Chapter 8 - CURRENT?
A year after Mercer slapped my hand away, I walked back into the same command center.
No undercover observer status.
No plain jacket.
Everyone knew why I was there.
The new resilience package had finished enterprise rollout.
Fort Langford was the last site on my review circuit.
Priya came with me.
Mercer saw us enter.
“Here to break something?”
Priya answered:
“Hopefully yours.”
He liked her.
Nobody understood why.
The room looked almost identical.
Same screens.
Same central table.
Different information in the corners.
Map age.
Source confidence.
Route validation date.
Small things.
The kind nobody puts in recruitment videos.
A captain briefed us on the changes.
Dana had transferred to another assignment three months earlier.
Promotion.
No grand farewell from our story.
People have careers after leaving our scene.
Lieutenant Park was now captain.
He still looked embarrassed whenever someone mentioned the day he laughed at me.
I stopped mentioning it.
Mercer had not.
Apparently he found it funny.
During the demonstration, central sync failed intentionally.
Amber border.
Thirty-two seconds.
An operator announced degraded status.
Mercer did not touch the console.
He asked:
“Field source?”
Operator answered.
“Two confirmations.”
“Route validation?”
“Current.”
“Continue.”
Simple.
No crisis.
Then Priya injected an expired local route package.
System rejected it.
Mercer smiled.
“You finally got your hard expiration.”
She answered:
“With override.”
He pointed at me.
“She ruined it.”
“Improved it.”
We argued for a minute.
Normal.
After the exercise, people went to lunch.
Mercer stayed.
So did I.
The central command chair sat empty.
He looked at it.
Then at me.
“You want to sit?”
“No.”
“Afraid?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
I walked toward the console.
He raised one eyebrow.
For a second I remembered his hand hitting mine.
The laughter.
The first wrong route.
The forty seconds when I believed I had saved the room because the screens became quiet.
I reached toward the map control.
Stopped before touching it.
Looked at the operator still logged into the station.
“Current?”
He checked.
“Twenty-one seconds. Two-source confirmed.”
“Thanks.”
I touched the control.
Opened the route layer.
Nothing dramatic happened.
Mercer leaned against the table.
“You know, first day I thought you had no command experience.”
“I noticed.”
“You did look lost.”
“I was reading your clocks.”
“Same thing.”
I closed the layer.
Then he said:
“You really think Ruiz saved you?”
“Yes.”
“Still bothers you?”
“Yes.”
Good.
No need to convert it into gratitude before it stopped hurting.
A field sergeant had trusted his local information more than my confident order.
He had been right.
That fact had made me better at designing command systems than being praised for a fast recovery ever could.
I did not say that.
Mercer would make fun of me.
Probably correctly.
Instead I asked:
“You still call it your board?”
He looked at the display.
Then toward Captain Park, who had returned carrying coffee.
“No.”
Park stopped.
Mercer added:
“It’s his until fifteen hundred.”
Park looked suspicious.
“Sir?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He sat.
Mercer moved out of the way.
That small movement interested me more than the chair.
A year earlier he had physically blocked me from it because he needed everyone to know the center belonged to him.
Now his shift was over.
So he moved.
We left the operations center.
Priya was already halfway down the hall.
Mercer headed toward another building.
I stopped at the door long enough to hear Park question a route update.
An operator answered.
Park asked for a second source.
No one laughed.
No one announced what that meant.
May you like
The room kept working.
Good.
