GenGen said the labs were sealed tight, ready for the proper authorities — when? Ha! The CDC inspectors were ahead of schedule; somehow they had gotten superballistic transport. They'd be on the ground in ten minutes. He had support extending up the chain of command. And downward, too. Some very large, very competent groups were reworking the odds that the labs had been converted to factory-of-death mode. They agreed that the probability was less than one percent — that is, science fiction.
Now his analyst pool was larger than Bob Gu had ever seen, perhaps fifteen percent of the analytical power of the entire U.S. intelligence community. All that support should have been comforting, yet there were places where the connectivity looked thin. Maybe that was just the way the associations flowed when a crisis was totally bizarre.
Others thought it strange, too. He saw lots of paranoid colors. Finally someone got desperate:
<point-of-order>I have a sanity check. We've lost communication with five percent of our original threat analysts since the revocation attack began. This should be impossible.</point-of-order> All analysts were internal to the U.S. intelligence community. If Credit Suisse certificates were necessary for any of those participants to maintain connectivity, then there was at least a design failure… and maybe the enemy had been part of Bob's own support staff.
There was an immediate counterargument:
<point-of-order>You're mistaking loss of connectivity for loss of trustability.</point-of-order>
Then parts of the analyst pool got jammed in the controversy. It was the kind of deadlock that only a miracle-worker could quickly untangle… and Alice is off in some hospital ward.
Another alarm flashed across the lower part of his vision. His combat network lay all across campus now, and it did more than manage communication. Altogether, it was a two-thousand-meter-wide snooper-scope, and its report: GenGens private UP/Ex launcher has just gone hot. A counter showed sixty seconds till cargo boosted out of the labs.
Even as USMC sensed the launch capacitor charging up, GenGen's own network continued to assure the world that all was safely sealed.
Something was trying to break out of GenGen.
This is way too much like Asuncion.
Bob glanced at the nukes and death-fog dispensers and HERFs and HEIRs floating down through 10,000 meters. To the journalists, those weapons should look like random aerobots — but they gave Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., the physical power to annihilate any threat in this corner of the U.S.A.
So what was the Minimum Sufficient Response?
Thirty seconds till UP/Ex launch. Chaos still reigned in the land of the analysts.
Verified contact with DoD/DHS had been lost.
Sometimes decisions come down to one poor slob on the ground.
32
The Minimum Sufficient Response
Mus MCog
The Stranger's pdf said that "Mus" was short for "Mus musculus ." Mice! The mouse arrays stretched away into the dark. If anything, the place seemed even bigger than it had the first time Robert had been here. So where to go?
Miri hesitated only a second, then ran in the direction of the loudest noises. They trotted down two aisles and over one. Yes! Here was a cabinet with doors swung wide. Pneumos were delivering white cylinders into the crystal forest on top.
Miri skidded to a stop in front of the opened doors. Inside the cabinet were glassy racks; it was like some kind of old-time snack dispenser. The slots behind the glass were a silvery honeycomb, hundreds of perfect hexagonal cells. Hundreds of tiny faces looked out of the cabinet. Tiny faces with tiny pink eyes, on tiny furry white heads. A high-pitched chittering came through the glass.
"They can't move, they're wedged in so tight," said Miri. "Their rear ends must be plugged into little — " She paused, perhaps looking up background on her local cache? " — little sucking diapers." For a little girl who had no interest in pets, there was a strange sadness in her voice. "It's a standard thing really."
Miri tore her gaze away from the array of chittering faces. "Each of these cabinets has mice cells arranged twenty by thirty by ten. So there are nine more arrays behind this one we're looking at. Hear the crunching noise? Smart-Aleck's friends are wrapping up some of them for shipment."
"But where?" None of the mouse cells were moving.
"That must be in back — "
There was a sound like a goblet breaking. Colored mist floated down from the crystal forest. It barely wet his face. But Miri was standing right beside the cabinet. He reached out and drew her back. Above them, the rest of the fluidics shattered. There was the faint scent of unwashed socks. Robert moved them farther back, stepping on the broken glass. "Miri, that could be nerve gas."
Miri was silent for a second and then her voice piped up confidently: "They're trying to scare us. This part of the lab isn't designed for simple poisons." But Robert remembered the shipping cartridges just arriving here. We were suckered into stopping at this cabinet .
Miri slipped out from behind him and ran around the cabinet. "Ha! There is a transport tray back here." By the time he caught up, she was hosing the tray with aerosol glue. Tiny motors whined, unable to load from the cabinet. Miri reached out, patted the almost invisible boundaries of the gel. After a moment the crunching sounds within the cabinet came to an untidy stop. "Nothing's going out from here!"
They stood, listening… and now the familiar sound of cargo prep came from all over the cavern.
"How many mouse arrays are there, Miri?"
"Eight hundred and seventeen when I cached the lab description." She looked up at him. "But there's no way Smart-Aleck's friends could be using more than a few arrays. There's too much security and too many other projects down here…" The sounds of packaging grew louder. Dozens of cabinets were playing the game of Come Stop Me. Miri stepped back and gazed into the distance. The lab was a miniature city, its alleys laid out in a rectangular grid, stretching off into the dark beyond their single street-lamp. "I've got a good map, but… what can we do, Robert?"
Robert looked at her map. "I came through here with Tommie. We set down gadgets by particular cabinets."
"Yes! Which ones?"
Robert looked again at the map floating in the air before him. The place was a maze, and the cabal had come in from a different direction. "I, uh — " In 2010, Robert had gotten lost in a shopping-mall parking lot. After an hour, he still couldn't find his car; he'd ended up at mall security. That had been the first undeniable encounter with his mental decline. But the new me shouldn't have trouble remembering ! "The nearest is two rows thataway, then jog right."
They raced past two aisles, then over one to the right. Almost all the cabinet doors were open, their transport trays working to prep cargo. Miri waved at the pneumo tubes that branched above the cabinets. "But see, nothing is actually shipping from here. Where's the next place?"
And they were running again, off toward his best guess.
Ahead of them something loomed against the ceiling. The GenGen launcher.
Miri skittered to a stop, and began shaking her spray can. "Which one, Robert?" All the cabinets around her were behaving like suspects.