Zipping through the deep in a cocoon of air, Taylor felt happy and relaxed. Even being a two hundred foot sea monster that was currently mostly tail seemed normal these days and she was enjoying the whole experience more than she'd expected. Her first solo, more or less, road trip was certainly different than the sort of thing she'd expected to encounter one day, she thought with amusement, but it had its own rewards. The Varga seemed pleased as well, she could feel him at the back of her mind just watching and experiencing everything she was, while radiating a sensation of comfortable assurance and competence.

That whole experience that had ended up with her in the locker might have been the worst thing that ever happened to her, but the rewards were incalculable, she had decided. She still thought that the three girls were appalling examples of humanity, and had no intention of ever forgetting or forgiving what they did, but she was, oddly enough, almost grateful at this point for the experience itself in a weird way. That said if she met any of them again she was going to at the very least glare disapprovingly at them.

Idly wondering who those people at the island had been, and feeling guilty about the way she and the Varga had managed to destroy their base, she kept swimming. Her companion had further tweaked the form they were using and improved the speed even more, she thought they were probably doing something like three hundred miles an hour or so, which sounded totally insane on the face of it. Wondering how much wake they'd produce if they were near the surface she was more than slightly tempted to find out, but thought it was probably a little too much. They'd felt the vibrations of a number of ships both on the trip out and this one back, so there was always the possibility of either worrying someone on the surface, or actually damaging something, neither one of which she wanted to do.

One thing she'd noticed as they swam was that she had no trouble keeping to a course, instead of wandering around aimlessly. The Varga had explained that her electrical vision was linked to an ability to sense magnetic fields more accurately than most creatures, although it was a common ability both on his world and hers, so she basically had a built in compass that was guiding her. When she consciously considered the matter she'd found she could indeed work out the direction they were heading in to a high degree of accuracy.

She also had a pretty good idea of where home was, knowing it was off to the right, or west, somewhere, at a considerable distance still. She was currently heading out towards the middle of the Atlantic, wanting to throw off anyone who might somehow be following them, such as whoever had arrived in the aircraft they'd spotted. They'd left the sunken remains of Newfoundland behind them a few minutes ago, passing over much shallower places and weaving in and out of undersea ridges that in some cases still bore traces of man-made structures, neither of them wanting to stay in an area that had seen so much death. She was fairly sure she could taste it in the water, a concept that made her feel a little ill.

Even at their current depth there was just enough light that the extraordinary Varga sight could navigate fairly easily, much of it not in the wavelengths that humans used. Every now and they they passed some form or other of bioluminescent creature, some of which lit up quite brightly in the shockwave of their passage. Others simply fell apart, something that she felt a little guilty about, but couldn't think of a way to avoid.

Fish and larger creatures at least seemed to have the wit to get out of the way and the ability to sense her coming in time, which interested her. 'I wonder how they know we're coming?' she asked her companion.

"If they're anything like the equivalents on my original world they can sense both the vibrations in the water and very small electrical currents over a large area," he remarked thoughtfully. "Much like we can. That probably gives enough warning to move. I expect their brains are very well programmed to avoid predators and we register as the biggest predator they've ever seen."

Taylor snickered a little. 'That's for sure. We could snack on whales even at this size. Never mind if we scaled it up to the maximum, we'd be about seven or eight hundred feet long. Talk about sea monsters, I never thought I'd end up as one.'

He laughed slightly. "You have given me more scope for experimentation than I could ever have hoped for, to be honest. None of my previous Brains ever considered anything at all like this, even to the lesser limit it was possible. You are very flexible and practical."

'I'm nearly flexible enough at the moment to tie myself in a knot,' she joked, getting another laugh back. 'Hey, here's a thought for you to work on. Can we pull off that bioluminescence thing that all these jellyfish and the like can do? It would be useful if we go really deep, even in the middle of the day to our eyes, the bottom of the ocean a couple of miles deep is going to be completely dark.'

"Interesting thought," he mused. "It should be possible, the chemical reaction involved is simple enough, from what I understand." After a moment, he added, "The next one you see, grab it, and we'll analyze it to see if I understand it properly."

'How the hell to I go about doing that?' she asked.

"Just swallow the thing. You don't even need to slow down. I'll do the rest."

'Oh. OK, that's easy enough.' Slightly surprised, she kept an eye open, soon seeing a glimmer in the dark ahead of them. Opening her enormous mouth she allowed the glowing pinprick to enter then slammed it shut quickly so it wouldn't wash away, before swallowing. 'Like that?'

