Page 46 of Oath

The signal from Bones should’ve pinged by now.

We had redundancy built into the redundancy—a subdermal tracker, untraceable by standard sweeps, hardwired to activate if his vitals spiked or flatlined. His phone was either in a ditch or tossed into a microwave, based on the last static-laced ping we scraped from the network. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the implant—quiet as the grave.

Which meant one of three things.

Bones was dead.

Bones had cut it out himself.

Or these so-called Vega bastards had done something I didn’t fully understand.

And that…thatwas the real problem.

Vega wasn’t a personora team. It was a program, a protocol, a whispered myth in the darker corners of SIGINT briefings. A Cold War-style ghost supposedly mothballed after the Berlin Wall fell. Counter-intelligence wrapped into sophisticated computer programming and predictive modeling

So-called artificial intelligence on crack

A program thatneverworked. But it didn’t stop their repeated investment like Charlie Brown trying to kick the ballLucy was forever taking away. Arguing that if they didn’t do it, then someone else would was about as sensical as mutually assured destruction.

The one scattered reference I dug out of a redacted archive came from a former team lead. The goal:"Vega doesn’t protect information. It erases the need for it."

Still… Leaving the computer, I headed down to the basement. This place had a cell in it, which worked out in our favor. I didn’t ask where Voodoo dug this place up from, when we needed something, he damn well found it.

O’Rourke was still inside the cell, shackled at the wrists and ankles, blindfolded, headphones snug against his ears. No sound. No light. No stimuli. A human in purgatory.

I stared at him for a long moment. Taking him along was a risk. But we’d also scanned him for trackers, he had none. That didn’t mean he didn’t have an inert one, but I had a radio jammer down here that would hopefully mitigate it if he did.

In the meanwhile, I unlocked the cell door and walked in. He didn’t move. I peeled the headphones off first. He flinched, maybe out of reflex. Then the blindfold. His pupils tightened like they were trying to crawl back into his skull.

Sensory deprivation could really fuck with a person. He didn’t speak. Just breathed. Watched me.

“Bones is gone,” I said.

No reaction.

“No phone trace, no subdermal ping. Nothing. Tracker’s dead.”

Still nothing.

“I think your pal Vega had something to do with it.”

That got him. A breath, quick and shallow. The kind you take when you realize the drop’s coming, but it’s too late to grab the edge.

“I told them not to use it,” O’Rourke muttered. “I told them it wasn't built to end problems. It was built toerase them.”

I stepped closer. “Erase how?”

He lifted his head. “Eraseyou. The moment you become inconvenient.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Did he know something or not?

“No,” he said, smiling grimly. “But it’s what the program became.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t need to. The program didn’t evenexistanymore.

He kept talking. "You still think Vega’s some smart program? Some watchdog chewing on intelligence trafficking? On isolating technological advances from other countries in order to co-op them?”

“That used to be what they said in the old files about it.” The whole idea behind the protocol had been to take the lead. Part of the reason the damn thing never worked, it needed too much data to actually deliver anything. Large language models still hadn’t achieved that type of sophistication.