We quickly turned our attention to Blumenthal. Not that it was particularly productive, mind you.

Yes, we could, and did, copy all disconnected crystals. Didn’t do us much good, though. Naturally, they were encrypted, and we expected that. Would be no big problem, as we had entire supercomputer banks at the ready to decrypt them.

No, the problem was that as with the binary OS they used, the crystals did not have all the information.

In theory, it should be possible to read out the active crystals, and any chip included in the system.

We decided to not even try. As paranoid as the people who set up this system seemed to be, they would almost certainly notice any activity on the crystals and the chipsets we would generate.

No, we had to wait for the computer to be shut down to access it. And obviously, if Blumenthal was in the room, thinking the computer was shut down, only for it to turn on… you get the idea.

Thus, we decided to wait until Blumenthal left the bunker.

Ramon and his crew, along with part of Warden, turned to dig as deep into Blumenthal’s cover as they could.

I could, maybe even should have done the same, but honestly, I doubted they would find much, and my time was way too valuable for me to waste in such a manner.

Instead, I turned back to the quantum fields of the Kobashigawa coils. While I seriously doubted that the neutrino-influencing field would be the culprit, it was a field that I already partly understood, so I started there.

It provided some… interesting results as well. I was right that it could not do anything about the missing high-speed neutrons, the vanishing heat, or the mysterious energy gain.

What it gave me, however, was a surprisingly compact, exceedingly sensitive device to detect neutrinos.

Why was that important, you might ask? Neutrinos are a natural byproduct of nuclear reactions. We had neutrino detectors for centuries now, but those were the size of a warehouse.

Not particularly mobile in other words. What I now had was the size of a book. It was sensitive enough to detect the neutrinos emitted by tritium in self-illuminating emergency signs at a distance of 12m. An active fusactor, it could detect at a range of 15km.

The problem here was, naturally, that it could only detect the direction and the strength of the nuclear device.

You needed two of them to triangulate the position. And to differentiate between multiple neutrino sources on the same path.

The device I had developed had two detectors, but the parallax was… meager.

Now, some of you might ask, why I thought this was in any way interesting. The answer is that it provided another layer of protection for Palantír.

The neutrino detector did not quite invalidate stealth, as Palantír did, but it made it so much harder, and it was virtually impossible to hide beyond 15 to 20km if you had any active nuclear reaction on board.

Its very existence would provide a useful explanation for why we could see the stealthed grav ships. An explanation that would make the other corporations stop looking for Palantír, hopefully.

After that, I started another deep dive into the Seeberger equation. I spare you all the madness-inducing findings that I unearthed during the next two days. Unfortunately, none of the next eight fields had any possible impact on how fusactors worked.

The only effect they had was giving me a headache. I was extremely grateful for Darren’s presence when the Gamma Curse raised its ugly head again.

Blumenthal, in the meantime, mostly spent his time reading, playing computer games, watching some holodramas, or killing time in general.

Twice a day, he booted the computer for a few minutes and looked for something, only to shut it down almost immediately.

Then, on the fifth day, when he booted it up, he found a message notification and started up what seemed to be a chat app.

Over the next 15 minutes or so, around a dozen other users logged on.

He was, naturally, not the only one reading what was presented on his display. After a notification from Warden, Naveen, Ramon, a couple of our analysts, and I, watched the stream from the Lachesis looking over his shoulder.

Monolith: Now that you are all here, we can proceed. Operation Bronze Puma has been finished. After we have concluded the debriefing, you can return to your roles.

Cabal: Do we have any results in yet?

Monolith: We have. Overall, it was a successful test run. Philadelphia had 4233 dead, Boston 3316, Chicago 8274, Montreal 7819, Toronto 3708, Quebec 5017, Baltimore 2209, Columbus 1822, Indianapolis 2017, and Detroit 2236.

Monolith: Only Washington DC with 874 dead and NYC with 346 behaved outside of expectation.

Carnage: Shit? I thought DC was in the sack. What happened?

Monolith: Random luck. A company of Marine Raiders had a recruiting drive at Georgetown University. They had 200 Marines in Power Armor just happened to be in DC.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Viking: I assume in NYC we have C-87 to thank for the anomaly?

Monolith: Correct. They reacted faster and were way more decisive than expected. They deployed about 1500 of their new combat bots to counter the hordes.

Viking: That is why I suggested not trying to test Bronze Puma in NYC. We don’t have enough information about C-87 to confidently gauge their reaction.

Monolith: You are wrong. We gained significant insight into a possible reaction of C-87. Our analysts are still working on it, but so far they don’t behave like the other C entities.

Viking: They still stabilized C-14, which was entering a death spiral. And I encountered C-87-001 personally. She is as callous and haughty as all the other C principles.

Monolith: I read the report. I also can tell that C-87 reacted fast and decisive not just to protect themselves, or even their employees, but they intervened in a region of NYC where they have only marginal business interests.

Viking: Maybe they wanted the elite of NYC in their debt.

