes. He rubbed the back of his head where she’d struck him and said placatingly, “It’s not porn, it’s science fiction.”

  “Science fiction?” The woman planted her fists on her hips, her sleek pageboy bob quivering indignantly. “That’s not science fiction, that’s, that’s…”

  She leaned toward the screen he’d been facing, jamming half-glasses onto the end of her nose to scan the screen. “‘…Its hot silky blue tentacles slithered down to tighten around his throbbing cock’?” She jerked upright, scowling. “‘Spasms of illicit pleasure’? ‘Teasing the cleft of his straining buttocks’? It’s nothing but porn! Alien-porn with butt-sex!”

  I had been studying the man’s jowly face and trying to figure out how I knew him, and sudden recognition made my jaw drop. “Shit, that’s Murray Stout!”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Chow repeated.

  “I recognize his photo from his book covers! One of my friends is a huge fan.” I turned to Chow. “Murray Stout is known for his incredibly detailed and accurate science, and his kinky sex scenes. They call him the hard-sci master of soft porn. He wrote that!”

  “No, he didn’t,” Chow said tiredly. “That’s not Murray Stout.”

  “Yes, it-”

  “No, it’s not,” he overrode me. “That’s Murray Stout.” Chow jabbed a finger at the woman still loudly berating the hound-faced man, who stood protesting feebly with his head hanging as if in shame.

  When I gaped at Chow, he explained, “They’re Melinda and Murray West. She writes the sci-fi. He’s just a fan. They met at a convention years ago. She wasn’t getting anywhere with her books because a lot of hard-sci readers think women can’t write sci-fi. So after they got married she used his first name and made up a new last name, put his picture on the cover, and her books rocketed onto the bestseller list.”

  “Really?” I stared at the bickering couple. “Murray Stout is a woman?”

  “Yep. And this little show’s all for you. They’ve been together nearly fifteen years and I swear this is how they keep the spice in their marriage. Every time they get a fresh audience they pull this shit, and then they fuck like rabbits. It won’t be safe to open a supply closet around here for the next week.” He raised his voice. “Knock it off, you two!”

  “Yeah, really!” the bushy-bearded Sawyer chimed in. “If I have to hear about Captain Mack’s tentacle fetish one more time I’m going to lose my lunch.”

  “I can’t imagine how you’d know if you did,” Melinda retorted. “You could have three meals piled up in that beard and never know the difference. It looks like a live badger strapped around your neck!”

  Sawyer flipped her a cheerful middle finger and they all drifted back to work, casting surreptitious glances my way as if to be sure I’d appreciated the show.

  “Anyway…” Chow said with long-suffering emphasis. “Welcome to the asylum. Come on, I’ll brief you on the prototype you’ll be carrying.” He wheeled away and I followed, watching Melinda/Murray West/Stout with caution.

  “You acquired the original prototype of the fatal ultrasound weapon, right?” Chow inquired as he leaned toward the wall for a retinal scan.

  “Um… yeah,” I mumbled, still rattled. “John Kane and I did.”

  A door swished open with a Star-Trek-like sound effect, and I snickered. Chow gave me his one-sided grin and led the way inside a small room. “Occupational hazard when you work with a bunch of science geeks,” he said over his shoulder.

  I was still hovering half-in and half-out of the door. From inside the room, the main area of the lab was clearly visible as if through a floor-to-ceiling glass panel, but from the outside it looked like a solid painted wall. I rocked back and forth, craning my neck to examine the panel from both sides.

  “Pretty cool, eh?” Chow asked. “That was a byproduct of one of the defense-camouflage technologies we’re working on. Unlike regular one-way glass, the light can be as bright as you want in here without compromising the impermeability from the outside. The defense system is still under development and highly classified, but we’re gradually phasing these one-way panels into all the labs. They’re lightweight and bullet-proof, too.”

  Grinning, I stepped inside and let the door swoosh shut behind me. “This is so cool. I feel like I’m in a James Bond movie and you’re Q.”

  “I’m much smarter than Q,” Chow said matter-of-factly. “So, you saw the original ultrasound weapon in action, right?”

