This chapter's mainly fluff.
Usual disclaimers for the land of litigation, no rights to any characters portrayed, and this isn't the real world, it's my world, welcome to my nightmare!
The President and the DNI had elevated Director Preston to Acting DCIA as soon as his predecessor was arrested, and once the Ring clean-up operation was wound up to the powers that be's satisfaction, Chuck, Sarah, Ellie, Casey and the senior members of the team who'd come to D.C. to support them in stopping the Ring's plan were called back to attend his official induction into the position.
Of course, there were other reasons to call them to D.C. The primary reason was the fact that the powers that be had used the opportunity presented by the groundswell of relief and gratitude that arose from their thwarting a global plot like that to combine stages two and three of the plans for the realignment of the Special Projects Groups and push it through Congress while they had the support to do so, so they were once again told which uniforms to send over to be prepared for the ceremonies. The six of them who'd be running things (Chuck, Sarah, Ellie, Casey, Mary and Emma) were all being pushed to the final ranks of the three stage process, but their other ranks were being pushed up to just short of their primary ranks as well.
In this whole process, the only one taking a step back was Aunt D, as she was going from Director to Deputy Director for the Special Projects Group, and the Intersect Project, though she was staying as a Major General in the Air Force. Chuck was a Vice Admiral in the Navy and Colonel in the Air Force, Army and Marines, Sarah was a Major General in the Air Force, Captain in the Navy and Colonel in the Army and Marines, Ellie was a Rear Admiral in the Navy and Colonel in the Air Force, Army and Marines. Casey was a Brigadier General in the Marines, Commander in the Navy and Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force and Army, Emma was a Rear Admiral lower half in the Navy and Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force, Army and Marines, and Mary was a Brigadier General in the Army, Commander in the Navy and Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force and Marines. Bry was a Colonel in the Army and a Commander in the Navy, Zondra was a Colonel in the Air Force and a Commander in the Navy, Carina and Jeff were Captains in the Navy and Lieutenant Colonels in the Air Force, Mei-Ling was a Captain in the Navy and Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. Anna was a Commander in the Navy and a Major in the Marines, Vinnie was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army and a Major in the Marines and Mike was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marines already, but they also made him a Major in the Army.
With the expansion of the flag ranks in the group, they had to have a total revision of their aides, as well, Chuck now had an Army Major (Alex Forrest) and Air Force Captain (Vicky), Sarah shared Vicky with Chuck and also had an Army Lieutenant (Kim), Ellie had an Army Captain (Rick) and Marine Lieutenant (Alex McHugh), Casey shared Alex with Ellie, while Emma and Mary shared an Air Force Lieutenant (Abi) for their aide.
They also had to go through the ceremonies for a Presidential Unit Citation for the actual Special Projects Group (Navy and Marines, but the Army and Air Force people in the core team didn't mind), and there were also Presidential Medals of Freedom awarded and presented to the key people in the operation (awarded with distinction for Chuck, Sarah and Ellie, along with additional awards of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal and National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal for all three of them, and the National Intelligence Cross for Chuck and Sarah).
At the dinner after the ceremonies, the Secretary of Defense had a deja vu moment, because he once again had the Secretary of the Navy asking who these young girls were, and about the rest of the group that they were here for. As he had with BJ, he started with Lieutenant McHugh, as she was the first of the Flag Aides that came up, except she wasn't Admiral Carmichael's Flag Aide any more, she was Admiral Casey's, and General Casey's Aide De-Camp as well. He had a laugh as he pointed out that she was now the aide to both her father and step-mother, the rest hadn't changed, other than the fact that they were also Aide De-Camps now, and nor had the reaction to hearing that the two youngest girls were actually Admiral Carmichael's daughters.
Now that they'd leapfrogged to the third and final phase of General Beckman's plan, there was a bit of explaining to do about the empire that these people had created and had been running over the past fifteen years, and how it rated an O-9, three O-8 and three O-7 Flag officers, plus the fact that the five O-6 officers here were less than a third of the officers at that level in the group, and the three O-5 officers were only a small fraction of the officers at that level. The sub-flag officers who were here, were here because they were also part of the command structure of the group itself. The command structure of this group was spread across all of the services, with seven Navy, three Air Force, three Army and two Marines. He'd only had a glimpse of the true extent of this group himself, the units they commanded were spread across the country, across the world in fact if you factored in all of the myriad intelligence groups that were part of it, and many of their overseas stations also had a military component as well to support operations. He couldn't discuss much of what he'd been shown with the SECNAV, as he'd barely been cleared high enough to see most of it himself, but trying to explain the Group to him made Bob think about what he'd seen.
