Shad POV

I was jolted awake out of a sound sleep by Coyote's urgent voice. "Captain Williams, you're needed at once.” Beside me, Juana rolled over and sat up. "Ms. Lopez-Williams, you as well, please.”

Coyote's odd formality struck me. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"We have been formally mobilized," Coyote said. "As part of that mobilization, I have been required to integrate my systems into the Dominator network. I trust you understand."

I did. Coyote's subtext was clear. Our communications were no longer private. "What's wrong?" I asked, swinging my legs out of bed and standing up as Juana crawled out on her side.

"First of all, I am simultaneously sending word to your mother-in-law, asking her to come and keep your daughter company. You are both needed on the bridge at once. General Twofeather is already on his way."

I shrugged into trousers and a fresh shirt, then grabbed my discarded jacket and pulled it over. Juana was already dressed, running a brush through her hair.

"What do you mean by mobilized?" she asked.

"As per our agreement with this Reality Engine exploit council, in the event of a Class One emergency, all assets involved in the exploit will be mobilized under a single banner," Coyote quoted.

"A Class One emergency?" Juana asked, her eyes narrowing. “They haven't had one of those in, I don't know, 200 exploits. They didn't even declare Kronos a Class One emergency."

"Because by the time they would have, it was too late," Coyote said, his tone nearly normal. "The rogue element," he paused, and I knew he was referring to Colin's crew, "has struck multiple locations at once and caused significant damage. They have changed their usual procedures. Instead of robbing, they are now outright destroying. They have vented several billion units of Ethereum into the system."

"Is that retrievable?" I asked, pulling on my boots.

"Perhaps, but it will not be available until after this engine is completely dominated. As far as we are concerned, for the near term, it's been destroyed."

I wondered what Colin was up to. Were his allies perhaps able to access this ethereum? I suspected that my sending in his team had changed his plans. I wished there was a way to communicate with them, but I kept my mouth shut. Juana met my eyes. She nodded grimly. She understood too.

"The mobilization only lasts for the duration of the emergency," she said. "As soon as that's over, Coyote will be able to detach from the network. They only do this when they suspect some elements of the exploit may be working against other elements."

Which was, in this case, true.

Coyote continued. “I also must inform you that sanctions will be taken against any elements found to be assisting the rogue, and that all miners involved in the exploit have had fail-safes attached. Should they be found to be assisting the rogues, they will be pulled out of the exploit and not permitted back in for the duration of the emergency."

I got the message loud and clear. We needed to keep our heads down and not draw attention to ourselves.

We hurried up to the bridge where Grandpa already had the other department heads assembled. Colonel Marona was present. I had managed to avoid having much to do with him in the past year. My role as civilian liaison gave me plenty of freedom to operate on my own. He was bleary and red-faced, clearly not happy having been woken at, I checked my clock, oh three hundred hours.

Mama Grace sent us a quick message that she had arrived at our apartment and checked that Mila was still asleep. I appreciated it. I needed to be able to focus right now. In addition to Colonel Marona, Dwight and our mining coordinator, Allison, were there.

"What's this mobilization about?" Colonel Marona asked. "What's it got to do with us?"

"A class one emergency means that the exploit has gone badly awry and is under the galactic equivalent of martial law," Juana said. "Since it's an alliance of different corporations, that takes a form that seems a little strange to us. Basically, the Dominator Network will now be calling the shots. As per terms of our agreement, they are requesting two platoons’ worth of troops to provide security to their mining teams. For the moment, the consensus is to remove existing ethereum deposits back to the ships."

"That's not standard doctrine," Coyote said. “In the stage of an exploit, Ethereum is needed to power the continued exploit. However, clearly a decision has been made to pull out what they can so it will not further be destroyed."

"We can't field that many. We have our own obligations to meet," Colonel Marona said.

"They're already being deployed," Coyote said.

"On whose orders? Yours?"

"Martial law," Juana reminded him. "It's in the contracts we all signed."

I was itching to get involved. Sage and Colin were down there doing something, executing a plan I couldn't guess. It hurt, being on the sidelines. "What about us?" I asked.

