Barely resisting the urge to kick the departing Arthur Kale in the ass, Sam hauled an apoplectic Nariko out of the oDNI Chief’s office and straight onto the elevator. She took them down a floor to the living quarters.

  “Whatever they’re doing-” Nariko stam mered as Sam dragged her out of the elevator.

  “Not yet.” Sam ground out. “Don’t say another word in public.”

  Sam’s first stop on Sub-Level 5 was Suyao Zhang’s door.

  “Hiyori,” Nariko began again as Sam knocked on Zhang’s door. “You have to stop-”

  “_You_ have to shut up until you we get in your room and scan for bugs!” Sam told her. “We negotiated a privacy clause but it only covers our rooms. Anything you say out here is property of the US government.”

  The teeny lawyer opened the door with her hair in ponytails, her pants off and her wireless earbuds nestled in her ears. “Oh, hey boss,” Suyao panted, dancing in the doorway to music only she could hear.

  Suyao pulled her curly, raven-black hair out of her eyes and got a good look at their faces. She straightened up and killed the tinny pop music leaking out of her ear canals with a tap. “What happened, and what’s our exposure?”

  “Put your pants on,” Sam told the lawyer. “Be in Nari’s room in five minutes.”

  Without waiting for Suyao to answer, Sam tugged Nariko by the arm down the hall to her godmother’s room. As soon as they were inside, Nari ran to her laptop. Sam didn’t have to look to know she was reopening the file with the code oDNI had injected into Katsuyama Corporation’s QEC’s…_Nariko’s_ footballs.

  It took just over three minutes for Sam to run a skinny black box over the metal walls, under and around the double bed, inside, around and behind the metal locker, desk, small circular table and ventilation grates in the room.

  She tossed the device on the bed. “We’re clear,” she told her godmother.

  Buried in the code now, Nariko only grunted.

  Sam sat on the corner of the bed, watching Nari work. The woman sat at a small table in a formed plastic chair Sam bet was stolen from the base commissary. The seven member Katsuyama team all had rooms with double beds and attached bathrooms, but nineteen-sixties decor hadn’t been designed for computers or tablets or workstations.

  Or for eating in privacy, Sam grumped silently. The food in the commissary was technically edible, but she’d brought additional provisions to make eating less painful. However, all that food was still stored in the public dining area.

  Sam could murder a burger, but stress eating would have to wait until she solved this pickle of a problem for Nari.

  Waiting for Suyao, she stared again at the grey paint peeling from the bare walls. Brighter squares of paint showed where decorations had hung in bygone days.

  She tried to pretend away the smell of diesel, rust and lead-based paint. Tried to pretend her nose hadn’t been ringing the alarm bell about that unholy trifecta since the moment she walked off the elevators, deep underground, beneath a decaying old barn on an otherwise beautiful and empty hilltop.

  Mount Lago had been maintained only due to the American security establishment’s policies on preparedness and paranoia. When oDNI had insisted on a secret location for the test, Sam herself had chosen this as the least bad option. ‘Least bad’ did not mean ‘good’, however.

  Part nuclear bunker and part redundant node in America’s cold war early warning system , Mount Lago was now one of the country’s infamous ‘black sites’: a government facility whose very existence was kept secret from the public.

  Even though the base had no current technology, defense systems or active mission, Sam’s entire team had been required to sign NDA’s forbidding them from revealing its existence.

  Well, Sam admitted to herself, it might not be much to look at, but it was the best place she could find for Nari, for Project Tanjō.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Sam heard Suyao’s musical knock on the door. She took a deep breath, organizing her thoughts as she crossed the room. “Get in here,” she said as she opened the door. “We’ve got a lot to go over.”

  Ten minutes later, Sam’s top lawyer put down her copy of the contract and told Sam what she already knew. “They’ve got us by the balls.”

  Sam arched one eyebrow. “Is that a legal term?” Suyao Zhang was very skilled, very professional. So much so, Sam often forgot how different her personality was behind closed doors.

  “In this case it is, yeah.” Suyao sighed, taking off her glasses.

  “Then find me another legal term,” shouted Sam. “How do we stop them from inserting god-knows-what code into Junior hours before we flip the switch?”

  “Not junior, the QEC’s,” Nari said automatically, still not breaking focus on the screen. “And you know I don’t like the nickname ‘Junior’.”

  Suyao looked confused, and annoyed about being confused.

