The God Wave (26 page)

She nodded, scrambling mentally for a way to ask what she really wanted to know. “I still haven't gotten used to the idea that they're probably listening to everything we say.” She met his eyes as forcefully as she knew how and reached up to tap her ear, raising her eyebrows questioningly.

He held her gaze for a moment and then glanced at the office door, which she'd closed behind her. “They certainly try. My office, however, is an island of silence and sanity.”

“You sure? How?”

“I have my ways.”

“Won't they think it's odd that your office is so quiet?”

“Oh, I let them in on things several times a day. Business-as-usual things. They're blocked right now, though.”

Sara's knees felt suddenly weaker than they had a moment before. She sat down in the chair across from Chuck. The alpha zetas had been able to compare notes with the betas only infrequently for the simple reason that the general and his minions
(God, she was starting to think like Tim) seemed to go out of their way to keep the two groups apart. She had thought of calling Chuck a hundred times to ask if there were someplace they might meet where they wouldn't be overheard. Each time before today, she'd hesitated.

How much time have we lost with me wavering like that?

“I don't like what's happening here, Doctor,” she told him. “None of my team does. The Deeps, the Smiths—I mean the security guys—”

Brenton smiled. “Yeah, we call them that, too.”

“It's like we're skating on very thin ice over a bottomless lake. There are things going on underneath that are scary.” She cocked her head and gave the scientist an assessing look. “Of course you might tell me I'm imagining things or exaggerating . . .”

“I'm not going to tell you anything of the sort, Sara. They've replaced our grounds crew with their people. They're having us followed—”

She drew in a swift breath through her teeth at the confirmation. “Damn.”

“Nor has it escaped my notice that the general's people have worked very hard at keeping the two teams of zetas apart.”

“So I'm not the only one.”

He smiled again. Really the man seemed to find humor in every situation.

“No,” he said, “you're not paranoid. They really are watching us. I think it's just that they don't trust me, and they think of your team as the senior practitioners. You and Mike and Tim are the systems wizards, and that is apparently of primary importance to them. Lanfen's discipline is at a more detailed level than yours, and Mini's craft is simply window dressing to them.”

Something about the way he said that. “Are you hinting that maybe Mini isn't just window dressing?”

Brenton got an almost wicked look on his face. “We haven't exactly been forthcoming with the full extent of our . . . accomplishments.”

Now Sara smiled, too. “Neither have we.”

She told him in broad strokes what Mike and Tim were capable of when it came to the direct manipulation of mechanisms. He was impressed beyond words. Then the flood of questions came.

“All that notwithstanding,” Sara said when she'd wrapped up her quick recital, “we can't keep meeting like this. Mike can create dead zones for us and even muck with the cameras pretty effectively, but that will be suspicious after a while. And having me coming to your office repeatedly is bound to draw attention.”

Chuck chewed the inside of his lip ruminatively. “Likewise if we were to suddenly start socializing.”

“Dice works with us fairly often. I think I might have a way I can pass information to him. Once he catches on, he might very well be able to figure out a way to respond. He's a smart guy.”

“He is that,” Chuck agreed. “See what you can do.”

She realized what she could do the next afternoon as she was rendering an elevation to test her abilities with a new piece of software. On a “whim,” she inserted some signage and artful elements into her output.

“Like my work, Dice?” she'd asked when she'd finished the building.

He glanced up at it. Did a double take. She saw puzzlement in his eyes before the light of dawning comprehension produced a slow smile.

“I like it a lot,” he said. “Can I keep a rendering of it? I know it's just a practice plot, but . . .”

“Sure thing.”

“In fact,” he said, “could you maybe do some renderings of my robots?”

So it went. He passed information to her in his instructions for the robots; she passed information back through the renderings. The information mostly came in the form of brief progress reports on their private work with their abilities and any new observations of Deeps' behavior. Anything more complex would be communicated in a series of brief meetings, usually between Mike and Dice.

