“But even cost isn’t the real limiting factor. To put it simply, Inspector, the supply of potential drop commandos is extremely finite because they require inborn qualities which are very, very rare in combination.
“First, they must come from the sixty-odd percent of the human race who can use neural receptors, and they must be able to tolerate and master an augmentation package far more sophisticated than anyone outside the Cadre even suspects. Secondly, they must possess extraordinary physical capabilities—reaction time, coordination, strength, endurance, and other physiological requirements, some classified, that I won’t go into. Many of those can be learned or developed, but at least the potential for them must exist from the start. But third, and most important of all in a sense, are the psychological and motivational requirements.”
Keita fell silent for a brooding moment, then continued thoughtfully.
“That isn’t unique to the Cadre. A thousand years ago, when chem-fuel rockets were still the ultimate weapon on Old Earth, navies faced the same problems when choosing strategic submarine commanders. They needed people sufficiently stable to be trusted with independent command of such firepower, yet for their military posture to be credible, those same stable people had to be capable of actually firing those weapons if the moment came.
“You see the problem?” He shot Ben Belkassem a sharp glance. “A nuclear submarine, for its time, was every bit as complex as anything we have today. They had to find people with the same intelligence we need in a starship commander, which meant they exactly understood the consequences if their weapons were ever used, and those same extremely bright people had to be stable enough to live with that knowledge yet able to face and accept the possibility of pushing the button if their duty required it.”
He paused, waiting until the inspector nodded in understanding.
“Well, we’ve got the same problem, if on a rather less comprehensive scale. That’s why we select our people for certain specific mental qualities and then enhance and strengthen them throughout their training and service.
“You know what Alicia did, but have you really reflected on the odds? She went in against twenty-five men in a free-flow tac link through their helmet coms, all in light armor, armed with combat rifles, side arms, and grenades, who only had to get one pilot and a weaponeer into their shuttle to kill her. Her sole pre-engagement intelligence consisted of her own last-minute reconnaissance; she was armed only with a civilian rifle and survival knife; and she killed all of them. Of course, she had surprise on her side, and her rifle was unusually powerful, but in my considered opinion, Inspector, she would have gotten all of them even if she’d been unarmed at the start.”
Ben Belkassem made a noise of polite disbelief, and Keita grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant expression.
“You might consider what she did at Shallingsport, Inspector,” he suggested softly. “I don’t say she’d’ve done it the same way. Most likely, she would have taken out one man first and appropriated his weapons to go after the others, but she would have gotten them. Admittedly, Alicia DeVries is outstanding, even by the Cadre’s standards—“
He paused and cocked his head as if in thought, then shrugged.
“I suppose that sounds arrogant, but it’s true, and a very real part of the Cadre’s mystique. A drop commando knows he’s the best. There’s no question in his mind. He wouldn’t be there unless he wanted to prove he can hack it in the toughest, most challenging and dangerous job the Empire offers. He’s there to serve, but that need to meet any challenge with the best, as one of the best, is essential to his makeup, or he’d never be accepted.
“Yet at the same time, he has to recognize that what he does—the purpose for which he exists—is a horrible one. However much it demands in courage and self-sacrifice, however deeply it contributes to the safety and well-being of others, he’s a killer. A drop commando is trained to kill without hesitation when killing is required, to use his weapons and skills as naturally as a wolf uses his teeth, but he also has to be aware that killing is an ugly, hideous thing. One of our ancient ancestral organizations put it very well indeed: the Cadre does a lot of things we wish no one had to do.
“And, perhaps even more importantly, drop commandos don’t know how to quit. There are some people like that in any combat outfit. They’re the ones at the sharp end of the stick, the ones who come through when the going gets worst, and there are seldom enough of them. They’re self-motivated—the rare ones who carry the bulk of the outfit with them by example or by kicking them in the ass when they’re so tired and scared and hungry all they want to do is die. But in the Cadre, they’re the norm, not the exception. You can kill a drop commando, but that’s the only way to stop one, and that absolute inability to quit is another fundamental requirement for the Cadre.
“And when you take that kind of pride, killer instinct, and utter tenacity and combine it with the capabilities our people have after they’ve been augmented and trained, you’d better make damned sure they’re stable, rational people. They have to be warriors, not murderers. We turn them into something that scares the average civilian shitless, but they have to be people you can trust to know when killing isn’t required—who can do what they must without becoming callous or, even worse, learning to enjoy it—which is why our psych requirements are twice as high as the Fleet Academy’s. That makes the Cadre an extraordinary body of men and women by any measure. The Empire has over eighteen hundred inhabited worlds, Inspector, with an average population of something like a billion, and we still can’t find forty thousand people we’ll accept as drop commandos. Think about that. Oh, they’re not really superhuman, and some of them do break, but Alicia DeVries, who tested extraordinarily high even for the Cadre, is one of the last people in the galaxy I would believe could do that.”
“But surely it isn’t impossible,” Ben Belkassem suggested gently.
