Dacy would understand. I wish we had been allowed to remain in contact.
We reach a ventilation panel connected to the shaft that the rat disappeared down. I press my nose to it, the work of scenting pushing my thoughts down for one moment of calm. The trace of Rat is faint but there. I follow the schematics to the next panel and repeat the process. I hunt the scent this way for several minutes, until finally it’s lost. The schematics confirm that several junctures in the ventilation system have given my target multiple options, while mine are limited.
I stop again to think. The thoughts that catch up to me are no less confusing than before. Even if I follow the target from ventilation panel to ventilation panel through every tunnel in the MFA, it won’t solve my quandary.
At ESAC they taught me that every decision I make on a deployment may be life-or-death. I was taught to be decisive, confident, and analytical under pressure. I am good at that job. I am not used to being so… worried.
Carol retiring, the unsettling sound of this place, its massive population of drones. Now this bite. I am not used to all of these feelings.
I can at least pretend to be confident and decisive. That is a small comfort. I make a decision.
Carol, I ping. The target is EI.
For a few seconds, she does not respond. She simply stares at me, and I look back at her.
“What?”
The target, I tell her, isn’t a bodydrone. It’s a stolen EI animal recruited as a Strong Arm agent. It must be from one of the Dynagroup laboratories in Georgia; those are the only EI rats I know of that are functional at this level, though I know nothing of any break-ins at those labs. None of this intelligence was included in my dossier. The target itself forced this information on me in order to confuse me and, I assume, as part of a recruiting effort, as I was also transferred a good deal of propaganda material.
“Sera!” She sounds almost angry in her surprise. “You didn’t read the propaganda, did you?”
I scanned their summaries only, I lie. It wasn’t relevant.
The information dump was not something I had the power to control, so this is another lie. However, I found much of the material’s sentimentality about experimentation on dogs off-putting. I am not a dog. I am not an early intelligence hybrid either. I don’t suffer. What relevance do those animals have to me?
Some of the information on the history of EI was new and interesting in an objective way, but this attempt at provoking my pity strikes me as vulgar.
The Strong Arm has given me something, however, for which I suppose I must acknowledge their comradeship. I don’t mention this to Carol either.
“That’s sick,” she says. “Pitting you against each other. This is exactly what—” She bites off the end of the sentence. “And what next? Will you be fighting our wars for us next?”
Military intelligence was the first implementation of EI. Animals have always been used in war, I say. Animals are present in most human endeavors.
“But you don’t have a choice about it.”
I enjoy my work.
She sighs, but it is a big uhf of breath. This is the sound she makes when she and Anders disagree about some aspect of a deploy but he is correct. She’s speaking to me like she speaks with Anders.
Carol and I seem to realize this at the same time. We both look away into our private thoughts. When I begin to calculate the rat’s most likely intent based on its previous locations and current heading, she speaks again.
“We’re going to have to catch it.”
Yes.
“No,” she says. “I mean, change your objective, Sera. You can’t kill it if it’s EI. It’s… That’s wrong.”
I don’t see how this is true, except on a relative scale. If a human had infiltrated the MFA with unknown intent, would the men deployed to stop them be worried about the right or wrong of lethal force?
Carol is falling prey to the ruse the Strong Arm laid for me. I was the intended target. I did not think Carol would be vulnerable.
Perhaps I should have done this differently.
“We’ll have to just catch it somehow. Can you stop it without hurting it?”
I think of the hot shooting through my blood and muscles as I chased the rat into the ventilation system. Of my lack of concern as I wedged myself into a too-small space. Unsafe, irrational.
I am not certain I can.
“Okay,” she says. “A mousetrap, then.”
I don’t want to change my objective. The dossier and Anders’ instructions from the DHS were clear: I am to eliminate the target. To trap, instead of eliminate, the target seriously endangers the mission’s outcome. But with no access to outside authority, cut off as we are down here, I will have to appear to go along with Carol’s plan.
I need her to feel connected to me. And it doesn’t appear that I can complete this search without her support.
I will have to go along with this. For now.
I share with Carol my statistical analysis of the rat’s most likely objectives based on its movements, editing out DHS protected information. We agree on a physical path forward, though our plan once we get there is still unclear. Reactor D is down for maintenance. In order to get past D and to Reactor E, its likely next objective, the rat will need to find its way out of the ventilation system and back into the access tunnels. We should have some time, though we can’t know how much.
This is utterly abnormal, incomparable to any deployment I have studied. I am in unrecognizable territory: subterranean, infected with illicit information, and keeping many secrets from my handler, and my objective not to rescue, but to apprehend. This search has no Is Like.
I haven’t lost control of the situation yet.
Carol’s mousetrap is too elaborate to work.
In my own experience of making complicated, covert plans, I took months to identify patterns in our routine that would provide an opportunity for my advantage. I spent additional months waiting for the right moment to act. Yet Carol has made her plan in only minutes. She’s forcing her advantage.
I would prefer to follow my nose and the original orders.
I don’t voice my discomfort, but Carol can tell. My movements are hesitant; when she gives me directions her voice has reverted to the clipped cadence she used in the past. I am already losing the advantage I have gained with her down here, where we have worked together so well.
For the first stage of the plan we must separate. This is what Carol has disliked so greatly in our work together in the past, but now she asks me to leave her and track the target on my own. I won’t be able to reach it, safe as it is in the ventilation system, but it must leave the ventilation system in order to proceed toward the next reactor. If I am in the access tunnels, the target will have to enter the empty steam vent shafts. Carol needs to know when this occurs.
I give Carol a list of the remote heavy machinery used for maintenance throughout the MFA, which was included in my DHS dossier. If we had encountered this machinery during our search, Carol would be aware of it. I can justify the information sharing.
During phase one, Carol will find the nearest pieces of large machinery and remove their batteries while I continue to track and herd the target toward the steam shafts. We will be in and out of DAT range during this stage of her plan.
The team that cleared the drones from this sector did a poor job; they still populate the tunnel. Previously the ones that crossed our path were like rabbits scared out of long grass. But now they are more like traffic on a busy street. Despite my outsizing their largest by three times I feel their menace. Without Carol nearby, I find comfort in Is Likes.