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CHAPTER TWELVE

The Specs

The next morning, Evelyn invaded my office just minutes after I got in. And I mean that literally: I’d touched my keypad to warm up the workstation, unpacked my bag, and boom, there she was.

“Good morning, Noah!”

I jumped, and just managed not to drop my tablet. “Morning. Jeez, you startled me.”

“Sorry. I thought you might be getting in.”

I gave her a side-eye. “You have an uncanny knack for knowing right when I arrive.” It was always possible she used the company’s video surveillance to watch for me. That was another legacy of our former security chief. Yet it didn’t seem like her style to sit in his cramped little booth to await my arrival. Especially because, as the caretaker for a pack of small but clever dragons, I kept wildly inconsistent hours.

“It’s your tablet.”

By that she meant the tablet she’d given me when I’d been promoted, the one that was hot-linked to our servers. I glanced at it with new suspicion. “Is there tracking on this?” I’ve taken the damn thing everywhere with me the past two weeks.

“No, of course not. Unless it’s stolen. But when it comes in range of the company network, your status changes. See?” She pointed to the tiny icon in the top-right corner of my tablet, which did show that I was behind the company firewall. A tiny thing, but I supposed you could use it to know if someone was on-site or off-site.

I frowned. “Well, that’s intrusive.”

“Relax, Noah. There are a dozen ways I could keep tabs on you if I wanted to.”

“Great.”

“Come on, let’s get some coffee into you. You look like you could use it.”

It was both an unflattering remark, and completely true. Marcus Aurelius had gotten into my coffee canister at the condo and spilled it everywhere. I couldn’t make my own, and I hadn’t wanted to stop anywhere before getting in. Phoenix traffic got more brutal with every minute of daylight. “You read my mind. Coffee machine?” It was a short walk down the hallway, and still state of the art. It would not only make you a latte or a cappuccino, but even 3D-printed a cup if you wanted one.

“I was thinking the Java Bean,” she said.

“Ooh,” I said. That was across the street, about a five-minute walk. It was a little strange that she’d made time to go off-site with me. I was certain that her CEO schedule kept her insanely busy. But hey, the coffee was better than even what our fancy machine could do, but more importantly, they had French ovens. “Sold.”

We walked across the street and settled into a table by the window. I tackled a butter croissant while she nibbled on a very small pastry. I tried the coffee and sighed. This was the jolt I needed. “That’s better.”

“Major Nakamura has been in touch,” Evelyn said.

“Okay.” This is what she wanted to talk about.

“Since the DOD contract is now a competitive bid, there have been changes to the specifications.”

“What kind of changes?”

She slid over her tablet. “Take a look.”

It was a DOD document; I knew the fonts and the spacing right away. I could picture them every time I closed my eyes. I even recognized this document. “These are the specs for the flying model.”

“Correct.”

Yet even as I read it, I started to notice the differences. “Now they want it to have an eight-hour flight time, and a range of five hundred miles.”

“I saw that.”

I ground my teeth. “They know dragons are living creatures, right?”

“Swifts can do it,” she said.

“Swifts, sure. They’re all feather.” She wasn’t wrong, though; there were numerous avian models of long-endurance flight. Dragons had a different physiology, though; they were heavier, and there was a cost to keeping them aloft. Even so, as I scanned the rest of the updated specs, all I saw was a value with the phrase or better appended to it. These were all categories on which we’d be graded, and they were hard enough on their own. I shook my head and slid her tablet back. “I don’t know if we can do this.”

“We don’t have a choice, Noah.”

“Those numbers have no basis in reality.”

She bit her lip. “I’m not so sure. They don’t issue requests for proposals that they don’t think anyone can fill.”

“Sure, I guess they expect us to make the impossible possible,” I said sourly. And Greaves could have told them anything is possible. It was very much his style to overpromise and force others to deliver.

“It’s more than that. We don’t simply have to meet specs. Now we have to do so better than any competitors.”

I wanted to point out that we shouldn’t truly have competitors, but we’d already had the argument. As far as the DOD was concerned, we weren’t the sole supplier any longer. Yet the more I obsessed over the contract and the specifications for dragons, the harder it got to ignore a raw truth. “What if I have a problem with the fact that these are reptilian weapons? For use against actual people?”

