Chimera

Twenty-Five

The corpse on the table smelled cloyingly sweet. Baxin, Sipha Palen's pathologist, directed a squad of devices while speaking aloud his findings for the recorders.

"-lungs are permeated by clusters of nodes which seem to function as storage systems for long-term oxygenation. Secondary vascular system routed through what appears to be a secondary spleen suggests waste gas disposal follows complimentary pathways for storage in…what the hell is that?"

He fidgeted nervously and glanced at Derec and Palen, who watched from the other side of the isolation screen. Baxin was perspiring slightly. His fingers worked a keypad, and the small scavengers moved on and through the body of the cyborg.

"The muscle structure is a complex interleaving of polymers and protein. Molecular bonding seems to be cyclodextrous…we have polyamide bonding along single-chain amine nitrogen…looks like it uses adipic acids to facilitate the protein interactions…"

Baxin looked at Derec and shook his head.

"I have no idea what I'm looking at," he said. "This thing looks like it's made of nylon and nylon analogs."

"Myralar?"

"Yes, I'm finding a lot of that in the joints and the valves. A second pancreas that looks like an organic polymer factory…it's producing hexamethyline diamine instead of insulin…I don't even know why it was brought here."

"This doesn't look like the being in the recovered memories," Palen said. "The skin looks…normal, I suppose."

"Oh, that," Baxin said. He took a pair of forceps and lifted a layer of skin from one pectoral. Instead of the red and gray of organic tissue, the underside looked like graphite. "There's a layer of composite that seems to be electrolytically active. If I run a small charge through it, the material shifts to the exterior derma." He dropped the layer and shook his head. "It causes problems-skin irritation and infections from the look of it. That's the source of the rough complexion."

"In your opinion," Palen asked, "is it at all human?"

Baxin shrugged elaborately and surveyed the body. "Sure. There's blood, oxygenation, amino acids…I'm seeing some alternate building blocks in part of the DNA, like fluorotryptophan…but it's at least as much a machine… a very odd machine…" He grabbed a hand and held it up. "The musculature in key areas has an underlying carbon isotope structure that responds to pressure by forming a kind of sheathe. The best comparison I have is calcium deposition in bones under stress. But that takes days or months. According to the projections I've got here-" he pointed at his monitors "-this responds instantly by creating a kind of exoskeleton which can be reabsorbed." He shook his head. "In my opinion, the only thing that would define this as primarily organic is that you'd have to grow all this. You couldn't add it onto an already extant organic structure."

"Not at all?" Derec asked. "I mean, how early would you have to start?"

Baxin sighed and glanced at the readouts on the bank on monitors beside him. "Well, there are some problems. I've got an organ here that looks like a gall bladder, but as far as I can tell it's strictly for the isolation of ammonia, which seems to be produced as a byproduct of a polymerization process. The ammonia would still be toxic if released generally, so it's flensed from the system and fed back into the one of the spleens for venting. It's not a perfect system-I'm seeing excess carbonic carbonyl in the duodenum that seems to be ingested to compensate for an imbalance. I'm thinking that most of this secondary polymer system was introduced before puberty, probably in infancy. You could overcome some of these problems by starting with a base genetic template and growing one from scratch, but I wouldn't be able to tell you how. Probably the rate of breakdown would overwhelm it at that stage, so starting later might compensate for some of the flaws. "

"You don't sound too certain, " Palen said.

"There'd have to be certain preconditions," Baxin said. "I'm not good enough for this, Chief. I'm guessing. You need someone who understands sequencing and gene therapy."

"What about the brain?" Derec asked. "Is it wholly organic?"

"No…well, yes…I mean, it's oxygenated, but what I'm seeing is the presence of protonated oxygen. That would limit cell absorption considerably, except that there's a monomer fiber strung along the vasal matrix that's drawing particles from a small isotopic shunt in the hypothalamus. "

"What kind of particles?" Derec pressed.

"Positrons."

Derec sensed Palen looking at him. "All right," he said. "When you finish, I want the brain sent to the positronics lab."

"The whole thing should've been sent there to begin with," Baxin complained. "Sorry. I'll let you know when I've completed my autopsy. "

"Thanks, Doctor," Palen said. "By the way, the masking ability-"

Baxin laughed sourly. "That's the only thing that's easy to explain. The clothing. It doesn't have it built into itself. It just wore military tech. "

Derec walked away from the theater. Masid leaned against the wall by the exit, arms folded over his chest. Derec heard Palen's heavy tread catching up to him.

"Your assistant, " Masid said, "just called to say you should come to the lab ASAP." Derec nodded in response.

"So, just what is that thing?" Palen demanded as the three of them stepped into the corridor outside the morgue.

"A cyborg," Derec said. "What I was afraid of."

"Where did it come from?"

"I have no idea."

