Glancing up from her novel, Amy looked at her sister again, then sighed a little, put her bookmark into the page, closed the book, then put it down. "What the hell is wrong with you, Vicky?" she asked, more or less sympathetically. "You've been moping around ever since you insulted that new cape. You apologized, she accepted, why are you still looking like someone pissed in your cornflakes?"

Vicky, who was sitting in a chair beside her sister's bedroom window peering out at the skyline, shrugged. From her position on the bed Amy watched her curiously. The girl had drooped her way in after dinner, muttered something that might have been a hello, then slumped into the chair like a golden blonde pile of depression, which Amy found both odd and irritating. She had enough angst for the both of them herself, she didn't need her sister adding to it. Or, at least, doing it in her room.

Picking at some loose paint on the windowsill with one long fingernail, Vicky sighed. "I don't know, really. I'm… worried? Scared? Sad?" She shrugged again. "It's difficult to put into words."

"Surely Saurial can't be that terrifying," the healer remarked. "I know what you said at lunch and it's obvious that she's not only ridiculously strong and fast, but has some weird powers on top of that, but that sort of thing isn't all that unusual in capes. She's a grab bag with a very heavy dose of Brute, right?"

Vicky looked over at her for a moment, then went back to wrecking the paint job. Amy winced as her sister managed to peel quite a long strip of white gloss paint loose, looking guilty for a moment and hastily pressing it back down again. When she moved her finger it fell off onto the carpet. "Oops."

"Stop ruining my décor and tell me what the problem is, you idiot," Amy sighed, getting off her bed and moving to the other chair next to her sister, shuffling it around so she could look at her more directly.

It took a while for the other girl to nod, but she finally opened up a little. "Partly it's me, I guess. I did something really, really dumb, just because I was angry with Dean. It wasn't even his fault, I know that, and I'm sad about always flying off the handle so easily. Partly it's because she did accept."

"What on earth do you mean?" Amy asked, somewhat confused. "That's a good thing, right?"

"Yes, I guess," the blonde mumbled. "But I can't get over the fact that I blew up over a trivial little thing and went off looking for a fight just because of that, but she genuinely did get insulted and yelled at and just thought it was nothing serious. She actually asked Mom if I was OK! And Mom thinks she meant it. What does that say about me as a person? Never mind the fact that someone was trying to kill her for over a fucking hour and she just said it was rude. Every other cape I've ever met, assuming they didn't actually die, would have been ranting and raving about that sort of thing, not laughing about it."

She momentarily smiled, adding, "Can you imagine what would happen if someone started shooting at Lung like that? He'd burn down half the city just to avenge the insult even if he wasn't hurt."

"Lung isn't known for a sense of humor, no," Amy admitted with a wry smile. "Although as far as I know if you actually got him in the head with a large caliber rifle before he started to ramp up you'd stand a good chance of killing him. After that, you're toast." She thought, then continued, "Actually, now that I say it, I'm kind of surprised that no one has ever actually done that. He doesn't make a lot of friends."

"Maybe they tried and it didn't work," Vicky noted, going back to looking depressed. "I can guarantee from what I saw yesterday it wouldn't work on Saurial. Which is fucking terrifying in a way." She looked at her sister. "You didn't see it. Hearing about it is one thing, seeing someone charge about the place at freeway speeds with a sword six feet long cutting solid steel mannequins into little chunks and laughing about it is… not comforting. Sure, if she hit me with the thing it would only knock me flying. The first time. The problem is that she's so quick she could do it again before my force field reset and I'd be dead just like that."

"There are lots of capes that technically could kill you, though, and it's never stopped you before, or made you like this," Amy noted.

"True, I guess. It was just one more thing to add to all the weird shit. She doesn't act like any cape I've ever met. Not even Case 53s. She seems totally comfortable with herself even though she looks so different, which is… odd. If that had happened to me I'm sure that in only a couple of weeks or so which is what Dean says is how long she's been active as far as anyone can work out, I'd still be curled up in a ball crying about what I looked like."

