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By Root 1178 0

or their sensors acting as homing beacons, the fugitives were as good as gone. The Fast Deployment Units he’d dotted through the city were mostly for show. He closed his eyes. Over a century earlier, during the Warsaw uprising in WWII, thousands of people had moved across the city through the sewers despite having masses of German troops over their heads. The Germans hated the sewers and were scared to enter them. And, after a short incursion a couple of years earlier to inspect a clandestine laboratory, Nikola understood their reluctance. Instead of keeping company with the rats, the Germans would lower listening devices and wait patiently for any noise that didn’t belong. Then they would hurl stick grenades down the utility holes. But the groups moving about through the sewers were anything but stupid. They shunned flashlights, and talking was forbidden. Anytime Nikola met any reference to sewers in his daily work, a bizarre image flashed in his mind—a macabre procession of silent shadows in the choking darkness of a sewer.

“You have a theory how they found out about the transmitters?” Nikola asked.

“It was an oversight. I should have known.”

“Go on.” Nikola knew what Dennis was about to say, but he wanted to hear it anyway.

“When their signature flared over at Nyx, it should have been obvious they would try to reanimate Russo or, at least, stabilize him. That would mean sophisticated equipment, and nowadays they use wireless sensors. As soon as another transmitter entered the monitor’s radius of detection, it would show.”

“Yes, that was my guess.” When he spotted the machine in the surgery room, Nikola had come to a similar conclusion.

Dennis flicked his fingers over a pad and the screens refreshed with data. “There’s one thing I can’t figure out, though.”

Nikola reached by feel to a small fridge built in by his seat for a water pack—a flat, soft polymer container with a nipple to one side—and tore its seal. “Go on.”

“If these things broadcast all the time, why don’t they interfere with the equipment in the tanks?”

Dennis’s best and most useful feature was a beautiful mind, Nikola thought. “That was an obstacle when I oversaw the design, and a dead end until someone found the answer. As you know, the inmates have their sensors precisely implanted, so the transducer choker circling their necks will never be farther than a quarter inch from its receiving surface. The sensors need little power to relay signals to a receptor so close, but to be effective as tracking devices they need to broadcast with more power.”

“And that would mess with other equipment nearby,” Dennis mused. “I suppose that scores of separate signals radiating in the close quarters of a tank must have played hell with the other receivers.”

“Precisely. The answer was to have them switched off as locators when immersed.”

“How did you manage that? A signal tripping a relay?”

“Much simpler. A junior engineer at Hypnos, almost a kid, figured it out. He wired a microscopic bimetallic strip switch to the casing.”

“A temperature switch?”

“Correct. When the inmates sink into the tank and their body temperature drops, the transmitter switches off.”

“How long can the implants broadcast?”

“Indefinitely. The erbium accumulators inside recharge from the natural current in living bodies.”

“And outside a body?”

“Almost a year. So, if they remove the implants, they’d better smash them to bits instead of keeping them as a souvenir. They are pretty things, you know?”

Dennis nodded. “You reckon they’re still wearing them?”

“Well, they didn’t have the time to take them off at Nyx. Now”—Nikola shrugged—”they have a doctor with them.” He cocked his head again to look toward the Nyx building and sighed. “I don’t think the brainiacs gathering bits of fluff down there will find anything else. Let’s go home.” He stood and stepped over to the front of the van.

Dennis’s hands flew over one of his keyboards to set the equipment on standby, then he unplugged a flat screen, perhaps six inches by eight, moved over to the driver’s seat, and clipped the pad into a