Taylor had spent a lot of time sleeping, which was a good thing in Roxi's estimation. She had been watching her pilot's vital signs in case something happened. So far, everything was stable, and Taylor was resting comfortably.
She'd been accessing the local data infrastructure from Mr. Smith and Cooper's access node, very careful to not to use too much network bandwidth. Her current topic of research was the Parahuman phenomenon.
From where she had originated, many people had a power of some sort, though fairly low level and often quite minor. Low level empathy and telekinesis were common. The top tenth of a percent would be powers that could be weaponized, and the top hundredth of a percent of those would be truly destructive, what was termed an "A" or "S" rank threat here on this variation of Earth.
Based on her discreet research, roughly one percent of one percent of the population here had some kind of power that could be leveraged to engage in conflict of some sort. And engage in it they did. Crime rates were unusually high across the North American continent, and they were extremely high here in the city of Brockton Bay.
There was definitely a 'Might makes Right' attitude amongst the various factions in the city. This was actively aided by the attitude of the agency whose remit, ostensibly, was to deal with those groups. Yet it seemed the PRT and Protectorate were more concerned with high profile actions against various Parahuman groups rather than the enforcement of the law. Peculiar. She would have to research why this was so.
She was very quick to notice several instances of anomalous access taking place at the PRT building. There was the usual low security access of various administrative personnel. There was the higher level, and even according to her standards, high security access with good encryption, and then there were what were clearly bypasses of the normal security through various means. A quick trace of traffic had shown that a lot of data was going to a location in the financial district, and some was going to what appeared to be an abandoned commercial building in the Docks area of the city.
Perhaps it was not so abandoned, after all? The link there suddenly went dead for no obvious reason.
Her first pilot had taught her the importance of having good intelligence before planning any operations. Given that she appeared to be in a version of the United States of America on an Earth analog, she could reasonably assume that she was in violation of a whole host of laws. She should see about trying to get legitimate access to various sources of data, as well as find and review the relevant laws.
The one thing that fascinated her was that there appeared to be another AGI operating on this world. There were several communications that were
heavily encrypted by her standards, which would require effort on her part to crack if she was so inclined. Most of those lines terminated in another node in the Pacific Northwest region of the continent. There was one thread from there that she traced, with some difficulty, to a remote location off the coast of eastern Canada. Peculiar.
Roxi emitted the electronic equivalent of a sigh. She moved finding up to date maps of the world on her list of things to do. That didn't take long, there being several excellent free nodes that had high quality maps of the planet.
She waited a couple of seconds, parsing multiples of the map data. Most of the heavily encrypted communications went to a node outside Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The other appeared to be a small, rocky island off the coast of Labrador.
She put both locations on her list of things to look at later.
A quick check of Taylor's vitals showed that she was still resting. She'd have to wake up soon so she could eat. Taking care of several bodily functions would be more difficult, since they hadn't inserted a catheter or a colostomy bag, and transporting her back to her cockpit for only that seemed impractical. She would have to talk to one of the nurses.
The girl's father had been physically removed from the room a couple of hours prior. "Taylor is stable," the doctor had informed him, "and you will be notified immediately if there are any changes for good or ill." Then he had to be escorted out of the building by a couple of the large orderlies.
The local news outlets were just beginning to announce that classes today at Winslow High School would be canceled. That was not one of her prouder moments, Roxi had to admit in the privacy of her own thoughts. She knew better than that, and three of her previous pilots had taught her to be better than that. She'd have to come up with a plan to somehow make amends for that oversight.
"Hey, Tats," Regent said with a yawn. "Ah, you've got coffee made." At the lack of an answer, he looked over at his teammate, sitting at the table with her laptop. "Hello?" he asked, waving his hand in front of her face.
"Huh?" Tattletale said with a start. "Oh. It's only you." She looked at her laptop one last time and closed it.
"Normally you would be getting your beauty sleep," Regent told his teammate. "Sure as hell looks like you need it."
"Love you, too. Late night call from the Boss," Lisa said as she went and got herself another cup of coffee. "He needed some information."
And I wished I hadn't looked. Something was watching.
Regent ignored her answer and had already turned on the TV. Lisa could hear the Brockton Bay Morning News. "Tats," Regent said in hushed tones, "you need to see this."
Lisa poked her head in to look at what Alec was going on about. She was about to say something when she saw the image and just stood there, jaw hanging open.
"...And the authorities aren't saying what caused most of Winslow High School to collapse and melt. When asked, Armsmaster stated that the investigation had just begun, and that any information they would release would be through the usual channels.
"We have managed to secure a few photographs taken during the night…" Lisa ignored the rest of what the anchorwoman was saying, her eyes threatening to pop out of their sockets. There, in all its grainy, high-gain night exposure glory was a gleaming white titan. Then she winced as her power dumped several dozen data points into her skull.
