Amy looked around as she heard someone sit down, smiling at Taylor who'd slid into the desk next to her. "Cutting it fine," she whispered while the teacher checked the roll.
Her friend grinned quickly, wiping a strand of hair out of her face and tucking it behind her ear. "Overslept," she whispered back, as she unpacked her notebook, textbook, and pen, putting them on the desk and her backpack on the floor under her chair.
"Again? That's like four times in the last three weeks, Taylor. Are you getting enough sleep?" Amy felt mild concern. The other girl nodded, smiling.
"Yeah, I just had a couple of projects I got really into at home and lost track of the time," she replied. "I'm fine, really. Thanks, though."
The teacher cleared this throat meaningfully and both of them quickly looked frontwards, putting on a serious expression of studious eagerness. He gazed narrowly at them, then nodded in satisfaction. "All right, then, my young friends, today we are learning about neurons. Turn to page forty nine, please, and pay attention."
Amy, who in some senses didn't need to learn biology, was still fascinated by it, and listened carefully. She noticed that Taylor was doing the same, paying rapt attention and taking notes now and then in a very neat hand without looking down.
While she'd only known the girl for a few weeks, she was rather impressed with her, and was pleased to count her as a friend. She wondered if Taylor might like to come over to her house sometime for a meal.
It was something to consider. Right now, though, she was studying a picture of an axon and comparing it to what her own ability told her about such things.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Mr Calvert."
Thomas twitched, then groaned.
"Ah. You are still alive. Excellent, I was beginning to wonder if we were slightly overenthusiastic."
Blinking hard, he tried to work out what the hell was going on. The last thing he could remember was getting out of his car in his home garage, then…
He was sitting at his desk in his base a hundred meters under the middle of the city, when the entire room jumped slightly. Dust settled from the ceiling onto the surface in front of him. He looked at it, puzzled, and ran a finger across the desk, lifting his hand to see the glove of his costume covered in gray powder. Looking up he saw the light fixtures in the ceiling flicker momentarily.
"What the hell?" he muttered as he turned to his computer and brought up the base security status screen, his eyes widening in shock when he saw indicators on all four entrances, the main one, the two escape ones his mercenaries knew about, and the last one only he was aware of, showing that they were currently opening. No alarms were going off as they should have done, but even as he watched the status of the doors went from closed to open, then the sensors stopped reporting. Looking up at the monitors on the wall where dozens of camera views were display, he was just in time to see them all go blank in a couple of seconds, one after another.
"Shit!" he yelped, spinning around and slamming his hand down on the main emergency alarm button behind him on the wall. It depressed with a click.
And that was it. There was no other result.
That was not supposed to happen. And was very, very bad.
Rotating it to unlatch it, then slamming it again, harder, resulted in another click but nothing useful. Giving up on it, he spun his chair around to the computer again and tried the icon to achieve the same result via different means, but that only got a message on his screen saying 'Function Error 2.' He had no idea what that was except very wrong indeed.
Giving up on it, he grabbed his sidearm out of the top drawer and checked it had a magazine in, then picked up the other two in the same drawer and put them into one of the hidden pockets in his bodysuit as he stood. Quickly walking across the office to the main security console he typed in two passwords one after the other, held his hand over the RF ID reader so it could register the tag in his glove, then typed in the final password. Once the console decided he was authorized it popped up a display showing the locations of every single person in the base according to the internal sensors, the status of his self destruct system, and a secondary camera network feed in critical areas.
The news was grim.
His self destruct system had somehow been disabled, showing as offline, the main server room was on fire, the armory was literally filling with water as he watched in horror, one of the water mains that ran under it having apparently exploded, and the few cameras that showed his mercenaries displayed a lot of people draped over various things with a few of them frantically running around trying to put on gas masks. Even as he stared in horror the rest of them dropped limply to the floor.
He heard a hissing sound above him. Looking up, he saw a set of dim lights surrounding an obvious lens sticking out of one of the ventilation ducts, along with a nozzle which was spraying a fine mist into the room. His vision started to swim but he was able to barely make out some sort of small machine behind the lights and lens, looking like a tiny tracked vehicle.