"Are there more of them?"

"There's no reason to think this one is the prototype. Why use it for something as risky as slipping into a police station to murder someone if it's the only one? No, there are others. " He glanced at Palen. "What did your Brethe dealer find that got her killed by one?"

Palen glared at Masid. "I don't know," she said. "We didn't get a chance to debrief her."

"Where was she when you picked her up?" Derec asked.

"Settler section, dockside," Masid said. "She used to keep a flop there, in the service section."

"Has anybody looked at it since she died?"

Palen nodded. "It had been tossed, pretty thoroughly. None of her associates shed any light on what she was into."

"Was she actually dealing Brethe?" Derec asked.

"Absolutely," Palen said. "Only way to keep her cover valid. "

"Who was her supplier, then?"

Masid nodded. "A local boss named Metresha, who also has a finger or two in the baley traffic."

"Has anybody talked to her?"

"Not yet," Palen said. "She's offstation right now. I didn't want to move on her till we had some solid information about these deaths."

"Does anybody know when she's coming back?"

Masid shrugged. "Metresha is rather hard to keep track of. No one is really sure what she looks like-she tends to work through intermediaries a great deal. I gather the docks are being watched?"

"The Settler ship that was supposed to pick up those baleys is in dock now," Palen said. "Metresha always shows up when a cargo is being moved."

"Have you heard from Lanra?"

"Not since yesterday."

"I want to talk to Ariel," Derec said.

"I want to know where that robot is," Palen said.

Derec glared at her. "You might want to ask your new prisoner about the cyborg. He knew its name, after all."

"We're letting him think things through a while longer," Palen said. "Do you want to be there when we question him?"

"It might be useful to have someone there who knows a little about robots," Derec said sardonically.

The three of them took the next shunt to the Spacer quarters in stony silence. Derec found himself slightly in the lead as they strode toward the lab. Agent Harwol and one of his people stood outside the lab, talking quietly. When he spotted Derec, he came forward.

"We have a situation, Avery-"

"Talk to the ambassador," Derec said irritably, brushing past the TBI agent.

"Avery-"

Derec entered the lab and stopped abruptly.

The DW-12 stood in the center of the space, most of the resident techs standing in a loose circle around it. Director Polifos sat, arms folded indignantly, before the robot. When he saw Derec, his scowl deepened and he tried to stand. The robot placed a hand on his shoulder and urged the director back into the chair.

"Damn it, you cannot do that!" he shouted. "What is wrong with this robot? Doesn't it know that it has to take my orders?"

"It knows it has to keep you here," Derec said. "For your own protection."

"I'm in no danger!"

"Then, why were you running?"

"I wasn't."

Derec looked at the robot. "Thales?"

"The Director had booked passage on a Settler transport," the robot said. "I found him in a dockside tavern in Section Forty-nine, carrying a pack of personal belongings."

Polifos glared up at the robot.

"What is this thing?" he asked quietly.

"Never mind that," Palen said. "Why don't you tell us where you were going? And why?"

Polifos looked at her, anger and fear working at his expression. He shook his head.

"What ship?" Palen asked.

"The Reyatta," Thales answered.

Palen pulled out her comm and stepped away, speaking softly. A few seconds later, she came back.

"Interesting choice of ships, Director," Palen said. "The Reyatta is a known blockade runner. Where were you going, Director Polifos?"

Polifos shook his head and studied the floor.

Derec searched the lab until he saw Rana over by the workstation they had been using. She waved him over.

"Ariel needs to talk to you," she said.

Derec stepped up to the console. "Thales, are we secure?"

"Yes, Derec. I have traced all the gates in place. One of them fed directly to Director Polifos's quarters. Another went to Chief Palen's office. One, however, I have a location for but no identification, in the Settler's section."

"Where's Ariel?"

"Back in the embassy," Thales said. "But not for long. There have been developments."

"Connect me." Derec stopped before Polifos and waited for the man to look up. "Director."

Polifos frowned.

"What kind of work did you do for Nova levis?"

Polifos blinked and went pale.

Derec turned to Palen, who had been talking intently with Masid, away from the others. "I want to bring him down to the morgue. "

Palen looked intrigued. "All right."

Thales/Bogard urged Polifos to his feet. Harwol and two of his agents came forward. "What are we doing?" Harwol asked.

"A demonstration," Derec said. "Thales?"

"Please follow Derec Avery," the robot said.

"Agent Harwol, if you could have your people guard our flanks on the way down…?"

Reluctantly, Harwol agreed. The entourage emerged from the lab and headed back down to Palen's morgue.

Baxin still worked on the body. He looked up at the approach of this new group, his brow knitting. Derec glanced at Polifos.

When the director saw the corpse, he stopped, then tried to back up. Thales/Bogard blocked his escape. Derec reached for him, took his shirt sleeve, and dragged him close to the transparency.

