"Hello. Are you having vehicle troubles?"
The female voice from behind him made Eric jump a little, but he nodded, still on his hands and knees looking under his truck. "Yes, Miss, I am," he sighed. "I've managed to get the driveshaft hung up in a pothole and the thing is completely wedged. I'm going to have to call for a tow truck and it's going to take hours… to… get..." He trailed off, his voice rising in pitch, as he looked over his shoulder to the woman who had spoken.
"Oh, OK," the enormous reptilian creature standing behind him said, bending down to look for herself. "Doesn't look like anything is actually damaged though, as far as I can see. Do you want some help?" She looked enquiringly at him. Eric nodded reflexively, not able to actually do anything else.
"All right." Straightening up, she moved around to the front of the ten ton delivery truck, carefully grabbed the jacking points under the front bumper, then lifted, raising the vehicle like she was moving a sofa. "Is it clear?"
He stared, swallowed, then looked. He nodded.
"Great." She moved sideways, the truck following obediently, then lowered it to the ground when it was safely away from the massive pothole. Staring at her work for a moment, she moved around to the back, vanishing from sight, then the rear of the vehicle shifted as well, leaving it neatly parked beside the road. The lizard-like thing reappeared, dusting her hands off with an air of satisfaction. "There you go."
"Thank you," he squeaked.
"Just visiting Brockton Bay?" she asked. "I see you have a Boston address there on the side."
He nodded again.
"Yes," he managed to say, then cleared his throat and tried again. "Yes. I'm delivering some supplies to Medhall Pharmaceuticals."
"Oh, right. You just go down that road over there, then take the second left, it's about a mile further," she replied with what looked horrifyingly like it was meant to be a smile.
"Thank you," he repeated.
"No problems. Nice to meet you, sir," she replied, then wandered off down the road, looking into shop windows as she went with the air of someone just browsing.
Quite a number of pedestrians had stopped to watch, most of them holding camera phones, but they rapidly dispersed when nothing else interesting happened. After nearly a minute, he shook his head, peered after the reptilian cape, whose tail was just disappearing around the corner a couple of blocks away, shrugged, and got into the truck.
"They said Brockton Bay was weird."
Shaking his head again he started the vehicle and drove off.
"What."
Armsmaster's voice was completely flat and expressionless.
Across the table from him, Leet, wearing a balaclava and ordinary street clothes, shrugged.
"Electron degenerate matter? You can't be serious."
"I am."
"It's impossible."
"You're looking at it."
The Protectorate Tinker looked at the cube of insanely dense metal sitting on the table between them. Reaching out he picked it up with some effort and a whine from the servomotors in his power armor, using the rope connected to it, then studied it closely.
"You're really sure that's what this material is?" he asked, his voice sounding almost plaintive now. Leet nodded again.
"I am. Look, you've tested my tricorder, you know it does what I said it does. My stuff always works, at least for a while. Even you admit that."
Reluctantly, the other Tinker nodded. It was true enough, Leet seemed able to make essentially anything.
Once.
His inventions almost inevitably blew up or otherwise failed after a while, often while he was using them, with rare exceptions. And he could, for some reason, never either fix or duplicate them successfully, something that made him very annoyed indeed.
"I'll admit, with some reservations, that your device does indeed appear to do what you claim it does. But even so… Electron degenerate matter should be utterly unstable outside the core of a fairly large star. Or the surface layers of a neutron star. How you could possibly make it not only stable at standard pressures, but a solid as well..." Armsmaster's voice faded as he looked at the dangling cube of gray metal. "Not to mention the minor matter of over six orders of magnitude of density difference."
Spreading his hands, Leet leaned back in his chair. "I know. Believe me, I know. I've been over it and over it and I can't explain it in any way at all. I have absolutely no idea how it could be made. Nothing I can come up with is able to affect it at all. The hardness might as well be infinite, as far as I'm concerned, likewise tensile strength, compressive strength, any physical measurement you care to name. I'm certain it isn't actually infinite but it's so fucking high it might as well be for all intents and purposes."
He sighed heavily. "I can't make it, damage it, work it, affect it at all."
"Neither could I," Armsmaster admitted somewhat sourly. Leet looked at him, so the hero explained about Hookwolf and his still present manacles made of the same material.
Leet snickered. "Serves the bastard right."
"I tend to agree, to a point," Armsmaster replied with a very small smile that immediately vanished. His mouth reflected a thoughtful look. "I still maintain it's unlikely in the extreme, but… It would explain some of the results I've had. Some of the methods I used to attempt removal of the manacles would have worked on anything I can even theoretically come up with, but they had absolutely no effect on this material."