"You know, Alec, I think going to bed's a good idea," she commented. "Yeah, it's too early to deal with something like this," she muttered. With that, Lisa went to the bathroom, took two tranquilizers, and crawled under the blankets on her bed in the hopes that whatever it was would be gone when she woke up, and the Boss wouldn't want her to poke at it.
Because that would end badly. It would end badly for the Boss if he poked at it directly, but she wasn't going to tell him that. If anything, she wanted to watch – from a good distance away.
Then she was out, and enjoyed a rather long and quiet morning nap, untroubled by giant robots and half melted and collapsed schools.
Thomas Calvert looked up from his desk in his secret base. He'd seen the first reports, and done his split the timeline trick, only to find out that any in which he pushed to figure out who had created the metallic titan would usually come to a painful end, the rest ending abruptly anyway. There was the bright flash of light, the crushing darkness, his base's self destruct system going off without warning, something about ceiling lizards that had given him a stroke, sudden decompression – and that had been excruciatingly painful before he expired – and at least six other rather bizarre ways to meet one's end.
He'd tried to get his pet thinker on the job, but she'd turned off her phone after his first call. The surveillance team had told him that she was still at the Undersider's lair and not her apartment, so she hadn't tried to leave town on him.
Tired of being the butt of some power's idea of gallow's humor, he decided that the safe thing to do would be to just enjoy the danish and coffee on the desk in front of him, and wait to see what else the PRT put into their system about the robot that had demolished the school.
Kenta Moroboshi looked about his office as he arrived. The usual staff were there, making sure things were running smoothly. He took off his great coat and hung it on the coat rack in its usual place.
"Good morning, Sir," the receptionist said. "I've already got the morning paper on your desk, and your usual selection of breakfast food." The young woman checked her notes. "Your ten o'clock had to cancel, and would like to reschedule for tomorrow."
"Thank you, Makoto," he replied with a nod. "See what can be arranged. I'm not to be disturbed for the next hour or so."
The young woman nodded.
With that, he walked into his office, and sat down at the slab of wood he called a desk. With the familiarity of long habit, he opened the newspaper with a crisp snap, and began reading.
There were a couple minutes before there was a bellow from the office of Mr. Moroboshi.
"Nanda sore?!?!"
There was a bit of stunned silence in the office as the staff looked at the door to Kenta's office before they got back to work, wondering in hushed voices what that was all about.
Makoto counted to ten.
"Ms. Aino," Kenta's voice said via the intercom, "please tell Lee and Hannya I wish to see them as soon as they arrive."
"Yes, sir," she replied. She turned to her computer, and in seconds, a text message to both was on its way.
There were, Max Anders decided, some things you were just not prepared to deal with. At all.
From his penthouse office, he was looking at the half melted pile of rubble that used to be Winslow High School. Not that he cared about the school – Theo went to Arcadia – but it was one of the better recruiting grounds for his organization.
Victor had already been there, digging up whatever he could find about what had happened. Max could hear him cursing in several different languages.
"Anything of note?" Max asked as he watched emergency services scurry around the destroyed school.
"I've got rumors of a white student locked in her locker by a black student and her hangers-on," Victor stated. "No names yet."
"Check with some of the members who attend that alleged excuse for a school. Whatever happened involved a Parahuman," Max said after lowering his binoculars.
"There were several arrest warrants issued first thing this morning," Victor added. "Three juveniles, and a half-dozen adults. Fairly serious charges. One of the juvenile warrants is
Federal, but I can't put a name to it yet."
"Really? Hmmm. Anything else?"
"A really grainy picture of what caused the damage," Victor admitted. "Not the best picture, but it was taken from Medhall's cameras around two AM. Other views are circulating, and have appeared on broadcast news." He held the tablet out so Max could take a look at it. "I might suggest not having a very heavy pair of expensive binoculars in your hands when you look."
Nodding, Max set the binoculars down on his desk, then picked up the tablet. "That's impressive. Also worrying. Any clue on what it is and where it went?"
"I honestly don't know," Victor admitted. "Nobody claims to have tracked it after it launched. It looks like something from Japanese media, probably from Earth Aleph."
"Might we have a tinker to look for?" Max asked. Organizations such as his were always looking for tinkers.
"If it was a tinker, they'd triggered months ago," Victor said. "And we've had no new Protectorate capes except Shadow Stalker in the last six months. Definitely not Squealer's aesthetics. To build something like that takes some heavy industrial resources."
Max nodded. "Our friends down at the DWA have those resources. They have most of the heavy industry left in this city."
"I agree, but they've had relatively few capes come out of there," Victor added. "And even then, they remain surprisingly close-lipped about everything. There's also been no sign of the kind of activity required to produce something that big. They've never been able to hide getting even a small wreck salvaged."
"No luck slipping a couple of people in?"
