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M
ILITARY
H
EADQUARTERS

Morgan Lekkas tromped across the atrium outside Stanley’s lab. What was taking Gianno so long? She’d said she’d be here within the hour. It had been…forty-nine minutes. Damn, it felt like hours. Everything felt interminable these days, as if time had slowed merely to prolong her torture.

She glowered at the door to the lab. She wanted to hate Stanley, wanted to blame him for shackling her to the ground. But try as she might she couldn’t hate him. He hadn’t asked for this either. He didn’t despise it quite as much as she, but she recognized her frustration was bleeding into him nonetheless. It was making him jittery and erratic, which in turn made her more jittery and erratic. She hadn’t meant to start an endless negative feedback loop, but she couldn’t seem to find a way to bring an end to it.

Field Marshal Gianno walked in at five minutes before the hour. “You wanted to see me, Commander?”

She straightened into a semblance of parade rest. Muscle memory. “Yes, Marshal. I want to respectfully request—I need to get out of here, ma’am. I need to be in the cockpit—
really
in the cockpit, live and in the flesh. I signed up to Noetica to save the galaxy, not to be a lab rat.”

Gianno nodded thoughtfully. “And you did, for which we’re all indebted to you. Let me ask you something. What do you imagine you would do if you were to return to active duty in the Southern Fleet? We’re at peace—with the Alliance, with the Metigens, with everyone of consequence. There is no war to fight.”

“So? I’d fly patrols, same as I did before. Drill and train my flights. Take out the occasional pirate or merc. Be on alert for new threats.”

“Do I detect a trace of bloodlust, Commander?”

“Ma’am.” She’d begun to traipse around again; she forced herself still. “I’ve always had a trace of bloodlust—and I’ve always kept it under control until it could be directed at an appropriate target. I’m not a threat. I’m a soldier and a pilot.”

“You’re a Prevo.”

“Yes, ma’am. About that. I’d not be one, if it meant I would be able to return to active duty.”

For a second Gianno looked taken aback, but she quickly covered it behind her usual unflappable demeanor. “My understanding is it’s not as simple as deciding not to be one any longer.”

“I realize it isn’t, ma’am, but surely it’s doable. Listen, I don’t bear Stanley any ill will—he kind of grows on you, even if he’s a bit of a dunce and still horrifically naive. But I don’t want the rest of my life to be lived in a lab.”

The Marshal arrested her gaze on Morgan with such intensity she obeyed the irresistible compulsion to meet it. “I knew your mother—did I ever mention that?”

Morgan frowned. “No, ma’am…you didn’t.” Her mother had died in a test flight accident when Morgan was ten years old. She’d been a military pilot as well and away from home for long stretches of time, so much so Morgan had never felt as if she truly knew her mother.

“I did. She served honorably in the First Crux War. You’re a lot like her in many ways—hot-headed, willful, and a damn talented pilot.” She paused. “Commander, Noetica is producing groundbreaking advances for the Federation and for all of humanity. It’s crucial the program continue.”

“With respect, ma’am,
Stanley
is producing groundbreaking advances. He and Annie, together with Valkyrie before she left. You don’t need me—he doesn’t need me.”

Gianno’s expression solidified into resoluteness. “Well, whether he needs you or not, he is part of you, and you part of him. There is no separation, Commander, a fact which was made clear to you when you signed up for Noetica. I sympathize with your discomfort, but that is, as they say, the way it is. You are serving your Federation in more ways than you can appreciate by staying right here.”

Morgan’s eyes widened in disbelief, but she clamped her jaw shut with vicious force to prevent the words screaming through her mind from coming out of her mouth. She swallowed the most damning of the words, then responded in a flat tone. “Yes, ma’am. In that case, I’ll…be in the lab. Forever.”

18

EARTH

EASC
H
EADQUARTERS (
S
PECIAL
P
ROJECTS)

D
EVON WAS ELBOW DEEP
in one of Annie’s quantum boxes, installing an improved module the bureaucracy had finally approved for use, when the sound of footsteps began echoing in the lab.

His connection with Annie was open, and he paused to take in the details. The steps sounded…not hesitant, but careful. Slow and purposeful. There were four distinct footfalls—two individuals, men judging by the weight driving each stride, and they moved in concert, matching their pace to one another.

This being a military installation, none of those attributes were particularly unusual. Devon finished threading a strand of photal fibers together and climbed to his feet. It was late in the evening—he checked the time and discovered it was in fact far later than he’d realized—and other than security most of the Special Projects personnel were off-duty.

“Hello?”

Two men rounded the corner of a row of server racks near the front of the large room. They wore dark business suits, not military uniforms, and serious countenances. “Mr. Reynolds?”

He eyed the men suspiciously. “How did you get in here?”

The one on the left responded. “We have authorization. We’re consultants from the Assembly Military Oversight Committee. We’d like to talk to you about Project Noetica.”

Devon, Assembly members serving on that Committee are aware of Noetica. However, it would be a violation of thirteen regulations and four laws for consultants or anyone not an elected representative to be so informed.

He hoped the dim lighting in the lab aided his poor attempt at a poker face. “I’m sure I don’t know what Noetica is. I just work on Project ANNIE. And I’d need to clear discussing anything with the Director of Special Projects or Admiral Solovy first.”

They continued approaching him in their careful manner. He had the errant thought that they moved the way ‘heavies’ did in spy thriller vids. It led him to step backward in increased wariness.

“We understand. Why don’t we go out into the lab’s office and you can contact one of them.”