He did know that looking at personnel statistics didn't come close to showing the true measure of this group, on numbers alone, the amount of brass it carried may seem excessive, but that didn't take into account the fact that just about every single individual who was part of this group qualified as the elite in their fields, even these young lieutenants who were the flag officers' aides easily outclassed most personnel twice their age in ability, though considering who their parents were, that wasn't really surprising. For all that, even the make-up of the Group's personnel still didn't give an indication of the importance of the achievements of the group. The country, and sometimes the world, had been depending on them for most of the fifteen years that the Group had been operating, and most of that came down to the siblings who were the two senior Admirals of the Group, though General Carmichael had been changing the world by herself for over a decade, too.
Thinking about that, he reflected that he knew with utter certainty that these people had EARNED everything that they'd received, he'd been shown more than enough evidence to prove that! The Carmichaels were pretty much Captain America and Wonder Woman, no, that wasn't right, they were more like Captain America and Black Widow, with Admiral Casey as Wonder Woman…. He couldn't help smiling as he wondered to himself whether that made General Casey the Hulk? He shook his head at the thought and went back to enjoying the company of these remarkable people, the image of General Casey as a not so jolly green giant keeping the smile on his lips, oh yes, he could definitely see that!
Chuck, Sarah and Ellie also had sessions with the French, German and British ambassadors, because Chuck was awarded the French Legion of Honour (Commander) and the German Gold Cross of Honour for Outstanding Deeds, and was made an Honorary Military Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. Sarah was awarded the French Legion of Honour (Commander) and the German Gold Cross of Honour for Outstanding Deeds, and was made an Honorary Military Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath. Ellie was also awarded the French Legion of Honour (Commander) and the German Silver Cross of Honour for Outstanding Deeds (as the criteria for the Gold Cross specified 'at the risk of one's life'), and was made an Honorary Military Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath. (It had been made clear to all concerned that while Chuck and Sarah were the ones in the thick of it, Ellie had been planning and commanding all the activities from outside.)
While other countries may not have agreed, those three countries had regarded their actions to be of great moment, considering that they had stopped the heads of their primary intelligence agencies being eliminated in order to replace them with the puppets of some international criminal organisation, and they were determined to show their gratitude.
The French and German ambassadors were more than a little surprised to be addressed in perfect French and German by Chuck, Sarah AND Ellie when they were talking with them. The American politicians and officials who were present were rather put out by this, because these discussions had been going too fast for them to follow, and politicians and officials never liked not knowing what was going on.
Their aggravation levels only increased when they asked what had been discussed, and Chuck had told them with a smile that they were swapping recipes. They couldn't do anything to the heroes of the hour, so they had to try to swallow their pride and reactions to that. This was escalated when the British Ambassador had smiled charmingly and then had his own conversations with the heroes of the hour in fluent French, as he'd been watching the reactions to the previous discussions, and he was having a great time watching the politicians and officials just about pop a blood vessel as they fought to keep quiet about it.
The actual discussions they were having hadn't been about anything that concerned the government at all though, they were primarily around how three people of such apparent youth could have won the medals and ranks that they had (because the powers that be had insisted that they attend the award ceremonies in full uniform), but as usual they'd just waved the matter off as just being in the right place at the right time, or rather, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They'd also called over John, Lottie and Charlie to introduce them to the Ambassadors, by this stage they weren't so surprised by their mastery of their languages, not even in the girls.
When the ceremonies were finally done, they all piled back into their G550 and the C-37 Aunt D had organised for them and headed back to L.A. to catch up on what they'd missed doing while much of the core team was tied up in D.C. playing nice with the politicians. They'd been stuck in D.C. for a few days this trip, but the matter of the Ring should be finished now, which hopefully meant that they could go back to working through the rest of the issues in front of them without having the worry of dealing with enemies like that hanging over their heads all the time.
