The beams ceased, and Jared and the rest of the 2nd popped their parafoils. Charged nanobots extended in tendrils from backpacks and formed individual gliders. Jared, no longer free-falling, tilted himself toward the palace and the smoking hole left by the third beam—a hole that led to the heir’s nursery.
At roughly the size of St. Peter’s Basilica, the Hierarch’s Palace was no small edifice, and outside the main hall where the hierarch held formal court and the now-shattered administrative wing, no non-Eneshans were allowed to enter. There were no architectural plans of the palace in the public record, and the palace itself, constructed in the fluid and chaotically natural Eneshan architectural style that resembled nothing so much as a series of termite mounds, did not lend itself to easy discovery of significant areas or rooms. Before the plan to kidnap the Eneshan heir could be put into action, it had to be discovered where the heir’s private chambers lay. Military Research considered it a pretty puzzle, but one without a lot of time to be solved.
Their solution was to think small; indeed, to think single-celled—to think of C. xavierii, a Eneshan prokaryotic organism evolutionarily parallel to bacteria. Just as strains of bacteria live in happily symbiotic relationships with humans, so did C. xavierii with Eneshans, primarily internally but also externally. Like many humans, not all Eneshans were fastidious about their bathroom habits.
Colonial Union Military Research cracked C. xavierii open and resequenced it to create the subspecies C. xavierii movere, which coded to construct mitochondrion-sized radio transmitters and receivers. These tiny organic machines recorded the movements of their hosts by polling their positions relative to C. xavierii movere housed by other Eneshans within their transmitting range. The recording capacity of these microscopic devices was small—they had the capacity to store less than an hour’s worth of movement—but each cellular division created a new recording machine, tracking movement anew.
Military Research introduced the genetically-modified bug into the Hierarch’s Palace by way of a hand lotion, provided to an unsuspecting Colonial Union diplomat who had regular physical contact with her Eneshan counterparts. These Eneshans then transmitted the germ to other members of the palace staff simply through everyday contact. The diplomat’s personal brain prostheses (and those of her entire staff) were also surreptitiously modified to record the tiny transmissions that would soon emanate from the palace staff and all its inhabitants, including the hierarch and her heir. In less than a month Military Research had a complete map of the internal structure of the Hierarch’s Palace, based on the movement of its staff.
Military Research never told the Colonial Union diplomatic staff of its unintentional espionage. Not only was it safer for the diplomats, but they would have been appalled at how they had been used.
Jared reached the roof of the palace and dissolved his glider, landing away from the hole in case it collapsed. Other members of the 2nd were landing or had landed and were preparing for their descent by securing rappelling lines. Jared spotted Sarah Pauling, who had walked up the hole and was now peering down through the smoke and debris cloud.
::Don’t look down,:: Jared said to her.
::Too late for that,:: she replied, and sent him a vertiginous image from her point of view. Through their integration Jared could sense her anxiety and anticipation; he felt that way himself.
The rappelling lines were secure. ::Pauling, Dirac,:: said Jane Sagan. ::Time to move.:: It had been less than five minutes since the beams had torn down from the sky, and each additional second brought the increased chance that their quarry had been moved. They were also working against the eventual arrival of troops and emergency responders. Blowing up the executive wing would distract and delay attention to the 2nd Platoon, but not for long.
The three clipped in and dropped down four levels, straight into the heirarch’s residential apartments. The nursery was directly beyond; they had decided not to send the beam down directly on top of the nursery to avoid an accidental collapse. As Jared dropped he sensed the wisdom of that decision; “surgical” or not, the beam had made a mess of the three floors above the heirarch’s apartments, and much of the damage had fallen straight down.
::Activate your infrared,:: Sagan said, as they rappelled. ::The lights are down and there’s a lot of dust down there.:: Jared and Pauling did as they were told. A glow suffused the air, heated by the exertions of the beam and the smoldering remains below.