Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Laroo’s Island

I walked into the dockside security office with a sense of doom, yet also with a feeling of intense excitement, as if my whole life had prepared me for this moment. Enough of the idea was necessarily left to improvisation, and knowing I was going up against the best the planet had to offer added to the challenge of it all.

The security officer was surprised to see me, since we had no shipments today, but he just nodded and looked curiously at me.

“I want you to get in touch with Security Coordinator Bogen,” I told him. “I want to see him as soon as possible.”

“Bogen’s on the island,” the man responded. “Besides, anything about security concerning you is more my problem than his.”

“No offense, but you’re too small. Besides, it’s not a breach. You’re a good cop, Hanak, but this is out of your league.”

That nettled him. “What the hell are you spouting off about, Zhang?”

“Radio Bogen and tell him I want to talk to him right away. Just do it, Hanak, will you? It won’t cost you anything.”

“He won’t see you,” he sneered back at me. “He has more important things to do.”

“If you send this message just the way I dictate it, I guarantee you I’ll not only see him, but he’ll break the galactic record to get to me.”

“So what’s this big, important message?”

“Tell him…” Here goes. “Tell him that he’ll never solve the deprogramming problem no matter how much time, money, and effort he puts in Project Phoenix. Tell him I can do it.”

Hanak stared at me. “You ain’t supposed to know about that.”

“Just send it. And let me know when he wants the meeting. I have work to do back in my office.” And with that I turned and walked out the door and back to the administrative complex. I had no doubt that Bogen would take the bait. None at all. I figured I’d hear the explosion from the office, and I wasn’t far wrong.

Just a few minutes after I’d settled back down to try and get some work done, Hanak rushed in to see me.

“Well, big shot,” he said, “I sent it out to the island and they threw a half-dozen shit fits. Bogen’s up on the satellite but he’s coming back down, personal, just like you wanted. You’re to meet him in ninety minutes.”

I nodded and grinned at him. “Where?”

“In his office in the Castle.”

“On the island?”

“What other castle is there?” He paused a moment, looking at me strangely. “You know, Zhang, you’re either the dumbest guy I ever met or the nerviest. Which are you?”

I gave him a wide, toothy grin. “Guess!”

It was harder to get up a crew on this day-off than I’d figured, but with backup and emergency services I was able to muster a gunboat crew in about half an hour, leave a note for Dylan reading simply, “It’s started,” and head for the island.

Bogen, although coming from the space station, would probably arrive before or at least at the same time as I did, assuming he left right after sending his reply. In point of fact, his “ninety minutes” was unrealistic for me to make, short of flying over, which security really wasn’t prepared for. Even at top speed of something around seventy kilometers an hour, the boat would take almost ninety minutes just to reach the island, and we’d had a half-hour delay in starting. That was just fine with me. I liked to keep people waiting and fuming a bit—knocks them off balance and makes them somewhat emotional in a situation where I’m perfectly rational and as calm as I can be given my training.

Still, it seemed like an eternity crossing that stretch of ocean. I kept having nightmares about being attacked by a bork on the way over and having the whole thing end right there.

The crossing, though, was uneventful, and soon the shining tower of the Castle hove into view, rising eerily up out of the trees. The sky was darkening, and I could feel a slight chill that told me that rain was due. It hardly bothered me. The executioner might care what sort of day it was, but not his victim.

We pulled up to the island dock and secured quickly. I walked off and up to the security building in back.

“Zhang,” I told the duty officer. “Here to see Bogen.”

She checked a screen and nodded. “You’re cleared to his office and no other areas. Pick up your escort at the security gate.”

“Escort, huh? Well, well!” I turned and walked out, then over to the gate I’d never gone through before. I had to put on a scanner to enter. Finally it confirmed that I was me and slid open, allowing me to step into a second chamber, where the procedure was repeated. Finally a far gate opened, and I walked through, meeting two khaki-clad and very serious members of the National Police, both very large men and both heavily armed.

“Walk between us and don’t deviate from our path,” one of them ordered. I gestured for him to lead the way. As we walked along the tree-lined paths I couldnt help but notice the special security systems all over the place and the fact that just about every step we took was being closely watched by somebody. Still, we were almost to the Castle when we had to get through yet another double gate with scan, and from there we walked on into the inner courtyard.