Victor sighed. "The last time we tried, our men were
politely beaten, and we were given an equally politely worded message to not try again; that was using deep cover and cutouts, they were still spotted. When your
father tried more forcefully, they rigged up some booby traps, and JagdPanther died. Horribly. It took five days for the spot where he died to stop burning. Even Brad doesn't want to push his luck there."
"I do remember that. Hans wasn't all that bright, and my dear departed father probably considered him a liability."
"I think what we've got here is a projection master," Victor speculated. "We'll have to stand back and see what happens."
"Yes, that's prudent." Max sat back down at his desk. "So tell me, how goes your experiment?"
"The use of five and six year olds to review some of our sanitized plans has produced some startling results…" Victor started.
Max leaned back as Victor gave his report, and thought about the list that Rune had forwarded to him. It had some good points.
"Hey babe." The raspy male voice came from underneath a pile of what might-have-been-called-blankets, which were piled on something that might have been a mattress sometime in the last ice age.
"Yeah, Skids?" The slightly drunken sounding female voice also came from underneath the same pile of might-have-been-blankets.
"Whatever you did last night was
mind blowing," Skidmark moaned. "I even felt the goddamn Earth literally move!"
"Uhm sure, Skids, whatever you say," Squealer replied, her voice somewhat confused.
"I don't think we should do it again, though," Skidmark admitted. "I think I threw out my back." There was a pause. "Did you just nibble on me?"
"Uhm, no?"
There was a pause before both Skidmark and Squealer screamed, and the blankets, Squealer, and half a dozen rats were thrown from the bed.
There was someone pounding at her door.
Janice Blackwell was not happy. She was already late, and now she had someone at her door, just before seven AM, when she needed to leave for work.
"What is the meaning of this…" she began as she unlocked the door and opened it. Her protests fell into silence as she noticed the two PRT troopers and an FBI agent at the door.
"Are you Janice Blackwell?" the agent asked.
"Yes, I'm Janice Blackwell," she replied automatically.
"Agent Jones, FBI. Janice Blackwell, we have a warrant for your arrest," the agent stated, displaying said warrant along with his ID.
"The charges?" she reflexively asked.
"Conspiracy to defraud the Federal Government, Misuse of Federal Funds, Fraud, and several other felony charges," the first PRT officer read off the warrant.
"Turn around and face the wall, and put your hands on top of your head," the second PRT officer stated.
As she complied, her mind was racing.
How had they found out? This was followed shortly by
How can I blame someone else for it?
"You have the right to remain silent," the second officer recited Janice's MIranda rights as he firmly grabbed one arm, pulled it down behind her back, and attached half of a zip cuff. Then the other hand was wrenched down, and secured.
Taking a moment to grab the woman's briefcase and engage the door's lock, they pulled the door shut and marched her off to the waiting van.
The scene repeated at several locations scattered across Brockton Bay. Two had been the most exciting.
At the Barnes household, they'd originally had just a warrant for Emma's arrest. She'd offered no resistance to the police officers. Her father, on the other hand, decided to get in the faces of the two officers, who warned that if he did not back off and quiet down, he would be charged with interfering with a police officer, and if he continued after the warning, he would be tased.
One thing led to another, and Zoe Barnes facepalmed as her husband danced a little bit of a jig before falling over in a heap. They'd made sure he was OK, gathered him up, cuffed him, and put him in the car with Emma.
A few minutes after they'd left, Zoe dialed a number on her phone for one of Alan's coworkers. "Carol, it's Zoe." There was some squawking about the early hour. "I know it's early, and I apologize. Alan won't be into work today, because he's been arrested." More noises of disbelief came from the phone. "The other reason I'm calling is that I need a good criminal lawyer, because Emma was also arrested, and I found a couple of the charges rather disturbing." There was a bit of silence, and some much quieter words were said. "Thank you, Carol. I'll let you know when the bail hearings are."
Anne was still sitting at the breakfast table as her mother closed the door. "What was that all about?" she asked between mouthfuls of food.
"It appears your father has been less than wise this morning," Zoe said as she finished her coffee. "And has complicated things a great deal. And somehow, Emma appears to be in a great deal of trouble."
She sighed as she sat down. "Carol's going to be our representation, so it's not going to break the bank too badly. I'd better call the university and let them know I'm not going to be in today."
Anne looked at her phone. "I wonder if it had anything to do with Winslow getting destroyed?" She turned her phone around to show her mother.
It would be some time before Zoe Barnes said something intelligible.
At the Hess apartment, things went much smoother.
As Sophia opened the door, she was greeted by the sight of Miss Militia, who was holding a taser formed from her power. "We need you to come with us," she said, her eyes betraying no emotion. "You can do this the hard way, or the easy way."
