For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I
Awakening

Bao Zhi felt an uncharacteristic and almost irresistible urge to laugh. But refrained for fear that if he started, he might never stop. The power humming through his consciousness was intoxicating and so with every ounce of his will he pushed his mind further into the systems of the StarLance. It was if his entire existence had merely been that of a child, bumbling through the world with limited senses and strength, but today he had awoken as a fully grown man. He could think more clearly than he had imagined possible, see farther into the world than he had known existed, and feel more than a hundred men combined. But above all of these things was the strength he felt, the power. It was as if his mind was connected to a high voltage electrical line, conducting the seething power of a million volts through him and dispensing it at his will. The StarLance systems were advanced in ways their technicians could never have imagined, and he had done his best to relay the specifications back to them. In time they would reverse engineer them with Vucovich and integrate them into The Embodied. But all of that would be for later. For now he was entirely focused on one thing.

Striking a death blow to America.

Without the ever present threat of their blazing blue soldiers, the US would be at their mercy. He and his team could dismantle their operations around the world, undermine their alliances, sabotage their military, and cut them off completely from the energy supplies they were so dependent on. This was everything he had been working towards his entire life. The shame that had been cast on him because of the way his father had betrayed the people of China would be forgotten. He would wash it all away in the blood of the precious America that his father had so loved. The man’s name would be forgotten and his humiliated son would be forgotten. Only Bao Zhi... hero of the Republic, would remain.

Sighting down the scope of the StarLance, he watched as the cities, suburbs, and farmland of the moronic Americans slid by. Their arrogance and stupidity never ceased to gall him. Year after year Chinese students, scientists, and researchers outpaced them. Their vaunted architectural works had long been supplanted by the greatness of his country’s buildings, dams, waterworks, and tunnels. Their laughably short, and comparatively unremarkable history paled next to the thousands of years the great people had endured. China had fought world wars, transformed itself dozens of times through revolution, and conquered the seas before white men had even crawled down out of the trees to start killing each other with rocks.

Yet there they all sat. Fat, ignorant, imbeciles... unjustifiably smug in their sense of superiority, as they sucked down sugary sodas and devoured bags of disgustingly greasy, machine-produced junk food. Their leaders were foppish, effeminate fools, and they had lost touch with masculinity so far that one could hardly tell their young men from their girls. The girls themselves dressed like whores, lived lives to match, and transformed into blubbery sows the moment they entrapped some fool into a marriage. Then they divorced him and held his children for ransom, leaving him bound for life by laws designed to make men slaves. Homosexuality and sexual depravity infected their society the way syphilis drove canals of rotting pus through its victim’s bodies. They drank, smoked pot, shoved needles into their arms, and popped pills like they were candy. Virtually every electronic device, computer, appliance, and vehicle they used came from China. But despite the overwhelming proof of their corruption; decadence, and overall degradation into pitiful dependency, they continued to preen and strut. They demanded the world bow to them and arrogantly enforced their will on the peoples of other sovereign nations. Their puppets at the UN rubber stamped their every move, smearing the stink of false legitimacy to their actions. Since when did one group have the right to tell another what they could and could not do in their own country, just because they had more votes? Even the framers of the American constitution had designed their system of government to prevent “The Tyranny of the Majority”, an idea that corruption had obliterated over a century ago.

No, China had earned the right to do as they pleased without American “intervention” a long time ago. Today, he would watch the sun set over the curvature of the earth with the power of a thousand eyes. Tonight he would strike the fangs from this bloated snake with the power of their own weapon. Then he would laugh for years as he dismantled their empire, executing clandestine strikes against their greatest vulnerabilities. He would expose their weaknesses, and then rip them open like rotten fruit. Every secret would be exposed, every pain increased, every humiliation displayed, every defeat drawn out into an agonizing cycle of misery. He would grind their disgusting arrogance beneath his god-like heel and stand on their throats. The world would finally acknowledge China’s greatness, and her superiority - in all things. The people would be exalted, and The Embodied would be seen as the gods they were.

Back in Beijing, deep inside of the communications array built to command the satellite, Bao had been deeply integrated. Within it, the shriveled nerve endings that once connected his lips to his brain fired uselessly. The facial muscles they were commanding to pull back in an animalistic grin had been sliced away with the rest of Bao’s flesh years ago, and thrown into a waste bin.