Monolith: Possible. Not that it matters that much. It is irrelevant if they are different from the other C entities. They are stabilizing the establishment too much.

Viking: They do? How?

Monolith: The news about their new fertility treatment has calmed the population down significantly. If the rumors are true, then it will erase most of the unrest about the cloning costs.

Viking: I thought that were unsubstantiated rumors.

Monolith: They have been substantiated. C-08 is running tests on the same treatment in the Commonwealth. We have no information as to why those two are working together.

Viking: At least that I can answer. C-87-001 is also C-08-003. With C-08-002 being mentally incapacitated, she is the designated heir of C-08-001.

Monolith: Yes, that would explain that. Are you sure about it?

Viking: Positive. She announced it at the New Year's Eve ball. She is also accompanied by a group of personal protection soldiers from C-08.

Monolith: That is troubling. The way C-08 stabilized the Commonwealth is already a problem in its own right. And with them taking over the AFS and the market share of C-21 makes them too strong for Venator’s liking already.

Monolith: If they are now getting into a stable alliance with C-87 that will be a problem. Especially as C-87 seems to be hellbent on introducing new technology.

Honor: I thought the new tech would destabilize the situation to our liking.

Monolith: It seems that C-87 is too smart for that. They share the technology with most C-entities.

Velvet: But the way they dismantled C-17… they have to destabilize everything.

Monolith: As I said, they are too smart for that. Yes, they dismantled C-17, but at the same time, they introduced top-tier medical care to the disenfranchised masses. Quelling much of the smoldering unrest we counted on.

Nemesis: But that only serves to make the masses realize what they have been living without all the time.

Viking: No, I get it. They know they were without that medical care, but now they get it, and that makes them more content.

Monolith: It gets worse. The way they throw those jacks around will pacify the population even more.

Monolith: In general, they will calm down the seething undercurrents in the lower classes. Fortunately, we still have time to do something about it. It will take years for all that resentment to die down.

Viking: So, we are working on cutting them down?

Monolith: Correct. Venator concludes that they’ve grown too big too fast. If that continues, we can no longer counter them. We would have to treat them like the other big league C-entities. But unlike the others, we don’t have decades of observation and infiltration to plan around their behavior.

Monolith: If they reach the point where they can’t be simply snuffed out anymore, we would need to pull back and start planning with them in the equation. That will take years, maybe decades.

Monolith: We can’t allow that to happen. We are closing in on Phase II, and being pushed back to the start of Phase I would be a disaster.

Monolith: That means that Operation Tickle is a go, with C-14 as the primary, and C-87 as the secondary.

Monolith: Can you do that, Viking?

Viking: I still need to find a reliable tool to get it done, but with C-14-002 here in NYC, it should be doable. But it will take some time.

Monolith: That is a given. Take care that neither of them gets suspicious. We are planning for Tickle to take six to twelve months.

Viking: If I get access to the database for the tools, that should be a realistic time frame.

Viking: The big problem is finding a tool that is at once convincing, gullible enough, but also capable of pulling it off.

Monolith: Nemo is already in the process of vetting the available tools.

Viking: Then yes, I should be able to get it done.

Monolith: That is good. I will tell Venator that Operation Tickle is in the planning phase.

Monolith: That was it for now. Does anybody have anything else we need to talk about?

For nearly a minute, nothing followed, before this Monolith typed again:

Monolith: Then we will contact you when you need to get to your secure locations. Be careful, all of you.

With a shrug, Blumenthal then shut down the computer, pulled out the crystals, placed one of them back into the safe, and made his way back to his car.

We, on the other hand, sat in VR and were, in general quite stunned.

Finally, Naveen sighed.

“Fuck. Now… figuring out what they mean with C-87 is easy. The same with C-08. I guess the other C-entities are probably the other A+ corporations. Right now, there are 86 active ones. Not that Panacea will remain in the A-tier for much longer.”

I nodded slowly.

“C-21 is, or more likely was, Falconer. C-14… I think they mean Ralcon with that. Without us, their flagship, Envision would no longer be viable for much longer.

And like Panacea, they are so rabid and vicious that most of the other A+ corps would have delighted in ripping them from limb to limb.”

Ramon shook his head.

“Fuck. And it seems that they are trying to start something with Ralcon and uns. Do we have any idea what?”

One of the analysts snorted:

“You have exactly the same information that we have. We need to wait until we can analyze the crystals, but right now, we have nothing to go on.”

Naveen focused on the analysts.

“Any clue who we are dealing with?”

Both analysts shook their heads.

“No, they were too careful to conceal their identities. The only one we know about is Blumenthal. We can surmise that Carnage is based in DC, but otherwise, no information about their identities.”

That was the moment that Warden interjected:

“It seems that they are using an old secure US network from shortly before World War 3 for their communication. I am already looking for any information about it.”

“That means we have virtually nothing, except that they are trying to stop us from growing too big. Well, I wanted a challenge. Now I have one it seems.”

Naveen’s dry tone belied the situation, as nobody was in any way happy about what we had just read.