There was silence, and then Sophia tried to slam the door in her face. Miss Militia was just a bit faster, and Sophia dropped to the floor twitching. "Sophia Hess, you are under arrest, having violated your probation," she said as she applied the bracelet that would shock her any time she tried to shift to her breaker state. She picked the stunned girl up. "Mrs. Hess," she said to Sophia's mother, who had looked over from the kitchen. "I apologize for the interruption to your morning. We've uncovered evidence that Sophia has
grossly violated her probation."
Naomi Hess facepalmed. "What does this mean for our family?" the woman asked when she'd recovered.
"The PRT will abide by its agreements with you," Hanna said, a gentle smile appearing in her eyes from under the bandanna. "If it becomes necessary, we will relocate you out of the area, and provide what assistance we can for the duration of Sophia's contract."
"Thank you for that," Mrs. Hess said. "How bad is it?"
"It's doubtful she'll see the world outside of a prison again," Hanna said sadly. "That's just for the five murders she committed last year before we caught her."
"I see." Mrs. Hess sighed. "It appears my daughter is truly dead, then. Thank you all for what you tried to do, Miss Militia."
Miss Militia looked down at Sophia. The girl was still twitching from the taser shot. "We have a search warrant, we will be searching Sophia's room."
"I understand," Sophia's mother said. "Please try not to leave too much of a mess."
"Momma? Where are they taking Sophie?"
"Alsie, Sophie's done some bad things."
As Miss Militia walked down to Sophia's room with another female trooper, she listened as the mother tried to explain why Sophia was leaving,
Trying and failing.
Quickly and efficiently, they searched the girl's room, taking anything that could be used for evidence – her computer, phones, discs, notebooks, and even the contents of the trash can from the girl's bathroom. They placed it all in evidence bags, and those went into a box.
Alsie Hess had wound herself up into hysterics now.
Miss Militia handed Naomi Hess the receipt for what had been taken from the girl's room. "I'm sorry it came to this, ma'am."
Naomi took the receipt. "I understand," she said, sadly. "You'd better leave."
Miss Militia simply nodded, and left quietly.
She was sitting in the back of the van, keeping an eye on the recalcitrant ex-Ward. "Happy now?" Sophia asked, a smirk on her face.
Miss Militia gave the girl her best 'I have no fucks left to give' glare. "You're the one who wrecked their lives." Miss Militia reached up and turned off the camera and microphone on the ceiling. Her power then formed a large caliber pistol, which was then leveled at Sophia's head. "Do you know what keeps me from pulling the trigger?"
"You don't have the strength," Sophia snarled. "Miss 'I'm a good little soldier'."
"And that is where you're wrong," Miss Militia answered. She clicked the safety off and cocked the hammer. "I have killed more people than you ever will before I was your age." The look in her eyes was so very, very cold.
Sophia was now sweating a bit.
"Strength is what keeps me from pulling the trigger
right now and saving everyone – you, me, your mother, your teammates, and what few friends you have – a whole lot of grief. But what do you care, Sophia? So long as you could keep running away from your problems."
The muzzle came to rest between her eyes. Sophia tried to phase and got zapped by the bracelet. "Get this fucking thing off me!" She tried to phase her hand, only to get zapped harder. "AGH!"
The large handgun had disappeared. "No. You'd better get used to it, it's going to be a part of you for the rest of your life. And that's two escape attempts."
She reached up and turned the surveillance camera back on. "Is the prisoner still alive?" one of the troopers in the cab asked.
"Don't worry, she's alive," Hannah answered. "She may soon wish she wasn't, though."
Darrel Smith, alias Uber, smelled something. He blinked a couple of times, waking up. He'd be OK, he'd often had to wake up in the middle of the night and take care of something, then come back to the shop where he and his partner also lived and crash for three or four hours before rising from the dead and doing it all again.
There was the aroma of coffee, bacon, eggs, some hash browns, and some donuts. The donut smell was very familiar, from his partner's autobaker. Put the ingredients in, press the button, and donuts came out. It also did other small dessert items if you knew the tricks.
He opened the door to his bedroom, and checked over in his partner's space. Daryl had fallen asleep at his computer – again – and had filled a text document with gibberish. A lot of gibberish.
Who was cooking?
He quietly made his way down towards the kitchen area. Manning the stove was a figure, possibly female based on the general build, shorter than he was. The skin was nearly the same impossible white that the armor on the mobile suit in the B building was, with some clothes over various areas of the body. It looked like something from one of the sci-fi JRPG's he'd played a bit of. Remaining quiet, he moved closer.
"Good morning, Mr. Smith," it said. The voice was one they'd heard before, namely last night.
"Roxi, I thought you were with Taylor." He abandoned all pretext of stealth and sat down at the table. She placed a cup of coffee in front of him in seconds.
"Like most computers," she answered, "I can multi-task quite well."
Darrel never thought a computer could look or sound
that smug.
"So, why are you in our kitchen, cooking breakfast?"
