Chapter 410 — The Ultimatum Expires I

Chapter 410: Chapter 410 — The Ultimatum Expires I

Dublin had changed in four hours.

James noticed it at the first set of lights. There was a Garda car parked across the mouth of Merrion Street with its blue lights turning silently, and two officers in high-vis standing beside it. Further on there was another outside the Department of Finance, and another beyond that. Government Buildings had a ring of them.

The streets were quieter than they should have been at that hour. They were not empty. People were still out, walking home and getting off buses. But every few metres someone had stopped on the footpath to look at their phone. Outside an electronics shop on Baggot Street, a small group stood in front of a window full of televisions all showing the same frozen frame of a man in a dark chair, and none of them were talking to each other.

He parked where O’Shea had told him to and walked to the gate.

The guard at the gate checked his name against a list and his face against his licence, then rang somebody, and checked his licence again. Nobody asked for a photograph. Nobody said *you’re James Ganner*. A soldier in combat uniform walked him up a flight of stone steps and along a corridor without saying a word.

It was nothing like the Bureau.

The Bureau ran on the Tower’s time, with its gates and rotations and floors that would still be there tomorrow. This building ran on minutes. Doors were half open and phones were ringing behind them. Officers in uniform went past in pairs carrying folders and tablets, talking low and fast. A civil servant with her lanyard twisted round her neck nearly walked into him and did not look up.

Niamh was waiting outside a set of double doors at the end of the corridor.

She looked as if she had not slept since the festival, which James supposed she hadn’t. Her hair was tied back badly and there was a coffee stain on her cuff.

"James. Thanks for coming." She kept her voice down. "They’ve started. The Defence Forces have been doing preliminary assessments for the last twenty minutes." She hesitated. "What you hear in there is classified. All of it. I need you to keep it to yourself."

"I will."

She held the door.

---

The room was long, with one great table down the middle of it and chairs along every wall. Screens covered the far end.

The biggest screen held a countdown in plain white numbers.

`44:17:52`

The others had reports from the Defence Forces, from the intelligence services and from the National Emergency Coordination Centre. There were maps of Ireland with things marked on them that James could not read from the door. There was the festival square from above, and a photograph of a hotel on St Stephen’s Green.

He knew some of the faces.

Marcus Hale sat among the guild representatives on the left side of the table. He was impossible to miss. He was broad in a dark jacket, sitting very still, with the new hand the System had given him on Floor 20 resting flat on the table in front of him. Two seats from him was Saoirse Doyle, who had walked out of that throne room with James and seven others. She was independent now, the only S-rank in the country who answered to no guild at all. There were other guild leaders James recognised from national boards and Bureau events, including someone from Ironwall and someone from a Cork guild whose name he could not remember.

O’Shea was further up the table, nearer the government end, with an empty chair beside him for Niamh. In the middle sat senior officers of the Defence Forces in uniform, national-security people in plain suits with no names on anything, and members of the government.

Marcus looked up when James came in. He nodded.

James went down the side of the room toward the empty seat with his name on a card, and Marcus said, quietly, as he passed, "How’s Finn?"

"In every day," said James. "Training. On his own, mostly." He paused. "He’s not good."

Marcus nodded slowly.

He did not ask anything else. He had walked out of the Floor 20 throne room with eleven people on the floor behind him. He knew exactly what *not good* meant.

At the head of the table, someone said, "If we could come back to order."

James sat down and looked at the screen.

`44:16:31`

Ireland had less than two days to decide whether it was going to stop being a country.

---

A senior government official began. James did not know her name, and no one used it. She was the most senior person from the Department of the Taoiseach in the room, and she spoke as if she had given the same summary four times already that night.

The British King had publicly demanded that Ireland submit to the Crown, hand over control of its national defence, and accept British authority over its strategic institutions, the Tower among them. He had publicly claimed both of last night’s attacks. He had promised another explosion for every twenty-four hours that passed without surrender.

