"It's a theory," I said noncommittally.
"Think we're going to find worms at the bottom of this?"
"I don't know what we're going to find."
"It's not a worm nest, though, is it?"
"No. It isn't. At least, it isn't like any worm nest I've ever seen."
"So…" Siegel hesitated. "Do you think it might be a nest of worm-eaters or overlords or whatever-?"
"I don't think," I said curtly. "I'm not being paid to think. I report. I let other people think."
Willig snorted. She knew it was a lie, but she wasn't going to contradict me aloud when she didn't know who might be monitoring the channel.
But I knew my sharp reply hadn't been fair to Siegel, so I added, "This isn't a nest. This is something much more complex than a nest. This is a-factory." And even as the words fell out of my mouth, I realized the truth of them. This was an industrial plant pun intended.
I sat paralyzed in my chair for a moment, while the realization sank down to the pit of my stomach and then began clawing its way back up again.
"Holy shit," I whispered to myself. Then: "Siegel, take over. Willig, get me an operator. Oh hell, see if Dr. Zymph is on-line."
Within seconds, a new voice came on the channel. Female. I didn't recognize it. "Houston here."
"Are you monitoring?"
"You've got a prowler down a hole-" Pause. "So what? It's a worm nest."
"No, it isn't. I know worm nests."
Another pause. "Looks like a nest to me. Oh, I see. You've got unidentified life forms, and-" This time the hesitation was much longer. "Is this correct? No, it can't be. You'd better pull your prowler out. Its sensors have gone dysfunctional."
"No, they're not dysfunctional." I let an edge of annoyance creep into my voice. "We've got some kind of organic factory down here. We've been descending through a series of pressure locks; the valves are a kind of bladder device, either a specialized organ of the tree root or a symbiotic partner; probably a partner, we've seen similar doors in worm nests. We've pushed through twenty or thirty of them. I promise you, the atmospheric readings are correct."
"Can you pull your prowler out and double-check it?"
"That's not practical," I said. My tone was final. "Can we bring a bio-team on-line?"
"Just a moment." She sounded annoyed. She clicked away momentarily, then came back. "Stand by. We've got an officer in Oakland on duty."
"Is Dr. Zymph available? I think this is-"
"You're not being paid to think, Captain. Let us do the evaluations."
"What is that?" Willig muttered. "A mantra?"
"Yes, ma'am," I said quickly. I put my thumb over the mike and turned to Willig. "See? I told you."
She shook her head. "More fools they." She turned back to her station.
"Ma'am?"
"Yes, Captain?"
"What is your name, please?"
"Specialist First Class, Martha Dozier. Why do you ask?"
"Just in case the next time I see Dr. Zymph she asks me who refused to forward my report, I want to be able to tell her."
"Cute," replied Specialist First Class, Martha Dozier. "But it won't work. Your job is to report. My job is to filter. My supervisor will back me up. Stand by. Oakland's coming on-line." Another new voice. Also female. Also unfamiliar. "This is Dr. Marietta Shreiber. What have you got?"
"Have you got a VR?"
"I'm linking up now. I've got your mission log downloading too. Brief me quickly."
"Large shambler grove. Over a dozen trees. Very tall. Satellite surveillance shows it hasn't moved in at least six months, but I'd guess it's been here a lot longer than that. At least eighteen to twenty-four months. Very unusual. We sent in a prowler. We took a look around the roots and found a tunnel mouth. I don't know if all the trees have tunnels under them or just this one; but I don't think it's anomalous. The roots of the tree go right down the shaft. We sent the prowler in, and it looks like the tunnel was carved by the roots. Inside, the shaft is some kind of organic structure-I don't know how to describe it; it looks like the inside of a blood vessel. There are artery-like tubes down here that have some kind of fluid in them, and they pulse with a rhythmic beat, about once every fifteen seconds. We've got a sample of the fluid, it's still in the prowler. There are other kinds of fleshy organs as well, growing out of the tunnel walls. We came to a place where some of these organs have expanded to become valves that seal the whole channel. We pressed through and found a whole series of valves. We must have gone through a couple dozen, at least. The deeper we go, the thicker the atmosphere gets; the humidity is up, the pressure is up, temperature is up, the oxygen levels are up; the gas mix is very weird, very soupy. And there's lots of funny stuff swimming in it."