"She does seem quite different to a normal human," Amy smiled, remembering the PHO videos she's seen. "But as far as I can see she's a decent person."

"I know. Everyone who's met her who wasn't a criminal seems to like her. In a weird way I like her. She's friendly, polite, obviously happy, and stupidly skilled. That's part of the problem, even people who think she's terrifying like her. It's strange. She looks so… dangerous, I guess, but she acts like she just wants to be your friend. When she's not acting like something out of Alien."

"Hmm." Amy thought for a moment. It was true enough, there were a surprisingly large number of people, often cops, who were quite complimentary about the reptilian cape on PHO, to a level that seemed a little odd for such a short active career. "Maybe she's a Master of some sort, and is influencing them to like her," she joked.

Vicky's eyes went wide as she lifted her head and stared at her sister. "Oh My God!" she breathed, sounding horrified. "You really think so?"

Laughing, Amy shook her head. "No, I don't. I think she's just a happy and polite person who is nice to people and so people are nice back. It happens." Looking at her sister for a moment, she added sarcastically, "Anyway, why would you of all people be worried about that, Aura Girl?"

Vicky flushed, looking embarrassed. "I try to keep it under control."

"Not very hard," Amy replied. The flush deepened. "You really should, you know."

"Dean told me the same thing before our last but one fight," Vicky said with a grin. "What do you think the fight was about?"

Sighing but amused, her sister shook her head. "You're a strange girl, Vicky."

"But you love me even so, right?"

Vicky looked a little confused by the expression Amy felt cross her face as she quickly turned it away, going red and not answering. Regaining her composure after a second or two and a deliberate act of will, she looked back. "You're my sister, of course I love you, idiot," she said in a snarky tone. "Stop moping around. Saurial isn't going to hurt you, even if she could, unless you do sometime a lot worse than calling her names, so don't keep thinking about it. I'm getting sick of hearing about her. Saurial this, Saurial that, all lunchtime, and after school as well. You'd think that Dean and his friends can't talk about anything else than her. It's irritating."

Vicky seemed surprised about the sudden diatribe, but also considerably less depressed. "OK, we can talk about something else."

"Thank you." Amy huffed a little, but was very relieved that she'd managed to change the subject from something that was getting a lot too close to home.

Although she really would like to have a look at how the lizard girl's body worked. It was intriguing and possibly less boring than the rest of her life.

With an inner sigh she listened to her sister chatter on about something silly one of her friends had managed to do to her Dad's car, which was admittedly quite funny, the blonde noticeably cheering up as she spoke and soon enough more or less back to normal.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Mayor Christner looked at the somewhat elaborate metal clock on his desk, a present from an old friend in Boston and some extremely fine work, noting the time. If his next appointment kept to schedule as accurately as usual, any moment now…

Less than fifteen seconds later the old fashioned intercom on his desk, which he kept because for some reason it amused him, made a discreet buzzing sound. "Yes, Maria?" he said.

"Mayor, your half past three appointment is here," his secretaries' voice came through the speaker.

"Send him in, please," he said, standing and moving out around his desk. Moments later the door opened, the familiar figure of Danny Hebert, head of hiring at the Dock Workers Union and the man everyone knew essentially ran the DWU whatever he said about it, strode in. "Hello, Danny," Roy said, holding out his hand, which was taken and shaken with a firm grip. "Nice to see you again. You're looking well."

This was true, the man before him was looking happier, calmer, and generally fitter than he'd been for years, the perpetual stoop of the downtrodden no longer in evidence. He looked confident and ready for anything the world threw at him.

Roy was pleased about that, he liked and respected the Union representative, although there were certainly times around a negotiating table that he deeply wished the other man would find a different career path, one that was less trouble to the city administration. Perhaps home explosives manufacture or something nice and inconspicuous like that.

Hiding a smile at the ridiculous thought, he motioned to a pair of chairs on the other side of the office, a small table between them, in a less formal layout that being on either side of a desk. "Sit, please. Can I get you anything?"

"Thank you, Mayor Christner," Danny replied, looking pleased. "Some water would be fine."

