Seed of Hope
Growth 2.1

It was a quiet night, and we were all in costume.

"Hellcat checking in. I'm out by the docks. This place is dead."

I didn't hear the reply. The encryption the PRT used on the Wards-issued communicators were fantastically complex, even harder to crack than the Expeditionary Forces' encryption.

"You don't have to be here for this," I reminded Emma.

"I know," she assured me. Back in April, she'd been recruited into the Wards - a bit forcefully at that - and was technically on probation. Someone had connected the dots and had concluded that she had triggered that night in the alley.

Wrong as it was, it was a reasonable conclusion, and they believed the three Cougars I'd given Emma were projections. I felt more than a little guilty that Emma was taking the blame for what happened that night, but she had insisted, and while the PRT was lenient when it came to fresh triggers, they were considerably less so when it came to Tinkers who built killer robots that went too far. The fact that she had enough control over them since her transmutation to keep them from seriously injuring anyone else had helped her case a lot.

Of course, with her in the Wards now, the bureaucratic red tape meant she wasn't allowed to use any tinkertech I gave her until it went through a very extensive - even longer, since I wasn't a member of the Wards or Protectorate myself - vetting process and was specifically authorized, which meant no Cyclone for her, anymore than for Sophia, whose power didn't play well with a couple hundred pounds of tinkertech powered armor.

I turned my attention back to the task at hand. The fence wasn't an obstacle for any of us, really. Sophia could ghost right through, and I carried Emma as I flew over with my Cyclone's thruster pack.

The door lock was marginally more concerning. While I could easily break it down with my Cyclone-enhanced strength, I didn't want to damage it. Instead, I looked over at Sophia, who nodded and shifted to her shadow state, ghosting through.

A couple of minutes later, the door unlocked and swung open, and Hellcat and I stepped through. I activated the headlights on my Cyclone to illuminate the place as I made my way to our objective.

I spent a moment taking it in. I'd been working toward this for months now. I just hoped I was ready.

"All right," I said, "time for me to get to work." I looked at each of them. "Watch my back."

"You got it."

"Of course."

School the next day passed quickly. Considering last night, I was simply too excited to pay much attention to it, and the Winslow faculty remained as apathetic as ever. So long as I did my work, they didn't care.

My face fell when Dad got home. Ever since Mom died, he'd basically been running on autopilot, throwing himself into work, but the Dockworkers' Association had been slowly dying for years. When he came back from work, he usually looked pretty listless.

Now? Now, he looked beaten. Defeated.

This wasn't how he was supposed to be tonight.

"Dad?" I asked softly. "What's wrong?"

His head snapped up, and he blinked at me. It must have been worse than I thought; he hadn't even noticed me standing there until I spoke.

"Taylor, I- um, nothing," he said. "Nothing's wrong. Just... another long day at work."

Really? Really, Dad?

I crossed my arms and leaned back. "That's not just a long day at work, Dad. What happened?"

He flinched, and - perhaps for the first time in a long time - he really looked at me.

"Taylor..." He trailed off for a moment, then his shoulders slumped. "It's the ferry."

I blinked. "The ferry?" That... didn't make sense. He should have been happy.

He nodded. "Last night, someone managed to get into the ferry house," he said. He gave a bitter laugh. "They fixed up the ferry. This morning, it was good as new. Better, even. It's been upgraded with tinkertech."

"That- that's good news, though... isn't it?"

"You'd think so," he said, "but... the PRT impounded it."

I blinked as I tried to process what Dad had said.

"What? But why?"

He sighed. "They said it isn't safe to let people ride a ferry upgraded by an unknown Tinker. They need to verify it first."

"Oh."

No. This- it wasn't supposed to go like this!

I could fix this. I could!

I could have sent a message to Dragon.

After I'd sent him the VF-1 Valkyrie data, Kid Win had referred The_Betrayed to Dragon; I hadn't realized she even had a PHO account. Working with her over the past year had been an amazing experience, and she'd been surprisingly accommodating on my request for anonymity. We'd discussed everything from metallurgy and electronics to mecha and construction, and Dragon had even managed to wrangle up some federal funding for some of my designs, after some tweaking.

The one thing I never brought up was biotechnology, particularly protoculture. That was a risk I just wasn't willing to take.

In the end, that's also why I decided not to bother Dragon about the ferry. The_Betrayed was comfortably anonymous, and I intended to keep it that way. Besides, going through the world's greatest Tinker for something like this seemed needlessly... petty? Shallow? Egotistical? Something like that.