As a result of the changed status of most of the core group, they now had a row of six desks outside their offices, on both Level 1 and level 2, as their Flag Aides or Aide De-Camps were also their assistants in PS&T, on Level 2 they were the Flag Officers and their Aides, on Level 1 it was management and their assistants.
Once Mary and Dr Dreyfus were comfortable that she could handle the issues that came up for her after the PI unlocked the memories that she'd thought she'd buried, Dr Dreyfus made a proposition to the team. Dr Dreyfus was pretty much dedicated to working with Stefan and others from the team now, so what he proposed was for him to refer what few other clients he had to someone else, get rid of his house in Washington, and he and Stefan come to Los Angeles. The question wasn't so much debated so much as Chuck looked around and got a nod from everyone, so he agreed on the spot, and within a week a much improved Stefan and a very good psychiatrist moved into Quixote House and took their proper places in the team.
With Dr Dreyfus on-site and ready to look after them, Carina, Zondra and Leslie went ahead and loaded the PI. The girls had the expected issues when all the memories of what had been done to them were unlocked, but they were soon handling them OK with a little help from Dr Dreyfus. With each successful load of the PI, there were more of their people stepping forward wanting to load it, and by the time they went to D.C. for the promotion and induction ceremonies, the entire core team, their 'FBI' support team, Aunt D, Uncle Roan, Dr Dreyfus, Lottie and Charlie had all loaded it, and others in their groups were loading it as well.
One group especially jumped at the chance, Casey's 'Combat Logistics and Planning' Group, this was made up of thirty men who'd been among the very best of the United States' special ops combatants before they were forced from active duty due to injuries that they'd received in combat. Most of them were amputees, and they'd never be cleared for combat again, but they'd been fighting being pensioned off for medical reasons. The USSOCOM Commander had talked to Chuck back when they first created their military operations groups about whether they might be able to find a place for these men, after all they'd given in the service of their country, and it had grown from there.
The thirty men currently in the group ranged from Sergeant, up to Commander in rank, and they had over four hundred years of combat experience in all types of terrain and conditions, including urban combat, all over the world between them. This meant that they could explain the requirements and best strategy for pretty much any type of engagement faster than just about anyone else, and they had enough experience in military intelligence matters to be of considerable assistance to Emma's Analysis groups as well. On top of everything else, these men had been some of the best warriors the United States had, and they'd kept up their weapons proficiencies, so they also made up the last line of defence for the Special Projects Group and Quixote House, the 'Home Guard' as it were, and if anyone ever managed to breach the building, they would be in for a nasty surprise!
Another thing they'd discovered about the PI was that the host's genetic make-up determined how much benefit they'd get from the the PI. Everyone got benefits from the repair functions and the core functions of the PI, but there seemed some sort of correlation between those with eidetic memory and getting more notable mental and physical enhancements, such as Chuck had, Mary, Ellie, Sarah and Carina also exhibited this, as did about half a dozen of the others, all of whom had eidetic memories as well. This was something that they couldn't resist investigating, so Ellie took the samples necessary to run full DNA tests on everyone who exhibited this (along with other control subjects, such as Stefan, to see what differences showed up), and they found that the one genetic marker that everyone exhibiting the additional effects of the PI shared appeared to relate to Norse bloodlines, and specifically Berserkers.
There was very limited test data recorded for Berserkers, as the incidence of 'true' Berserkers in recent times was quite rare and no formal studies had been done on them, but the stories about them appeared to relate to a hyper sensitivity to adrenalin, in small doses it increased the strength, speed, co-ordination and mental acuity, so that they became supermen (or women), and their neural pathways appeared to differ from 'normal' people as well (at least the people in their test group did, anyway), in large doses (equating to instances where 'normal' people perform acts of extreme strength etc due to adrenalin), the Berserkers appeared to be out of control, far stronger and faster than anyone else could possibly be, not reacting to injures and not ruled by rational thought while in that state. The full effects of the 'extreme' state was obviously not the target for the Intersect, but rather the 'enhanced' state, as these capabilities, along with the different neural pathways, enabled a capability to host and utilise the Intersect in a way that 'normal' people couldn't achieve.
