Chương 131: 130. Humanitarian Missions

The new machines were being wheeled in, bulky blocks of alloy and crystalline processing cores. Kelly watched the workers, her arms crossed.

"Will they be okay?" she asked. Dr. Joe Haider stood beside her, a data-pad in his hands. He didn't look up from his readings.

"The machines or the workers?"

"The machines. These floors look scratchy." That got a faint snort from him.

"They're based on the old Tüin-language cracking models. From the first war."

"I remember. We lost."

"We did. But the tech got better. Vastly improved. These models have the latest adaptive logic engines and language algorithms. Military-grade. Explorer-grade. All the corporate exploration teams use them now. You find a glowing rock on a dead moon, you feed it to one of these. It catalogues material properties, energy signatures, and if there's any symbolic language of any kind, it runs comparative analysis across every known database." He finally glanced at her.

"It's the best tool for alien materials. Or alien languages. Once it catalogues the runic effects you manually trigger, it can cross-reference for patterns. If you want to crack alien materials or poke at an unknown language, there's nothing better. Makes the whole process considerably less… manual." Kelly nodded, watching a crane arm carefully lower a unit into place.

"Uh, yeah. Sure. That's what I thought. Less manual is good." Kelly's thoughts drifted as Haider oversaw her new rune-lab's birth. Dr. Joe Haider stood to gain from this. Financially, to a degree that would make most corporate boards weep with joy. His personal, physical investment—being here, contributing his own resources and signature to the project manifests—was driven by that. Which was great. He was supposedly one of the smartest minds on the planet.

He was also reputed to be crooked to all hell, a man who'd sell his own grandmother if the share price was right. He'd also always been nice to her. Weirdly nice. His stake in this project's success was even larger than her own. That guaranteed he would do his best. It made him a boon. Betraying her would mean torching his own fortune, his company's future, and his legacy in one move. The convenience of that alignment was not lost on her. His profit margin was her survival. His legacy was her success.

As long as she stayed useful, he'd treat her like a golden goose, at least until his financial interests diverged from hers. After that, all bets were off. His perpetual niceness, however, felt objectively illogical. It pinged a low, steady alert in the back of her mind. The timing lined up wrong. He'd first met her when she was a kid, during that stretch of time she'd spent with Jenny. Her Jellybean. Maybe he wasn't just being nice to the reckless intern. Maybe... he'd always known who Jenny really was.

Which meant his perpetual niceness wasn't illogical at all. It was just capitalism dressed up in a three-piece suit. Kelly sighed, she had heard that every family had a beloved uncle you couldn't trust with your wallet and a bad day. Turns out, it was universally true. The door slid open with a hydraulic sigh. Reggie entered. Or, as Dr. Haider's intelligence network insisted on calling him, Reginald Archibald Somerset Ward III. Favorite nephew of Lucian Ward, founder of GeneCorp.

He was wearing a dirty GeneCorp hoodie that looked like it had been used to clean an engine block. His hair was a memorial monument to a recent and intense argument with a pillow. And he was carrying a large, ribboned box of chocolates in his arms, holding it with the careful focus of a bomb technician. A memory surfaced, crisp and unbidden. Turns out she'd killed his cousin, Adrian, so many loops ago.

A corporate heir who'd been too good at his job—or bad at it, depending on which side of the explosion you were standing on. They'd fought over her precious cube in a dome that had needed to stop existing. Who knew. She doubted Reggie would be mad about it if he ever found out. From what she'd pieced together, the Ward family tree was less a tree and more a thorny thicket of mutual antagonism. It was always interesting spending time with Reggie as her bodyguard. There was a chaotic honesty to him she appreciated.

If only he knew the amount of times they'd tried to kill each other in past loops. He'd probably ask for triple pay, or pull a gun. With Reggie, it was a coin toss. Kelly's money was on the gun.

"This calls for a celebration. Seriously, congrats," Reggie said. The scion to one of the major world powers, currently pretending to be a normie gun for hire, slapped the chocolate box onto a nearby crate of sensitive optical cabling.

"You actually pulled it off." He was grinning. The sort of grin that meant he'd already decided his new employers fortune-changing deal was a win, consequences be damned. Reggie surveyed the chaotic hall, the sterile new lab rising from the industrial gloom. His expression curdled into genuine dismay.

"They brought the equipment in by air? The sky? Really?" He shook his head.