“You don’t seem to have that issue with the attack dragons,” Evelyn said.

“It’s not the same thing. With an attack dragon, I have no idea if or how the owner is going to use it. I can tell myself it’s for intimidation. Or for protection, even.” I gestured vaguely at the projection screens. “These are purpose-bred killing machines. If we make them, that’s what they’ll be used for.”

“That’s the job, Noah.”

“I know.” I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed them with my fingertips, but the afterimages of those phrases seemed permanently etched into my retinas. Close-quarters combat. Salvage operations. Blowing things up.

“I’m sorry about this,” Evelyn said at last. “It’s not what I hoped would be the new company mission. But we must survive.”

“Or the world loses dragons,” I said.

“Exactly.”

I took a deep breath, and maybe it was just the coffee taking hold that fully brought me around, but I gave her a nod. “I can do this.”

“I’m afraid that’s not all I need from you, which is why I asked you here,” she said.

A vague sense of foreboding started to rise in me. “What else is there?”

She stirred her coffee, almost as if to buy time. “The Director of Dragon Design duties that go beyond dragon engineering. There is social engineering, too.”

By that she meant working with people, but I didn’t take her meaning. “How so?”

“Part of your job is getting your team behind you to do what needs to be done.”

Like she used to do by persuading me to do things. Come to think of it, I’d had more than a few tense conversations in her office. More than once I went marching in, all but certain that I was damn sure not going to do something she wanted, no matter how important it was. Most of the time, I came out somehow having agreed to do the thing, and even excited about it. “I think you’re talking about the Evelyn Wong effect. Bringing me around on something even when I didn’t like it.”

She nodded. “Now it must be the Noah Parker effect. You have to lead your team to this. That’s the only way it’ll work.”

I sagged back in my chair a little. “You know, this job is harder than I thought it would be.”

“Look at the bright side. One of the hardest designers to persuade is no longer your problem.”

I liked to think she meant O’Connell, but I’m pretty sure she meant me.


Evelyn and I decided to break the news in our conference room, so I hurried into the design lab to round up the troops.

Korrapati had wasted no time in settling in to my old workstation. It wasn’t a large space, really, but somehow her possession of it transformed the place I once knew. She’d brought in a little Himalayan salt lamp that softened the harsh LED lights to an orange glow. Every surface was spotless. And somehow it even smelled better despite the constant outflow of metallic-scented air from the God Machine.

Luckily, Wong’s workstation remained a fixture to his own personal work style. The stack of empty energy drink cans had reached three high and ran the length of the wall between our workstations. No, I reminded myself, his workstation and Korrapati’s. The wheels of his chair had long ago worn tracks in the carpet from when he rolled out to talk to someone. Which he’d done this morning: I found him and Korrapati in deep conversation.

I pushed down a spike of envy and put on a big smile. “Hey, guys!”

Korrapati smiled. “Hello, Noah.”

“You all settled in?” I asked.

“Yes. Wong was just catching me up on the DOD project.”

“What do you think so far?”

“It’s . . . intimidating.”

And you only know the half of it. “Well, Evelyn wants us in the conference room. She has news.”

“What kind of news?” Wong asked.

“The good kind, I think,” I lied. “We have some idea what we’re up against. Come on.”

We made our way to the conference room. The door hissed open, and the air carried a stale quality. No one had been in here in a while, possibly since before I’d left. Normally, the tinted windows on the outside wall of the room let in a perfect amount of natural light. When I hit the button to lower the RF shield wall, however, I won curious glances from my designers and also made the room too dark. They could stare all they wanted, but if Robert Greaves was willing to steal one of Redwood’s inventions, I wouldn’t put it past him to train a listening device on our windows. We called it the “RF” shield but the lightweight micro-mesh blocked all manner of signals, from radio frequency to UV to heat signatures. Disrupted lasers, too. Every biotech worth its salt had curtains like these on all exterior windows.

Evelyn arrived just as we’d figured out how to turn the lights on. “Good morning, everyone.” She glanced up from her tablet, saw Korrapati, and broke into an open smile. “Good to see you, Priti Korrapati.”

“It’s good to be seen,” Korrapati said.

“You missed us too much to stay away.”