When this came out, Chuck, Sarah, Ellie and Mary sat down to talk with Tiffany and Monica, because Lottie and Charlie also had eidetic memories. When Tiffany saw the benefits that they'd gotten from the PI, she readily agreed to the DNA testing, and she and Monica were tested as well. The results for Lottie and Charlie showed the same genetic markers as Chuck and the others, and after another talk with Tiffany, and them, they loaded the PI. The database was intentionally kept pretty bare for the girls, they were given extra martial arts and other skills to protect themselves, and that was most of it, as they wanted them to learn things through the normal processes because that would be better for them. Chuck explained and demonstrated to them how to access the additional fighting skills etc in case they ever needed them to defend themselves. Like Alex had been, they were already quite proficient in a wide array of martial arts and with many weapons (and had their pilot's licenses), but what they'd loaded into the PI database for them would mean that they should be able to fight just about anyone off.
It wasn't necessary to remind them never to let anyone else know about this, but he did. Lottie rolled her eyes at him "Daaadddd, you and Uncle John (John and Ellie were the girls' godparents, they had been since Tiffany and Monica moved back to town and introduced them to Chuck them so that they could get to know their father) have been telling us that since we were little girls, do you really think we don't get it yet?"
Charlie didn't say anything, she just shook her head at him in resignation, and he had to pull them into his arms and kiss them, they reminded him so much of Ellie when they did this "Yes, but you know the process, and your Dad, I'll always remind you of these things."
After loading the PI while they were still developing, the girls went through another growth spurt, shooting up another few inches and developing a bit more in a matter of months, so that they were an inch taller than Sarah now and were quite eye catching beauties, which made Chuck all the more happy that they had the extras available in the PI to protect themselves with. He wasn't sure whether the attention that they were getting from men and boys was harder on him or John though, as he'd had to stop John attacking more than one idiot over the inappropriate attention they were paying the girls. The PI had also further developed their already formidable intellects, guaranteeing that they'd be starting at Caltech when they turned sixteen next year, because they were almost locked in already. (That was the source of quite a bit of good natured bickering between Chuck, and Tiffany and Ellie, the fact that they'd both followed their father into technology fields, rather than following their mother into biochemistry. The family had arranged for financial and other assistance to get Tiffany into UCLA to study biochemistry, because even with the disadvantages of home schooling, she'd had the grades to get in.)
A few months after the girls loaded the PI, they went to a red carpet premier for a new teen movie with Chuck and Sarah. As they headed up the red carpet, their excitement about the movie and the actor they were crushing on just emphasised their vivacious beauty, and at five foot ten, developed the way they were and with their hair and makeup done, they certainly didn't LOOK like the sweet and innocent, barely fifteen year old girls they were. They were actually taking attention away from Sarah, which was quite unusual at these events, and Chuck was regretting giving in and letting them wear those elegant but short little black dresses and tall heels, they looked utterly stunning, but what he saw in the eyes of most of the men looking at them was just about enough to make him go on a rampage.
Just then, it got even worse, as he caught sight of Grimes and Patel out of the corner of his eye and tried to hurry into the cinema before they saw them. Fat chance of that, they'd become obsessed with Sarah in the few days before he'd managed to get away from the Buy More, and sure enough, Grimes started calling out "Chuck! Hey Chuck! Over here buddy!" Unfortunately, with the sharper hearing that the PI had given him, he could also hear what they were saying to each other, he gritted his teeth and tried to hurry more when he heard Grimes say "Man! Look at how fucking hot Sarah is in that dress! I SO wish I could get onto that just once!" but it was Patel's response to that which made him freeze.
"Forget about Blondie Morgan! Look at THOSE two! Man, what I'd do to get a taste of THAT!"
"Oh yeah, they're so fucking hot, twins! Those legs, those bodies, oh man I want that! And there's one for each of us! It's party time Lester!"