He moved to sit down, placing his briefcase, the one he'd been carrying around for as long as Roy had known him and which was a wedding gift from his wife, on the floor beside his chair. Going to the small refrigerator built into the other side of the room next to his desk, Roy retrieved a pair of bottles of water from it, then a couple of crystal glasses from the cupboard above it, taking both sets of items back and putting them on the table. "Help yourself. Are you sure you don't want anything else?"

"This is fine, thanks," Danny replied, removing the top of the glass bottle and pouring half of it into his glass, then taking a sip. Roy did the same, sitting in the other chair.

"How is your daughter?" Roy asked, inspecting the other man. "Taylor, isn't it?"

"She's very well indeed, thanks," Danny smiled broadly. "She's transferred to Arcadia after some… minor unpleasantness at Winslow made us both feel she was under-appreciated there. Her entrance tests on Friday went very well. She started on Monday and seems to be having fun so far, she's already made a couple of friends."

"That's good to hear," Roy nodded, taking another sip of water and listening. "I wish something could be done to improve Winslow, it's more run down than I like, but it would take a lot of money that simply isn't available to do more than maintain it." He sighed slightly, as Danny nodded understandingly. "We don't have the budget for massive rebuilding projects which is what I fear it would take."

"Arcadia seems to be doing well, though," Danny noted.

Roy sighed again. "That point has come up more often than you'd think. The problem is that Arcadia is partly privately funded by people with deep pockets, who of course send their children there as well. They generally have little interest in funding other schools. I've asked, but the answer so far is always no."

"I understand. It's annoying but I suppose life isn't perfect. I'm just glad Taylor is going there now." Danny shook his head a little, before topping up his glass. "She was unhappy at Winslow and not doing as well as she's capable of. You should see how she's changed and blossomed in the last little while since the transfer came through, though. Completely different girl in some ways." He grinned. "She looks so much like Annette now you wouldn't believe it and has inherited more than looks from her. Determined young lady."

Roy grinned back. "I remember Annette well, Danny. It was a tragedy losing her like that, so young."

"It was," his guest replied, a momentary distant look on his face. "However, I have things to remind me of her, one of them the best thing in my life, so there's that. Enough about me, how is your family?"

"Rory's doing well, thank you, as is Kyla and Deb. I'll mention to Deb that you asked after them, she'd like that."

"Good. Nice to hear it."

"My niece has been a little unwell recently, though. She keeps getting headaches from what I'm told. Hopefully there's nothing too serious wrong, she's only just twelve, so that's pretty young for most of the bad problems I can immediately think of." Roy sighed, shaking her head. "She's a nice girl but so serious a lot of the time. I'll have to visit my brother and take her a little get well present or something. Oh well, I'm sure she'll recover, the young are pretty resilient."

Danny nodded knowingly. "Oh, yes, they certainly are, trust me."

Pleasantries over, Roy leaned back in the comfortable chair, holding his glass of water, and studied his guest, who smiled a little under the inspection. "So, Danny, what can I do for the DWU today? I'm afraid that there aren't any large contracts available at the moment, although there may be one or two small short term projects available."

"I'd be interested in talking about those at some point, but at the moment, it's not so much looking for work as presenting a proposal." Danny's smile had gone somewhat mysterious.

Looking narrowly at him, knowing damn well the man always had some sort of angle, Roy slowly parroted, "A… proposal."

"A proposal, yes. One that could benefit the city considerably, and I'll admit my own men and women as well." Danny's smile grew. "But it's somewhat… unusual."

Putting his now-empty glass down on the inlaid tabletop with a click, Roy leaned forward again. "How unusual?" His voice was suspicious.

"Quite." Danny's was amused. After a moment, he put his own glass on the table and stood up, walking to the window overlooking the bay in a generally northern direction from the sixth floor of the building. "Come over here a minute, if you would, Mayor."

Curious now, Roy did as asked, moving to stand beside his guest, who pointed out the window. Roy looked in the direction indicated. "How would you like that removed," Danny said quietly.

