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With the firefighting mech handed off to the professors, Ryan turned to the thing he'd actually been waiting for.
He went to find Patricia.
He'd squeezed Calloway for ten million. Symmetry demanded that Aegis receive the same treatment.
Patricia's office.
"How much are you requesting?" Patricia's voice was carefully neutral, which was how Ryan knew she was bracing for impact.
"Twenty billion."
Patricia did not move. Did not blink. Did not breathe, possibly.
"Twenty billion dollars."
"Give or take."
She looked at the hard drive Ryan had placed on her desk. The same kind of portable drive he'd used to deliver the plasma reactor specs. Same size. Same black casing. The object that had, last time, contained technology worth more than most countries' GDP.
"What's on the drive?"
"A project proposal. Technical specifications. And a cost estimate."
"The cost estimate being twenty billion dollars."
"The cost estimate being a starting figure. The actual total will depend on fabrication timelines and supply chain negotiations."
Patricia picked up the drive with both hands, as if it might detonate.
"I'll send it up. You understand that a number this size doesn't get approved at my level. Or my boss's level. Or his boss's level."
"I understand. That's why I'm giving you the complete technical appendix. The people who make this decision will want to see the engineering before they see the price tag."
Patricia left with the drive. Ryan went back to his equations.
The meeting convened within hours. A conference room. Secure facility. Twelve people around a table, none of whom Ryan had ever met, all of whom had the authority to move numbers with nine or ten digits.
"The asset has submitted a new project proposal," the briefing officer began. "Estimated budget: twenty billion dollars."
The room reacted exactly as expected.
"Twenty billion for what?"
"Is this the same person who spent eleven million on batteries?"
"What could possibly require that kind of allocation?"
"Open the drive."
The contents projected onto the wall screen.
THE JAEGER PROGRAM
Proposed objective: Construction of a Jaeger-class mech assembly and pilot training facility. Concurrent development of a single combat-rated Jaeger standing 250 feet tall, weighing approximately 1,700 metric tons. Parallel research and development of the following core technologies:
The technology list scrolled down the screen.
Liquid Neural Multi-Pilot Connection System
Multi-Vane Plasma Cannon
Three Sun Horizon Gate Operating System
Midnight Ring Processor Power Core
Mechanical Transmission Cockpit Assembly
Underwater Dynamic Seal System
The list kept going. Subsystems, support technologies, materials research requirements, testing protocols. Over a thousand individual line items, each one representing a technology that either didn't exist or existed only in theoretical form.
The room went very quiet as the list scrolled.
Someone finally said, "Skip to the visual."
The screen jumped to the bottom of the document.
An image filled the wall.
A mech. Red. Massive. Standing in an ocean, the water at its waist, storm clouds above, rain driving sideways. Helicopters circled its shoulders like birds around a lighthouse, tiny against the machine's scale.
Three arms. Not two. The right shoulder mounted two limbs, one forward, one aft, each terminating in a massive rotating blade. The left arm was a cannon, barrel wide enough to fit a car inside, glowing blue at the aperture.
The head was a sensor dome, projecting a cone of white light into the rain, illuminating the storm.
Every surface was detailed. Armor seams. Weathering marks. Impact damage. The image looked less like concept art and more like a photograph of something that already existed.
Beside the main image, a structural cutaway showed the internal architecture. Power core location. Cockpit position. Drive system layout. Weapon mounts. Every major technology from the list, mapped to its physical location inside the machine.
The name was printed across the bottom of the image in clean white text:
CRIMSON TYPHOON
The room stared at it for a long time.
"Setting aside whether this can be built," someone said carefully, "what is it for? The firefighting mech has a clear civilian application. This is a weapons platform. A very large, very expensive weapons platform with no identified threat to deploy against."
"The plasma cannon alone would justify the investment if it can be made functional. That technology has applications across every branch of the military."
"The cannon is one line item on a list of a thousand. We'd be funding an entire weapons system to develop one component."
"What about the multi-pilot neural link? If that works, the implications for coordinated operations are enormous. Not just for mechs. For any system that requires synchronized human input."
"If it works. The technical appendix describes a shared neural connection where participants involuntarily share memories during the link. That's not a feature. That's a security nightmare."
The neural specialist at the table shook his head when everyone looked at him. "We've never tested anything like this. The existing single-pilot system is already beyond our understanding. A multi-pilot variant that includes memory sharing is purely theoretical."
"Theoretical, but the theory is internally consistent," someone else noted. "Same as the plasma reactor was theoretical. And that worked."
"The reactor cost eleven million. This costs twenty billion. The comparison isn't equivalent."
The debate continued. Arguments for, arguments against, technical assessments, strategic considerations. The usual dance of institutional decision-making applied to a proposal that was, by any historical standard, insane.
Finally, the senior figure at the table spoke.
"We're not approving twenty billion tonight. Nobody in this room has that authority, and nobody should. But the technical appendix deserves a full review. If the underlying science is sound, which it may well be given this individual's track record, then we can discuss a phased approach."
He looked around the table.
"Allocate initial funding sufficient for the first research phase. Let him demonstrate progress on the core technologies. If the results justify continued investment, we escalate."
"And if he does what he did last time? Takes the seed money and produces a finished product before we've completed the first review cycle?"
A few people laughed. It wasn't entirely a joke. Ryan Mercer's track record with "initial funding" was, to put it mildly, aggressive.
"Then we'll have a very interesting conversation about phase two."
The meeting adjourned at three a.m. The lights in the conference room had been on for eleven hours straight.
Nobody had left early.