The Merchant’s War

Eric shook his head. "You're telling me they're artificial. It's nanotechnology. Right?"

"No." Dr. James turned round again. "It's more complicated than that. Dr. Hu, would you mind demonstrating preparation fourteen to the colonel?"

Hu stared at Eric. "Prep fourteen is down for some fixes. Can I show him a sample in cell twelve, instead?"

"Whatever. I'll be in the office." James walked away.

Hu stood up: "If you follow me?"

He darted off past the row of cubicles, and Eric found himself hurrying to keep up. The underground tunnel looked mostly empty, but the sense of emptiness was an illusion: there was a lot of stuff down here. Hu led him past a bunch of stainless steel pipework connecting something that looked like a chrome-plated microbrcwery to a bunch of liquid gas cylinders surrounded by warning barriers, then up a short (light of steps into another of the ubiquitous trailer offices. This one had been kitted out as a laboratory, with worktops stretching along the wall opposite the windows. Extractor hoods and laminar-flow workbenches hunched over assemblages of tubes and pumps that resembled a bonsai chemical plant. Someone had crudely sliced the end off the trailer and built a tunnel to connect it to the next one along, which seemed to be mostly full of industrial-size dish-washing machines to Smith's uneducated eye. A technician in a white bunny suit and mask was doing something in a cabinet at the far end of the room. The air conditioning was running at full blast, blowing a low-grade tropical storm out through the door: "Viol , the lab."

Eric winced: the horrible itch to correct Hu's behavior was unbearable. "It's voila

," he snapped waspishly. "I see no medium-sized stringed instruments here. And you'll have to tell me what everything is. I know that's a laminar-flow workbench, but the rest of this stuff isn't my field."

"Hey, stay cool, man! Um, where do you want me to start? This is where we work on the tissue cultures. Over there, that's the incubation lab. You see the far end behind the glass wall? We've got a full filtered air flow and a Class two environment; we're trying to get access to a Class four, but so far AMRIID isn't playing ball, so

there's some stuff we don't dare try yet. But anyway, what we've got next door is a bunch of cell tissue cultures harvested from JAUNT BLUE carriers. We keep them alive and work on them through here. We're using a 2D field-effect transistor array from Infineon Technologies. They're developing it primarily as an artificial retina, but we're using it to send signals into the cell cultures. If we had some stem cells it'd be easier to work with, but, well, we have to work with what we've got."

"Right." The president's opinion on embryonic stem-cell research was well known; it had never struck Eric as being a strategic liability before now. He leaned towards the contraption behind the glass shield of the laminar-flow cabinet. "So inside that box, you've got some live nerve cells, and you've, you've what? You've got them to talk to a chip? Is that it?"

"Yup." Hu looked smug. "It'd be better if we had a live volunteer to work with-if we could insert microelectrodes into their optic nerve or geniculate nucleus-but as the action's happening at the intracellular level this at least lets us gel a handle on what we're seeing."

Live volunteers?

Eric stilled a twitch. The "unlawful combatant" designation James had managed to stick on Matthias and the other captured Clan members was one thing: performing medical experiments involving brain surgery on them was something else. Somehow he didn't see any of them volunteering of their own free will: was Hu really that stupid? Or just naive? Or had he not figured out how the JAUNT BLUE tissue cultures came to be in his hands in the first place? "What have you been able to do with the materials available to you?"

"It's amazing! Look, let me show you preparation twelve in action, okay? I need to get a fresh slide from Janet. Wait here."

Hu bustled off to the far end of the lab and waved at the person working behind the glass wall. While he was preoccupied, Eric took inventory. Okay, so James wants me to figure it out for myself. He wants a sanity check? So far, so obvious. But the next bit was a little more challenging. So there's evidence of extremely advanced biological engineering, inside the Clan members' heads. Quantum dots, fullerene stuff, nanotechnology, genetic engineering as well. Artificial organelles. He shivered. Are they still human? Or something else? And what can we do with this stuff?