"It's also a perfect thermal conductor and a perfect electrical insulator as far as I can measure, which fits the theory of electron degenerate matter," Leet added. Armsmaster nodded thoughtfully.
"True." He experimentally tapped the dangling cube with his other hand, watching it swing. "How did you get this sample?"
"I asked her for it."
The power-suited Tinker gave his guest a long look. "Just like that? You simply asked?"
"Yes. She asked if I was going to do anything illegal with it, I promised her I wasn't, and she gave it to me." Leet shrugged. "I was a little surprised myself, it seemed… unusually generous… but having studied it, it's not giving anything away. It's not like I can actually do anything with that cube, except throw it at someone. I'd assume her armor is made of the same stuff, but based on my tests I doubt a piece of it would penetrate another piece of it without so much energy input that the actual projectile was irrelevant. She wasn't taking much risk."
"Interesting. I'd have to agree, based on my own studies." Armsmaster put the cube back on the table, both of them looking at it for a moment.
"All right. Assume for the moment that you are correct, Saurial and Raptaur can somehow make arbitrary constructions of electron degenerate matter. How does this allow us to fight an Endbringer?"
Leet smiled slowly.
"Using Raptaur, a large tube made of this stuff, a hell of a lot of little darts also made of it, a disk of tungsten… and a very small fusion bomb."
Armsmaster actually gaped at the other Tinker, then slowly got a very thoughtful look. "Ah. I believe I see where you're going with this."
"It might work."
"It might not. And it would cause a lot of collateral damage."
"In an Endbringer attack, collateral damage is the least of it."
"Very true."
They looked at each other for a few seconds. "I will have to run a large series of simulations."
"Here's the data and designs I've already worked out," Leet replied, handing over a USB memory stick. "Keep the cube. I've got everything I could from it, and there's nothing else I can use it for except a very heavy paperweight."
"Thank you." Armsmaster actually sounded like he meant it. Leet nodded, standing up and leaving the room. The other Tinker stared at the cube of metal in the middle of the table, then picked it up and carefully put it in a carrying case he retrieved from the floor, leaving the rented room in the out of town motel they'd mutually agreed to meet at under the auspices of the Endbringer Truce conditions. Locking the case onto his motorcycle, he mounted it, looking around curiously. There was no sign of the villainous Tinker or his compatriot Über who he'd arrived with and who had been waiting outside for him.
"What do you think?" he said as his machine rumbled back into town.
"I think he's insane, frankly," Dragon's voice said in his helmet. The small image of her face floating in the upper quadrant of his vision looked both confused and intrigued. "But that might be exactly what we really need. The Endbringers are killing our world and so far all we can do is hold them off at terrible cost of life. If this plan can actually seriously damage, or possibly even kill one…?"
"It's a somewhat extreme weapon," Armsmaster commented.
Dragon laughed. "That's an understatement. A nuclear shotgun loaded with degenerate matter flechettes? Extreme doesn't even begin to cover it. But… It would destroy anything else I can think of at close range. Possibly even an Endbringer."
"The Simurgh would be the most appropriate target," he replied thoughtfully. "And she's the next expected Endbringer to attack. Within a matter of weeks at most."
"We'll need to work fast, then. We'll have to have a very good plan in place with everything calculated out perfectly or no one will ever let it be used, even against an Endbringer."
"True. I will also need to contact Raptaur when we have a design, to see if we can persuade her to help. Without her or Saurial, we have nothing except an idea."
"They both seem reasonable and to genuinely want to help," his friend noted. "I suspect they'd agree."
"Hopefully, yes," he muttered, thinking hard, and falling silent as he kept piloting the bike back to the boat to the Rig. He had a lot of work to do.
"We'll also need to keep quiet about it until we have the calculations done, or there will be so much shouting we'll never finish the design," she added, before also going quiet. He nodded absently, still going over numbers in his head. He was starting to get quite excited about the idea.
"How did your day go so far, dear?" Danny asked, looking up from his new computer as Taylor appeared at the door to his office. She smiled at him, coming in and leaning on his desk.
"Very well, actually, Dad," she replied. "I practiced with the darts and the javelins for a couple of hours. I was getting pretty good in the end, but I'll need to do it some more to really learn it as a skill. But I can hit a target about a hundred yards away in an area about six inches across with either of them three out of four times now."
Danny went slightly pale. She smirked a bit. "Oh, it turns out that Raptaur can throw the things at more than the speed of sound as well. It makes a pretty loud crack sound."
