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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The Misdirect

There was no question that some parts of our planned raid on the Greaves facility were illegal. It was private property, first and foremost, and we had no justifiable reason for trespassing. Then there was the question of theft. I had no hard proof that the Codex had been stolen. My only evidence was the word of a dead man, against the word of a polished corporate executive with near-limitless guile and resources. I’d swallowed that reality pill already, though. What truly worried me was the part about the dragons themselves.

Having seen the sort of military-grade dragons Greaves and his team could design—not to mention what they were capable of when properly trained—I didn’t dare risk trespassing on his property without some way to handle them. Tech was a possible angle. Ever since the advent of the hog-hunting Guardian model, third-party companies had been developing all manner of unsanctioned products for “dragon security.” We tended to find out about them when something went wrong and a customer called the support hotline. That’s how Evelyn learned that there were such things as sedatives, tranquilizer guns, and snout muzzles for our products. Supposedly there were ultrasonic devices, too—strictly black-market items—that delivered incapacitating audio pulses designed for reptiles.

Yet I hesitated to rely on something unproven like that against dangerous attack dragons. The more reliable course of action was to bring dragons of our own to neutralize the threat. The good news was that we knew how to design the type of dragons that would work best. The downside was that Greaves and his team did, too. The other downside was that if we were going to do this, it had to be totally off the books. No matter the gray legal area of ownership of the Redwood Codex, trespassing and breaking and entering were crimes. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it possible that releasing weapons-grade reptiles into an unsecured area was a crime all by itself. And whatever happened, however it came out, there could be nothing that linked Build-A-Dragon to our raid.

That meant Evelyn couldn’t know, and any dragons we designed to help us had to be produced without creating any documentation in the company’s records. The trouble, as I’d discovered during my rogue employee days, was that our systems for printing dragon eggs were tightly linked to all kinds of tracking and billing systems.

“How did you get around this before?” Korrapati asked. We sat on the curb in the shade of a food truck, waiting for our orders. We’d taken to walking a couple of blocks during lunch, which afforded us a bit of privacy. And took us off company property, too. Evelyn hadn’t replaced Ben Fulton with a new security chief, so maybe I was being overcautious. Then again, this was biotech. There was no expectation of privacy anywhere, anytime.

“I tampered with the scale in my workstation so that it read light,” I said. Maybe it was a managerial mistake to tell them this, but I figured it counted as ancient history. “Then I printed the eggs really small.”

Korrapati looked shocked. “Oh, you are so bad!”

“Clever,” Wong said, with a hint of his crooked smile.

“That won’t work this time around, though,” I said. “Four or five pounds and a printing error are not going to cut it for the sort of dragons we need.”

“Five pounds not enough,” Wong agreed.

“What if we just purchased them?” Korrapati asked. “Custom jobs, with specs close to what we’ll need.”

“Well, sure, if you’re independently wealthy I suppose you could do that,” I said dryly.

Something flickered across her face that told me maybe my offhand remark wasn’t so far from the truth.

“Wait, are you?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

“Oh.” I could have sworn there was something to it.

“Not me, personally,” she said.

“Okay.”

“My family is another story.”

She comes from money. Korrapati almost never spoke about her family, which was unusual. I knew she and her parents spoke often—they lived somewhere on the East Coast—but I didn’t have much more information than that. Tempted as I was to delve into this new twist, I could tell it was making her uncomfortable. “That’s very kind of you, but I don’t think it would be fair. Besides, we’re inside the walls here. We should be able to come up with a solution.”

“Maybe we can find a loophole in the payment system,” Korrapati said.

“Maybe.” I was dubious, though. If there was one thing our company paid attention to, it was money coming in.

“I know where the code is. I can poke around.”

“Do it, but be careful. We don’t want to trigger an internal audit or something.” The last thing I wanted was extra scrutiny of our team and its recent past. Evelyn and I had swept a lot of irregularities under the rug after Greaves left.

“I will tamper with scale,” Wong said.

I barked a laugh. “You think you can get it to ignore a twenty-pound egg?”

“Worth a try, maybe.”

“All right, knock yourself out.”

“Knock myself?” Wong asked.

“Try it if you want.” I managed not to grin, Sometimes I forgot how strange my casual slang must seem to anyone from somewhere else.

Unfortunately, by our next outing it was clear that both of these were dead ends. Wong had only managed to get his scale off by six pounds—better than I’d achieved on my own, but still far too small to be used for our purposes—and Korrapati had not found a weakness we could exploit in the payment system. She began hinting again about buying the dragons outright. I objected to that idea for so many reasons.

And on top of it all, Evelyn summoned me to her office to talk about our official work.

“How are the designs looking for the DOD?” she asked, once I’d settled into a chair opposite her desk.

“They’re coming along.” I was hedging a little because, truthfully, we’d spent the past couple of days tinkering with scales and poring through the code for our accounting and inventory systems.

“Coming along as in almost done?”

“The aquatic model is close.”

“The aquatic model started close.”

She had a point. Wong and Korrapati had designed an outstanding first prototype, and even the DOD’s revised specs didn’t hold them back for long. It occurred to me that I hadn’t asked them what they did to get the aquatic dragon to swim like it had. Seemed like something I should know.

“What about the others?” Evelyn asked.

“We’ll make the deadline,” I promised.

“And all the specs?”

Of course all the specs. But I managed not to say it out loud—not only because I was speaking to my boss, but because an idea had struck. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to meet the requirements.”

“Pretty sure?” she asked.

“Well, the simulator only gets us so far.” I hated to say it, because I’d written the damn thing. “There’s no substitute for seeing the dragons in action.”

“You want a field test?”

“Just the flying and infantry models.” The aquatic models would be hard to test, especially in the desert. On the bright side, those had done so well that the DOD could hardly give us more to accomplish with them. Technically, we weren’t under contract to develop the infantry models, but we were still hoping the DOD would come to us for them. When they did, we wanted to have a design that was just as good as the other team’s dragons during the first field trials.

She wrinkled her brow. “I don’t know, Noah.”

There was a lot to be nervous about. We’d field-tested plenty of dragons, but they were generally the safer models designed to be placed with families. Hatching and testing a purpose-built killing machine was another matter entirely. I knew she was thinking about the risk, so I tried a different tack. “You want the models to hit all the specs when we deliver them, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“This is the only way we can know for sure.”

“It makes me nervous just thinking about it.”

“We can take precautions. Tom will help with the hatching and the obedience training so that we can test them safely.” I’d already visited him in Herpetology to get his sign-on. It had come easy, in the sense that he was always willing to hatch and train new dragon prototypes. Granted, he’d extracted a promise from me to come on his next desert hike to catch some kind of venomous lizard, but I was hoping he wouldn’t hold me to it.

“And what happens to these dragons when the trials are done?” Evelyn asked. “The military won’t take them if they haven’t overseen the hatching. It’s in the contract.”

I sighed. “I guess they can go to the Farm.”

“I can’t believe you are saying this.”

Neither can I. The idea of sentencing any of our products to live out their lives in a cage bothered me more than a little. “Hey, I don’t like it either. But failure is not an option if we want to keep producing dragons.”

She chewed her lip, which meant she was thinking about something and not liking where the thought led. At last she said, “You are right, Noah Parker. It’s worth the cost. And they may not have a worse life at the Farm.”

“Thanks, boss. I’ll let you know when the designs are ready.” I ducked out of her office before she could change her mind.


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Framed