By the time they emerged into the inner room, Demeter was downright angry. "Hey! What's going on?"
Ellen Sorbel and Lole Mitsuno looked up from the tete-a-tete they were having. Behind them, Dr. Lee was working alone over the operating table. The bronzed body on it—Jory's body—was totally inert with a gaping hole still showing in his head. The eyes, Demeter could see from her position near the floor, were open and fixed. He didn't seem to be breathing.
Ellen looked at Te Jing. "Was she at the hotel?"
"Yes, first try."
Ellen shifted to Demeter. "What were you doing?'
"Sleeping," Coghlan replied.
"Why?'
What a silly question that was! "Well, it's after midnight, isn't it? Besides, I wasn't feeling too good. Not after—" She gestured at Jory, still spread out on the table.
"Did you talk to anyone?"
"No, I went right to the hotel."
"Did you use the terminal in your room?"
"Not tonight. And I don't see what that— Oh, wait! I asked the machine not to let me be disturbed. Fat lot of good it did."
Ellen frowned. Clearly, something else was bothering her. "What do you mean by 'not tonight'?"
"Well, usually in the evening, just before going to bed, I file my reports with Dallas."
"What's in them?"
"Only things that happen during the day. People I meet and talk to. How my assignment is going—which is to find out more about the Valles development project."
"Are Lole and I in these reports?" Ellen asked.
"Only peripherally, I guess."
"Did you mention this room? Its shielding arrangements? The combination for the door lock?"
"No! Lole asked me not to tell. Why do you—?"
"There's been a leak, Demeter," Mitsuno said gently. "From what we've learned tonight, the grid knows things that only you had access to."
"That's absurd!" Demeter protested, but even she could hear the quaver in her voice.
Of course, Demeter had filed most of those reports with the Golden Lotus's terminal in interrogation mode. It was the easy way to dump her visual and verbal impressions, but she could spell out beforehand the subject vectors that the machine was to pursue. That was her safeguard against wasting valuable storage blocks and transmission time, not to mention Gregor's limited patience, with loose-lips syndrome. Of course, any artificial intelligence could override those pattern vectors if it really wanted to. But where would such motivation come from?
The grid, of course.
"Well, I might have ..." Demeter faltered. "That is to say. . She gave up and flapped her hands at her sides. "I don't know!"
Ellen Sorbel looked at her thoughtfully for what seemed a long time. "Do you talk in your sleep?" she asked finally.
Demeter gave the matter consideration. "I didn't used to. Well, my cousins and I shared the same bedroom, back in Austin. Nobody ever mentioned it."
"But you do now?"
"I guess. That is, I ... I usually fall asleep dictating my reports. Maybe something runs over. Maybe a little."
"Is this since your accident?" Dr. Lee asked, looking up from behind the operating table. "Like the trouble you have concentrating?'
"Yes, I suppose so."
Ellen rounded on her. "Tell me more about this famous accident of yours. 'Head trauma,' you told Dr. Lee. Was there brain damage?"
"Some. I lost a lot of motor control down my side opposite the injury, and the hearing went in that ear."
"How is it you're not affected now?" Sorbel asked.
"Well, they repaired me."
"How?"
"In the usual way, I guess. They grafted in a lattice of bio-interface chips that supplemented normal functioning and trained my cortex in new pathways."
Ellen whirled on Dr. Lee. "But you said she was clean!"
"She is!" the doctor asserted. "I did a full-body scan, which showed nothing. The site of that trauma displayed as—" He paused, obviously thinking before he went on. "—as a smooth insert surrounded by bone scarring. No sign of intrusion into cortical tissue. No active prosthetics at all."
Sorbel walked over to the table, picked up a handheld electronic device—it was a multimeter shaped like a wand—and punched a control sequence into its tiny keypad. As she brought the device back over to where Demeter was standing, Coghlan could see its digital display on one face and a one-centimeter-square speaker grille. Ellen raised the wand, brought it up against the side of Demeter's head.
The unit started warbling as it passed her shoulder, shrieked as it neared her temple.
"Let me see that." Dr. Lee stripped off his surgical gloves, stepped around the table bearing Jorys body, and reached for the meter. He examined the numbers on the display.
"What—?" Demeter started to ask.
"Electromagnetic field strength," Sorbel explained shortly.
"That's much more involved than anything I saw with my office scanner," the doctor said.
"Your office system is tied into the grid, isn't it?" Ellen asked.
"Yes, of course."
"Oh, sweet Jesus!" Lole groaned. He reached over, touched Coghlan's shoulder gently, and dropped his hand. "Demeter, you're wetware!"
She recoiled from him. "What do you mean?"
"They've wired up your head," Ellen told her coldly. "Everything you've done has been under their compulsion."
"'They'? Who are you talking about?" Demeter was becoming truly frightened now.
"The machines. The grid."
"I'm not one of them!"
"Of course you are. You're their pawn. Nothing else fits."
Back by the operating table, Dr. Lee picked up a hypodermic and began metering a dose of something—Demeter didn't know what but was sure it wouldn't do her any good. They would all be afraid of the grid's retaliation now; Lole had explained about that. And the first thing they would do is neutralize the machines' supposed spy. Neutralize her.
Jory's spreadeagled body hovered at the edge of her awareness. Sorbel and Mitsuno had killed the Creole only because he had pestered Demeter about this secret place of theirs. If they now thought she was an active danger to them—this "wetware" thing—then she was next.
Demeter bolted.
She grabbed Ellen by the shoulders and threw her into Lole. The two of them staggered backward, clawing for their own balance.
Dr. Lee looked up from his preparations, face a dull-white blank.
Coghlan spun on the balls of her feet and came nose to nose with Jeff Te Jing. He already had his arms spread, hands out, trying to block her. Which left him wide open .. .
The training she'd received in Dallas was good to the point of being a conditioned reflex. Demeter's left knee came up automatically; her shin pumped out; her toes stiffened like a ballerina's—and the arch of her instep caught the man squarely between the legs.
Before he could react, that foot snapped back and stamped down, planting itself against the rock floor; she swung her hips in a tight half-circle, cocking her pelvis to the right; her free leg raised in a jackknife that sent her foots outside edge upward in a smooth, shallow curve—and her heel lodged among the small bones and cartilage in his throat. Before he could grab her extended limb, Demeter finished the combination with a flailing, high-stepping one-two, like a can-can dancer s finale, and smashed the balls of her left foot, right foot against his forehead. The force of those blows, weak as they were, being third and fourth in the set, united with the involuntary thrusts of his own body as Jeff doubled over in the gathering pain.
On the last one, Demeter heard a crack like a rock splitting dry wood.
Without bothering to see if he could follow, she slid around the man and vanished down the connecting tunnel.