Once she was through, the door hissed shut and then produced various heavy clonkings that indicated it would not be opening again until it was damn good and ready. Then the inner door opened, and they dragged themselves in.
The two-story-high room was brightly lit and lined with tiles that Odette guessed were fireproof, shatterproof, acid-proof, and easy to clean. In the center was the operating table, and on it lay a figure under a discreet plastic sheet. Above the corpse was a lighting array with a camera pointing down. Using sterile gauze, they hurriedly plugged the trailing hoses into the outlets, and a blessed coolness came pumping around them. They slipped antistatic bands around their nondominant hands and connected the trailing cords to the corners of the table the body lay upon.
“It’s a fairly standard setup,” Dr. Bastion assured her. “Here are the three panic buttons,” he said, pointing out a panel near the operating table. “Blue fills the room with a fire-retardant gas.”
“Okay,” said Odette.
“White fills the room with a paralytic chemical. It took down a weremoose last month, so it should be able to sedate anything person-size or smaller.”
A weremoose? thought Odette, nodding automatically.
“And the red button fills the room with fire. Don’t worry, though. The really heavy fire will be centered on the table, so if you have to hit the button, be sure to step back as far as possible.”
“But the whole room is filled with fire?” asked Odette.
“Only a light fire,” he assured her. “And some of the lower layers of the gowns you’re wearing are fire-resistant.”
“There’s no button to summon armed guards?” joked Odette.
“Oh, all three of them summon armed guards,” said the doctor. “Plus, we already have a couple up in the gallery.” Thanks to the armor, Odette couldn’t actually raise her head, but she tilted back at the waist and saw a window beyond which two men with machine guns were standing. She waved awkwardly, and one of them waved back. Behind them were Graaf Ernst, Rook Thomas, Security Chief Clovis, and Pawn Clements.
“We have pistols here as well,” said the doctor. “Just reach under the operating table, and you’ll find them.” Incredulously, Odette felt around and found herself unholstering an alarmingly chunky handgun. “Armor-piercing ammunition,” he informed her.
“Okay, well, let’s see what we find,” she said, picking up the scalpel from the instrument tray. She wasn’t sure what to say, but focusing on science and medicine gave her something to hold on to. She paused when she realized that Dr. Bastion’s eyes were wide open. “Is everything all right?”
“I’m just rather eager to see a doctor of the Broederschap at work,” he confessed. “Do you use a Y-incision or a T-incision? Or just a single vertical cut?”
“Usually I do an asterisk or an outward-spiraling incision,” said Odette.
“Oh... By all means, proceed.”
34
“What’s that?” asked Dr. Bastion in fascination. It had been twenty minutes, and it was, according to Odette’s rough mental tally, the thirty-third time the doctor had asked exactly that question in exactly that tone. She couldn’t really blame him — the interior of the body looked like somebody had taken a copy of Gray’s Anatomy and engaged in some vigorous cutting-and-pasting.
“I think it’s a junction box,” said Odette. Crammed deep into the man’s torso was a hard, ridged object that looked like the child of an oyster and a chestnut. Clear plastic pipes led out of it, and strands of tissue ran through them to other parts of the body. “See how it’s been plumbed into the spinal cord here?”
“Fascinating,” murmured Dr. Bastion.
“Hand me those forceps, please,” ordered Odette. “We should be able to open it up; these are generally accessible to allow for later modifications and — ah!” The casing opened smoothly and revealed a fist-size mass of tissue, its surface covered with familiar-looking ridges and folds.
“It looks like a brain,” observed the doctor.
“It is a brain,” said Odette. “A supplementary brain.” She peered closely at it, looking for anything unusual. “When they modified this guy, they had to add in a whole bunch of new ligaments, nerves, and muscles to control his implants. See this?” She reached out with a probe and manipulated a nodule of gray matter. The man’s left arm convulsed, and with a wet cracking sound, a steel bolt launched itself explosively from his wrist. It shot across the room and lodged itself in the shatterproof tiles. They looked at the bolt cautiously. “Okay, well, I probably shouldn’t do that anymore.”
“Perhaps not,” agreed Dr. Bastion.
“Anyway, when you receive implants, you don’t just get automatic control of them. Some of them, like respiratory or digestive changes, can be wired into your autonomic nervous system. But for weapons or extra limbs, you’ve got to learn how to use them. It can take months. This type of extra brain is a quick fix to that problem. It’s got instructions and commands preloaded.”
“Do you have an extra brain?” asked Dr. Bastion.
“No,” said Odette. “The control they give is very crude. And it’s considered bad form, like cheating. If you want the implants, you must have the self-discipline to train to use them.” She thought of her own implants. She’d mastered sheathing and unsheathing her spurs in a couple of days, but it had taken months before she could use her revamped musculature to perform microsurgery. “These sorts of things are generally implanted if we’re in a hurry. This gets them active, and then we usually remove them later.”
“You remove them?”
“Oh yes. Once the subject can take the time to learn things properly. They’re like training wheels. Only, you know, they’re brains.” She didn’t say that the first supplementary brains had been developed for shock troops for the invasion of the Isle of Wight.
Obviously, whoever put the junction box into this guy didn’t care about him at all, she thought. Quite aside from the seizure fail-safe. The simultaneous deaths of the men proved that it was no accident or coincidence.
“Dr. Bastion, you said the prisoners were in special cells?”
“Yes,” he said. “They were underground and shielded from all means of electronic communication.”
“Why?”
“Um, we’ve had some problems with previous... Grafter... prisoners,” the doctor said uncomfortably. “A man in our custody once turned out to be sending information back to his superiors through some sort of antenna on his spine, and then his body was ordered to destroy itself. Of course, this was before we started moving toward peace and amalgamation,” he added hurriedly.
Odette raised her eyebrows. The implants he was describing weren’t like anything she was familiar with, but she had no difficulty believing they existed. I suppose they’re used for espionage, she thought, which is why I’ve never heard of them.
“These men were never intended to survive,” said Odette grimly. “They had a mission to accomplish and a set amount of time to get it done. Whoever performed the operations on them knew they would have either succeeded or failed by four a.m. and didn’t want them to be alive either way.” Probably so they couldn’t answer any inconvenient questions. “Disposable troops.”
“Clever,” remarked Dr. Bastion.
“Let’s keep going,” said Odette. “Here, can you help me remove the liver and all these lungs?” The two of them worked briskly for a few minutes, and Odette found herself relaxing a little as she slid into the familiar routine and focus that exploring a body required. She scrutinized every organ closely, paying special attention to the points where they had been joined to the man’s nervous system. The placement of the organs might have been sloppy, but the connections were of the highest quality, and there were features she recognized, ones she carried within her own frame. Pim, she thought sadly. Then she noticed something in the cavity, a flicker of independent movement that made her freeze. Not wanting to put her face too close to it, Odette opened her eyes wide, sharpened her gaze, and zoomed in.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered. Be calm, she told herself. You must be calm.