Once this stage of their work was complete, Matsuoka Industries would be able to manufacture microchips that were smaller, more reliable, and most of all cheaper than anyone else, and all in a fraction of the time per chip it took more conventional facilities. That was how they had sold the idea to the company’s overjoyed CEO. But as the technology mogul licked his lips over his new toy, he had no idea that the manufacturing device they were going to make at his facilities was capable of far more than even he imagined. So much, in fact, that in time the microchip would be made defunct by the incredible abilities that the new resonance technology would give humanity. But for now that was all moot. They needed the new tool in order to build the tiny and impossibly complex bio-devices that the group needed to bolster humanity’s defenses against the almost inevitable biological attack they were going to invite.

While Madeline had been playing corporate spy, Colonel Milton had moved to his new posting at Hanscom Base in New England. Unbeknownst to General Pickler, he had also started to recruit a small but highly capable team from among the many officers stationed there, giving him access to some of the skills and resources he would need to coordinate an international attack on the network of satellites above.

Ayala, meanwhile, had taken on the role of intermediary, for which her training made her uniquely qualified. She travelled almost constantly between North Dakota, Massachusetts, and DC, updating each arm of the team on progress, and sharing crucial information, while helping each maintain their all-important cover stories.

Neal remained, for now, the lone member of the team’s third branch. His role was more esoteric. Firstly, he had looked for ways to find and track the satellites above them, relying solely on passive sensor data gleaned without ever referencing what he was really doing. It was an intricate ballet, to be sure, forever dancing around his real goal, taking almost comically convoluted routes to track down four devices that were already, by design, pretty damn hard to find.

He had made a brief return to his old job at the Array in Arizona timed to overlap with a similar trip by Colonel Milton. They had tested some of his theories using its phenomenal network of antennae, but while they had been able to detect one of the satellites on a couple of sweeps, it had soon become clear that to track them accurately they would have focus far too much of the array’s attention on them, and risk alerting the constantly vigilant devices to the Array’s newfound affection for them.