I was impressed. Although artificially surfaced like the docks and landing areas, and made from careful cutting of the trees, the area around the Castle was something I hadn’t seen since leaving the Confederacy. They had imported sod from somewhere—probably Lilith, since that was supposedly the garden planet—and there was a huge, brilliant green lawn complete with exotic plants and flowers. I was impressed a little more with Laroo; this was the sort of thing I would have done in his position, but few others would have.

After another scan at the Castle entrance as we approached, we were inside double sliding doors. I had to admit, despite the tales from the concubines, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. We walked through huge open areas with incredibly opulent furnishings. Beautiful rugs and carpeting blended into furlike couches, chairs, and recliners. On the walls were beautiful works of original—I supposed—artwork that matched the mood of the rooms. The only jarring note was the policemen standing guard just about everywhere, that plus the knowledge that cameras were following us everywhere and seeing everything.

I never saw any stairways, although they might well be somewhere if only for safety reasons. We went up in a large elevator that was basically a glass tube wrapped completely around its supporting pole. Very neat, I thought. They control access to and egress from the elevators, can see you at all times, and make sure you go only where you’re supposed to.

We got off on what I thought was either the fourth or fifth floor, walked across to the main building on a small ramp—which had emerged when we stopped there and pulled back into the wall once we were clear, another nice touch—and down another corridor. This floor was filled with rooms resembling national museums, complete with display cases and lighting. Weapons, corns, and gems from many worlds were all there in their respective places. I was more than impressed. I knew, too, that this stuff wasn’t Wagant Laroo’s—it was just put in his charge. Everything here was a type of object that could survive Warden sterilization from the Cerberan organism, and all of it belonged to somebody else, put here for safekeeping until its owner needed it or was in a position to enjoy it. I began to appreciate just what Bogen secured most of the time.

Finally we reached the end of the hall and a door slid back to reveal a modern office waiting room, complete with receptionist but lacking, I noticed, anything to read or look at.

My two guards flanked me while I presented myself. The receptionist nodded at my name. “Go right in. Director Bogen is waiting for you.”

“I’ll bet,” I muttered and walked to the inner office door, then turned and looked back at my guards. “Not coming?”

They said nothing, so I opened the door and stepped inside.

It was a small, cramped office, one that looked really lived in—all sorts of books, magazines, print-cuts, you name it—were scattered over the place, practically obscuring an L-style office desk with computer access terminals on one side and a pile of papers and other stuff, even a dictawriter, on the other. Bogen, dressed in casual work clothes, needed a shower and shave. Clearly he wasn’t prepared for this, and his eyes had an angry look.

“Clear that junk away and sit down,” he snapped, gesturing to a chair. I did so and just looked at him.

“Well?” he shot. “Just what kind of shit are you trying to pull on me, Zhang, or whatever your name really is?”

“I wanted to prove a point about your operation, and I think I proved it to your satisfaction,” I told him, controlling heart rate, blood pressure, and everything else, to keep as calm and relaxed as was humanly possible.

“That my security stinks? Is that it? Look, it’s easy for you to have picked up that Project Phoenix name just from some of the stuff around the docks, and maybe to guess a little that we’re doing some kind of biological experiments out here. But you put your finger on the heart of the research, and that just isn’t possible. Aside from the Chairman, me, and six or seven other people on Cerberus—and the other three Lords—there’s nobody, and I mean nobody, who knows what we’re doing who ever gets off this island. I want to know how you know, and I want to know why you told me you knew, before I have you killed.”

“Charming,” I responded dryly. “I’ll bet that line is a big hit with all the girls.”

“Cut the clown act, Zhang! I’m in no mood for it.”

“Would you believe I deduced it?”

“Ha! From what? You’d have to know more than almost anybody on this planet to do that.”

“I do,” I replied coolly. “I’m not from this planet. And to judge from your accent, neither are you originally. I know about the aliens, Bogen. The aliens and their fancy robots.”

“How could you know? Or are you admitting you’re a Confederacy agent, like I thought?”

“I’m an agent,” I admitted. “My old employer was the Assassination Bureau of Security. They took me and using a process that seems to have been developed based on what happens here on Cerberus, they put me in Qwin Zhang’s body and sent me here.”