"That will do it," he replied, satisfied. "Let's see..." There was silence for a while. "Yes, it's a simple chemical reaction involving oxidation of an organic chemical series. Very elegant, actually. It should be fairly simple to copy."

He fiddled with their body for a few minutes, before sounding smug. "Got it. What color do you want?"

'Try blue, it should go further under water.'

Taylor felt something on her head change, then there was a distinct blue glow surrounding her head, surprisingly brightly. 'Headlights, literally,' she giggled.

"I can make it quite bright, but this should be enough for our purposes. Unless you want navigation lights as well?" He sounded amused. "I believe red is port and green is starboard."

'This is fine, thanks," she laughed, picturing the effect. 'Let's save the special effects for some other time.'

Playing with the light emitting organ that he'd made in the middle of her streamlined forehead between her eyes, she found she could turn it on and off with an internal effort. Switching it off for the moment after she'd gotten used to it, she began to curve around to aim due south, intending to continue until they were more or less level with Boston, then head towards land, before slowing and sneaking up on Brockton Bay. Hopefully that would throw off anyone trying to track them.

The water was becoming slowly but surely deeper as she followed the bottom, and she could sense that it dropped off fast some distance away, presumably at the edge of the continental shelf. Satisfied she was heading in the right direction, she straightened up again and kept going.

"The SOSUS data shows the bogey shifted course to dead south, and is going deeper," Dragon reported as her transport aircraft shot through the air, rapidly gaining on the mystery object. "It went right over one of the hydrophones, I got a good acoustic signature from it. It's very weird, no mechanical sounds at all, but it's definitely some sort of supercavitating hydrodynamic drive. Extremely efficient, I think, the data shows minimal skin friction and wake. There's nothing like it on record anywhere."

"The course indicates it's heading for the Laurentian Fan, the closest edge of the continental shelf. If it goes past that point the water depth increases to over eight thousand feet very fast. How deep will your probe go?" Armsmaster was watching the data she was sending him and checking various charts on another monitor.

"Not that deep, definitely," she admitted. "It's good to about three thousand feet before the hull implodes. I haven't had time to build a really serious pressure hull, although I'm upgrading the last two drones to an increased specification now based on the last couple of hours. Originally they were only intended for around Brockton Bay, a two thousand foot safety margin was overkill, I thought."

"I agree, I'm not criticizing your design, merely noting a possible issue," he replied mildly, making her smile at him.

"I know. Don't worry." She checked the range to the object. "I'm going to go ahead of it a few miles and deploy the probe, it's nowhere near fast enough to catch up. At best we'll get a glimpse of it as it goes past assuming it doesn't change course. With any luck we can identify it."

"All right, that sounds good."

"Two minutes to deployment, then you have three minutes to dive to one thousand and eighteen feet, the predicted depth if it maintains the current dive profile, at these coordinates." She send him the relevant data. "Get ready, or we'll have to do it all over again."

He nodded, waiting.

"Ten seconds," she announced at the relevant time. "Five... Four… Three… Two… One..." The probe dropped as she slowed hard, then hovered. More faint swearing came from her prisoners in the back, which she was slightly ashamed to note gave her a good feeling. She really didn't like Saint and his friends one little bit.

"Drone online, diving to the coordinates you gave me," Colin remarked absently, fiddling with the control panel in front of him. "Four hundred feet and going down… Five hundred..." He kept going. "One thousand and eighteen feet, cameras and lights aimed at the predicted location of the object."

"One minute to contact."

Dragon kept watching the data. The oncoming mystery object didn't slow down, heading right for the probe.

'What's that?' Taylor wondered, hearing something make a whining sound some distance in front of them. 'It sounds like a machine. Like little propellers.'

There was a faint glow coming from the same location, as something sank to their depth.

"I'm not certain, but I think you're right. I believe someone is looking for us."

'What should we do?' she wondered, worried. 'I don't want them following us home. For all I know they're villains.'

"Don't deviate yet, we don't want them to know we detected them, I think," the Varga replied thoughtfully. "They're still a couple of miles away. I'm interested how they tracked us with such precision, that thing is exactly in the way, which implies they're predicting our path."

'How could anyone do that?' she asked. A moment later, she realized the answer, mentally slapping herself. 'Sound. Sound carries for a hell of a long way underwater and I'll bet we sound totally different than anything else in the sea.'

"Most likely," he agreed with a sigh. "Annoying. That makes this high speed travel less practical than I'd like, if someone can follow our track that accurately."

Taylor had a sudden brainwave. 'What about the assassin's cloak technique? That blocks sound as well, doesn't it? Can we use that?'