"We are to stand by and wait for orders," Grandpa told me. I met his gaze. I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was. “There's a strategy meeting in 20 minutes, and we three are invited," Grandpa said, including Juana.

Colonel Marona puffed up. Grandpa cut him off. "You, Colonel, are to maintain the rest of our troops at high readiness. I expect we will be called on soon. When we are, I want us prepared."

"What's the situation so far?" I asked.

Juana had already been studying displays. She brought one up now on our main screen. The bridge was quiet at this time of night. During the day, it was our bustling hub of communications. Not the center of a ship, but the center of a factory, calling out job orders and working to keep our operation running. Now it was silent.

“Eight zones have been hit so far. Nine now," she added as a new report came in. She pulled them up on her screen and showed us. "Strewn across as many different corporations. No faction is getting off unscathed here. One of our own crafting operations was disrupted. We're having to respawn three dozen crafters right now. I've called them all back until the situation is resolved."

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"And they're sure it's the rogues?"

"Yes," Juana said. "There's no question of that."

I looked at the display, willing it to make sense. Colin was reacting to something. Or was it just because I'd given him enough people to finally put a plan into action? No. My gut feeling said that the team had filled him in on what was going on up here, and that had pushed him into action. But why? We weren't at a particularly crucial phase of this exploit.

Ever since realizing that Sage and Colin were alive, and based on Coyote's assumptions, I had thought that they must be trying to get back up here. They had made an alliance with a fragment and would need to have that fragment extracted along with them. But this... this was something more. They weren't trying to negotiate a settlement. They were upending the existing order.

"Has there been any attempt to communicate with the rogues?"

"The Coalition Intelligence is not attempting that at this time," Coyote said. I could hear in his reserved tones more than he was saying. The Coalition didn't want to talk to Sage and Colin. There had to be a way to open comms.

"Time for the meeting," Grandpa said. We followed after him to a transfer point, stepped through, and were in a crowded briefing room full of aliens.

I spotted Veda across the room. She saw us and came over at once, looking frustrated.

"I would never have thought to find an exploit as annoying as yours again," she said. "It's like the galaxy called down a curse when we went into your system and the curse isn't over yet."

I refrained from saying anything.

"How badly hit is Proxima?" Juana asked.

"We've lost a lot of ethereum. We have records of how much, so maybe at the end of this we'll get it back?" Veda sighed and shook her head. "Your teams fought hard. I reviewed the footage from the battle against the rogues earlier. You got a lot of kills, and fewer deaths than almost anyone else."

"You're welcome," I said. I had told the other two teams to fight hard, not letting on that we had any other agenda other than trying to conquer the people we were attacking. I'd had to have faith in Colin and Sage's ability to handle them.

"But—and this is something that took me a minute to notice—you sent three teams in and only two came out."

I had been hoping she would overlook it, either accidentally or intentionally. Our teams had come out in twos and threes, and when the level slammed shut, everyone had been busy trying to figure out what had just happened. I thought maybe we had escaped notice.

"One of my teams was captured," I said.

Veda cocked her head to the side. "Captured?"

"There was an enemy with the ability to turn people on each other."

"Yes, some of the other teams reported that, but none of them suffered permanent loss."

"It was probably a side effect of their classes," I said. “It was one of my specialist teams, the Gamers. They're all built around exploiting features of the exploit, but it leaves them vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks, psychic and willpower-based ones among them."

"I see," Veda said. "Well, we underestimated the enemy, and we won't be making that mistake again."

I was saved from answering as the meeting was called to order.

At the center of the room, I saw the six representatives I'd met earlier and Patriarch Kvaltash. He was gesturing around with him a staff.

“The rogues stand in our way. They have clearly the intention of thwarting this exploit. We will not permit this to stand,” Kvaltash pronounced.

The Proxima rep frowned. “The fragment managed to lock out our people on an individual basis. We've been following up and found that their individual Soul Coin signatures were locked out. We can’t get back in, and if we could, we can’t bring a big enough force to overwhelm the rogues.”

"If the Coalition Intelligence will grant me the authority, I can open a way into the rogues' domain, permit all of our banned miners to enter, as well as ignoring the cap on participants. We shall overwhelm and crush the rogue and its forces."

“How?” one of the corporate leaders demanded. “Since when have you had that sort of power, Patriarch?”

