It goes without saying that we started reading crystal #2 as soon as Blumenthal had locked it into the safe. It would be easy to cut the connection of the computer to the network.

That meant the only missing ingredient for us to access the basic OS was crystal #1. We had to wait until Blumenthal placed it somewhere.

Then the new set of Lachesis‘ and Clothos would try to read it out. The new set, because the old set stayed behind in the bunker.

While it was possible to read a crystal with the Clotho motes, it was a slow process, and we would need a week to read any of the crystals. Fortunately, it was also a parallel process, as we could copy all the crystals in the safe at once.

During that time, I finished the portable neutrino detector and built a first prototype.

It was not perfect, and even I could see that it was still a bit clunky and needed the magic of a good ergonomics designer, but it worked. The rest was something the Minions could work on.

I also sketched out ship sensors on the principle and seeker heads for our missiles. No, we would of course not replace the Palantír in the seekers with neutrino detectors. For our missiles. But sooner or later all the others would want to buy our missiles, and if the missiles we sold them could not ignore the stealth of their ships, we would have some explaining to do.

Then I turned to the next quantum field. Marvellous, something that could influence photons. Virtually useless, but a nice toy for the theoretical physicists nonetheless I think.

It took me a couple of days to get this field isolated and understand it enough to remove it from consideration.

The next field was a doozy. It generated some strange resonance on no less than eight dimensions.

It would be of some interest as a communication utility, seeing as it was faster than light, if we did not have the Q-links already, which was instant.

But like the other fields I had identified, I put it onto the Enki network. Maybe somebody would think of some use for it.

By that time, it was Monday afternoon, and I decided to spend the rest of the day having some fun.

Nothing earth-shattering, mind you, just some playtime with my pet, as well as working on some music.

And would you know it, we had a week after the zombie attacks already. When I entered the meeting room Tuesday morning, I was greeted by a first. We had guests. Sure, the table was big enough for 25 people, so the half a dozen additional people were no problem. Seating wise, that is.

But... what the heck was Mayor Walsh doing here?

One of the men in his company was easily identifiable as the new police commissioner, by his uniform alone.

He was a heavyset man with almost white hair and light blue eyes, though the most startling thing about him was the scar that ran along the left side of his face, from the temple down to the cheek, nearly touching the eye and branching out when it reached the cheekbone.

He also did not look like he was enjoying being here.

The other four I would tentatively classify as toadies.

They were seated in the visitors' chairs on the other end of the elliptic table, clustering around the mayor.

Honestly, I was too surprised to say anything and just sat down in my place in confusion.

After an awkward couple of minutes, Maynard entered the room as the last of us, and the guard detail closed the door.

As had most of us, Maynard stopped short when he noticed the guests, only for Michael to impatiently rap onto the table.

“Sit down please.”

When Maynard followed the request, Michael continued:

“As you can see, we have some guests today. Most important, Mayor Walsh, followed by Commissioner Hellstrom.”

When he did not continue, one of the toadies visibly got angry and snarled:

“We also have names, you know.”

Only for Michael to snort:

“Who would have guessed? But as I don’t know your names, I can’t introduce you.”

Toadie #2 rolled his eyes and sighed.

“Fine. I am Gabriel Booth, those are Olliver Mason, Mohammad Orr, and Bradley Carpenter.”

Toadie #1, a.k.a. Olliver Mason, narrowed his eyes and sent a scathing gaze at Mr. Booth, but remained silent.

Unperturbed, Michael continued:

“Now that that is cleared, I am sure most of you are wondering what they are doing here. Well, this is the fallout from last week's unpleasantness.”

Commissioner Hellstrom cleared his throat:

“From my perspective, I want to know how you people knew about the second horde before anybody else.”

Mr. Orr snarled:

“You just want to cover your ass and put the blame on somebody else. Face it, you fucked up and overlooked not one, but two zombie hordes. That won’t look good on your resume, and as soon as we can get it done, you will need one.”

I snorted and shook my head, and Orr turned his attention to me:

“You find that funny little girl? What are you doing here anyway? This is for grown-ups.”

The reactions ranged from chuckling from Michael to a facepalm by Mayor Walsh.

I on the other hand just shrugged.

