In the distance the hovercraft was wheeling around and looking to make a run at Sagan. Sagan examined the weapon in her hand, trying to see if she could make sense of the thing before the hovercraft came back her way, and decided not to bother. She grabbed the Obin, punched it in the neck to keep it subdued, and searched it for an edged weapon. She found something like a combat knife hanging from its waist. Its shape and and balance was all wrong for a human hand but there was nothing she could do about that now.
The hovercraft had now turned around completely and was bearing down on Sagan. She could see the barrel of its gun spinning up to fire. Sagan reached down, and with the knife still in hand grabbed the fallen Obin and with a grunt heaved it into the path of the hovercraft and its gun. The Obin danced as the fléchettes sliced into it. Sagan, covered by the dancing Obin, stepped to the side but as close as she dared to the craft and swung the knife as the Obin flashed by. She felt a shocking wrenching of her arm and was spun hard into the ground as the knife connected with the Obin’s body. She stayed down, dazed and in pain, for several minutes.
When she finally got up she saw the hovercraft idling a hundred meters away. The Obin was still sitting on it, its dangling head held on to the neck by a flap of skin. Sagan pushed the Obin off the hovercraft and stripped it of its weapons and supplies. She then wiped the Obin’s blood off the hovercraft as best she could and took a few minutes to learn how the machine worked. Then she turned the thing around and flew it toward the fence. The hovercraft crested the guns easily; Sagan set it down out of their range, in front of Harvey and Seaborg.
“You look terrible,” Harvey said.
“I feel terrible,” Sagan said. “Now, would you like a ride out of here, or would you like to make some more small talk?”
“That depends,” Harvey said. “Where are we going?”
“We had a mission,” Sagan said. “I think we should finish it.”
“Sure,” Harvey said. “The three of us with no weapons, taking on at least several dozen Obin soldiers and attacking a science station.”
Sagan hauled up the Obin weapon and handed it to Harvey. “Now you have a weapon,” she said. “All you have to do is learn to use it.”
“Swell,” Harvey said, taking the weapon.
“How long do you think until the Obin realize one of their hovercraft is missing?” asked Seaborg.
“No time at all,” Sagan said. “Come on. It’s time to get moving.”
“Looks like your recording is done,” Boutin said to Jared, and turned to his desk display. Jared knew it before Boutin said it because the vise-like pinching had stopped mere instants ago.
“What do you mean that I’m the thing to get you back on track against the Colonial Union?” Jared said. “I’m not going to help you.”
“Why not?” Boutin said. “You’re not interested in saving the human race from a slow asphyxiation?”
“Let’s just say your presentation does not leave me entirely convinced,” Jared said.
Boutin shrugged. “So it goes,” he said. “Naturally, you being me, or some facsimile thereof, I would have hoped you’d come around to my way of thinking. But in the end, no matter how many of my memories or personal tics you may have, you’re still someone else, aren’t you? Or are for now, anyway.”
“What does that mean?” Jared said.
“I’ll get to that,” Boutin said. “But let me tell you a story first. It will make some things clear. Many years ago, the Obin and a race called the Ala got into a go-around over some real estate. On the surface, the Ala and the Obin were well-matched militarily, but the Alaite army consisted of clones. This meant they were all susceptible to the same genetic weapon, a virus the Obin designed that would lie dormant for a while—long enough to be transmitted—and then dissolve the flesh of whatever poor Ala it was living in. The Alaite army was wiped out, and then so were the Ala.”
“That’s a lovely story,” Jared said.
“Just wait, because it gets better,” Boutin said. “Not too long ago, I thought about doing the same sort of thing to the Colonial Defense Forces. But doing that is more complicated than it sounds. For one thing, Colonial Defense Forces military bodies are almost entirely immune from disease—the SmartBlood simply won’t tolerate pathogens. And of course neither the CDF or Special Forces bodies are actually cloned bodies, so even if we could infect them, they wouldn’t all react in the same way. But then I realized there was one thing in each CDF body that was exactly the same. Something I knew my way around intimately.”
“The BrainPal,” Jared said.
“The BrainPal,” Boutin said. “And for it, I could create a time-release virus of its own—one that would embed itself in the BrainPal, replicate every time one CDF member communicated with another, but would stay dormant until a date and time of my choosing. Then it would cause every body system regulated by the BrainPal to go haywire. Everyone with a BrainPal instantly dead, and all the human worlds open for conquest. Quick, easy, painless.
“But there was a problem. I had no way to get the virus in. My back door was for diagnostics only. I could read out and shut down certain systems, but it wasn’t designed to upload code. In order to upload the code I would need someone to accept it for me and act as a carrier. So the Obin went looking for volunteers.”