"The government is treating all of it as credible," she said. "He’s already shown he’ll kill civilians. He’s already killed a minister. We can’t assume a single word of it was empty. And we have to plan for the possibility that he means the rest of it, a conventional military move to take what he’s asked for."

A Defence Forces officer stood up. He was grey-haired, with a brigadier’s insignia, and he talked with a pointer in his hand that he never used.

He went through it plainly. Every unit was at a raised state of readiness. Protection had been put on key government facilities. Coastal surveillance and airspace security were being reviewed with what the Air Corps and the Naval Service had available, which he did not pretend was a lot. They were coordinating with the Gardaí, the HSE and local authorities through the national emergency framework. Every department and agency had a role, and the government sat over the lot.

"And I’ll be honest with the room," he said. "We cannot protect every possible target in the country. Not even close. He hasn’t said where. It could be a shopping centre in Limerick or a bus station in Sligo. If we put a soldier on every door in Ireland we’d run out of soldiers before we ran out of doors."

Nobody argued with that.

---

The arguments started straight afterward.

A man from the Department of the Taoiseach wanted the government to reject the ultimatum publicly, tonight, now.

"Every hour we sit on this, it looks like we’re thinking about it. Like there’s a version of this where we say yes. People are terrified out there. They need to hear the state isn’t going to fold."

"He’s said what happens if we refuse," said a woman from Foreign Affairs. It was the same woman from the meeting after the festival. "He’s said he’ll invade. If we refuse tonight and the Defence Forces aren’t ready, we’ve just told him to come before we can stop him."

"So we wait and let him pick the time?"

"We wait and *we* pick the time."

"And in the meantime?" A third official, older, from the Department of Defence, had his hands flat on the table. "Even if we refuse, there’s nothing to say tomorrow’s bomb doesn’t go off anyway. Refusing doesn’t stop it. Waiting doesn’t stop it either. Every hour we spend arguing about the timing of a press statement, there’s someone somewhere in this country walking past a device."

It went round and round. They were refusing surrender, and they were choosing when to say so, and the room could not quite separate the two.

At the head of the table the Taoiseach had been listening without speaking. Now he raised one hand.

The room went quiet.

"Ireland is not surrendering," he said. "Let’s be clear about that, here, so nobody in this room is in any doubt. We are not giving this country to that man."

He looked down the table.

"But I am not going to put out a statement tonight because Twitter’s angry. When we answer him, we’ll answer him once, properly, when the Defence Forces have had the time they need, and when we’ve spoken to everyone abroad we can speak to. Our answer is going to come with something behind it."

Nobody argued.

James had said nothing.

He had led a raid of ten people into a room with a fallen angel and brought six of them home. He had stood in a strategy room and planned a fight around a mechanic nobody understood. He knew what it was to give an order that might get someone killed.

He did not know what *airspace security posture* meant. He did not know how many ships the Naval Service had, or what *coordination with local authorities* meant in practice, or how you moved a battalion from Athlone to Wexford. Every person at the middle of that table was dealing in consequences a thousand times bigger than any floor.

He did not pretend otherwise, and he kept his mouth shut.

---

"Which brings us," said O’Shea, "to Challengers."

He laid it out simply. Ireland had some of the most powerful Challengers on the planet. It had established guilds, Emerald Spire, Ironwall, Guild Zero, and a dozen smaller ones, and some of the best independents in the world.

"But I want everyone in the room to understand something," he said. "Every one of those people operates under civilian Challenger law. They’re registered with the Bureau. They answer to their guilds, their contracts and the courts. Not to the army. However strong they are, they’re not soldiers. They’re not part of the Defence Forces just because they could flatten a building."

The brigadier took it from there.

"The government’s proposal," he said, "is that experienced Challengers be invited to volunteer for military service. They’d serve with the Defence Forces, under emergency terms that would need proper authorisation." He looked round at the guild end of the table. "I want to be very clear about what that means, because I don’t want anyone to say afterwards they didn’t know. This is not a Tower expedition. Anyone who volunteers goes into a military chain of command. You follow lawful orders. You work alongside ordinary soldiers. You go where defence needs you, not where you’d like to go."

