He led them down a long hall, through three security doors and a pressure-sealed vault door until they reached a room with a large glass window that opened onto a freezer. Inside, Conner stared at the Drasin soldier drone that was standing there. It appeared dead for all he could tell, but he was assured that it was not.

“How do you know it’s alive?”

“When our teams found this one in Antarctica, it was with a squad. They must have been trying to core through the ice, but it was too thick for them, I believe. We can detect some activity, and it still has a significant body temperature. It’s alive, sir.”

Conner nodded, his lips drawn tight. “What have you learned?”

“A great deal, though how much will be useful is another issue,” the man admitted. “The reason I called you down, though, is this . . .”

He gestured to a screen that made no sense to the President.

“What is that?”

“Sir, are you familiar with the two methods humans have for storing memories?”

Conner nodded again. “Yes. Chemical and neural, right?”

“Precisely . . . watch this.” The man hit a key and Conner found himself entranced as he watched what had to be the interior of an alien ship.

There were dozens . . . no, hundreds of drones just like the one in the next room, and they were all moving with military precision. He watched as the perspective moved as well, into some sort of pod, and then everything shook. When it steadied finally, the pod blew open and a roar of snow and wind obliterated the visibility.

He looked between the screen and the drone, frowning. “You can scan its memories?”

“Yes, Mr. President, but that’s not the interesting thing.”

No, Conner supposed it wouldn’t be. It had been possible to do that for decades with humans, to varying degrees.

“What is interesting is that when we located the system for storing memories it was based on silicate atomic bonds, compared to our own chemically bonded memories,” the man said. “But the . . . coding . . . that was identical to humans.”

Conner snapped around. “Say that again.”

The man in the lab coat sighed. “Whoever built these things, and yes we’re sure now that they were built . . . this sort of parallel evolution is only marginally more likely than every star in the galaxy going supernova at once . . . but whoever built them was intimately familiar with human physiology, sir.”

He scowled. “In fact, it’s almost like they just cut and pasted part of our . . . part of us into the design of these things, just to save time.”

“They don’t think like us. . .?”

“No, not at all. More like animals, if anything. No, this is just the memory system, Mr. President.”

Conner rubbed his face, thinking about what he’d just learned. “Dig deeper. Learn everything. We must know where . . . who built these thing, how . . . and why.”

“Yes Mr. President.”