reconfiguration … sure, we might have cured cancer with the stuff, but was it safe?
I would have been extremely surprised if any of these people had nanobots in them, or any of the nanotech extensions—cerebral implants, neural circuitry, or other internal hardware.
For neo-Ludds, asteroid mining came right behind nanotech as a key target—especially when that industry involved moving asteroids into Earth orbit. Proponents suggested that the technology, with massively redundant backups, was failsafe. The neo-Ludds pointed out that sooner or later technology always fails, and that Earth could not risk even a single such failure.
But did it make sense, I wondered, for them to protest the technology by bringing about the very disaster they feared? That simply wasn’t rational.
But then, I had trouble thinking of neo-Ludds as rational.
I went down the line, scanning each man in turn. All of them were clean—no active nano circulating inside their bodies. Curious, I put the N-prog away and pulled out a DNA tester. Approaching the first man, I touched it to his upper arm. He yelped when it bit him, and cut loose with a torrent of invective in a language I didn’t understand.
“You understand any of that, Sarge?” I asked Aguirre.
“Negative, Doc,” he replied. “The station translators aren’t programmed for it, whatever it is.”
Figured. The station AI could translate between us and the Brocs, but we couldn’t understand this group of humans. I studied them as my analyzer churned away. They weren’t Chinese, certainly. No epicanthic folds. Their skin was swarthy; Middle Eastern, possibly.
I took samples from the rest of them, eliciting reactions that ran the gamut from bored indifference to angry hostility.
A few minutes later, my analyzer started to send back data, scrolling it down through my in-head in a sudden cascade of alphanumerics. I couldn’t follow it all; genetics is not my specialty. But I caught a couple of key indicators as they flicked by: macro-haplogroup K … paragroup L … haplogroups R1a1 and R2 … mutation M198 …
The analyzer popped up a series of possible answers: a 65 percent probability of Central Asia, 22 percent South Asia, lesser percentages for portions of western China, Siberia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
I looked at the first man, who was still scowling at me. “Kazakh?” I asked.
His nostrils flared, and he barked at me in the same unknown harsh and vehement language. The others looked frightened.
“We know they speak English,” Aguirre told me. “Some of ’em, anyway.”
“Betcha that’s Turkic,” I told him. “Kazakh. Kyrgyz, Uzbek—one of those.”
“Damned Cackies,” Aguirre said.
I looked at the sullen prisoners. “We don’t know it’s the Caliphate, Sarge.”
“Aw, c’mon, Doc! Who the fuck else would it be?”
He had a point. The Central Asian Caliphate—the western name usually shortened to “CAC” and pronounced “cack”—was the Islamic theocracy sprawling from Azerbaijan to Sinkiang, notoriously volatile, notoriously anti-Western, notoriously anti-technology. They were known to sponsor neo-Ludd terror all over the world. Allah, after all, hates anything not found in the holy Qur’an, including nanomedical life extension, educational downloads, and anything at all that changes the eternal heavens.
I opened a channel to operations HQ back at Synchorbit. They had access to more complete haplogroup records than I did through the Net, and would be able to confirm the results. As the results came back down then link, a call came through my in-head from Major Lansky, the Battalion CO. “This is … who? Carlyle?”
“HM2 Elliot Carlyle, sir,” I said. “Second Platoon Corpsman.”
“What’s this stuff you’re uploading?”
“DNA readouts from five prisoners, sir. They would appear to be Central Asian.”
“Shit. You’re sure of that?”
“About sixty-five percent, sir.”
“Okay. I—” The transmission cut off in mid-sentence.
I waited, wondering what was going on up-El. Abruptly, a sign popped up in my in-head: SECURITY BREACH: CONVERSATION TERMINATED.
What the fuck? And then something queried my AI.
Normally my in-head software handles routine e-queries, everything from sales pitches for masculine enhancement genetic prosthetics to calls from home. It’s got a fairly comprehensive response list that lets it act as my personal secretary. It can even imitate me—audio and video—if need be, and most incoming traffic is either flagged for my attention or spam-slammed.
The thing is, nothing should have queried my personal AI while I was in the middle of a mission. Bad operational security, that. The only things that should be able to get through are military traffic or …
I slapped a trace on the query. I didn’t catch it … but I did get an ID.
GNN.
The Global News Network would have a particular interest in this mission, I imagined. Though we certainly hadn’t told them we were going in—why tip off the tangos who had access to GNN feeds on Capricorn Zeta?—the newsies knew about the station’s takeover, of course, and would have been flooding local virtual space with netbots and snoopers. There were reporters embedded with the unit, I knew, and—shit. They were up-El, up in Synchorbit with Major Lansky.
I felt a sinking feeling in my gut, something like a realization of impending doom.
“Carlyle!”
It was Singer. “Yes, sir.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m with the prisoners, sir. They’re clean. I, ah, went ahead and pulled a DNA analysis on them. They’re Central Asian … probably CAC.”
There was a long pause. “I ordered you to sweep them for nanobots, Carlyle, not play geneticist!”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“No buts. Get your ass in here!”
I looked at Aguirre. He wouldn’t have heard the conversation going on in my head, but the glazed look in my eyes would have told him I was talking with someone. “Gotta go,” I told him.
“Keep your ass covered, Doc,” he said. I wondered how he knew, or if that was just a lucky guess.
“In here” turned out to be Capricorn Zeta’s primary command center, two levels farther out from the rock. It was cramped and high tech, filled with microgravity consoles, bulkhead vidscreens, and couches with palmlinks on the armrests, so that mining personnel could connect directly with the facility’s computers and operational controls. A smaller version of the transplas window on the lounge deck looked down on Earth’s nightside. Glowing cities drifted