Sarah didn't need to look in Chuck's eyes to see his driving need to kill these fucking perverts, talking about what they wanted to do to his little girls like that, because she'd also heard what they'd said and was feeling it as well, they were her daughters too now! She had to get Chuck out this situation before he exploded though, she knew that this would be spread across the front pages by tomorrow, but she had to break him out of the killing rage that gripped him at the moment. She stretched up on tiptoe and latched onto him with a searing kiss, but for all that she was the very centre of his existence 99.99% of the time, it took nearly a minute for that kiss to get through to him. Sarah finally felt him start to relax as he came back to her, but kept it up for another thirty seconds or so to get him down from the brink before she whispered into his mouth "Lets get our girls inside where they're safe!"
Chuck came back with a sweet kiss and whispered "Yes! Love you" back. At that, Sarah broke off, and blushing bright red on cue, grabbed his hand to hurry towards the entrance of the cinema. She grabbed Charlie by the hand as Chuck did the same with Lottie, and they all rushed into the cinema. The girls didn't argue, as they'd stopped to watch that kiss like everyone else, and they'd seen that while the embarrassment their parents were showing was faked, their underlying rage was very real. Inside, Charlie asked in a whisper what was going on, but Sarah whispered back "I'll tell you in a minute Sweetie, but I have to get a couple of sick bastards taken down first!"
She keyed her mic "Anna! I need you to get into those bastards' phones and insert voyeur pictures of young girls, if you can grab something from tonight and include that, all the better! Jeff, I need you to get into the police systems and insert records for nasty child pornography and child molestation for both of them, with a court order that they have to keep well away from any events or locations involving under age girls, then send an alert with their pictures to all the police here that they've been spotted here to get them picked up!"
"Sarah! Who the hell are you talking about?"
"Oh, sorry, Chuck and I are pretty worked up at the moment, it's Grimes and Patel, they're here, and they're talking about what they want to do with our girls."
"WHAT?"
When she heard Casey bellow, she kicked herself, he'd kill anyone thinking that way about the girls even quicker than they would "John, stop! We need those bastards arrested and sent to prison, not us! If Anna and Jeff can get this started now, Chuck can plant enough evidence to get them sent away for a long time, or even better, hopefully get them killed in prison!"
Casey growled, but Anna said "OK, the Bear's back on his leash, sorta, Zondra, can you find these two and get a relay close enough to them for me to break into their phones with bluetooth?" (She'd obviously brought up pictures of the two on screen) "Even if I trusted Casey not to kill them, which I don't! They might recognise him from when he busted them trying to film Ellie in her bedroom."
"On it!"
With the others working on the problem, Sarah turned to Chuck to see how he was handling this now, he'd settled down a little, and he was hugging Lottie as he tried to control himself, which was pretty much what she was doing with Charlie. She kissed Charlie on the cheek, and started talking quietly to the two of them "There are a couple of perverts out there who used to work with your father, and you two caught their eye. They started talking about what they'd like to do with you and your father went into a rage, I wasn't far behind but that was what the kiss was about, it was the only thing I could think of to get through to him."
Lottie looked distraught "We shouldn't have come here dressed like this, I'm sorry Mama…."
"Lottie, NO! You two haven't done anything wrong! You both look so beautiful, it's not your fault what sick perverts think when they look at you, or any other woman's. Don't worry Sweetie, we're going to deal with those sick little fucks!"
It was only when the girls, and Chuck, grinned at what she'd said that she replayed it in her head, this time the blush WAS genuine "I shouldn't have said that, and I better not hear either of you saying it either! It's just, I was upset, sorry."
The girls laughed and Charlie kissed her on the cheek, and with that they went in to take their seats before anything else could happen.
Outside, Jeff and Anna were using the equipment they had in the van to locate incriminating voyeur pictures of young girls, and scan any bluetooth, WiFi or cell signals they could find in hope of picking up some more from this event. They managed to grab a few up the skirts and down the tops of obviously young girls getting out of cars at this event, which should do the job nicely. As they got the images, they resized and reformatted them to look like camera phone pics. Jeff got into the police system and created records for a couple of nasty child molesters and child pornographers, adding some of the images that Anna wasn't getting ready to insert into their phones to strengthen the case against them. He also added a record for a court order prohibiting them from going anywhere near places where young girls would be, like this event, and sent the alert to the police stationed near the event.