“For what specific purpose?”

“Basically because they already suspected how the robots were so perfectly programmed,” I told him, lying profusely and knowing that I was being monitored by lie-detection gear of the first [water]. That was all right. I had been trained to fool the best of them.

“That’s bullshit and you know it!” he shot back. “If they knew that they’d be on us like a ton of bricks, connections or no connections.”

“They know,” I assured him. “And I’m almost certainly not the only one here, although I don’t personally know of any others. Sure, they could knock down your fancy space station, maybe fry this island with a deep beam—but what would that get ’em? They want tne aliens, Bogen, and Cerberus is the only place so far where they have a direct link to them. They’ll fry us, maybe the whole damned planet, one of these days, that’s for sure—but not as long as they can gain as much or more than they lose.”

Bogen chuckled. “Well, they’ll have a long wait for that. I don’t think even Laroo’s ever met one. If any of the Four Lords have, it’s probably Kreegan of Lilith. This whole thing was his idea, anyway.”

“It’s to our advantage not to let anybody know that—to our advantage, really. I don’t want to be fried, Bogen.”

“It won’t make any difference to you, anyway,” he noted. “You’re a dead man right now.”

“I doubt it,” I responded, sounding less than upset by his threats. “Now, I’m going to make a point, and I think you’re intelligent enough to realize that it’s the truth. I could have just reported my findings on Project Phoenix to the Confederacy and let them take drastic action. I didn’t. Instead I reported them to you.”

“Go on.”

“You know the old problem with agents sent to the Wardens. We’re trapped here, same as you.”

“They must have been pretty sure of you, since they could hardly keep any kind of trace on you from body to body,” he noted.

“They were—and with good reason. I was born and bred for a job like this. It is the sole reason for my existence, what I live, eat, sleep, and breathe for. Once the objective’s accomplished, there’s no further reason for living. You’ve heard of the assassins before.”

He nodded. “Met a couple, and I agree. Fanatics. I think old man Kreegan used to be one, in fact. So I know what you are and what you’re like. I know out of your own mouth you’re the most dangerous man on Cerberus to me and my boss.”

“But they screwed up,” I told him. “Believe me, it surprised me as much or more than it’s gonna surprise them, but they slipped up. This place—well, it changed me, too. I have something to live for beyond the mission—or rather, someone.”

Bogen seemed to relax a bit. I saw, though, that one eye kept glancing down at something beyond my field of vision. The lie-detector screen, probably. “So now you want in and you’re trying to bargain with us, right? But you’ve got no cards.”

“I think I do,” I responded carefully. “The fact is, they were so sneaky they put in a deep psych command for me to report and forget I reported. I didn’t even know that until I put my wife and myself under Dumonia up in Medlam.”

Bogen tensed. “Then you might already have reported.”

I shook my head from side to side. “No, not this much, anyway. My last report was more than two months ago, and I haven’t been near the agent who can trigger the command. But I know who he is now, so they don’t own me any more.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter? If you nab him, they’ll just establish a dozen more, ones we don’t know. No, from the point at which I learned of all this stuff, I started getting ideas of my own. First, I definitely wanted in. I don’t like being a prisoner any more than you or any of the rest of us, and I don’t like living under the Confederacy’s gun. Whether I succeeded or failed, I was a dead man—and I don’t want to be dead, Bogen, and I don’t want the kind of stasis my life’s now in, which was the other alternative. So that got me to thinking about you and Laroo and Project Phoenix. It occurred to me that you’re dealing with a product of alien technology using people who have no experience even in our end of things. Organic computing’s on the proscribed list, as you know, so there are few experts in it, and those who are, are basically industrially oriented, toward the parts the Confederacy does use. You don’t have the people or the years of research and development to solve the problem, and I think you know it.”

“All right. I’m not about to grant that, but I’ll admit progress has been almost nil. We know what, but there’s just no way to take the programming out selectively—and if you take it all out, you destroy it, since life support and all the other normal functions are part of the programming molecules within each tiny cell. Basically you need a full-blown organic computer to do the job, and we haven’t been allowed to get near those things in hundreds of years, not since the war.”