It was ironic really, Sara thought as she watched her class of Deeps go through their drills with the design software they were manipulating. The zetas had begun this relationship trying to impart their practical knowledge to their clients and now were working to keep it from them. The poor Deeps didn't know what they didn't know . . . or so she thought.

She didn't realize the scenario was changing until lunch one Tuesday. It was her turn to drive to the restaurant the alpha zetas had begun to frequent, and she and Mike waited in the parking lot for several minutes until Tim appeared. Sara could see he was upset when he climbed into the car. His face was red, his eyes glittering, his brows pulled down into an aggressive scowl.

“What's up, guy?” Mike asked, peering around his headrest at the younger man. “You look like a storm cloud.”

“Is it secret? Is it safe?” Tim asked in return.

Mike rolled his eyes, then closed them for a second before nodding. “Yeah. What's up?”

“The imperialist monkey boys are asking questions,” Tim said darkly.

“Oh, for God's sake,” said Sara, laughing. “What kind of questions?”

“One of the guys asked me if there's a way for them to manipulate the hardware directly—bypass the Kobayashi servomodule and act directly on the hardware and firmware. Then he started talking about literally rerouting signals through the traces on
a circuit board to make the commands do things they weren't intended to do.”

Sara faced front, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb, her mind suddenly racing. “For purposes of sabotage?”

“That's the only thing I could think of,” said Tim. “But it's out of my area of expertise. I don't do hardware or firmware. I'm a programmer. Machine language, yeah, that I can manipulate. Ones and zeroes are my first language. But these guys . . .” He stared out of the window for a moment, then snapped back into sharp focus. “Y'know, something the little commandant said—”

“Who?” Mike asked.

“The ranking officer—what's his name? Ortiz. He's a lieutenant commander and won't let me forget it. Treats me like—” He caught Sara's look in the rearview mirror. “Anyway, he made this comment about needing to
go underground
to . . . how did he put it? To consolidate their learning. He said he thought we'd be getting our last class of recruits in a couple of weeks.”

“The last recruits?” echoed Mike. “Isn't that good news? We'll be done with them. Then we can go back to—”

“Do you think they're going to let us go back to the way things were?” snarled Tim. “We're a freaking security risk.”

“Cool it, Tim. If we're getting another bunch of recruits, that means these guys think they're ready to graduate.” Sara frowned at the road. “So it wasn't Oritz who asked about psyching the firmware?”

“No, it was one of his minions—Pierce.”

“Did you get the feeling Pierce was asking in an official capacity?”

“Well, now that you mention it, no. Ortiz and the rest of his team seem to be dedicated code jockeys. Pierce is a different bag of cats. Maybe a too-curious bag of cats.”

“Yeah, but Ortiz is the man, right? And it sounds like he's
thinking they've got all the training they need. Since none of them has shown any ability to manipulate the hardware without the interface . . .” Mike shrugged. “So there you have it.”

“I guess.”

“Even better, though: all that stuff you said about them not letting us go? We're American citizens. We have families and friends outside of this place.” He bobbed his head back toward the receding Forward Kinetics campus. “They can't just disappear us. At worst they could make us sign double-deluxe, megastrength NDAs that we'd be stupid to break.”

Tim's lip curled. “Yeah? You think? And what does
at best
look like in your sunny little snow globe, Mikey?”

“It looks like they pay us, they go away with a reminder to honor the NDA we've already signed, and we go about our business in the private sector. I'm glad they're bugging out after this next class of recruits. Then things can get back to normal.”

“Maybe,” said Sara. “Maybe not. I've kind of forgotten what normal looks like.”

THEY HATCHED THE PLAN IN
a noodle shop in the Harborplace Mall. Eugene had been hoping for stupid simple, but the complexities of Deep HQ ruled that out. Their schedules were structured so they worked the end of the week while the alpha zetas worked the beginning. Sara, Mike, and Tim went in for six hours on Mondays and Tuesdays and until noon on Wednesdays; Lanfen and Mini came in on Wednesday afternoons and worked their twelve hours on Thursdays and Fridays. Dice's schedule varied, though he was in most days for a while.

