Doc Holliday arranged for her presentation to be held at the TOC instead of her lab because it had bigger screens. Church and Wilson together, with Bug, Nikki, Yoda, and a dozen other department heads clustered around. Isaac Breslau and Ronald Coleman sat at the front near Doc, who stood and addressed the group.

“Okay,” she began, “we’ve been going over this for weeks, and as puzzles go, it’s got that ol’ Gordian knot beat six ways from Sunday. The challenge here is that we have a lot of pieces to that puzzle, but we are only just now getting a sense of what exactly this is.”

No one commented. Church nodded for her to continue.

“I’m going to give this to you point by point. Most of you know some of it because you’ve been working on your piece of it. I know most of it because … well, hell, guys, I’m the one giving the presentation, now, aren’t I?”

She picked up a small clicker and put up the first image.

“This is a 3D model of one of the exosuits based on the schematics we found. This is the K-110 fighting machine, which is the most recent one of its class described in the recovered data. Looks like a robot version of Quasimodo, all hunched over, but see there? The back is articulated, and there are servos so the driver of this nifty gizmo can stand straight.”

As they watched, the computer inserted a person into the suit, and it stood up.

“Now it looks more like the love child of Iron Man and one of those Transformer thingies,” said Doc. “Or, as Bug insists, something—god help me—called BattleTech.”

“Gundam!” yelled Nikki.

“Mazinger Z,” countered Yoda, “or Super Dimension Fortress Macross.”

Scott Wilson turned and gave them a withering look until they fell silent.

“And now we have this,” said Doc, and she fed a short video clip—poor resolution and from a distance—of a single fighting machine going through its paces. “This is footage we got from the button cam worn by Top Sims. As you can see, this isn’t something they’re just thinking about building. Top reports that they had several of these, and drivers—as you can see—are actively training.”

She ran the footage three times.