Korrapati smiled, though something passed between them. “Something like that.”

Evelyn’s eyes went back to her tablet, and the furrows returned to her brow. “The DOD has adjusted their specs for the contract.”

“Why change?” Wong asked.

“Because there may be another company putting in a competing bid.”

“That shouldn’t be possible,” Korrapati said.

“It’s possible,” I said.

Korrapati and Wong looked from her to me.

“Noah,” Evelyn said. A warning.

“What? They need to know.” And we need transparency, now more than ever.

Evelyn gave me the fine, go ahead gesture.

“We think Greaves took dragon-printing technology and started a rival firm,” I said.

Korrapati gasped.

Wong shook his head and said, “Bad business.”

“As a result, the DOD no longer considers us a sole supplier,” Evelyn said. “Here are the specs for the competitive bid.” She made a few flicking motions on her tablet, and projection screens bloomed to life around the conference room.

Korrapati hurried to the nearest one. “This is the marine dragon.” She glanced over the specs. “‘Adjusted’ is a bit of an understatement. These are totally changed.”

“What’s different?” I asked.

“They want the marine dragon to run twenty-five miles an hour on land, and swim twenty knots.” She kept reading and made a little tsking noise. “Oh, and hold its breath for five minutes.”

Presumably while keeping at twenty knots. Yikes. I looked over at Wong, who was looking at another screen. “What’s that one?”

“Infantry dragon,” Wong said, tapping at his screen. His hand went right through it, of course, but the image didn’t so much as flicker. “Many new requirements.”

“Are they doable?”

“Maybe.” He frowned. “Hard to make so strong and fast and nimble.”

If Wong didn’t have brazen overconfidence, then we really did face an uphill battle. I eased over to the third screen. It was the aerial model, the one I’d already complained about to Evelyn. “This one is the flier. It’ll be tough, but I think we can manage.” I looked at Evelyn, who gave me a little nod.

Korrapati had gone quiet. Some of the glow of her long-awaited return seemed to have faded, too. I shuffled over to see what she was looking at. Yes, the marine dragon. Not going to be pleasant reading at any time, and God knows what they’d added.

“How bad is it?” I asked her.

“They’ve added a carrying load requirement. Eighty pounds.”

“What could that possibly be for?”

“It doesn’t specify,” she said, but it was clear she knew.

After a moment, it dawned on me as well. “Ordnance.”

Korrapati nodded.

“What is ordinance?” Wong asked.

“Not ordinance, that’s like a township regulation,” I said. “Ordnance.

Evelyn said something low in Mandarin, a phrase I hadn’t learned. Wong’s eyebrows inched up a little, but otherwise he said nothing. Even though the meaning of a dragon carrying explosives couldn’t be clearer.

We swapped screens and spent another ten minutes grumbling over the new specs. The DOD had made this task infinitely harder. Worse, they appeared to have a much more intuitive grasp of dragon biology than I’d given them credit for. They knew which things were close to possible, the things that we’d really have to push to achieve.

“Well, what do we all think?” Evelyn asked.

“I think this is going to be hard.” Korrapati glanced at the screen with the marine dragon specs and looked away just as quickly. “Even overlooking what they intend to use these dragons for, the performance requirements are beyond anything we’ve ever designed.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t do them,” I said.

“Even Wong designs are not so good,” Wong said.

“The thing is, Evelyn says we need this contract for the company to stay in business.” I looked at Evelyn. “That’s true, right?”

“It is,” Evelyn said. “I wish it weren’t, but our current revenues won’t keep us afloat for long.” She didn’t add that the board had pretty much told her they’d liquidate the company if we failed to secure the contract.

“Even so, when dragons are dangerous . . .” Wong shrugged unhappily. “Hard to go back.”

“I know. I felt the same way when I learned who the client was,” I said. “But if we fail as a company, then no one gets to have dragons. I don’t want to live in a world without them. So I’m willing to do what it takes to survive. But I can’t do it without both of you.”

I looked at Wong and didn’t need to ask the question.

“Survive,” he said.

“What about you?” I asked Korrapati.

She took a moment longer, the emotions warring on her face. Then she set her jaw and gave a nod.

With her and Wong, I can do anything. I faced Evelyn. “The Design team is in.”


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