"Gutsy move. Also real dumb. It's a miracle none of it was stolen. And this decor… it's aggressively joyless, Kelly. Did you tell the designers you wanted... this? or did they just sense your aura?" He said it the way someone might comment on the weather. Offhand. Unbothered by the fact that he was the nephew of one of every world's major powers, standing in her lab, casually critiquing her aesthetic choices. Reggie looked down, studied the carpet, and scoffed.

"What kinda' lab has a carpet? Ugh. Zoomer much. I thought you guys had more style." Kelly stared at the chocolates, then at him.

"The contract says double pay for 'Doctor Voss'. Or 'my lord'. The extra cash buys respect." Reggie ripped the plastic seal open.

"Contract also says hazard pay for dealing with your personality. We're both cheating. Have a chocolate. They're the stolen good ones." He tossed one in his mouth.

"See? Not poisoned." Kelly took one. It was stupidly rich. She decided not to mention that she'd killed his cousin. Seemed like unnecessary context. Reggie looked like a rich kid who'd fallen into a dumpster and decided to make it his brand. Streetwise scruff on an oligarch's allowance, moonlighting as a mercenary who'd probably invoice his own mother for the bullet.

He wore that perpetually unimpressed face teens reserved for when they were surrounded by elders, except his face suggested he'd spent considerable time deciding whether people were worth killing, and had only recently decided Kelly fell into the " not yet" category. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. The only reason he wasn't trying to kill Kelly was because she'd already paid him to stop other people from trying to kill her. It was a simple, elegant relationship.

He hadn't come alone. Dr. Haider's daughter, Stacy, had followed him, the giant three-eyed wolf cub in her arms looking more like an overgrown, bizarrely adorable pillow than a magical creature. She held the cub the way someone else might have held a championship trophy made of soft fur. Manuel from Haider's crew was with her, the guy who kept failing to catch a much larger, billion-dollar teleporting werewolf. They were here to watch Kelly's lab get rebuilt in their building's basement.

Curiosity, apparently, was a powerful motivator, even during an apocalypse. Reggie lit a cigarette, the smoke curling up in the basement's industrial lighting.

"So," he said, the word hanging in the air.

"Your bosses at Vaughn. You think they'll be thrilled you're cutting deals with Genecorp? Their biggest rival? You really that dumb?" Kelly leaned against a stack of crated nano-fibers.

"Dumb is relative. Mostly it's profitable."

"Because," Reggie continued, ignoring her jibe, "I'm trying to decide if you're breaking your employment contract, which would be a legal matter, or whether you're stupid enough to think they don't already know what you're doing, which would be a you matter, and I prefer to know which kind of problem my client is."

"It'll be fine," Kelly waved a hand dismissively. Really, it would.

"They know," he stated, not asking.

"You think they don't have people watching this block? You're building a weapons lab in a subsidiary's basement in an invasion. That's not subtle." Stacy adjusted her grip on the cub, who was now licking her chin. She sounded like she'd had this kind of conversation with Reggie before.

"Do you think they'll move against her?" Manuel leaned forward.

"Look, they're not going to stop her from working. They don't need to. Most employment contracts say the company owns anything you invent on their time, using their stuff, or connected to what they do. See all this work? It's theirs. Full stop." He glanced at Kelly.

"So you take the deal with Genecorp, you do your research during work hours. The moment you've got something, their lawyers swoop in and take it. No payment, nothing. Especially now." He shook his head.

"An invention? A breakthrough? They'd own it. They'd market themselves as the company that saved humanity. Make bank off the whole thing. It's how these places operate when everything's going to hell." Kelly listened, her attention seemingly on the mangled component in her hands. It was the obvious play. The standard corpo handbook for a crisis: let someone else do the work, then seize the results and the publicity.

"Naturally," she said. Her tools clicked against metal.

"Exploit the situation, look good for the cameras. Shareholders love a good human interest story." She set the component down.

"Well, I'm sure their lawyers already have the paperwork ready to file. Just waiting for me to sign so they can steal it. It's a great plan. Really elegant, actually. It assumes I'm building something they can own." She pulled an energy bar from her inner pocket, examining it with fresh interest.

"You can't trademark war crimes." She'd already considered that outcome. The solution was baked into the deal. She tossed the crumpled wrapper toward a nearby recycler. It missed and clattered on the floor. A dry, humorless sound escaped Kelly's throat as she considered making her discoveries spectacularly, catastrophically un-patentable —something to give their legal department a collective aneurysm.