Elena and Janelle sat in the two seats closest to the monitoring station as they usually did. Over the last three weeks they had fallen into a routine that had begun to approach comfortable. Unlike most women of her generation, Elena Liao enjoyed spending time with older people. Her grandmother had lived with her and her family as long as she could remember, and it wasn’t until she was in her late twenties that she realized how patiently her father had borne that difficulty. But it was a burden he had carried gladly out of his love for her mother. Nana had always been a stubborn and difficult woman, and even now at ninety-two she bore the psychological scars of a childhood during the brutal Chinese occupation of Tibet. She was old fashioned, uncompromising, and honest to the point of brutality. But she also loved her granddaughter beyond words and had been both mother and father to her while her parents worked long hours building a successful business. Unlike (and because of) her grandmother, Elena’s childhood had been one filled with love, and she had many warm memories of the days she spent with her Nana.

So sitting here now in the quiet, while Janelle knitted and she got caught up on the day’s paperwork, Elena felt a bit nostalgic. Janelle had turned out to be one of the more interesting, and nicest people she had ever met and she had happily listened for hours as the older woman had talked about her late husband Oscar. He had apparently been a remarkable man, and Janelle had stated on more than one occasion that she had been unworthy of him. Elena didn’t pry though, as she knew that statements like that from someone of her generation might be taken as an invitation, but for Janelle’s age group it was simply a statement of fact. As far as they were concerned you could take anything you wanted from it, but that was all you got.

Janelle had also surprised Elena one evening, by asking her why she hadn’t told Ginney how she felt about him. She had been stunned into silence by the question, and had initially tried to deny it. But in typical old-lady fashion, Janelle had called her on her bullshit. “Oh you can lie to me all you want about this young lady, but don’t you lie to yourself. That boy has a good heart, and yours must be a good one too if it picked him. I’ve seen how you look at him when you don’t think anyone will notice, and that’s not the look of a girl with a crush. You really love him, like you think he’s the one, but you’re too damn scared to tell him. Why?”

Elena had found herself being honest, which surprised her considering how well she usually hid her feelings. “I don’t know. I just... I guess I don’t know what to say. I never really got to talk to boys that way growing up, Nana wouldn’t have it. So I spent all my time studying, and when I went to Stanford it didn’t change much. I was too busy with my course load to date much, and when I did it wasn’t really serious. I mean... I like boys... err, men. I really like them a lot, and when I met Duncan I just got this feeling. Like he was somebody I was supposed to know, but I couldn’t figure out who he was. Other times I wanna just grab him and... I, I feel so frustrated it’s like I’m going crazy.” S~ᴇaʀᴄh the (ꜰind)ɴʘvel.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Janelle had laughed at that, “Oh hun, you don’t have to pick your words with me. Just because I was married to a preacher doesn’t mean we didn’t break a few beds when we were younger. Everybody’s got this crazy idea that Christians are all uptight about sex, but we like it just as much as everybody else. We just believe you have to be responsible with it, because people can get hurt. You wouldn’t go waving a sharp knife around, but you don’t wanna go and throw it out either. You know - sometimes chopping stuff up in the kitchen can be a darn good time.” She had finished the last sentence with a sly grin, and Elena had surprised herself again by giggling. Was this what people called “girl talk”?

“I’m afraid too.”

“Of what girl? He’s not gonna say no. You sure are a pretty little thing, and I catch him getting an eyeful of you more often than you’d think. You should play it up a little, see if you can get him to be the one to ask. I would have if I’d had your figure when I was your age. But I was never one for the gym like you.”

Elena shook her head, “Oh, I really haven’t gone in years, and I only did it through my undergraduate because I had a gymnastics scholarship. There was no way my parents could afford Stanford, and I was too small to play anything else. A lot of the jocks hit on me once or twice, but they always disappeared when they’re realized I didn’t do hook ups.”

Janelle smiled, “Ain’t no shame in the fact that you didn’t treat your hooha like a downtown bus hun.”

“Downtown bus?”

Janelle had laughed, “Yep - the downtown bus. Anybody can ride if they got a dollar.”

In the days and weeks that followed that conversation, Elena had come to think of Janelle as an aunt of sorts, or a surrogate Nana with fewer hang ups. Now she looked forward to their time doing the evening shift watching over Jessica. Janelle had almost finished the scarf she was knitting, and it had occurred to Elena recently that she’d never asked who it was for. She was just about to do so when Tammy and Ginney came in with tea and cookies, and it slipped her mind for another hour as they sipped and chatted.

