Star Chamber

Test Year 0, Day 325, 14:00 CST
Tau, Caltech tunnels, The End
MIT, Kruft Labs/SHASS Dean’s Office/pika

This time the teleconference had rather higher attendance. Marriner, Gera, Hildenstoy, and Delbert called in from MIT – Zijun was supervising one of the Beret’s helicopters landing at the research station he’d started to call the White Towers. Townsend, Dorman, and Will represented Caltech. Sakhar didn’t know about this meeting: he only knew the results of his testing of the lidocaine vial and his screening of much of the other medical supplies, and that Townsend had asked him to take his shift.

The End of the Caltech tunnels was indeed an end: a steam/water pipe tunnel ran a level below ground, parallel to what had been Wilson Avenue and was now the Catalinas’ vegetable garden. The tunnel ran from the northern substation, inactive now since the fission pile wasn’t active, eastward past a half-dozen buildings until it came to the Broad Lab. There there was a door which went into the building, and the pipes turned and ran through the wall, but the tunnel kept going, wrapping around the foundations in an unlit passage of reinforced concrete until it dead-ended about fifteen meters back. The area had been a favorite site for pranks, Ditch Day obstacle courses, and occasional drinking parties, but it was now mostly abandoned.

Dorman had wired it with a small beta-voltaic power source, minicams of the tunnel leading to it, seismic sensors, and an Internet link. It was the closest thing the ninjas had to Hildenstoy’s byzantine defenses. Will would have preferred his secrecy to be by distance and be out in the open, but there was someone wandering around who was willing to kill, and there were a certain number of telescopic scopes attached to hunting rifles in circulation. If there was a person with one of them who knew how to lip-read and was watching from cover three hundred meters away… Hence the basement and the security cameras.

Sakhar’s report was thorough and very distressing: at least a tenth of the remaining vials of drugs the Examiners had provided had been spiked with a concentrated extract of Page’s Folly, rich in an alkaloid that was even worse on the human body than strychnine. That fraction included just the drugs that had been separated out as spoiled and kept and those vials that had shown crystallization of proteins when the poison had disagreed with the solution in the vile. Venkat was going to check everything in the stock now that he knew what to look for. Films of sealant that matched the original vial covers had covered the needle holes that had been used to inject the poison. This had been a very deliberate attempt to poison patients. It had most likely happened sometime in the two weeks since the last time high-level drugs had been needed, so they had been lucky the lidocaine solution forced the alkaloid out of solution. There weren’t any cameras inside the Health Center. The lock on the pharmacy wasn’t that hard to crack so the list of suspects was long. There were no unidentified prints even though the cleaning crews had been very thorough in looking for them.

A single attack did not necessarily mean a link to Andrew Chao. Even back on Earth, there had been instances of students turning on each other or committing acts of terrorism, and if Chao could decide that violence was acceptable so could another. But Will’s screening program had found a few suspicious messages passing across the link, although nothing that had seemed to warrant a block or that he could trace to an individual. There had just been a message containing a link to the webpage where Chao had posted his manifesto, one going back promising support and asking for information, then a reply asking for an unspecified but serious demonstration of loyalty. There were no names attached, and the accounts used had been dummies that were never used again.

“Kathryn, has your surveillance given any information that might give us a culprit?” Townsend was under control, but over the audio link, Marriner could hear the harmonics of anger.

“Nothing conclusive.” Chao and his core group were indeed playing DnD. This was not unusual: with twenty-three years of isolation ahead, the absence of a persistent gaming server, and inconsistent power supplies at night, tabletop gaming had enjoyed a burst of popularity. There were at least fifteen games running at any given time. Even the setting of Chao’s game was not unusual: a home-brew setting based loosely on the Aztec Empire.

But there were occasional changes in the topic of conversation: mentions of viruses and poisons and fissile uranium, deuterium and lithium, how to extract material from tritium batteries. They seemed more serious than normal Techer conversation and had mentioned a bare dozen other names that Hildenstoy had duly noted and passed to Delbert for monitoring. So far she had heard nothing so serious that she wanted to risk tipping the fact that the Failure cell had been bugged. She was sure more information was being passed by print, which was invisible without a video bug, but it was secondary. If Chao was planning something violent and-or deadly, it was not very far towards completion.