I nodded. “There’s only one place other than the aliens where the kind of expertise you need exists at all. You know it and I know it. I’m sure you’ve sicced some of your robots on it, but the data are too diffuse to get at. It might take years to put it all together, even assuming you can break the codes. I don’t think you fed like you have years to spare.”

“Go on.”

“Security. Confederacy Security. They could easily tap the data, put it together, and send it to as complex a computing network as necessary to solve the problem. They use organic computers, you know. Not like these—not at all like these. But they do use them in their ships and modules. They could solve your problem for you.”

He laughed. “And just like that—you ask ’em and they comply, right? Don’t be ridiculous!”

I relaxed a little. “Not at all. I told you I knew who the communications agent was. If I walk in there and force him to put me through, there’ll be no force, no coercion, and no forgetting. Now, just suppose I call upstairs and tell them I’ve got a crack at stealing one of the alien robots?”

“What!”

“Uh-huh. And I tell them how I’m going to do it. I’m going to clear it of all prior-programming, then take control myself. Let my mind go into it and bring it—and me—out of Cerberus.”

“They won’t swallow it.”

“I think they will. Remember, they don’t have any way to check on the truth of what I’m saying, and the mere fact that I’ll be coming to them with this will prove an unbroken line. I’m a pretty good hypnotic subject when I want to be. Let’s say I tell ’em some of the robot programming is being done on this island—they already know almost as much anyway—and that I’ve wormed my way into the project through my Tooker associations. Some of the experts working on the project don’t like the idea of working for unknown aliens, and I’ve got some underground help—if I can get a robot out. And the only way to ensure that is to walk out as one. They’ll buy it. It sounds just like me.” He thought it over. “Too risky.”

“There’s no risk, if you think about it. They already know that the Cerberans are involved in the programming, and it doesn’t take a master detective to figure that it has to be the space station and the island. I’m giving them a convincing scenario that meshes with my previous reports and also with what they already know. They themselves then have the choice. Either they okay the plan and give the solution to me—if they can solve it—or they turn me down as too much of a risk for that kind of information. I think I know them. As long as they know they have the power to destroy this whole planet, they’ll okay it. The temptation, the bait, will be too great.”

“Supposing they do? What happens to Cerberus when you don’t deliver?”

“We have the key, and that solves the problem. Beyond that—well, I would assume protection for my wife and myself, perhaps eventually cleared robot bodies of our own. And if the Confederacy makes a move to atomize Cerberus, we’ll have a lot of advance warning. You just can’t make that kind of decision easily, so we’ll have th opportunity to call on those aliens for help.”

“And if they won’t?”

“Then at least we get away.”

He thought it over some more. “Well, what you say is true—up to a point. My only concern is that, unbeknownst even to you, this is a subtle Confederacy plot.”

“Huh? What could I do to you?”

“Oh, not you. But suppose they use all this to get a authorization for planetary destruction? Suppose that’s what they really want—direct cause they can get through the Councils? Their primary, maybe only, objective is to bring these aliens out of the woodwork. Maybe the authorized destruction of Cerberus is the way they’re planning to do that-—and we have no guarantees the aliens will protect us, or be able to. It seems to me that if they could defeat the Confederacy militarily they wouldn’t have needed us in the first place.”

It was a glum thought, one I hadn’t really considered. As sneaky as my bosses had been, was this, then, their goal? Certainly it would be the ultimate goal, to smoke them out. I didn’t like to think of the idea that they expected it all along, though, from me.

“It’s a possibility. A risk. A big risk, I admit. But which is the bigger risk? Not to try it, not to crack this programming code, and still be sitting here when they eventually do get around to excising us? It’s going to happen. You know it and I know it. If they go along, at least we have a chance—all of us.”

Bogen sighed and shook his head, but all his belligerence was gone. “This is too big a decision for me to make, you know. I’m going to have to buck this to Laroo. You, too, probably.”

“Suits me fine.”

I sent back word with the boat crew that I would be remaining at least overnight, and gave Dylan some encouraging news, in the simplest form of code. I didn’t really care if Bogen’s people figured it out or not; if he didn’t have some foreknowledge of me and my nature he didn’t deserve to be in the business.

Then I waited for Bogen to call his boss, and finally he returned. “Okay,” he said, “He’s coming in tomorrow afternoon. Earliest he can get away. You’re to stay here as his guest until he hears you out and makes a final decision.”

