Hello all, a bit more action in this chapter. Thanks to all my supporters, and I won't keep you distracted any further...

Kayo walked into her uncle's office.

"Ah, Kayo. I was just about to call you," The Hood remarked. He was on the comms to...

"What do you want?" She hissed as she stalked over to Scott's hologram. The Hood raised his eyebrows and wisely left the room

"Kayo, you're cover was very nearly blown," Scott stated bluntly.

"What?"

"The Pendergast's reported their encounter with the Hood and the Mechanic, and apparently identified you to Colonel Casey," Scott explained.

Kayo face palmed. "I'm an idiot," she muttered.

Scott was quick to reassure her. "Don't worry, I convinced her it wasn't you, but she's still on the lookout for your twin. So just stay out of sight (or in disguise) and you'll be alright."

"My twin! You didn't implicate her in this, did you?" Kayo asked incredulously.

Scott spluttered. "WHAT?" Kayo realized too late her error.

"Um, OK, calm down. Yes, I have a twin. However, my parents were different colours, and so were we. You probably led Casey to believe I had an identical twin, which I don't."

Scott turned red as he considered this new piece of information. Actually, the bit about her parents made sense, she was black and her uncle was white.

But still...

"You didn't tell us!?" He gritted his teeth.

"Oh, come on Scott," she snapped, shocking him. "I'm not going to jeopardize her career for your sensitivities. She isn't working for my uncle, and I'm not going to let her relation to the Hood stain her life like it has mine."

Scott's temper dropped a notch, and he remembered the other part of the reason he was calling. "Oh, come on. You know that's not true."

"But it is," Kayo's temper rarely showed, but it was a terrible thing when it did. "I was the natural choice to you to work for the Hood, BECAUSE I'm related to him. And of course, I had to go because the Hood insisted, BECAUSE I'm related to him. Then, you guys always try to convince me that I shouldn't consider him my family, because you know that he is..."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Kayo," Scott felt as if his heart had just been ripped out. He had to admit that she wasn't wrong. "I... I... You never told us..."

"Oh, come on. I really have to tell you when your acting like a****" Kayo yelled. "You're not even going to apologize to me. You're just making excuses, now."

Scott opened his mouth to apologize.

"Shut up," She screamed, cutting the comms and storming out of the room. She briefly wondered what Scott would say to her about that, but was more wishing she hadn't said anything. Now, when she got back, they would be all over her, trying to apologize, and only because she had told them.

But at the moment she had more important things to think about.


There had been numerous reports of unauthorized space launches all over the world in just the past few hours, and the Hood was convinced the Mechanic was putting Stage 4 into operation. After briefing them on its purpose, everyone went as fast as they could to prepare for launch.

Down in the hangar, the Hub ship had been rebuilt. It was rather a slapdash job, and it wasn't as good with Jones in charge of engineering instead of the Mechanic, but it was more or less suitable to their purposes.

The engines charged to life while the ceiling of the base opened up, the pilots took their seats and the gigantic aircraft rose into the air.

"Get us into space," The Hood ordered. "From there, we should be able to track the Mechanic's rockets."


Clump by clump, tonnes of space junk came together, the nanotechnology crawling all over them, melding them together, reshaping them.

Close to geostationary orbit, larger defunct satellites were joined together in long lines. Reconfigured and charged by the nanites, they began to absorb radiation from the Van Allen Belts and convert it to electricity.

Lower down, anything that moved was being grafted into one of several dozen gigantic generators taking shape. Once the radiation-absorbents came and transferred all that radioactive power to them, they could serve out their diabolical purposes with perfect impunity.


The Mechanic tapped his fingers together, the movement keeping the entire operation in order. It was tiresome using his body and mind to run everything, but years of practice meant he was quite used to the drain.

He was not a patient man, though he had to admit. The 20 year delay in his original plans meant that the technology was a lot more reliable now, but he could only dream wistfully of what tech he would've owned if things hadn't been shelved.

The Hood had let everything go to ruin after Lucy stole the final stage, it wasn't the only option, but he had become obsessed with re obtaining it.

The Hood was morally predictable as far as the Mechanic was concerned, he wanted to use Operation Thunderbird for global domination, but he wasn't 'a savage', he intended to use the stages to cause short term terror, to be solved by the final (stolen) stage, to make the public go crying to him like sheep.

