me. I politely but firmly declined. I rose to my feet, and he did too. We didn’t shake hands. I left his office, and the heavy steel door closed firmly behind me.
* * *
I strolled through the brightly lit corridors, nodding amiably to everyone I passed, and they all avoided my gaze and hurried away. No one wanted to draw attention to themselves. I did think about grabbing a few at random, slamming them up against the nearest wall and asking a few pointed questions, but I didn’t see the point. The Commander was right; security in Lark Hill was airtight. Cameras everywhere, no blind spots, all kinds of hidden surveillance systems . . . So the problem had to be with the only new element: the Big Ear. Someone must have got to it.
I made a point of popping into various offices and just hanging around, chatting aimlessly, letting people get used to me. Making it as clear as I could that I wasn’t on any kind of witch hunt. Gradually, people started to open up and talk to me. They all seemed honestly puzzled as to how the information was getting out. They all had their own theories too, but none of them amounted to much. There were the usual suggestions as to who might be behind it—agents of a foreign power, someone doing it for the money, or even some over-principled whistle-blower doing it for WikiLeaks. All perfectly plausible, but no one was able to suggest how it could be done.
The one thing that did emerge, very clearly, was that none of them had ever seen the Big Ear. They’d all been locked in their offices and workrooms the day the device was installed by outside contractors. And the device and its room were strictly off-limits to everyone but the Commander. So who operates it? I asked. And the answer came back: We think it operates itself. One technician lowered his voice to a whisper as he told me that even the approaches to the device’s room were protected by seriously extreme security measures. One man had been killed, early on, just for taking a wrong turn and ending up where he shouldn’t have been. The Commander hadn’t even tried to cover it up. Just let it stand as a warning, and an object lesson.
I went back to wandering through the corridors, heading nowhere in particular, thinking furiously. It was clear the centre’s security was as much about keeping an eye on people inside Lark Hill as on people outside. Nothing happened here without someone knowing all about it. Whoever was beating the system had to know every detail of how Lark Hill operated, from the inside out. Including the Big Ear. Which meant I had to see the device for myself. I always love it when my first instincts turn out to be right. I contacted Kate.
“Way ahead of you,” she said briskly. “I’m sending you Lark Hill’s floor plans. Don’t tell the Commander; he doesn’t know we’ve got them. We’ve already worked out where the Big Ear is, but . . .”
“Oh, it’s never good when you hesitate like that,” I said. “But what?”
“Well, it is rather odd. The first thing we looked for was the kind of power levels necessary to run something as powerful as the Big Ear would have to be, and there don’t appear to be any. Whatever kind of device this is, it doesn’t follow any of the expected design parameters. No energy drain, no connections to the rest of the centre’s technology; and no one to operate it. Which suggests . . .”
“It’s not technology as we know it,” I said. “Not from around here . . .”
“Exactly. So find out what it is, Eddie. And if need be, take it away from them.”
“I’ve been told there are lethal levels of protection in place, defending the device,” I said.
“Oh yes. All sorts.”
The floor plans arrived through my torc. I looked quickly around to make sure no one was watching, then sent a trickle of strange matter up the side of my face to form a pair of golden sunglasses over my eyes. The floor plans appeared floating on the air before me. I studied the plans just long enough to memorise the quickest route to the device, then let the sunglasses run back into my torc.
“I’m going to need a distraction,” I murmured to Kate. “Something to keep everyone occupied while I pay the Big Ear a quick visit.”