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and the doors they passed but could see none. Come to think about it, even the person questioning him had not told him his name.
                "Sorry, Sir, but I didn’t get your name, Sir," Tom said. The person that had questioned him kept marking things on a document on his tablet and hadn't looked up for some time.
                "Lieutenant Riley, have you suffered from any kind of migraine, had trouble sleeping or taken any kind of sleeping pills during the last two months? Have you had problems with light flashes in your eyesight or tunnel vision? Do you ever experience dizzy spells in the morning or before going to bed? Do you wake up at night or have thoughts racing through your head for no reason at all? Do you sometimes feel your heart racing even though you haven’t done any kind of physical activity? Have you recently experienced sudden changes in body weight?"
                "No, Sir," Tom said, and the lead technical person bent his head back to his tablet, furiously writing and marking things. They hadn't stopped walking for a moment since leaving the Hummer, and Tom was already quite confused as to his location. They had been moving and turning and weaving through the endless, white neon-lit corridors for quite some time now. They had passed through three or four steel security doors, each one guarded with squads of heavily armed soldiers. The doors had always been open, waiting for them, and had then whirred quietly closed behind them.
                "Sir! Sorry, Sir, but I didn’t get your name. Sir, are you a doctor?"
                The man did not respond at first, but just kept his fingers flying all over his tablet, doing something Tom could not see. Finally, he looked up and lowered his tablet. He carefully put his round glasses into the breast pocket of his lab coat and glanced at Tom for the first time. But he broke eye contact quickly.
                "Lieutenant Riley, I understand you may be confused and perplexed, but we are operating on a very tight schedule. You received explanations about the Serpent project and about piloting it?"
                "Only very briefly, Sir."
                "Very well, Lieutenant. The Serpent MK Two is a personal battle tank. Its development started in the sixties during the cold war, but only now have we been able to field several working prototypes. The Twelve Cities War made using the Serpents imperative. Did you have any experience with tanks, Lieutenant?"
                "I'm Military Intelligence, Sir. We don't drive tanks."
                "You have a driving license?"
                "Of course, Sir."
                "Well, thanks to its humanoid form, you'll find the Serpent easy to operate. There are three main differences between the Serpent and more conventional vehicles. The first of those, and the most obvious, is its form. The Serpent is based on the human form, more or less. It uses bipedal locomotion and has robotic arms and hands to manipulate objects, mainly weapons. This makes it ideal for urban warfare, which is, coincidently, the reason work started on it during the Cold War."
                Tom saw fewer and fewer people moving through the corridors now, almost all tech types with red security cards on their breast pockets.
                "The second thing that makes the Serpent special is its piloting method. The Serpent is not steered by the conventional arrangement of steering controls other vehicles use. The Serpent is controlled directly by the mind of its pilot. In fact, that was the main obstacle to fielding it years ago. In fact, the technology for it became available more or less at the same time the Twelve Cities War started." The man stopped and laughed dryly, though Tom thought that even the man hadn't thought the joke, whatever it was, very funny.
                "The third thing is its armor. The