“What exactly is a Warwick node?”
Thomas’s voice was dry. “The device in front of you.”
“Thank you, Thomas. I’m asking what a Warwick node does.”
He frowned. “I should think that would be obvious from the name alone.”
“The name?”
Andrew intervened. “Never mind the name. The name is not important. What’s important is that we think this is a continuity device, like the one August Marcenn tried to make on Tower 7.”
I gave him a questioning look. “I’d say it went a little further than an attempt.”
“Considering that it drove him completely insane, I’d say it didn’t. His experiment was a failure, and that’s why so many people on Venus died. We’ve had information from multiple sources for years about this, but never any actual evidence. We thought we’d finally found something with Marcenn, but that was just a clever exploit of a dataspike vulnerability.”
“So this is a better version of the same thing?”
He nodded. “Better in every way. This is a functioning Warwick node, capable of transferring a human mind from one body to another. The only problem with it, as far as we can tell, is that it’s ancient tech.”
Raven frowned. “Ancient? What does that mean?”
“Think back to what Huxley told us. He said that he’d been alive for several centuries, switching from one body to the next whenever it seemed like the right time?”
“Yeah, sure,” she replied. “But I thought the assumption was that he was full of shit”
Andrew shook his head. “Not anymore, now that we have our hands on an actual Warwick node. One thing I’m sure of: the basic design is really old. This has modern components, but the logic of how it’s built, the underlying structure, is more like something you’d see in a museum. What this machine does was possible to do 800 years ago.”
I looked up at the Warwick node, the partially disassembled paneling and exposed internals reminding me of an unearthed corpse. Were we really looking at a revenant from the distant past? “If that’s the case,” I pointed out, “then why isn’t this tech more widely known?”
“I think the explanation is a vast conspiracy. People wealthy and powerful enough to keep this tech for themselves, and to stop anyone else from learning anything about it.”
I thought back to the guards who had opened fire on us during the raid. “So this Warwick node was on Llyr Station under armed guard, but they didn’t have the means to seriously resist and they shot at us anyway. How does any of that track?”
Thomas seemed to take an interest in this question. “It implies that they had recently moved the Warwick node.”
Andrew snapped his fingers. “That makes sense. Maybe we got close to it once before without realizing, and they wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. But they didn’t anticipate us reading Huxley’s memories and tracking down the Havisham. They would have had to move the Warwick node under pressure.”
“So what you’re saying is that we got lucky.” Raven pointed at the Warwick node. “We just happened to follow the right lead, and it took us straight to their immortality machine.”
“Luck is not a valid concept,” Thomas replied. “It was merely a convergence of events, perfectly normal in an investigation of this kind.”
Raven looked like she was about to say something unkind in response, but Andrew spoke first. “Whatever you want to call it, we now have what seems to be a functioning device. Once we finish reverse engineering the thing, it’ll be a huge step toward proving the truth of Huxley’s entire story.”
“Which part?” I asked. “That he was born in 2015? That there’s a hidden cartel of immortals manipulating events from behind the scenes?”
He shrugged. “All of it. Or some of it. I mean, someone had Huxley killed, right? And whoever that was, there’s a good chance they were trying to keep him quiet. What was it he told us, that they were erasing him and his entire family?”
“That’s what he claimed,” I admitted. “If true, his explanation would clear the books on several murder investigations.”
Andrew grinned. “You’re still thinking like an Arbiter. We’re not interested in clearing any murder cases. Just in finding the truth, so the people who run the Sol Federation can make the best decisions possible.”
“I’d hate to think the victims were never going to get any kind of justice.”
“Hey, maybe they will when all is said and done.” He turned back to the Warwick node. “You ready for the next circuit, Thomas?”
“I’ve been ready this entire time.”
“That’s why you’re a legend, buddy. Circuit 33-H. This one has a new structure. I don’t think we’ve categorized it yet.”
I gestured to Raven, and we left them to their task. Whatever secrets the Warwick node contained, it looked to be a long and grueling process to reach them.
13
Nine days went by, and there was still no word from Andrea.
She could already be dead, her body abandoned in a back alley somewhere out there in the solar system or floating silently through space. I found myself wondering if this was how it had been when Katerina disappeared. Did everyone go on working, waiting for her to come back until it finally became obvious that she was never going to? What if that was exactly the case right now, and Andrea had merely run away from Section 9 to be reunited with her adoptive mother? Had our field commander been killed in action or had she gone rogue?
With those thoughts running through my head, I was having trouble focusing on Vincenzo Veraldi’s instructions. He had me on a treadmill, while he monitored everything from my breathing to brain waves. He frowned at whatever he saw on his screen.
“You seem distracted, Tycho. Something on your mind?”
Veraldi tended to be critical, so I wasn’t too concerned that he had something to say about my performance. “Just thinking.”
“Mmm. Well, your performance on this test is exceptional. A significant improvement over your baseline. Let’s move on to the strength test.” I would consider going straight into that to be another kind of endurance test, but complaints wouldn’t garner results. I stepped off the treadmill and went over to the weights.
“Over here?”
“Yes. I’d like to see if you can lift the big one.”
I looked down at “the big one,” a barbell loaded with heavy weights on either end. I counted eight 75-kilogram plates. “That’s crazy,” I protested. “Veraldi, this is competition weight.”
“Just give it a shot.”
I shrugged. He didn’t need to see me attempt something that wasn’t possible. He could just mark it and move on to a more reasonable set of weights. I squatted down, grabbed the bar with both hands, and stood. It came up with me, and the weight wasn’t even especially challenging.
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“You’re underestimating how augmented you are. Try to raise it up to your chest.”
That was a bit of a challenge, but not as much as I’d expected. We moved on to the next exercise on his list, to much the same effect. He conducted the entire strength battery with the heaviest weights we had available, and I was able to lift all of them with ease. I wasn’t even getting tired.