He paled further.
"I desperately hope you were aiming out to sea and made sure no one was in the way," he managed to say. She nodded reassuringly.
"We only tried that once, and made sure they didn't last more than a few seconds. I'm pretty sure we didn't impale some poor fisherman. Although one of the wrecked ships has an awful lot of holes in it now." Taylor grinned as he sighed in relief. "It makes a really neat sound when the things hit the ships as well. Like a weird bell."
"How… nice," he sighed. She laughed, pushing herself erect again. "When are you going out to meet your friends for that movie?"
Looking at the clock on his desk, she thought for a moment. "About two hours from now, I think."
"Time for a meal, then, before you go."
She nodded with a smile. "I'd like that. I was thinking about trying another of Varga's recipes, I bought the things I need on the way home."
"Thank you, dear," he smiled back. "And thank you, Varga, for giving her these ideas. So far they're all very good." Danny grinned for a moment. "A cooking demon. Somewhat unusual, none of the legends mention that."
Taylor giggled as the creature attached to her mind said something to her. "He says that for such a noble warrior you have a strange sense of humor," she reported, making Danny chuckle.
"Coming from such an inveterate troll as your friend, I'll take that as a compliment," he retorted.
Laughing, she left the study. "I'll call you when it's ready, Dad," she said as she went out. Smiling to himself, he turned back to his work, adding some more explanation to the section on pollution control measures while referring to a book of legal regulations. It was coming along very well so far.
Taylor watched her father's face as he tried the forkful of food, then smiled at her. "Very nice. Very nice indeed. You should write these down and publish a book of recipes, you must have enough for one by now."
"Not a bad idea," she nodded. "Maybe over the summer or something."
"So, what else did you do other than make lots of holes in old ships?" he asked, happily eating. She joined in the process.
"Well, I bumped into Über and Leet," she grinned, laughing a little as he looked surprised. "Or rather, they bumped into me. I heard their van arrive, they were unloading something made of metal based on the sounds. I think they heard me making holes and came to see what the noise was. They were a little surprised but seemed friendly enough. Leet was really interested in the Vargastuff."
She giggled, then told him what had happened. He looked stunned at the outcome of the Tinker's investigations.
"That's… more than a little remarkable," he said when she finished. "Although it certainly explains why I couldn't work out what the hell that stuff was."
"Do you think he's right?"
"Probably. His reputation isn't very good for obvious reasons, but to be honest I think the guy is actually very smart and knows his stuff. He's just got the Tinker equivalent of a disability somehow." He shrugged a little. "I kind of feel sorry for the guy, it obviously bothers him a lot. Some of the stuff I know he'd designed is amazing even in Tinker terms. I suspect that if he could do it more reliably he'd be a hero and not a rather lackadaisical villain. It's not like either he or Über really commit serious crimes. Between them they could do a lot worse if they wanted to. They're just sort of… irresponsible, not actually evil."
"They seemed nice enough when we talked," she said, smiling at the memory. "Nervous, or at least Leet was, until he really got interested in the Vargastuff, but at that point he sort of forgot about me and just poked it for a while. I gave him a little piece of it to play with when he promised he wouldn't do anything bad with it."
"Was that a good idea?" her father asked, looking somewhat worried.
"It's not like he can really do much with it," she shrugged. "Varga is pretty sure that nothing we have, or even a Tinker has, can touch it. They might be able to break it, possibly, but he says it's extremely unlikely that anyone other than another of his kind could actually use it for more than a weight. But he seemed interested and I kind of like him. It was only a small cube of the stuff, not a blade or anything dangerous."
"All right, dear, I suppose Varga would know if anyone would, but be careful who you give unbreakable things to, please."
"I was going to suggest that I could supply the DWU with some Vargastuff tools, things like that, but if you think it's too dangerous..." she snickered. He looked surprised, then thoughtful.
"That… could be very useful. If you can make them hollow so they're actually light enough for mere humans to actually pick up in the first place," he suggested. Nodding, she held out her hand, on which a collapsible baton appeared.
"Like this?" She watched as he picked it up, inspecting it closely. "I saw some in a shop today and had a good look at how they worked. We figured out how to copy them. That one is very thin material so it should only be a little heavier than the steel one but I don't think you can break it."
"Interesting," he mumbled, turning it over in his hands, then extending it with a surprisingly practiced flip of his wrist. He grinned at her expression. "I told you it's not my first time around the block, dear."
"You have a backstory I don't know," she laughed.