“Obviously not, since that’s precisely what she seems to have done. But that’s why I’m so bothered by it. None of this makes sense. I don’t understand how she did what she did, and I’d have said Alley DeVries would die before she broke under any conceivable strain. And you’re right about how convincing she is, how rational she seems in every other way.” Keita turned his coffee cup in his hands, staring down into it with eyes as dark with worry over someone for whom he cared deeply as with puzzlement. “I almost want to believe she’s succumbed to some form of external influence or control.”
“Mind control? Brainwashing? Some sort of conditioning?”
“I don’t know, damn it!” Keita set down his cup so hard coffee splashed. “But I can’t get that damned EEG out of my mind.”
“I thought that had cleared up,” the inspector said in surprise.
“It has. Major Gateau confirmed its presence during her initial examination, but then the cursed thing just vanished in the middle of a scan. It’s gone, all right, and Alicia’s current EEG exactly matches the one in her medical jacket, but if it was related to her delusion, why is she still insisting this ‘Tisiphone’ entity is still present after the EEG’s faded out? And where did it come from in the first place? Neither Tannis nor any of her other people have ever seen anything like it.”
“Like what?” The inspector’s eyes were fascinated, and Keita shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he repeated. “Neither do they, and I’d feel a lot happier if they did.” He rubbed his upper lip. “I know science has never demonstrated anything like reliable, trainable extra-sensory perception among humans, but what if that’s exactly what Alley’s stumbled into? We know the Quarn have limited intra-species telepathy— could she have activated some previously unused portion of her own brain? Tapped into some latent human capability we’ve never been able to isolate? If she has, is it something just anyone could learn to do? Would recreating the same abilities in someone else send them over the edge, as well? And what if she’s got other capabilities—ones even she doesn’t know about yet—that tack in under some fresh stress???
?
The inspector began to speak again, then closed his mouth as he recognized Keita’s very real concern. It was all fantastic, of course. However special the Cadre might be they weren’t gods. Even Keita admitted that at least some of them broke under stress, and Ben Belkassem had never encountered a human with more right to break than Alicia DeVries, so—
His train of thought suddenly hiccupped. A right to break, certainly, but Keita was right in at least one respect; that simple and comforting answer left other questions unanswered. How had she survived unattended in subfreezing temperatures with those wounds, and why hadn’t the Fleet’s sensors detected her before someone went in on the ground to identify the dead?
Could there be something to this notion of a second entity? It didn’t have to be a Greek demon or demi-goddess just because that was what it told DeVries it was, but Mathison’s World was on the very fringe of known space. No one had ever encountered anything like this before, but the possibility that something existed couldn’t be entirely ruled out. Bizarre as DeVries’s claims might be, no one had been able to suggest an explanation that was less bizarre, and it was axiomatic that the simplest hypothesis which explained all known facts was most likely to be correct. . . .
He leaned back in his chair, toying with his coffee cup, and his eyes were very, very thoughtful.
The admittance signal chimed, and the hatch slid instantly aside. Ben Belkassem hesitated in the opening, startled by how quickly it had appeared, then looked across the small, neat cabin at the woman he had come to see.
Alicia DeVries sat with her left hand fitted awkwardly into a normal interface headset, and her eyes were unfocused. They turned to him without really seeing him, and he recognized that inward-turned expression. She was linked into the transport’s data systems, and his eyebrows rose, for he’d understood that her computer links had been shut down.
His presence registered on Alicia, and she blinked slowly.
Impatient refusal whispered through her mind, and her next thought was louder.
Tisiphone was suddenly fully back within Alicia’s skull, her mental voice glowing with vitality as it always did after one of her jaunts through the ship’s computers. She’d discovered roundabout routes to the most unlikely places, and she’d been studying the transport’s Fasset drive when Alicia interrupted her. she pointed out, not for the first time.
Alicia replied, blinking again and letting her eyes drift back into focus. It was Ben Belkassem, and she wondered why he’d sought her out as she gestured politely to the cabin’s only other chair.
The Justice man sat, studying her openly but inoffensively. She was a striking woman, he reflected as her blank expression vanished. Tall for his taste—he liked to make eye contact without getting a crick in his neck— and slender, yet broad-shouldered. She moved with hard-trained, disciplined grace, and one forgot she was merely pretty when her face came alive with intelligence and humor, but there was something more under that. A cool, cat-like something and an amused tolerance, rather like what looked out of his own mirror at him, but with a peculiar compassion . . . and a capacity for violence he knew he could never match. This was a dangerous woman, he thought, yet so utterly self-possessed it was almost impossible to think of her as “mad.”
“Forgive me,” he began. “I didn’t mean to burst in on you, but the hatch opened on its own.”
“I know.” Her contralto voice had a soft, furry edge, and her smile was wry. “Uncle Arthur’s been kind enough to allow me free run of the ship, but given the, um, concern for my stability, I thought it would be a bad idea to go all secretive on him when I don’t actually need privacy.
He nodded and leaned back, crossing his legs, then cocked his head. “I noticed you were interfacing,” he observed, and her eyes twinkled.
“And here you thought Uncle Arthur had deactivated all my receptors.” She disengaged her hand from the headset and wiggled her stiff fingers.
