Chương 14: Corporate Questioning

The entrance to Vaughn Industries was a chaotic, smoking mess. Bootprints smeared blood and genetically altered fluid across the metal grating. The lobby was a wreck—turrets slagged, drones lay in smoking heaps, mechs and bots lay scattered in burning piles, and the walls were in the process of self-repairing from being shattered. She'd looped more than a hundred times, fought Payne, the 7EQ monster to a standstill, shoved troll DNA into her bloodstream, inverted dark energy, and told physics to go fuck itself.

It had been a productive morning. Kelly always made sure to deactivate and rip herself out of Vaughn's surveillance system loop after loop. Erased logs, wiped footage, scrubbed footage, burned secret footage, burned secret-secret footage, until the lab's records were cleaner than corporate tax reports. That's why she needed Jackhammer. Security clearance was for more than summoning an army of turrets—it was all about not leaving a digital footprint behind. Data? Deleted. Files? Gone. Hard backups? Smashed.

Even built half her own equipment from the lab's 3D large printers just to keep it out of the system. But she wasn't delusional. Somewhere, buried deep, Vaughn still had about 30% of it. Maybe less. Enough that if she was unlucky and someone way too high up the food chain ever noticed, there'd be problems. If Vaughn decided to send their top operatives? Or, worse, if Vaughn himself got curious? This loop wouldn't end with some Major Payne merc putting a bullet in her skull.

She'd wake up every morning with a body rejecting itself like bad transplant surgery and a several-minute countdown to liquefaction. She needed a permanent fix for the whole 'spontaneous self-destruction' situation— fast. And she already had a solution in mind. The troll was built like a walking tank—it had shrugged off everything they threw at it, healing faster than her or their bullets could carve it up. Near-instantly healing injuries. She only had its bones.

If she could crack that, splice it, pull another trait out of it, she wouldn't need to keep patching herself up with medical nanotech every hour. She just needed another troll. Jackhammer was standing at the building's entrance. The last she saw him, he was being hunted down by a 6EQ and a pack of 4s. She had assumed he was dead. Apparently not. He tapped the side of his temple, the faint gleam of cybernetic enhancement visible beneath his skin. An Ocular scanner, insurance against Darwinism and standard issue.

Everyone had them. They were handy little things that provided a near-perfect estimation of a person's EQ Augment score, and kept most people from making terminally stupid decisions, like picking a fight with someone who could turn them into a smear on the pavement. Jackhammer's scan completed, and his entire stance shifted. A small thing—barely perceptible. But Kelly caught it. His jaw tightened. His weight adjusted. That fraction-of-a-second reassessment. He wasn't looking at a scientist anymore.

"You survived that fight." His voice wasn't questioning. It was an accusation. She wasn't supposed to survive that fight; it was why he had given her full security clearance. A final gift. Kelly popped her neck, ignoring the dull ache of her strenuous existence.

"That's what I've been saying." A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Jackhammer didn't look away. Because it shouldn't be possible. A researcher—a fucking physicist—went toe-to-toe with a 7EQ, fully-equipped contract killer and walked away? Calling it improbable was an understatement. That was the sort of thing that got flagged. That got reported, and most of all, that got interest.

"What the hell happened to you?" he asked. Kelly grinned, wide, teeth bared with a secret she wasn't ready to share, "Science."

"Anyway, where are the files on permanent medical nanotech?" She leaned against the nearest console, smearing blood and dust on its surface without a care.

"I need them for research. Big important science things. Don't ask questions." Jackhammer didn't blink. His left eye pulsed with a faint white glow, scanning her as if he were still deciding if she was worth the hassle. After a pause, he exhaled through his nose, the closest thing to a sigh he'd allow.

"You already have full clearance," he said, calm as ever.

"Had." A flicker of his fingers on his neural augments.

"Revoked. The threat's over. You're back to standard employee access." Kelly narrowed her eyes.

"Wait, you can just—" She gestured vaguely.

"Press a button and demote me? That's so corporate. What, no exit interview? No severance package?" Jackhammer folded his arms.

"You should know better than anyone there are no files on permanent medical nanotech. That's not what Vaughn Industries does." Kelly let that sit for a second, staring at him like he'd just confessed to not believing in oxygen.

"Okay, first of all," she said, straightening up, "rude. Second, you're telling me a multi-trillion-dollar corporate empire, with enough black-budget experiments to make the Geneva Conventions cry, never once thought, 'hey maybe let's make medical nanotech that doesn't expire after an hour'? You expect me to believe that?" Jackhammer's expression didn't shift an inch.

"I expect you to know the answer already." Kelly clicked her tongue, rolling her shoulders.

"Fine. Be boring about it." She turned on her heel, already walking away.

"I'll just find another way."

Jack 'Jackhammer' Vance - Vaughn Head of Security. Jackhammer didn't stop her. Just watched, impassive, as she strode off, probably to do something insane. He finally exhaled. Why was she like this now? It was like someone had taken her fringe qualities and dialled them up to a thousand. To Jackhammer, it had been a single day since he last saw her. One day. One day ago, Kelly Voss was a minor problem—a kind but reckless, messy scientist with no real survival skills. An endearing annoyance.

Someone who needed protection and a person who wouldn't last a second in a real fight. Now? Jackhammer was looking at something else entirely. The lab coat was gone. The half-wild, bleeding lunatic in front of him was grinning through blood stains over unblemished skin, suggesting she'd survived and healed from injuries that should have put her down.

The way she moved was too confident, too loose, and too used to pain—nothing like the sweet, gentle, kind, perpetually late and professionally hardheaded scientist he'd known just the day before. She wasn't normal. Not anymore. She shouldn't have made it through that fight. A scientist did not walk away from a 7EQ mercenary without injury, and a scientist definitely did not smile afterwards.

Jackhammer's high-end neural augments synced with the building's security systems, pulling surveillance from the 10th-floor labs at speeds no human could match. There was nothing but a gap—scrubbed footage. Scrubbed data. Suspicious. He activated the C-level back-channel—an encrypted feed so deep in the system that only Gideon Vaughn himself had the clearance to erase it. Few even knew it existed. Fewer still had the access to use it.

The feed connected to show snippets of Kelly's whip-like blade cracking at near-supersonic speeds, turrets and drones answering her every command, her movements precise enough to hold off a 7EQ merc like she'd rehearsed it a thousand times. Then everything went fuzzy, and it wasn't the feed—it was everything in the lab as though reality had faltered momentarily. Even more suspicious. When the feed kicked back in, Kelly looked different. Stronger.

And there, right between her eyes—undamaged bone beneath a rapidly healing bullet hole. The feed ended and Jack stood still. Kelly shoved her hands in her pockets.

"So, uh. You reporting me or what?" Jackhammer didn't answer. He just kept looking at her. Because whatever happened in that fight... It wasn't normal. And Kelly Voss wasn't just a scientist anymore. With a thought, he pinged a report to HQ, his high-end communications implant sending a visual memory pack to upper management. Someone needed to see this.