“With my crew, back in the old stomping grounds. It’s totally affadelic, wouldn’t miss it. Did you get Accetta yet?”
“On it,” Kat beamed.
Sure enough, they found Zane a few minutes later, just starting through the line with his tray.
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she cooed, slipping up alongside him, lips curling up in a grin.
“No.”
But after a few portions of rice and tofu curry, accompanied by both Gammas, she and Lee returned to the PARC.
They didn’t have to stake territory as the four of them claimed their former spots along either side of the long table, Whistler running a finger the length of the table as if challenging the pristine room to dare something like dust. But when she stole a glance around, she noticed the slight uptick of Whistler’s lips, and the spark of clarity in Zane’s dark eyes.
“So what are we after, exactly?” Zane asked.
“Anything and everything connecting the General to Segura,” Lee stated, and he raised his brows. “And everything in-between.”
“Zane and I will take the known sister operation, see if we can’t find some connection there,” Lee said.
“And we get baby Narron,” Kat beamed.
“He wasn’t a babe at the time—” Zane corrected her. She caught Lee’s subtle shake of the head.
Rolling her eyes, Kat turned to Whistler. “I just dug through his notable accomplishments high level this afternoon and couldn’t find anything. But there’s got to be something in there, something to insinuate the General’s involvement. Some glutton of youth maybe?”
“Rebel rockstar,” Whistler murmured, eyes twinkling across the table.
Alas…
“I don’t know how he even has any room left on that jacket of his,” Kat grumbled an hour later.
“I’m sure it’s a very nice jacket, though,” Whistler agreed.
She slowly scrolled back through thegrosslylong list they’d compiled of each and every public award or promotion the General had ever received during those prime years. Including but not limited to the Galactic recognition for a paper he’d co-authored on—even her eyes tripped over the dense title as she re-read the name in her head.The Half-Life Stability of Molecular Fragmentation. She swore, if she found one more “future of leadership” award…
“Hang on, what’s this one?” she said, pointing, as Whistler clicked into the representation of a gold-coated bird in flight.
“A Raven? It’s from ‘89,” he murmured. “‘Given to a loved one upon the death of a scholar for distinguished service in the fields of science…’ Accepted by a Lieutenant Marion Narron on behalf of Dorn Lewell.”
“Lewell… I just read that name somewhere.” Kat sifted between the glowing holograms she had open before her.
Whistler cleared his throat. “Listen to this. ‘On the day of the malfunction, despite the AMG’s best efforts to evacuate the premises, a small number of civilians were trapped in the blast. Among them were chief scholars, Ervwyn, Gail, and Lewell of the Mangorian–Drevix unit. Their deaths are to be celebrated at a private ceremony with only the families.’ That sure sounds like our accident.”
“But why would it have been accepted by—”
Kat’s mouth opened and closed as she stared at the two names gracing the research paper cover.
The Half-Life Stability of Molecular Fragmentation
Co-authored by Marion Narron and Dorn Lewell
“They were colleagues. He wasn’t just alive during this operation, General Narron was workingwiththem before that accident.”
“We may have found something as well,” Lee said a moment later, eyes slipping further down the holofile he was reading. Kat sat up in her chair while Zane expanded a second hologram from he and Lee’s glowing stash at the center of the table.
“It doesn’t tie into General Narron specifically,” Zane clarified. “But if we cross reference the timeline of that accident forty-three years ago with the AMG Laws and Federations, we learn that it was only a couple of years afterward that they made it illegal to harness the dark rays. Something about the fragility of human lives…”
“‘The decision to suspend any such future acts was made in conjunction with the much earlier amendment and the AMG’s decision to pull funding from like operations,’” Lee read off the statement from the press report. “But what I’m more curious about with these are the timelines. According to this one, thisall happened around the same time that the first regulation on verinity production started up.”
