The security cameras bore down McCray and his team of scientists as they examined the cog every way they possibly could. Structural analysis, checking its reaction to various chemicals, even making sure it could actually function as a cog. For the first three days, very little progress was made. Even with all the staff working on this one object (and it was clear based on how many they employed they expected far more work), it resulted in very little done. As far as they could tell, it was a cog. A nice cog, to be sure, but a cog.

  Then it began to grow.

  Doctor Wakefield entered the lab early on the fourth day of testing, clearly not having had a good night’s sleep. As he cleared the sand from his eyes, he looked at the cog, and then tilted his head in confusion. Clearly thinking he was seeing something, he went over to the gear and measured it. He blinked a few times, confused, then turned and walked out.

  McCray was in his office, always up bright and early, dealing with paperwork from NGE who thought that progress was going too slow even though they’d barely been active a week. Wakefield knocked hard, and McCray pressed a button under his desk to open the door.

  “Doctor Wakefield,” he said, doing his best to muster a smile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “The cog is growing,” he said quickly. “Look, it sounds crazy, but…just come with me!”

  Wakefield ran while McCray walked back to the cog, down the empty stairwells and back to the cog. McCray was clearly confused when Wakefield started to point enthusiastically at one of the spokes.

  “There!” He said. “Get a magnifying glass!”

  McCray did as he was told, examining the gear. It took a lot of searching and more enthusiastic pointing from Wakefield to find what he was looking for. There was metal growing off of the cog like a kind of mold.

  “My word,” McCray muttered.

  “You understand, right?” Wakefield said excitedly. “Metal that grows! We’ll never have to mine worlds dry again, we’ll have an infinite supply of ore! Sure, bronze isn’t that useful a metal for things like spacecrafts, but…”

  “We could potentially implement it in alloys,” McCray interrupted. “We could also figure out how it grows to potentially do the same for more useful materials.” He patted Wakefield hard on the back. “Well spotted, good Doctor! With this, we can fund further expeditions into the Clocktower!”

  “D-do we need to?” Wakefield asked nervously as McCray turned to leave. “I mean, we already have this, and based on what I heard from the soldiers…”

  “Don’t worry about their tall tales! We fear the Clocktower because we do not understand it. Once we have done more research, the threats from those robots will be shown to be empty. Yes, we can draw some amount of knowledge from one cog, but it will not grow fast enough for the research we want to do. The Federation demands results. We must grant them. Summon the garrison.”

  /////

  The Captain was completely silent as he stood in front of McCray’s desk, glaring down at the professor. Even beneath the visor and heavy black armour, his contempt for the man was clear. The silence stretched on uncomfortably long before McCray finally spoke.

  “Is there an issue with your new orders, Captain?”

  The Captain chuckled. “No sir, I will carry out these orders to the letter.”

  “Then why life?”

  “Just because I will follow them doesn’t mean I think they’re smart. They’re the opposite of smart, actually. Did you fake your diploma, Professor?”

  “How dare you speak to me like that,” McCray snarled. He reigned in his anger as best he could. The Captain was his inferior here. He couldn’t let himself be taken aback by him. “I suppose you're a military man and I’m not. What about this plan do you not like?”

  “That we’re doing it at all.”

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  “Be more specific, damn you.”

  The Captain’s formal stance relaxed a little. “We were given that cog as a gift from a sentient machine in a massive tower we do not remotely understand. Many, including members of my own garrison, would look at that gear and consider it a divine offering from the Worldwyrm itself. We made a promise with a machine who serves the Wyrm himself, and you would have us break it for…what exactly?”

  “For the good of humanity.”

  “Be more specific, damn you.”

  The Captain almost spat out the words. McCray leaned back in his chair. It was hard to lock eyes with someone who never took off his visor. It was like staring into the abyss. The effect was almost certainly intentional.

  “We have an infinite source of metal, Captain,” McCray said bluntly. “If that is what we acquire from a single gear, imagine what we could gain from deeper inside the structure. Take apart that robot you met with, learn how to copy it. Figure out how the internal gravity of the space works. Discover if there’s more materials like the cog in there. It is a goldmine of technology we don’t understand! That’s why you signed onto the mission. That’s why we all did.”

  “Circumstances have changed.”

  McCray scoffed. “Circumstances? What circumstances? The fact that there are sentient beings inside the Clocktower? If you believed in the Worldwyrm, then you wouldn't be shocked by that. Or was it the fact that you cannot break a promise to a pipe of metal?”

  “I keep my promises, Professor. Doesn’t matter who they’re too.”

  McCray looked down at his laptop, the footage of the previous excursion on his desk. He quickly played the last section, where the Captain and the metal tendril made their deal.

  “You may take a single cog from this holy place. Then, you must leave.”

  McCray smirked as he closed the video. “If I recall correctly, you made a promise to leave. You never said you wouldn’t come back.”

  The Captain’s anger was clear now even with the helmet. “That’s not what he meant and you know it.”

  McCray chuckled. “Oh, really? I follow my promises to the letter.”

  “And I follow their spirit, like any good person would!”

  “There is another loophole here, of course,” McCray pointed out. “It said that you must leave. It never said new people couldn’t enter. I could easily have your garrison discharged dishonourably for failing to carry out an order, and considering the exceptional circumstances we’re dealing with, I doubt I could give an illegal order when it comes to the Clocktower. If it suited me, I could replace you whenever. I. Wanted.”

  The Captain stood dumbfounded for a second, any semblance of a formal military man vanishing. McCray pushed the advantage while he still could.

  “What if I replaced your garrison with a group more docile, Captain? What if I turned down the Federation’s offer of support and sent in a group of Nemesis’ own private military contractors? I’ve heard rumors that we’ve been working on some quite powerful brain implants. Our soldiers would not be stopped by reason, or promises, or religion. Just there to kill and take what they want. Barbarians, by your standards. Would you turn us down just to be replaced by that?”

  The Captain stood there in stunned silence. McCray no longer sensed anger from him. Just disappointment.

  “Are you enjoying this, Professor? Is this what Nemesis does? Coerce and manipulate soldiers into violating principle and basic common sense? Or is that just a you thing?”

  “Watch your tongue, Captain, or I’ll have Nemesis troops in the Clocktower by the next cycle. Now, will you continue to help us in our pursuit of humanity’s future?”

  The Captain slammed his hands onto the desk, his mask an inch away from McCray’s face. McCray smiled, knowing the Captain was resorting to brutality to scare him, but he knew them too well. If this conversation had shown anything, the Captain wouldn’t kill an innocent man.

  “You haven’t given me a choice,” the soldier growled. “I will do as you say for now, because you’ve convinced me in your infinite wisdom that I’m stopping something worse. Make no mistake, Franklin McCray. I am watching you, and everything you do. A single foot out of line and I will tell the Federation. Understood?”

  His cries would fall on deaf ears, but McCray didn’t want him to know that. “Plainly, Captain.”

  The Captain turned around and stormed out of the office, glaring at Wakefield who had been standing next to the door. The Doctor reeled back in shock as the soldier walked past the other researchers and down the stairs. McCray sat back in his chair and smiled as Wakefield walked into the room, holding a pair of rusted tweezers.

  “Sorry to interrupt sir,” Wakefield said, “but could we get more packs of tweezers? The one I used to extract the metal from the gear seems to have rusted already.”

  “Of course, Doctor Wakefield,” McCray said enthusiastically.

  Wakefield looked surprised. “If you don’t mind me pointing out sir, you seem to be in high spirits.”

  “Of course I am, my good man. Everything is going exactly as it should.”