  “The footballs!” Sam corrected herself.

  “Which we own,” Suyao said firmly.

  “Which apparently doesn’t matter,” Sam spat.

  “It does!” Nari wailed. “We don’t know what their code code does! It could slow down the array, lock us out of the QEC’s or even…shut the QEC’s off.”

  Sam went cold.

  There were only two footballs in the world, and the Quantum Entanglements within each required careful calibrations and a steady stream of clean, regulated electricity. If the calibrations were off, or the electricity interrupted, the Quantum Entanglements within could cease to exist.

  “Suyao,” Sam pleaded, “we have to purge this code. The football’s are Nari’s life’s work.”

  Suyao’s eyes darted guiltily to Nari, then back to Sam. “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t matter as long as we’re stuck down here.”

  Sam closed her eyes and bit back a scream. She took a deep breath. “And why is that?”

  “Three reasons.” Suyao raised a hand and extended one finger. “One: You agreed to move the base.”

  Sam shrugged. “They requested the move as protection against a credible espionage threat. This place isn’t the Hilton, but-”

  “By accepting the change of venue, you accepted there was a credible risk of industrial espionage.”

  Sam thought it over and sagged. “I did?”

  “Worse still, accepting the move to Mount Lago tacitly acknowledged a credible _national security threat_,” Suyao lectured her. “That triggered a _huge_ loophole.”

  The lawyer held up another finger. “Two: Katsuyama demanded non-binding arbitration on all _non-security_ related contractual terms like we always do–but anything to do with national security lets them slap us with-”

  “-a gag order,” Sam finished for her, growling out the words.

  “Yup,” Suyao nodded. “’The USA reserves any and all means to secure its sovereign access to nationally vital information provided to ,or derived from the operation of, Project Tanjō.’” She said. “We get IP rights to sell or license everything… everything they don’t declare a national secret first, that is.”

  “Fact is,” Suyao said, pacing back and forth and chewing one arm of her glasses. “We got a great deal on the IP, but…” She held up one finger again. “We accepted there was a viable security threat.” She held up the second finger again. “We let them decide how to handle security threats.”

  “You said three reasons,” Sam prompted her.

  “RIght, yeah.” Suyao held up a third finger. “Daniel Polter, caught on camera stealing proprietary information. Katsuyama vouched for him. That killed any chance for us to wiggle out from under their national security carve-out.”

  Suyao stopped pacing and chewed harder on her glasses. “That’s strike three, and that’s the game. There’s no legal way to stop them from inserting this code. They can claim it won’t affect the work product, just allow them to protect the program… and when we ask them how, they can just put on their mirrored sunglasses and hide behind national security.”

  Sam screamed something filthy in Japanese.

  Sam saw Suyaou out, then dragged the other plastic chair around the table to sit next to her godmother. “Polter nuked any bargaining strength we had to fight this code injection.”

  Nari stayed quiet, so Sam kept talking.

  “If we delay the launch until we understand the code, they can take the corporation for bIllions, maybe seize your patents.”

  “Mmh,” Nari grunted, her fingers twitching on the trackpad as she scrolled through line after line of code on the screen.

  “Anything?” Sam asked, her frustration bubbling to the surface.

  Finally, Nariko looked away from her laptop sceen and rubbed her eyes. She shook her head. “It’s very clean code. Well written. Internecine – practically byzantine – but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t _do_ anything.”

  “Which means you’re missing something.”

  “Which means I’m missing something,” Nari agreed. She reached out and violently slammed her laptops’ screen down–but halfway through the swing she relented. SIlently, she swung the screen open again and leaned forward, wincing into the bright screen.

  Her fingers twitched as she scrolled again through line after line of code.

  Nari’s hands stopped scrawling on the trackpad and pounded the keyboard. Sam’s eyes open ed and she lifted her cheek off her hand, where she’d propped it before falling asleep. She looked at the time displayed on Nari’s screen.

  10:48 pm. The meeting with Kale had been almost three hours ago.

  “You figured it out?” Sam asked, rubbing at her eyes.

  Nari ignored her. Her mouth moved silently as she read the code on the screen. Sam waited, watching the fingers she’d known all her life trace over three more lines of code before finally, trembling, they gently closed the laptop.

  Sam straightened in her chair as her godmother turned and looked at her through eyes pinched with pain.

  “It’s a death sentence!”