Summary: Hacker has come up with a new evil scheme, a bit of a last ditch one. But it's alos his deadliest...

Rating: T (again)

Summary: Another dark story. I've left the summary purposely vauge, so to not give too much away. It'll be very dramatic, kind of a climax to the whole series of fanfics I've been writing. No, the other fanfics haven't been building up to this point like in "Breeched", but like always, they do tie in.

For newcomers who want to start reading at the beginning (which would be wise), the order of stories is as follows: "The Time Traveler", "Parallelism", "Mishap", "Backup Support", "Devil's Advocate", and finally, "Breeched."

Enjoy!

CYBERCHASE

NEUTRAMATTER

1.

Brainstorming

The Grim Wreaker drifted through Cyberspace lazily, still bearing the scars of it's last battle, and still mostly crippled. Hacker had ordered his lackeys to set a course to the Northern Frontier, so proper repairs could be done, but Hacker doubted the ship could be completely restored to the original. He almost didn't want to bother.

In fact, he hadn't bothered with a lot of the damage the Wreaker had received over the past few months. It was really only until now that the damage was becoming serious, but all things considered, the Wreaker had been through a lot lately. Hacker stopped what he was doing to mentally review all the damage the Wreaker now sported.

First off was the damage the Wreaker had received, way back when Cyantis had first been discovered and the ordeal with the time traveler. He had been rushing to try and grab the Encryptor chip before the kiddies did. To try and make a quick getaway, he had ordered the Wreaker to fly by overhead on autopilot, but ended up crashing into a building. The only real damage was a dented hull, and scratched paint. The dents, Hacker knew, had been repaired, but he couldn't remember if he ever had Buzz and Delete repaint.

Then there was the time he built the jury-rigged Transformitron. First, the Wreaker received minor damage when, while trying to catch a mouse running loose in the ship, Hacker accidently trashed up his own bridge in his anger. They were all easy repairs, though, and little evidence remained of the damage. But not so, when later that same day, the Wreaker's hanger collapsed onto the ship, severally denting the hull, and scratching the paint even more. It also buckled one of the landing legs. Again, however, most of that damage had since been repaired, including the collapsed hanger bay.

Then there was the time Hacker laid siege to Pompedoria and attempted to destroy the site in an explosion big enough to create a cyberbreech that would spread and tear Cyberspace apart. In that incident, there was one or more firefights that took place within the Wreaker, and a specially made prisoner retention room was torn apart when the Cybersquad escaped. Hacker never did have any of this damage repaired. By this point in time, he was focusing on his next evil scheme.

By this point, he had captured Future Matt, and had downloaded the Cyantian database and was working on the portal generator. So to keep attention away from this plan, he came up with the scheme with the superweapon capable of turning whole cybersites bad. More firefights had taken place in that incident, the superweapon crippled beyond repair, and a window was broken. Of those things, only the window was repaired, as that was a necessity.

Then, finally, he had his main master plan ready, and went to stage an attack against the Cybersquad in the Real World. The plan, at first, was very successful, and probably would've kept on being so had it not been for an unforseen aftereffect of a cyborg residing in the Real World. Being forced to retreat back to Cyberspace, the Wreaker was met with an armada of ships, which promptly started attacking.

Their shots were too weak to cause any real damage, but they did batter, dent, and scratch the Wreaker's the hull some more, and managed to damage the Wreaker's laser cannon, disabling it. But the real damage happened inside. The portal generator was destroyed, and took the Wreaker's main fuel line of lynitrogen with it. Hacker had to reroute the line in order to get the Wreaker flying again. Then the Wreaker's computer core had also been destroyed, taking with it the Cyantian database, and overloaded several computer systems. Several firefights also took place, and left the interior of the Wreaker looking like a war zone.

Which brought Hacker to the present. With the Wreaker only operating at a quarter of it's usual power, the trip back to the Northern Frontier was taking several long weeks, leaving Hacker with little to do. He could theoretically start work on making those repairs, but as he had already decided, he didn't have the heart. Buzz and Delete, being the slackers they were, didn't do it either, as Hacker had not ordered him to. They just stayed out of his way.

Which was very easy, all things considered. Hacker hadn't done or wandered much since that last battle had ended so poorly. The reason was that he was in bad shape. Not physically like the Wreaker, but mentally. What would probably be his best plan ever had failed him. And for the first time in years, he hadn't come up with a new plan to replace it.

This tortured the cyborg's mind like no other, to the point that even Hacker knew he was losing it, and if he didn't get a new plan soon, there would be no hope for him. So, as he no longer had a large and complex computer core to refer to when working on new evil plans, Hacker spent his time in the library, working with physical books, hoping to find something to spark a new evil plan.

But after several weeks of this, he had nothing. Nothing but reminders of old ideas that wouldn't work again. Yet Hacker kept at it, discarding the books he had found nothing in to a pile, humming the song "Daisy Bell" in an off-key and offbeat manner all the while. Finally, he came across a book that wasn't a book at all. It was a notebook, and Hacker recognized it as one of many he had filled during his time stuck on the Northern Frontier, after he had been banished there by Dr. Marbles.

Hacker was puzzled, thinking he had either lost or destroyed all of those notebooks, having found no use for them after he had started his campaign of chaos on Cyberspace. Curious as to why this one was spared from that, he started flipping through it, looking at the complex equations and theorems within.

His eyes started to widen as he realized he had found something he had not thought about in years. A project he had dedicated years to his life to, in trying to pull off, but ultimately failing. There was something missing that wasn't permitting him to make the connection. But he now realized with a start that his reviewing of the now lost copy of the Cyantian database had provided him with the answer. This years-old project could now become a reality.

Hacker had his newest evil plan...