"Aha. That's an idea, certainly. It will need some tweaking, it wasn't designed for this sort of thing, but… Let me think for a moment."

He fell silent while she kept swimming. "All right," he said a few seconds later. "Let's see what this does. If nothing else it should confuse their machinery even if it doesn't block everything."

She felt the familiar sensation of the magic surround her, subtly different from the one she was used to. "It's active, let's see what their reaction is. Turn slightly to pass them on the other side, I suspect they're waiting to see us go by, so we might be able to come in behind them, and slow down so we can get a good look."

'OK.' She adjusted her course slightly, watching the distant glow rapidly approach, now going to pass them on the left rather than the right.

"What the hell?" Dragon couldn't help the exclamation. "It's gone?!"

"Gone? How?" Colin snapped, looking at the instruments closely.

"I have no idea, but it's dropped off the SOSUS network completely, all at once. It didn't slow down, it just vanished."

"That's impossible," he replied, still tweaking the instruments on his copy of her controls. "It must be masking the acoustic signature somehow."

"Yes, but how?" She was very puzzled. "Assuming that it hasn't changed course or speed, it should pass us in about fifteen seconds..." They waited. Nothing happened.

"Damn. It must have veered off."

A sudden pressure wave made the probe spin wildly, and Armsmaster swear. "What was that?" he yelped, bringing the machine back under control.

"A wake, I think," she frowned, checking the data. "Yes, it was a pressure spike consistent with something passing the probe about a hundred feet away at approximately a hundred and twenty miles an hour. That damn thing snuck up on us, it saw us coming and went dark. I'll bet it got a good view of the probe as well, it came in from behind." She was equal parts admiring the opponent and frustrated at their competence. "I think I can get enough data to track them at close range, but the SOSUS data is now useless. The displaced water is a clue to the location but only at fairly close range."

Seconds later the probe spun again, giving another block of data points. "It's definitely looking at us, that one came in from the opposite direction."

"This is extremely irritating," Colin growled. "I can't see anything on the camera and the sonar isn't doing very much either."

"No, it's evading both of them somehow. I wish I knew how," she grumbled. A third pressure wave came and went, then everything damped out. "OK. I think it's resumed more or less the original course and speed, based on those waves and the sonar data reflecting from them. I can only track it for about a quarter of a mile using that method, though. As far as I can see it's going more east now by a few degrees, but mostly still south. I think it's trying to throw us off."

"Can we intercept it again?" he asked.

Dragon sighed. "It's worth a try, but it's at least half guesswork. Let's see if we get lucky. Bring the probe up and I'll retrieve it."

He headed the machine to the surface, where she hovered ready to collect it.

'What do you think that thing was?' Taylor asked. They'd circled it a couple of times, gone in for a closer result, which seemed to irritate the device as it spun around emitting loud sonar chirps, then resumed the trek home. She veered out to sea a little to prevent whoever was behind the thing simply dropping it in their path again. 'Some sort of little robot submarine, it looked like.'

"I'm unfamiliar with such machines but it looked much too small to contain a person," the Varga mused. "So a remotely operated device seems likely, unless it contains some form of machine intelligence. I recall your world is aware of such things although none of your research has shown anything currently existing at a very high level."

'People are scared of intelligent machines, or AI,' Taylor agreed. 'I think it's fear of the unknown again. Intelligence that isn't human seems to upset people. I don't know why, personally.'

"Of course you don't, you meet that description yourself for most purposes," the Varga snickered, making her smile. "As do I."

'I guess so although I never thought about it like that,' she laughed. 'Anyway, with any luck we've lost them. I wonder who it was, though? Someone went to a lot of trouble to track us then drop that thing in the way.'

"I have no idea," he told her.

'What do we do if they manage to do it again?' Taylor sighed a little at the thought. 'I don't want to spend hours playing cat and mouse with tiny submarines.'

"Don't bother, just eat the thing and be done with it," the demon advised, sounding amused. "A little metal in your diet is good for the digestion."

Laughing, she swam on.

"OK," Dragon announced, hovering over a new set of coordinates, "This is my best effort at predicting the position of whatever the hell that thing really is. There's about a sixty-eight percent chance it will pass within a couple of hundred feet of this point, at about twelve hundred feet down. That's the best I can do."

"It's worth a try, certainly," her friend replied, checking the controls. "I'm ready."

