“I’m beginning to believe you actually like being the center of attention,” Charlotte laughed as I climbed out of my truck.

  The Carrier had taken a couple days to get back to Calgary, and although I really enjoyed spending that time with Jane, Alan, and the kids, I couldn’t wait to get to the Family’s headquarters in order to get an update on the Phobos situation.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the giant ship you drove right into the middle of the city, or the fact that it just disgorged dozens of armored vehicles the instant you arrived,” she replied. “I know you don’t like to be subtle, but did you have to deploy all your forces the instant you arrived back in town?”

  “I didn’t see any point in wasting a bunch of time slowly sending the bears out a couple APCs at a time,” I told her. “I had more important things to worry about, and besides, BearForce One has far more firepower than the APCs. If people wanted to worry about something, they should have worried about that.”

  “They did. When you first drove that behemoth into the city center, we noticed a huge spike in the number of outgoing calls from the Corps in the area. It seemed like most of them were contacting their satellite offices to find out if any of them pissed you off,” Charlotte explained. “That number doubled when your forces came pouring out of the hangar.”

  “So I strike fear into the local corporations just by showing up in force?” I smirked. “Good! That means my very presence is enough to deter them from doing anything stupid. Hopefully that means they won’t do anything stupid while we deal with this next catastrophe.”

  I let the smirk fall and glanced over at my friend. “So, what is the Phobos situation right now? I tried to keep myself from calling in every night and bothering you to get updates, but as soon as I got back in town, I felt the need to come get an update.”

  “You could have just called,” Charlotte said.

  “I could have,” I admitted, “but if I did that I wouldn’t have been able to drop this guy off.”

  I waved my hand towards the truck as my squad piled out, followed by a hound dog in a trench coat and fedora. “I designed it to scan the various news feeds and create a regular summary for me to go over. Unfortunately, it hasn’t proved all that useful yet, because most of the news feeds were either talking about my arrival or rumors about major samurai activity around Mars. It seems like even the biggest news outlets aren’t aware of what’s happening with Phobos.”

  “That’s because Phobos is creating some sort of disruption field around itself, and to detect it you’d need access to an exceptionally powerful detection system. Almost all of those are Samurai built, and those that aren’t are Samurai sponsored. We’re suppressing the knowledge until the countermeasures are in place. It’ll be easier to avoid creating a panic if we reveal both the threat and our solution at the same time,” she explained.

  “I wish that I’d known that before,” I grumbled. “I bought that thing to monitor all the news streams and look for disappearances and disturbing rumors. Instead, all it’s been able to find is misinformation and romance.”

  “So why bring it here then?” Charlotte asked.

  “I was hoping that I could maybe convince you to give it access to the Family’s intelligence and monitoring network. I know I’m not a member, and I’m not asking for access to the core system, but you’ve probably got access to a lot more raw data than I do, and I was hoping that I could test it using that.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “I don’t know about the intelligence system, but I may be able to give it access to the raw feeds,” she replied. “I can’t do more than that unless you actually join the Family.”

  “I’ll consider it,” I muttered.

  Charlotte, who had just started turning back towards the entrance of the building, twisted back towards me, her eyes wide. “Beg your pardon?”

  “I said, ‘I’ll think about it,’” I repeated. “Look, I don’t love the idea of being associated with a corp, even a samurai-centric one, but I admit that almost all my interactions with the Family have been beneficial to me. Plus, I like most of the local members.”

  “I never thought I’d hear you say that,” Charlotte chuckled.

  “And I never thought I’d admit it, but here we are,” I replied.

  “Yeah, here we are,” she replied quietly. After a moment she seemed to rouse herself, and she gestured back towards the entrance. “We’ve set up a room to keep an eye on the Phobos situation. Since you came straight here after arriving, I assume you’ll want to see it. This way.”

  I fell into step next to her, and my squad followed behind, giving us enough space to talk. “Has the situation changed since we last talked?”

  “Yes, quite a bit actually,” Charlotte replied. “First of all, not only have they started firing at the moon with the rail driver built in Montreal, but the European Vanguard have created some sort of storm cannon and the Asian Vanguard have created a self-replicating drone swarm. The three groups have been taking turns to strike at Phobos and slowly wear it down.”

  As soon as we entered the door, I noticed a virtual line guiding me towards our destination. Charlotte must have forwarded me the navigation information so I’d be able to find my way through the labyrinth of identical white corridors if we got separated.

  “Is that going to be enough to stop it?” I asked.

  “That’s still unclear…” Charlotte admitted. “While the storm and drones seem to be doing a good job of stripping the surface of Phobos away, and the rail driver is punching holes into the mass, the planetoid is still huge. Each strike is removing less than a percent of Phobos’ total mass.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” I grumbled.

  “It’s not, but since they’re cycling between the different weapons, they’re managing a decent rate of fire, and we have a little time until Phobos arrives,” Charlotte said.

  “Have we figured out a timeframe?” I asked.

  “A week, give or take a few hours,” she replied. “That should be enough time to rip through the majority of the planetoid’s mass.”

  “Let’s hope,” I muttered.

  I’d only been half paying attention to the guideline on the floor, so when it suddenly turned into a secure doorway, I was surprised. I looked back, confused. It didn’t feel like we’d been walking very long.

  Charlotte must have noticed my expression. “Although we’re running all the tracking and data processing in the command center, so many of our members have been stopping in to get updates, I decided to arrange a monitoring room in one of the conference rooms near the main entrance.”

  As she stepped up to the door, it slid open, revealing a large darkened room. In the middle of the table was a massive hologram, which displayed what I could only assume was a realtime image of phobos.

  There were six or seven people sitting around, either working on tablets or watching the hologram. I nodded towards Nora, who was sitting in one corner, before sinking into one of the seats. Underneath the hologram were three different countdowns, and just as I slipped into a chair, the top one hit zero. As it did, a small section of the hologram flared red.

  It took me a moment to realize what happened one of the super weapons had fired. Probably the rail driver, based upon the small impact site.

  Despite the relatively small impact site, the attack had apparently caused some significant damage. The surface of the moon cracked, and a significant section of it started to split and float away.

  Before it got very far, tentacles shot out from the rupture in the moon’s surface, grasped the debris, and pulled it back. Patching the damage the best it could.

  I didn’t know how big Phobos was, but considering how little of the moon had broken off and how close those tentacles were to the surface, the moon must have been absolutely full of Antithesis biomass. Not only that, but the mass was strong enough to fly through space, tough enough to survive samurai super weapons, and smart enough to rebuild its defenses on the fly.

  “Something tells me these superweapons aren’t going to do enough to stop this thing,” I muttered quietly.

  Charlotte nodded. “I had the same thought. I really hope the super weapons manage to destroy most of it, because in the end, killing it is going to fall to us.”

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