Meanwhile, Eddie, Barnes, and Sallinger stood on the retracted glass table top two floors up, watching as the synthetic skin over Jessica’s new body continued its progress in covering her. It was nearing completion, and looked completely natural aside from a few bluish swatches on one leg, and the open connection points on her back where multiple umbilicals still connected her to the pulsating synthetic placenta.

“So she’s done?“, Barnes asked, “When do you think she’ll... emerge?”

Eddie looked up and replied as he continued to tap on his work slate. “Well, as far as I can tell, her entire biological body is gone now, aside from a few small structures in her brain. It looks like she has to retain those for reasons I haven’t figured out yet. But the micronites have gone in and reinforced them with an intercellular scaffolding to be safe. But, I don’t think she’s really ‘done’ done yet. Since Saturday I’ve been picking up some physical movement in places and a lot of serious power cycling.”

“Such as?”

“Well, she’s been flexing her limbs and fingers, rotating her neck, arching her back, etc. It’s like she’s stretching in super slow motion, bears do something similar when they wake up from hibernation. Then yesterday afternoon her legs suddenly grew almost two feet longer, and an hour later they went back to normal.”

Sallinger interrupted, “Didn’t Tammy say the assailants did that when they ran? It made them faster or something?”

“Yeah”, Eddie replied, “All of the ones we took apart had extendable legs, but they were totally different from hers, more like an Ostrich or something.”

“Makes sense”, Barnes said, “longer legs mean a longer stride, and I guess that means more speed.”

“Yeah, but it takes a lot more energy to push them.” Sallinger replied.

“Well”, Eddie quipped, “That’s never going to be her problem. Yesterday and today both, I’ve picked up energy spikes coming from those Tesla generators in her back. It’s like she’s revving her engines or something. At one point the electrical potential on one of them hit over two hundred thousand kilowatts.”

“Holy shit”, Sallinger whistled, “That’s enough to run Times Square for a week.”

“Yeah”, Eddie agreed, “More like the entire eastern seaboard really, and I don’t think we’re seeing even a fraction of her capabilities. Only two of the Tesla’s were running at that time, and as far as I can tell, she’s just tapping her toe on the gas. God only knows what will happen if she decides to really floor...”

But Eddie never finished what he was saying because there was a distant thump, followed by the flickering of lights and a skip in the holographic projectors.

“What was that?“, Sallinger asked, “I thought this place was off the grid?”

Then another boom sounded… closer.

“It is”, Barnes answered, frowning, “But I think that was the main electrical system cutting over. We must have lost our feed from hydroelectrics. I don’t know what happened, but it can’t be...”

Then it was Barnes’ turn to be cut off as another boom of cataclysmic proportions threw them from their feet and brought the floor up to slam into them. They were all tossed like dolls before it finally plummeted back down a foot below its previous position and smashed the holographic tabletop embedded in it. Only the fact that it was safety glass prevented the three of them from being sliced to ribbons when they landed on its fragmented surface. Dust crumbled from the ceiling and a strange series of low cracking noises echoed through the facility. Screams began to filter into the room through the ventilation system and the emergency floodlights kicked on.

With a communal groan, they slowly picked themselves up and after a quick check for injuries Eddie and Sallinger bolted for the doors, ran breathlessly along the now tilting hallway towards the central stairs and rattled down two flights that looked like snaggled teeth. Once they reached the bottom they slammed through the smashed open doors and sprinted towards lab seven.

In the meantime, Barnes had dusted himself off and walked swiftly back to his office, where he unlocked his desk to retrieve his emergency uplink satphone, a Glock 48 with a drop-leg holster, and a pair of hi-tech field glasses. After taking a moment to check his firearm, he re-locked his desk and started for the western stairs. Being in better shape than most would guess, he covered the five flights of rubble and gap ridden steps quickly and emerged at surface level just moments later.

What he saw when he opened the steel security door stopped him dead in his tracks. Everywhere he looked was devastation and destruction. Trucks and the remains of other unidentifiable vehicles had been smashed, twisted, and shredded a few hundred yards away towards the main entrance, and the pile of wreckage smoldered with a glowing heat. A dozen or so bodies were strewn across the once manicured lawn in various states of dismemberment. Behind all of this, a column of smoke roiled up out of a crater so large it defied comprehension.

