“I don’t know,” Becker said.
“You know what would make them even more transparent and accountable? If they released the video for the night of the twenth-fifth. I keep asking, and they keep telling me there isn’t any.”
Becker shook her head. “There isn’t.”
“Come on.”
“Really. Too memory-intensive. “
“Corporal, I’m recording this,” Sabrie pointed out. “16K, Slooped sound, no compression even.” She glanced into the street. “Half those people are life-logging every second of their lives for the sheer narcissistic thrill of it.”
“And they’re streaming it. Or caching and dumping every couple of hours. I don’t get the luxury of tossing my cookies into some cloud whenever my cache fills up. I have to be able to operate in the dark for weeks at a time: You stream any kind of data in the field, it points back at you like a big neon arrow.
“Besides, budget time rolls around, how much of your limited R&D funding are you going to take away from tactical computing so you can make longer nature documentaries?” Becker raised her espresso in a small mock toast. “You think the People’s Republic is losing any sleep over that one?”
Which is awfully convenient, remarked a small voice, when you’ve just—
She shut it off.
Sabrie gave her a sidelong look. “You can’t record video.”
“Sure I can. But it’s discretionary. You document anything you think needs documenting, but the default realtime stream is just numbers. Pure black-box stuff.”
“You didn’t think you needed to document—”
“I didn’t know. It wasn’t conscious. Why the fuck can’t you people—”
Sabrie watched her without a word.
“Sorry,” Becker said at last.
“It’s okay,” Sabrie said softly. “Rising bubbles. I get it.”
Overhead, the sun peeked around an office tower. A lozenge of brightness crept onto the table.
“You know what they were doing out there?” Sabrie asked. “Tionee and his friends?”
Becker closed her eyes for a moment. “Some kind of fishing trip.”
“And you never wondered why anyone would go fishing in a place where there wasn’t anything to catch but slugs and slime?”
I never stopped wondering. “I heard it was a—cultural thing. Keep the traditions alive, in case someone ever builds a tuna that eats limestone.”
“It was an art project.”
Becker squinted as the hockey puck bounced sunlight into her eyes. “Excuse me?”
“Let me get that for you.” Sabrie half-rose and reached for the center of the table. The parasol bloomed with a snap. The table dropped back into eclipse.
“That’s better.” Sabrie reseated herself.
“An art project?” Becker repeated.
“They were college students. Cultural anthropology and art history majors, wired in from Evergreen State. Re-enact the daily lives of your forebears, play them back along wavelengths outside the human sensory range. They were calling it Through Alien Eyes. Some kind of commentary on outsider perspectives.”
“What wavelengths?”
“Reesi was glassing everything from radio to gamma.”
“There’s a third-party recording?”
“Nothing especially hi-def. They were on a student budget, after all. But it was good enough to pick out a signal around 400 megahertz. Nobody can quite figure out what it is. Not civilian, anyway.”
“That whole area’s contested. Military traffic all over the place.”
“Yeah, well. The thing is, it was a just a couple of really short bursts. Half a second, maybe. Around eleven-forty-five.”
Wingman froze. Gooseflesh rippled up Becker’s spine.
Sabrie leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?”
“You know I can’t discuss operational details.”
“Mmmm.” Sabrie watched and waited.
“I take it you have this recording,” Becker said at last.
The journalist smiled faintly. “You know I can’t discuss operational details.”
“I’m not asking you to compromise your sources. It just seems—odd.”
“Because your guys would have been all over the bodies before they were even cool. So if anyone had that kind of evidence, it would be them.”
“Something like that.”
“Don’t worry, you don’t have a mole. Or at least if you do, they don’t report to me. You want to blame anyone, blame your wing man.”
“What?”
“Your preconscious triggers tie into some pretty high-caliber weaponry. I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you what kind of games physics plays when multiple slugs hit a body at twelve hundred meters a second.”
Momentum. Inertia. Force vectors transferred from small masses to larger ones—and maybe back to smaller ones again. A pair of smartspecs could have flown twenty meters or more, landed way up in the weeds or splashed down in the lagoon.
“We wouldn’t have even known to look,” Becker murmured.
“We did.” Sabrie sipped her drink. “Want to hear it?”
Becker sat absolutely still.
“I know the rules, Nandita. I’m not asking you to ID it, or even comment. I just thought you might like...”
Becker glanced down at the jammer.
“I think we should leave that on.” Sabrie reached into her blouse, fingered the luminous medallion hanging from her neck. “You have sockets, though, right? Hard interfaces?”
“I don’t spread my legs in public.”
Sabrie’s eyes flickered to the far side of the street, where a small unmarked quadrocopter had just dipped into sight below the rim of the parasol. “Let’s talk about your family,” she said.
***
Monahan didn’t seem put out.
“We thought she might try something like that. Sabrie’s hardly in the tank. But you did great, Corporal.”
“You were monitoring?”
“Like we’d let some gizmo from the Sony store cut us out of the loop? I could’ve even whispered sweet nothings in your ear if I’d had to—acoustic tightbeam, she’d never have had a clue unless she leaned over and nibbled your earlobe—but like I say, you were just fine.” Some small afterthought made him frown. “Would’ve been easier if you’d just authorized frequency hopping, of course...”
“She had a lot of gizmos on her,” Becker said. “If one of them had been able to pick up the signal...”
“Right. Good plan. Let her think it worked.”
“Yes sir.”
“Just Ben. Oh, one other thing...”
Becker waited.
“We lost contact for just a few moments there. When the umbrella went up.”
“You didn’t miss much. Apparently the collateral was doing a school project of some kind. Art history. They weren’t actually fishing, it was more of a—a re-enactment, I guess.”
“Huh. Pretty much what we heard.” Monahan nodded. “Next time, might help if you went to active logging. You know, when we’re out of contact.”
“Right. Sorry. I didn’t think.”
“Don’t apologize. After what you’ve been through, I’d be amazed if you didn’t make the occasional slip.”
He patted her on the back. Wingman bristled.
“I gotta prep for a thing. Keep up the great work.”