John Scalzi - We Only Need the Heads

“You want me to do what?” asked Doctor Tomek. They had taken the entire bodies of the Ivanoviches after all, and both of them were now spread out on examination tables. Doctor Tomek was too much of a professional to register displeasure at the sight and smell of the decayed bodies, but she was not notably pleased with Lieutenant Wilson for bringing them into her medical bay unannounced.

“Scan their brains,” Wilson said. “I’m looking for something.”

“What are you looking for?” Tomek asked.

“I’ll tell you if I find it,” Wilson said.

“Sorry, I don’t work that way,” Tomek said. She glanced over to Lieutenant Lee, who had remained after her soldiers had hauled the Ivanoviches into the medical bay. “Who is this guy?” she asked, pointing at Wilson.

“He’s temporarily replacing Mitchusson,” Lee said. “We’re borrowing him from a diplomatic mission. And there’s something else about him.”

“What?” Tomek asked.

Lee motioned with her head to Wilson, who took that as his cue.

“I’ve got top-level security clearance that allows me to order anyone on the ship to do what I want them to do,” Wilson said, to Tomek. “It’s left over from my last mission. They didn’t get around to revoking it from me.”

“I’ve already complained to Captain Augustyn about it,” Lee said. “He agrees it’s a crock of shit but also that there’s nothing we can do about it right now. He’ll send a complaint with the next skip drone. Until then, you’ve got to do what he tells you.”

“It’s still my medical bay,” Tomek said.

“Which is why I’m asking you to do the scan,” Wilson said, and nodded at the body scanner tucked into a cubbyhole in the back of the medical bay. “I’ve serviced those, and have trained on them. I could do the scan myself. But you’d do it better. I’m not trying to shut you out, Doctor. But if what I’m looking for isn’t actually there, then it’s best for everyone if my paranoid delusions are kept to myself.”

“And if it is there?” Tomek asked.

“Then things begin to get really complicated,” Wilson said. “So let’s hope we don’t find it.”

Tomek glanced back over to Lee, who shrugged. Wilson caught the substance of the shrug. Humor this idiot, it said. We’ll be rid of him soon enough. Well, that worked for him.

Tomek walked over to the cubbyhole and retrieved the scanner and the reflection plate, then came back to the examining table that held Vasily Ivanovich. She donned gloves, gently lifted Ivanovich’s head and set the plate behind it.

“Where’s the visual going?” Wilson asked. Tomek motioned with her head to the display above the examination table; Wilson turned it on. “Ready when you are,” he said. Tomek positioned the scanner, activated it and after a couple of seconds looked up at the display.

“What the hell?” she asked, after a moment.

“Lovely,” Wilson said, looking at the display. “And by ‘lovely,’ I mean ‘Oh, crap.’”

“What is it?” Lee asked, coming over to get a better look at the thing Wilson and Tomek were looking at.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Wilson said. “We’ve all got one in our head.”

“That’s a BrainPal ?” Lee asked, pointing at the screen.

“Got it in one,” Wilson said, and leaned in toward the display. “Looks like a little different design than the version I worked on when I was in CDF Research and Development. But it can’t be anything else.”

“This guy is a civilian,” Tomek said. “What the hell is he doing with a BrainPal?”

“Two possible explanations,” Wilson said. “One, it’s not a BrainPal, and we’re looking at a really coincidentally-arranged tumor. Two, our friend Vasily Ivanovich isn’t really a civilian. One of these is more likely than the other.”

Tomek glanced over at Martina Ivanovich. “What about her?” she asked.

“I suspect they’re a matching set,” Wilson said. “Shall we find out?”

They were indeed a matching set.

“You know what this means,” Tomek said, after she shut off the scanner.

Wilson nodded. “I told you this would get complicated.”

Lee looked over at the two of them. “I’m not following.”

“We’ve got BrainPals in the heads of two apparent civilians,” Wilson said. “Which means they’re probably not civilians. Which suggests this wildcat colony might not be the freelance colonization effort that it’s been advertised as being. And now we know why all the computers and records were destroyed by the colonists.”

“Except for the data chip you found in this guy,” Lee said, pointing to Vasily Ivanovich.

“I don’t think he swallowed it to save it,” Wilson said. “I think he swallowed it because they were being overrun and he didn’t have time to destroy it any other way.”

“What was on the chip?” Tomek said.

“A bunch of daily status reports,” Wilson said. Lee frowned at this, clearly not seeing how that would matter. “It’s not what data were on the chip that was important,” Wilson continued. “It was the fact that data were saved in a memory structure that’s proprietary to BrainPals. The fact it exists implies someone was using a BrainPal. The fact the BrainPal exists implies this is more than just a wildcat colony.”

“We need to tell Captain Augustyn about this,” Lee said.

“He’s the captain,” Tomek said. “He probably already knows.”

“If he already knew, he probably wouldn’t have let me order you to examine these two,” Wilson said. “No matter what my security level. No, I think this is going to be as much of a surprise to him as it is to us.”

“So we tell him,” Lee said. “We tell him, right?”

“Yes,” Wilson said. “He’ll send a skip drone detailing what we’ve found. And I expect that immediately thereafter we’ll get new orders, telling us that it’s no longer just an extraction job.”

“What will it be now?” Lee asked.

“A cover-up,” Tomek said, and Wilson nodded. “Destroy any evidence this was anything but a wildcat colony.”

“We’re supposed to be destroying all the evidence anyway,” Lee said.

“Not just down there, ” Wilson said. He pointed to the Ivanoviches. “I mean turning these two-and their BrainPals-into a fine powder. Not to mention obliterating any information on what we just found out, and that data card we found. And if these two really were still active in the CDF, I suspect they’ll be posthumously demoted for not blowing their own heads off with a shotgun.”

Lee went to speak with Captain Augustyn; Tomek stored the bodies. Wilson wandered toward the officers mess to get a cup of coffee. As he did so, he pinged his BrainPal’s message queue and found there was a message there from Hart Schmidt. Wilson smiled and prepared for a delightful dose of Schmidt’s special brand of wan neuroticism. He stopped smiling when Hart noted he’d been assigned to be Ambassador Abumwe’s right-hand man for the Bula negotiations and that Sub-Ambassador Ting’s personality was like that one time on Phoenix Station he and Wilson had met up with that other Bula.

“Shit,” Wilson said. There’s no way that Hart put that phrasing in that sentence coincidentally.

Wilson thought about it for several minutes before muttering, “Fuck it,” composing a note and encrypting it. Then with his BrainPal he took an image of his coffee, created a steganographic picture with it and the encoded note, addressed it to Hart and sent it off to the data queue for transmission on the next skip drone, which given the bombshell Lee was dropping into Captain Augustyn’s lap at the moment would probably go out almost instantly.