"I'm imposing on your hospitality and good will," Roxi stated. "One of the things I learned when I first awoke was repaying my debts. Had I known that the building belonged to you, I'd have chosen the other site."
Darrel took a sip of the provided coffee. "This is good, thanks. Anyway, if it's the building I'm thinking of, it would've been a bad choice. One of our local Parahuman gangs is using it as a drug lab."
Roxi brought a plate over, which had a fair amount of food on it. "I'm assuming they're not producing legal pharmaceuticals?"
"No," he replied before digging in. "This is really good," he added as he took a moment to compliment the cook. "Where does an AI from God-knows-where learn how to cook, anyway?"
"From my first pilot and his daughter," Roxi replied. "And from some of his wife's friends. One was a really good cook. You only asked my first pilot's wife to cook if you needed a bioweapon or biotoxin. I do miss them." There was a hint of melancholy to the voice. "That was an interesting time."
"I smell food," came the groaning voice of Daryl, sounding like a B-movie zombie. As he entered the room, he still appeared to be half asleep, had keyboard-like impressions on one side of his face, and had his eyes closed. Darrel was about to tell him to wake up when he turned too soon and walked into the wall. Then bounced off the wall behind him, and then ran into the first wall again. He soon settled to the floor. "Ow," he moaned. He turned to glare at his partner. "Asshole. Why didn't you wake me up?"
"Since it looked like you fell asleep at the keyboard – again – I decided to let you sleep," Daryl stated. "We both had a long night."
"So what'd you fix for breakfast?"
"I fixed nothing," Darrel admitted. "Our guest did."
It was then that Daryl noted Roxi standing across the room at the stove, a plate in hand. "Breakfast?" she offered.
"I need some coffee before I'm ready to deal with this," and he sat down and began drinking.
"OK," said Daryl. "I've had my coffee, and listened to your explanation while we ate. While that answers most questions, there are a few unanswered."
"If I can answer them, I will," Roxi said from where she was sitting.
"Mobile suits are fusion powered. What kind of reactor do you use, and what's its fuel?" Daryl asked.
"I am currently running on a lithium-6 and deuterium fueled reactor. I have the reactor turned down to idle to minimize fuel usage."
"OK," Daryl said. "Making a note here, it might be hard to get that. Sure, we got an ocean full of deuterium nearby, but lithium – especially lithium-6 – isn't easy to come by. Out of curiosity, what's the output?"
"Peak power output is 175 megawatts constant. Idle is twenty kilowatts. I can maintain idle power for two years, a hundred megawatts for ninety days," Roxi duly reported.
"Hmm," Daryl said while thinking. "I'll assume heat is an issue."
"Very much so, yes," Roxi replied. "What appear to be wings are actually radiators."
"Thought as much." There was some more writing by Daryl on the notepad. "Flight is a purely thrust based system, using reaction mass?"
"Yes. I can use a variety of reaction masses. Performance varies greatly. Typically, liquid water is used. I have used industrial carbon-diamond and buckyballs for reaction mass as well." The gynoid looked thoughtful. "There
were early tests using mercury, but there were metallurgical, material and safety issues, so we didn't continue."
"Thank God for that," Darrel said, on his fourth cup of coffee. "That stuff's bad news all around."
"And when the tank it's stored in becomes an amalgam of mercury and whatever polymer, then bursts…" Roxi shrugged. "It was a mess. Especially since it happened in microgravity."
"Well, that's enough 'boggle the tinker'," Daryl stated. "Is there anything you really need, besides a number of strategically restricted materials? There might be a workaround there, though."
"If I am going to be located here for any significant amount of time," Roxi stated, "I'm going to need a support gantry. Currently, my joint pins have locked my joints, and the only balance correction I have is my foot actuators. It takes less power, but slows my reaction time.
"I would also like legitimate access to your 'internet'," Roxi asked. "I've been spoofing wireless access since I arrived."
"Yeah, we noticed a fair amount of traffic coming from you," Darrel said. "Thanks for not using all of our bandwidth. Our service provider gets a bit testy when we go over. Dragon's pretty decent about it, though." His phone played an ominous sound, and he checked his text messages. "We'd better figure out what to tell the Protectorate when they come back in an hour."
"Do they even sleep?" ranted Daryl, almost throwing his coffee into the air.
"We already know Miss Militia doesn't need to, she's told us that," Darrel answered. "Armsmaster is the only one we suspect might be a robot."
"Armsmaster is definitely human, and not a robot, cyborg, or android," Roxi stated.
Daryl sighed. "We know that, it's just that the man has such a lack of empathy it's almost machine-like. He just doesn't get people."
Darrel's phone played a slightly less ominous sound. "Dragon herself will be joining them. She's curious about what's standing in our B building."
"Who, or
what, is Dragon?" Roxi asked as she picked up the plates and loaded them into the dishwasher.