Roy stared, then looked back to the other man's face. He seemed serious. "The tanker?"

"Yes."

Silence fell for a few seconds while the mayor thought hard. Danny wasn't known as a man who played jokes, although he certainly had a good sense of humor. And one hell of a temper if you managed to ignite it, which was never good. But at the moment he just looked like he was patiently waiting for an honest answer.

"I suppose it would be a good thing, but you probably know better than I do how incredibly expensive that would be. Marine salvage is pricey at the best of times, which these aren't. How would it even be done, anyway? That thing must weigh thousands of tons at least."

"Thirty one thousand six hundred," Danny nodded. "According to the records. Probably less now because some of the equipment was either removed or stolen over the years, but in that ballpark."

"That's a hell of a lot of steel to cut up and take away," the mayor commented, looking back at the vast old ship miles away on the horizon. "It would take years, surely. And what would you do with it? Refloating it would be nearly impossible, I know for a fact that there are at least a dozen large holes in the hull from where rocks went through when it sank."

"True. But, at the current price of approximately two hundred and thirty-five dollars a ton for good quality bulk scrap steel, that represents a little less than seven and a half million dollars, just rusting away. Just for the steel, there are other metals that are worth more in the engine room, the drive shafts, that sort of thing, so call it about eight to eight and a half million dollars. Owned by the city, as far as we can determine."

Roy was a little startled at the figure. It wasn't huge, but it was nothing to sneeze at, either. "OK," he replied, not sure quite what the other man was driving at. "But even so, I can see it costing that much at least to salvage it."

"But even if that was indeed the case, it would then unblock the harbor and allow much larger ships to come and go. The damn thing is completely blocking the deep water channel into the bay. Only fairly small trawlers or cargo ships can go around it, the water either side is too shallow for anything that has very much draft. Not to mention the wreckage in the area which makes it dangerous even then. That's why the port died, of course." Danny sighed in remembrance, as did the mayor.

"It wasn't that long ago that from here you'd have seen a couple of dozen ships and thousands of men working every day down there."

"Those days are gone, Danny," Roy replied sadly.

"Not necessarily."

They shared a look, then Danny went and sat again, pushing his glass and empty water bottle to the side and putting his briefcase where they'd been. The snapping sound of the latches unlocking was loud in the quiet office. The DWU representative pulled out a thick sheaf of papers in a folder and put it in front of Roy, who had just sat again as well.

"This is a very preliminary proposal and a lot of information is missing from it, but the basics are there," Danny told him as Roy looked at the document with raised eyebrows. "However, I've checked with a salvage expert, a ship dismantling yard on the west coast, a marine law expert, the records department, and even a marine biologist. It's possible. Even fairly easily doable with some care. And it would revitalize the port, create or maintain close to eight hundred jobs just in the first year, and possibly even allow for the ferry to reopen. You already know my views on that, of course."

"All too well, Danny," Roy chuckled, opening the report and reading the first page, a summary of the proposal. His eyebrows disappeared into his hairline within the first two paragraphs.

"You can't be serious."

"I am. Very." Danny looked it, when Roy glanced at him. Intrigued, he resumed reading, picking the document up and leaning back. Danny waited patiently.

The actual proposal was only about eight pages, the remainder of the thick stack of papers being made up of charts of the bay, proof of ownership of what looked like at least ninety percent of the junked ships in it, maps of the ships graveyard, a topological relief cross-section of the mouth of the bay, and many other things besides. Most of it had obviously been cobbled together in a hurry but as far as he could see, all hung together.

Feeling a little faint, he closed the report and dropped it to the table, resting his hand on it. "Is this possible? Really?"

"Yes, I think it is. I know how… bizarre… it looks on first sight, but I really think it could be done. The parahuman in question is happy to donate their time and effort to the city, they don't want to profit from it. That makes it much easier from a legal standpoint. The lawyers I spoke to thought it was eminently possible with the right wording in the contract."

He fell silent again, allowing Roy to think. Getting up and wandering back to the window, the mayor stared at the graveyard of dead ships, slowly going orange in the setting sun. "The entire graveyard, the bay, everything?"