Trying to raise the pistol, his hand shook as he gasped for breath, then sank to his knees. His finger squeezed down on the trigger, but before the weapon could fire he felt blackness take him.
The timeline ended.
He'd been on the way home in the other timeline when whatever had attacked his base had done so. Frantically trying to work out what the hell had happened and who was responsible he'd rigidly controlled his reaction and calmly followed the routine drive from the PRT building to his house. The attack had come out of nowhere. He'd had no warning, no indications that the PRT knew anything about him, or that anyone else did either. His tame Thinker hadn't mentioned a thing about possible threats, but then she was a little bitch who'd never volunteer a word given the choice. Possibly he simply hadn't asked the right questions…
Who was it who behind what happened? Was it the PRT? He hadn't seen any sign of the attackers other than the little machine that had gassed him. He'd only been able to guess that they'd entered at the surface in one of the heavily disguised cooling vents and somehow made it past the various traps in the ventilation system without setting off any alarms. Probably a Tinker involved, then. Armsmaster? Someone new?
Possibly one of the gangs, but the Merchants were idiots so seemed extremely unlikely, it wasn't Lung's style as he'd just have blown the doors in and stomped inside setting everything on fire on the way, and Kaiser, while sneaky enough, didn't have Tinkers as far as he knew. And to the best of his knowledge had no idea where his base was anyway, nor any particular reason to attack him like that.
So who was it? Clearly the perpetrator had a lot of inside knowledge. There was no way he could see that all his alarms could have been disabled so cleanly without that, nor the armory and server rooms destroyed that efficiently. It spoke of a lot of data on his facilities that no one should have had, along with a significant amount of resources and work. And likely patience too, as he couldn't see it happening as a spur of the moment effort. No, it was someone organized, far too well informed, and ruthless.
After all he didn't know for sure that whatever gas had been used was lethal, but he sure wasn't going to assume otherwise.
It was going to take a lot of careful work to discover the people behind the attack. He had to assume his base was compromised and probably at least some of his mercenaries in the pocket of his attacker. The total lack of any warning was the really worrying part, he had no idea who was watching him and what they actually knew.
If it was the PRT, which appeared the most likely source of the attack, it almost certainly wasn't the ENE division. He'd have found out about it if it was, as his taps into their systems was more than enough to make hiding an operation of this size impossible. So it seemed probable that another division, probably not Boston, but perhaps Chicago, had somehow located him and moved in without notifying Piggot.
It would be more complex to confirm it if that was the case, he didn't have very many resources past Boston yet, but he did have a few people he could lean on for more information. As soon as he got home, he could check that his backup, and much smaller, base was intact, then start the process of discovering who had caused him so much trouble. And when he found them he wasn't in the mood to be pleasant about expressing his disapproval.
And if that girl was in some way involved, well, she was not going to enjoy it at all.
Pulling into his driveway he'd hit the button to open the garage, driven into it, and closed the door as he turned the engine off. Then he'd opened the door, got out of the car, and…
There'd been a tiny noise behind him followed by a prick on the back of his neck. The world had gone swirly.
And now he was here, dry mouthed and feeling like he'd been rolled up in a carpet and dragged down several flights of stairs by careless movers. What the fuck was going on?
And who was talking?
He tried to ask a question, but only produced a croak. He couldn't see anything, while turning his head produced a rustling sound. After a few blurry seconds of thought he came to the conclusion that there was something over his head. As sensation came back to him in a rush of pins and needles he realized with worry that his hands were apparently tied behind him, and a twitch of his legs showed that they were also bound to something.
This wasn't good.
Not even a little.
A moment later light agonizingly stabbed into his eyes as whatever was over his head was removed. Involuntary tears streaming from them, he blinked frantically, looking around for some indication of what was going on and who was doing it.
All he could see for several seconds was a very bright light in front of him, with shadows elsewhere. As his eyes adapted to the light, he was able to make out a silhouette just to the side, and some distance behind the light there were hints of movement. He glanced from side to side, then down, seeing that he was still wearing the suit he'd had on when he'd been grabbed and was apparently bound to a metal chair which was bolted to a concrete floor. The room it was in was fairly large as he couldn't make out the walls past the blindingly bright light pointing at him.