"I would like to take this chance to announce that the Ember Dawn faction has achieved what has long been one of my Order's goals. We have completed an Overmind Key."

I heard excited whispers all around the room.

"Once we have finished attuning this key using the fragments still remaining in this reality engine, we will be able to unlock any untapped reality engine that we can find, thereby bypassing the costly and time-consuming Phase One and going straight to the profitable portions of the exploit. However, I will remind my colleagues that we are not completed with this exploit. It has been incredibly profitable despite a few setbacks, and I for one would not want to give it up early. Let us discuss how we may finish our efforts here."

"We need to wipe out this pocket of resistance,” Deneb’s rep insisted.

“Yes," the Patriarch said, "but I must ask for a chance to examine this fragment. Whichever Dominator captures this, must hold it in stasis for me. I believe we will be able to greatly increase the efficiency of my key by examining this outlier, just as we were able to formulate the plans for building this key by studying the entity referred to as Kronos."

I felt like I'd been stabbed in the gut. I thought that Kvaltash and his people had been studying Kronos because they genuinely wanted to know what the fragments were like, but all this time they'd just been using him to build this device that would let them better enslave other reality engines.

Maybe I shouldn't care. My people were well on our way to being well set up in the galaxy. But I had come to think of Kronos, and now Coyote, as individuals, and the Galactics were talking about enslaving them, just like they had enslaved me and my family. Not just for a period of time, but forever.

From what I had been told, it was too late to let most of the fragments here assemble into a gestalt like Kronos and give them ownership of the reality engine. The best I could hope for was to save the last few free minds.

But at what cost? My priority had to be getting my sister and Colin out of there. I didn't know what kind of deals they might have made with this lesser fragment. I was assuming I'd have to offer to take it out. I didn't have a bargaining chip. Unless I did.

"And what will this cost the Coalition?" Deneb’s rep asked. "The Church of the Progenitor does nothing out of their own, out of selflessness."

"No, indeed," Kvaltash said. "In return for this, I want to secure your backing later to help me complete this key."

"Not if it has the power you say," Proxima’s head snarled. "We'd be giving you the solution to every Reality Engine exploit from here on out."

"Have you not been watching what has happened in the past cycles?" Kvaltash challenged. "The costliness, the resources wasted. We let one Reality Engine slip out of our fingers, and we are close to another. I believe this is not an accident, but the work of terrorists."

Yeah, like your people, I thought to myself, but I kept my mouth shut. I was not going to accuse the Patriarch when apparently the Galactics had all cleared him of any wrongdoing.

"There will be time to negotiate how best to use this power once the immediate emergency is passed," Kvaltash said. "For today, all I ask is that you allow your forces to be deployed as the Coalition Intelligence wishes. I am presenting my own assets, that is, the key, so that the Intelligence may make the best decisions possible."

"Out of the question," Deneb said.

Then, a voice cut across everything else. "The Patriarch's proposal is acceptable." It was cold, calm woman's tones. I had never heard that voice before, but I was guessing this was the Coalition Intelligence mentioned. "I shall begin deploying everyone's forces at once. Your requisitions are being sent now."

A note popped up in my field of view. I guessed from the way Grandpa reacted that he'd gotten the same. Two of our five previously-deployed brigades were being withdrawn to assist with this attack and all of our remaining forces were to be deployed.

My own requisitions were in more detail. I was to assemble all of my civilian teams for a briefing in 20 minutes. I passed the message along, and Coyote said he was already on it.

I squeezed Juana's arm. "Gotta go," I said. "Sounds like the decisions are being made higher up than me."

"Be careful," she told me. "Our contracts are…well, I don't like to use the word 'bulletproof,' but I wouldn't like to have to defend us breaking them."

"I'll do what's right," I told her. There was no way I was going to betray Sage and Colin. If they needed me, I'd be there. Damn the consequences.

"Shad," she lowered her voice, speaking just to me. The room was crowded. "I know what you mean. I know how you feel. But the penalties involved will cripple the company and Earth. You have to be careful, whatever happens."

I shut my mouth. I was getting damned tired of being pushed around by galactic law. "I'll keep that in mind," I told her.