Chapter 65: WB-17

They brought Field Unit 03 to the surface inside a containment shell. Dorn refused to let anyone carry it on their back.

The old harness stayed folded beneath the casing while two technicians moved the unit on a reinforced cart. Vale went to medical. The creature followed in a sealed transport box large enough that three people had to guide it through the Western Access gate.

Nate came up last with Darek.

The moment they crossed into Operations, Renn was waiting. She looked at the blood on Nate’s clothes, then at the cart. "What did you find?"

Dorn removed her helmet. "Something your Directorate should’ve told Field Command existed."

Renn looked at the faded lettering.

IMPERIAL RECLAMATION PROGRAM

Her expression changed very slightly.

"You know it?" Darek asked.

"I know the name."

"That’s already more than us."

Renn walked around the cart without touching it. "Where?"

"Inside the shifted section."

"Operational?"

"It scanned Calder."

Renn stopped.

Nate wished Darek had chosen a different sentence.

"It did what?"

Dorn answered. "Detected an available Node. Offered host compatibility. Then warned that successful use could permanently prevent future natural Skill selections."

Renn turned toward Nate. "Did you connect to it?"

"No."

"Touch it?"

"No."

"Activate anything?"

"It activated itself."

Dorn stepped between them and the cart. "Interrogation later. I want to know why a portable Imperial device with that warning was buried under Varen."

Renn looked at her. "So do I."

For once, Nate believed her.

Seris arrived forty minutes later. She came through the Operations doors carrying two cases and stopped when she saw the Field Unit behind the containment screen.

"What is that?"

Tessa pointed toward the old label.

Seris read it. Then read it again. "Where did you get this?"

"Underground."

"I assumed that."

Tessa handed her a pair of gloves. Seris put them on.

Dorn had allowed the casing to be opened again after technicians confirmed there was no active transmission. Five empty slots. One black residual capsule. The small display remained dark.

Seris crouched beside it. "Power source?"

"Internal cell is almost dead," Tessa said. "We disconnected it."

"Then how did it activate?"

"That’s one of today’s better questions."

Seris inspected the rear housing. Nate stood on the other side of the containment screen. He wasn’t supposed to be helping. Dorn had made that explicit. He was there because nobody had decided where else to put him.

Darek sat beside him with his arms folded. "You keep leaning."

Nate straightened. "I can see better."

"Glass is transparent."

Seris found a maintenance port beneath the casing. "External power. Low current."

One technician connected it. Nothing happened. Seris tried again. The unit clicked. The screen returned.

FIELD UNIT 03

Then:

RESIDUAL PATTERN PRESENT

RECONSTRUCTION READY

The capsule remained in its slot. Seris looked at it. "That’s a Skill?"

Renn stood behind her. "A pattern."

"Difference?"

"If the program worked, apparently not enough."

Seris looked back at her. "You really only know the name."

"Yes."

That seemed to annoy Seris more than if Renn had known nothing. She turned back to the display. "Can we read storage without initiating reconstruction?"

The technician navigated through the old menu. Most sections were corrupted. One wasn’t.

FIELD PROCEDURE

Seris opened it. The document was short. Too short for something capable of ruining a person’s future.

INSERT VERIFIED RESIDUAL PATTERN

CONNECT HOST

CONFIRM AVAILABLE NODE

INITIATE RECONSTRUCTION

Beneath that sat a warning.

FORCED PROPOSAL MAY PERMANENTLY DISRUPT NATURAL SELECTION FUNCTION

Tessa leaned closer. "So it recreates a Skill selection?"

"One Skill," Seris said.

"From that?" She pointed at the black capsule.

Seris scrolled. "Looks like it."

Nate watched from behind the glass. A rejected Skill from decades ago could be put into that machine. Then offered again. His empty Node responded faintly just thinking about it.

Darek noticed him rubbing his sternum. "Still doing something?"

"The Node."

"What about it?"

"Reacting."

Darek looked at the machine. Then at Nate. "Don’t."

