Observations and Assessments

March 10, m0039, continued

And so the team are on their train, in a carriage temporarily defined as EU territory, for a twenty-hour journey. Actually, the trip is going to be divided in two; once they reach a stop on the edge of more densely inhabited territory, they're booked to transfer to a sleeper car. Meanwhile, this two-carriage train picks up only a few more passengers - Chinese colonists, only one of whom decides that a carriage occupied by a bunch of foreigners, one of them a Felicia who's nursing an automatic weapon, is preferable to one occupied by a group of large gentlemen whose manner screams "Chinese government agents" (and even he sits as far from the group as possible).

Just moments before the train reaches the stop where they're due to change, Jianwei efforts in preparing reports for the embassy are interrupted by a call over the Web. The caller speaks as though she knows him, and identifies herself as "Diana D'Ollio".

"Oh yes," says Jianwei, guessing that this is the bartender from the elevator car, "I've been thinking about you..." Which is no more than the truth; however, he asks her to call back in ten minutes, by which time he's able to chat as he eats takeaway Chinese food in the sleeping compartment.

It turns out that her software agents alerted her to a report appearing on a technological problems board; wildly misbehaving hoppers aren't exactly common on Mars, and the incident earlier that day is sure to draw attention - she's merely got in first. She was quite impressed by the video footage she found, and is politely amused by Jianwei's responses to her probing. (Well, politely by her standards. "Oh yes - you're government scum, not corporate scum, aren't you?") She knows some basics that the team also picked up - that the hopper, which had only recently arrived at the maglev stop, was the property of a small hire company with rather obscure ownership, now that anyone checks. The software and software-hardware combination (supposedly) involved are being investigated, but no other anomalous behaviours seem to showing up so far. She suspects that there's more to be found.

"I don't suppose that you can give me anything else to look up while you decide what you can tell me?"

"No," Jianwei replies, "but do check the news for the last 36 hours."

"Okay. That's not just a distraction for the next six or twelve, is it?"

"I don't know."

"Fine, okay. By the way, do bear in mind that not all of my colleagues are as subtle and polite as me..."

She ends the call, and the train journey continues, with the train stopping occasionally for other passengers. Dr Vartex explores the benefits of his new part-electronic condition, turning his hearing down so as to sleep more easily. But as everyone settles in, the unsleeping Vajra notices one passenger, apparently confused and in the wrong carriage, pausing for oddly long outside the group's compartment. He puts some surveillance dust out through a ventilation vent, and is pleased to determine that there are no obvious booby-traps or weapons outside; however, when he follows this up with a bug-hunter swarm, he does find some other surveillance dust. So he sends a surveillance swarm further afield, into the carriage where the "lost" passenger is now sitting, and manages to identify him and acquire a decent video image. Running this through a facial recognition system and accessing a few public databases achieves a quick success; this is a known professional freelance reporter. So Vajra leaves messages with his colleagues' AI aides

March 11, m0039

When the organic team members awake, they all consult silently and decide on a policy. Florence lends Vajra her cleaning swarm, and he uses that and his other resources to locate and gather up the dust that's supposed to be watching them. They put it in a disposable cup, to be left in the compartment when they depart.

When the maglev train eventually reaches Port Lowell, Dr Vartex receives a message from "some people he knows", and announces that he's going to have to leave the others now; somebody to whom he evidently feels obliged to respond has called him in for a debriefing. The others bid him goodbye and head to the embassy, where Colette Schmidt calls them all in for a meeting in person. Once they're all seated and basic courtesies have been observed, she gives an invisible signal, and one whole wall of the room turns into a viewscreen, showing a virtual space that is designed to look like an extension of the office. This space holds one chair, which is occupied by a figure - clearly an avatar, not designed to look entirely realistic; a man all dressed in grey, with his grey-tinged face partly in shadow.

Schmidt introduces this as "Mr Grey", a representative of certain agencies who've been assisting with background investigations regarding recent incidents, and then hands things over to him. Mr Grey nods and begins to talk.

First, he apologises for any mistakes on the part of his organisation that may have caused or exacerbated the team's recent problems. It's clear that they became mixed up in a complex situation, made worse by what was probably sheer coincidence in that they found themselves in company with Dr Liang. Anyway, it would be useful to know more, so "appropriate people" have been trying to extract more information from the SIA, who have been slow to respond; it seems probably that they've been escalating questions of need-to-know right back to Earth orbit. Still, they've released a little more now.

So the EU now has a file on "Quipu", although they aren't necessarily sure that it exists as anything more than a codename for some temporary operation, or perhaps just a piece of disinformation. There really isn't much to go on. The betting in European circles is now that, a year ago, the SIA determined, through what the EU thought was an exchange of routine information, that Dr Vartex was on good terms with British military intelligence, and used the information that they had about him to lend them weight when they requested a private chat with him, out in the desert. However, "Quipu" (if it exists) must have spotted that something was going on, decided that having someone with potentially hostile allegiances actually working in the middle of its operation at Nova Iquitos was dangerous, and chose to eliminate this potential threat by a brutally direct method.

After Dr Vartex was saved for uploading by the Chinese medical team, Quipu must have decided that he was no longer a threat, or that attacking him in a Chinese hospital installation was too dangerous. Hence, it left him alone there, and was evidently slow to respond when he and the team began investigating his murder. The team then became entangled with Quipu's countermeasures against the problem posed by Dr Liang, and in the end, after they helped her work, it may simply have panicked or turned downright malicious. The attack with the hopper may have been a desperation measure, or an opportunist attempt to remove both the immediate threat of Dr Liang (and her collected samples) and a possible hostile agent in the person of Dr Vartex - or both.

In any case, it failed, and with Dr Liang under Chinese government protection and the EU prepared to make it clear that attacks on the team will be investigated strenuously, the threat is hopefully now over. Anyway, Mr Grey thanks everyone - and the wall screen switches off.

Colette Schmidt has one or two things to add to this. It seems that Dr Vartex is probably being checked over by his old military superiors, who can't be entirely happy that his brain scans have been in Chinese hands for a year - but she's seen his record, and while he had routine military clearance, there was nothing in his past (that she can discover) that was either deeply secret or of great interest to the Chinese (or his scans would perhaps have been pulled out of Chinese hands much sooner). The current "debriefing" will presumably include tests and checks to make sure that he hasn't been edited; if those don't find anything, though, it's unlikely that the military will be entirely sure about him.

However ... Schmidt is pleased to be able to say that she suddenly seems to have acquired a little more funding for the consular services team project, somehow. Hence, the team can now add one more member - and she wonders if the existing members would mind if that new member was in fact Dr Vartex. After all, he's an EU citizen, a medical doctor with military experience; it might be hard to find anyone better.

The team agree happily enough, and so the decision is formalised; Dr Vartex will be asked if he'd like the job. Then, Jianwei raises one more matter; the contact from "DD". The main question is how much they can release to her; he thinks that she could be a useful press contact, and he'd rather not antagonise her; on the other hand, the Nova Iquitos affair presumably rates as at least somewhat secret. He and Colette Schmidt review the matter, and she gives him permission to admit to some elements of the incident, and perhaps to hint at a little more - but mostly, he should be careful. He's going to have to be cagey if he speaks to "DD" again, while playing matters by ear.