APPROXIMATELY +1.3.11 POST-INCIDENT

  MINOR TIMESTAMP ERRORS DETECTED

  Mod, Arsenal, and Lock ran down the interstate. They were on the shoulder, and keeping pace with traffic.

  Athena stayed behind. She had her own personal business in Belport and didn’t elaborate. Mod didn’t want to pry, but TINA knew, which meant Mod inadvertently found out. Athena was visiting her vampire friend Lucy.

  Mod partitioned the information after that, that way he wasn’t inadvertently spying on his friend. The process was roughly the same as partitioning a hard drive, but the information was still there and Mod could still access it in an emergency. If anything happened to Athena, he could find her and track her down.

  The rest of Mod’s group ran down the highway. TINA’s cloaking hid them from everything—from human sight, biomechs, and drones, and hid their transmissions. Before they left, Athena had given them each minor wards; those would hide them from any random magic checkpoints along the way.

  Mod wasn’t sure what was weirder: Looking over and seeing the same cars beside them, or the fact that they could jog at eighty miles an hour for two days.

  Well, not two days straight. They took breaks to eat, sleep, and relieve themselves, and also for their own sanity. Mod could probably manage the trek without stopping, but Clara needed breaks to recharge, and Lock got bored. Clara and Lock still needed to eat; even packing only high density calorie bars and Mod not needing to eat, their food took up the bulk of the supplies they brought. The group split everything between three backpacks.

  But the main limitation on their speed was the nanite transmission cable. As they ran, Mod left a thin stream of nanites behind. The mix of nanites contained a mix of everything needed to self-replicate and then manufacture the cable itself. Both Mod and the nanites had made significant progress, but it still took time for Mod to make more nanites and for the nanite transmission cable to catch up to their highway speed. Taking period breaks wound up not just being good for their health, but necessary for the cable to construct and sink into the ground.

  By the time they were done, the cable would stretch for miles, all the way from the backup lab to their target.

  TINA could access some things wirelessly, but there were core parts of the warehouse that could only be accessed with a hardline. Besides, wireless transmission wasn’t fast enough for what they needed to do. TINA needed direct access.

  ~

  They reached their target that evening—a drone manufacturing warehouse right off of the highway.

  The Binary Brotherhood had stepped up production. Their drones were now a cornerstone of national defense against enemies from outside and against enemies within. Over the last few months, the number of drones within the Allied States had ballooned from thousands to millions. No matter what city you lived in, you could look up and see drones overhead. Heavy drone manufacturing was a bit slower, but there was at least one heavy drone in every major city.

  They had been monitoring communications within the Allied States for months and were now expanding servers to encompass the entire world.

  Bastion, and by extension, the Brotherhood, were everywhere.

  And Mod’s group operated right under their noses.

  Mod, Arsenal, and Lock crept through the woods that surrounded the warehouse. It was slow going; their cloaking was almost foolproof, but they still had to worry about traps and errant biomechs. Mod led them through the undergrowth, before cutting his way through a simple barbed wire fence.

  They paused just at the edge of the woods while Mod and TINA

  The building itself used to be a distribution hub before the Brotherhood bought it. They gutted it and repurposed it. Now it bared more resemblance to a military compound. It was still more efficient to transport raw materials by road, so driverless transports came and went like giant metal ants. Familiar drones circled overhead, but most of the outer security was covered by biomechs.

  Squads of biomechs manned all entrances and patrolled the outer perimeter. There were a dozen heavy mechs scattered around, and four times that many human-sized security units. Aside from weapon loadouts, most of the biomech designs hadn’t changed.

  The security units were the exception—the Brotherhood had started making them look more human.

  Half of them retained the standard sleek metal, but the other half were covered in a layer of skin. Infiltration units. At a distance, they could pass as human—at least while they walked upright. But up close, their skin looked like rubber in some places and bad special effects in others. Of course, it didn’t help when the sec units started running on all fours or unsheathed weaponry out of their skin.

  Mod couldn’t understand how the new security units could fool anyone… but they must’ve been working. Otherwise, the Brotherhood wouldn’t be using them.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Most of Mod’s team thought they looked creepy—very uncanny valley. Mod couldn’t help but see himself. It wasn’t that long ago that his prosthetics had a layer of artificial skin like that. Granted, Dr. Venture hadn’t given him some mass produced crap, but it still held an uncanny feeling for Mod. In a way, it was like looking in the mirror or hearing a recording of his voice.

  Is that really what I looked like?

  Clara had sworn that he had never looked like that, and that she’d never been able to tell the difference between his skin and the synthetic skin.

  He appreciated the sentiment. …He also knew she was lying.

  Mod ignored it. That was in the past. He was a new man now—in every sense of the word. Beneath his cloaking, Mod still looked normal, but his next gen RB-2 body retained only a passing resemblance to his original body.