"I would apologize for the somewhat cliché arrangement but it's still quite effective," whoever it was that had spoken before said in icily calm tones. It was the voice of a woman, sounding professional and unhurried.
"Who the hell are you?" he croaked, licking his lips which felt numb.
The woman moved slightly, the light that was pointing at his face shifting so he didn't need to squint, then she came closer so he could see her. She was of medium height, sharp featured and with red hair, and was regarding him with a sort of emotionless interest.
"Who I am is at the moment not really relevant to you, Mr Calvert. It may become so in the future, depending on various parameters. One of those is whether you are alive, of course."
She pulled an office chair on wheels from somewhere past the light and sat down, adjusting the legs of her suit as she did so, then regarded him closely. "Thomas Calvert, formerly a member of the Parahuman Response Team special forces group, one of the two survivors of the Ellisburg event. Also known as Coil, a Parahuman Villain who fancies himself as something of a mastermind would-be ruler of Brockton Bay."
His heart sank into his boots at her comment. This was really not good.
"Where am I?" he demanded hoarsely. "I want to speak to a lawyer. You've kidnapped me, you won't identify yourself… Are you PRT?"
She smiled a little grimly. "Oh, no, Mr Calvert, I'm not associated with the PRT. I am associated with a department of the United States government which is currently tasked with… cleaning up some problems. You are one of those problems, one that potentially could have made our jobs more difficult. It was decided that somewhat more direct action was required in your case than in some of the other ones we're handling."
She crossed her legs one over the other and leaned forward, inspecting him with interest as he blanched. "We are fully aware of your abilities, by the way, and precautions have been taken. You are highly unlikely to succeed in any escape attempt, and the results if you did would prove… final. On the other hand, if you cooperate, your life will be..." The woman paused as he stared at her. "Longer. Definitely longer. And possibly quite comfortable although I'll admit that's not a priority at the moment."
He thought frantically. Who the hell did this woman work for? CIA? FBI? No, the FBI didn't do this sort of black bag operation, it was unlikely to be them. CIA was a possibility but it didn't quite fit. Someone who had somehow found out way too much, that was clear, and by the sound of it someone who was a lot more ruthless than he liked.
Thomas wasn't used to being on the receiving side of this sort of thing.
He decided he didn't like it much.
"What do you want?"
"Oh, we want everything, Mr Calvert," she replied with a small hard smile. "We already have the contents of your databases, but I'm sure there are things locked up in your head which will prove useful." Standing, she walked over to him and reached out, tapping his forehead right between the eyes. "We would very much like to know all the little facts you have squirreled away in there, along with all the plans you were making for your empire building goals. And sooner or later I'm sure you'll tell us."
The finger tapped him once more, while he sweated bullets. Then she stepped back.
"How?" he finally said. She raised an elegant eyebrow.
"How what, Mr Calvert?"
"How did you do it? How did you find me, how did you infiltrate my base?"
A voice that was much, much too familiar, and so smug it burned, spoke from off to one side.
"Oh, that part was fairly simple, Boss," Tattletale said as she stepped into the light, a vicious grin on her face that made him think for a moment that she was going to go for his throat. "They made me an offer I really didn't have to think very hard to accept. In fact it was a positive joy. And I know more about you than you do in some ways."
The little blonde bitch leaned down and smirked at him as he gaped, feeling a disorientating mix of total confusion and white-hot fury. She had been involved. He was going to kill the little cunt.
"No, you're not, ex-Boss," she smirked. "The days where you are going to put a gun to someone's head are gone. You're screwed, I win." Leaning close to his ear, she added very quietly "Mua ha ha."
Standing again as he shook with rage, she said, "The rest of my team says hi, by the way. And fuck you."
The blonde grinned nastily at him, nodded to the red-headed woman who was watching with a hint of a smile, before disappearing into the darkness. His captor looked after him then turned back.
