Chapter 235: The D6 Accelerator Armor
The Cobra assault on the G.I. Joe facility had been running for approximately eight minutes when Jake decided to accelerate his own timeline.
The facility's chaos was comprehensive — Storm Shadow working through the base with the specific efficiency of someone for whom closed doors were a minor inconvenience and personnel who got in the way were a brief delay, Baroness and her team moving toward the warhead with the organized purpose of people who had rehearsed the route. The G.I. Joe team was responding, but the response was playing catch-up with an assault that had been designed to deny them the time they needed to organize.
Jake had been in the facility's lower research wing for the past forty minutes, waiting.
He canceled the stealth compound's concealment with the specific gesture that had become automatic, and twenty Knights materialized from the coat's compression space in the way that the planar storage technology produced — the quiet shimmer, the transition from absence to presence, twenty people standing in neat formation in a research wing corridor of a facility that had been designed to make unauthorized entry very difficult.
The Knights pressed their right fists to their chests.
"Five of you," Jake said. "Find the manual alarm activation points. The Red Queen has the locations. Trigger them in sequence — I want the facility's response fully active before Cobra gets clear with the warhead."
Five Knights separated from the group and moved with the efficiency of people who had been briefed and understood their assignment.
"The rest of you — research wing. We're moving equipment." He paused. "Cobra is in the facility and the G.I. Joe team is running a full response. If any of their people challenge us, we're not their problem tonight — make that clear and keep moving."
The remaining fifteen Knights moved toward the research wing doors.
A patrolling soldier came around the corner and found twenty people in a corridor that shouldn't have contained anyone.
He did what trained soldiers did — raised his weapon, identified the threat category, and issued the challenge in the specific compressed language of someone who needed information fast.
Jake raised his hand and shot the pistol out of the man's grip with a round that passed between the soldier's fingers without touching them, because the Fraternity arc-shot training had produced sufficient precision for exactly that application.
The soldier looked at his empty hand.
Jake looked at him. "We're not Cobra," he said. "Your people need to focus east — that's where the real problem is."
He turned and led his team through the research wing doors.
The G.I. Joe facility's accelerator suit program had been in development for three years, according to the franchise's established timeline. The current generation — what the files designated as the D6 configuration — was the first fully operational version, two prototype suits existing outside the development archive.
The archive was what Jake had already extracted through the Red Queen's network penetration.
The suits were what Jake wanted to test.
The research wing's secure storage section held both prototypes in the specific container configuration of things that were in development rather than deployment — accessible for testing and modification, not locked down for operational security because they hadn't yet been cleared for operational use.
Jake put one on.
The process was straightforward once you understood the sequence, which the Red Queen had walked him through from the extracted documentation during the Batcraft flight. The fitting was not designed for speed — the neural-sensing helmet and the hydraulic suit system required calibration — but the calibration was faster than the documentation suggested because the Red Queen was running the interface adjustments in real time through his wrist unit.
"Neural link established," the Red Queen said, her projection appearing on the interior of the helmet's display surface. The avatar resolution was clear and close — she was running through the suit's communications infrastructure rather than his earpiece.
"This is the first time we've talked at this distance," Jake said.
"I find it slightly unusual," she said, with the specific quality she used when she was being honest about something she hadn't fully processed.
"Unusual good or unusual concerning?" Jake said.
"Unusual interesting," she said.
He moved.
The transition from his own physical movement to armor-mediated movement was different from what he'd expected — not the external amplification of something strapped to the outside of his body, but the genuine integration of the suit's hydraulic system with his neural commands, the sensors reading intent rather than muscle movement and translating that intent into output that the suit's engineering could produce.
The super soldier serum had given him a physical baseline that was already beyond standard human parameters. The D6 suit took that baseline and amplified it.
The first step he took cracked the floor tile.
He recalibrated.
The output the suit generated against an instructed movement of his normal force magnitude was approximately four times what he'd intended. The suit was designed for baseline human operators — its amplification ratio was calibrated to take normal human output and multiply it to something extraordinary. Applied to his enhanced baseline, the arithmetic produced something in a different category.
He filed this as important information for Zola.
The G.I. Joe counterattack team arrived at the research wing with the specific professional efficiency of people who had trained for base intrusion response and were implementing that training.
Twenty-two people. The right equipment. The correct formation.
What they encountered was not what their training had prepared them for.
An armored figure was moving through the wing with the specific combination of enhanced capability and suit amplification, and the encounter data that twenty-two trained soldiers generated in the next ninety seconds was something Zola was going to find very useful.
Jake moved through the engagement without the aggression of someone trying to win a fight — the specific quality of someone testing parameters. He wanted to know where the limits were. He wanted to know how the suit handled incoming fire, edge cases, the specific failure modes that prototypes had when pushed past their design envelope.
The invisibility system was a bonus he hadn't fully accounted for — the cameras and projection array that produced optical concealment, the franchise's established G.I. Joe technology that was less sophisticated than the stealth compound he carried but was available at scale in a way the compound wasn't. He tested it. The G.I. Joe team's counter — concentrated fire on the visual distortion artifact that imperfect optical concealment produced — was sound. He noted it.
"Research equipment is loaded," a Knight reported through the suit's communications.
"Move to extraction point," Jake said.
"The armor?" the Red Queen said.
Jake looked at the suit's condition — the impacts it had taken, the stress points the engagement had produced, the specific data that a first operational test generated.
He kept moving.
"I'll keep it," he said.
"It belongs to the G.I. Joe program," the Red Queen said.
"The documentation belongs to us now," Jake said. "We can produce a better version. This one is a test specimen." He paused. "I'll return it when we've extracted everything useful from the data."