Instead, when the weekend came, I rode my Cyclone to PRT headquarters as Regess. I never even considered parking the mecha, instead reconfiguring it to battloid mode and letting it wrap around me before I walked in. I noted with more than a little pride the CBR-5 tactical body armor the two door sentries were wearing. The PRT had snapped them up - along with the FAL-2 laser carbines for anti-Brute work - as soon as Dragon and I had gotten them into production. It gave me a rather nice trust fund I could tap into if I absolutely had to, but aside from some high end components and possibly helping with the mortgage, there wasn't much I needed it for.

"Hello?"

I felt a little insulted when my sensors registered the containment foam sprayers hidden in the ceiling arming themselves, but I guess I could understand the precaution.

"Can I help you..." the desk sergeant paused and glanced at her computer as it dinged, "Regess?"

I nodded. "I hope so. I'm here to talk to someone about the ferry."

I had been ushered into a conference room and informed that Director Piggot happened to be in the office this weekend - I got the impression that that was pretty common - and would be with me shortly. "Shortly" turned out to be a little over an hour, and the first words out of her mouth did not endear me to her.

"I'm sorry about the wait," she said as she entered, "and I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to disarm and remove your armor.

No, she wasn't. She wasn't even remotely apologetic, and I could feel it. This was a power play.

"Then I'm going to have to ask that we relocate to a room that doesn't have half a dozen concealed weapons targeting me," I retorted. At her surprised look, I pointed them out. "Three containment foam sprayers there, there, and there; a drop down gun turret concealed in the ceiling over there - for Brutes, I'm guessing - and two gas projectors behind the baseboard here and here."

Her face soured.

I didn't like Director Piggot.

After a brief pause, she said, "I understand you're here to discuss the ferry."

"That's correct."

"The ferry that we impounded earlier this week after it was repaired and upgraded with unauthorized tinkertech."

"I honestly hadn't looked at it that way," I said, offering a shrug. I may not like her, but there was no reason to be rude... yet, at least. "I just saw something I could do that might be able to help the city and did it."

"Overnight," she said flatly. "Without leaving any other sign of your presence."

"I work fast."

That was when the door burst open. The director's face twitched in annoyance, the only sign of the spike of fury I sensed off of her. "Who the hell-?!" She bit down when she saw who it was: "Armsmaster."

"Director. Regess," he said, nodding to each of us in turn. "I came as soon as I heard you were here."

"Armsmaster," I said, a little ambivalent about his presence. I was still a little miffed about what had happened back in February; it had taken me longer than I'd preferred to get my new lab set up properly in the underwater caverns. His apologies since then hadn't really rung true, either. It was painfully obvious he wanted to recruit me, and it would have been even if Emma wasn't there to give me the Wards' point of view.

"I understand this is about the ferry?" he said. "I've seen some of what went in it. Was that your work, Regess?"

I nodded. "Yes, it was."

"Very impressive," he said. Beneath my helmet, I could feel myself blushing at the raw sincerity behind his words.

"Thank you, sir."

"Some day, you'll have to tell me how you worked so fast, though," he added.

And there he went again, ruining a perfectly good moment with another carefully calculated probe into my secrets.

"Maybe some day, sir," I said.

"Ahem," the director broke in. She was still furious, but it had settled to a slow simmer. Looking between us, she said, "I assume, then, you can vouch for her intentions, Armsmaster?"

"Yes, Director," he said.

"Very well," she said, eyes narrowed. "Then I'll leave this in your capable hands, Armsmaster," she added frostily, then turned and left.

"She... doesn't like me very much, does she?" I asked.

"The director is... complicated," Armsmaster replied. "Let's talk about the ferry."

"When can we get it up and running?" I asked.

He shook his head. "It's not that simple," he said.

"Why not?" I frowned. "You know I'm not a villain."

He gave a frustrated sigh. "There's... regulations," he said finally. "People don't understand tinkertech - not even other Tinkers, usually - and it scares them, so there's a... fairly extensive review process." He cracked a smile. "Even I can't avoid it, and that's with things I'm making for my own personal use. We can expedite it, since it's not combat equipment and we now know who's responsible for it, but it'll still take time."

I looked down thoughtfully. "I see."

He pursed his lips. "And there are some forms you'll need to fill out."

"Of course there are."