"Oh, definitely. I'll tell you one day," he promised, tapping the baton on the table, then trying, totally unsuccessfully, to bend it. "This is very good. Will it last?"
"That one is permanent. An early birthday present."
"Thank you, Taylor," he smiled. "Yes, if you can make various tools like this, it would help enormously. Nothing that needs to be used around hot things, this stuff conducts heat far too well to make that safe, but I can think of all sorts of other things where being basically unbreakable would be really useful. Hammers, saws, that sort of thing."
"Make a list and we can go over it when I get back," she suggested. He nodded, playing with the baton for a moment, then collapsing it again and putting it on the table.
"So other than breaking a poor Tinker, what else did you get up to today?"
"I helped a delivery driver who got stuck in one of those horrible potholes on Arcade Avenue, the front of his truck had almost disappeared into it the thing was so big," she laughed, only slightly exaggerating. "He seemed pleased. Then I bought a nice GPS unit that's meant for sailors with maps of all of North America on it and about three days battery life. That should come in handy for exploring."
"Do you have any idea where you're heading?" he asked curiously.
"I was thinking possibly as far as Canada," she replied idly. He nearly choked on his meal.
"Canada!? That's about two hundred miles by sea." She nodded contentedly. "How fast can you swim underwater for god's sake?"
"We're not sure, that's one of the things we want to find out, but based on the other day and last night, sixty, seventy miles an hour or so?" She shrugged slightly as he gaped. "Maybe faster if I get really big. It shouldn't take more than two or three hours to get to the end of Nova Scotia, and I know there's all sorts of completely deserted areas up there that got washed away when Leviathan sank Newfoundland. Hardly anyone lives there now, especially along the Atlantic coast."
Recovering, he listened, then slowly nodded. "It seems, aside from the ridiculousness of the entire concept, a fairly sound plan. You're right, Nova Scotia was badly affected by the Newfoundland Tsunami, although it did protect us down here by deflecting the worst of it out into the ocean. PEI more or less got washed clean but then it was pretty much only an overgrown sandbank in the first place. A lot of New Brunswick was hit as well along the coast. OK, I can see it."
"I'll leave tonight, after the movie, swim up, play around for a while when I find a good deserted area, then come back. I'm not in any real hurry so I might not come home until sometime in the afternoon or early evening. Is that OK?"
She watched his face as he looked mildly uncertain, then shrugged. "Any normal teenaged girl wanting to stay out all night would get a long talk, but if anyone can look after themselves, it's you. Or both of you together, I guess." He grinned as she laughed a little. "Try not to freak out the Canadians. Or our people. We still have a Navy even if it's only a small fraction of the size it used to be."
"I'll go deep, don't worry. I'll probably head out over the continental shelf then up along it as deep as I can go. I could go all the way out past it and go really far down but that would double or triple the distance. It stretches out a long way around here, hundred of miles."
"You've been researching it, clearly," he chuckled.
"Hey, I'm a sea creature in some ways, I need to know these things," she replied, grinning, which made him laugh again.
"Try not to bump into Leviathan while you're swimming around out there," he advised. She got a thoughtful look, which made him sigh. "I mean it. No Endbringers."
"Oh, OK," she sighed. "Varga is curious to see one. But you're probably right."
"With any luck you'll never see any of them," he said firmly. "Which is all to the good. We have enough problems around here without bringing an Endbringer into it."
Laughing, she went back to eating.
"Oh, while I think about it," he added a minute or so later, causing her to look up. "I drew up a short plan for how you could move the tanker with minimum damage to anything else, and hopefully minimum fuss. If you could look it over that would help, as would suggesting any changes?"
"Sure, no problem."
"All right, let me get it." He got up and left the kitchen, coming back shortly with a couple of printed pages stapled together, which he handed to her, then sat again. Eating with one hand, she read the document and flipped the page with the other.
"Why so slowly?" she asked curiously, pointing at one paragraph. "I think I can push or pull it a lot faster than that. It will take hours at this rate."
"I'm sure you probably can, but don't forget, there are several issues in play. One of them is that the thing will have a considerably larger mass than just the dry weight of the hull, a lot of it is flooded and you'll be towing all that water as well. Some of it will drain as you float it off the rocks, but not all of it. A rough estimate suggests you'll be moving over two hundred thousand tons at least."
"OK," she nodded, thinking it over. It sounded sensible.