"Deploying probe," she said, dropping the machine into the water. He aimed it down and started the engines. A few minutes later they were at the correct depth, in water nearly twice that deep, hovering in the dark. "Keep the lights and sonar off, that might be what let it detect us," she suggested. "There was no detectable active sonar from it. It might be running on passive sonar and visible light, or just have someone looking out a window."

"A window in a pressure hull at this depth?" he retorted, making her smile, but he turned out the lights anyway.

They waited.

'I don't believe it,' Taylor muttered, as they heard the same little machine come to a halt in front of them, surprisingly close to their path, then after a moment, go quiet and dark. 'Either they can still track us somehow or they're really fucking lucky.'

"Probably a mixture, Brain," the Varga sighed.

'Eat it?'

"Eat it."

Diving, she slowed right down, then approached from only just over the sea bed, until she was directly under the machine, before aiming up and opening her mouth, then accelerating again. As an afterthought she had the Varga turn off the modified cloak. If someone was actually watching, she wanted them to see what following her around got them. As she approached, an idea struck her and she illuminated her 'headlight', snickering internally at what this probably looked like to an outside observer.

"Oh, crap," Dragon mumbled, somehow not as shocked as she expected. "We found it, or more likely, it found us. There's a pressure wave approaching from directly under the probe."

Armsmaster quickly swiveled the device in the water to point the camera straight down. A blue glow was rising towards them. He waited, then turned the lights on, before recoiling from the screen with an involuntary exclamation of horror.

They had just enough time to see a streamlined head the size of a garbage truck, gaping jaws lined with hundreds of razor sharp teeth, before the probe was engulfed. A squeal of distressed metal came from the audio feed from the machine for half a second then the signal went dead.

Both of them sat in silence for a long few seconds, before they exchanged a glance via the monitor and camera sitting in a lab hundreds of miles away. Colin was pale.

"Colin?"

"Yes, Dragon?"

"You remember your first successful joke?"

"Yes, Dragon."

"It's not a joke if it's actually a statement of truth. I think you should know that."

"Yes, Dragon." He was still pale. "Did you notice the eyes?"

"I did. They looked horribly familiar."

"How many of those things are out there, and for god's sake how big do they get?" he muttered in shock. "And, for the love of all that's holy, where did they come from and what do they want?"

"I have no idea, but I suggest that being polite to Saurial and Raptaur is a very good idea. We don't want their Endbringer-eating relatives coming looking for them."

"No, Dragon, I don't think we do."

Both of them fell silent again. Even she was shocked and stunned by what they'd seen. It seemed impossible but she had the recordings to show it really happened.

"I'm coming to the Rig, we need to work out what to do about this," she finally decided. "I'll arrange to have Narwhal and some Guild personnel come and collect Saint and his friends and take them back for incarceration until their trial."

"You're welcome, of course, as always," he replied, finally looking away from the monitor that had been connected to the submersible drone. Without looking he poked the control that made it go black. "I'm going to get a little more sleep until you arrive. I don't think I can do any more work for the moment, until I manage to get over what we just saw." She could see he was trembling a little.

To be honest, if she wasn't an AI, she'd be doing the same thing.

"OK. ETA is about forty minutes."

"I'll be waiting," he assured her, then got up and left his lab, looking somewhat stunned even now. She scanned the water surrounding the drop zone for a moment, not sure what she was looking for, then climbed and set a course for Brockton Bay.

'Yuck. It tastes horrible,' Taylor complained, running her tongue around her teeth and picking out little bits of metal and plastic, then spitting them out. She was swimming again, heading back towards the coast. They'd be back on land by sunrise at this rate.

"I doubt it was built for taste," the Varga joked. Laughing, she was forced to agree. They cleared the edge of the continental shelf and she headed down, mainly out of curiosity, turning on her light when she could no longer see anything. Eventually they found the bottom again, which was surprisingly full of life. Slowing so she didn't leave enough wake to tear the bottom up she cruised along, marveling at the fact that she was swimming effortlessly in an area only a handful of people had ever visited, and none of them outside machines.

'I wish I had a camera, Dad would love to see this,' she sighed, passing over some sort of deep sea coral which in her light glowed in several pastel colors. 'Maybe we can find something that can survive this pressure, or make a case for one or something.'

"It's worth some experimentation at some point," the demon replied, also interested in the sights. They spent a little while poking around, even finding a small wrecked ship at one point that looked like it was probably about three hundred years old, remarkably well preserved in the nearly freezing water, before heading back to the shallows and home.

"Hey, Colin," Ethan called as he walked toward the master Tinker, who was heading in the direction of his quarters with an oddly blank expression on his face. The other Hero looked at him without responding.

