Tomek walked over to the cubbyhole and retrieved the scanner and the reflection plate, then came back to the examining table that held Vasily Ivanovich. She donned gloves, gently lifted Ivanovich’s head and set the plate behind it.

“Where’s the visual going?” Wilson asked. Tomek motioned with her head to the display above the examination table; Wilson turned it on. “Ready when you are,” he said. Tomek positioned the scanner, activated it and after a couple of seconds looked up at the display.

“What the hell?” she asked, after a moment.

“Lovely,” Wilson said, looking at the display. “And by ‘lovely,’ I mean ‘Oh, crap.’”

“What is it?” Lee asked, coming over to get a better look at the thing Wilson and Tomek were looking at.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Wilson said. “We’ve all got one in our head.”

“That’s a BrainPal?” Lee asked, pointing at the screen.

“Got it in one,” Wilson said, and leaned in toward the display. “Looks like a little different design than the version I worked on when I was in CDF Research and Development. But it can’t be anything else.”

“This guy is a civilian,” Tomek said. “What the hell is he doing with a BrainPal?”

“Two possible explanations,” Wilson said. “One, it’s not a BrainPal, and we’re looking at a really coincidentally-arranged tumor. Two, our friend Vasily Ivanovich isn’t really a civilian. One of these is more likely than the other.”

Tomek glanced over at Martina Ivanovich. “What about her?” she asked.

“I suspect they’re a matching set,” Wilson said. “Shall we find out?”

They were indeed a matching set.

“You know what this means,” Tomek said, after she shut off the scanner.

Wilson nodded. “I told you this would get complicated.”

Lee looked over at the two of them. “I’m not following.”

“We’ve got BrainPals in the heads of two apparent civilians,” Wilson said. “Which means they’re probably not civilians. Which suggests this wildcat colony might not be the freelance colonization effort that it’s been advertised as being. And now we know why all the computers and records were destroyed by the colonists.”

“Except for the data chip you found in this guy,” Lee said, pointing to Vasily Ivanovich.

“I don’t think he swallowed it to save it,” Wilson said. “I think he swallowed it because they were being overrun and he didn’t have time to destroy it any other way.”

“What was on the chip?” Tomek said.

“A bunch of daily status reports,” Wilson said. Lee frowned at this, clearly not seeing how that would matter. “It’s not what data were on the chip that was important,” Wilson continued. “It was the fact that data were saved in a memory structure that’s proprietary to BrainPals. The fact it exists implies someone was using a BrainPal. The fact the BrainPal exists implies this is more than just a wildcat colony.”