“Thought projection? You mean mind control?”
“Possibly,” he said. “I’ve put out some feelers for information on any project related to that, with a bias on anything that might explain what happened to Glory Price and Dr. Sanchez.”
I sipped my coffee, realized it had grown cold, and splashed some warm into the cup. “Mind control…? Is that even a real science?”
Church said, “There are a lot of radical projects in the various levels of R and D. Some are improbable, most hit walls and are proven to be unsound, some are merely unlikely, a few stretch credulity to the breaking point. But every now and then we advance the more arcane branches of science by an interesting inch or two.”
I drained my cup and set it down. “We didn’t get close enough to assess the process down at Gateway. And without our body cams and telemetry we got bupkes. Do you have anything else?”
“That was all Bug found. I asked him to dig deeper but so far he hasn’t found anything of use.”
“What about that QC thingie? I thought our new quantum computer could find anything.”
“Bug hasn’t fully integrated that science into MindReader,” Church said quietly. “He has been readjusting.”
I nodded glumly. Several months ago I’d recovered a prototype of a truly practical quantum computer. Normally Bug would have freaked out about it and danced the Snoopy dance, but the guys who owned that tech had made some vicious attacks against us, targeting our families in order to cripple the DMS. Bug’s mother was killed by a small drone packed with explosives. Her murder nearly killed Bug, though in a different way. It took Church a lot to get him to even agree to come back to work. Since then Bug sounds and acts like his old self, but I think a lot of it’s game face. My dad, Church’s daughter Circe — who was pregnant at the time — and other innocents were also targeted. Rudy was attacked and Aunt Sallie nearly died. If Bug needed time to get up and running, then I wouldn’t be the guy standing over him with a whip.
That said, I kind of wanted to stand over him with a whip because I fucking well needed to understand what happened in Antarctica. When, of course, I could actually stand.
I sighed. Very audibly, and Church gave a small, sympathetic nod.
“I’m not sure the QC would help,” he said. “Even if we had all of the MindReader upgrades finished we still might be looking for something that does not exist on any computer.”
“‘Verbal briefing only,’” I quoted, and he nodded. “So what are we thinking about all this?”
“That is still a work in progress, Captain. We need a lot more information. Currently the pieces don’t seem to fit together in any way I find comfortable.”
“Well, join the damn club, Boss.” I rubbed my tired eyes. “So, are we both thinking the same thing? That our friends from outside the neighborhood are the ones who built that city?”
“Ah,” he said wistfully, “if there were only something left to study, then perhaps we could answer that question.”
“You think I shouldn’t have called in an air strike?”
“I wasn’t there, Captain, and I try not to Monday-morning quarterback my officers. The call was made and that’s that. Even if it was the same call I would have made, it still leaves me with regret that we can’t explore that city.”
“Yeah. Sorry I didn’t pick you up a travel brochure, but I was in the moment.”
“Apparently so. Unless we can identify and interrogate any surviving persons involved, we may never know what most of these programs are, or were,” said Church. “Excavating the site is pointless. Have you seen the satellite pictures? Cartographers around the world will have to redraw their maps of Antarctica. To say that the president would very much like to have you skinned alive is not an understatement. He used those exact words.”
“Nice to be admired for one’s accomplishments.”
Church gave me a sour look.
I said, “Well, okay, maybe I was going off the deep end when I tried to order a nuke — thanks for running interference on that one — but the rest? Yeah. You didn’t see what we saw. Maybe it was us hallucinating, but I don’t think so, which means the strikes I ordered kept whatever it was from getting out. Or… if it was some kind of psychic warfare, then this is on them for playing us. Either way, I stand by my call.”
“Have you heard me say otherwise?”
“Yeah, well…” I stopped and changed the subject. “So… what does Bolton make of this? Does he think I’m crazy, too?”
“Harcourt has been very sympathetic to your recent troubles. He has also tried several times to intervene with the president. The fact that our charter has not been terminated is largely due to him.”
“Ah. But what does he think about all of this?”
Church took a moment with that. “He was not involved in the Majestic affair, but he’s been briefed on it. He knows that we are dealing with some extraordinary matters.”
“You’re dancing around it, Boss,” I said. “He doesn’t believe what Top, Bunny, and I saw down there, does he?”
Church picked up a cookie, looked at it, then set it down without taking a bite. “He has expressed some concern that, with a lack of evidence, we should all avoid jumping to conclusions.”
“Sigh,” I said. I got up and stretched my aching muscles and began pacing the room, feeling restless and angry.
“Harcourt is working the Kill Switch angle,” said Church. “Portable directed-energy weapons, particularly jammers and EMP-type devices, are the next hot technology. The science of miniaturization is catching up to both military and terrorist needs for man-portable weapons of that kind. They are very attractive to terrorist groups because of the relatively low cost and ease of transport.”
“Houston,” I said. “That’s ISIL, right? I mean that’s what we all think?”
“It’s a high probability, but they are being coy about taking credit because of the obvious global political and military backlash.”
“Sure, if we knew it was them, then everyone would go on a witch hunt for them. A lot of civilians would get killed in the process, though.”
“Regrettably, yes, but that witch hunt would happen. Nothing could stop it.”
I squatted down to pet Ghost while I thought it through. “Houston was big,” I said slowly, “but it wasn’t enough. It was a stupid risk because of what you just said.”
“But—?” he said, gesturing to encourage me to follow my thought.
“But, I think there’s another shoe about to drop. Houston was a punch but it wasn’t a knockdown punch. Not even close. Same for the racetrack and the debate. They were jabs, but somewhere there’s a big overhand right coming. Whatever it’s going to be, the Kill Switch thing is going to set it up.”
“Agreed.”
I straightened. “What about nuclear power plants? What would happen if they hit one of those with the Kill Switch device?”
“We looked at that,” Church said. “If this was twenty or thirty years ago, then they would have had a real chance at causing a catastrophic nuclear event. But the safeguards built into all domestic nuclear power plants wouldn’t permit it. Older systems were based on the SCRAM method that inserts chemicals into the reactor to effectively negate the reaction and cool down the rods. The SCRAM systems were electronically and mechanically based, and Kill Switch would have been effective against them. However, the newer systems are classified as passive designs, but these still require batteries if AC power is lost. The problem ISIL would face is that the emergency diesel generators on the current designs can be manually started. They use air-start motors. And the control rods are held out by electromagnets, so in the event of a power loss, gravity would let them drop into place, thus preventing overheating and meltdown.”