SCMR Chpt 20

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==Chapter 20 - Self Configuring Modular Robot==
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Adept Janelle Rhys...
...gaped openly at the ROM agent report from inside the Davion Household. There are levels of access, there are proper ways to go about doing things.
Letting people who don't understand why something can't be done, (or shouldn't) free to do that thing was almost as horrifying as the profiles of the persons in question.
In the old days, Comstar ROM would handle a mess like this quietly-a lab accident, or a transport accident, something subtle.
but that was the old days, before the Great Houses started to get wise to careful deflections and deniable operations. Worse still, the targets in question are still children, and their coming to harm would motivate someone far more than a remote academic, or a statistic.
Especially in the care of a Royal House.
It will have to be done delicately. she decided, if it is to be done at all.
She tapped the ash from her Avalon Gold cigarette into a powered ash compactor on her desk.
"Adept! Glad I caught you." The Precentor New Avalon was in her office doorway, apparently willingly, something unusual when dealing with the Station Chief for ROM on New Avalon (especially after a string of incidents less than ten years ago that got her previous superior removed from the posting.)
"Precentor, this is unexpected..."
"I received an eyes-only from the home office." the Precentor said with a smile that told Janelle her career was in serious jeopardy.
"Oh?" she cautiously asks
"Yes. I'm to share it with you." he said, striding in, "Don't worry, nobody below our level has a clue what it says. I assume you have your security devices active?"
"Of course." ....okay, I'm not being removed. She watched him close and seal the door before he laid the encrypted chit on her desk.
She took it up, and plugged it into a reader.
The first gigabyte of data was a litany of horrors. The last bit, the bit that was why the whole thing was encrypted, contained instructions.
The Primus's instruction was blunt, to the point, and directed as much at ROM as it was directed at the Precentors in the First Circuit.
"You're smiling, why are you smiling?" she asked when she finished.
"Because your reports to my desk say the Davions may be working on just what we need to deal with this...and because you're supposed to support my effort to get them on-board in dealing with the Callison situation and this mechanical plague!"
"So...I don't have to arrange the termination of seven children?" she asked, "Is that what you're saying?"
"Very much, though I would like you to have arrangements made to...secure the children for the Order."
"Why me?" she asks
"Because anyone else I might send, would flinch." he said, "I'm going to offer Prince Davion Comstar's assistance with his little pre-academy program. You're going to be part of that assistance, and you're going to help them to succeed. Then, you're going to secure the whole thing for the Order. He's growing the kind of genius that MUST be under the Order's control for the safety of the human race...or it must be destroyed. I'd favor it if you didn't have to kill them all, so you can work on black-bagging the little tykes and bringing them to Terra."
"As Blake wills it." she nodded.
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