Distraction - Bruce Sterling [161]
Burningboy listened. “I gotta go,” he announced abruptly. “There’s been a new development. The boys have brought in a prisoner.”
“What?” Kevin demanded. As the new police chief, Kevin was instantly suspicious. “We already agreed that you have no authority to take prisoners.”
Burningboy wrinkled his large and fleshy nose. “They captured him in the piney woods east of town, Mr. Police Chief, sir. Several kilometers outside your jurisdiction.”
“So then’s he’s a Regulator,” Oscar said. “He’s a spy.”
Burningboy put his notes and laptop in order, and nodded at Oscar reluctantly. “Yup.”
“What are you going to do to this captured person?” Greta said.
Burningboy shrugged, his face grim.
“I think this Committee needs to see the prisoner,” Oscar said.
“Oscar’s right,” said Kevin sternly. “Burningboy, I can’t have you manhandling suspects inside this facility, just on your own recognizance. Let’s interrogate him ourselves!”
“What are we, the Star Chamber?” Gazzaniga said, aghast. “We can’t start interrogating people!”
Kevin sneered. “Okay, fine! Albert, you’re excused. Go out for an ice cream cone. In the meantime, us grownups need to confront this terrorist guerrilla.”
Greta declared a five-minute break. Alerted by the live coverage over the loudspeakers, several more Committee members showed up. The break stretched into half an hour. The meeting was considerably enlivened by an impromptu demonstration of the prisoner’s captured possessions.
The apprehended Regulator had been posing as a poacher. He had a pulley-festooned compound bow that would have baffled William Tell. The bow’s graphite arrows contained self-rifling gyroscopic fletching and global-positioning-system locator units. The scout also owned boot-spike crampons and a climber’s lap-belt, ideal for extensive lurking in the tops of trees. He carried a ceramic bowie knife.
These deadly gizmos might have passed muster on a standard hunter, but the other evidence cinched the case against him: he had a hammer and a pack of sabotage tree-spikes. Tree-spikes, which ruined saw blades, were common enough for radical Greens; but these spikes contained audio bugs and cellphone repeaters. They could be hammered deep into trees, and they would stay there forever, and they would listen, and they would even take phone calls. They had bizarre little pores in them so that they could drink sap for their batteries.
The Committee passed the devices from hand to hand, studying them with grave attention, much as if they captured saboteurs every day. Producing a pocket multitool, Gazzaniga managed to pry one of the spikes open. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This thing’s got a mitochondrial battery.”
“Nobody has mitochondrial batteries,” objected the new head of the Instrumentation division. “We don’t even have mitochondrial batteries, and the damned things were invented here.”
“Then I want you to explain to me how a telephone runs on wet jelly,” Gazzaniga said. “You know something? These spikes sure look a lot like our vegetation monitors.”
“It was all invented here,” Oscar said. “This is all Collaboratory equipment. You’ve just never seen it repackaged and repurposed.”
Gazzaniga put the spike down. Then he picked up a dented tin egg. “Now this thing here—see, this is the sort of thing you associate with nomad technology. Scrap metal, all crimped together, obviously homemade.… So what is this thing?” He shook it near his ear. “It rattles.”
“It’s a piss bomb,” Burningboy told him.
“What?”
“See those holes in the side? That’s the timer. It’s genetically engineered corn kernels. Once they’re in hot water, the seeds swell up. They rupture a membrane inside, and then the charge ignites.”
Oscar examined one of the crude arson bombs. It had been created by hand: by a craftsman with a hole punch, a ball peen hammer, and an enormous store of focused resentment. The bomb was a dumb and pig-simple incendiary device with no moving parts, but it could easily incinerate a building. The seeds of genetically engineered maize were dirt-cheap and totally consistent. Corn like that was