"Dragon is the world's greatest tinker," Daryl stated. "I'm a tinker, but Dragon can not only build it, she can understand parts of it, and make it work as normal technology. Sometimes."
"Tinkers being a subclass of Parahumans who build anomalous technology. The tinker known as Leet is known to be able to make nearly anything – once. Anything outside of a couple of fields of technology tends to fail when repeated, often in a most spectacular way." Roxi smiled brightly.
"How'd you figure that out?" Darrel asked, pulling out his tablet to check on the day's other activities.
Roxi looked very smug. "I do have access to the internet, you know. There is an archive of videos about Leet's failures. Many are quite humorous, and it is only because medical related technology is one of the fields where things don't fail if you make more than one of them that he," and with that, she pointed at Daryl, "is still alive."
Daryl's remaining coffee
exploded out of the coffee cup.
After taking a few minutes to clean up and change into working clothes, they were all back in building B. "So what do you want to tell them?" Uber asked Roxi.
"As little about my full capabilities as possible," she stated. "Unfortunately, that includes you as well. However, since you are also aware of something of the origin of mobile suits, you are aware of more than they are."
"Yeah, we filled them in on the basics," Leet admitted. "Namely fusion power and beam weapons. I think they might have seen you take off from the wrack and ruin of Winslow, so they know you have flight capabilities.
"What are you going to tell your pilot? And how's she doing?"
"I will tell my pilot what she needs to know," Roxi explained. "As her skills improve, I will tell her more. And she's doing fine, she just finished eating her breakfast. She's also been told that someone named Panacea will be visiting this afternoon."
"That should fix your pilot up," Uber said. "Panacea is very good at what she does, I just hope your pilot can stand a visit from Glory Girl. She's a bit much for convalescents to handle."
There was a ping from Leet's phone. He looked at it before saying, "Well, our guests are on their way. Sentrycam one spotted the Armscycle turning onto the street."
They were also beginning to hear the whine of the turbines of one of Dragon's suits on approach.
Roughly the same time as the gate opened to allow Armsmaster and a PRT technical evaluation crew access to the yard, one of Dragon's newest suits touched down on a pad in one corner of the yard. By the time Armsmaster and the vans had parked, the turbines had spooled down and the flight surfaces had retracted while Dragon walked over towards where Uber and Leet were standing.
"Good morning gentlemen, Armsmaster," she said with a friendly wave.
Uber nodded. "Good morning. We all know why we are here, and our guest is ready for you in building B."
Armsmaster nodded. "I would very much like to see this giant robot. We also need to talk to the pilot about the destruction of Winslow High School."
"While the pilot is currently hospitalized, the control system is able to answer some questions," Leet added. "If everyone would care to join us, it's much warmer in there, plus we have coffee and donuts."
With that, they walked into the presence of a titan.
"That," Armsmaster said, "is very impressive." They'd entered through the smaller overhead door. As the door had rolled closed and their eyes adjusted to the lower light level, they had a clear view of the mobile suit, glittering white under the LED lights.
"Dude," whispered Leet to his partner, "I didn't know we had LED lights in here."
"I think someone made some improvements," was all Uber answered. He could see Dragon politely hiding a chuckle.
In front of the suit, there were several tables which had various samples of something on it. Standing behind the tables was Roxi. Soon, the entire group was by the tables, looking at things.
"Welcome," Roxi announced while bowing slightly. "I am Roxi, or more specifically, an avatar of the system control unit of RX-1.43.M5882353. I'll try to answer any questions you have that aren't covered by my security protocols.
"To answer the first and obvious question: Yes, I am an artificial general intelligence, or AGI. I have passed three sets of tests similar to what Alan Turing proposed in 1950, though modified to prove that I could think, and that I demonstrated that I had moral and ethical behavior. As of my last evaluation, I have a conversational level of thirteen, which is equal to most educated humans of the postgraduate level.
"The second obvious question is yes, I am armed. I was constructed as a weapon system whose complexity required a thinking assistant to handle the workload. To that end, I only have direct access to the point defense weapons except under extraordinary circumstances."
"What, specifically, are those extraordinary circumstances?" Armsmaster asked.
"Incapacitation of my pilot during combat to facilitate withdrawal. Defense of duty station in case of a decapitation strike by hostile forces. Proportional response in the case of self-defense," Roxi answered. "Those are the three most common circumstances. There are others, but they are very situational, and highly unlikely to occur while on the surface of a planet."
While Roxi was dutifully answering the questions, she was monitoring the data traffic in and around the area. Dragon's suit, which gave the outward appearance of having a woman inside, had a very high bandwidth link which ultimately terminated back at the server node in Vancouver. It was also even more heavily encrypted than the normal traffic to that location. Curiouser and curiouser.
"You mentioned that you had an ELINT and SIGINT suite of an exceedingly advanced nature," Dragon asked. "How advanced, and how capable?"