"That's the plan." Danny smiled when he looked back for a moment. "Clear some space on the docks first, which would require demolishing several warehouses, which are derelict anyway and also belong to the city and would have enough steel in them to be worth salvaging as well. Repair the ground in that area, one of them has a cellar which would need filling with concrete, which is easy and not too expensive, resurface the whole area, add retaining walls and absorbent zones for any runoff, that sort of thing. It's not complicated or very expensive and it's a known process."

"Once the scrapping area is ready, which we think would take about two weeks, maybe less if I put enough men on the job, we start with the tanker. It would be towed to the docks and the bilges pumped out, because it will be full of all sorts of crap we don't want leaking into the bay. Then, it's sliced up and brought on shore. My men could easily reduce the slices to smaller pieces, sort out anything that wasn't steel, then load the stuff onto rail cars. We'd need to rebuild about half a mile of track that's too badly damaged to repair, to link the rail yard to the main line, but I'm told that would take about two weeks at most, which would be done at the same time as the ground prep work. We even have the track in stock, left over from the refurbishment in the late seventies."

Roy turned around and stood by the window, listening intently. "The scrap steel would be shipped out by rail. There are six smelters within two hundred miles alone that could handle that quantity of scrap at a price like the one I mentioned earlier, and from what I've been able to find out with some discreet questions, at least three of them are desperate for metal and would probably bid for a contract for as much of it as we could supply."

"Once the tanker was gone, which would take about three months with a team of perhaps a hundred working on it, the money from it could be used to dredge the harbor, although the parahuman whose idea this ultimately was could help as well and is willing to do it. That then lets larger cargo ships in, which in turn makes shipping out further scrap easier. We can work our way through the graveyard, at a quick minimum estimate there's over sixty-five million dollars worth of steel there that could be sold off, several supertankers worth of smaller ships. It could be considerably more, there are a lot of ships with very incomplete records on the bottom of the bay half-buried in silt, some of them are pretty big. Not to mention at least a dozen hulls that are sound and refloatable. They could either be sold intact or rebuilt."

He paused for breath, while Roy stared, almost shocked. "Once the graveyard is clear, that's nearly three square miles of prime industrial land right next to the water, all of it owned by the city, available once again. It clears the way for the ferry, as well, which is a bonus. Not to mention allowing for an influx of exactly the expertise we need to revive it, the funds to pay for it, and the jobs for people to run it. At a rough calculation we would clear more than ten million dollars a year over three years after transportation, labor, and material costs are taken into account. But the indirect payback could be as much as ten times that during the same period. Much more over a decade, it could attract a hell of a lot of business to the Bay."

"We'd need to bring in some equipment, we have most of it in stock from the old days, but some is too old, some is worn out, and some is just not in large enough quantities. Large quantities of oxygen and fuel for thermal lances and cutting torches, new rail cars and replacement parts for some of the old ones that are still lying around the rail yard, things like that. Nothing very exciting, just normal heavy industrial equipment. A lot of it could even be purchased used in this economy for a large cost saving. We could upgrade it as needed when the money starts coming in, and the repair work means yet more jobs."

Falling silent, he watched the Mayor, who was gaping.

"That's… certainly an ambitious plan, Danny," Roy finally managed to say. Danny acknowledged the comment with a nod but didn't say anything.

"Too ambitious?" Roy mused.

"I don't think so, sir. The tanker is the bottleneck. Even without the help of the parahuman involved, once that was gone and the harbor dredged we could do the rest the old fashioned way. It would take years longer but is still practical. The figures are in the report." He shrugged slightly. "I'm told that they are happy to help do the whole thing, or any subdivision you want. They don't want to put good people out of work but at the same time they don't want to see the city decay any more. And you know as well as I do that Brockton Bay is dying. If we don't do something fairly soon, it might be too late."

"Depressingly true," Roy nodded, thinking deeply. "The gangs are killing us, we're on the edge of a cliff the whole time. If we could pump more money into the economy and stop it instantly disappearing into Lung's or Kaiser's pockets, the effect would probably be profound. A lot of the drug problems which fuel the gangs are in the end the result of poor desperate people, after all. They have nothing to lose."