"That doesn't sound like a normal worm nest, Captain."
"Listen to me. This is not a worm nest; I've been in enough nests to recognize the difference. This is something else."
"All right, wait a minute. I'm looking at your readouts now. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I see." There was a long silence, and then finally, she said, "Hmm. That's interesting-"
"What?"
"Dr. Zymph is going to want to see this. Some of it matches our predictions of what we think the atmosphere on the Chtorran home world might be."
Willig leaned over and patted me on the back. I shrugged it off. It was an obvious guess. And it could just as easily be wrong.
What if this was a womb of some kind? If that was the case, there was no reason why it would have to represent Chtorr-normal atmosphere any more than a human womb represents Earthnormal atmosphere. What if this was a specialized environment for some Chtorran purpose?
A pause. "What do you need, Captain… ?"
"McCarthy. Captain James Edward McCarthy, Special Forces Warrant Agency. Support. I need support."
"Oh. Yes, I see. Just a moment." This time the pause was much longer.
"Dr. Shreiber?"
"Yes?"
"Listen, I don't know if you recognize my name-"
"I know who you are,'" she said coldly.
"Then I'm not going to be modest. I know what I'm doing out here. I'm one of the most experienced agents in the, Special Forces."
"Yes, I know. Most of your colleagues get eaten young."
"Excuse me? I'm trying to do a job here. Why the sudden hostility?"
"I saw your performance on the news last week. Very cute. You embarrassed us all."
I sighed. "You're welcome to join me on my next mission and show me how to do it right. In the meantime, I think we have a real find here and I don't want to screw it up. I'd like some guidance on how to proceed. Are you going to support me or not?"
She didn't answer. "Dr. Shreiber?"
"Hold it," she said. "I'm on the other line." A moment later, she came back. "I'm sorry, I can't give you any backup."
"Because you disapprove of me personally?"
She hesitated. Her tone was deliberately unemotional. "I'm sorry, Captain. I can't give you any backup."
I was honestly confused. "What's going on-?"
"I'm going to break the channel now-"
"Dr. Shreiber! Scramble a private channel, right now!" I clicked over to privacy. "Are you there?"
To my surprise, she was. "Yes, Captain?"
"Give me a straight answer. What's going on?"
"Nothing's going on."
"Bullshit."
"You don't have to be rude-"
"Yes, I do. I've been on enough missions to know the protocol. Nobody ever refuses a call for assistance."
"Well, I am." There was something odd about the way she said it.
"You've been ordered not to give me backup, haven't you?" I realized it was true even as I said it.
"Don't be silly-"
"So if I file a report against you for this, you'll take full responsibility for your refusal?"
She hesitated. "You can file any report you want, Captain. I don't think either you or your reports are going to be taken very seriously.
No matter how high up you go."
"I see," I said. And I did see. I wondered who was on her other line coaching her. Dannenfelser? Or one of his toadies? That was a ghastly thought. What would a Dannenfelser sycophant be like?
"I'm going to disconnect now, Captain." Her tone was so polite, it was cloying.
"Have a nice day," I replied just as sweetly, and broke the connection. I whirled to look at Willig.
Corporal Kathryn Beth Willig, a grandmother, kept her face noncommittal for all of two and a half seconds. Then she said, "Should I cross Dr. Shreiber off the Christmas-card list?"
"I am so fucking pissed-" I stopped myself. We were in the middle of a mission. Anger was not an asset here. I glanced at Willig. She looked both saddened and upset. "Sorry," I said.
She shook her head. "I see what they're doing. They're setting you up. If anything goes wrong out here, you'll take the blame alone."
