Chapter 67: Trust No One

"Um... according to these records," Aaron said lazily, clicking his mouse, "the apostles had no intention of letting you go, much less paying such a lavish reward, you were supposed to be head of security... the decision to honor your resignation and increase the reward was one of the first actions of the collective mind."

"Shit!" Cursed Daisy, finding confirmation of her assumptions.

Even yesterday everything was fine. Brennan was more than happy with the position she found herself in after completing the most important assignment of her life. Not only did she receive proper treatment, but she was handsomely paid. So much so that she could have afforded not to work for the rest of her life and forgot both the fanatics and their two-minute god and the Shield and Hydra forever, but Johnson, that toothless old soldier bitch, came along and ruined everything. In her mind Daisy did not now separate the messenger from the bad news he had brought, though, judging sensibly, she ought to have thanked the colonel for the timely information. Frankly, she was fortunate that Johnson could not have found a more trustworthy person than she in the situation. The aloofness and squabbling nature of her former rival played into Daisy's hands, perhaps even saved her life.

"Can you see what else your "God" has done?" Daisy asked with unconcealed irony in her voice. She had no fear of offending Aron, for she had already made sure that the guy was as pragmatic as she was, for example, calling the creation of the apostles not a god like everyone else, but a collective mind.

"Just the stuff about the new appointments... the stuff that's in the common access... well, let's see... Mace Carson is now in your place and she's dragged a bunch of her people behind her, naturally moving the undesirables along. There's an even bigger reshuffle in the maintenance department, almost all the executives have been replaced..."

"And all this is "his" orders?"

"Yes," Aaron was clearly not particularly interested in what God did, "and what do you really care who paid for your pension and who was appointed to your old place?"

"I don't," Daisy said, "don't worry about it."

Brennan hurriedly said goodbye to the boy and left his office. Aaron noticed the strange concern of his lover, but, as usual, did not pay any attention to it. Sleeping with Brennan had been profitable while she was his boss, and now that she was a free bird, albeit one with a deep wallet, they had little in common. He wasn't, after all, a photo model or a hero-lover; with that kind of money Daisy could easily find a replacement for him, if she hadn't already.

The newly minted millionaire herself was in no hurry to rejoice in her sudden wealth. Changing with the help of a nano-mask appearance, she sneaked into the laboratory complex, in this she received help from Johnson fake pass, her own had already been revoked by this time, and who in his right mind would so get up, using for a secret entry into a secret facility own pass.

At first glance inside the complex almost nothing has changed, but after a couple of minutes Daisy noticed something amiss: there were significantly more cameras, but fewer people, although here and before much was done by automation, just now it became even more noticeable.

In fact, Daisy didn't really have a specific plan. She simply barreled through the familiar corridors, noticing all the changes. After five minutes of wandering around the complex, Brennan finally discovered something that might shed some light on the situation.

"There used to be no post here."

Trying to get past the security post in front of the entrance to a particularly important laboratory facility, Daisy found out two most unpleasant facts. First, the guard at the post, a slightly overweight girl with a dispassionate expression, was unfamiliar to her, and second, the pass issued to her by her former rival did not open all the doors.

"Your security clearance is insufficient," the guard informed her without a muscle twitching.

"What? There must be some mistake, try again!" Brennan demanded, feigning either indignation or astonishment.

Of course she wasn't hoping the second time the badge would suddenly be high-level enough to admit, she just wanted to distract the guard for a second before she knocked her out. Except the guard wasn't so naive, or maybe that was her instructions. Without letting on that she suspected something was wrong, she reached for the alarm button under the desk, but Daisy was faster. She grabbed an office pen from the desk, used it to nail the woman's palm to the mouse pad, then released the improvised weapon and sent her adversary into the realm of sleep with a pair of precise and confident blows.

"No you don't," Daisy whispered, securing the unconscious woman to her workstation with the belt she had removed from her own waistband so that from the outside it looked like she was scrutinizing something on a computer monitor, "we don't need the alarm yet."

She just wanted to check quietly that her fears, like a contagion passed down from Johnson, weren't unfounded. There was no reason to ruin her life by becoming a target for such an organization.

When Daisy was already planning to write herself down as the latest loser, Fortune finally threw out a lucky take in her honor as well. The lab door suddenly opened from the inside. Playing with a key chain, a skinny man over 40 in jeans and a greasy sweatshirt stepped toward Brennan.

"Great!" - Brennan rejoiced to herself. It would have been a problem for her to find and retrieve the right data from the secure computers herself. Much easier to get this man to do everything for her.

She didn't have time to speculate; there might well be something in the security system, something in case the guards were incapacitated. Some kind of password control that only the guard from the post knows. So, to show at once the seriousness of her intentions, Brennan stepped toward the man, drawing a double-edged dagger into the light. When he saw what he thought was a psychopathic woman with a weapon, the man backed away, trying to get some words out of himself. If he wanted to use the power of his eloquence, he was doing extremely lousy; Daisy couldn't even understand what he was talking about, so she concentrated on explaining to the man as quickly as possible what she needed from him.

Stabbing the point of her blade into the wall, a centimeter from his face, proved a very effective way to get her captive to pay careful attention to her every word. Like most scientists, much less men, this specimen was not particularly brave. Fortunately for Brennan, he was also not a fanatic like Yun Li. She would have rather let herself be cut alive than give out important information to the enemy, but there were few of them, and almost all of them fulfilled their dream by becoming part of their God.

"You have ten seconds to explain to me, in plain and simple language, what your 'God' is up to," Brennan muttered with a chilling composure, not breaking eye contact with the man.

