The fluorescent lighting buzzed overhead, just low enough to be annoying. Three techs hunched over their stations, eyes bloodshot, jaws tight, fingers blurring across keyboards. The drive sat in the middle of the room like a loaded gun. Black. Matte. No logos. No ports. Just connected to a custom fiber channel node and a Q.E.A.T rig.
Khine Latt stood off to the side, trying not to sweat through his shirt. He adjusted his tie, then glanced at the clock. Jean had been silent for twenty minutes. That was worse than yelling.
He leaned toward her. "We've exhausted Bravais-Q modeling and even tapped one of the Langley partitions. It's… beyond us."
Jean didn't look up. "Beyond DARPA? You should engrave that onto your building."
Khine swallowed hard.
Tech One turned. "Ma'am. The cipher rotates root keys every ten picoseconds. There's no symmetry. No fallback. No predictable vectors."