There had been a little discussion of Caltech. In some cases, mention had been made of sending a contact, and shortly thereafter Will had seen one of the flagged email flowing across the link. “They hardly ever use names, and when they do they’re first or partial or alias. I only have three names on record that I can locate to Caltech: a John who was mentioned twice and a Stan and a Ted who were referred to once. Unless they’re switching pronouns, these are men and -”

She was interrupted by the sounds of a brief scuffle from the Caltech end of the link and Townsend saying “David, don’t do something stupid.” The scuffle had started when Dorman had started to stand and to draw a knife, his momentum straight out of the End. It had ended when Will had grabbed the ninja’s wrist in the near-darkness and torqued such that the knife fell and Dorman found himself on the ground again. Townsend had started to move, but stopped when he remembered what Will could do. Then there was Dorman’s heavy breathing followed by “His name is John Stansted.”

The details came quickly from the computer with Will’s commands. The emails about working with Chao had been sent from computers that Stansted would have been able to access relatively easily. He hadn’t sent any messages to known members of the Failures, but his recent emails to MIT had several unusual typos and two had bounced off of non-existent addresses before they’d arrived. Now they had found Chao’s way of communicating information without running into Will’s firewall: low bandwidth communication through misspellings. It could be blocked with an automatic spell-checker, but Chao would find another way. In any case, what to do with Stansted, if he was indeed the poisoner?

The ninjas had not had to make provision for treachery in their task to follow the Honor Code. Partially for this, and partially because he’d spent the last year trusting all of his people implicitly, Dorman took this personally, and would have hunted down Stansted himself. Townsend would have stopped the ninja from doing something immediately foolish, but one of his men had tried to indiscriminately kill people in hospital beds. Pat did not have Will’s near-complete control. In David’s place, he’d probably have been halfway down the tunnel before he thought well enough to stop.

“We can’t bring this to the BOC or GSC. It would be out in the open, and then Chao would realize he’s been bugged.” Kathryn was not going to be trifled with on this.

“I’m not going to let him walk away. You mind letting go of my wrist?” Sliding until he lay prone on the floor, Dorman rubbed his joints where they’d been locked.

Will was calmer. “We have to know that he did the job. Any forensics we can use or do you want to resort to interrogation?”

Townsend: “I did collect a bunch of hairs from around the area. Most match to medical staff, but I’ve got a few mismatches. But that doesn’t help: Stansted was in ten days ago to be checked for damage to his shoulder.” The homemade cordite cartridges were a little explosive. “Unless you can show that his lockpicks have fragments from the pharmacy lock on them, we won’t get anything from that. We’ll have to ask.”

“If he’s innocent, we have no leads. What do we do then? General announcement but leave Chao out of this?” Even though he was the Captain of the Revere Company, Adam Delbert was not quite sure what to say when dealing with the oligarchs.

“My reading of him is that he doesn’t appreciate what Kathryn can do.” Marriner spoke with some assurance. “So if Stansted isn’t the one and we announce an attempted poisoning, Chao’ll think that we know nothing. Then whoever did do the job will be contacted again and we can try to trace that. Will will need to expand his program.”

Will was bothered by the idea, and forced the topic back to the main line. “And if John’s guilty? We can’t just make him disappear.”

“Are there any other options? Could we make a convincing case as to what led us to him without compromising Kathryn?” Gera had done some things on Tau that were not legal on Earth. Kidnapping and vigilante justice might not be outside his vocabulary anymore. “You can’t quote ‘The Examiners told me’ in this. And your BOC doesn’t hold closed sessions anymore.

“We can’t go public unless he confesses, and you’ll need to bring him in before that is an option. I’d leave everyone else out of this: if he isn’t guilty, we don’t want to risk warning the true culprit.” Gera didn’t mention the possibility that one of the attendees of the conference was the poisoner – they all had documented alibis for almost every minute of the last two weeks, and most had been observing each other for the last year. Even Kathryn was an open book.

Will looked at the other two crouched on the floor of the tunnel. “Pat, can you get access to one of the MRI scanners all by yourself and keep it private?” A nod.

“Alright. David, I’ll go with you to get Stansted. He’s on a wide nighttime patrol, right? We’ll use a tranq.” The ninjas’ arsenal now included dart guns, which wouldn’t seriously injure. Normally they carried poisons that only affected Tau life, but with the tranqs they could knock out Stansted in one shot

There was more business on the conference’s agenda, but none of it compared in magnitude.

Test Year 0, Day 325, 22:30 CST
Tau, Caltech, Broad Center, Brain Imaging Lab

Stansted did not have time to know what hit him. He was walking the northern part of his patrol loop, through the Jumble, when he heard a rustle in the leaves of a hedge. Although he didn’t see him, that was Dorman, being a decoy. In the time that Stansted was turned, Will came out from behind the corner of a dislocated apartment and put two darts into him at precise points. The drug flooded the ninja’s system starting from near the base of his spine and from the underside of his right jaw. He could neither speak nor stand, and was unconscious before Will finished guiding his body to the ground.