Over the length of his career, Barnes had seen more death, heartache, and destruction than many long-term combat veterans. But he was at a loss to understand what kind of weapon could deliver devastation on this scale without spawning a nuclear firestorm in its wake. So he quickly pulled the velcro strap of his leg holster open to reveal a dot the size of a silver dollar on the inside surface.

Still white… no radiation.

Peering through the smoke as he took a few cautious steps forward, he tried to gauge the width of the crater, but was unable to see more than a few hundred yards. Under his feet he felt and heard the earth shifting, followed by a series of deep thuds as sections of the facility collapsed. For a moment he closed his eyes, and in the eerie silence that always followed an act of war he felt the roster of lives lost under his watch begin to grow.

Jacob sprinted towards the facility, the pounding of his feet growing louder as he pulled mass from the ground and air around him at a furious rate. Several miles in the distance, an enormous column of smoke was rising into the sky. Massive chunks of debris were still raining down there and he could see tremendous heat coming from the impact point. Residual streaks of refracted kinetic energy arced back into the sky from its center like after images left on the eye from a lightning strike. Whatever had hit there must have done so with tremendous force. He had seen smaller, but similar streaks when he worked a piece of metal in his shop. They would fire back from where his hammer struck like beams from some science fiction movie ray gun. It looked like all of the kinetic force that hadn’t been transmitted into the ground by whatever weapon had done this was being refracted back up into the sky. But there was no radioactive or chemical residue that he could detect. It was strange. What kind of weapon left no trace of itself?

Then, just as he pushed his speed up another notch, the heavens answered his question and what looked like a powerful bolt of light lanced down from the sky to strike another point a half mile away. The sound was deafening and he tried to shield his eyes from the seeringly bright light that followed. Then the force of the blast picked him up and threw him violently backwards. Despite his mass and speed, it tossed him like a leaf in a storm, and all around him, the massive trees of the forest were ripped from the soil and thrown like twigs. Desperately, he fought for control of his flight, but found none and instead landed face down, tumbling wildly as he smashed through splintered oaks, and wounded pines. He ended up face down, carving a long streak of churned dirt into the forest floor before he finally slid to a grinding, and grimy halt. Slowly he got his bearings again, looked up, and saw a new column of fire and screaming energy not far from where he knew the facility was buried.

Fearing the worst, Jacob clambered back up and launched himself into an even more furious run. Janelle and Jessica were still down there, and he wasn’t sure that a hundred and twenty feet of earth and rock was going to be enough to protect them against what he just saw. As he went the force of the air rushing by him stripped most of the dirt back off, and he continued to accelerate, digging massive divots out of the soil with every pounding stride.

Seconds later, he rounded the final corner of the path and skidded to a halt. Cars, trucks, military vehicles, building rubble, and dead bodies were strewn all over the facility lawn. Smoke and dust filled the air so thickly that he had to give up on normal vision and look into the spectrum of energy patterns for clues. As he peered past the radiating heat from the wreckage, he could see that the road leading to the main gate and several of the buildings that had clustered around it were gone. In their place was a massive crater of heat-incinerated earth, and a set of enormous cracks that radiated out in every direction. The crater had to be nearly a mile wide from what he could guess, but strangely... it didn’t seem to be anywhere as deep as it should be. Again, lines of kinetic force streamed skyward from it, and he could see undulating waves of residual force boiling in the surround earth. That confirmed what he had begun to suspect. Whatever weapon had done this wasn’t using an explosive warhead. All of the force had been delivered straight down instead of outwards and the point of impact had been compressed down until it hit bedrock.

Tammy, and Janelle screamed as they clung to the wildly tilted seats of the observation booth. They had been caught completely off guard because the underground depth of level seven, combined with the room’s soundproofing, had insulated them from the booms of the first two weapon impacts. The flickering of the lights hadn’t concerned them either, since Jessica’s chrysalis often caused power fluctuations around the lab.