"The hell with them." I thought about it for a half second longer, then made a decision. "Break the connection. Shut down all uplinks. Everything. No network contact at all. Log it as an Article Twenty-Twenty authorization. We're putting on an iron cap. If they won't assist, we'll work without them."
Willig looked at me disapprovingly.
"I mean it," I said. "If they want a copy of this mission log, they're going to have to come begging for it. I'm not releasing it until Science Section commits to full mission backups. What the hell? Somebody wants to play politics with my life? Let's open up the whole goddamn can of worms for everyone to see. I'm getting awfully tired of this bullshit."
"Are you sure?" Willig was giving me a chance to rethink the decision.
I rethought. "Yes, I'm sure."
"Makes it harder to call for help," she cautioned.
"When have I ever in my life called for help? When have I ever needed it?"
"I haven't known you long enough," Willig said. But she got the point. "What about our pickup?"
"We have a prearranged rendezvous. They'll be there." Her expression remained unhappy,
"What's the problem?"
"Is that a direct order? Will you put it in writing?" Her expression was firm.
I recognized what she was doing. I nodded. "Give me the pad." I quickly wrote out the order, dated it, and added my signature. I passed it back to her. "Happy?" I asked.
"Ecstatic," she said quietly. She took the paper and began folding it carefully. "I don't disagree with you, Captain. I just wanted to know how certain you were." She finished folding the paper, tucked it into her shirt pocket, and began shutting down the network uplink.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence. For what it's worth, Special Forces reserves the right to put a total security lid on any military operation. The policy is a long-standing one, dating back at least three wars. Local officers are expected to exercise this authority with prudence. Generally, it's only for situations where we're dealing with renegades, especially armed bands. There are some things we don't want going out on the network. An officer is expected to use his own judgment as to what's appropriate. Considering our present circumstances, I deem that this is an appropriate time to cut all channels."
She didn't answer.
"You disapprove, don't you? You think it's a spiteful act."
"I'm not being paid to think," she said curtly.
"Sergeant Siegel, take control," I ordered. "Recalibrate the prowler." I turned my chair to Willig's so we were almost knee to knee. "Do you know anything about the Teep Corps?" I asked. "The Telepathy Corps?"
"Uh-huh."
"Bunch of people with wires in their heads, electronically linked to form a massmind."
"Right. They can all peek out through each other's eyes. The skilled operators can even use each other's bodies."
"Maybe I'm old-fashioned," Willig shuddered, "but it sounds spooky to me."
"It is. I knew someone once who became a telepath. He-or maybe she-I don't know what he is now-never mind; you're right. It is spooky. Anyway, the Telepathy Corps was supposed to be a great secret weapon. The perfect spy network. Only the war it was established for never happened; instead, this. Now, how do you spy against worms?"
Willig shrugged. "You can't just send someone walking into a camp, can you?"
"That's exactly what they tried. At first."
"Sounds like a good way to get eaten."
"It was. You don't get a lot of volunteers for that kind of mission. Nevertheless, the Teep Corps developed some of the very best intelligence on the worm camps that way."
Willig looked shocked.
I nodded a grim confirmation. "Remember the burnout in Oregon?"
"No, I wasn't there."
"It was a local operation. The national guard took down a village developing in the inland desert; it hadn't gotten big enough yet to show a mandala, but they were already starting to recruit slaves. Anyway, someone in the field hospital authorized autopsies on all the bodies, the renegades who were living in the nests and the people they had captured. They found implants in three of the corpses."
"Transmitters?"