As soon as Zondra got close enough to the pair for Anna to connect with bluetooth, she hacked into their phones and loaded the images, then reorganised the files to show a logical progression, the images that she'd inserted inter-spaced with the similar pictures already on their phones. She did remove the pictures they'd taken of Lottie and Charlie, and of Sarah kissing Chuck with them in the picture, from both their phones while she was doing that.
The police were on the ball that night, because Zondra had to urgently ask Anna whether she was done so she could get away from the pair before the cops arrived to take them down, hard! The cops who took them down obviously considered perverts who preyed on young girls like that disgusting, because it was at the very least bordering on excessive force when they did so, not that Zondra or those watching in the van objected, at all. Anna called through that the pair had been arrested, and Chuck and Sarah smiled at each other in relief, they would have shared at kiss at that, except the girls were sitting between them.
When they got home, Chuck got on the computer and set up the rest of the evidence on the pair, determined that Lottie and Charlie and any other girls who caught their eye would be kept safe from them. While he was doing that he called Anna "Was it you or Jeff who hacked into my profile to set that as my background?"
"A bit of both, actually."
"Who did you get it from?"
"Patel, the sleazebag either has a good eye or he lucked out, but it was actually a lovely image of the four of you, and nothing sums up you and Sarah better than a picture of you locked in a passionate embrace."
He ignored that last "Yeah, I think I'll keep it, thanks again for your help tonight Anna."
"Chuck, you know we'll all do anything to protect the girls! We're family!"
"I know, and that makes me appreciate it all the more, night."
"Night Chuck."
Before he went to bed, he had a look around the gossip sites, confirming what they'd expected, that kiss was going to be front page news for a few days at least, unless something big came along. Strangely enough though, the image that Anna removed from Patel's phone was better than any of the ones he found when he searched the Net.
Now that his father was firing on all cylinders, probably for the first time, he came to Chuck to beg for his help in removing the Agent X Intersect from Alexei Volkoff, so that they could get their friend Hartley Winterbottom back. Though he'd already heard the story from Auntie Di, Uncle Bry, Auntie Em and Mom, Chuck didn't interrupt him when his father told it again, and his father DID have something else to tell him, he'd been trying to come up with a way to remove the Agent X Intersect from Hartley for nearly twenty years now, but he'd never managed to come up with anything viable. More importantly, he still had a copy of the original corrupted code that had been loaded into Hartley. He also had the videos of how he'd reacted with he was loaded with it for the first demonstration before Chuck was born, and how he'd reacted when the hacked version was loaded into him when Chuck was almost nine.
Chuck took the code to Jeff, as their reverse engineering guru, and once Jeff had extracted the code, he and Leslie used the code that he'd provided to came up with a program that the simulations showed was almost certain to extract it properly, but that just left them with a bigger problem, how the hell were they supposed to get to him to execute the extraction program? Alexei Volkoff was a vicious, paranoid megalomaniac with more power and bigger armies than most of the world's smaller countries, there was no way for them to just walk in and put the Intersect glasses on him.
Chuck promised to try and find a way to do this, but they had a heavy workload, so it was going to be a long process, as Chuck could only look into this when he had some free time. This in itself showed how much his father had improved though, because instead of throwing a tantrum like he always had before, he said that he understood and thanked him for making the effort. He WAS trying to make up for his behaviour to Chuck and Ellie, now that he finally realised what he'd been doing to them for fifteen years. Dr Dreyfus had actually told them and Mary that the guilt he felt over that was one of his biggest problems now.
Since they'd officially taken over the Special Projects Groups, the issue of their meetings in D.C. had become more of a problem, because they were in the air much of the time now. As an interim measure, three F-15Es were allocated to them and they were kept hangared with their G550 in the RI hangar at Bob Hope Airport. Chuck, Sarah, Ellie and Casey used these to get to and from D.C. when there were only one or two of them going (well, up to six if they used all three jets), as this meant that they could attend meetings in D.C. without it taking all day, it still took half the day, but it made a difference.
They spread a cover story about that Roark Instruments was working on new avionics and imaging systems for the Air Force to explain the presence of the Air Force jets and crews in the RI Hangar at Bob Hope Airport, as well as the serious looking military personnel guarding the hangar. They were a little surprised that everyone accepted the story so readily, but they weren't complaining, as that made life so much easier.
