About an hour after Michael had sent the bots to the Bronx, it became increasingly clear that there was nothing for us to do in the meeting room any more.

The lingering Atropos quickly discovered the still exotherm zombies from the air, and the Einherjar made short work of them. Oh, not all of the zombies had been eradicated yet, but enough of them, without even one of the bots being damaged, that the remaining danger in Queens was negligible. In the Bronx, there was still a marginal rest of danger remaining, but we were not there.

By then, we had gotten the information about the zombie attacks on the other cities. The possibility of a follow-up attack still remained, mind you, but most of us resumed our normal work.

Just before Jessi broke the ice and left, one of Naveen’s officers entered and handed our security chief a tablet, before leaving again.

When he had read the text, he sighed.

“Well, my crew has gone over the Palantír data from the last month, and we can say with high probability how the zombies arrived in our fair city. A tramp freighter, the Angelica out of Tranquility Inception, a heavily modified ABAS FR-150-T 22, landed six times each in Alley Pond Park and an abandoned country club east of White Plains over the course of a week starting from January 3rd.”

Ok, I had to give the crew a bit of respect here. The FR-150 had been discontinued nearly 60 years ago, with the 24 revision.

It had been the premier 150-kiloton freighter of its day, but could no longer be modernized in 2193 and had been replaced by the FS-150. Despite the similar name, the FS was a completely new design, that had been replaced eight years ago by the GF-150. Yeah, ABAS had a somewhat simplistic approach to naming their utilitarian designs.

The point here though is that I would not have set foot into any FR-150. Oh sure, grav ships had way less mechanical stress while in use than any other mode of transportation, and the lightweight carbon mull was relatively robust, but an FR-150-T 22 had to have around 70 years of wear and tear on it.

There was no way that the electric and electronic systems were even in decent condition, much less safe to use.

Michael sighed as well.

“Figures that it was a TI-flagged ship.”

He was right in that. Tranquility Inception was one of the older Orbital Free States. And one that did not look too closely at the papers of any grav ship registered there. Or its general status, come to that.

In other words, Tranquility Inception created its place in the world order by being the dumping ground for grav ships with questionable provenance, a smuggler’s haven.

Unfortunately, even with mythical computer penetration skills, it was virtually impossible to get any information beyond the name of the ship and the owner of the note out of the station, simply because they refused to gather that information in the first place.

Which, naturally, made the ships registered there ideal for clandestine operations.

All that was known to Michael of course, which explained the sigh. That venue of investigation was a dead end.

So he just shrugged.

“Well, it doesn’t help. How likely is it that we can put pressure on somebody from the crew to get us some information?”

Naveen just shook his head.

“That is not possible, I fear. The Angelica suffered an ‘unexplained’ containment failure of its fusactor. The official cause is given as insufficient maintenance.”

Michael placed his head in his hand.

“So… a complete dead end. What else do we know?”

“We know that it was one of a dozen such ‘accidents’ caused by ‘deficient maintenance’ that destroyed a TI-flagged ship over three days.”

“A dozen… and how many zombie attacks happened?”

“A dozen as far as we can tell.”

Nobody said a word for some time before Michael walked to the window, standing in front of it with his hands clasped behind his back.

“How likely is it that anybody without Palantír has enough information to connect those 12 ships to the zombie hordes?”

Again, Naveen shook his head, even Michael standing with his back to all of us could not see it.

“Unlikely. From what we can tell, the Angelica dropped a container or two of zombies before continuing to JFK to deliver some freight. If there was not the possibility of the crew talking about their deliveries, eliminating them would have been overkill.

It is virtually impossible to connect those ships to the zombies without Palantír.”

“That means the only lead we have is Blumenthal?”

“Correct. I can not comment on how likely whoever did this thinks it is that he has been made though.”

Well, there was my cue:

“Unless there is anything remotely as stealthy as Lachesis out there, negligible. He used a 2x2m elevator to get into the bunker. One that was biometrically locked. It is way below any possible EM reception, and anything less stealthy than a Lachesis is either too small to be mobile on its own, or immediately obvious when it enters the elevator.”

That made Michael turn around.

“So… we have a trail to whoever did this, and they don’t know about it?”

Naveen nodded.

“It looks like it. I can’t say anything about how hard it will be to get the information out of Blumenthal though. Or his system.”

I shook my head.

“Don’t expect it to be easy. The people who set this up are paranoid. And good. Hand vein scanner to open the bunker, binary OS on the computer with one half that he carried around. A dedicated connection to somewhere else, not through the matrix.”

I snorted bitterly.

“If I had not used a swarm of Clotho, we might not have any access to the crystals either. It will take time to decode them anyway.”

“But we can decode them because we not only know that they exist in the first place, but we also can copy the data, even if it is encrypted. And then, when we know who is responsible, we will gut those assholes.”

Abruptly, Michael turned back to the window, looking out over the growing sea of our buildings.

“Naveen, what are the chances that we will get them?”

After a few moments, the tall man answered softly:

“We can’t say yet. The opposition is good. The chances are low, but we have a chance. They were methodical and covered all their bases. Removed all the evidence and eliminated all the witnesses.