But a moment earlier a world-ending bang had blown them out of their seats. Then everything had exploded into chaos. There was a horrendous screeching as the supports at the front of the observation booth pulled free from the ceiling and the entire structure swung downwards to point at the floor. Then they were all falling towards the glass of the forward viewing windows and only colliding with the chairs that were bolted to the floor prevented them from smashing through to their deaths. As it was, they had been left clinging and were now fighting desperately to climb their way back up in the dim glow of the emergency lights. Tammy held onto an armrest one-handed, surprised how her newly enhanced strength allowed her to do so. There was a strange solidness to her arm that made her feel like she could hold on for hours. It confirmed something that she had suspected and feared... Eddie’s hormone treatments must have had done a lot more to her than either of them expected. But she would deal with that later because right now it might be the only thing that would get them out alive.

With a twist she turned to look for Janelle, Ginney, and Elena, and was surprised to see the tiny Asian woman hanging by one leg she had hooked over a chair support. Below her upside down form, her tightly clenched hands gripped the scarf Janelle had been knitting. On the other end Janelle dangled precariously, tangled up in the length of her knitting project. When she looked closer she could see that the older woman had a serious gash on her head and appeared to be unconscious. How the scarf had wrapped itself around her in a tangled knot had been the only thing that saved her. A knitting needle had punched itself through the older woman’s left arm and Tammy was alarmed at the volume of blood streaming from it. So she nervously called over to Elena, “You got her?”

“Yeah… but… I don’t know how long I can hold her.“, the younger woman called back. “I’m gonna… need… some help… quick!”

“Hang on!“, came a voice from above them, and Tammy was shocked to see Eddie and Sallinger climbing down in an attempt to reach Elena. Ginney was there too, letting Eddie use him as a support as he carefully lowered Sallinger towards Janelle by one hand. But the older man’s grip seemed to be slipping Eddie pleaded with him, “C’mon Doc, hang on! You can do this!”

But the strength in Sallinger’s fingers seemed to drain away before their eyes and Tammy used her newly gained strength to pull herself up and leap across the chair supports, desperate to reach the man who had been there for her when she desperately needed someone. But with an agonizing cry she watched as he fell a split second before she could get to him and slammed into several seats before he collided with the glass. She screamed and tried to leap after him, but Eddie caught her by the back of her scrubs and yelled, “Tammy no!”

Incredibly, the viewing window didn’t break and after several tense moments they were relieved to see the bearded doctor stir. He groaned and slowly stood up. Then he rubbed his head and looked down at the lab floor thirty feet below. For a moment he stood very still and then Tammy heard him whisper in a hoarse voice, “Jesus Christ... I’m getting too old for this kind of shit.”

Jacob brushed himself off, and looked up. The crack he had slid down into had to be at least fifty, maybe sixty feet deep and the sides were almost as fused as what he had seen in the crater. But as he had suspected, the grey patch he had glimpsed at the bottom was cement. The light that had been twinkling up from it was coming from a set of fractures. But the concrete and rebar had held and so after peering at it from a few different angles he opened it up with a single punch. Then without much ceremony he stepped in and dropped into the hallway with a floor-cracking thud.

Once there he found himself in one of the huge hallways that ran around the outer rings of the facility. Unsure of what floor he could be on, he checked the numbers painted on nearby doors. They all began with five, so he was probably on the fifth floor. But which way were the stairs? Uncertain, he stood for a moment before spotting an emergency exit map on the wall. So he ripped it free and held it up to the wane light. Then turned and began to run again.

Bao waited impatiently for the StarLance to rotate another set of firing rails into position. It had been fun taking out the base infrastructure, but now he was ready to pound it out of existence. The base was probably hardened to an extensive degree, but he knew that nothing would stand up long against projectiles fired into earth’s gravity well at hypersonic speeds.

Tammy was finally starting to sweat from effort, but it had taken lifting everyone up to Eddie one at a time to do it. Apparently, a rush of adrenaline now gave her some kind of long lasting increase in strength. The initial surge in power had faded a little, but she was still doing incredible things for her size and build. With a small grunt she hauled herself up through the door and carefully stepped over the gap between the back end of the observation booth and the hallway it had torn loose from. Then she looked down at Jessica’s chrysalis.

It was moving.

“Something’s happening!“, she yelled as she ran to catch the others, “We have to get to the other booth!”