"I... I... I don't know..." the scientist babbled, but quickly realized that he'd said the wrong thing, "I'm new here! I really don't know anything... believe me, I beg you."

Daisy could clearly see how terrified her victim was. The quivering lips, the convulsive, confused breathing, and the boundless panic in his eyes, but had her luck been so fleeting?

"Then find someone who knows, or I swear I'll kill you! I want information!" Brennan blurted out, losing patience, and thrust the edge of the blade toward the man's neck for more convincing.

"But there's no one here but me!" The wretched man howled, "No one works here all the time! It's all automatic!"

Brennan's eyes narrowed warningly. That look said, "Rest assured, I will keep my promise!"

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"I won't even be able to download data from the server!" feeling the breath of death hit the man in panic, "I don't even know what software the local equipment runs on, there are no control interfaces!"

"Then why are you here at all? Don't be silly!" Daisy roared, not letting the machinery get away from the wall.

"I was called here to fix a broken-down Stark 2000!"

"A Stark 2000?" Brennan wondered, "A mechanical arm?"

"Yeah, yeah, it's all on there, a bunch of those manipulators, I just fixed one of them, you can check for yourself!"

Pushing the technician ahead of her, Brennan visually inspected the room, so carefully guarded by "God. Unfortunately, her knowledge was insufficient to understand the purpose of the great variety of equipment assembled here, not counting the infamous Stark-2000 arm and its modifications, of which there were indeed plenty. These things had been used everywhere in the complex before, but they were needed to facilitate people's work, and here they really seemed to be the main workers. The rest of the devices that Daisy saw... apparently they weren't designed for human use: no hint of the usual computers, much less monitors. It was clearly something beyond the scope of what the scientists of the organization had been doing before the resurrection of their Godhead.

As she surveyed the sights of the laboratory, the sights surveyed her in return. All the metal hands froze, the cameras and sensors mounted on them drilling the entrant with their mechanical gaze - an eerie sight. Brennan felt a shiver run through her body.

Then her attention was drawn to a metal container, shaped like a coffin, set in the very center of the room. To it converged numerous tangles of wires and tubes, with incomprehensible purpose, something similar she had seen in the place where the brains extracted from, as Yun Li said, "the chosen ones" were stored. But there was too much space for a brain in that container.

"What's that?" She pointed at the object she was interested in with her blade.

"I don't know..."

"Who installed all this?" Daisy came in from the other side.

It hadn't been a week since she'd been fired, someone had to have had this place built in such a short time.

"I don't know..."

"Useless," Brennan said with a frustrated sigh, knocking out the technician.

With her blade out in front of her just in case, Daisy squeezed between the mechanical arms dangling from the walls. As she approached the crate, she tried to scratch its surface or find a way to lift the lid, but failed. The metal is very strong. Finding no way to see what was inside, she cut one of the tubes connected to the device. The knife handled it playfully.

A lingering odor hung in the air, sour with a touch of iron, and a thin stream of murky slime flowed from the tube, but it quickly dried up, as if the container had been provided with a stopper in case of damage from the outside. "There's obviously something organic in there, looks a lot like liquid from brain containers," Daisy concluded from the contents of the tube.

The girl's act of vandalism was clearly not to the liking of the machinery in charge: all of it moved, and the ones closest to Brennan even attempted to attack her.

"Fuck off!" she shouted, but hurried to get out of the encirclement and back to the guard post.

Fortunately the many manipulators had not been designed by their creator to perform tasks like capturing people. Their speed and degrees of freedom were often very limited, and they were unable to keep up with the nimble girl.

At the guard post, Daisy noticed something amiss: the camera above the guard's head, which was supposed to, following an algorithm, make cyclic turns around the room, suddenly stopped. The mechanical pupil focused, taking in her face with an inanimate stare. "But no one controls the cameras, they're fully automatic!" - flashed through the girl's mind before the guard's computer emitted a warning signal.

In the next instant a red light went on over the girl's head and an alarm siren sounded in the air.

"What the..." Daisy was surprised, but then her gaze fell on the camera still watching her, "Yeah, I should have known. "Kiss my ass!" She pointed her middle finger at the camera.

There was nothing else for her to do here, so Daisy hurriedly left the complex. To do so, she had to change her appearance several times with the help of a nano-mask and some employees she could get her hands on. In doing so, she also took her victims' clothes.

Though not ironclad, she did have evidence. Unfortunately, it fit into the lousiest possible scenario, and we had to get out of the place and figure out what to do next. Damn Johnson had simply shifted the responsibility to her! But she was in no danger of anything other than a loss of pride from having to obey the spoiled daughter of one of the apostles she despised... speaking of apostles.

Brennan recalled her brief acquaintance with these ladies. They gave her a rather strange impression. Accustomed to Yun Li's fanaticism, she had expected to see a similar glow in the eyes of the people responsible for all this outrage. But they deceived her expectations. None of them seemed overly excited about the success of the main venture of her life; on the contrary, they seemed to be uncomfortable in the complex, as if it were all some sort of unpleasant duty. Thinking about it now, and comparing the behavior of the apostles with my assumptions about their "God

"Are they aware of what their Deity is doing?" - Brennan wondered, "and if they don't know, what effect will this information have on them?"

After thinking it over carefully, Daisy decided it was worth trying to help the apostles as an informant and see what would happen. If she was wrong, it wouldn't make things worse. However, to avoid unnecessary risk, messages to the apostles should be sent anonymously. Eh, it would be nice if they could deal with their "God" themselves and cover her ass from revenge at the same time. There was no doubt in Brennan's mind that he would retaliate.

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