Knowing that, Team Chuck (the nickname was Eugene's doing) conceived of a means of employing available talent to accomplish their goals. At least Lanfen and Mini had devised it; Eugene and Chuck had merely sat back, eating noodles and
watching them hatch a plot that relegated the two men to the roles of support personnel, diversionary operatives, and plucky comic relief.

“I can drive any bot,” Lanfen had said during their off-campus double date. “That's not the issue. The issue is I can't be in two places at once. Well, I mean I can be, but the me who's left behind is in a state of deep concentration. It won't do to have me camped out doing breathing exercises for the time I'll need to be inside. It only worked last time because my ride was delayed. I need some sort of cover.”

There had been a profound moment of frustrated silence until Mini had said, “There's a maintenance closet in the ladies' room on D level, between the canteen and their interior labs. If we could get you into that closet, say on Wednesday evening, you could activate the bot overnight, right?”

“Sure, but the driver will wonder where I went, won't he?”

In answer, Mini had grinned from ear to ear, then glanced up at the hallway that led to the restaurant restrooms. “Look who's here.”

They all did look and saw Lanfen step from a rear hallway into the restaurant. She paused a moment, waved at them, then turned on her heel and walked back up the corridor to the ladies' room. In fact she walked right up to the door and vanished.

“That,” said the Lanfen seated at the table, “was amazing.”

“Thanks.” Mini beamed.

“So,” said Chuck, “you're proposing that the Lanfen who leaves with you on Wednesday evening is a mirage?”

Mini nodded.

“We'll need to get me into the ladies' room,” said Lanfen. “Well, getting me in there isn't such a big deal. It's getting me in without security seeing that I don't leave. I suppose we could use the jammer . . .”

Chuck inhaled sharply. “That jammer is the only thing that grants us a clean place to confer on campus.”

“You can use Mike for that temporarily,” suggested Mini.

Chuck nodded. “Okay. Good. That could work. I'll need to come up with a valid reason to pull him into my office, but I'll just have to deal with it.”

“Great,” said Lanfen. “Once the place has shuttered for the night, I should be able to activate Brian's robot, Thorin, and go on a walkabout.”

“And in the morning,” Mini continued, “I come back into the ladies' with virtual you and a fresh change of clothes, and we walk out together. We should only need to jam any surveillance for a moment or two.”

“My God, you're awesome,” said Eugene. “And scary. Scary awesome.”

“Question,” said Lanfen, first glancing at Eugene then raising a hand. “We need the bot to be feeding video directly to Chuck and Euge. How do we do that?”

Dice had the answer to that later. During Lanfen's Wednesday afternoon drills with her class, Thorin developed a mysterious problem with his balance that required Daisuke Kobayashi's expertise touch. When the bot returned to the exercise room, his video feed had been tweaked. Lanfen, who had personally arranged the bot's vertigo, now felt for the firmware switch Dice had installed as he pretended to calibrate the gyro mechanism. She would trip that switch when she was ready to take Thorin out of his alcove. His feed would go live but would send its output to Chuck's personal laptop.

Matt Streegman had ridden with them to the Deep that afternoon—a thing that seemed to make Dice Kobayashi just about crawl out of his skin. Lanfen threw him a look, though, and the engineer calmed down. Once at Deep Shield, Matt had disap
peared into the public office area, escorted to a meeting with General Howard and his advisory staff. Dice, Mini, and Lanfen had each gone to their classes of trainees.

Lanfen was curious about what Matt and Howard discussed these days. It occurred to her to wonder if there weren't some way to bug Matt without his knowing it. She felt guilty even having that thought, but then reminded herself about what she was preparing to do and why. She punted the guilt away. Howard had bugged them first. Turnabout was fair play.

Lanfen had to resort to breathing exercises and mental trickery to keep her brain from fixating on her upcoming spy mission. She wanted to avoid anticipation—it was too easy for that feeling to morph into dread. She was especially watchful of her inner landscape because she had such observant recruits. A ripple of seemingly hidden anxiety in an unguarded moment might ping someone's subterfuge radar.