When the Devil Dances

The decision had been made to make the Urbs zero weapons zones and in the eyes of Mosovich and plenty of other people that was just wrong. If everyone in the Urb was armed it would probably mean a higher murder rate. But compared to the one hundred percent loss in the event of an attack, even one by a random landing, a few murders would be worth it. Besides, the improved defenses if everyone was armed might keep the Posleen out.

Nonetheless, through a combination of politics and Galactic intransigence the Urbs had been disarmed.

“Stupid.” Mueller shook his head.

Mosovich nodded as he turned down a brightly lit corridor. The walls had murals on them, which was unusual, and each of the doors had the nameplate of a different doctor on it. The sprite stopped in front of a door marked “Dr. Christine Richards, Psy.D.”

Mosovich touched the entry pad and the door chimed.

“Yes?” a voice asked through the pad.

“Doctor Richards? It’s Sergeant Major Mosovich. I’m here to talk to you about Captain Elgars?” The good doctor was supposed to have received an e-mail, but who knew what was really happening.

“Could this wait?” the box asked. “I’m preparing a report right now, but it’s not complete.”

“Well, you can report all you’d like, doc,” Mosovich replied to the speaker. He was getting a bit ticked about talking to a closed door. “But I suspect that the Army is going to pay more attention to me than you. And I’m going from here to run down Elgars. So this is your one chance to convince me that Elgars is crazy.”

The door opened and Dr. Richards sighed. “She’s not crazy, she’s possessed.”

* * *

Dr. Richards had spread out all the case files for Annie Elgars on her table, trying to explain why she wasn’t crazy. “I want you to look at this,” she said, laying down a long strip of paper with squiggly lines on it.

“Okay, I know my line here,” Mosovich said. “I’m supposed to say ‘Is this a brain map, doctor?’ But Special Forces guys used to get shrunk all the time and I’ve seen an EEG before.”

“Fine,” Richards said, pulling out a textbook. “You’re right, that’s an EEG and it’s Elgars’ to be exact.” She opened up the book to a marked page and pointed to the lines on the paper. “This is a normal EEG when a person is awake, or not in alpha mode. Look at it.”

Mosovich did and then at Elgar’s EEG. There was no comparison. “What are all these extra notches?” he asked, pointing to Elgars’.

“You tell me,” Richards snapped. “And here, look at this.” She riffled through the readouts until she came to another one that was marked. “When you do stuff that you’ve done thousands of times, the sort of stuff that they say ‘He can do it in his sleep.’ What’s really happening is that your brain switches to alpha mode, which really is like you’re asleep. It’s one of the bases for zen, that ‘state of nothingness.’ Look, when you’re shooting, do you actually think about what you’re doing?”

“I know what you’re talking about here,” Mueller interjected. “You’re talking about like when you’re in a shoothouse. No, you have to turn your brain off and let go, let your training do the thinking for you. When you’re really clicking we call it ‘being in the Zone.’ ”

“Exactly,” Richards said, pointing a different set of spikes. “This is alpha state. In Elgars’ case, she doesn’t have many specific memories, but she can perform a remarkable series of actual manual tasks. If a person is that badly injured, you expect them to have to learn to walk and eat and go to the bathroom all over again. When Elgars was wheeled into the recovery room, she was lucid and capable of performing almost all normal daily functions. Furthermore, we have since determined that she has a wide variety of basic skills, including driving and operating a variety of hand weaponry from knives to very large rifles.”

She pointed to the chart, running her finger along the normal rhythms until she got to the alpha rhythm and then pulling the book up alongside. “This is the transition point, where she goes from beta to alpha. And here is a normal transition.”

Mosovich and Mueller both leaned forward and looked. Again, the transition area was completely different than the textbook version. It was somewhat longer and had numerous extraneous spikes. Mosovich pointed to the alpha rhythm on the chart.

“Her alpha looks almost textbook, though,” he noted.

“Yes, it is,” Richards said. “The differences are just those of being a different human. And that’s the other scary part; her alpha is absolutely normal.”

“So that’s why she’s possessed?” Mueller asked with a raised eyebrow.