Now that both Stefan and Leslie were back at full capacity, Stefan had started looking seriously into something that he'd been keeping an eye on for a few years now, the SonicStar, a concept for a near hypersonic large business jet. He made a large investment into Hypermach, the company who were working on this, to get the rights to try and play around with it for his own use, signing contracts agreeing that he couldn't sell any derivatives of the SonicStar technology that he worked on. He wanted to develop this into a flying platform that the team could use to alleviate the strain that all this travel was putting on them. He also approached Chuck and requested permission to bring ten OTHER eccentric geniuses into Novatech to work on it with them, and get the Piranha Intersect loaded into them as well.
In that year after he'd disappeared, Stefan had linked up with a network of brilliant but crazy inventors like himself, and they'd helped him stay off the grid until Mary, Di and Bry found him, using their personal knowledge of him and his habits to locate him. He'd stayed in contact with these people and worked with them in secret ever since, trusting them more than the family in his paranoia. The thing was, now that he was finally straightened out and thinking better than he'd ever been done his life, except perhaps when he was at MIT, and he observed the changes in Leslie as well to confirm what the Piranha Intersect and working with Dr Dreyfus could do for people like them, he was thinking about what those others in his core circle could do if they were straightened out in the same way. These ten men, with Leslie, were the most brilliant of the people he'd dealt with over the past fifteen years, well ever, actually, their specialities were spread across all the fields, and he was pretty sure that if they were all straightened out like he'd been, there was pretty much nothing that they wouldn't be able to do as a team.
Chuck, Sarah, Ellie, John, Mary, Emma, Di, Bry, Leslie and Dr Dreyfus sat down to discuss this, on one hand, there was the obvious risk in opening their operation to unknowns, but as Stefan said, if this worked out the way he was hoping, the opportunities that this presented were staggering. Chuck had looked into these men, and their backgrounds were clear of anything that was too worrying, their rampant paranoia aside. Leslie had reviewed what these people had created and talked to them when Stefan discussed the prospect with him, and he was prepared to attest to their genius, and on the basis of what Stefan and Leslie said, Dr Dreyfus was cautiously optimistic that he'd be able to help them straighten themselves out. That was enough for them to agree to this, so they gave Stefan the OK to bring them in.
They all took to the PI well, four even more so than the others as they shared the traits that Chuck and the others had, which allowed them to glean the most benefit from the PI, and within a month of working with Dr Dreyfus, they were all working on the projects, though they were still having sessions with him. Stefan was quickly proven right, this team, with him and Leslie, and Chuck too when he had the time, were doing incredible things, they had a quarter scale unmanned full function prototype flying within six months, and after a couple of months of testing with that, they'd started creating the airframe for the full scale model. In the development process, they'd made some fundamental changes from the original Hypermach concept, such as creating the airframe and skin from carbon fibre and using nanotube technology to strengthen the structure and components and address the heat issues. The weight reduction from this change, as well as their aerodynamic testing, subsequently led to other significant changes to the design.
As well as the near hypersonic transport platform, they were also working on all sorts of other things, body armour and NBC protection suits, advanced prosthetics and exoskeletons, surface transports, even an VTOL transport platform, the boys were busy. They were actually having the time of their lives, because hiding in the shadows, without funding as they'd been for decades, they'd always been severely limited in the scope of what they could look into, but now they had pretty much government level funding WITHOUT worrying about what the government might do with their creations, because the vast majority of what they were working on here would never be released to anyone outside of the 'family', this was all for the family's use, and that meant that the sky was the limit (literally, seeing as their major projects were aircraft).
It wasn't just 'the twelve' (as the family had taken to calling them) who were creating things though, because both Sarah and Ellie were pregnant. Ellie and John had fun teasing Sarah and Chuck about how they were panicking about why Sarah was feeling sick all the time when Sarah was 'just' pregnant, until Ellie started going through the same things a month later, it suddenly wasn't anywhere NEAR as amusing then! Sarah let Ellie off the hook to a large degree, but Chuck enjoyed laying it on pretty thick with his brother in law.