“You must have had access to the storage area after he was presumed dead,” Szilard said. “Are you saying that no one thought it odd he had a clone vat in storage?”
Robbins opened his mouth but Mattson answered. “If he was a good research head—and he was—he’d have a lot of decommissioned and surplus equipment in storage, in order to tinker and optimize it without interfering with equipment that we were actually using. And I would assume that when we got to the vat it was drained and sterilized and disconnected from the server and the power supply.”
“That’s right,” Robbins said. “It wasn’t until we got your report that we put two and two together, General Szilard.”
“I’m glad the information was useful,” Szilard said. “I wish you had put two and two together earlier. I find the idea that Military Research had a traitor in its ranks—and as the head of an extremely sensitive division—appalling. You should have known.”
Robbins said nothing to this; to the extent that Special Forces had any reputation at all beyond its military prowess, it was that its members were profoundly lacking in tact and patience. Being three-year-old killing machines didn’t leave much time for social graces.
“What was to know?” Mattson said. “Boutin never gave any indication he was turning traitor. One day he’s doing his work, the next we find him a suicide in his lab, or so we thought. No note. No anything that suggests he had anything on his mind but his work.”
“You told me earlier that Boutin hated you,” Szilard said to Mattson.
“Boutin did hate me, and for good reason,” Mattson said. “And the feeling was mutual. But just because a man thinks his superior officer is a son of a bitch doesn’t mean he’s a traitor to his species.” Mattson pointed to Robbins. “The colonel here doesn’t particularly like me, either, and he’s my adjutant. But he’s not going to go running to the Rraey or the Enesha with top-secret information.”
Szilard looked over at Robbins. “Is it true?” he said.
“Which part, sir?” Robbins said.
“That you don’t like General Mattson,” Szilard said.
“He can take some getting used to, sir,” Robbins said.
“By which he means I’m an asshole,” Mattson said, with a chuckle. “And that’s fine. I’m not here to win popularity contests. I’m here to deliver weapons and technology. But whatever was going through Boutin’s head, I don’t think I had much to do with it.”
“So what was it then?” Szilard said.
“You’d know better than we would, Szi,” Mattson said. “You’re the one with the pet Rraey scientist that you’ve taught to squeal.”
“Administrator Cainen never met Boutin personally, or so he says,” Szilard said. “He doesn’t know anything about his motivations, just that Boutin gave the Rraey information on the most recent BrainPal hardware. That’s part of what Administrator Cainen’s group was working on—trying to integrate BrainPal technology with Rraey brains.”
“Just what we need,” Mattson said. “Rraey with supercomputers in their heads.”
“He didn’t seem to be very successful with the integration,” Robbins said, and looked over to Szilard. “At least not from the data your people recovered from his lab. Rraey brain structure is too different.”
“Small favors,” Mattson said. “Szi, you have to have gotten something else out of your guy.”
“Outside of his specific work and situation, Administrator Cainen hasn’t been terribly useful,” Szilard said. “And the few Eneshans we captured alive were resistant to conversation, to use a euphemism. We know the Rraey, the Enesha and the Obin are allied to attack us. But we don’t know why, how or when, or what Boutin brings into the equation. We need your people to figure that one out, Mattson.”
Mattson nodded to Robbins. “Where are we with that?” he asked.
“Boutin was in charge of a lot of sensitive information,” Robbins said, pitching his answer to Szilard. “His groups handled consciousness transfer, BrainPal development and body-generation techniques. Any of that could be useful to an enemy, either to help it develop its own technology or to find weaknesses in ours. Boutin himself was probably the leading expert on getting minds out of one body and into another. But there’s a limit to how much of that information he could carry. Boutin was a civilian scientist. He didn’t have a BrainPal. His clone had all his registered brain prostheses on him, and he’s not likely to have gotten a spare. Prostheses are tightly monitored and he’d have to spend several weeks training it. We don’t have any network record of Boutin using anything but his registered prosthesis.”
“We’re talking about a man who got a cloning vat past you,” Szilard said.
“It’s not impossible that he walked out of the lab with a store of information,” Robbins said. “But it’s very unlikely. It’s more likely he left only with the knowledge in his head.”