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At this hour, the headquarters of the Bureau of Internal Affairs was lit from end to end.
Listening to Colonel Tolliver's report over the phone, Nathan Graves wore an expression dark enough to drip water. Across the room, in the principal seat, Marcus Holloway sat with his brow deeply furrowed.
"Understood, Colonel," Graves said into the phone. "Thank you. The work you and your regiment did at the conversion center tonight will not be forgotten. Maintain security there by every means available to you. Nothing else gets near that facility."
On the other end, Tolliver's heart tightened. The Director of the Bureau of Internal Affairs sat outside the military chain of command, but in raw authority, even regional military commanders were careful to show him respect.
"Yes, Director Graves. You have my word. If so much as a fly gets into that facility, I'll take off this uniform myself and resign on the spot."
Graves accepted the answer and ended the call.
He set the phone down, and his composure went with it.
"This is outrageous." His voice rose. "When I find out who is behind this, I am going to skin them alive."
Holloway, who would normally have checked that kind of language, let it pass. He sat in silence for a long moment, and then spoke slowly.
"It seems that over the past years, our oversight of certain enterprises has grown too lax. They have come to genuinely believe that the state will not touch them."
He turned to the secretary standing beside him.
"Arrange it. This incident in the Hidden Dragon program is to be investigated to the bottom. Inform the Minister of Public Security, Aldous Renner, directly. Whatever this turns out to involve, whatever names it reaches, it is to be brought fully into the light. Arrest whoever the evidence requires arresting. Detain whoever the evidence requires detaining. And make this part explicit. Even if the investigation leads back to my own door, there is to be no holding back. None."
The Chief of Staff, standing to the side, felt his chest tighten at the resolve in that instruction. In all his years following this man, he had seen Holloway this angry exactly once before, during the matter of the Ashworth family. That was the only precedent.
"Yes, Councilor. I'll convey your instructions immediately."
Seeing that there were no further directions, the Chief of Staff left the office without delay to begin making the calls.
Inside the office, Graves, his anger not yet spent, turned to Holloway.
"Councilor. If you're handing the investigation to Public Security, then what would you have me do."
Holloway turned his head.
"I want you to use this opportunity to clean out the energy industry."
Graves went still.
He understood, immediately, the scale of what was being proposed.
In the decades since the Republic had opened its markets and embraced private enterprise, an enormous number of people had poured into the energy sector. The policy had produced real dividends. It had also, over those same decades, planted hidden dangers, and the chief danger was the instability of individual private actors. Unlike the state-owned enterprises, private firms, once they slipped outside effective government supervision, were prone to corruption, to malpractice, to exactly the kind of conduct that had nearly darkened an entire city tonight.
There had been bloody lessons before. Industries that had been allowed to police themselves until a scandal forced a reckoning. The state had, in each prior instance, weighed the cost of stricter control against the risk of dampening private enterprise, and had generally chosen to let the market breathe.
But tonight, a private energy magnate had tried to sabotage a flagship national project and very nearly succeeded. The calculation had changed.
Holloway let the silence sit, and then added, quietly, "We have been patient with this industry for a long time, out of respect for the economy. That patience has been read as weakness. It is time to correct the misreading."
---
Meanwhile, having handled everything at the conversion center, Ethan said his goodbyes to Tolliver and the regiment and flew back toward the company in the Mark VII.
---
At the New Future Technology Energy headquarters, the command room was in a state of barely contained chaos, the staff pacing in tight anxious circles.
Minutes earlier, watching the lights on the verge of going out, every person in the room had been drowning in despair. In their professional assessment, the failure of the Hidden Dragon program's first pilot had been a foregone conclusion.
And then, in the space of two or three minutes, the situation had reversed completely.
The dimming lights had, in an instant, snapped back to full brightness. On the main display, the line temperature readings had dropped at the same moment, sliding back into normal range.
What had happened?
Had the consumption dropped? But the load figure on the display showed no sign of decreasing. Was the monitoring equipment malfunctioning? The staff threw out one guess after another, and not one of them dared to suggest the truth, because the truth was the circuit breaker, and the circuit breaker was impossible.
Every person standing in the command room was an industry professional. Every one of them knew exactly what kind of death trap the breaker assembly at the conversion center had become. Millions of volts, indifferent to any defense, tearing apart any living thing that came near. They had, of course, considered cutting the power temporarily to replace the breaker. But that had not been realistic, and not only for technical reasons.
If an ordinary fault had caused an ordinary outage, the public would have understood. All equipment requires maintenance. But this was the debut of the entire Hidden Dragon program. It was like a new car at an auto show, brought out to demonstrate its speed and power in front of an audience. If a component failed during the demonstration, what was the manufacturer supposed to do, repair it on the floor in front of everyone? No one would buy that car. A debut that bad poisoned everything that came after it. The Hidden Dragon program had been staring at exactly that humiliation. Cutting the power on the first night would have cost the program the public's trust before it had earned any.
They could not retreat. Every path had been blocked. They had been able to do nothing but watch the readings crawl toward the limit.
And then the bulbs had brightened, and the entire technical staff was left baffled.
Watching her people argue, Yvette Caldwell had already formed a private guess. The resolution of this crisis, whatever its exact shape, was almost certainly connected to her junior brother.
She was proven right before Ethan could even return. A call from the Bureau of Internal Affairs reached her phone first.
On the line, a Bureau official walked Yvette through what had occurred at the conversion center a few minutes earlier. Because she had taken the call in haste, she had not stepped away from the room, and so every person in the command room heard the account.
A new class of powered armor. The capacity to absorb ultra-high-voltage current. The words landed on the room like hammer blows.
When the account reached its conclusion, Ethan successfully replacing the breaker and walking out of the forbidden zone alive, the command room erupted.
"Long live Mr. Mercer!"
"It's Chairman, you fool, not Mr.!"
"I get to keep my job. I actually get to keep my job."
"The Hidden Dragon program. Everything we poured into it. It didn't die in our hands after all."
Watching her staff shout Ethan's name, Yvette felt an enormous weight come off her chest.
And yet she did not feel relief. Not really.
Millions of volts. Current as thick as a forearm. She had now heard, in detail, exactly how dangerous the thing he had walked into had been. And knowing all of it, he had done it anyway, without hesitation, because the city needed him to.
Is that man an idiot, she thought, with a complicated tightness in her chest that was not entirely exasperation.
---
At the enthusiastic suggestion of the staff, the entire command room emptied toward the top floor to welcome their Chairman home.
And just as the crowd gathered on the rooftop, far out across the night, a single point of light appeared on the distant horizon, growing slowly larger as it came.