Back when I was in training Dacy taught me not to look at screens and so I don’t look at them. At ESAC, if you look at screens, you get a verbal warning. If you look again after you’ve been warned, you get a time-out. They even take away privileges, like free-swimming time. When you are a young dog and full of energy, losing free-swimming time is a seriously unpleasant consequence.
Down at the bright hallway’s end a flying drone the size of a sparrow ducks out an open doorway. It follows the seam of the ceiling and wall, bobs through the next door and then out of sight. It makes an awful sound, a wasp’s whine.
My body yawns. I sneeze. I am feeling many different kinds of pressure.
“Hey,” Carol says, “you’re okay.” She is watching me closely, and the words seem as much a warning as reassurance. I try to release the tension in my body so that it is not as noticeable.
We continue forward. I try not to lag from heel position but each step feels like pushing through chest-high water. I follow Carol into a room where we weave between lab benches to a large storage room. There’s a door in here with an access pad but also a physical lock on the doorknob. The access pad light blinks orange, but Carol ignores it and produces a key. She turns the lock with a smooth scrape.
The door opens onto a grate-floored hallway, walled in cement, dim, and crawling. Three paw-sized drones skitter from the trajectory of the opening door. Others the size of pigeons whine past along the ceiling. One drops from its path and, as I watch, extends wheels beneath it, tucks its flight apparatus, and transitions to the floor without changing momentum.
“Shit,” Carol says. She is watching the drones as well. “I would guess it’s cover for the movements of their own drone. Shit, Sera, can you do it?”
I can work, I say again, but the response comes faster than thought. Then I do think about it, but I don’t change my answer.
I step forward but pause. I feel my voice in my chest and I try to stop it, but I can’t. It is its own thing squirreling after the movements of the drones that make the backs of my eyes tingle and my joints itch. I force myself forward again, pushing at the barrier of all that awful movement, and I can move into the hallway but my voice moves as well and comes out as a low moaning growl.
A cleaning drone trawls past me, swiveling out of my way, its brush-roller chewing the metal mesh of the walkway.
My mouth parts in a pant. I can smell the anxiety in my own breath. At least with my mouth open I can’t whine. The sound of the drones grinding and buzzing through the narrow hall mewls over the deep, endless groan of the MFA.
I startle as something warm touches my back. Carol’s hand on my withers. I look up. “Hold it together, girl,” she says.
As much as I dislike being touched, I move into the pressure of her hand. It feels steadying.
Carol doesn’t usually pet me. That’s something she saved for Mack.
I begin to understand why he loved her so slavishly.
Often environmental stimulus will fade into the background as I grow used to it. This is the case with the loud engines running the MFA. After a time, my senses adjust, and my hearing is again an asset to my search.
Not so with the intense visual stimulus of the drones. If anything, the continued exposure builds up. There are fewer now, but one still passes us at least every ten seconds. Walking through these teeming service tunnels with my mind open for hints of my target is like standing in a severe windstorm with my eyes open and no eyewear or body protection. I feel battered.
That is a decent Is Like, but I am far too distressed to add it to any list. I must recover from this. I have to work.
This is an access tunnel between Reactors D and C. Reactor B was taken off-line roughly two hours ago. My target is very likely somewhere near Reactor C, though Array security and normal dog-and-handler teams have not located it. They have cleared the area to allow Carol and me to work uninterrupted. The tunnel is several kilometers long and will eventually flank a steam vent from Reactor C.
Carol drops her hand to my side again. The touch calms me only slightly. “Check here,” she says, gesturing to a dark crevice running beneath the joint of two support beams that I have stepped past in my distracted state.
It’s embarrassing to have missed something, but I am also grateful that Carol caught it. Doing a good job is my highest priority. I check the spot Carol indicates and resolve to miss nothing else.
I recognize Carol’s pattern. She’s searching with me now the way she searched with Mack. This inefficient, clumsy labor is how Carol enjoys working, the thing she lost when I joined her team.
The thought makes me hesitate. Carol stops, too, watching me carefully. She is watching for signals because this search is like a search with a dog that isn’t EI. It’s the kind of search that made Carol love SAR.
I step forward, careful not to give any false signs that I am picking up a scent. Instead, I am tracking an idea.
Maybe I should not recover.
Maybe I should continue to need Carol’s assistance on this search.
Already she’s behaving differently toward me. Perhaps she’s feeling the connection that she has missed. She’s thinking that she and I can do SAR together on Anders’ team until my body fails me and I am forced into retirement by my physical limitations, like a real SAR dog.
I could make Carol not want to retire.
Needing her assistance on this search might not be enough. It may be the beginnings of a connection, but how would I maintain that in our regular work? I can’t affect this slow and ineffective manner forever. Still, since I do need her help at the moment, it is worth using the situation for my benefit.
Even with these thoughts agitating my mind, I stop automatically as my nose whips my body to the left. Thoughts stop. Visual goes on low priority since it is rendered useless by the random movement of drones up walls, drones crawling along the crease of the wall and floor, drones dipping from overhead.
I reach with my hearing, tuning out the deep hum of the MFA, though I can already tell this track is at least several minutes old and its maker likely out of earshot. But most of my thought is with my nose, sucking air, sorting smell.
Interest, I ping.
“I can tell,” Carol says. She sounds pleased. Out of habit she taps her radio to report in, then pockets it when she remembers where we are.
I begin to work the scent back to its source.
Rodent, the nasty uric shredded-fiber feces smell of rat, and something subtler as well, not exactly matching the profile I was given, but close, not a common rat, certainly not a rat living down here in the cement and oil and cleaning supply smells, but a domestic rat from bedding and laboratory and eating well, but there’s something else and I can’t quite—strange, but then I have never tracked a bodydrone so I don’t
Fades and descends, the air isn’t still down here, heat and minute ventilation currents tugging through time and space in feathery curlicues along a branching corridor where it’s quieter and into a four-way crossing where the smell is not lost but
Interjection of small sour electrical fire, quick and here and grading off
Below the intersection a vent shaft billowing upward, target scent burst into an impossible array of
Not impossible but
Carol is behind me, out of the way of the scent trail, she is actually quite good at staying out of the way of