Cassie muttered something that she didn't bother to share and dropped her father's sword.

As she did, the skull leveled out as the top half hit the floor, landing on a burning cubicle wall. Part of me marveled that any part of the skull was working, but I hadn't gotten a good enough look after she'd cut it.

She'd cut it diagonally from one side of the bottom upward, revealing Dr. Mind, but not slicing into him—much. She'd cut into the outside that the brain's tendrils extended into, but not the main body of it. While she'd cut into the ceramic container at the center of the skull, destroying Dr. Mind's primary life support environment and many of the skull's internal systems with it, Dr. Mind still lived.

Worse, some portion of the skull's offensive systems worked because the mouth had begun to glow greenish-white, gathering energy to finish Cassie off.

That wasn't an assumption either. Dr. Mind's PA buzzed with static, but he half-shouted, half-gargled his way through saying, "Die!"

I, meanwhile, had fired off a killbot and narrowcast my sonics into the open skull from above, hoping a new vulnerability had opened up.

Cassie wasn't waiting for rescue. She'd jumped sideways, pulling her gun around and aiming it toward the brain in the middle. Dr. Mind didn't fail to notice this, firing a beam from the mouth before the skull even fully turned toward her.

Likely damaged, the mouth's beam couldn't seem to point in a straight line anymore, spraying instead of generating a continuous beam, and starting fires and melting every cubicle within thirty feet.

As the remaining guards in that section tried to roll away despite Camille's gravity well, Cassie locked in. Her gun fired, its beam as straight and precise as Dr. Mind's no longer could be.

Before my killbot reached its target, her beam turned Dr. Mind's brain into a greasy pile of ashes.

Dr. Mind's beam stopped as the skull's metal melted, the ceramic blackened and shattered, and the remains fell to the ground.

"Asshole," Cassie muttered over the group channel as I recalled the killbot.

She shook her head and then stared, running over to the spot where she'd cut into Dr. Mind's skull and pulling out a section of blade from the rubble. Slipping it into the sword's scabbard, she grabbed the hilt and repeated the move, testing if it would stay in place.

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It clicked in, and she asked me, "Can you fix it?"

Replying through my implant, I said, "Not now, but I should be able to at home. Worst case scenario, I can make a new one."

"I'd like this one," Cassie said, "but whatever. We can worry about that when we get home."

She turned around, giving the room a once-over. She wasn't alone. I hadn't been paying attention to anything other than Dr. Mind, either.

A tall, silver-haired man with a long scar on his cheek held his hands in the air, shouting, "We surrender," over his own personal PA, a triangular protrusion on the breastplate of his black uniform—Rook's design. It appeared to have been reverse-engineered to imitate one of Grandpa's.

My implant labeled him as "Edward Alan Branch, Night Commander of the Nine's Island Command Center." It added, "Mercenary. Expelled from the French Foreign Legion. Reads romance novels. Facebook account currently controlled by Russian botnet."

Branch, whoever he was, was older. I supposed he might not be very savvy on social media.

Via implant, Haley asked, "Can I use everyone's PAs?"

"Sure." I gave her control.

Her voice boomed out across the room, "Everyone who wants to surrender should drop your weapons, all of them, and stand next to the walls."

To our implant channel, she added, "Gravitystar, let them go."

Camille let out a sigh and said, "I'll be happy to."

Everyone dropped their weapons and migrated to the walls on either side of the room without complaint. They didn't complain when we stuck them to the walls with goo either, not even Night Commander Edward Branch.

He did look down at the streams of gray goo and frown, but that wasn't much of a reaction. When he looked up, he asked, "How long does it last?"

"An hour or more," I said, "but it depends on many different factors. It could be as many as five. I tweaked the formula for extra time before we went in. I don't know how much."

Branch continued to frown, but said, "As long as we don't starve or die in a fire, we'll be fine then."

Noting that the fires around Dr. Mind's skull had gone out, I said, "Unless you're already starving, I wouldn't worry."

Branch shook his head. Next to him, a smaller, overweight man looked down at the ground. Despite the ominous, black, "legion of evil"-style armor, he didn't have the intimidating presence you'd expect. It wasn't the weight either. It was the slouching.

My implant labeled him, "Brian Hart. Assistant Director of Teleportation Operations. Plays MMORPGs more than 20 hours a week. Attempting to become an MMORPG influencer. Has 27 subscribers."

Hal had said pressing them on their weak points might give us a tactical advantage, but pointing out his subscriber numbers just seemed mean—not to mention unnecessary as it turned out. He started talking on his own.

Looking up at me, he said, "I didn't know what I was signing up for. I don't want to go to jail. I'll tell you anything. How about this? Look in the back of the teleportation room. You wanted to kill Dr. Mind, right? You'd better look back there."

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