"Right." I explained slowly. "Turns out that the Teep Corps has been implanting people without their knowledge for years. The military has the authority to implant a monitor in you if they deem it necessary to your work. Most of the time, they don't; but under that authority, anytime they get a service body on the table, well-they can pop in a transmitter without your ever knowing. And they've been doing that for years. The whole thing only takes a couple hours. They drill the tiniest little hole, slide in a few CC of nanobugs, plug up the hole, and wait for the nanos to find their sites and link up and begin sending. You end up with a network of filaments strung along the whole inside of your skull; you become a walking antenna. There's not much more to it than that. They calibrate you in your sleep, in your dreams, or even in hallucinations; but for the most part, you can't tell if your body's been co-opted by the Teeps or if you're just going crazy. Everybody's crazy now anyway, so who could tell? And if they've got you, then thousands of electronic voyeurs, maybe hundreds of thousands, could be peeping through your body any moment of the day or night-watching through your eyes, listening through your ears, touching with your fingers, pissing through your dick-and not only would you not know about it, even if you did, there'd be nothing you could do-except maybe wear an iron helmet."
Willig looked puzzled. "So what does this have to do with shutting down the network uplink?"
"Everything. The Teep Corps knew everything that was going on inside that camp because they were looking out through the eyes of one renegade and two captured soldiers. Some of that intelligence was passed to the attack units; but not the source of that information. The Teep Corps was apparently willing to sacrifice those three lives and the lives of all the other captured troops too, rather than reveal the fact that people were being implanted without their knowledge. But the information came out anyway.
"There was a big uproar about this," I continued. "Public hearings. Sealed committee sessions. Major hoo-ha. Over a hundred thousand people are walking around implanted and don't know it. It still hasn't been resolved. On the one hand, the data gathered is very important. On the other hand, there's the whole personal privacy issue."
"But if you've been implanted, don't you have the right to know?"
"Legally, yes. And no, not if you're in the service. The military has the right to use you any way they deem appropriate. And that includes an implant. You can always have yourself scanned, of course; but the Teep Monitors can just as easily tell your implant to go inactive for a while and the scanner won't pick up a thing; so even if the scanner says you're clean, you have no way of knowing if that's really true. But, according to the Supreme Court, if you do know that you're bugged, then they can't monitor you without your permission. You have the right to switch them off."
"How?"
"Well, you can always apply for active Teep training. But that doesn't really guarantee that you'll be able to switch them off either. The m
onitor is a twenty-four-hour device. The only sure-fire way is to wear an iron cap."
Willig scratched her head nervously. She looked uncomfortable.
"Have you ever been operated on?" I asked. "Do you think you might be bugged?"
"No. I'm just wondering what I could do that would be worth the attention of a hundred thousand Peeping Toms."
"How about dying?"
"Huh?" She looked startled.
"Consider this possibility. Suppose you're monitored. And suppose you get caught in a life-threatening situation. In fact, suppose your death is absolutely certain-and suppose you don't know it, but the Teep Corps is monitoring you. They know where you are; in fact, they're the only ones who know where you are. They could send in a rescue mission to pull you out, but instead they don't-instead, they monitor your death as pure horror show. How would you feel about that?"
Willig's expression showed her distaste for the idea. "Do they really do that?"
I nodded.
She shrugged and said, "I suppose if I didn't know I was being monitored, it wouldn't make any difference." But she didn't like the idea.
"It's the amorality of the whole thing," I said.
"It's pretty heartless," Willig agreed
"It's not just heartless," I corrected. "It's inhuman. The Teep Corps is turning into a massmind. Its primary members don't exist as individuals anymore. They spend all their waking moments linked up with each other, and they don't think like separate beings anymore; they're all just bugs in a giant hive-mind. The only identity they have is the massmind-so the death of any individual cell, especially one that's only a sensory cell, and not a participatory brain cell, is meaningless to the corps. Do you see what I'm saying? If they don't care about their own lives, why should they care about yours? They're more interested in the information they gain about the way people die than they are in preventing the death in the first place. They don't have the same commitment to human life that you and I do. In some ways, their thinking is even more alien than the Chtorran's. We're sure they have people in other camps; but they're not saying what they know. They're not telling us much; they say we wouldn't understand, couldn't assimilate. There's a lot of frustration in Houston. The Teep Corps is very hard to control. It may be out of control. I don't know.
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