Adul Quan watched the elevator doors open on sublevel five. A man in a Z-B flight uniform walked out.
"Who've we got here?" Adul grunted. Procedure was to confirm everybody who arrived on sublevel five. The screen feed was linked to a desktop pearl that had no connection to the local network: instead, it was loaded with personnel files. Whoever the new arrival was, he walked right underneath the lens covering the elevators.
"Sket Magersan," Braddock read off the card's display.
"One minute." He was frowning as he riffled through a stack of hard copy. Both he and Adul had privately bitched about Simon Roderick insisting on keeping printed records. But their chief was convinced that e-alpha had been compromised, leaving their data memories wide open to manipulation. So every morning, the spaceport's personnel schedules were printed out. This way they could check who was supposed to be in the administration block and who was suspect.
Braddock glanced down Magersan's sheet, stopped and read it carefully. "Shit, he's supposed to be on leave today. Spent the last five days flying."
Adul straightened up and peered at the other screens covering sublevel five. "So what's he doing here, and down at that level?"
"Good question." Braddock went to stand beside his colleague. They watched Magersan walk along a corridor, nodding affably to people.
"Heading toward the vault," Adul said in a low, excited tone.
"That's not certain."
"Bullshit." Adul was on the edge of his seat.
Magersan had arrived at the communications department He gave the security sensor a codeword and put his hand over the scanner. His voiceprint and blood vessel pattern must have matched. The door slid open.
"Sir!" Braddock was heading for their office's connecting door. He opened it hurriedly. "Sir, I think we have something."
There were three offices making up the communications department, linked by a short corridor. Security cameras confirmed that as usual there were only two people inside, one in the first office, one in the third. When the outer door opened, Josep slipped in and waited for it to shut. Prime edited him out of the security cameras' vision. Neither of the two Z-B officers inside the department had heard the door. He paused for a second, then ordered his Prime to call the man in the first office. It was a query from the maintenance division about a glitch in a spaceplane satellite tracking unit, with the quasi-sentient program generating the supervisor's image and voice.
When the communications officer started to answer, Josep walked quickly past the office and went into the second. His Prime disabled three alarm sensors that were triggered by his entry. He shut the door and locked it with a manual bolt, then drew a quiet breath as he waited to see if either of the officers had reacted. Images from the security cameras hung behind his eyes, showing both of them at work behind then-desks.
The key vault had a big steel door reinforced by boron longchain fiber. Before Z-B arrived, it had stored the gold and platinum used in the microgee manufacture of electronic components. Now the metal had been shipped up to the star-ships, leaving a lot of empty space for Z-B to store its keys.
There were two locks that worked on deep-scanned hand patterns. They had to be activated simultaneously by two different people. Josep took a pair of slim dragon-extruded modules from his trouser leg pockets and applied the first one over the top lock. Its surface undulated slowly as it melded itself to the scanner. The second module went over the bottom lock. He activated them together, and the magnetic bolts snapped out with a clunk loud enough to make Josep flinch.
He pulled at the heavy door, swinging it back. The vault was a cube, measuring eight meters along each side. Bright lights came on in the ceiling as he walked in. The walls were lined by metal grid shelves; a single metal table stood in the center. There were fifteen black plastic cases stacked up on the shelving—seventy-five centimeters long, fifteen centimeters high. Z-B's silver emblem was embossed on the top of each one.
Josep took the first one off the shelf and put it on the table. He ran a sensor over it, which drew a complete blank. There was no detectable power source inside. If it was alarmed, they'd done it in a way he couldn't beat. He flipped the catch and opened the lid. His Prime reported that the datapool remained silent. No alarm.
The case contained three trays stacked on top of each other, each with a hundred memory chips. He scanned them quickly, looking for the number they wanted. The Xianti flights for the next five days had already been scheduled, and their communication code assigned to them. He and Ray had chosen one in four days' time, which would give everyone else involved in the operation plenty of time to prepare and fly over from Memu Bay.
He found the designated key in the third case he opened. The little memory chip fit into the interface slot on his bracelet pearl, and the code transferred without a hitch.
Josep smiled broadly. That was it. The last major obstacle eliminated. Not that the rest of it was easy, but the odds of a successful completion had just risen considerably. So much was waiting behind this moment, so many awesome possibilities.
He put the case back on the shelf exactly as he'd found it and left the vault.
Simon Roderick waited patiently outside the elevators on sublevel five. His DNI provided him with a simple audio channel to Adul, who was watching the screen in his office on the floor above.
"He's closing the vault," Adul said. "Gadgets coming off the locks. Putting them back in his pocket."
Simon shifted his sensorium focus. The blue-gray corridor around him melted into hazier shadows. It was sliced by long, thin threads of brilliant emerald light, lurking just below every fuzzy surface. Some of them glowed with an intensity that rivaled the sun, while others were more delicate, flickering at frequencies almost too fast to notice. He was even aware of the little jade ember alight inside his own skull.
The standard human senses of taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing provide a phenomenal range of input for the brain to cope with. In most cases it does so by subtly concentrating on one sense at a time, sliding the others into a peripheral mode. By using this inherent neural programming ability, geneticists reasoned that the sensorium could be expanded to cope with new inputs. The batches of Rodericks provided them with a perfect opportunity to experiment, by adapting and modifying each fresh generation.
The idea behind it, developing an ability to "see" electrical patterns, was an old one. Psychics, shamans and con artists had been claiming they could find north for centuries, along with other mystical perceptual traits. The discovery of magnetite in human brain cells back in the late twentieth century had bolstered their claims with the kind of pseudo-science backing such people thrived on. Given the minuscule quantities of magnetite actually involved, it was extremely unlikely that any of them could act as a human compass. In any case, there was no specific interface between the particles and the brain's neural tissue. That had to wait for genetic engineering to manipulate cells, incorporating magnetite particles into a ferro-vesicle cell model. The actions of a magnetic field on the particles suspended in serous fluid were found to generate discernible neural impulses.