My volume dropped, the venom scaling back. “The stakes are too high. You either stop, slow down, and listen, or that’s it. Last effort you’ll ever get from me. I’m offering you a solution.”

“Ultimatums are manipulative,” Marquis’ voice came through.

I could have killed him, if he were actually present.

“Fucking right they are. If anyone but you speaks, Amy, or if you give me a refusal instead of a hearing out, that’s it. I’m walking out of this room, and I’ll drop something massive on you from a place so high up you can’t even see me before I even run allow myself the chance of reaching out to you again. Decide.”

I had probably alienated so many people with the outburst. Hurt my standing with good capes.

I had tears in my eyes and I hated it. I gave so much of myself to reach out, for the sake of others, and even for her, to extend her small graces and benefits of doubt, and she didn’t even give me a spare thought. It wasn’t that she didn’t reach back. It was that she didn’t even think to.

“Okay,” she said.

“The Nursery creation. It produces lifeforms?”

“…Yes.”

“Out of imperfect meat? Like most power-created life?”

“…It does. Yes.”

“It spawns things that produce the aura, area-altering effect?”

“…Yes.”

She hesitated before each statement. Being careful, holding herself back.

“Can it produce life that doesn’t have that interdimensional effect?”

“The spawn it makes can.”

“Then can you have it send a stream of its minions to the quarantine site? Have them file in, dig things up, push things around, and fight the machines. It should be single file, past the danger area where an ongoing fight would disrupt quarantine.”

“I can’t.”

I tensed.

“But that’s not me being unwilling. It’s the control over the lesser minions I’m worried about. I—”

Amy hesitated.

I glared at the screen.

“—I could go. I’ll give individual instructions to each spawned giant we’re sending to the quarantine zone, until we have enough there or we find another option.”

“Does that postpone the creation of the other SDI soldiers?” I could hear a Shin-accented voice. Luis’s colleague.

“Probably, but we’re ahead of schedule,” Amy said.

I looked at Narwhal. She didn’t look happy, but she was nodding a bit.

Delays, at least, were a bit of sugar, making an imperfect compromise a bit easier to swallow.

“…The other problem is that they’re strong, but they’ll lose eventually,” Amy said. “How is this any better?”