"Another problem is that if you go hauling ass all over the bay, you'll wash half the docks away. That thing is huge. Moving it too fast will cause some very large waves which would cause chaos. You'll have to go slow to keep that to a minimum. The PRT, for example, will get very irritated if you manage to make the Rig tip over with your wake." He snickered as she smirked a little. "And no, I don't want you doing that on purpose."
"I'll be good," she promised.
"There's also the matter that you have to stop it when you get to the destination," he added. "The faster it's going the less control you'll have over the whole process. Take it slow and easy and it will be much safer for everyone."
"I see," she nodded, looking over the plan again. "Varga agrees, actually. We still think that making floats around the sides of the hull to lift it near high tide would be the best approach, then pull it. It'll take some effort to get it started but if we time it right the tide coming in will help once we get it unstuck. Looking at this I think you're right, it would take about six hours. The tide will be going out by then, though, so either I'll have to wait until it comes back in, or do it a little faster so I can get it into the deep water near the docks first."
"There's supposed to be a deep channel all the way out to the reef," he frowned.
"Half of it is silted up now," she told him. "I noticed when I was swimming around that first time. I think the currents were changed by the tanker, there's a spot about two thirds of the way between the entrance to the bay and the docks where the mud is really deep and looks newer than the rest of it." Looking thoughtfully at him, she added, "I suppose it would make sense to clear that out of the way first. That would make things a lot easier."
"Can you do that?"
"Sure, it shouldn't be too hard. I might have a go at it when I come back. I think the tide will be going out around midnight on Sunday, so if I start digging it up, it should wash away. Mostly, at least."
Her father thought about the suggestion for a moment. "I suppose there's no harm in it. Try not to be seen, though, we don't need any more sea monster stories on PHO right now. There will be enough of them later on."
Snickering, she nodded. "It's still quite deep there so I should be fine. The Rig is several miles away, there aren't a lot of ships around at that time of night anyway, so with a little effort I should be able to be discreet about it."
"All right, that sounds worth trying."
"You seem pretty sure the Mayor will approve the plan, Dad," she smiled, finishing her dinner.
"The closer I get to the final document the more certain I am, dear," he replied with satisfaction. "The numbers add up very well, there's a clear argument in favor of doing it and almost no real downside. Even if you only moved the tanker and cleared the channel, we could still do it and make a large profit, it would just take several times as long. That damn ship is the single most important obstacle and the most difficult to deal with. I expect he'll see it as well, he's an intelligent man."
Her father frowned slightly as she nodded with a smile. "However, I also think he'll want proof before he agrees, no matter how good the proposal is. Are you OK with meeting him?"
"As me, Saurial, Raptaur, or Kaiju?" she asked with a smirk.
"Probably the last one," he chuckled, "It would make the biggest impression."
"And footprints. I don't mind. Where, though? If we do it anywhere in the bay everyone in the city will find out almost instantly, I think," she frowned.
They looked at each other. Eventually, her father got up and went into the living room, coming back with an atlas, which he opened on the table, flipping through it to a map of the upper US East coast. "OK, we're here. Hmm. Somewhere close, or at least closer than Canada, that an eighty foot tall sea monster can meet the Mayor of Brockton Bay without drawing too much attention." He grinned as she giggled. "How about… right here?" He pointed to a spot on the map. She craned her neck to see, then nodded a little. "It's about an hour away by car, but a lot less by water, North up the coast a ways. It looks like there's fairly deep water in this small bay with cliffs around it and hardly any houses anywhere around."
"Isn't that a lighthouse there?" she asked, indicating a place very close to where his finger was. He looked closely, then nodded. "That should make it easy to find. OK, I can do that. Let me know when."
"Hopefully quite soon," he replied, closing the book. Looking at his watch, he said, "You're going to have to go soon if you want to meet your friends."
"Yes, you're right," she agreed, glancing at the timepiece.
"Don't worry about the dishes, I'll do them. Thank you for dinner," he smiled.
"It was fun. I'll call before I leave tonight, and when I get back. I'll have my phone off the rest of the time, though, I don't want it tracked all the way up to Canada and back. That might cause some funny looks."
"You can leave the Raptaur one on, I'd think, it's only going to connect when you're above the surface and half the people on PHO already think you live in the Bay in the first place," he laughed.
"True. OK, I'll do that." Standing up, she stretched a little, then hugged him. "See you later."
"Take care of yourself and try not to start any legends of the deep," he smiled down at her, returning the hug.
"I can't make that promise," she giggled, before heading up to her room to brush her hair. Soon she was tearing down the street as Raptaur, cloaked and moving at nearly fifty miles an hour, heading towards her friends and a silly movie.