“Not that you have any say in who sits here in the board meetings of my corporation, but whatever. And yes, I find it funny how you blame somebody who is what, in his third week in a new job? Let’s just for discussion's sake assume that there was that NYPD could have done to prevent this, then it would have had to been done by Henderson.”

“For discussion’s sake? It is the job of the NYPD to look for threats like zombie hordes. There were not one, but two hordes. So yes, they fucked up.”

I rolled my eyes, and focused on Walsh:

“You have my condolences, having to work with such an imbecile.”

Then I turned back to Orr.

“First, I don’t know if you are aware of it, but Queens is on an island. An island that has been cleared of any zombies over 100 years ago. An island where there are inhabited towns and villages east of where the zombie horde appeared.

Towns and villages who would have screamed bloody murder if they had seen even a hair of a zombie.

But suddenly there are what, 1500 zombies? 2000? Between the first town outside of NYC and Queens.

But sure, it is the fault of the NYPD, and more specifically the new Commissioner of the NYPD who is not even a month on his post. Yeah, I can see that.

We just have to conveniently forget that NYC is just one of twelve cities that experienced between 2000 and 4000 zombies virtually at the same time.”

Orr turned red, and for a moment, I expected to see foam on his mouth.

“Little children should be seen, and not heard! And what do you know about that? Who the fuck are you even? I already told you, this is a matter for the grown-ups.”

While I rolled my eyes, Michael chuckled for a bit, before he answered Orr:

“I would think it would behoove somebody going to somebody else’s house to at least know who that somebody else is, don’t you think, dumbo?

You are talking to, and insulting Dr. Vivian DuClare. Majority owner of Enki. And the genius that virtually all of our tech comes from.”

Unfortunately, Orr was not deterred and thumped with the fist on the table:

“I don’t care who the fuck she is! This is an important matter, and I will not let a little strumpet like that stop me. If she insists to interrupt we can get the NYPD here in a jiffy and have her spend the night in lockup!”

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By now, Walsh had buried his head in both of his hands, while Hellstrom shook his head.

“Orr, you dumbass, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. If you send the NYPD, you only will get arrested, wounded, or dead officers.”

That at least did stop Orr for a moment, and he turned to Hellstrom:

“The fuck you are talking about. I am an official of New York City. She is impeding me in my work. So how about you do your fucking job and stop her?”

Hellstrom snorted:

“You know, Orr, you were an official of New York City. Do you know the Rickman-Bergis Act of 2106? Because right now you are in the process of violating federal law. Fuck, you are violating international law.”

At least Orr was smart enough to at least consider what was going on. Of course, the damage was mostly already done.

Carpenter though asked:

“Uh, what is this Rickman-Bergis Act?”

Walsh sneered through his hands:

“That is the federal US law that guarantees important persons of Tier A+ corporations, like for example the double-A corporation Enki, and its CTO and majority owner Dr. Vivian DuClare, extraterritoriality."

“Extrawhat?”

Hellstrom sighed:

“Extraterritoriality. Diplomatic immunity on steroids. In case of any crime where one of the extraterritorial persons is involved, jurisdiction falls on the corporation. In this case, Enki has the right of the law to decide who gets arrested, prosecuted, and convicted.

In other words, if Dr. DuClare wants to, Orr will spend the rest of his days in prison.”

He sighed again.

“That by the way is exactly what your buddy Henderson fucked up, Orr.”

I shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Commissioner Hellstrom had no chance of preventing the horde attack.”

Mr. Booth frowned:

“But… those zombies had to come from somewhere. And Orr might be an ass, but he is right. It is the job of the NYPD to inspect the city for those things.”

Naveem cleared his throat.

“Yes, that is true. Once every three months that is. But the point is that we discovered a tramp freighter landing half a dozen times in Alley Pond Park in the week preceding the zombie attack.

And you can easily find the remains of the containers bringing the zombies there to this day. In other words, this was not a mistake or an accident. It was a purposeful terror attack.

The same freighter by the way has put down six times in an abandoned country club east of White Plains.”

That made Walsh perk up.

“Wait, you are saying that somebody purposefully placed those zombies there? Why?”

Michael shrugged.

“That is exactly what we are saying and unfortunately, we have no clue why.”

Booth frowned even harder:

“If you know the ship, why don’t you have the crew extradited?”