"Not a friend of yours, I fear, Mr Calvert. No matter. You're unlikely to meet again. Miss Tattletale has other tasks which won't bring her to cross your path. And, of course, you will be rather busy for the foreseeable future."
He swallowed hard, wondering how the hell he was going to get out of this...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"General Calhoun is here to see you, Director."
Emily looked at her screen and the video chat window that had popped up from her assistant, sighed a little, and nodded while pushing the hard-copy report she was hand annotating to the side. "Send him in," she replied.
Moments later her office door opened to admit the DARPA man, who closed it and walked over as she stood. After a quick handshake he sat. "What can I do for you today, General?" she asked, fearing the worst.
"It's more what I can do for you, Director," he replied with an easy smile. Reaching into his inner pocket he produced a couple of USB sticks which he put on her desk. She looked quizzically at them, then raised her gaze to his face.
"And these are?" she asked, not reaching for them.
"The red one has details of the moles in your organization, along with full dossiers on them all, payment details, blackmail data, times and dates of when they acted for outside sources, and other relevant information," he replied as she froze in shock. "The blue one is a full list of all the exploits and holes in your security and computer network including suggested patches."
She stared at him for close to thirty seconds before she could bring herself to speak. Eventually she swallowed, took a couple of deep breaths, and very carefully asked, "Where did you get this information?"
"It was passed along to us by another agency who came across it during a classified operation, the details of which I'm unfortunately not at liberty to divulge. It's been carefully checked and is valid. They felt that you'd like to deal with the internal issues yourself, although certain external ones have already been handled." He looked slightly apologetic. "We have no beef with you, and I don't want to cause any trouble if it can be avoided. You should be able to clean house using that information, and we didn't see any reason to involve the rest of the PRT. Especially considering your… minor disagreements… with the Chief Director." Calhoun smiled a little as she grunted in irritation.
"You know about that."
"Oh, we keep ourselves informed, yes," he assured her. "Between you and me I find her somewhat difficult to like. Competent, but..." He shrugged one shoulder.
Giving him a look, she finally reached out for the two USB drives, inserting the red one into her computer and waiting for the security check to finish before opening it. A large list of files appeared, neatly categorized by department. Her eyes widened at the sheer number of them.
"Jesus," she breathed, almost hesitantly opening the first document. A quick skim of the contents made her stomach turn over. "Oh, hell. So that's what happened to the E88 raid two years ago..."
This was going to be a nightmare to deal with.
"I'm not sure if I should thank you or shoot you," she growled, looking up at him. He gazed back with clear sympathy on his face.
"I understand, and I'm sorry to cause you trouble, Director. But it needed to be passed on."
Glancing back at her screen, she nodded heavily. "True. It's still going to be a massive pain in the ass." Sighing, she stood and held out her hand again. "Thank you."
"My pleasure. Good luck." He shook it, then stepped back, turned, and left. She dropped into her chair with a grunt and started going through the data, making notes on who was going to get fired, and who was going to go to jail for decades.
Eventually she picked up her phone and started making calls.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Closing the door of the warehouse behind her, Taylor looked around with a smile, then pulled yet another modified cellphone out of her pocket. She was going to have to get around to integrating all her sensors and other toys into one device soon or she'd be carrying more of the things around than seemed plausible, she decided as she turned it on and waited for it to boot. Once it was running she initialized the detector array with a tap on the correct icon, checked it calibrated properly, then went over to the far left side and started walking slowly down the aisle, scanning the towering racks of boxes and containers with her device.
It took her twenty minutes to get the first traces of what she was looking for.
"I knew it," she muttered under her breath, smiling broadly. "I was sure there was more in here somewhere. Considering how long they've been collecting stuff for, it had to be."
Moving around as she waved the repurposed phone about, she slowly localized the tiny variation in background quantum interference noise her scanner was filtering out of the much larger changes other sources of such things produced. It had taken some very careful work and a lot of thought, but she'd finally come up with a method after half a dozen failures, one of which had left an impressive scorch mark on her bench and come close to removing her eyebrows. She'd had to trim her bangs a little to cover the damage and had been blinking quite a lot for an hour or so.