"But give them jobs, even fairly basic ones, they have," Danny pointed out. "Start at the bottom and build from there."

"What about security and the gangs?"

"Page five. The equipment is the only really expensive thing and most of it is both so heavy and so specialized it's hardly worth the effort of stealing in the first place except for by a few Tinkers. We could secure it well enough just by putting a large fence around the entire site except the waterfront and posting a few guards, as we do with the DWU facility. More jobs. The upfront cost is fairly high but not unreasonable and could be done in stages, easily. The scrap itself is only worth anything in quantities measured in tons, so unless someone steals an entire trainload it's not an issue. If they do, that's what insurance is for." Danny smiled, again stopping.

"Christ." Roy sighed, flipping the report open and looking at the summary, then leafing through it to a table of estimated costings and studying it closely. "This is… I'm not sure what this is."

"A good idea?"

"A completely insane idea. But it's so crazy it just might work." He grinned as Danny chuckled. "You're sure this parahuman of your can do it?"

"I am, as mad as it sounds. Quite easily."

"There's a cape in Brockton Bay with that sort of power?" Roy was astounded. "A Tinker?"

"Oddly enough, no," his guest smiled. "That part is still a surprise. But they can do what's needed."

"You're absolutely certain of that?"

"I am. Some preliminary experiments have already been done." Danny snickered at the look on Roy's face. "Discreetly. But it's not too hard to arrange. The PRT will go mental when they see it, of course, so I'm half tempted not to tell them just to watch their expressions, but we should probably be more responsible than that."

Roy stared, then started laughing. "Oh, god, I can imagine Piggot's face if she looked out her window one day and that tanker was flying away or something. She'd pop an artery on the spot." Shaking his head, he snickered for a while. He found the PRT director, while he respected her, someone he preferred not to deal with too often. She was competent, but hard to like.

"Is this parahuman you found associated with the PRT?" he asked curiously.

Danny smiled. "The person in question respects the PRT to a degree but has no immediate wish to be directly associated with them," he said dryly. "I suspect that once they become known for what they can do, though, the PRT may be very interested in them. Not that it would do them much good if the parahuman decided they wanted nothing to do with them."

"A little difficult to deal with?"

"Not at all. Just dangerous if pushed too hard or threatened." Danny shrugged again. "Personally, though, I'd trust them with the lives of myself and my daughter any day of the week, which I have to say isn't quite the feelings I have for the PRT, sadly enough."

Shaking his head in wonder, Roy closed the folder. "I'm going to have to think very hard about this, Danny. It's a hell of a step to take and if it failed, it would fail spectacularly. Neither one of us would come out of that well."

"I know, but I have faith in the plan."

After a moment or two more, Roy sighed but nodded. "Look, you go ahead and work this up into something more concrete. Get all the facts and figures right. Bring it back when it's ready and I'll read it again. I'm going to think it over in the meantime, but..."

He trailed off. Danny nodded.

"All right, sir. Thank you for listening to my insane idea."

"Thank you for bringing it to me. I think." Roy smiled as he stood. "I really hope you're right about this, Danny. It could be… remarkable. But we need to be sure."

"I'll continue with working it out quietly," Danny replied. "We don't want to publicize any of it until we're ready, that would cause all sorts of problems, I think, but with some luck I can have a much more detailed report in about a week."

"Fine. I'll have to get it checked out, but I'll wait until you have the details ready." He held out his hand, feeling rather more positive about the day.

Danny Hebert might well be nuts, but he had both ambition and common sense, two abilities that seldom seemed to go together. The last one was so rare it was almost a super-power in its own right.

Shaking the outstretched hand, Danny put his paperwork back in his briefcase and left with a final smile.

Returning to the window, Roy stared at the dimming shape of the huge tanker. It had been part of the background for so long he had real trouble working out what the view would look like if it was gone, but he was suddenly feeling quite interested in finding out.