  The smile slid off my face at the memory of a handsome, competent young man collapsing into instant death.

  “Yeah.” My voice came out husky and I cleared my throat, eyeing the deadly bottle-shaped device with trepidation despite the fact that it was locked away under a heavy transparent dome.

  “Somebody you cared about?” Chow asked quietly.

  “N-no… I didn’t know him well. But he was such a nice young guy…” I shook myself and drew a deep breath. “So I’m transporting this thing again?”

  “No. We’re still working on it.” He patted the dome. “We want more miniaturization and a subtler design. It’ll be great for covert close-quarters wet work when it’s done, but what you’ll be carrying is new technology we’ve derived from it.” He rolled his chair over to another dome housing a black cylinder that looked like a shorter, fatter version of a law-enforcement baton.

  Punching a numeric code into the keypad beside the dome, he waved his pincer-hand in a theatrical flourish as the dome rose. “Voilà. The future of non-lethal personnel neutralization.”

  I backed away a step. “That sounds like a scary euphemism.”

  “Not as scary as the alternatives.” Chow lifted the baton out, hefting it comfortably. “So far all the current non-lethal control methods are pretty unpopular with the bleeding-heart types. We’ve got microwave guns that’ll heat up your skin ‘til you run screaming or get second-degree burns, tear gas that’ll choke you, rubber bullets that’ll knock you out, tasers that’ll shoot a hundred feet or more and light you up like a fucking Christmas tree, sonic generators that’ll temporarily deafen you, lasers that’ll temporarily blind you… it’s all technically ‘non-lethal’…” he made a one-handed air quote. “…but if you’re too close or you get too big a dose you’re fucked. This baby, on the other hand…” He hefted the baton again. “…is silent and it can’t kill you or cause any permanent damage.”

  He hesitated. “Well, unless you blow a blood vessel from puking too hard or hit your head when you fall down. It uses focused ultrasound the same as the lethal version, but instead of being tuned to liquefy your brain it’s tuned to fuck up your inner ear. Give somebody a one-second burst and they’ll fall over and puke their guts out for about ten minutes afterward. It’s not too bad if you lie completely still with your eyes closed, but the harder you try to move or focus your eyes, the harder you puke.”

  “I don’t even want to know how you know that,” I said.

  The undamaged corner of his mouth quirked up. “Yeah, don’t mention french fries to Sawyer for a while. I thought it was funny as hell when he horked one up through his nose, but he’s still a little sensitive over it.” At my grimace, he added, “We needed to know how it would affect different people so we each took a turn, but at least I was smart enough to do mine before lunch. The next-gen testing will happen in Calgary, so that’s why you’re taking it down.”

  “What’s the range?” I inquired, eyeing it cautiously. “And how do you aim it?”

  “There’s no real aiming system. It generates a cone that maxes out at about two metres diameter at thirty metres. If your target is closer, the cone is narrower so you need to make sure you’re pointing it roughly at their head.”

  “Doesn’t it get lethal at close range?”

  “Nope.” Chow hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, it didn’t do Sawyer any har
m, but he’s brain-damaged to start with.”

  “Very funny.” I leaned over to examine it. “So this is the business end and that’s the trigger?”

  “Yep. The rest is battery pack. This thing is good for twelve hours of continuous use.”

  “Twelve hours?” I yelped. “I thought you said a one-second burst would do it!”

  “It will, but it’s for crowd control. It’s strictly line-of-sight so you’d have to sweep it back and forth holding the trigger down, wiping out the front lines until they figured out what was happening and dispersed. It might work in hostage situations, too, but it’s not ideal. An asshole with a gun can still do a lot of damage firing blind while he’s lying there puking. And this…”

  He picked up a ballpoint pen that had been lying under the dome beside the weapon. “This is your covert ops version. Only good for maximum sixty centimetres diameter at three metres, and only enough juice for about ten uses, but if you need to create a diversion at a party, this is your baby.”

  My mind flashed to Stemp’s upcoming dinner party, but I squelched the thought before it was fully formed. The party wouldn’t be that bad. Deploying classified weaponry would be overkill. Probably.