"I haven’t done anything."

"I’ve known you long enough for that sentence to have a second half."

Nate dropped his hand.

Seris found the medical records next. That killed most of the excitement in the room. The surviving files covered fourteen field-unit activations. Several were incomplete. Nine contained enough follow-up to be useful.

Every successful recipient had developed the same problem afterward. Their Classes remained functional. Existing Skills remained functional. Circuits continued developing. New Nodes could still form.

But when those Nodes became ready for selection, nothing came. No options, no Skill proposals. An empty capacity with no natural way to fill it.

Tessa stared at the report. "They traded every future choice for one reconstructed Skill."

"Yes," Seris said.

"Who agreed to that?"

Renn answered from behind her. "People who thought the one Skill was worth it."

Dorn looked toward the black capsule. "Or people who weren’t given much choice."

Nobody argued with that either.

Nate kept reading. One case had opened two additional Nodes after reclamation. Both remained empty until the subject’s death. Another had survived long enough to reach Third Circuit. Still no further natural selections.

The machine did exactly what the warning claimed. It gave one old Skill back. Then shut the door behind it.

For almost any Awakened, that price was insane.

Nate looked down before anyone caught his expression. Path Reclaimer had never offered him a normal second selection. Or a third. His Nodes opened. Forsaken Claim filled them. Losing future natural proposals might mean losing something his Class had never intended to give him.

Darek shifted beside him. Nate didn’t look over. "What?" he asked.

"You’ve gone quiet."

"I’m reading."

"You’re always reading."

Nate kept his eyes on the display. Darek let it go. For now.

The pattern inside Field Unit 03 turned out to be Impact Frame. A defensive Skill. Rare, according to the archive. Good enough that an extraction team eighty-two years earlier had apparently carried the Field Unit specifically to reconstruct it.

Nate read the description once. Then lost interest. He already had something better sitting in reserve.

What mattered was the directory. The brief list he’d seen before Dorn killed the power had not come from the capsule. It was part of an old catalog. Seris found it buried beneath maintenance records.

Hundreds of entries had been corrupted. Most that survived were marked:

DEPLETED

Others:

RECONSTRUCTION FAILED

A smaller number carried a different designation.

PATTERN RETAINED

Tessa scrolled slowly. "How many?"

"Thirty-one readable."

"Thirty-one Skills?"

"Thirty-one records. We don’t know what’s actually left."

Nate moved closer to the containment glass. There were ordinary names. Skills he had never heard of.

Stone Pulse. Quiet Hand. Deep Anchor. Burning Wake.

Some records had only codes.

Then Nate saw it.

WB-17

He remembered the same identifier flashing before the Field Unit had shut down underground.

"That one."

Seris stopped. Dorn looked toward Nate. "What?"

"I saw it downstairs."

Seris opened the entry. Most fields were inaccessible. One line remained.

RECLAMATION PRIORITY: ABSOLUTE

Tessa frowned. "That’s not a normal classification."

"No," Renn said. Her voice had changed.

Nate looked at her. "You’ve seen it?"

"Not that code."

"But?"

Renn came closer to the screen. "I’ve seen old procurement language. Absolute priority was reserved for material they weren’t willing to lose."

Seris tried the attached record. Corrupted. Another. Locked. A third opened.

Video. Twenty-one seconds.

The image was nearly colourless. A wide field. Concrete barriers. Smoke. Bodies. A man stood near the centre. The timestamp was too damaged to read. His uniform had already been torn open across one side.

Someone was firing at him. The first shot hit his chest. He moved backward half a step. The second struck his shoulder. He kept coming.

Nate leaned closer. The man was Second Circuit. The recording identified that much.

A Second Circuit soldier approached from the opposite side with a heavy armament. They collided. The other soldier’s weapon entered the man’s abdomen. Deep.

Nate expected him to stop.

Instead his body changed. Lines appeared beneath his skin. Not light. Something darker. They spread from the Core, across his ribs, into both arms and down his neck. His posture shifted.

