Chapter 290: Scheduled Personnel Integration

The next morning, Hans returned to the Tech Center.

This time, it wasn’t because of the research happening inside.

Marcus Lenhert had finally arrived for his Personnel Integration.

Hans found him near the Integration section with Johannes standing a short distance away. Dianne was already there as well, carrying another set of reports that Hans knew she would eventually make him read.

Marcus looked toward him.

"Commander. I... I don’t know what to say."

Hans raised a brow. "Nervous?"

Marcus looked toward the Integration Pods again.

Unlike Tyrus, he didn’t spend much time staring at the rest of the Tech Center. His attention settled on the pod itself, then on the monitoring terminals and the equipment connected around it.

Something about the arrangement pulled at an older memory.

It wasn’t the same machine, but something about it reminded Marcus of the sealed processing equipment underneath the Conservatory.

Clinical. Isolated. Built for work that ordinary people were never supposed to see.

The Integration Pod was much cleaner but somehow, that didn’t make it look friendlier.

Hans noticed where he was staring. "Does it look comfy?"

Marcus released a long breath. "Better than some of the places I’ve slept these past few months."

He studied the pod again.

"What exactly happens once I get inside?"

Hans had already gone through this conversation once with Tyrus, so there wasn’t much reason to turn it into another long explanation.

"You will become part of the Golden Eagle Army under the same framework that supports my people. You’ll get the benefits that come with it."

Marcus narrowed his eyes slightly.

"And I’ll be tied to you for the rest of my life."

"If you choose to get inside that pod? Pretty much."

Hans gave him a small smile.

"So, what do you say, Agent Lenhert?"

Marcus clicked his tongue.

Hans let him think.

Marcus had spent years in the SAS. That wasn’t something a person threw away because another organization happened to have better equipment.

Marcus looked toward Johannes for a moment before returning his attention to Hans.

"The SAS gave me a lot."

Hans said nothing.

"But I’m not going to pretend the Central Directorate is still waiting somewhere for us to report back."

Marcus looked around the Integration section again.

"Your people are here. You’ve kept us alive and given us the resources to continue our work. I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about all of this."

He gestured loosely toward the Tech Center.

"Nothing like the present, Commander. I want to proceed."

Reechard had remained beside one of the terminals throughout the conversation. Once Marcus gave his answer, he finally moved.

"Then let’s begin. This way, Agent."

Several Tech Center personnel entered the Integration area and started preparing the pod while Reechard opened the control interface.

Hans had scheduled Marcus first for a reason.

The Tech Center could recover, reconstruct and decrypt compatible archives by itself. It couldn’t replace the context Marcus carried from years of working with SAS equipment, procedures and investigations.

Once the checks were finished, Marcus entered the pod and the Integration process began.

Hans stayed until everything proceeded normally. After that, there wasn’t much reason to stand around watching Marcus sleep for the next several hours.

Dianne was waiting for him.

"Commander. The first screening results from the recruitment program are in."

She handed him the report.

Several applicants had now made it through the first layers of background checking. Others still required more work because records were missing, conflicting or too incomplete to trust.

Hans skimmed through the pages.

It was a mix of military personnel, former security officers, some engineers, technicians, even doctors and researchers.

And another much larger group that wanted to become soldiers.

More than a thousand applications had sounded impressive when Dianne first told him. Now, it all sounded like paperwork.

"Found any good seeds?"

"A few. Mostly specialists and veterans."

Dianne flipped another page. "There are also four teenagers who stood out during the first screening."

Hans furrowed his brows. "Are you sure nobody’s going to sue me for child labor?"

"They were the ones who insisted on applying, Commander."

"Give me their files."

Dianne somehow already had four folders ready.

Hans stopped asking where she kept producing paperwork from and opened the first folder instead.

The photograph looked vaguely familiar.

A teenage boy stared back at him wearing an ordinary jacket. Nothing unusual there. Then Hans reached the attached recovery record.

Improvised road-sign armor. Carried a short bow. Rooftop survivor group.

"...Oh."

He remembered the recovery operation now.

Eight civilians. Four adults and four teenagers who had refused to leave their building until a recovery squad practically forced the issue.

The next file belonged to another boy from the same group.

Recovered carrying a machete. Initially resistant to evacuation.

The third boy was the one carrying a sharpened steel rod.

And the last folder belonged to the girl who was with them, the one evacuated with a schoolbag still pressed against her chest.

All four had survived together inside a commercial block while infected closed in around them. They had barricaded entrances, found maintenance routes through the building and even built makeshift rooftop crossings between structures.