"'Hello, Assault,' you're supposed to say at this point," he added, grinning. "Or possibly, 'Hi, Ethan.' I'd even accept 'Hey, idiot.' Quite a few people seem to like that one."

Colin merely stared at him, then kept walking. Confused, as he was normally able to at least provoke some sort of reaction out of his colleague, Ethan shrugged and resumed walking towards the canteen and a very early breakfast, or possibly a very late dinner. He was OK either way.

"Ethan?" He looked over his shoulder.

"Yes?"

"Don't go swimming." With that cryptic comment Armsmaster went on his way. Assault stared after him with raised eyebrows for some seconds, then shrugged again and kept walking.

"Must have taken too many stimulants again," he sighed, shaking his head. "He's going to drive himself around the bend doing that, and he's already half-way there."

The smell of fresh bread coming from up ahead drove the thought from his mind and he walked faster.

Danny looked up from his first cup of coffee at the sound of the door opening, smiling at Taylor as she came in and took off her coat, which evaporated into nothingness as soon as she did. He grinned at the effect which he knew she pulled off merely because she could. His daughter smiled back.

"Good trip?" he asked curiously. "You're back earlier than I expected. Did you actually make it to Nova Scotia?" He got up and headed into the kitchen to start breakfast, taking his coffee with him and heading her follow.

"We didn't bother in the end," she laughed.

"Too far?" he asked, glancing at her as he rooted around in the fridge for the ingredients for some omelets.

"Too close. We missed." She giggled as he stared. "Varga came up with this weird method of speeding the swimming up. It turned out to work almost too well."

"How fast did you manage to go?" he asked, carrying a carton of eggs and a bottle of milk towards the counter.

"We worked it out as about three hundred miles an hour," she snickered, then deftly caught both bottle and carton as he dropped them.

"Three…?"

"Hundred miles an hour. Yes. It surprised us as well." He stared in total shock. "It involves using a thin bubble of air around my body. It seems to reduce the drag by some huge amount," she explained.

"Supercavitation," he mumbled. "Incredible."

"Is that what it's called?" she asked, looking interested while she put the things she was holding down.

"Yes. There were some experiments going right back to before the second world war, I think, things like underwater rockets and super fast torpedoes. The Soviets had a supercavitating torpedo in the sixties and seventies as far as I remember. Much, much faster than anything anyone else had. Very noisy, though, submarines could hear it coming for miles, but it was so fast they couldn't get out of the way in time."

"Yes, we found out about the noise thing," she sighed. Sitting down she watched as he prepared breakfast, then when he finished and served them both, began relating the story of the Great Canadian Trip, which left him speechless at several points.

One of those was when she mentioned that she could, in theory, make a Hammer of Mass Destruction, which caused him to pale. Another one was when the true scope of the Vargas' so called Blast Voice was laid bare.

"An entire island?" he croaked.

"It was only a little one the first time," she told him, looking slightly guilty.

"The… first time?" he queried slowly. "How many islands did you blow away?"

"…Maybe a dozen?" He stared. "Or it might have been fourteen. Or fifteen."

"Oh, for god's sake, Taylor," he sighed, massaging his forehead. "At least in that area there was no one to see you."

"Um."

"Shit."

"About that..." She smiled at him in the same way she did when she was six and accidentally nearly burned the house down. "I think everyone was safe. But they were sort of pissed."

By the time she had finally stopped talking, nearly an hour later, he was shaking his head. "You, my dear, are a natural disaster just waiting to happen to someone. You actually ate a robot submarine?"

His daughter nodded with a smile, holding up a small piece of twisted metal he stared at. "All that was left was little bits like that. I swallowed most of it, it took a while to digest before I could change back, but it doesn't seem to be a problem. Varga says roughage is important in a growing girl's diet."

Danny sighed heavily, accepting the little bit of scrap titanium and staring at it. "I don't know whether to be proud, angry, or just amused."

"Try all three," she giggled. Shaking his head, he just grinned. "I'm going to take a nap, I've been swimming all night," she added. "We covered about two thousand miles in seven hours, which must be some sort of record. I think I deserve a few hours in bed."

"Yes, I suspect you do, dear," he laughed. "I'll see you later."

"See you, Dad," she smiled, rising and heading upstairs. He could hear faint snores within five minutes.

Holding the metal scrap up again and inspecting it, he shook his head. "My daughter and her demon friend," he mumbled. "The world isn't ready for either of them."

After a moment he put the fragment in his pocket, poured himself a new cup of coffee, and went off to watch the morning news.