Marcus spoke first.

"I don’t disagree with any of that," he said. "We need coordination. God knows we do. But I want to know how you intend to use us."

"Explain."

"A Challenger isn’t a soldier with very good numbers." Marcus turned the new hand over on the table. "One of my people puts up barriers. Another can see through walls at three hundred metres. Another can heal a man with half his chest gone. Another can do nothing at all except kill things, very fast, at close range. If you give a barrier specialist a rifle and put him in a trench, you’ve wasted him. If you send a healer forward on a patrol, you’ll get her killed and the twenty people she’d have kept alive behind the line will die with her."

"Nobody’s proposing to hand anyone a rifle," said the brigadier. "But I’ll say this plainly as well. An operation can’t depend on guild masters deciding which orders they feel like following. If your people come in, they come in under our command. Not yours."

"I’m not asking for that."

"It sounded like it."

"I’m asking," said Marcus evenly, "whether you intend to involve the people who know what these abilities do when you plan where to put them. Or whether we’re going to be interchangeable." He held the brigadier’s eyes. "You know how to fight a war, Brigadier. I’ve no illusions on that. But I know what my people can do. I’ve buried enough of them finding out."

The brigadier was quiet for a moment.

"Fair," he said. "That’s fair. We’ll need that. Planning, not command. I’ll take that away."

Saoirse Doyle leaned forward.

"What does it mean for independents?" she said. "I’ve spent every day since Floor 20 answering to nobody, on purpose. If I volunteer, is that for the emergency? Six months? A year? Do I sign something and find out in March that I belong to the army until I’m forty?"

"That would be in the terms."

"Then I want to see the terms."

A man from Ironwall asked about contracts. Half his people had sponsorship deals, and what happened to those? A woman from the Cork guild asked about injury compensation. What happened to a Challenger who lost an arm in a field in Wexford, which the System would never give back? And what happened to their family if they died?

The room got more complicated with every question. James watched the officials begin to understand that you did not get three hundred of the most powerful people in Ireland into uniform by saying *your country needs you* and leaving it there.

"Mr Ganner."

It was the brigadier.

"Would Guild Zero be prepared to contribute?"

James did not answer straight away.

"I’m willing to help," he said. "Personally. If this goes where it looks like it’s going, I’m not sitting at home. But I can’t sign Guild Zero up from this chair. It’s a registered company. It’s got staff and contracted Challengers and recruits, and they’ve all got families. I’m not putting any of them in uniform without asking them first."

The brigadier nodded slowly.

"And there’s something else." James chose his words. "My contracted undead. Alice, and Turiel. They’re not Challengers. They’re bound to me through my class. They’re not registered as people, they can’t sign anything, and there are already rules about what I can and can’t do with them out here. If I went in, I don’t know what that means for them, or whether you’d even want them near your soldiers, or whether anybody’s allowed to use them on Earth at all."

There was a pause around the table. Several people looked at each other.

"That," said the brigadier eventually, "is going to need separate consideration."

"The Bureau holds his registered abilities and his contract status," said O’Shea. "We can provide that, under the proper security arrangements. When you’re ready."

Marcus put his hand flat on the table again.

"For what it’s worth, he’s right," he said. "Nobody should commit a guild sitting in this room. I’ll take it to the Spire. I expect we’ll put up experienced volunteers. But I want the terms of service written down and in front of me before I ask a single one of my people to sign anything."

"The government will prepare formal terms," said the official from the Taoiseach’s department. "They’ll go to every guild leader and every registered independent at S and A rank. Within twenty-four hours."

Nobody had been enlisted.

Two of the smaller guild leaders said they would volunteer, if the terms were right. Saoirse said she would read them. The man from Ironwall said nothing at all. The government had made a start on something it did not have yet. It had not turned Ireland’s guilds into an army by asking.