The words penetrated through to Shahim, and he looked up at John like the savior that in many ways he was. Like the only man who could help him redeem himself for what he had done.

John saw this and put the fate of them all on this last statement, “Help me save our race from ourselves, Lord Mantil. Help me stop this madness.”

Shahim was still for a long, dry moment. And then he nodded.

John extended his hand and Shahim reached up and grasped it. As the beaten Agent arose to his feet, his list of tactical options sprang to life once more, unbidden. The list surged with new proposals. Shahim had a grip on his opponent and his machine mind thrummed with ways he could spin and throw the man, using his weight against him, negating John’s intact weapons array with physical blows to his head and face. But as Shahim looked into his would-be ally’s trusting eyes, he knew that the man had been right about him, and he was glad of it.

Deep within the substrate that housed his operating systems, he reached out and opened the virtual heart of his machine sub-consciousness. With precise mental movements, he began to reprogram it. He had an enemy, but it was not this man in front of him. It was time to put his crimes to right. It was time to salvage what honor he had left.

* * *

Fourteen hours beforehand, as he had closed the connection with the Council, John Hunt had debated his options. It had become riskier than he had ever wanted it to be, and he had considered rolling the dice and letting the team be discovered, allowing them to die if that was what happened. He could, hypothetically, start a new resistance, maybe even here in England, with all the additional access that would give him to them, but if he was discovered trying to save the American team, then John would be destroyed along with them, and, realistically, any chance for Earth’s survival would die with him.

He had debated it long and hard, for over a minute of real time, an age to his synthetic consciousness. He had wrestled for relative hours. But in the end, it came down to the same emotions that had swayed him to the resistance’s cause back on Mobilius: these people no more deserved to die than the billions of humans who remained completely unaware of the threat that hung over them.