ANOM: Awakening (The ANOM Series Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

room. The command center at Fort Blaney was state of the art; it
had to be for their mission. At the center of the room, a long wooden
conference table with high-backed leather chairs dominated the floor. There was
enough seating for a dozen men, but currently only four of the chairs were
occupied. Each of these four men sat in front of an open laptop, quietly
tapping away at their keyboards. The side walls of the room were lined with
flat-screen monitors, four mounted on either side, and on the far wall,
opposite Ellison, there was another monitor dwarfing the rest; the men simply
called it “The Big Screen.”
    The
command center served as the information lifeline for Fort Blaney. It was the
only room on site with access to the internet, live television, or outside
phone lines. There were no other connections between the command center and the
computer network on base; the men in the command center called it an air-wall,
and it was a simple solution to a complex problem: safeguarding information.
The command center was the only room on base that could be hacked from the
outside, and who cares if you get hacked if there’s no sensitive information to
find? Even the laptops used in the room got traded out and re-formatted every
five days.
    As
for the command center’s purpose? If Ellison were pressed, he would have to
admit he wasn’t exactly sure how it all worked. He was told that a complex
algorithm cycled through all available media, searching everything from local
newscasts to hacked foreign spy satellites, always looking for some preordained
combination of words, images, and facial recognition markers. Whatever that
meant.
    Four
teams of analysts monitored the command center every hour of every day. They
would check the search results, run research simulations, track down leads, and
filter out any false positives with old-fashioned common-sense. Ellison
considered it tedious work with little reward, and he was glad the job wasn’t
his. But on rare occasions, if the information warranted it, the analysts would
pass a result up the chain of command. Like today.
    Ellison
looked at the officer seated in the chair to his right. “Lieutenant Brown, I
want the subject’s history profile in my hand in the next sixty seconds,
including his hospital admission record.”
    Brown
snapped his reply without looking up from the laptop, “Yes, sir.”
    “Sir,
do you want those documents up on the big screen?” The question came from
Ellison’s left, from Captain Reyes, the watch officer.
    Ellison
turned. “Negative. Not necessary, Captain.”
    “Sir.”
Lieutenant Brown stood at attention in front of the major, holding out an
electronic tablet. Ellison reached for it, glanced down quickly at the screen,
and then returned his hands behind his back. Lieutenant Brown turned on his
heels in a perfect “about, face” and went back to the table.
    Ellison
watched him with a critical eye. Brown was a competent soldier, and in the end
it was that competence that mattered most, but still, somehow his “sir” came
out as too crisp, almost mocking. Besides, even if Ellison could fool himself
into believing the lieutenant’s “sir,” the “about, face” by Brown confirmed it.
No one marched in the command center. It was insubordination, subtle but
unmistakable, and Ellison would handle it. Later.
    At
thirty-two years old, Stuart Ellison was considered young, maybe even too young
to be a major, but he also knew it was the rank he deserved—the rank he had
earned. Besides, he spent all his life being “too young.” He had graduated a
year early from high school at seventeen. He spent the next four years as a
cadet at the Citadel, and then, after graduation, he accepted his commission as
a second lieutenant in the US Army. He was twenty-one at the time. Three years
later, and he made captain.
    Ellison
always knew he would be a captain, but even he was surprised at how quickly the
promotion came. It was Colonel McCann who