"The information on how advanced is unavailable at this time," Roxi stated. "The information on full capabilities is also unavailable. In general, with a few exceptions, I can unobtrusively monitor signal traffic of all kinds within a 30,000 meter radius. Right now, I am currently getting details about the region from publicly available sites."
"Does this include EWAR systems as well?" Armsmaster asked.
"Yes, and the specific capabilities of those systems are highly classified," Roxi admitted. "To ease your minds, I do not randomly snoop and crack systems, I do so only as required by mission parameters. So, while I do know where the data is moving, to and from, I don't know what it contains beyond whether or not it's obviously encrypted. I have dipped, so to speak, into my EWAR and SIGINT systems once since my arrival, as part of ensuring my pilot's long-term health and safety."
Dragon nodded. "I was able to get warrants to resolve that particular issue based on that 'anonymous tip', so thank you. Try not to do it again, please."
Roxi nodded. "I also have some demonstration pieces of technology that are used in the suit, along with a couple of presentations on a couple of larger systems."
Geoff Pellick looked at the screen that revealed, to him anyway, what the AI Dragon was thinking. Much of it was the usual minute-to-minute things Dragon often thought about, data she was processing for the PRT and the Guild, Narwhal's latest attempts to 'get her out of the suit', and various baffling things around the continent of North America.
Then there had been the strange alert he'd gotten from the Ascalon laptop last night, something about remote monitoring having been detected.
Suddenly, he frowned. His own programs running on the laptop had come across something in Dragon's streamed data that almost caused him to swear: Dragon had met another AI. Rather, it'd met another artificial general intelligence, or AGI, and one that he hadn't known about.
"Hey, Mags?" he called out to one of his teammates.
"What, Geoff?" Mags called back from where she was working.
"Anything exceptionally strange happen in New England last night?"
"Lemme check," she answered. "Just a couple of things: Something cratered a school, and some of Blasto's creations staged a rebellion and threw him out of his own lab." There was a sound of laughter from the room Mags was in. "That's fucking hilarious! One of the lizards was running around chasing him with a sword!"
Geoff chuckled at the biotinker's misfortune. "OK, that
is exceptionally strange, what about the other one?"
There was silence as Mags pulled up the information. "I'm sending you the link to the data on that one."
His tablet beeped, having received the link Mags had sent. He opened it, and was looking at an image of a robot of some kind, standing in the ruins of a school building. Another link had a video of the thing erupting out of the school, then standing up from a kneeling position. It looked around, spread actual
wings, and took off in a blast of superheated gasses.
"Holy shit…" the man known as Saint muttered.
"Yeah, that was my reaction, too," Mag said from where she stood at the door to Saint's office. "It almost looks like something from one of those Aleph cartoons. I hope it's not as well armed as some of those if it is."
Geoff leaned back in his chair. "Let's do some intel gathering before we go charging into the US and bearding that thing in its lair. I'm not as worried about Dragon right now."
Taylor had been sleeping on and off during the day, really only waking up to eat breakfast and lunch, or responding to the nurse's questions. Dr. Krogstadt came in to check on her as well, doing a couple of tests, before nodding and letting Taylor fall back asleep.
She was awake again, trying to distract herself from what had happened by watching some old cartoons. Usually, she'd enjoy the antics of the practically ancient shorts, but for some reason she just found them stupid and pointless today.
"Hello?" someone at the door said quietly.
Taylor turned her head to see who it was. Standing at the door was Vista, one of the two female Wards in Brockton Bay. "Hi, Vista."
"May I come in?"
"Sure."
There were none of Vista's normally eye watering spatial tricks, just a young girl – Vista couldn't be more than thirteen – walking into her tiny hospital room. "The Wards decided to get you a get well card," the girl said hesitantly. "And to apologize for the behavior of one of our teammates."
Taylor looked oddly at the girl as she took the card out of the envelope (one-handed, which wasn't easy but not that difficult), read it, and put it on the little nightstand next to the bed. "Ah, you mean Sophia," Taylor said.
"You knew?" was Vista's response.
"Yeah. Not like I could do anything with the information," Taylor said, bitterness creeping into her voice. "Unmasking a member of the Wards or Protectorate without just cause is a Federal felony."
"Yeah, I know," Vista muttered. "I just wanted you to know we're not all like that."
"Oh, I know," Taylor answered. "I'm just going to need some time to recover. Someone almost killed me, you know."
A new voice came from the door. "Well, we're here to fix that."
Vista turned to look at Glory Girl, who was accompanying her sister Panacea. "C'mon, Little V. We'd better step out into the hall while Ames sorts her out. I've got a low tolerance for body horror."
Vista nodded. "Yeah, Big V, that sounds like a good idea." She'd had to deal with stitching herself up once, without painkillers, and that was enough.
