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8: Counterintelligence

The head of the Baffin lab was a short, pudgy man with an amazing puff of curly grey hair. Wes thought he looked like he should have been wearing coke-bottle glasses, to put it in a mysterious old term he’d once read. Something Wes had only seen in pictures, but it would have fit.

The man’s name was Sage Benton, and he had never quite lost his Boston accent. He trundled along between gleaming stainless steel work surfaces that were subtly oversize for his stature, rambling on about what was state-of-the-art at Baffin Arctic Base, and what wasn’t.

Then he halted and did a 180-degree about face, clapping his hands together in front of his chest. “Not that it matters, since the state of the art just ate Planet Earth.”

“Tell me about that,” Wes said. “My orders are to get to the Winnipeg facility. What are my chances?”

“Oh, you’ll get there. We’ll see to it.” Sage Benton smiled. It reminded Wes uncannily of his favourite uncle, who was not a Caucasian from Boston. Who was probably dead. The resemblance faded, Cheshire-catlike, as Benton’s smile did. “The Winnipeg facility is in lockdown, but still functioning. You’ll see when you fly in — nano removal is a whole new high-risk occupation.”

Images came to Wes’s mind of the job he’d held as a dropout before he went back to collect the high school credits that had nearly bored him to death. On a drilling rig. “Like an Alberta roughneck…Or a Territories miner, maybe?”

“Pretty much. The key science centres, the headquarters of governments, those are being maintained…it’s the citizens who lost out. But then, as Hegel would have it, one must preserve the actualization of reason.”

Wes blinked. Hegel and Marx in a UN arctic outpost in in northern Canada. Life had gotten unusual since leaving the top-secret experimental lab on the moon base.

Benton smiled thinly. “Otherwise we are all as good as dead anyway.”

Wes studied Sage Benton and felt a current of dark humour pass between them. This man was understandable, though not in the usual way. “The presuppositions scent the air.”

“And not as flowers nor a morning’s rain.” Benton turned sharply around and started off again. “We’ve had to keep the children mostly sedated. They’re disoriented, sick and frightened. I understand you were on the regular caregivers’ rotation, so we thought it might help if you saw them.”

“What’s going to happen to them at the Canadian Science Centre?” Wes asked quietly.

Benton shrugged. “The important thing is that they get there. Others are looking for them, you know. And if the man in the moon chooses to sell them to the highest bidder — well, for their sake, let’s hope UNIA intercepts that transport. Here there be dragons, and at least one has turned her eyes skyward.”

Benton faced Wes, pressed his fingers to the corners of his eyes, and stretched them slantwise as if mocking Wes’s ethnic background. But his expression was dead serious.

Wes’s mind turned over Benton’s obscure phrasing. Man in the moon — Elgin Parker? No. Parker was the de facto head scientist at the Terramoon lab, but he had limited control beyond his R&D. “My family was never a friend of the dragon,” Wes murmured.

“And it may come down to clans — reason may not prevail.” Benton stopped at a sliding door with a digital keypad in the wall beside it. “Now, let me reintroduce you to yours. The three you brought are female, I noticed.”

Wes hadn’t thought much of it.

“A much more reliable transport container than a nitrogen freezer.”

Wes felt sick. For a second, he was back in the Terramoon lab, extracting unfertilized eggs from containment, running DNA confirmation before commencing the creation process historically referred to as “test-tube babies.” Benton was right. There were not merely under four dozen Moonborn children. There were potentially hundreds or thousands, all containing the DNA-based code to trigger shutdown in the nanobots. If the R&D bastions and their required resources could outlast the siege.

Which brought a whole new meaning to the idea of child soldiers.

Wes’s shoulders tightened. “They’re not disposable. They’re people.”

Benton gave Wes another of those thin, cynical smiles. “You will have to argue the semantics of that with Hegel. But try not to do so in too educated a way, my young rogue scholar. There once was a place called Cambodia, back in the 20th century.”

“Thank you for the orientation. I asked how the UN was doing, and funny enough, no one in Terramoon could tell me.”

“That may be a misapprehension. If you ever get back there — say hello to Ilsa Fridau for me.”

Wes blinked.

Sage Benton stood still, looking at him, and returned the blink in owlish fashion. “What would Ilsa tell you, now that you’re here, Dr. Liu?”

“I…don’t know.” Wes frowned down at his feet, trying to imagine his enigmatic supervisor’s reaction to the shifting perspective he was facing. It all felt like quicksand. All that came to mind was Dr. Fridau’s question about whether Mars or Earth were worth it. And the answer he’d given her.

“Innovative thinking in experimental process,” said Dr. Benton quietly. “There’s so much that can’t be tampered with, so much to be observed. Variables to control for.”

Wes met the lab director’s eyes. “And variables to fine-tune.”

Benton nodded. “Those, you must work with in order to see the results you’re attempting to uncover. In order to discover the real way of things, unmuddied by polluting factors.”

Wes nodded in a mirroring gesture. “Understood.”

Benton held his gaze a moment longer, then let him into the children’s containment room.