She looked at the half-built lab, a chaotic sprawl of potential, its chaos suddenly striking her as something noble. A place to save the world, and make her so functionally powerful that her mere existence became a standing argument against everyone else's limitations. A real humanitarian mission. Kelly was standing in what Dr. Haider called his mansion, which was really just a headquarters with expensive wallpaper and the constant, low-grade panic of a corporate panic room.

She had just finished informing the collected suits and lab coats about her newest venture. She was building a war crimes lab. Well, not building it with her own two hands at that exact moment—there were whole teams of technicians for that particular grunt work. They were off constructing the shell, the plumbing, the things that required permits and plausible deniability. But Kelly would be the one inside it, building the warheads.

"Big beautiful magical warheads," she said, with the pride of a sculptor describing her masterpiece. Those warheads, and the very specific international violations they would perform, were slated for direct grafting onto her skin. Delivery system: her. Kelly observed as the workers erected a large cage in the center, complete with a chair with straps, locks, restraints, and numerous cuffs for things with too many arms and legs—it looked like an observation chamber for eldritch horrors. Kelly thought it was perfect.

New war crimes needed a home.

"Speaking of crimes, Kelly, I am highly disappointed in you." Dr. Haider's voice cut through the ambient hum of anxious productivity. He wasn't yelling. He sounded like a headmaster reviewing a poorly forged absence note. He looked at her like she'd tracked mud over a white carpet. She turned. Her mind ran through her list of broken rules. It was hard to pick just one.

"What'd I do?"

"I remember telling you that your designation was Timer now, yet you introduced yourself in your interview and dossier as ' Dr. Kelly Voss the new God of time.' Now the damage is done, and it might be even too late to correct that mistake."

"Finally! —Wait, that's what bothers you?" Kelly asked, surprised.

"You're not mad about Vaughn's stake in any discoveries we make?"

"Why would I be?" Dr. Haider's expression shifted to one of authentic, clinical puzzlement. He inhaled, as if explaining basic arithmetic.

"They will only have a claim to your percentage, which we agreed on as merely twenty. Not ours. Not mine. Our contribution and ownership is clear. You have provided us with everything we need to gain a massive advantage in every system." A thin, professional smile touched his lips.

"And when they try to stake your claim—which they will—you will have turned the most dangerous player in the echelon into our unwitting ally. You will have advanced humanity and granted us better standing with Gideon Vaughn, while dealing a savage blow to every single one of our competitors." He paused, a professional smile slipping through.

"You did good."

"Yeah, thanks," Kelly said, not bothering to mask the flatness in her voice. She hooked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the conceptual direction of the interview room she'd never stayed in.

"But I skipped the interview and induction. Your interviewer yelled that rogue agents are not allowed in the establishment. He vowed to watch my every action on your behalf and remove me the instant I became a problem. Said you supposedly don't like unpredictable elements."

"I don't," Dr. Haider responded smoothly.

"But I believe you are under a misconception. You are free to do as you wish, with consequences." He leaned back against a polished console.

"If your actions, no matter how irresponsible, lead to a victory, then obviously it was done with our organization's full approval. If you fail in a way that leads to catastrophe, then you did it on your own." Kelly stared at him.

"So, if I succeed in whatever I do on your time," she summarized, her voice dry, "you take the credit. And if I fail, I get fired?" Manuel, who had been silent until now, shook his head with a look of mild correction.

"No, no," he reassured her, his tone implying she'd missed a subtle but important clause.

"If you fail, you get hired. Just not by us." The distinction was meaningless. It was the difference between being thrown off a cliff and being taken to a roof with a locked door. Both paths ended with the same steep drop and a messy conclusion.

"How kind." Kelly's voice was a masterclass in deadpan sarcasm.

"Seriously, your contractual brinkmanship is impressive. Your total absence of shame is masterful, too. A real work of art. You've really thought this through."

"We have," Dr. Haider said, accepting the compliment at face value. Dr. Haider dropped the pleasantries like a hot rock.

"Enough with the fake-humble ass-kissing, Kelly. I get enough of that from the staff. It's not like you—it's like seeing a person swallow a much larger person. It's disconcerting." He joined his hands in that calculating mastermind pose, fingertips pressed together like he was about to declare hostage terms, or auction off everyone's good mood. Kelly watched, her expression flat. She'd seen this pose enough times to predict the weather with it.

Her brain was already two steps ahead, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It always did.

"Now that we have gotten the good news out of the way, here's the bad news."