We only have a chance because frankly, Vivian got a bee in her bonnet about this Blumenthal character.”

He ignored my indignant “Hey!” and continued:

“It was such a random, low-probability event that there was absolutely no way for them to account for it. Add in that it was Vivian who got this obsessed and tried to find ways to solve the Blumenthal riddle… that was the worst thing that could have happened to them. Anybody else, and they would be mostly unable to do anything. Either they would lack the time and energy to focus on that, or they would lack the ability to make any headway, or most likely both.”

Michael groaned.

“I know that. I was asking about the probability of us finding them.”

“I know. My point is that it will be hard. Whoever they are, they are professional and good. They wiped out every trail between them and the attack. We have an opening, but we have to be careful and methodical as well to get them.

And even then it is a toss-up. One mistake on our side, if we tip them off, and we are shit out of luck. They will burn Blumenthal, and dismantle the whole network to keep hidden. Oh sure, there is a chance that, when they get close to their ultimate goal, they will be less secret about it.

Because it will most likely be too late to do anything against it then. But even that is uncertain.”

“I understand. Do your best.”

I mostly listened to the two, but I had one niggling question.

“One thing. If you thought I was going on a wild goose chase with Blumenthal… why didn’t you try to intervene?”

For a few seconds, nobody said a word, before Michael snorted.

“God, Vivian, do you seriously believe we could have intervened?”

I rolled my eyes.

“No, of course not. But you could have at least tried.”

That elicited a low chuckle from our CEO.

“Never give an order you know will not be followed. But in all seriousness… why should we intervene?

Have you ever heard about an employee who with one single invention, one organizational change, one idea, any deed really, created so much profit or savings for a company that for the rest of his work life, he paid for all of his salary? That for all purposes, from then on he works for free?”

I was… honestly, confused.

“Uh… no. What are you implying with that?”

Shaking his head, Michael turned to me.

“Vivian, you are this employee on steroids. If you don’t do anything anymore, what you’ve provided to Enki already will pay for everything you get for several decades. Fuck, the whole company exists because of your inventions.

What that means is that whenever you get a wild idea, fixate on something, or just want to relax, we let you.

Even if you go on, as you called it, a wild goose chase, like with Blumenthal, it is very probable that we get something out of it. Like the new surveillance gear. I don’t know if you are aware, but over the next decade or so, those alone will be worth billions.

So what if you get crazy about one thing or another now or then? If you had been wrong about Blumenthal, then the worst that would have happened is that you violate the privacy of some poor fucker. So who cares?

But you weren’t wrong. You were right. He is an operative.”

Then he turned to Naveen again.

“I assume you will put everything your people have to help Vivian, correct?”

The answer was a nod, followed by some words:

“Of course. I will send a couple of our Psionics to the man as soon as he comes out of his bunker. I will put the majority of our cyber security department to the task, and most of our analysts. Oh, and we will send our newest recruit for the cyber security division to work with Vivian directly.”

O-kay. Whatever he meant by that. I was not quite sure why he would send a new recruit to work directly with me, but whatever.

Clearly, my confusion was easy to see, as Naveen turned to me:

“You know the man. A Brazillian, by the name of Ramon Gutierrez.”

What the… no, I knew nobody by that name, from Brazil or somewhere else.

When I showed no sign of understanding, Naveen smiled happily.

“From what I understand, he recently retired from his previous career as a freelancer.”

I could just shrug.

“If you say so. But I think we should concentrate on observing Blumenthal and decrypting his crystals.”

While he pointed his thumb over his shoulder out of the window, where it had already gone dark, Michael interjected.

“I think, for now, you should concentrate on getting home and relaxing. It was a long day, and most of us will do the same.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Yeah sure, but I doubt Blumenthal will show his face in the next few days. I will have Warden give our security department all the feeds and information we got about him.

However, I doubt that they can provide much help with decrypting. I would leave that task for Warden anyway, and it is mostly just a game of waiting until the best computers finish doing their work.”

Naveen nodded.

“Sure, but the analysts can start on their work if they get anything that you have about the man.”

Michael interjected.

“By the way, the way you said it, do we have more than two Psionics on our payroll now?”

That caused a guffaw from Naveen.

“Oh boy do we ever. Our original Psionics convinced a couple of others that they would want to work for us, and as soon as the new Psionics learned about the mind blockers, they started recruiting others as well.

By now, we have 53 of them working for us.”

Before Michael could protest, he lifted his hands in a warding gesture:

“They all understand that the mind blocker is still a secret, and don’t mention it directly. But it is apparently pretty convincing that every single Psionic that hires on with us soon after fully agrees with the ones we already have in our employ that all the others desperately want to work for us.

It helps that we pay well, of course. Psionics have always been exceptionally valuable for security forces, even though some corporations seem to think that the honor of working for them should be enough.

Anyway, we are getting more and more of them. And they are happy to work for us as far as I can say.”

“Ok, that is good. It will always cause problems if employees are unhappy with their jobs, but that is even more important with the security people. Too much opportunity to cause trouble.”