The armament was still inside him. He grabbed its shaft. Pulled himself farther onto it. Then punched the other soldier. The man’s helmet broke. So did the barrier behind him.

Nobody in Operations spoke.

The video jumped. Seven seconds missing. The same man was running. His left arm hung wrong. He used it anyway. A third opponent entered the frame. Then a fourth. One of them had a Second Circuit signature. The other reading spiked higher. Third.

The Third Circuit struck him once. The image shook from the impact. The man disappeared through a concrete wall.

Nate thought the recording was over. He came back through the hole. Slower. Bleeding badly. Still moving.

The Third Circuit backed up. Only one step. But Nate saw it.

The recording ended. A single frame remained. Text over the man’s body.

WB-17 ACTIVE

Seris opened the attached classification. This file wasn’t corrupted. Two words appeared.

WARBODY

Nate didn’t move.

Tessa read the description first. "Full-body combat conversion."

Seris scrolled. The technical language was dense. Enough survived to understand the principle. Warbody didn’t create an attack. It altered the host.

Muscular safeguards reduced. Circulatory limits raised. Circuit throughput increased. Trauma response suppressed during activation. Structural reinforcement redirected toward immediate combat performance.

Dorn read over Seris’s shoulder. "How long?"

"Activation?"

"Yes."

Seris searched. "Depends on the host."

"Cost?"

Another file opened. This one contained medical images. The room changed.

The first Warbody user had survived. So had the second. By the fifth recorded activation, one subject had permanent tendon damage. Another developed fractures along the same bones repeatedly. One user’s Circuit pathways had begun scarring from excessive throughput. Another could no longer fully extend his right hand.

The man from the video appeared near the bottom. Thirty-four recorded activations. Final condition:

COMBAT INELIGIBLE

Age: twenty-nine.

Darek exhaled through his nose. "So that’s why they didn’t keep using it."

Seris opened one final note. "Apparently they did." Darek looked over. She showed him the date.

The program had continued for another seventeen years.

Renn’s face hardened.

Nate barely noticed. He was looking at the medical images. Torn muscle. Damaged connective tissue. Fractures. Bodies pushed beyond what they could safely recover from.

His left shoulder felt perfectly normal. Body Memory had restored damage months old in a single morning.

Nate said nothing.

Dorn shut the archive down herself. "We’re done."

Tessa looked at her. "We’ve barely opened it."

"We found an Imperial program capable of forcing Skills into people and permanently altering their development. That’s enough for one afternoon."

Seris reluctantly disconnected the power. The screen went black.

Nate remained by the glass. "Where’s WB-17?"

Dorn turned. "What?"

"The pattern."

"We don’t know that a pattern still exists."

"It said retained."

"The catalog said retained when that record was last updated."

"When?"

Seris answered. "Eighty-one years ago."

Nate looked at the Field Unit. One portable machine. One capsule. Thirty-one readable retained records. Somewhere under Varen, perhaps nothing remained. Perhaps thirty-one did.

Dorn walked toward him. "This does not become your project."

Nate met her eyes. "I didn’t say it was."

"You asked where Warbody was before asking where Vale nearly died."

Nate had no answer ready for that.

Dorn waited. Then shook her head once and walked away.

Darek stayed. His gaze moved from Nate to the dead screen. "She has a point."

"I know."

"Do you?"

Nate looked through the containment glass. Impact Frame sat inside Field Unit 03. Second Vector waited in reserve. His third Node remained empty.

Warbody had destroyed every body in the medical records sooner or later.

Nate flexed his restored shoulder. "I want to see the rest of the archive."

Darek laughed once. There wasn’t much humor in it. "That’s not what she meant."

"I know."

A technician entered to seal the Field Unit for transfer. The black capsule disappeared beneath the casing. Nate watched until the lid locked.

Then his hidden interface flickered. Not Forsaken Claim. The empty Node. Waiting.

Somewhere under Varen, WB-17 had once been stored.

Nate wanted to know if it still was.