  He was still partially solid. At his center was a metal-alloy chassis. It was comparable to the bones of a skeleton—it housed his brain, all of his batteries and containers. It also had an internal musculature and next gen non-newtonian fluid for additional resilience.

  Mod could function as a skeleton—it was rated Class 3, in fact. But his real strengths came from the specialized nanites that made up the rest of his body. They were the equivalent of his old ablative armor, combination fabrication and manufacturing nanites, and every weapon he could ever want. Gone were the days of carrying weapon mods around and connecting them when he needed to.

  Now all Mod had to do was think of a weapon and conjure it out of his skin.

  He and TINA had a silent conversation about how to proceed. It was over in a millisecond, and Mod knew what he had to do.

  Mod’s right arm began to change. His hand and forearm elongated into a thin rifle barrel. Meanwhile, the internal structure shifted to form power channels, magnets, slides, housings, and specialized casings. While his body changed, his brain was taking in information—taking in the flight paths of drones and the patrol paths of biomech patrols.

  Mod’s cloaking shimmered as he took aim. Then fusion energy from Mod’s cell trickled into his arm, powering his nearly created gauss rifle. Magnets along the barrel accelerated the bullet to just under the speed of sound. There wasn’t any noise, and the little bit of heat byproduct was filtered through Mod’s cloaking system.

  The whole process—from creation to firing—took about a second.

  The nanite bullet struck one of the circling Fast-Response drones. Its outer casing of nanites dissolved and blew away in the wind, and the specialized inner nanites seeped into gaps in the drone’s armor.

  Two seconds later, TINA had access to the warehouse drone network.

  Roughly two seconds after that, she had access to the warehouse servers.

  Mod looked over TINA’s proverbial shoulder while she tapped into the network. It felt like watching a sculptor chisel a statue out of a block of marble—she worked in broad strokes at first, exploiting backdoors and cloaking herself from Bastion’s detection. bypassed nearby cameras and motion sensors. Slowly, the shape of her plan came into view as she narrowed her focus to security systems and server storage. With quick chisels, she bypassed outside cameras and motion sensors.

  Their part was coming up. Mod had already found a route between biomech patrols and to a side entrance. He waited for the next patrol to pass.

  Mod whispered, “Move to stage two.”

  He led. Arsenal and Lock followed just behind. The trio stalked quickly across the grass, leapt over the barbed wire fence, and snuck to the door in absolute silence. TINA triggered the electronic lock, and Mod’s group slipped inside.

  ~

  The inside of the manufacturing warehouse was completely different from the outside. Outside, the warehouse had been hastily retrofitted, surrounded by barbed wire, and was surrounded by squads of mechs and drones. Other than those, the warehouse looked similar to how it had in the past.

  The inside had been completely transformed. Rows of storage shelves were replaced with automated assembly lines. Most of the building was packed with machinery, and the only spaces for humans were narrow passages and hanging walkways.

  Not that there were any people to notice.

  Midas had built the drone manufacturing warehouses to be one hundred percent automated. Technically, Midas and Ava Savanus were still working together, but their partnership had soured with the rise of the Menagerie.

  A lot had happened since that fateful day outside of Gnosis, when the Menagerie had used the psychic Kairon to take over an entire Summit squad, numerous mechs, and some of Mod’s own allies. Despite constant testing and attacks by the Menagerie, Savanus still couldn’t completely secure her biomechs from psychic attack.

  As a result, Midas was cutting her forces out of the equation. Biomechs might be part of the warehouse’s outer defenses, but everything inside was controlled by Bastion.

  In some ways, getting in had been the most nerve-wracking part. Now that they were inside, there weren’t any biomechs that could see through their cloaking. TINA could easily loop sensors and cameras to keep them hidden. Midas’s hubris and paranoia worked to their advantage.

  Arsenal and Lock followed TINA’s directions to a secluded hall. Meanwhile, Mod went the opposite direction toward the server clusters—

  All the while, he laid a trail of nanites. They slipped through the floor and continued the transmission cable beneath the tiles. A few minutes later, that cable connected to the warehouse servers.

  Mod turned his attention back to TINA and watched while she finished taking over the lab.

  She chiseled away on her block of marble. Its form was nearly finished, and all she had left were the finer details—some of the most delicate and most important. She hacked the communication lines between the warehouse and Bastion’s mainframe. Once TINA had access, she began subtly altering the data coming and going between the two locations.

  This part was the most delicate process, but once TINA finished, she had effectively partitioned off part of the warehouse. They could repurpose assembly lines for their own manufacturing process. Neither Bastion nor the Brotherhood would realize anything was wrong, and with any luck, it would stay that way.

  TINA’s marble sculpture was nearly finished. Only, it wasn’t a sculpture of a person—

  It was a tool.

  The first of many that they needed to build their new reactor.

  ~ ~ ~