Date: June 2, 2440 Time: 8:00 AM CST
“Fire that useless general. Now.”
“We can’t,” Vasquez snapped back, voice sharp but controlled. “He was blindsided—same as we were. Marmaduke played him like he played all of us.”
“I warned you,” Matheson said coldly, his gaze unwavering. “You saw a farmer with calloused hands and a polished handshake. I told you not to underestimate him.”
Director Halvorsen folded his arms. “The issue isn’t what he did. It’s what the hell we do now.”
“What we always do,” Vasquez murmured, eyes flicking to the real-time convoy feed. “We pivot. We deal.”
“Deal?” one of the directors scoffed. “With a man who just got crowned by aliens? He took a blood oath in a hay field and didn’t blink. That’s not a negotiator—that’s a warlord in waiting.”
Halvorsen cut through the noise. “He hasn’t moved against us. Not once. And those aliens didn’t make him High Lord to threaten us—they did it to avoid us. He’s their firewall.”
Matheson nodded grimly. “When the next species shows up—and they will—this becomes his headache. Not ours.”
“We haven’t lost anything tangible,” Vasquez said. “Nothing vital. Not yet.”
“He’s demanding finalization of the Missouri and Kansas corridor agreements,” another executive said, scrolling furiously. “He wants parts of Oklahoma and Nebraska, too.”
“Not to him,” Halvorsen clarified. “To a sovereign trust. Legally autonomous. He’s shielding himself from liability while using our own precedents against us.”
“How the hell did he find out we called that region a wasteland?” Josif Ottinger asked, voice rising. “That was internal. Not public. That wasn’t even in the minutes.”
Halvorsen narrowed his eyes. “Leonard wasn’t in that meeting.”
Silence fell like a dropped gavel.
“Then who?”
“He’s got ears in the room,” someone muttered. “Or a feed we didn’t catch.”
Vasquez shook her head slowly. “Or maybe we’re giving ourselves too much credit.”
Matheson turned. “Explain.”
“We didn’t need to leak it,” she said, turning the screen around. “We’ve said it so often it became instinct. Every time someone mentioned the Midwest, someone else said, ‘Wasteland. Better off cut loose.’ We stopped thinking. He didn’t.”
Halvorsen exhaled through his nose. “So he didn’t need a spy. He just needed to listen.”
“And now he’s weaponizing our own language,” Vasquez said. “He’s quoting our contempt back at us—justifying separation by citing our indifference.”
“How much time do we have to respond?”
Vasquez didn’t look away from the screen. “None. Google finalized its holdings transfer at 6:30 a.m. CST. Resource claims, title deeds, infrastructure—gone. The public statement was gracious. They wished him luck.”
Matheson hissed through his teeth. “Those bastards.”
“It’s done.”
“Is there any chance he can deliver?” Halvorsen asked.
Matheson pulled up a digital dossier. “He says he can restore full ag capacity within ten years—twenty million tons annually. Thirty million by year fifteen. He’s using pre-Collapse benchmarks.”
“Is he bluffing?”
“No,” Vasquez said. “He’s lowballing. He’s got V’ren logistics, unrestricted labor buy-in, and no bureaucratic choke points.”
Halvorsen leaned back, eyes distant. “Then we do nothing. Not today. We lost this round. He beat us clean. Next time—we adapt.”
The silence that followed was heavier than before.
Then, almost to herself, Vasquez asked, “How did we miss someone this dangerous?”
Matheson didn’t even look up. “Because he didn’t want to be found.”