Chapter 411 — The Ultimatum Expires II

Chapter 411: Chapter 411 — The Ultimatum Expires II

The brigadier went to the screen and brought up the other side of it.

"Britain," he said. "Conventional capability."

He went through it the way someone reads out the weather before a storm. There were aircraft, fast jets and transport. There were warships, submarines, armoured formations, artillery, drones. There was a professional army many times the size of the Defence Forces, with a great deal of experience.

"And I want to say something to the guild end of the table," he said, turning. "With respect. I’ve watched your streams. I know what some of you can do. But please don’t anybody walk out of this room thinking that a handful of very powerful Challengers can stop a modern military on their own. You can’t be in two places at once. You can’t see a missile coming from two hundred kilometres away. You can’t stop artillery you can’t reach. You’ll matter enormously. You won’t win it by yourselves."

Marcus nodded, as if he had expected that and agreed with it.

"Then tell me about the other thing," he said. "What do we know about anything they’ve built to deal with us? Specifically?"

The brigadier looked at O’Shea. O’Shea looked at a man in a plain suit near the screens, who did not stand.

"Previous intelligence identified British interest in weapons intended to threaten high-level Challengers," the man in the suit said. "Some of the procurement activity came to light during the Langford investigation. There were England-linked contracts and a development programme." He paused. "We don’t hold verified current specifications. We don’t know what’s been built, how many there are, or whether any of it has been deployed. We have names of things. We don’t have what they do."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing we’d stake a life on."

Marcus sat back. His face did not change much, but James saw his eyes go to the screen and stay there.

They closed the military section with three agreements. Defensive preparations would go on through the night. The proposal for Challengers to volunteer for military service would be drafted and circulated. And every diplomatic channel the government had would be used to find support abroad.

The room started breaking up into smaller groups.

James had come in not knowing what Ireland would do. He knew now. Ireland was going to fight.

Whether it could win was another question, and nobody in that room had answered it.

---

"James." O’Shea stopped him at the door. "Give me ten more minutes."

It was a smaller room off the main one, with Niamh and O’Shea and two officers from the investigation. One was a Garda detective superintendent with tired eyes. The other was a woman from the national-security side who wrote everything down and said almost nothing.

They told him what they had.

The festival and the hotel were two separate crimes, being investigated as two separate crimes. The messages and the King’s own broadcast had now given them a common political purpose. That did not mean the same people had done both. It did not even mean the people who did one knew who had done the other.

At the festival, investigators had hours of footage from phones, shops, buses and the festival’s own cameras. There were hundreds of witness statements. There was physical evidence that the detective would not discuss. The priority was simple. Who did it, and was there anything else already sitting somewhere waiting?

"And the hotel?"

"The Minister arranged to meet a woman," said the detective. "Privately. He’d been seeing her for some months. We know that much. We know she arrived and we know she left. We’ve got her on two cameras in the lobby." He rubbed his eyes. "We don’t know who she is. The name he knew her by doesn’t go anywhere. We’re working on where she went after she walked out of the front door. It’s slow."

"She’s a professional?"

"Somebody spent months putting her next to a minister. Draw your own conclusions. I’m not drawing any until I’ve got her."

Niamh opened a folder.

"We’ve reopened the Langford material," she said. "All of it. You’ll remember that some of our own officials gave the English side access to protected records and administrative processes. Some of them were caught. The network was disrupted." She turned a page. "Disrupted isn’t the same as gone. We can’t rule out that there are other arrangements like it that we never found."

"I want every bit of it gone back over," said O’Shea, "for anything that touches these attacks. Credible connections only. No fishing."

"And the broadcast?" said James.

O’Shea’s face tightened.

"The NCSC is leading it, with cyber people from half a dozen other countries," he said. "Connected devices across dozens of nations showing the same feed at the same moment. Televisions, phones, public screens, aircraft seatbacks." He shook his head. "They haven’t got a reliable explanation. Some of the early theories contradict each other. One team thinks it’s a compromise at the network level. Another one says that’s not possible at that scale, not in that time."

"Was it tech," said James, "or was it something from the System? An ability?"

"We don’t know."

James sat with that. It was a man in a dark room who could reach every screen on Earth whenever he liked, and nobody could tell him how.

"That’s the bit that worries me," said O’Shea quietly. "If he can do it once, he can do it again. And next time it might not be a speech."

He closed the folder.

"This goes on," he said, "whatever happens with the army. If tanks come up the M1 tomorrow morning, we still need to know who walked into that square and who walked into that hotel. That doesn’t stop for a war."

"If you need anything from me," said James, "ring me. Anything I know about abilities, anything at all."

He did not offer to go looking. O’Shea did not ask him to.

---

The founders were in the room upstairs at Guild Zero when he got back after two in the morning. None of them had gone home.

Finn was on his feet before the door had closed. Cillian looked as if he had been watching the same news channel for six hours. Maeve had a laptop open and a phone at each elbow.

James told them everything he was allowed to tell them, which was most of it, without the numbers.

When he got to Marcus, Finn went still.

"What did he say?"

"He asked how the army planned to use us. He said a Challenger’s not a soldier with good numbers. He said they had to plan with people who know what our abilities actually do, or they’d waste them, or get them killed." James looked at Finn. "And he said he’d take it to the Spire, but he wanted the terms written down before he asked anyone to sign."

Finn let out a breath that was nearly a laugh.

"Course he did," he said. "That’s exactly what he’d say."