“What about my wife?” I asked, somewhat concerned. “She has no credit, remember.”

“She’ll be all right through tomorrow. My people will be there if she needs anything. After that, well, we’ll see. Remember, your future and hers are hanging by a thread right now.”

Didn’t I know it! Still, I was committed now. “Well, since I’m either in or dead, mind letting me see one of these wonders of the universe?”

He thought it over. “Sure. Why not. Come on.”

We rode down in one of the transparent elevators, far beyond the ground floor and into the vast trunk of the main support tree itself.

The lab facilities down there were quite modern and impressive. Along the way I ran into several old Tooker employees who saw and greeted me, but Bogen wasn’t in the mood to let me renew old friendships.

The center of all this activity was an eerie lab in two parts, with a monitoring and control panel of unfamiliar design on one side and a series of small booths along an entire wall. A young and very attractive woman with long black hair trailing down over her traditional lab coat was checking a series of readings on one of the machines as. we entered. She glanced up, saw Bogen, and rose to meet us.

“Here’s the best mind on Cerberus, and one of the best in the whole galaxy,” Bogen beamed.

She smiled and put out a hand. “Zyra Merton,” she introduced herself.

I was startled even as I shook the thin, delicate hand. “Qwin Zhang. Did you say Merton?” She laughed pleasantly. “Yes. You’ve heard the name?”

“I sure have. Somehow, though, my vision was always of some little old man with wild hair and a beard.”

“Well, I am pretty old,” she replied good-humoredly. “In fact, I’m close to a hundred and eighty. The reason why I came here, almost ninety years ago, was not only to study the Warden processes on Cerberus but also because it was at the time the only way to save my life. However, I assure you that I am and have always been a woman, and I’ve never once had a beard.”

I laughed back. She was charming, and a surprising answer to the question of just who Merton really was.

“But tell me, where did you hear my name?” she asked.

“I’m a product of what the Confederacy calls the Merton Process,” I told her.

She seemed very interested. “You mean they solved the problems? It cost too many lives and too many people’s sanity ever to be very practical, I thought. I abandoned that research when I turned entirely to researching Cerberan processes. That was—let me see—fifty years or so ago.”

“Well, they solved some of it,” I told her. “Not the attrition rate, though.”

She looked disappointed and a bit angry. “Damn them! Damn me! My biggest regret has always been that I developed the thing to begin with and sent out the data in so incomplete a form. Still, in those days there were few people here, and not much technology or governmental structure, and I was dependent on outside support to get anywhere. Still, I’d like to give you a complete psych scan sometime, just to find out how far they did go with it. It’s a dead end beyond what you say, I fear.”

I decided not to tell her how much of a success the Confederacy thought it was. Out of respect for my counterparts on Lilith, Medusa, and Charon, I didn’t want to blow too much right now.

“I’ll be glad to—sometime,” I told her sincerely. If I could trust anybody on this crazy ball it was probably her, if only for her scientific detachment.

“Zhang’s interested in our friends,” Bogen told her. “Can you give us a bit of a demonstration?”

She nodded. “Glad to. Got one that’s just about ripe.”

“Ripe?”

“Finished. Complete. Ready to go.” She went back to her instruments and punched in a series of instructions. A slight buzzer sounded over one of the booths, and a red light came on. After a moment the red light went out and was replaced by an amber standby, then a green.

She left her panel, went over, and opened the door to one of the booths. The sight revealed startled me. It was the body of a tall, muscular man to civilized worlds’ norm. He looked recently dead.

“Two one two six seven—awake and step out,” she instructed.

The cadaver stirred, opened its eyes, and looked around, and into its whole body came an eerie sense of life, of full animation. It walked out of the box, suddenly appearing very natural.

I went over and looked at him. Doing so made me a little uncomfortable, because suddenly it was a person and not a thing I was eyeing as I would a piece of sculpture.

“The most amazing marriage of organic chemistry, computer, and molecular biology I have ever seen or known,” Merton told me.

“This is a robot?”