The flash had been rather bright.
And her father had been pretty sarcastic about the bang, not to mention pointedly handing her a set of safety goggles which she'd accepted with a rueful smile and mild shame.
Still, science sometimes bit you. It was just one of those risks.
But in the end she'd managed to achieve her goal. Now she followed the changing graphs on the screen with complete concentration, eventually stopping half way down one aisle, before slowly raising the scanner to point at the fourth shelf up. Nodding in satisfaction she put the thing in her pocket, then walked off, coming back a few minutes later pushing the rolling stairs with some effort. Getting them next to the shelf she scurried up them, then scanned the boxes in front of her until the readings peaked. Putting the modified phone next to her on the steps she leaned over and hauled the large box closer so she could open it, before diving in and rummaging around, a small flashlight between her teeth.
Shortly thereafter she yelped in excitement and surfaced holding a metal and plastic widget about the size of a car radio. Sitting on the steps she carefully examined it with the aid of the light.
"Huh. Not Squealer's work, this is much too neat. I wonder who made it?" she murmured, turning the Tinker device over in her hands, then squinting into one of the gaps in the casing. Pulling a small screwdriver out of her pocket she quickly located and removed several screws, then opened the thing and looked at the innards with interest.
"OK. Cool… still wrong, but not as wrong. Pretty neat too. Nice wiring." She kept mumbling to herself as she leaned over the thing on her knees while studying it closely. "Leet, maybe? Definitely not Squealer. Might be someone else but I can't think of any other Tinker around here other than Armsmaster and I can't see him leaving his stuff lying around..."
Eventually she shrugged, screwed the lid back on, and put the thing in her backpack, before scanning the box again to make sure no more Tinker tech was hiding inside. Not detecting any of the minute quantum noise it seemed to produce, she shoved the box back into place then descended to the floor again, waving the scanner around once more with a questing expression.
Soon she was following another signal. She was very pleased that her guess had been right, the DWU had indeed managed to pick up other random Tinker scrap over the years.
She was very intrigued by what she'd learn by studying it. And figuring out how it tied into her steadily improving understanding of Parahuman powers.
Eventually she was going to work out what was hiding behind the phenomenon. It might take a while, and perhaps a missing eyebrow or two, but they'd grow back and she was patient.
And this was fun, too, as well as educational.
When she left the warehouse two and a half hours later, covered in dust and cobwebs and lugging a fairly heavy backpack, she was definitely feeling in a good mood. She trotted off to the Gravtec offices whistling happily, smiling at the large man with a gun he thought was hidden in his jacket who nodded to her as she passed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"There you guys are."
Danny looked around at his daughter's voice, Angus also turning to see the girl standing in the doorway to his office grinning at them. She seemed in a good mood even for her.
"Hi, dear. Did you need us for something?" He looked at his watch. "No more tests today, I thought?"
"No, we're done with that series," she replied, coming in and closing the door. "Got all the data we need, we can move on to phase two soon. This is something different."
He examined her face suspiciously. He knew that tone of voice.
"You've done something again, haven't you?" he probed cautiously as Angus looked between them, then moved to his chair and sat down with an expectant expression. She waved a hand in front of her.
"Kinda, yeah."
"Something that's going to make me lose what little hair I have left, or something that's not quite that worrying?"
She giggled at his tone of voice. "Bit of both, probably."
"Oh, lord," he sighed, sitting down himself and staring at her. "What now?"
"You remember that stuff we found in the store room?"
He thought back a couple of weeks and nodded slowly and carefully. "The Tinker devices?"
Angus looked sharply at him, then very thoughtfully at Taylor, who was still smiling.
"Yep."
"What about them?" he asked warily.
She put her backpack on the table at the side of the room and opened it, pulling out a device he recognized as the first one she'd found. It looked like it had been cleaned up and the wiring that was hanging out the side was now gone. Putting it on Angus's desk she tapped it as both men leaned over to inspect the thing.
"This is trying to be an optical diversion field generator, and doing a very inefficient job of it," she said. Angus and Danny exchanged bemused glances, then turned to look at her. She sighed faintly and added, "A cloaking device."