Devon didn’t need Annie’s voice modulation analysis to recognize the man was lying. If he wanted to contact someone, he could do it from right here. He retreated an additional step; his heel thudded into the rear wall.

“I need to finish what I was working on. I shouldn’t leave it half-done. I mean, look! The insulation panel’s still off and everything.” He motioned with great fanfare in the direction of the open module.

Their attention flickered to where he pointed, an ingrained reaction to the gesture.

He lunged to his left and ran.

The lab was a maze of floor-to-ceiling server racks, hardware modules and power allocators. He knew the layout intimately, and there were precious few routes through it to the front door. The back door provided even less help—a dead-end of cooled power generators and supply closets.

Their footfalls now thudded loudly behind him, all the subtlety of their entrance abandoned in the name of speed.
Show me where they are, Annie.

Thermal imaging of the lab appeared in an overlay of his vision. Annie filtered out the power flows, leaving his slender signature and the two far bulkier signatures of his pursuers. They had split up; one trailed too closely behind him while the other moved toward the front of the room to cut him off. The thermal imaging couldn’t pick up weapons, but each held an arm out in a manner suggesting they had drawn Daemons.

He veered down the next aisle then darted through a small gap into yet another aisle, buying himself time by crossing the breadth of the suddenly tiny, cramped lab. The second man now blocked the door. There was no way out.

Annie, I need a weapon!

Hurl one of my quantum boxes at him. I do not mind.

He’d have laughed if he wasn’t panicked and running for his life—oh!
Release all the stability clamps.

Done.

The first man was now directly behind him and gaining. He swung around the corner of the end of the row and threw his shoulder into the tall rack. He wasn’t a strong guy—every now and then someone called him scrawny—but the jolt of momentum sent all the servers on the shelf tumbling off the other side.

The man yelped as they crashed down onto him, then lurched into the shelving on the next row. Without the clamps that held the structure steadfastly to the ceiling and each module in its place, the rack teetered, sending modules sliding off of shelves to pitch to the floor. Lighter and even less stable now, the rack toppled into the next row like a domino. Unfortunately, that was the last row, and the cascade of crashing racks and equipment came to a premature end against the rear wall.

But the man now lay prone amid a pile of hardware, moaning, so maybe it was enough.

The tactic wasn’t going to work a second time, though, for too much open space stretched between the front-most row and the door. He still needed a weap—

Move!

He saw it as Annie did, but his weak, slow physical limbs simply could not react fast enough. The blast from the stunner landed square between his shoulder blades.

A prickly tingling sensation spread from the impact point outward, racing along his arms and down his spine. As his legs collapsed beneath him he managed to turn enough to see the arm and hand of the man trapped beneath Annie’s hardware pointing the stunner at him.

Devon, disconnect from me.

No, I don’t want—

A hand grasped his shoulder and roughly rolled him onto his stomach. The second man? He tried to fight, tried to crawl away, but his body no longer obeyed his commands.

Do it now. Please.

Okay. I’m sorry, Annie.

He felt the collar of his shirt being yanked down and a wrap shoved onto the base of his neck. Then everything went dark.

Miriam rushed into the suite housing Project ANNIE one notch below a run. She was stepping into a crisis to be sure, but the immediacy of the emergency had come and gone.

The premises breach alert from Security had woken her at 0120; by the time she’d reached her vehicle, MPs had detained the intruders. It was now 0145, and Major Lange was waiting on her in the office outside the main lab.

“Admiral.” He gestured to the glass divider separating the small meeting room and the office. “Two men are in custody. They claim to be official representatives of the Assembly Military Oversight Committee and clerks of the Chairman. Their credentials check out, including ostensible sanction from the Committee to enter EASC Special Projects and disconnect Mr. Reynolds from the Artificial.”

“I never authorized their entry, much less any action with respect to Mr. Reynolds.”

“No one at EASC did, Admiral.” He handed her a small disk. “Here’s the directive issued by the Committee. It appears they believe they had the inherent authority to grant themselves entry and freedom of action.”

“They are mistaken. Treat these two with proper decorum, but continue to detain them. File a formal complaint with the Assembly and misdemeanor charges with the court. Go a few rounds with their counsel negotiating the terms of release before you let them go, and if the Assembly is too unreasonable, charge them with criminal felonies before releasing them. Under no circumstances whatsoever should you agree, explicitly or implicitly, with their assertion the Committee has the authority to circumvent EASC security protocols in any way.”

“Understood.”

“Where’s Mr. Reynolds?”

Lange pointed deeper into the suite. “In the lab. We’ve got a medic trying to take a look at him, but he’s not cooperating. He took a stunner hit and is bruised up at a minimum. He put up quite a fight, though, as best he could.”

She considered the intruders through the glass. One of them sported a long cut on his cheek, and blood still trickled down his temple from a gash on his skull. He also held his left arm against his chest at an awkward angle. None of the wounds had been treated.

“So I see. Do we know what they did to him?”

“They claim they connected an external interface to his eVi cybernetic access ports, which ran a pre-prepared ware routine. It forced a disconnection in the quantum link to ANNIE and installed a firewall preventing it from being reconnected.”

“Did they say how they came into possession of such a routine?”

“ ‘Classified Military Oversight Committee consultants.’ ”

Her jaw locked grimly. “I don’t believe ‘classified’ means what they believe it means, Major.”

“No, ma’am. We’ll find out who they are.”

“I’m certain you will. Carry on. I’m going to see to Mr. Reynolds.”