Up Against It - M. J. Locke [129]
“It had to be preprogrammed, then, that worm. No way whoever planted it could have anticipated when our walls would drop.”
Aaron said, “I was afraid Tania’s organization might be … infiltrated. That someone might have been cracking us on the fly during the assault. That was why I sent Marty. Communications had been corrupted by the feral sapient. Because of this, one major set of archives was offline during the worm’s attack. The drives in question had not yet been brought inwave and needed to be physically disconnected from the system before the repair sapients reached them, in case the worm was still hiding somewhere in the system.
“I wanted to send someone we could trust. I knew I could trust Marty.” Then he broke down, and pressed his hands against his face.
Jane had to speak. “Aaron…”
He looked up at her, horror stamped on his face, and shook his head: a silent plea for her not to say anything—not to comfort him, not to absolve him. She felt a sharp pang, remembering all those late nights working together, the bull sessions afterward; all the confidences. Now she could not comfort him. She was no longer his boss, and no longer his friend.
Aaron had not been work-hardened, yet, by all the forces they would bring to bear against him as resource chief. He would master himself, and excel. She knew Aaron. But any death resulting from one’s orders was a dreadful burden to carry. Ironic, that she had shouldered such a burden at the very end of her tenure while he had had his thrust on him at the very beginning of his.
“What about the other videos?” she asked. “The doctored ones?”
Tania answered. “We couldn’t detect anything from the tampered video. Whatever the worm was designed to hide or change, it succeeded in doing so. But we do know the place and time that was altered. The altered video was a span of about fifteen minutes, two months ago, recorded by a couple of store security cameras in a neighborhood in Uraniaville.”
Uraniaville was a residential neighborhood in a mid-gee quadrant.
“Why Urania?” she asked. “Why then?”
“We don’t know,” Aaron said.
“Hang on.” She brought up Jonesy. She fed it the term “Uraniaville” and asked it to cross-reference with information on news coverage over the past three months. Then her lift arrived at the Hub, and she launched herself out.
Her destination was a set of computer archive banks at Weesu and Level 1, the uppermost level beneath the Hub. The tunnels surrounding the archive were cordoned off with a mesh of police tape. A crowd of spectators had gathered to ogle the goings-on beyond the barrier. The officers standing watch inside the barrier recognized Jane, but would not part the mesh to let her through until Aaron came over and authorized it.
“This way,” he said.
The mesh repelled “Stroiders” motes. An officer sprayed her with a fine mist to rid her of any clinging to her skin or clothing. Then she accompanied Aaron into the archive room. Chief Fitzpatrick stood nearby.
The forensic team guided a small army of miniature sapients in the measuring of blood spray patterns, gathering of air samples, and collecting of dust for DNA analysis. Near the computer banks was Marty’s corpse, attended to by a medic in a body glove and filtration mask. Two other officers were studying the room.
Marty’s body lay inside a shallow, inflatable bug bath. Assembler fluid sloshed lazily therein. A network of tubing draped him. He looked like a vine-coated, semi-deflated, plant-based version of himself. The medic bobbed beside him, stripping off the paraphernalia. The sour-sweet smell of assembly fluid reached her.
Jane started, remembering the dream image of her son with Marty’s face, dead and covered in vines, and again felt the Voice’s faint touch.
She had known. She had known.
“The medical team tried to revive him,” Fitzpatrick told her, “but we found him too late.”
They lofted themselves over to Marty’s remains, which rested lightly on