"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.
After that, the alignment of the ferro-vesicles to provide a valid image had to be determined, along with its size and how the impulses were best introduced into the brain. By the time the SK2s were gestated, the design was essentially complete. Their electric sense organ took the form of a membranous crown with a nerve path direct into the medulla oblongata. It allowed them to see wires carrying current, or dataflow. But most important, and the reason the Rodericks wanted the ability in the first place, it allowed them to sense the impulses of another human brain. They were never going to be able to read thoughts directly, but by observing a brain in action, they could determine the emotional composition, see how much creativity was going into the thought processes, how much memory. As a lie detector, the ferro-vesicle organ was almost infallible. In negotiations with the senior management of other companies they had a profound advantage.
"He's coming out," Adul said.
Simon started walking forward. There were a few other people in the corridor. He certainly couldn't risk clearing the building; that would have alerted Sket Magersan. Simon was already quite worried about the man's capabilities; the last thing he wanted was for this operation to degenerate into violence.