"What do you think of that, Director Polifos?"

"I-" He shook his head. "Please."

"Recognize it? Perhaps some of it is your own work?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? Then why are you frightened? Why were you running? Is this what you were running from?"

"You don't understand-"

Derec tightened his hand on Polifos's arm. "Then make me understand. "

"Please!"

"Is this what you've been hiding from for the last twenty years? Did you make that?"

"No! I don't know what that is! Let me be!"

Polifos squirmed loose from Derec only to encounter Palen, Masid, Harwol, and Thales/Bogard.

"Talk to us, Director," Palen said. "We've got a lot of dead people we need explanations for."

"I didn't have anything to do with that," Polifos said.

"What did you do in Nova levis?" Derec asked. He pointed at the cyborg. "Is that a direct result of your work?"

Polifos tried not to look at it.

"Is that your work, Kyas Vol?"

Polifos paled visibly then. "You know?"

"You've been hiding here under the protection of the Auroran government since disappearing from Earth after Nova levis closed down. Why? What were you doing there?"

"I'm trying not to die, damn it!" He whirled around, shoving Derec away. He backed against the transparency. "They killed everyone! Anyone who knew anything about it! Fos and Holani…Cortem…the documentation staff…" He was shaking now. "I went to the Aurorans because they were the only ones not involved. Terran authority, Solarians, corporates…Aurora had nothing to do with it."

"With what?" Harwol demanded.

Polifos started sobbing. He slid to the floor, eyes streaming.

"We never really knew who we were working for, " he said finally. "The lab took subscriptions for stock. It was supposed to be a public corporation-we didn't know…"

"Your mission," Derec said. "What was your mission?"

"The plague. Stop the plague."

"What plague?" Palen asked.

Polifos shook his head. "There wasn't one. We succeeded." He sat there, crying for a time, until he finally got control of himself. He stood and looked at the corpse. Baxin stood away from the body now, waiting. Polifos turned away. "Please. I don't want to look at it anymore."

Palen led them all to Baxin's office. One of Harwol's people got Polifos a cup of water. The director sat in a chair, trembling and sipping.

"What plague?" Derec prompted.

"Old, old nanotech," Polifos said. "Do you know what UPDs are?"

"I know the term," Derec said. "I'm still not sure what it means. "

"Untreatable Physiological Dysfunction," Polifos said. "The term covers a lot of ground. Some of it is organic illnesses, chronic systemic dysfunctions, things we can only watch. We can't cure them. In some cases, we can provide a little relief, but they're all fatal, and usually pretty quickly. Ninety-eight percent of the cases are infants. The worst of them are nonorganic. We used to call them Vonooman Plagues." He shrugged. "I don't know why."

He drank again, coughed, and set the cup down. "Before we outlawed robots-long time ago-we played with everything. One of our developments was nanotech. We still have a lot of it. Food production is a result of old nanotech. Some medical treatments, manufacturing-but most of it got thrown out with the robots. Largely because a few experiments went wrong and we created self-sustaining inorganic colonies. Parasites, really. They disassembled extant structures and used the material. There was a huge panic when the first of them erupted a few hundred years ago. But the fact is, they ate themselves out. It was fast and furious and so fatal that within ten, twenty years they died out all on their own, except for a few aberrant strains that stayed in the ecosystem and caused relatively minor problems since."

"UPDs, " Derec said.

Polifos nodded. "Poor kids. They'd be born with a minor problem and through some vector we've never been able to trace, a colony of these things would take advantage and set up within the system. Within extreme intervention, death would be quick. We set up hospice centers for them. "

"They aren't very well advertised, " Palen said. "This is the first I've heard of them."

"Nobody wants to know about them. Anonymity is almost always desired by the parents, so it works out comfortably for everyone but the victim."

"So what changed?" Derec asked.

"We found strains that were sustaining the victim. They were adapting. Why now and not before? Don't know. And not in very many cases. But when we diagnosed the first adult cases of new infection, we knew we had a big problem."

"Terrans?" Derec asked.

"Settlers," Polifos said. "We needed to find a cure. To do that we needed to find the vectors and we needed to understand the nature of the host system. We set up Nova Levis as a research lab in prostheses to cover the actual research into the new plague."

"And what was the vector?" Harwol asked.

"Only certain colonies. We found a series of enzyme deficiencies that produced chronic conditions that were treatable but rendered the system vulnerable to opportunistic infections. Those colonies tended to be the smallest and most isolationist. The influx of new colonists had been cut off for a variety of reasons-diplomatic, financial, other things. We were afraid that the plagues might adapt sufficiently well to become generally virulent and infect us. It was a small population that was at risk. We found a vaccine that was communicable by touch and could be spread through viral transfer."

