The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [98]
“Enough chat-chit,” their stocky host chirped. “I’m a busy lady. You say Molpi sent you to me? That’s good enough.” Naturally chubby cheeks bunched up in a rosy maternal smile. “He knows I’ll have his testicles melded if he sends me anybody suspect.” She looked speculatively from Ingrid to Whispr. “What can I do for you charming folks?”
His task accomplished, Whispr moved aside verbally as well as physically and let Ingrid take over. Stepping forward, she identified herself as a physician who was researching a particular, peculiar, possibly unauthorized, and potentially dangerous medical implant. From her backpack she removed and activated her own unadorned professional comm unit. The two women lapsed into silence as they spent several moments studying the projections the device projected into the air in front of them.
“Now that’s something you don’t see every day.” Their host squinted at one small portion of the infojection. “Might even be something you don’t see any day.”
“Can you help us?” As she spoke, Ingrid held her unit close to her waist. Her breath formed small cumulonimbus in the chill air in front of her lips.
The Inuit turned thoughtful. “Not without being able to directly input at least some of what you have just shown me. I could describe it in my own words and formulae, of course, but a half-assed evaluation is likely to be slimmer and much less accurate.” Turning flinty, her suddenly unblinking stare locked on the taller woman’s gaze. “It’s up to you. Did you come here for results or just to see if your panties would freeze?”
An uncertain Ingrid looked to Whispr for advice. He shrugged bony shoulders. “I’d say the same thing.”
The doctor nodded and followed their host over to a console. Shown a contact point she extended her unit toward it—and hesitated.
“The information I’m transferring concerns a nanodevice that I removed from the head of a young girl. What I”—she glanced quickly back at the watching Whispr—“what we want to know, if you can find out for us, is not only what it does but whether my initial analysis of its composition is correct, its factory or country of origination, and any additional relevant details you can uncover.”
She touched her unit’s contact to the open port on the console. Information was soundlessly transferred. When the exchange had been completed, their host took a seat before the console and began to verbally and manually manipulate some very elite instrumentation. As the thickset woman concentrated on her work Ingrid quietly moved back until she was once again standing beside Whispr.
“If she’s just researching the same lines of inquiry that I did in my office then we’ve come an awful long way for nothing.”
Whispr was watching the Inuit operate. “There is the global box everyone knows, and then there are the box channels that exist outside what is known. There are legitimate, accessible sites, and then there are those that have been rendered intentionally difficult to visit. There are some that when found fail to acknowledge their existence or will just vanish at the mere hint of a probe. It takes more than a tech to get inside them: it takes an artist.” He nodded toward where their now silent host was bent at her labors.
“Look at her. She’s not the type to waste time rescanning the obvious. That doesn’t mean she’s going to find anything. But I can tell that she’s looking. Looking hard. Looking serious. And there’s something else that recommends her.”
An increasingly intrigued Ingrid looked on as multiple data projections began to appear both in front of and behind their host’s station. “What else?”
“She hasn’t set a price on whatever she might find. That’s a sure sign of someone who’s secure in their abilities. If she didn’t think she could teach us a something or two she would