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The lights in the lab had been raised to full strength, giving the room a harshly antiseptic appearance and revealing far more disarray than she had expected.

The lab was nothing short of a disaster. The far left third of the server racks were toppled to the floor and the extensive equipment they had held was scattered haphazardly across the floor. She shuddered to contemplate how much damage Annie had suffered, but she had to prioritize. Devon still came first.

She followed the muffled sound of voices and found him sitting on the edge of a table along the far right wall. A lieutenant was trying to run a medical scanner over his forehead, with minimal success.

“For the forty-seventh time, there’s nothing wrong with my brain! Could you please stop that—” he spotted her and waved her over around the shoulder of the medic “—Admiral Solovy, would you tell him I’m fine?”

She regarded Devon critically. His pupils were dilated despite the brightness of the room, and several blood vessels in his eyes had burst. A thin sheen of sweat gave his neck and face a faint glisten. His entire body vibrated, and his hands and feet twitched erratically—possibly a side-effect of the stunner blast, but she suspected a different cause.

“I’ll be happy to do so, as soon as
I’m
convinced you’re fine. I might be convinced sooner if you would allow the lieutenant to examine you.”

He squeezed his eyes shut with a grimace. “He won’t find anything wrong. What’s wrong with me no instrument will see.”

“You mean the loss of your connection to Annie. Can you tell me what happened?”

His gaze fixated on her, as much as it could with his eyes darting around anxiously. “I was installing some new quantum boxes when these two goons walked in—they must have hacked the door, because it was locked like it was supposed to be. They said they were consultants from a…” he blinked “…Military Oversight Committee? Yeah, that was it. They said they wanted to ‘talk to me’ about Noetica, but then they tried to corner me. I ran, but it’s not like there was any way out of here.”

He frowned at the destruction in the back of the lab. “Oh, um, sorry about the mess. Annie and I tried to take them out—would’ve succeeded if it weren’t for the damn stunner. Once I was down, one of them forced that thing—” he jabbed a finger at a neck wrap interface sitting on the table beside him “—onto my ports. I blacked out. When I woke up, they were nowhere to be seen, I was on the floor and Annie was gone.”

‘I’m not gone, Devon.’

“You know what I—!” He wiped sweat off his brow and brought his voice back under control. “You know what I mean, Annie. Surely you feel it, too?”

‘I do.’

At least Annie retained basic speech and thought capabilities. At the moment Miriam would take whatever good news presented itself.

“Did you catch the goons? I have a few things I want to say to them.”

“Major Lange has the two men in custody. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to speak to them right now.” She looked at the medic, who gave her a prevaricating shrug.

“Devon, we’re going to take you over to Medical and get you checked out more thoroughly. Dr. Canivon has been visiting Commander Lekkas on Seneca, but she’s on her way back now. She’ll be here in a couple of hours.” She typically addressed him by his proper name, but he needed comfort, not formalities. Providing comfort to another was hardly her strongest skill, but there was no one else to do it.

“I don’t
want
to go to Medical—I want to give those guys black eyes, then I want to be reconnected to Annie.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t allow the first, and as for the second…we’ll have to wait and see what Dr. Canivon says.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ll wait here.”

She sighed. “Annie, please tell Devon he should go to Medical. We need to ensure this ware routine didn’t cause any neural damage.”

‘Admiral Solovy is right, Devon. I’m worried about you. What if they hurt you?’

“You know damn well they hurt me!” His sagging, defeated posture belied the fervor of the outburst.

Miriam moved forward and grasped him firmly by the shoulders. “Devon, I need you to listen to me. I promise to do everything I can to fix this, but you have to let me help you.”

He stared at her, eyes wide and bloodshot, and mumbled a weak agreement.

S
EATTLE (
O
LYMPIC
R
EGIONAL
S
PACEPORT)

Abigail exited the massive interstellar transport amidst a throng of first-class passengers and made her way as rapidly as possible toward the main ORS terminal.

A military transport had been offered to her for the trip to and from Seneca, though such voyages were still being made only on an as-needed basis. Commercial travel to Seneca was brisk, however, since being reopened after the end of the Metigen War, and she’d opted for the private transport. She was not military, and she sought what small opportunities she happened upon to remind EASC brass of that truth.

In point of fact, she hadn’t strictly needed to travel to Seneca at all—with Annie’s help the routine examination of Commander Lekkas could have been conducted virtually. But since no one at EASC save Devon understood the intricacies of Noetica, she’d been able to wave her hands, mutter ‘Prevo details,’ and everyone had simply nodded blankly.

It was good to get away for a few days. She hadn’t dared depart the Sol system in the last month, once she and Vii’s work on Mia and Meno reached a critical juncture and Mia’s awakening neared. But the effort was a success, and the woman exhibited all the signs of a full recovery.

Yet the instant Abigail
had
left the Sol system, disaster struck.

She was on the way back from Seneca when Admiral Solovy’s comm came in. Details of the attack soon followed, and she’d spent the remainder of the trip working remotely with Annie to understand the mechanism of attack and the damage it had caused from the Artificial’s perspective; evaluation of the damage to Devon would have to wait for her return to EASC.

The incident was bringing back her worst memories of the Alliance bureaucracy, reminding her of several reasons she’d chosen to resign over a decade earlier and pursue more productive, fulfilling work on Sagan. Bureaucrats were so eager to pile rules, regulations and ‘safety mandates’ up into roadblocks to stop anything which even resembled progress, all in the name of increasing their power.