"That's a flexible definition of return," the Red Queen said.
"Note it for the meeting with General Hawk," Jake said. "Complete transparency about what happened here is part of what makes the meeting productive."
"You're going to tell them you took the prototype suit," she said.
"I'm going to tell them I tested it and found several significant improvements to make," Jake said. "And then I'm going to offer to share those improvements, which they can use on their next generation, in exchange for a discussion about the Cobra threat profile that they don't have complete data on."
The Red Queen was quiet for a moment.
"That's either a very good offer or a very good-sounding offer," she said.
"It's both," Jake said.
The extraction point was the same ventilation access that had served as the entry point — the specific facility geometry that the Red Queen had identified as the gap in the G.I. Joe security coverage during her preliminary network analysis.
The Knights were through in organized sequence, the research equipment loaded into the coat's compression space and the Batcraft's cargo hold, the whole process moving at the pace that two hours of preparation had made possible.
Jake came through last, the D6 suit still on.
The facility was in the specific condition of a place that had been hit hard and was fighting back — the alarm systems running, the response teams moving, the G.I. Joe personnel doing what the franchise had established they did under pressure, which was considerably more effective than what the initial surprise had suggested.
He looked back at the facility's exterior.
Inside, Storm Shadow and Baroness were somewhere with the warhead, and the G.I. Joe team was somewhere between them and the exit, and the franchise's events were playing out in the direction the narrative required.
The Dark Council had what it came for.
Jake walked toward the Batcraft's position, the D6 suit's powered movement translating his normal walking pace into something that covered ground faster than it should have.
"The suit," the Red Queen said through the helmet display, "is producing a gait pattern that will be visible on the perimeter sensors."
"I know," Jake said.
"You want them to know someone else was here," she said.
"I want Hawk's after-action report to include 'unknown party operating within our facility during the Cobra assault, demonstrated capability consistent with enhanced physical profile plus accelerator suit amplification, took one prototype and research equipment,'" Jake said. "That's a very specific data point. It confirms that we're serious, that we're technically capable, and that we have objectives that are different from Cobra's."
"It also confirms that we operate opportunistically," the Red Queen said.
"Everything operates opportunistically," Jake said. "The useful distinction is what you do with the opportunity." He reached the Batcraft. "What I did with it is take a prototype and leave them with everything they need to build a better one."
He opened the hatch and boarded.
The Batcraft was at altitude before the G.I. Joe perimeter response reached the ventilation exit.
Jake sat in the pilot's seat in the D6 suit and looked at the display — the facility below, the desert around it, the night sky above.
Selene was in the co-pilot position, looking at the suit with the specific attention of someone who had been mentally cataloguing the capability profile it represented.
"The hydraulic amplification against your baseline," she said.
"Four times my normal output," Jake said. "Approximately."
She processed this.
"That's significant," she said.
"Zola needs to recalibrate the amplification ratio for an enhanced baseline operator," Jake said. "The current design assumes a standard human input. Applied to the serum's output, it's producing numbers that exceed what the suit's structural components were rated for."
"It didn't fail," she said.
"It held," Jake said. "That's not the same as being rated for it. Zola will find the stress points in the data and redesign the structural elements. The next version will be rated for it."
She looked at the suit's surface — the scoring from the G.I. Joe team's engagement, the specific wear pattern of something that had been used rather than displayed.
"Marcus's armor design was functional when he could produce," she said. "I never wore armor."
"The next version will fit you," Jake said. "Zola has your physical profile from the base's biometric intake."
She looked at him.
"He measured me?" she said.
"Standard intake procedure for all personnel," Jake said. "The Red Queen runs it automatically."
Selene turned back to the viewport with the expression of someone who was determining how she felt about this and arriving at the conclusion that it was acceptable.
"The meeting with General Hawk," she said.
"He'll contact us," Jake said. "The after-action report is going to include the Dark Council's presence in the facility during the Cobra assault. He's going to want to understand whether we were there as a third hostile force or something else."
"And you're going to tell him something else," she said.
"I'm going to tell him the truth," Jake said. "We were there because the Cobra assault created an opportunity to access technology we needed. We took the prototype and the research data. We didn't interfere with the G.I. Joe response to Cobra. And we're willing to share the improvements we develop from the research in exchange for a conversation about the threat landscape that his intelligence doesn't currently cover."
"He's going to ask why we didn't just ask," Selene said.
"He's going to ask that," Jake agreed. "And the answer is that asking produces a bureaucratic process that takes months. Taking and then offering the improvements takes hours. The outcome for both sides is better under the second approach."
"He's going to have opinions about that," she said.
"He's going to have opinions and he's going to see the logic of it," Jake said. "Those two things can exist simultaneously."
Selene was quiet for a moment.
Then: "He's going to like you."
Jake looked at her.
"He's going to find you extremely frustrating," she said. "And then he's going to like you anyway. Because you're going to be right, and people who are right and honest about it are rare enough that the frustration becomes secondary."
Jake considered this.
"You're describing Lucian's reaction to me," he said.
"I'm describing a pattern I've observed," she said.
He looked at the night sky ahead.
The Wasteland was several hours south.
Matilda was going to be awake.
Zola was going to be very happy about the research data.
The D6 suit data was going to produce the next generation of something that addressed the gap Selene had identified in her assessment.
And somewhere in the Arctic, the franchise's events were continuing toward the conclusions the franchise required, and General Hawk was going to read an after-action report in the morning that included the Dark Council's presence in his facility and was going to make a specific decision about what to do with that information.
Jake set the Batcraft's course.
The night was not finished with interesting things.
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