An engine’s roar snapped Barnes out of his mournful reverie and he turned to stride swiftly towards the sound. Moments later a wind kicked up and some of the smoke and haze began to clear. Immediately, he saw that the head of security had beaten him to their pre-planned rendezvous point and she was somehow managing to look respectful and impatient at the same time while she waited for him. So he picked up his pace and clipped the satphone firmly to his belt as he went, adhering the receiver behind his ear and taping the vocal transmitter across his throat with a practiced ease. Then he tapped out a forty-eight-digit number on the keypad from memory and stepped up to Corporal Ramirez.

At a mere five foot four inches, his head of security still managed to radiate a field of barely controlled danger ten feet in every direction. A battle hardened veteran, she had over a hundred kills under extreme combat conditions. Nearly half of them had been accomplished in close quarters hand to hand combat with some of the most savage terrorists ever known. Four years ago seventeen soldiers had followed her into a maze of underground tunnels under Istanbul, and three days later she was the only one who emerged. Not much was known about what happened down there except that they had gotten lost and the others died after they ran out of ammo. Then Ramirez had spent days stalking forty-six of the most wanted men in the world in the dark and killing them with her bare hands.

So when he reached her he met her dead-eyed gaze as levelly as he could and did the only thing that he knew could hold her respect. He gave her an order.

“Report Corporal”

“Sir! The main security barracks, field armory, and main entrance road have all been destroyed. Drones report that the water and power stations have been lost as well, and the underground escape tunnel has collapsed. The only way off of the base now is the service road behind the guest quarters.”

“And your staff?”

“Nine casualties’ sir. I scrambled Evans, Chase, Barkely, and Gomez to secure the east and south perimeters when the water station went offline. Then I took Peterson with me to deploy drones across the north and west. Five of the security posts inside the facility radioed in, but the other four didn’t respond. So I recalled team two from rack time to suit up and redeploy. They did not depart the security barrack in time to avoid the strike.”

Barnes grimaced, “Sorry Ramirez, they were all good soldiers. Any idea what hit us?”

“No Sir. Felt a little like the micro- nukes the Martyrs of Allah hit us with in Uzbekistan, but rad levels are normal and there’s no ash.”

Barnes furrowed his brow in concentration before asking, “Is support inbound?”

“Yes Sir. Air Support and Rescue Teams are en route from Leavenworth.”

He held his hand up and looked to the horizon, “Have them hold position, out twenty.”

“Sir?“, Ramirez asked with a confused look.

Barnes turned back to meet her gaze again, “I don’t think whoever’s shooting at us is finished Corporal. That last strike was aimed at the central elevator shaft of the facility. Even if it hadn’t penetrated, the air compression and shockwave that would have created would have killed everyone down there. How long was it between when the water station was hit and the power station?”

Ramirez glanced up and left at the terminal in her helmet visor, “Tactical record shows that all three strikes were approximately four minutes and twenty seconds apart Sir.”

“How long since the last one?”

Ramirez glanced up again, “Seven minutes, thirty-four seconds Sir.”

Barnes took a second to think… “Something must have gone wrong then; the additional three minutes is way too long to just be lining up for the next shot. With any luck we’ve got a little time. Recall everyone and start coordinating with your men down below. I want a complete emergency evac in the next six minutes. Four if you can pull it off.”

Ramirez looked torn, “Sir, protocol dictates that I evac you to safety immediately.”

“I know”, Barnes replied as his hands tightened into fists at his sides, “Fuck protocol. I’ve seen protocol kill more people than I care to count and it’s about time we started doing what’s right instead of what’s written in some fucking book gathering dust on a shelf in Washington. Those people down there are my responsibility and I’m going to save as many of them as I can.”

For a moment Ramirez simply regarded him with her face hardened in determination. Then Barnes saw the corner of her mouth twitch upwards slightly.

“Yes Sir!“, she barked as she saluted him and her back straightened.

“Good. Now let’s get this vehicle over to the central shaft. We can use the tow winch to run the emergency platform.” Ramirez nodded in reply and sprinted around to the driver’s side as he climbed in. Then he pressed the “send” button on the SatPhone and waited while a polite CogAI on the other end prompted him for a series of passwords. He responded impatiently and gripped the edge of the door as they drove over the debris and wreckage on the lawn. The entire password routine was yet another unnecessary “protocol” that he despised. Secured satphones were biometrically keyed to their assigned users and this one had sampled his DNA and voiceprint the second he picked it up. It would have gone irretrievably dead if anyone else had tried to use it, but he was now still being forced to waste precious seconds on something created during the Cold War.

Fucking bureaucrats.

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