  Dr. Chow handed over the pen and I held it carefully on the flat of my palm, squinting at the sleek polished cylinder.

  “It’s a Cross pen,” I said blankly. “It’s even got the Cross logo on it. Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope. It writes, too. Just don’t try to write a letter to your mama, ‘cause it’s only got a few drops of ink. The rest is microminiaturized guts.” He pointed to the pocket clip. “If you rotate this ninety degrees it’s ready to fire. You squeeze the top of the pen to generate the beam. It scans your thumb and forefinger, so it’ll only work if your fingerprint data is coded into the pen in advance.”

  “Slick! So nobody can fire it accidentally or take it away and use it on you.”

  “You got it.” Chow retrieved the pen and tucked it and the baton back under the dome. “I’ll have these packed up for you at ten hundred Friday morning.”

  I nodded and followed him to the door, which swooshed open as we approached. We were crossing the lab when a shout jerked my head around.

  “Goddammit! My flies!”

  A buzzing swarm circled Sawyer’s head, diving and circling in a choreographed pattern while he swatted ineffectually at them.

  Then, as if recognizing the unnaturally perfect formation at the same time I did, his hands dropped to his sides and a grin split his bushy beard as he looked over to where Melinda and Murray stood.

  They grinned back, Murray manipulating the joystick on a small handheld box while the swarm of flies swooped up from Sawyer’s head and flew a rapid circuit of the room before tumbling into a heap on the table in front of him.

  “You did it!” Sawyer bounced up and down with excitement. “It worked!”

  “Yes.” Melinda was positively glowing. “The genetic modifications were fine; it was the control system that was the problem. We just figured it out last night.”

  Beside me, Dr. Chow let out a war whoop and wheeled over to the table so fast he laid rubber. I hung back, wary of the buzzing, crawling heap and the crazed light in Murray’s eyes as he fondled the joystick.

  “Did you see that, Kelly?” Chow demanded. “Fly control!”

  “Um… great,” I agreed. “Dare I ask?”

  “There are so many potential applications for this!” he exulted. “And with a ten-day gestational cycle, we can breed these fucking things as fast as we want, in the field or wherever…”

  He broke off, eyeing me speculatively. “Hey, maybe you can help us out.”

  “Um…?” I took an involuntary step backward.

  “No; don’t worry, we just want to capture your pheromones.” He advanced on me, a fanatical gleam in his eye.

  I eyeballed the distance to the door. He could probably peel out in that souped-up wheelchair faster than I could run…

  Melinda laid a restraining hand on Chow’s shoulder. “Maybe if you explained what you have in mind instead of scaring the life out of her?”

  Chow shook himself. “Sorry. It’s just that this is one of my pet projects. We’re working on a way to differentiate between hostiles and non-combatants. We have imaging systems that can identify any living thing, even through six feet of concrete bunker, but they’re bulky and expensive. And when they locate somebody we still don’t know whether they’re insurgents waiting to blow us to hell or shit-scared non-combatants trying to hide from the fucking insurgents.”

  He sent a loving glance toward the heap of insects. “Flies are perfect. They can get in anywhere, they’re fast manoeuvrable fliers, they’re ubiquitous nearly everywhere so nobody pays attention to them, and they have extremely sensitive olfactory processing. Their gestational cycle is so short that even if we lost an entire batch we’d have a whole new one in ten days. And now we can make them fly wherever we want.”

  “So… how does that help you?” I asked. “Are you going to put little cameras on them?”

  “That would be great, too, and we’re working on it,” he agreed. “But for this application we’re using the flies to map personnel locations. They’re far cheaper and more portable than an imaging system. And we’re also working on isolating the specific pheromones humans excrete in high-adrenaline situations. Our preliminary research indicates that we should be able to differentiate between pheromones released by predator humans and prey humans. Flies would be sensitive enough to smell the pheromones, so once we’ve pinpointed the specific pheromones the flies will also be able to tell us who our targets are.”

  “But a predator might also be prey,” I argued. “And vice versa. If somebody’s hunting me and I turn around and kill him, I’d have both predator and prey pheromones.”