He did not say anything else about his father. James did not push.

Maeve had her pen out.

"Have we been asked?" she said. "Formally. Guild Zero, as a company?"

"No. They asked me if we’d contribute. I said I would, myself. I said I wasn’t signing the guild up from a chair." He sat down. "They’re sending written terms. Every guild, every independent at the top ranks. Nobody’s agreed to anything."

Cillian had not taken his eyes off the television.

"So we’re talking about joining the army," he said.

"We’re talking about reading what they send."

"We buried Ronan five weeks ago." Cillian turned round. "Five weeks, James. And now we’re sitting here talking about going into a war. A real one. Not a floor where we can at least see the thing we’re fighting. Somewhere with people giving us orders who’ve never seen any of us fight, and who don’t know what we can do, and who might not care." He shook his head. "Are we actually ready for that? Any of us?"

"It’s not the same as Forty-One," said Finn.

"I know it’s not the same."

"No, listen. If we don’t go up Forty-One, Forty-One stays where it is. It doesn’t come down the road looking for us." Finn’s voice was low. "If they come over the water and we sit in here, that doesn’t keep my ma safe, or yours, or James’s, or anybody in this building."

"I know that."

"Then—"

"I *know* that, Finn. I’m not saying we hide." Cillian’s hands had gone flat on the table. "I’m saying being frightened for your country doesn’t mean every Challenger in it owes the army their life. That’s all. I’m allowed to think that."

Finn opened his mouth and closed it.

"You are," he said.

James let it sit.

"I’ve said I’ll help," he said. "Me. I haven’t said anything for any of you. And I won’t. When the terms come, we read them, all four of us, and then each of us decides for ourselves."

Maeve wrote that down.

"In the meantime, medical and security are already working with the HSE and the Gardaí, through the proper channels," she said. "We can’t defend the country. But we can put trained people and supplies where they’re asked for. We don’t need anyone’s terms of service for that."

"Keep doing it."

Nobody mentioned Ciara and Declan. Ciara’s message was still sitting in James’s phone, unanswered, and the decision was still sitting on the table where they had left it.

---

The day went by in pieces.

The news ran without a break. There were extra Gardaí at train stations, at Busáras, at Heuston, at shopping centres. Hospitals across the country were reviewing their emergency plans. The government asked people to stay alert, to report anything suspicious, and not to panic. Every radio station was asking people not to panic, which seemed to be making everyone panic more.

Online, the country split down the middle and kept splitting.

**@GalwayGoblin:** say no. say NO. we did not fight for a hundred years to hand it back to a man in a chair

**@saoirse_k:** i don’t want to surrender. i also don’t want another festival. i don’t know what i want

**@dub_zero_fan:** there’s a march outside the dáil. thousands of people. tricolours everywhere

**@climbgod_99:** and theres another one outside the british embassy calling for the government to "negotiate". nice

There were protests. There were vigils for the festival dead in Dublin and Galway and Waterford. Somebody had painted *NOT FOR ANY KING* across a gable wall in Limerick, and a photograph of it had a million likes by lunchtime.

James stayed at the guild. He rang his mother at ten, at one, and at four. Both times after the first, Nyra answered before their mother could get to the phone.

The clock on every news channel went down.

`24:00:00`

`23:59:59`

---

He was in the operations room with Finn and Maeve when it came.

It came as a push alert from RTé, and then the staff channel lit up, and then a phone rang at the desk nearest them.

*EXPLOSION REPORTED IN CORK CITY CENTRE. EMERGENCY SERVICES RESPONDING.*

James was already looking at the map.

It was in Cork, on a busy shopping street just off Patrick Street, in the middle of the afternoon.

"Staff," he said. "Anyone we’ve got in Cork. Anyone with family there. Contracted Challengers, recruits’ families, anyone."

Maeve was on the phone already, and on a second one before the first had finished ringing. "Medical, we need to know what the HSE wants from us in Cork. Through the coordination centre, *not* on our own—"

Finn had the television up and was flicking between channels for something real.

It was not the festival over again. It came in pieces, as it did when nobody had been ready with a camera. There was a phone video from a car park on the other side of the street, all smoke. There was a reporter on the phone from somewhere nearby, out of breath. A Garda spokesperson said only that there had been an explosion, that emergency services were at the scene, and that there were casualties.

Then, slowly, more came in.

There were people dead. Not as many as the festival, but some, and the number kept going up by ones and twos. There were people injured. A department store front had come down. People were trapped. Firefighters were going in.

And then there was something else.

The streets had been quieter than usual for a weekday afternoon, because people had stayed at home. The Gardaí and the fire brigade had been on standby near the city centre, because every city in the country had been told to stand by. The ambulances were there in four minutes instead of twelve. The A&E at the Mercy had cleared its waiting room that morning, on instructions.

The preparation helped. It saved people. A paramedic on the news said so, in so many words, with her face grey.

It had not stopped it.

A woman in a red coat stood at the cordon on Oliver Plunkett Street holding a phone that nobody was answering. A man sat on a kerb in his work uniform with a bandage round his head, staring at nothing. There was a pram on its side by a bus stop, empty, and the camera stayed on it too long before somebody in a studio cut away.

James watched.

He had two fallen angels on a contract. He could raise the dead. He could do things nobody in the world had ever done.

None of it could tell him where a bag had been left on a street in Cork.

He did not stay with that thought this time.

"Maeve," he said. "What do they need?"