Their decision-making back then was questionable. Their ability to survive wasn’t.

Hans continued reading.

After arriving at Route One, none of them became troublemakers either. They helped around the civilian area, carried materials, worked around the garden plots and receiving station, and apparently spent a lot of time watching Golden Eagle Army vehicles return from operations.

"These notes are pretty detailed. Since when do we have secret Military Police following teenagers around?"

"We don’t." Dianne flipped the folder toward him. "Route One kept intake and work records. The screeners combined those with the original recovery report."

Hans nodded at her response, then looked at the files again.

The three boys were easy enough to remember from the recovery report.

The girl hadn’t been carrying an improvised weapon, but she had stayed with the same group through all of it and still volunteered for military service afterward.

"Do they even know what they’re signing up for?"

"That’s what the interviews are for."

Hans closed the folders together.

"Don’t reject them just because they’re young. But don’t give them special treatment either."

"Isn’t it already special treatment that you haven’t rejected them yet, Commander?"

"Don’t play words with me now, Adjutant."

He gave the folders back to Dianne and moved on to the other applications.

The more he read, the more obvious the next problem became. The System could create trained soldiers for him in minutes.

Ordinary people didn’t work that way.

A technician could be integrated and still remain a technician. A teenager who survived on rooftops didn’t suddenly know how to fight in a mechanized platoon either.

If Hans really wanted civilians to become proper Golden Eagle Army personnel someday, they would need an actual way to train them.

The answer would eventually lead back to the Barracks, but that capability still needed research.

The Tech Center only had one Core Research Slot, and it was already occupied.

------

[ Advanced Radar Network ]

[ Research Status ]

Active

[ Research Director ]

Tyrus Shearman

------

Hans had no intention of interrupting it, but Pylow was another matter. He had already handed the weather records and northern reports to Tyrus before the Silverpeak situation exploded.

He might as well find out whether the man had discovered anything useful.

The Research Core remained busy when Hans entered. Radar simulations moved across the larger displays while assistants worked through another set of results.

Tyrus noticed him approaching.

"Ah, Commander. You again."

"Good morning to you too."

"Are you here for the Pylow reports?"

Hans smiled.

"Great. Saves me from explaining why I’m here."

Tyrus reached toward a stack beside his workstation.

Hans took the report.

"So you found something?"

"I didn’t find anything new. I remembered something old."

Hans raised a brow.

"What’s the mystery now?"

"Weather control. Climate control. Whichever term sounded more politically pleasing."

Tyrus tapped the folder.

"Some parts of the world don’t particularly enjoy their own weather, and DAEDALUS had a few ideas for correcting that... unfairness."

Hans stared at him.

"How the hell do you know that?"

Tyrus smiled.

"Trade secrets. I already told you how it worked before, Commander."

He tapped the folder again.

"Researchers talked to universities. Universities talked to contractors. Contractors talked to the military. Funding moved between all of them. Somebody always knew somebody."

"Even classified things?"

"Especially classified things. Those were usually the things people became nosy about."

Hans narrowed his eyes, and Tyrus shrugged in response.

"I never worked on it. I don’t know the exact hardware, the method they settled on, or how far they got. I don’t even remember what the final project was called."

His expression became slightly more serious.

"I remember what they were trying to do."

Hans looked down at the Pylow report.

"So the blizzards are artificial."

"Most likely. Pylow is cold, Commander. Snowstorms aren’t exactly a mystery there."

He flipped one of the pages.

"But I know what the weather around that region normally looks like, and what your people are reporting doesn’t fit it particularly well."

Tyrus leaned back. "Once? I would’ve blamed the mountains. Maybe twice."

He tapped the report again.

"Repeatedly, while I also happen to remember DAEDALUS people trying to control the weather around the same region?"

He shrugged.

"I’d be more surprised if the two weren’t related."

Tyrus picked up one of the drives.

"This is all I could pull from my old Shearman files. References, funding notes, a few reports and some names."

He handed it over.

"Don’t expect schematics. If I had those, we wouldn’t be having this conversation."

"Were you really a HELIX researcher and not DAEDALUS?" Hans wondered.

"I was a HELIX researcher." Tyrus corrected. "Now, I’m my dear Commander’s first and foremost Research Director."

"Drop the dear. I’m straight."

Tyrus waved him off.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night. Now, unless you have another national problem hidden in your pocket, get out. I still have research to finish."

Hans looked toward the simulations still running behind him. Tyrus was already half-focused on them again.

"I’ll leave you to your playground, then."

Tyrus didn’t answer. He was already reading the next set of results.