She nodded. “They don’t come packaged exactly like this, I should tell you. They arrive in a roughly human-old shape and with the same mass, but that’s about all. From cell samples supplied us, we’re able to graft an entire skin onto it so perfectly that it is an exact duplicate of whoever’s cell we use. The material we use for it is similar to the stuff used on the entire device, but it’s capable of following and using the genetic code of the original. When we have the original subject handy, it can add in moments any scars, blemishes, or oddities to make itself a complete duplicate.”

“How the hell can you make something like this?” I gasped.

“We don’t, and can’t. The Confederacy could if it wanted to. Even then, the design would be different. It takes very little time in close examination to see these devices are the product of a society and culture that is extremely alien to our own. Not that scientific laws are violated—they aren’t. But the whole evolution of science up to this point came from a far different series of steps.”

“Where do they come from, then?”

She shrugged. “We have only a few here, partly for seasoning and partly for experimental purposes. They don’t let us have too many, and only when we have a specific individual in mind. They’re pretty careful.”

“But the whole thing is done here? All the mind-changing?”

“Oh, no. It can be done anywhere in the Warden system out to a point roughly one hundred and sixty million kilometers beyond the orbit of Momrath. Just as long as it’s done in an atmosphere containing only Cerberan Wardens. I don’t know the details.”

“And this doesn’t disturb you? That we’re using these to spy on the Confederacy?”

“Not really. Why should it? Everything that government does turns to dust or ashes, including the people. We have an entirely new, fresh technology here from an entirely nonhuman evolution, and that’s far more interesting. I can hardly blame them for not announcing themselves to the Confederacy. Every alien race we’ve ever touched we’ve murdered, literally or culturally.”

“You sound like you would have gotten sentenced here if you hadn’t come voluntarily,” I noted.

“Probably,” she laughed. “We’ll never know. But it worked out, anyway.”

I stared at her, thinking hard. “And you haven’t been able to solve the programming riddle? If you can’t, can anybody?”

She looked questioningly at Bogen, who nodded, and then she turned back to me. “It’s not all that simple. Here, let’s go over to the scope.”

We walked over to the instrument cluster. “I don’t recognize any of this,” I told her. “Whose is it? Your own design?”

“No. It’s supplied by the makers, too. That’s part of the problem. Here. Look in the screen.”

I looked, and saw a close-up of a cell. No, not a cell. Some sort of unicellular animal, it seemed, like the amoeba.

“That’s a cellular unit from one of the robots,” she told me. “It really isn’t a cell, although it acts like one. It’s a complete self-contained microcomputer using organic molecules and an organic structure.” She fiddled with a dial and the tiny thing was gone, replaced by a horde of tiny things swimming in a clear river.

“The molecular chemistry itself’s a nightmare,” she told me. “It’s not that we’re seeing anything unusual. No special elements we’ve never seen before, nothing like that. But they’re put together in a way I couldn’t even imagine. There is in fact no way I know to build or grow something like that, composed of all those elements and compounds, and make it work. For example, I can take carbon chains and sulfur and zinc, potassium, magnesium, and a hundred other compounds and elements and put them together—but never would I get something like that.” She shifted the focus to the cellular wall and blew it up almost impossibly large. “See those tiny little hairlike things? They’re the electrical connectors to the surrounding cells. Like nerves, yet not like them. Connected up, they form conscious communications system from cell to cell. The brain can tell any cell, or any cell group, what it wants the little bugger to do, look like—you name it, and it can do it. Mimic almost anything. Even functional things. Impossible. Inconceivable. Even in our best bad old days of the robot war we had nothing that could do that. We might have had, though, had they not banned further research and development.”

“I get the point. What you’re telling me is that even the Confederacy couldn’t reprogram or deprogram the things.”

“Nothing of the sort! Given one of these, they probably could. But we—we’re at a dead end. We are able to see how it’s done, but we can’t do it—or undo it—ourselves. And most important, we can’t tell the necessary programming from the unnecessary stuff. See?”

I did see. “But you think the Confederacy could?”

“Only because they have bigger, faster, quasi-organic devices themselves. I doubt if they could duplicate this, but they could probably tell it what to do. That’s why each cell has a self-destruct switch. If it’s incapacitated or in danger of capture, it simply melts down. All of it”

“Seen enough?” Bogen asked impatiently.

I nodded. “For now, anyway. I’m impressed, I have to say that.” I was more than impressed. The damned things scared me to death.