She remained with the Alliance for now because she was heading the most cutting-edge Artificial experiment—no, the most cutting-edge experiment, period—ever to be conducted, and because she’d become rather protective of Devon and Mia. Less so Commander Lekkas, partially due to distance and partially due to the fact the woman had not fully embraced her new nature.

But now the bureaucrats were coming for her and everything she’d created, as they always, inevitably, did.

She spotted a kiosk with no line and quickly stopped to purchase a latte, then took the central passage toward the exit.

The route was crowded, as was typically the case no matter the hour, and she scowled when a tall, sweaty man jostled her as he hurried past her at a jog. She needed a shower, and now she needed a change of clothes…but she needed to see Devon first.

She also needed to begin making contingency plans that would allow her to preserve the data and research behind the advancements Noetica had achieved. No bureaucrat was going to erase what she accomplished—

Another traveler bumped into her from behind, sending her stumbling forward. An arm reached out to steady her. She mumbled a ‘thank you’ and tried to pull away, but the man held her arm fast. Startled, she looked up at him just as she felt a sting at the base of her neck.

Injection
.

Her eVi identified it as a muscle relaxant and neural inhibitor as the substance began speeding toward her motor cortex.

Emergency countermeasures.

Her veins flooded with stimulants as firewalls propagated through her cybernetics. She tried again to yank away—then a virus that had piggybacked on the injection crashed her eVi. A new wave of inhibitor coursed through her nervous system.

She blinked.

“Easy there, Dr. Canivon. You’ll be able to stand and walk—with a little help from us—but you won’t be fighting back any more.” She was vaguely cognizant of being propelled forward then to the right, into the corridor which led…to the private hangars? She couldn’t remember. She felt sleepy, dreamy, while a tiny portion of her brain screamed to fight and scrambled for some additional defense to deploy against the attack.

“Where…what…?”

The man on her left gazed down at her, fuzzy and indistinct. “We’re going to take a ride.”

19

EARTH

W
ASHINGTON:
E
ARTH
A
LLIANCE
H
EADQUARTERS

I
T TOOK ALL OF
M
IRIAM’S
considerable self-restraint to refrain from barging into Brennon’s office until he was free to see her. Luckily for her and him both, it wasn’t a long wait.

She waited until the door closed behind her before leveling a sharp glare at the Prime Minster. “Let me ask you something—do I have any power at all?”

“When we are at war, Fleet Admiral, you have the most consequential of power. When we are at peace, perhaps a bit less. Is there a particular grievance you have?”

He appeared unfazed by her challenge; the man was strikingly cool, a cypher behind a statesman’s smile.

Their relations had been somewhat frosted since the end of the Metigen War, since she’d learned he was not only aware of but had approved Hervé’s implantation of the Kill Switch in the Prevos. True, he ultimately didn’t call for its use, but he’d been playing all the angles.

Objectively she acknowledged it was not merely a political choice but arguably a logical one. Subjectively it raised her hackles that he hadn’t trusted her to handle the situation, whatever the situation might become.

“There are many particular grievances I have, but the pertinent one today is that agents of the Military Oversight Committee
broke into
EASC Special Projects. They held Devon Reynolds against his will and blocked his connection to Annie.”

Genuine surprise flared in his eyes. So he hadn’t known? Good. “Is he alive?”

“He is. They had the slightest foresight to sedate him and take minimal safety precautions, presumably lest they be accused of murder. He is not well, however, as you can imagine. In a small blessing, security arrived and detained the intruders before they succeeded in also taking control of or destroying the Artificial, thus they were not able to irrevocably compound their error.”

She paused, but not long enough to allow him to respond. “Oh—and in what I’m sure is a completely unrelated matter, the Ways and Means Committee has decided the military will be cutting its supply of adiamene to the Federation to four percent of our production. File it away as a grievance for tomorrow.”

“I’m glad to hear Mr. Reynolds is in good health. I suspect Ways and Means is attempting a lateral exertion of pressure on the Federation to force it in the direction of reunification—if they rejoin the Alliance they can have all the adiamene they want. Tell me, Admiral…did you know our friends Chairman Vranas and Field Marshal Gianno were involved in provoking the First Crux War?”

Miriam sucked in a breath. It was a loaded and leading statement delivered out of left field. What was he playing at? “I did.”

The silence lingered for a ponderous moment; he seemed content to wait for a more fulsome response from her. She schooled her expression. “We don’t always get to choose our allies. There are times when we must take them as we find them.”

“I agree. To the extent it matters, which may turn out to be very little extent at all, I happen to like the Chairman.”

She stared out the expansive windows. Forcing herself to work with Vranas and Eleni while knowing they had played central roles in the Senecan revolution had been…difficult. At the time she’d brushed it aside as the price of their survival. Later, it had been harder—harder because as Brennon liked Vranas, so too was she discovering she rather liked Eleni. But that was months ago, and a trial she’d already faced and moved past.

“I refuse to believe it won’t matter, Prime Minister, for it matters to us, and we were and are the ones in the trenches.” She quickly pivoted to the more practical issue. “Regardless, so long as Chairman Vranas and Field Marshal Gianno are in charge, the members of the Ways and Means Committee are deluding themselves if they think there is any chance for reunification, amicable or otherwise.”

Brennon smiled, possibly in mild amusement; he was facing the windows so she couldn’t be positive. “You don’t believe people can change, Admiral? It
has
been twenty-three years since the war ended.”