There were alternative stages, but the Hood had shut many of these down. Why? Not actually because of his conscience, but he wanted the population itself as undamaged as possible. The Mechanic didn't think like that, he wanted all the stages used to distract everyone, then take over and beat the populace into submission. The Mechanic hated the illusions of being a hero that the Hood needed, he dealt in reality. If anyone didn't like that, they didn't have to... live with it.

A fair arrangement, in his mind, though he hoped that certain people would help him willingly. Particularly Kayo, he hoped that she might sympathize with him against the Hood, after...

Ok, don't go there.


Kayo had learned when she was a kid that going to your room and crying alone didn't work, so she didn't. Steeling herself carefully, Kayo headed for the control room of the Sahara base where Jones was viewing the Hood and Havoc's progress.

"You've reached outer space, sir," Jones quipped keenly.

"I can confirm that if you want," Havoc snidely retorted.

Proceeding to hack all satellites with scanners and video feeds, and then comparing them with the international space control, the Hood soon had the trajectories and probable destinations of the rockets.

"Perfect," he crowed. "Nearest one is just a few hundred miles from here. Gun it Havoc."

"Aye, Dad," Havoc hesitated. "The Mechanic will be operating this stage remotely, right?"

"Yes."

"So couldn't we track the remote signal to his location?"

"An excellent idea," Kayo nodded. "Though that has failed in the past."

"Couldn't we at least try?" Havoc nearly pleaded. Everyone knew what she was thinking. If they could find the Mechanic, they might find Fuse.

Kayo sighed and gave in. "Well, I suppose we have to try. It'll mean at least one more of his hiding places gone." She stepped up to one of the computers and began typing a flurry of commands.

The Mechanic was clever, he had several fake signal emitters, and they were all bouncing around on repeaters along with whichever was the real signal. Kayo nearly developed a migraine trying to track them all.

After a few minutes, she had all the locations. Passing them along to the Hood's field agents, she started trying to figure out which was actually the Mechanic's.

Jones shook his head from another computer he was standing by. "You'll never find it that way, deary. The reason this failed before and will fail now is because they're ALL fakes."

Kayo turned to him. "That's not possible."

"Yes, it is," the old man corrected her. "The Mechanic himself only uses quantum messaging. It's impossible to track quantum messaging, and you can't even bug it without the original sender knowing. What you want to do, darling, is to locate where the rockets came from, and find which pad hasn't got a signal." He pulled up a satellite photograph of an old spaceport on the computer. "Already done it for you."

Kayo stepped over and kissed him fondly on the cheek. "I ought to marry you for your skills, you know."

Jones laughed. "What about your Tracy boy?"

Kayo stiffened, partly in jest. "Did you have to remind me of him?" She replied, then returned to business. "We'd better get out there." Glancing at the location given, she and Jones raced to the Chaos Cruiser, picking up a platoon of the Hood's soldiers on the way.

Several minutes later, they were on their way.


The Hub ship maneuvered over to the calculated position of one of the nanite loads.

"Sir, the nanites have just completed construction of the shield generators," one of the Hood's minions reported.

"A bit quicker than I thought they'd be," the world's most wanted remarked. Then, the ship's radar started pinging.

"Sir, there's something big headed our way."

"W ha-" All of a sudden, one of the miles long radiation-absorbents filled their view. Docking with the gigantic generator, it transferred gigawatts of radiation-converted-to-electricity into it.

Charged with a sudden surge of power, the generator's thrusters fired, sending it hurtling down towards Earth, its shield already powering up.

"After it," the Hood yelled. Then, with a screeching THUNK, the absorb er (still with most of its charge) suddenly rammed into them, sending them both hurtling after the generator, albeit in a slower fall.

Mass-coordinated together, the shield generators reached the upper atmosphere, where they performed their true wicked potential. As they fell down, the shields protected them from burning up, scattering hot plasma across the mesosphere instead of letting it build up and then dissipate in front of them.

The mesosphere, you see, is the most turbulent of the layers of the Earth's atmosphere, it has supersonic atmospheric tides of up to 500 to 800 miles per hour. The generator's were purposely heading towards these tides, and that was where they got sneaky.

The scattered plasma got caught up and entwined into the tides, then the now electrified currents got hit straight on with the plummeting shields.

The supersonic winds were being deflected towards the Earth's surface.


Spinning around in their now coming apart ship, Havoc hit the comms.

"Calling International Rescue, come in International Rescue."

I can't remember if the figure for the winds in the mesosphere was supposed to be kilometres or miles, so I picked miles for dramatic effect.