“Here we jump into biochemistry, specifically eugeroics,” Doc said. “And before you embarrass yourself by telling me you don’t know what that big word means, it’s the science of developing wakefulness-promoting drugs. Ostensibly for dealing with a raft of sleep disorders from narcolepsy to idiopathic hypersomnia, with some very specific train stops in between. But Isaac here—who, I should tell you, is more than just a hobbit-size stud muffin—thinks that some of this research ties into a case that Church started a bunch of years ago and Ledger wrapped while on a gig in Paris with Violin. The bulk of this research is new stuff, and it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to play well with labor unions. There are reports in there for use in factory workers to permit them to work shifts of forty to sixty continuous hours—and that’s like combining a sweatshop with the Boston Marathon. And references to research lines with military applications. Think about that—soldiers on a specific mission who don’t need to sleep and don’t tire even with constant movement and exertion.”

Tap.

“Then this stack is science straight out stolen from us, and I think it was back before my time, during that time MindReader was being bent over a barrel and rogered. Before Bug gave her a big ol’ makeover. There’s data here that I know for sure we took from the Jakobys—from the Dragon Factory run by Paris and Hecate, and from their father, Cyrus. There are extracts from Zephyr Bain, from Sebastian Gault, from the Seven Kings, from maybe twenty of the cases the DMS worked on. And all of it is coded. Bug thinks the codes are a cross-indexing system, and he put someone on it to figure out how it works.”

She tapped another, but then hesitated.

“I could go on,” she said. “Bottom line is that this is both a jackpot and a big ol’ ball of confusion.”

“How so?” asked Wilson.

“Well, on one hand, it’s a treasure trove that will, I hope, give us a clearer peek inside Kuga’s research and development process. Given enough time, we might be able to determine what they’ve been working on and the likely applications of the same.”

“Except that it may not be as random as it appears,” said Isaac.

“Correctamundo,” agreed Doc.

Wilson chewed his lip as he wandered around, looking at the mountains of material. Without turning, he said, “The manifests say that there were biological samples. Is there anything there that might explain this?”

“Oh, hell, sugar bear,” said Doc, “there’s forty kinds of bioweapons. We have full specs on some—and, Rage is in there, by the way—and then there are some that all we have are samples, but no specs. Those are in a hot room, and I have people studying them.”

“What about the people? The, um, test subjects?”