Vern pinched the bridge of her nose with obvious exasperation. “You can’t use metal welding. It is an electromagnetic gun. Needs to be welded with plastic, otherwise the electromagnetic energy will… You want to be the guy who blew up the ship because he didn’t understand the future? Let’s leave it at that.”

“All right, all right,” said Mike. “Parker, you have one job now: Find me more shielding and install it like she wants it. Just make sure you understand what she’s talking about. If you have to strip apart your beloved weight room to get it, you will. If you have to use all the plastic chow trays in the shipyard, you will. Understood? If you need to bribe, screw, or steal to get what Dr. Li needs, you will.”

He turned to the others. “I know I don’t have to tell Parker here, but if anybody questions one of his fellow crew members’ patriotism again, I’ll grind you up and feed you to the seagulls myself. Now get back to it.”

The Directorate marine was twice the size of the pizza-shop owner and he was not holding back. A desperate gasp followed each blow as Skip’s lungs emptied of air.

The translator on the marine’s belt was oblivious to the violence, stating the order in a digital monotone.

“Your daughter will come with us to a fancy party,” said the device.

Another marine held Sharon. He pinned her arms behind her back, forcing her to stick her chest out. Her head hung down, so her black hair veiled her face.

“She’s just fifteen,” said Skip, gasping for breath. “She stays here —”

Two more quick blows. The crack of Skip’s ribs made Sharon scream again.

“Shut it!” said the marine in English, tugging hard on her arms.

Conan ducked back into the stairwell.

A roundhouse kick from the giant marine sent Skip sliding through a cloud of flour and down behind the counter. With his brow covered in white powder, he looked up at Conan peeking through the stairway door.

Help, Skip mouthed. It looked like he couldn’t even get enough air in his lungs to speak.

Conan squeezed the riot gun’s pistol grip and ducked back out of sight.

A burst of Chinese among the marines followed.

Conan closed her eyes. There were four Directorate marines. She had eight rounds of ten-gauge street shot loaded. She could blow apart the restaurant in a matter of seconds.

Skip got up from his knees and charged the marines. The wet sound of his head hitting the hard yellow tile made Conan’s stomach turn.

Enough.

She raised the riot gun and flicked the safety off. She would have to get in close to make sure she didn’t cut down everyone in the restaurant with the gun’s wide arc of fire. She counted down.

Three. Two. One.

Exhale. Go.

And then she froze. This was not the mission. She clicked the safety back on.

Skip tried to get up from the floor but made it only to his hands and knees. He spat out a sticky crimson stream that mixed with the blood pooling from his split scalp. Then another kick landed with a thump on his temple.

Sharon wailed, “Don’t touch me!” Then muffled screams.

Conan dashed back down the stairs silently on bare feet.

“What the hell was going on up there?” asked Finn.

“You’re fine. I had you covered,” said Conan. “Just some customers getting rowdy. We gotta go out the back way, though.”

Finn put his hand on Conan’s arm. “What the hell is going on up there?” he asked again.

“I said let’s go. That’s an order,” snapped Conan.

Finn, Nicks, and Conan filed out the back of the restaurant into the alley and slunk out in the darkness, slowly working their way toward their extraction point, an eight-by-six-foot steel recycling bin a few blocks away. They climbed in and covered themselves in the wet and moldy cardboard and aluminum cans that would break up their bodies’ thermal signatures.

“Ten seconds to detonation,” whispered Finn, and he began to count it down.

“And contact,” he said.

Nothing.

“Well, at least the pizza was —” said Nicks.

An explosion detonated in the distance, the blast wave shaking the recycling bin a bit.

They waited the next hours for the morning pickup in silence broken only by the occasional siren going by. It was just reaching early morning when Finn finally decided to bring it up again.

“Conan, I’m serious,” Finn whispered. “What was all the noise upstairs about? Are Skip and Sharon okay?”

“Yeah, they’re fine,” Conan said quietly. “Let’s stay focused on the mission.”

“The act is so questionable in law as to make it positively un-American.”

Jake Colby’s talking points had been produced by analytic software and then checked by Legal and Public Relations. Both had advised Colby, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, that the most effective approach was to flip the script and paint the White House’s proposal to use the old Defense Production Act from 1950 as something out of the Directorate playbook.

The act, passed at the start of the Korean War, gave the U.S. president the power to require any American company to sign any contract or fill any order deemed necessary for national defense. The CEO was now explaining to the shareholders that Wal-Mart was joining a coalition of leading multinational firms that, using both the courts and congressional lobbying, would attempt to block the act’s resurrection.

“Losing is un-American!” a seventy-year-old woman in a denim pantsuit shouted back at him. He knew not to ignore her. Lee-Ann Tilden was a multibillionaire who owned 4 percent of his outstanding shares, and yet she still worked as a greeter at the Tulsa store.

The CEO tried to repeat the talking points’ core premise, that a corporation’s status as a legally defined individual meant that the government couldn’t tell it what to do, even in a time of war.

“Legally defined individual?” Tilden retorted. “Mr. Colby, you know that’s bunk and you know that Sam would want to help the country any way he could.”

Before he could reply, another voice broke in. A Swiss-German accent. One of the institutional investors, in this case representing a sovereign wealth fund from Qatar that had bought a 17 percent position when the share price collapsed after America lost Hawaii. “Madame, I appreciate this company’s quaint practice of letting anyone speak at these forums, but you simply fail to understand the multinational nature of this enterprise now. The global shareholder base must come first. This concern is not in the business of any one nation’s war. No matter where it is based, it is a global retail chain, definitively neutral in its activities and intent,” he said. “The desires of Uncle Sam, or whatever your outdated idea of a patriotic patriarch in a funny hat is, is now beside the point.”

Hearing the crowd growl, Colby winced at the fund manager’s gaffe. So typical. The internationals loved the company’s returns but didn’t bother to understand its story. She meant Sam Walton, you moron. Hell, the company founder’s desk was on display in the museum just down the road, the papers he’d been working on the day he died still on it, as if he had just stepped out for a coffee break.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s try to keep focused,” the CEO interceded. “This is not just about the U.S. government overstepping its powers, however limited those now may be. We’re on the razor’s edge. The Directorate has rigged our corporate network with enough tripwires and viruses that we might lose control of the company if they don’t like the way I part my hair.”

“Then what do we have to lose?” said Lee-Ann. “I’m calling a vote.”

There was no loss of life at Lee-Ann’s Revolt, as it would become known nationwide once the viz of the meeting leaked out, but it was nonetheless momentous. The voting bloc of sovereign wealth funds proved unable to stop the small investor pool once it was mobilized. And by the end of the meeting, shareholders were no longer voting about whether to resist U.S. government rationing schemes. Instead, Wal-Mart declared war on the Directorate.