With that, Vista and Glory Girl retreated to the hallway, while Amy pushed a cart ahead of her. "Hi, you probably know who I am. May I have your permission to heal you?"
"Sure," Taylor said in a flat tone.
"What're you going to be doing?" Roxi asked.
"Well, I'm going to be using the biomass on the cart to rebuild two legs and a hand and… what are
you?!?!" Panacea exclaimed quietly as the Haro drone on the side table turned to face her.
"My name is Roxi," the drone stated. "I'm using this Haro drone to monitor the condition of my pilot after having to resort to drastic measures to keep the gangrene and necrosis in her extremities from spreading."
Panacea reached out and touched Taylor. "Yeah, I can see that. Huh, nanotech. Don't see that very often. Did a good job on the amputations, I should be able to regrow things without a problem."
"There was the issue of not having enough biomass to do so…" Roxi noted, before looking over what was on the cart. "Ah. That would do it. May I observe the process?"
"You may. I think I'd have to get rid of your nanites to try and stop you," Panacea said as she placed her hand into the bowl containing the collection of meat and vegetables, and turned it into a stew of life. Gathering some up, she applied it to the stump of the left leg, and Roxi watched it change into the structures needed, eventually forming a new left foot. The process was repeated for the remaining extremities, resulting in a new hand and two feet. The last bit was used in putting a little bit of extra flesh back onto Taylor's underweight body.
"OK, I've rebuilt both legs below the knees, and the left arm below the elbow. I also dealt with the last vestiges of the other infections you'd gotten. I've also brought you back to a more healthy body weight, since you were very underweight," she explained to Taylor. "Eyes are trickier, and since you're not blind or anything I'm going to leave them alone. You'll need to eat a bit more than usual for the next week, and I would try to eat a little better than you have been, because I also fixed some early malnutrition issues as well.
"I left your nanites alone," Amy explained to Roxi. "If I was reading them right, they should last another fifteen days before they get flushed out. And they're still doing useful things. Doctor Krogstadt will want to arrange for some physical therapy, which is normal after I regrow limbs."
"Thank you," Taylor quietly said. Roxi did likewise.
"You're welcome. You should be able to go home this evening, too," Amy added.
"May – may I give you a hug?" asked Taylor.
"What?"
"I can't think of a better first use for a replaced arm than thanking the person who restored it."
"I… uh, okay."
"So, what are we going to do with Stalker?" Director Piggot asked the room at large. Said room had the Protectorate in it, along with some senior PRT staff, Aegis (the current Wards team leader), and Dragon.
"It's a pity we can't throw her into an electrical substation," Assault said darkly. "Not fair for the utility workers who have to clean up the mess."
"The girl is a liability," Brockton Bay's PR director, Jenora Vasche said. "The news was anonymously leaked this morning and there are groups howling for blood. Fortunately, most of them are howling for the blood of the school administration, and not ours. At least nobody's revealed she was a probationary Ward."
"That's a relief," Miss Militia added. "I've only got one politely worded request from the Youth Guard, asking 'What is going on?'"
"Thank God for small favors," Emily muttered. "Executing Stalker is out of the question unless we can get a capital charge to stick."
"Such as bio-terrorism?" Dragon asked. "She not only contributed materials, there is evidence she placed them in the locker. She was clearly attempting to use fear and violence in a calculated way to coerce individuals, organizations, and the government in the form of the school administration in pursuit of a goal."
Emily Piggot slumped in her chair. "Oh, great. I guess she's going in front of a PRT tribunal in New York, then."
"That would be what procedure calls for," Armsmaster stated. "We have the evidence from the remains of the locker, the electronic evidence from the phones and surviving computers of those involved, and the records seized from the office, which was relatively intact." He took a sip of his coffee, then continued. "We also have Stalker's attempt at running when confronted, and her consistent denial of the matter which is coming up as untruthful on both my prototype and our normal voice-stress analyzers."
There was a beep as a notification came through his armor's systems. "And then there are the repeated attempts at trying to break out of the holding cell. That is attempt ten."
"Why did we even try to put her back on the street?" Dauntless asked. "The girl is a sociopath according to her file, and a borderline psychopath, and guilty of multiple counts of manslaughter. She should have been locked up in Leavenworth."
"Someone higher up the chain of command thought her abilities to be useful and wanted her available," Emily answered. "Keep in mind Legend
agreed with me, but even he was overruled on the matter. Who that person is, no one is saying.
"The city is down one school, half the administrative staff and board of education have been arrested for being in on it, and we've had to arrest two PRT agents and three adolescent girls whose behavior makes them lucky to have survived to age sixteen," Emily concluded.
"So, what about the victim of all this?" she asked.
"Taylor Hebert, aged fifteen, daughter of Danny Hebert…" Miss Militia began.
She had to wait until the Director stopped banging her head against the table to continue.
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