"Ah." Angus nodded. "I recall Squealer is known for such inventions."
"She's not very good at it," Taylor said with some asperity. "The tolerances on most of the field coils are horrible, the wiring is substandard, most of the circuitry is seriously underrated, and quite a lot of it is entirely wrong. I mean, it sort of works, but it shouldn't."
"That's rather the point with Tinker technology, though?" Angus commented, sounding a little confused. "No one can properly understand how it works, not even the Tinker who made it."
She put her hands on her hips and glared at the device like it had personally insulted her. "Well, I understand how it's meant to work, and she did a really bad job of implementing it." His daughter shrugged. "So I did it right."
They gaped a little at her, before exchanging another glance. "You… did what right?" Danny asked with trepidation.
"I reverse engineered her toy and fixed the bugs, then made a better one," Taylor smiled, pulling out her phone.
Angus cleared his throat, making her and Danny both look at her. "Taylor, I know full well that you're probably smarter than any six normal engineers put together but people have been trying to understand how Tinker technology works for nearly thirty years and… good lord."
Both of them stared in shock at where Taylor had been standing, and was now an entirely empty patch of carpet. She'd raised the phone and tapped an icon, then simply disappeared. Very slowly Danny stood, before cautiously reaching out with one hand.
"Boo!" she shouted as she reappeared a couple of feet to the left, making him nearly jump over Angus's desk in shock. They gaped at her as she collapsed in giggles. "Your faces," she chortled, pointing. "That was fantastic."
Taking a couple of breaths, Danny calmed his racing heart, then walked over to her and put his arm over her shoulders, which were shaking with laughter. "Taylor?"
"Yes, Dad?" she said innocently, gazing at him with big eyes behind her glasses. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Are you saying that you understand how Tinker technology actually works?" he asked mildly, feeling light headed. Angus was gaping still.
She shrugged a bit. "Some of it, yeah. It's not really that difficult if you look at it right. It's not very well designed, that makes it a bit tricky, but the underlying concepts aren't really drastically weird. I mean, I don't know yet if other Tinkers than Squealer will make better stuff, she might be a bit handicapped or something. I found some more widgets in the store room I think are Leet's work and it does look much neater if nothing else. I guess she's probably high or something a lot of the time? Maybe that explains it." The girl looked thoughtful for a moment as he tried to parse the stream of words. "I can't see being on drugs really helping with making hardware. I know that if I drink too much tea my hands shake a little. But that coil was really badly wound, I'm amazed she didn't burn her workshop down or something..."
Holding up a hand, he waited for her to stop talking. "All right. Let's slow down and take a step back, just for me?"
"Sure, dad."
"You figured out what Squealer's device did?"
"Yep."
"And how it did it."
"Yep."
"Then duplicated it and made it small enough to go into a phone?"
"Yep." She grinned widely as he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. Angus was sort of smiling while still looking stunned, he noticed. Taylor just seemed pleased with herself, which to be honest wasn't unwarranted.
"So you now have an invisibility phone."
"I do, yes." She held it up proudly. "Still working on the sound suppression field, that one is slightly trickier to miniaturize enough and I have to recalculate all the emitter parameters from scratch, but the theory's not too hard. And the structural field generator is coming along well, but I haven't had time to finish it yet."
Dropping into his chair he stared at his brilliant, irrepressible, impossible daughter in silence.
Eventually he shook his head in wonder and turned to Angus, who picked up his phone.
"I'll call Brendan," the physicist said with a smile. "He's going to love this."
Taylor produced a thick printout from her backpack. "I've got my design notes all written up if that helps."
"Of course you have," he sighed. He held out his hand and Angus put a small shot glass into it, then filled it from the bottle he kept in his desk while holding the phone to his ear with his other hand.
"Hello, Brendan," the older man said with a mischievous expression, even as Danny tossed back the whiskey. "Is DARPA interested in a cloaking device small enough to go in your pocket?"
All three of them could easily hear the shouting from the other end of the phone, which made Danny and Taylor both grin.