When the ninja awoke a half-hour later to the jab of the needle carrying an antidote, he was burrito-wrapped: from the neck down he was double layered in the sheets and tape that bound his body to a backboard. He could not move anything but his eyes. The rest of his muscles just pushed against each other. Even his head was bound in place by soft foam and straps. He could tell by the pattern of pressure that his weapons and tools, knife and gun and lockpicks and radio, had been taken from him. After a few seconds of struggling, he opened his eyes and started to take stock.

Stansted’s head was inside the cylindrical cavity of an MRI machine. It was very loud in there. Although the bound man couldn’t see them, he was wearing noise-canceling headphones. The nuclear spins of the hydrogen atoms in his head had been forcefully aligned, then let decay, then pumped up again. The radio emission from this mapped out the location of blood flow in his brain.

As the prisoner struggled, in the next room Townsend saw the appropriate patches in his motor regions light up as they got more blood. When his eyes opened – he was being watched through a camera – there was another pulse, this one in the visual cortex. So far, Stansted’s brain acted in accordance with one of the normal patterns. So the interrogation could proceed. When Stansted spoke, they could tell if he was lying by the blood flow pattern: crudely, a truth or at least something that he believed would be one spot while a deliberate lie would also light up the regions associated with imagination. It is possible to trick an MRI lie detector, but only if you either force yourself to believe the lie or have an aberrant neural blood-flow structure or response. The latter had become quite uncommon with the amount of research on the matter.

Will conducted the interrogation. This was necessary because even though Stansted couldn’t lie, he could not be allowed to know who was asking the questions. One of Will’s many Examiner-taught tricks was an ability to fake different voices.

“John,” the captive hurriedly closed his eyes, “we can tell that you are awake. Don’t bother pretending. You are in that scanner so we can trust you. As to how we got access to it, that need not concern you.” Will’s voice now had a thick accent of indeterminate East Asian origin, and was a half-octave lower than normal. He followed a slow pattern of questioning designed to rattle Stansted, knowing that he was already very close to telling all that he knew. So Will waited until there was a response. The MRI scan quite unnecessarily reported patterns of anger and frustration.

“What do you want? Who are you? You know the ninjas will come to find me.” In the next room, Dorman had a death’s head grin.

A pause of a few seconds, just enough to bring the emotional intensity up. “We will be done with you before you’re missed. Andy Chao wanted a demonstration.”

That did it. Stansted talked, and the MRI confirmed that he believed what he said. Without prompting, he confessed to refining the poison ‘like I told you I could’ and spiking ‘half the vials in the Health Center’. Not only that, he was not lying when he’d said the entire demonstration was his idea. “… When they need them, they’ll die. Only a few, but without the drugs more will die and Townsend will lose his reputation as a medical miracle worker. Then Chamer will fall and his ideas with him. Is that enough for you?”

It was. Without another word being spoken, they drugged him again, unwrapped him, and dropped him outside where he had fallen. Will hit him with a lower concentration of antidote and left, leaving no tracks. Thirty minutes later, Stansted’s backup found him starting to wake up and called Dorman, who was back at his own office in Blacker. When Stansted didn’t explain where he’d been or what had happened, Dorman wrote him a warning for unprofessional conduct. In his private logs he noted four needle punctures in odd locations.

Two days later, an anonymous flash memory chip that had originated from the dwindling computer supplies of the Wired Store arrived in the Board of Control’s mailbox. To it was attached a printed note: “I overheard John Stansted ranting about killing someone. I managed to get this on record.” It was not signed.

During his trial, Stansted was subjected to a less restrained version of the MRI scan, in the absence of a polygraph. Dorman had recused himself from the case, as the accused was a ninja, although he did emphasize that any ninja who violated the Honor Code would be removed from the force immediately and treated without partiality. Townsend served as the counsel for the prosecution, and structured the questions so that Stansted was able to avoid mentioning Chao without setting off the lie detection. Reading deeper and knowing what he knew, he saw that the defendant was in far greater fear of what he thought were operatives of the MIT cell than of the justice of the BOC.

Stansted declined counsel, confessed again, and was sentenced. There was a large fraction of the population that wanted him put to death, but the debates were such that he was eventually sentenced to life on the chain gang – now assembling expansions to housing since they’d finished the septics – while the question of capital punishment was settled. The guards were not fast enough to stop him when he turned on the electric drill.

The oligarchs were not sure if what they had done was the right choice or not. They had found the poisoner, but now there was another urn in Millikan. There was the normal trauma that would be expected, with the additional fear that the Examiners would take this as evidence of humanity not being worthy. Excluding the Examiners entirely, Marriner and Will sensed potential long-term trouble stemming from even this single application of vigilantism by the oligarchs, but neither could quantify their fear at the time.