“Something like that, yes.”
“Well, he left my Beta receptor open,” she told him, opening her hand. She flexed her wrist, stretching her palm, and he saw the slight angularity of a receptor node against the taut skin. “I have three, you know, and this is the most harmless of them.”
“I knew you had more than one,” he murmured, “but don’t three get a bit confusing?”
“Sometimes.” She raised her arms and stretched like a cat. “They feed separate subsystems, but one of the requirements for the job is the ability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time—sort of like being able to play chess on a roof in a driving rain and carry on a conversation about subatomic physics while you replace the bad shingles between moves.”
“Sounds exhausting,” he remarked, and she smiled again.
“Mildly. This—“ she touched her temple “—is my Alpha node. It’s the one connected to my primary processors, and it’s configured for broadband access to non-AI computer interfaces like shuttle controls, heavy weapons, tac nets, and data systems. It also handles things like my pharmacope, so it makes sense to put it here. After all, if I lose this—“ she thumped the top of her head gently “—I won’t miss any of the peripherals very much.
Her smile turned into an urchin-like grin at his expression, and she opened her right hand to show him its palm.
“This is my Gamma node. We use it to interface with our combat armor, unlike Marines, who keep their armor link here.” She tapped her temple again. “I could run my own armor through the Alpha link, but I’d have to shut down a lot of other functions. The Gamma link is sort of a secondary, load-sharing system. And this—“ she opened her left palm again “—is dedicated to remote sensors and sensory data. It’s got some limited ability to take over for the Gamma node if I lose my other hand or something equally drastic, but it’s not the most efficient one for computer linkages by a long shot. That’s why Uncle Arthur chose to leave it open when he closed the others down.”
“I see.” He studied her for a moment. “You don’t seem particularly angry, I must say.” She shrugged, but he persisted. “I understood the reason most drop commandos who survive retire to colony worlds is because they resent the Core World requirement that their augmentation be deactivated.”
“That’s only partly true. Oh, it’s a good part of it, but we’re not exactly the sort who find ultra-civilization to our taste, and we can be damned useful on the out-worlds. Most of them are glad to get us. But if you’re asking if I resent being closed down this way, the answer is that I do. There’s no particular point getting angry over it, though. If I were Uncle Arthur, I’d do precisely the same thing with any Cadreman I thought had . . . questionable contact with reality.”
Her tone was edged yet glittered with a trace of true humor, and it was his turn to grin. But his smile faded as he leaned forward, hands clasping his right ankle where it lay atop his left knee, and spoke softly.
“True. But I can’t help wondering, Captain DeVries, if your contact with reality is quite as questionable as everyone seems to think.”
Her eyes stilled for just a moment, all humor banished, and then she shook herself with a laugh.
“Careful, Inspector! A remark like that could get you checked into the room next to mine.”
“Only if someone heard it,” he murmured, and her eyes rounded as he reached into his pocket and withdrew a small, compact, and highly illegal device. “I’m sure you recognize this,” he said, and she nodded slowly. She’d never seen one quite that tiny, but she’d used military models. It was an anti-surveillance device, known in the trade as a “mirror box.”
“At the moment,” Ben Belkassem slid the mirror box back into his pocket, “Major Gateau’s sen
sors are watching a loop of the five or six minutes before I rang your doorbell. I hadn’t hoped that you’d be using your neural link. No doubt you’ve been sitting right there concentrating with minimal movement for quite some time, so the chance of anyone noticing my interference is lower than I’d expected, but I still have to cut this fairly short.”
“Cut what short?” she asked quietly.
“Our conversation. You see, I don’t quite share the opinion of your fellow Cadremen. I’m not sure what really happened or exactly what you’re up to, and I’m certainly no psych specialist, but something Sir Arthur said about your personality rubbed up against something Major Gateau said about a desire on your part to go after whoever’s behind these raids.”
“And?”
“And it occurred to me that under certain circumstances being considered mad might be very useful to you, so I thought I’d just drop by to share a little secret of my own. You see, everyone out here thinks I’m with Intelligence Branch. That’s what I wanted them to think, though I never actually said I was with Intelligence. I’m an inspector, all right—but with O Branch.”
Alicia’s lips pursed in a silent, involuntary whistle. O Branch—Operations Branch of the Ministry of Justice— was as specialized, and feared, as the Cadre itself. It consisted of hand-picked troubleshooters selected for initiative, flexibility, and pragmatism, and its members were charged with solving problems any way they had to. It was also very, very small. While “inspector” was a fairly junior rank in the other branches of the Ministry of Justice, it was the highest field rank available in O Branch.
“You’re the only person out here who knows that, Captain DeVries,” the inspector said, levering himself out of his chair.
“But . . . why tell me?”
“It seemed like a good idea.” He gave her a crooked smile and straightened his crimson tunic fastidiously. “I know how you feel about spooks, after all.” He walked calmly to the closed hatch, then half turned to her once more. “If you decide you have anything you want to tell me, or if there’s anything I can do for you, please feel free to let me know. I assure you it will remain completely confidential, even from your kindly physicians.”