Naveen sighed:

“A couple of reasons. First, the ship is Tranquility Inception flagged. Good luck getting the government there to do more than vocally agree and then twiddle its thumbs. And even if we somehow manage to put enough pressure on them, nobody will extradite the crew. A couple of days before the hordes appeared, it had an ‘unexplained’ containment failure.

It was a bad week for TI, no less than 12 of their tramp freighters had ‘sudden’ and ‘inexplainable’ containment failures.”

Hellstrom raised his eyebrows before he rubbed his chin.

“So… you are saying somebody removed loose ends?”

“Exactly.”

“Fuck!”

Walsh now looked at Hellstrom.

“What do you mean, and what does that mean for the investigation?”

“It means that somebody eliminated the possible witnesses and that the investigation has run into a dead end. We know it was a terror attack, and that somebody is behind it, but we have no way to find that somebody.”

He turned to Naveen.

“That is, I assume that you have investigated the containers?”

“Bog standard freight containers with cutting charges on the doors. No DNA traces except from the zombies, no fingerprints, nothing.

The zombies have apparently been ‘sourced’ from all of the Americas. We found at least 16 lineages of the virus. Whoever did this, they erased every trace that we can think of.”

Walsh did not look very happy.

“So… we don’t know who did this?”

“And for the time being we have no chance of finding out either.”

Hellstrom then coughed discreetly.

“If we could come back to my initial question, how did you know about the second horde?”

Michael sighed.

“When we got the alerts about the first horde, we, naturally, concentrated our efforts on that horde, but we also sent surveillance drones to the other Burroughs. And it was good that we did, as we discovered the second horde before they caused too much damage.”

With Walsh mumbling:

“And giving my secretary a panic attack in the process.”

We all ignored him, and Hellstrom answered:

“Yes, you are right. It is good that you did. I also wanted to ask if we maybe could buy a few of those bots of yours. They… proved quite efficient.”

Naveen shrugged.

“Against a disorganized, unarmed, and unintelligent mob of raging zombies, they did, yes. And we are not averse to selling them. As long as you accept that we need to ramp up production. We intended them for internal use and have only a small production line.”

Mr. Mason piped up:

“By the way, do they have to look so menacing?”

That made all of us on the Enki side frown.

“Menacing? What do you mean?” Maggie had entered the discussion.

“They are black, and those glowing red eyes… they look dreadful.”

I shook my head.

“They are not black, they are anthracite.”

Mason shrugged.

“Tomato, tomatoe. Does it matter if you painted it black or near black?”

“It does matter. The carbon composite we use as armor is anthracite naturally. If they were black, it would be because we painted them. As it is, they are just unpainted.”

“And the red glowing eyes?”

“I assume you speak about the cooling slits, right? They literally glow to radiate the heat.”

“And do they have to look like some sort of medieval killer?”

That made me recoil in confusion. Thankfully Michael seemed to understand that question.

“Form follows function. They look like a knight because knight armor is historically the best armor. Of the tech level of course.

As with the full plate armor that a knight wore, the armor of the Einherjar is there to protect the more vulnerable parts. It has the same function and as such mostly the same form.”

I was, frankly, getting slightly annoyed by this whiney wuss. I mean, come on, we are talking about fricking combat bots. They do not look menacing, they are menacing.

And it seemed as if I was not the only one. Kenneth growled:

“What the fuck is your problem with how they look? They are war machines. Self-propelling weapons. It makes no difference if they look menacing or not.”

“But, but… if we try to use them as a police force, they need to look nicer.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Then paint them white and blue. Or make it white, gold, and blue. It is unimportant. We have them in anthracite because we don’t bother to paint them. Or if you want to spend the money we can design a variant without the armor. They won’t be as strong, and will cost more because we have to design them especially for your use, but if you really need it…”

The whiney: “But why will they cost more?” grated on my nerves, but thankfully Alena barked:

“Because we have to invest more work and effort to bring them to you. We have to pay somebody to design it. We have to pay somebody to plan and build the assembly line. We have to use some of the space that we need for other things to build the assembly line.

All that costs money. Money we would not have to invest if you would just take the standard model that we already have designed, and already have an assembly line for, and just paint it differently.

Money that we will have to add to the price.”