"How did you get around the immigration barriers?" Harwol asked.

"Baleys," Derec said.

Polifos nodded. "Slipped them in through the back door."

"What about the infants?" Masid asked.

"We continued our research on them. We found that the diseases had reworked their basic genetic structure in some cases, demanding augmentation in key organs. We thought we were finding a cure. We found that the disease had left us with an organic system perfectly suited to the introduction of symbiotic machine prostheses. But it was a holistic approach. We couldn't fix one organ, we had to address the entire system."

"You started playing with positronics," Derec said.

Polifos nodded. "We got them through our Solarian contacts."

"That means you. You're Solarian."

Polifos shook his head. "I was born here, on Earth. My parents were Solarian and I kept my citizenship, but I've never been there. "

"Then who was your Solarian contact?"

"Through the embassy mission. I never knew who."

"Why was the lab shut down?" Palen asked.

"We started getting infants in large numbers. We'd developed a method of introducing self-sustaining support into the organic matrix, freeing them from the massive support systems they'd been forced to live in. The babies showed up, we'd refit them, and then they'd disappear. Director Holani was our head of staff. She found out they were going offplanet. She started demanding to know what was going on. She threatened to go public. That's when everything was closed down."

"So how does this explain that thing Baxin's working on?" Palen demanded, gesturing in the direction of the cyborg's remains.

"We stumbled on a process that would enable us to fuse machine and organic systems. The vonooman infection opened the way for the introduction of fully symbiotic artificial components. Puberty alters too much for reintroduction-a lot of it is mitigated by viral infections, RNA recompositions, stuff like that-but from infancy, we found we could grow a composite organism to adulthood. That's when the traffic in infants increased."

"So that thing may have been one of your patients?"

"May have," Polifos admitted. "I went to the Aurorans when my colleagues started dying. I told them what was going on. They took me in and hid me." He looked around at them. "I don't want to die."

"Where's the work being done now?" Derec asked.

Polifos frowned.

"Where are the cyborgs being grown now?"

"A sister lab was built on Cassus Thole," Polifos said. "A transfer point for baleys to the other colonies where the plague was taking root."

"Cassus Thole?" Palen asked. "I never heard of that one."

"It's an old name," Masid said. "It's now called Nova Levis. " Yuri Pocivil did not try to run when he saw the cyborg corpse. He swallowed, hard, and stared at it. Slowly, he turned to Palen.

"I don't know anything," he said.

"You worked the baley run out of Petrabor," Palen said. "You worked with this thing. We have documentation on it, so don't bother lying. "

"I'm just a dockworker, that's all," Pocivil said.

"Running baleys?" Masid asked.

"Baleys, drygoods, food, manufactured components-it's all just cargo. My job is strictly dockside. I don't know anything."

"You know who pays you," Palen said. "You know your contacts. You get your assignments from somewhere."

"I also know what 'dead' means," he said.

"You should, " Derec agreed. "You already are. That was coming to kill you. " He nodded toward the cyborg. "You know that. "

After a time, Pocivil nodded. "I got caught. That's against the rules. "

"So why protect them?" Palen asked.

Pocivil shrugged. "A gato's got to have standards."

"Pretty low ones, in your case, " Masid said. "You know all those baleys were murdered. The last shipment you sent up here."

Pocivil sighed. "Shit. I guess it doesn't matter. You won't find them, anyway. "

"Why not?" Palen asked.

"Because the operation is over. It's being shut down. I was on my way home when your people grabbed me."

"Shut down," Derec said. "You mean, no more baley runs? No more-"

"Nothing, no more anything. They're closing up shop. It's over."

"Why don't you tell us where and who, then?" Palen asked.

Pocivil let out a long, shuddering breath and turned away from the autopsy theater. "What do you want to know first?" Derec watched through the transparency as Polifos assisted Baxin in removing the brain and brain stem from the cyborg body. He finally realized what bothered him about the scene: the colors were all wrong. The blood was nearly purple, organs were gray or bronze colored, nothing looked like it came out of a human body.

He glanced back at the robot. Thales/Bogard remained nearby, silently observing the same operation.

"What do you think, Thales?" Derec asked. "Or should I call you Bogard?"

"Either, both, or some new name," the robot replied. "What do I think about what, Derec?"

"This," Derec said, gesturing at the cyborg.

"I have not decided yet."

"What do you mean?"

"The cause of Coffee's collapse was due to a misidentification. It believed that it was intervening against a robot. When he injured the being and realized that it had just assaulted an organic form, it naturally recoiled, assuming it had just attacked a human."

"Assuming? "

"I am not certain this construct qualifies as human."

Derec felt a disquieting coldness form around his thoughts. He stared at the robot for a long time.

"You be sure to let me know when and what you decide," he said finally.

"I shall, Derec."