Bella temporarily set aside the problem of Juno and Minerva. It was only 2006, after all. There were still six years before 2012. Plenty of time!
The Assassin Brotherhood thoroughly inspected the Grand Temple in New York. There were no enemies and no traps.
And so the Grand Temple in New York—more than nine thousand square meters in area, over twice the size of the White House—was completely occupied by the Assassin Brotherhood.
Because Juno and Minerva needed to keep their own movements hidden, the Templars knew absolutely nothing about the Grand Temple in New York despite holding a considerable lead in other areas and possessing more than three Apples of Eden, the Shroud, an Isu sword, and other artifacts. Using this place as the Brotherhood's headquarters was the safest possible choice.
The temple was divided into three sections: a rest area, a research area, and a power-supply area packed with equipment. The Brotherhood moved a great deal of confidential research and data into the Grand Temple. Several of the newest Animus models were also installed here. Powered by Isu systems, they performed far better than machines outside that relied solely on electricity and fusion reactors.
The Brotherhood's Animus technology had now advanced another step beyond its original foundation. It could instill combat skills into ordinary people who had no connection whatsoever to Assassin ancestors.
In other words, the Brotherhood could now mass-produce Assassins instead of being limited to particular bloodlines. As long as someone was an ordinary person of sound mind, they could come here for a night of skill implantation, practice a few times afterward, and most likely have combat techniques that had taken Assassins years or even decades to master become muscle memory.
Several senior managers who had rendered major service to the Continental Hotel or worked for Weyland-Yutani over the long term received varying degrees of skill implantation. The standouts among them were junior employee John Wick, the Bowery King, who raised pigeons and controlled a small slice of New York's underworld, and attorney Jeri Hogarth, who had long provided legal services for Weyland.
John Wick wanted to get revenge on a colleague. The Bowery King wanted to fight other gangs for territory. Attorney Jeri Hogarth wanted a trump card against the other lawyers at her firm. Really, they were all harboring bad intentions for the same reason: dealing with people in their own line of work...
The Continental Hotel, Weyland-Yutani, and the Assassin Brotherhood operating behind the scenes were all developing nicely. Compared with the Templars, whose progress had stalled in every area, Bella's side was not only growing rapidly but doing so with remarkable stability.
After finishing the Brotherhood's affairs, Bella listened to old buddy Jupiter tell her two more secrets across seventy-five thousand years.
Juno and Minerva were still alive at that point in time, but neither woman had any interest in listening to the two of them chat. They showed up only once and never appeared again afterward.
Bella's life was extremely comfortable. In the morning, while Natasha was at work, she stayed home and looked after the children. Around noon she would wander off to listen to Jupiter spin stories. Her afternoons were free for sleeping, researching new spells, conducting experiments, or whatever else she felt like doing.
The moment she heard Starscream had produced new results, she hurried to Weyland's laboratory.
Under Bella's relentless exploitation, Starscream had truly worked himself to the bone. The guy had accelerated human technology by at least fifty years.
Bella found herself wondering whether she could squeeze even more out of him. If left alone, Starscream's loyalty would decline all by itself. She had to make full use of him while she could.
Her attention therefore turned to Combiners.
In her previous life, Combiners had cheated her out of plenty of money. They were obviously built from nearly identical molds, yet the manufacturers would repaint them, bolt on another pair of rotors, and sell them all over again. Even thinking about it now made her heart ache.
Devastator really was rather weak, but that did not mean the entire concept was wrong. It depended on the "people" involved.
When Starscream learned that Bella wanted to build a Combiner herself, he raised both hands in approval. This was very Cybertronian and very Decepticon. It was far more interesting than researching spaceships or atmospheric processors!
After hearing Starscream's requirements, Bella spent two days thinking them over. Then she sent 006 to negotiate with the U.S. military.
The expedition to Pandora was entirely under Weyland's direction. Future voyages certainly could not be this extravagant. Even with strict budgeting, the spacecraft had already cost more than three billion dollars to build. That was an unbearable burden for a single company, even a colossus like Weyland. In the future, they would definitely have to sell spacecraft to the Pentagon.
The reason they had not sold one this time was simple: nobody knew whether it worked. If you wanted to sell something, you had to demonstrate it first, right? Selling the propulsion system by itself would be a disastrous loss. They had to sell the entire spacecraft to recoup their costs. Weyland now needed to prove that the vessel was capable of long-range travel and could leave the Solar System before the military would pay.
In other words, this first voyage was being supported entirely by Weyland's own resources. If it succeeded, orders, contracts of every kind, and patent protection would inevitably follow. If it failed, then it was Weyland's own problem. Whether the company went bankrupt or restructured, nobody else would care.
The risks were enormous, and so were the potential returns. That was simply how the game was played.
Weyland's relationship with the military was currently extremely cordial. Although neither the White House nor the armed forces could figure out how Weyland had developed its technology, both hoped the company would succeed.
006 held several rounds of negotiations with senior Pentagon officials and ultimately acquired the corpses of two Decepticons—Onslaught and Brawl—for an extremely low price.
Blackout and Barricade had originally been available as well, but Blackout's corpse had already been reduced to powder by MARS Industries' nanomite warheads. The military let Weyland choose two out of the remaining three, so 006 selected Onslaught and Brawl.
In theory, any metal equipment could be transformed into a Decepticon. But just as no two fingers on a hand were exactly the same length, not all metals were equal. Transformers created with the AllSpark could differ enormously from one another.
Bella implanted absolute obedience to her commands directly into the sparks of Onslaught and Brawl, then used the AllSpark to revive the two Decepticons who had participated in the original attack on Earth.
Both had also been old subordinates of Starscream. During the years Megatron was missing, they had followed Starscream all over the place, so they knew one another extremely well.
Starscream and Bella repeatedly selected and compared equipment from Weyland's many military projects. Learning from Devastator's problems, they reduced the number of members in the Combiner from six to five. In the end, they created an entirely new Combiner centered on Onslaught—Bruticus!
Onslaught, transforming into a missile trailer, formed the torso and served as the control center after combination.
The veteran member Brawl, transforming into a Leopard tank, formed the left leg.
The new member Swindle, transforming into a military jeep, formed the right leg.
Vortex, transforming into an armed helicopter, formed the left arm, while Blast Off, transforming into a fighter aircraft, formed the right arm.
All five Transformers still bore Decepticon insignia, but from the moment of their birth, the object of their loyalty had already become Bella. Under her orders they now obeyed Starscream's commands—partly to satisfy his vanity, and partly to keep him under surveillance.