  “True, but it’s not binary; it’s more like a spectrum. The necessity of killing in self-defence produces a different blend of pheromones than the intent to kill unprovoked.”

  “Okay, if you say so. But I can’t help you with that,” I said, trying to hide my relief. “I don’t know a thing about advanced biology or chemistry and I especially don’t know anything about flies. And I don’t want to.”

  “No, we need you as a test subject. We’ve been monitoring our own pheromones in simulated battle scenarios and simulated fear scenarios, but because we know they’re simulated, we can’t be certain we’re getting accurate results. If you’re going back on active duty…” Chow picked up a compact black box on a lanyard and advanced on me. “…would you wear this portable pheromone recorder for a while?”

  I eyed it with suspicion. “What does it do?”

  “When it detects an elevated heart rate it takes an air sample. It’s good for ten samples and then it has to be returned and downloaded. So you’d remove it if you were working out to avoid wasting the sample on an artificially elevated heart rate, but other than that you don’t have to do anything with it. Just wear it around your neck under your clothes. Completely non-invasive.” Chow and the others studied me hopefully.

  “If you do this, you could help eliminate a lot of unnecessary suffering,” Chow added quietly.

  Melinda nudged him. “Way to play the guilt card.”

  Chow gave me his distorted grin, but his one-eyed gaze met mine with a challenge.

  “All right.” I took the monitor from him. “But you’ll pardon me if I hope it doesn’t have any reason to take samples from me.”

  Chow sobered. “For your sake, I kind of hope it doesn’t, too.”

  Chapter 15

  I staggered out of the Weapons lab feeling like Alice emerging from the rabbit hole. The sense of unreality persisted during my exit through the time-delay chamber, and when I finally stepped back into the main lobby I stood blinking for a moment. At last I managed to summon my wits, and headed for my office.

  As I approached it, Stemp strode out his door, but he halted at the sight of me. “Kelly.” He jerked his chin back toward hi
s office, and I sighed and obeyed.

  Inside, he eyed me piercingly. “Will there be a problem with Dr. Chow?”

  “No, I think we’re okay. We just got off on the wrong foot…” I winced. “Oh, God, I didn’t mean to mention feet, I just meant…” I drew a deep breath. “We’ll get along fine,” I said firmly.

  Stemp leaned back in his chair. “Good.” The hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “For once your legendary temper has proved to be an asset. Dr. Chow is abrasive at the best of times, but he has zero tolerance for anyone who patronizes or kowtows to him because of his disability. Calling him a dickhead was probably the best possible way to gain his respect.”

  I slumped in my chair and massaged my aching temples. “Yay, me. You couldn’t have given me a heads-up beforehand?”

  “Would it have helped?”

  I sighed. “No. It probably would’ve made things worse.” His expression didn’t change, but I thought I detected a hint of smugness. “It must be nice to be three steps ahead of everybody else at all times,” I added sourly.

  “Nice?” Stemp considered that for a moment, one brow raised fractionally. “Not particularly. Necessary? Yes.”

  I reined in my irritation, releasing a slow breath. Fine. Maybe I could use that annoying trait.

  “Are you monitoring the investigation into Daniel’s abduction?” I asked.

  “No. In the first place, it’s outside the Department’s mandate. In the second place, there is nothing I could do to expedite the investigation even if I chose to involve myself. And in the third place…” He gave me a wintry smile. “I’m quite sure you’re on top of it.”

  His smile dissolved, leaving the winter-cold behind. “However, for your own good I’m giving you a direct order to stay out of it. If you get caught interfering in a police investigation that’s unrelated to any of your ongoing missions, you may be subject to prosecution that even I can’t deflect. And I assure you, making the chain of command doubt your discipline as an agent is the fastest possible route to lifelong incarceration.”

  I rubbed my forehead, my heart aching with futility. “There’s nothing to interfere with, even if I wanted to. The man who abducted Daniel was killed in an accident, and it looks as though Daniel wandered away into the woods. If he’s been lost all this time…” My throat tightened. “…if they find him at all, he likely won’t be alive.”