When Mason opened his mouth again, Walsh snarled:

“Shut it, Mason. Those bots are no more menacing than our SWAT teams. And that is exactly what we want to use them for. To supplement our SWAT.”

Then he took a deep breath and calmed down.

“Now, I assume we can come to an agreement at some better opportunity. No point in wasting the time of all these high-powered folks here. Just the point that we are interested in buying some, and you are willing to sell. The rest our procurement department can hash out with your sales department.”

Honestly, while I would probably never think of Walsh as a friend, he was just way too much a politician for that, he at least had a working brain in that head of his. I just could not figure out why he brought the toadies.

Hellstrom I understood, and at least he was, on the first impression, capable enough.

Mason was just plain sulking, Orr tried to switch between murdering Hellstrom and me with his gaze, and Booth, while on the first impression mostly harmless, seemed that way because he was simply not smart enough to cause problems. Only Carpenter was mostly taking notes and keeping silent.

That did not mean that he was competent or harmless. Just that he had not done or said anything that allowed me to even begin to understand him.

It did not matter though. Walsh had brought them along, and I did not care enough about them to do anything.

Not so Naveen.

“One other thing. Mr. Orr has amply demonstrated that he is not to be trusted to be in any position of power.”

Which of course, made Orr explode again.

“So, now you want to remove me as well? Was it not enough that you’ve gotten Bill Henderson fired, and now you are going after me?”

Naveen calmly answered:

“Henderson was unacceptable as a police commissioner for the same reason you are unacceptable as a city official. You fail to see that the balance of power in NYC has shifted. Enki is a double-A corporation headquartered here in New York. It is just a matter of time until we reach triple-A.

I assume that you have the same sponsor group as Henderson. The self-styled elite in the Bronx. They were less important than they thought, with Phillip Rawleighs residing here, but now they are even lower on the totem pole.

And people like you, or Henderson, who do not understand that Enki is now the leading power in NYC are only bound to create trouble. Trouble that might, in the worst case, end with dead people.

It is better to remove the troubling elements beforehand.

Meaning you.”

“Just because you are not decent enough to accept the way this city worked for hundreds of years…”

I interrupted him:

“It did not ‘work’. It was just convenient for the rich people, first in Manhattan, and then in the Bronx. The rest of the city had it way harder. Guess what, things changed. Enki is here. And Enki is now the power. If your sponsors can’t accept that, then they will suffer.

But we had to remove Henderson because he is a hardheaded, stupid, belligerent, imbecile, who would use the NYPD, and Woodrow as a weapon to hurt our interests.”

I wiped over my eyes.

“I don’t know how you see it, but that would have resulted in death. Dead police officers. Think. You want Einherjar to supplement SWAT. We already have around 3k of those. You have what, 250 SWAT officers?

Do you seriously think that a corporation that has to plan on being assaulted by another corporation will be overwhelmed by SWAT?

And the worst thing is that he had absolutely no legal standing in attacking us. He was a police officer. He had to know about Rickman-Bergis. He needed to understand that we had the legal precedence. And he still chose to be aggressive, insulting, and threatening.

Does that sound like somebody you want as the head of police?”

When Orr breathed in to scream out a rebuke, Walsh screamed at him.

“Shut the fuck up, Orr. Sit down, and keep your mouth locked. You already managed to make me organize a recall vote for you.

Don’t make me extradite you to Enki as well.”

After a few seconds, he shook his head.

“You know what, you should leave. Go to the cars, and wait there for us! Maybe the rest of us can salvage a bit of the situation with you gone.”

When Orr just starred at the Mayor in shock, Walsh snarled:

“Parker, see to it that Mr. Orr reaches the cars safely!”

One of the rent-a-muscles in dark suits with sunglasses standing behind the mayor and his party immediately walked to Orr and grabbed his shoulder.

“At once, Mr. Mayor.”

And he physically dragged the protesting man out of his chair, and through the door.

When the door had closed, Walsh took a deep breath.

“Fuck, I should have put my foot down on that asshole.”

Then he turned to us:

“I seriously hope we can put what that man said behind us. I can assure us that he does not speak for us all.”

Michael answered softly:

“Don’t worry. If anything, you’ve impressed us with the way you reacted to the situation. Not just today, but with Henderson as well. Far too many people would have protested and dug their heels in.”