"I'll see you guys tomorrow," Taylor said to Mandy and the others as they gathered outside the school, sheltering from the rain that had started coming down an hour earlier. "Let's make an early appointment this time for Friday, OK?"
"Sounds good to me, Taylor," Rich said. He looked over to where Chris and Dennis were standing, talking to each other. "Hey, Chris, you coming to Taylor's on Friday?"
The younger boy turned around, looking a little surprised, but after a moment nodded. "If I'm allowed to I'd like that, thanks," he replied.
"Of course you are, Chris," Taylor smiled. "I hope the abacus is helping?"
"More than I'd have believed, actually," he grinned. "My special class was amazed, and now the teacher is looking into the idea for several other people. You may get asked about it."
"That's fine," she said with a nod, feeling satisfied. "I'm really glad it worked so well. See you later, then."
"Have fun, human friends," 'Saurial' said with a smirk, making Lucy giggle. The girl was very pleased that the lizard-girl had been wandering around intermittently during the day. Taylor had to dismiss the other aspect whenever it wasn't needed, but it was easy enough to make it look like her second personality was lurking somewhere just in case she was needed. So far, things were working out well. The PRT troopers had parked their truck behind the sports hall and draped a huge tarp over it so it wasn't obvious, and a couple of them randomly and discreetly patrolled the grounds, one of the five-man school security team accompanying them as per the plan that their boss Ed had worked out with Lieutenant Pratchett that morning.
Neither Taylor nor the Varga thought it wildly likely that Sophia would either turn up in the near future, or attack her at school, but the girl was definitely something of a random element and prone to anger-induced lack of critical thinking. As a result they couldn't rule it out entirely, so these precautions, while annoying, were probably for the best.
Plus it let her play a little, and the Varga too, by allowing her second aspect to meet other people. It was a little weird how quickly everyone seemed to have become used to the scaly cape, but by now most people merely greeted her politely as if she was a slightly odd mix between a staff member and a student. All in all it was working well.
"Come on, both of you, I don't want to stand around in the rain and get soaked," Amy put in slightly impatiently, spinning her car keys around one finger. They all waved to their friends and ran for the car park, Amy hitting the unlock button on the way, and were shortly inside the vehicle. Handing Amy a towel she produced, Taylor used another one to quickly wipe her face and hair free of water. Both towels vanished moments later, leaving the water behind, where it promptly fell onto their laps.
"Oops," Taylor said, as her friend gave her a dark look. "Didn't think that one through."
"Try again, you menace to normal people," Amy sighed, holding out her hand. This time, when the towels were disposed of, she tossed them out the window.
In the back seat, the Varga was snickering to himself, highly amused once again. "I've enjoyed today very much, Brain," he said, letting his 'Saurial' mannerisms lapse now they were alone. Amy started the truck and reversed out of the parking space, then headed for the street. "Thank you for allowing me to do most of the work with this aspect. It was very entertaining."
"You're welcome," Taylor smiled as she leaned back in the seat, wriggling a little to get her tail comfortably situated into the hole in it. "I thought things went very well too. It was interesting finding out how seriously the PRT took the investigation into Sophia."
"What actually happened at that meeting?" Amy asked curiously as she turned right and accelerated.
"It was a pretty comprehensive briefing, in fact," Taylor explained. "Director Piggot herself, along with Miss Militia, and that Lieutenant Pratchett guy who came to the office, were all there..." She spent the rest of the trip to the DWU yard going over what had been discussed and decided.
When they pulled up at the gate, all three of them stared at the sight they could see past the fence, then exchanged glances.
"Looks like Linda got it finished," Amy said in bemused tones. Both the others nodded silently, impressed.
"I think I want a go," Taylor said when the barrier closed behind them, as she watched the action. A grin was spreading across her face.
"Kevin is going to gape, then laugh, you realize?" the Varga commented, also watching. "And I would also like to try."
"Based on the crowd, everyone wants a go," Amy giggled. "We'll have to be patient."
"Quick, park the truck so we can get in line!" Taylor called, bouncing in her seat.
"What part of 'patient' are you having trouble with, you weirdo?" her friend snarked, but she was definitely driving faster than normal towards the office.
Taylor merely grinned, her head swiveling to keep Linda's device in view.
Brian wiped his face, then glared at Alec, who was smirking at him in the irritating way he seemed to have picked up from Lisa. "Was that entirely necessary?" he asked with a frown. "Right in the face?"
"You have a very shootable face, Brian," his friend told him earnestly. Mark, who was watching with a smirk of his own, standing next to Zephron and the PRT guy, Sergeant Foxton, snorted with laughter.
"I thought the funniest thing was how he tripped you, then foamed you on the way down," the DWU security head snickered. "Two legs sticking straight up out of a pile of containment foam isn't the sort of thing you see every day."
"I think you pass the training course, Alec," Sergeant Foxton added, smiling a little as well, although he was clearly trying to remain professional. "Very good shot, and good tactics too. That would take out an opponent with minimal foam usage and disorient them into the bargain."
"Don't encourage him!" Brian snapped, still cleaning dissolved foam from his face and hair. "Shit, this stuff is nasty when it's all sticky like this. Like bathing in molasses, only it tastes a lot worse."
"You get used to it," the sergeant shrugged.
"Pardon me if I say, quite honestly and loudly, that I do not want to get used to it," the young man grimaced. "And stop sniggering like that, Alec, you're worse than Lisa and Saurial put together."
"Can't help it," the smaller boy shrugged, still smirking. "Every time you speak all I can hear is that muffled swearing..."
Zephron started chuckling, slapped Brian on the back, and said, "He'll find someone else to grin at soon enough."
"True, I guess," Brian sighed. "Is that it? We've all been foamed, tased, which stings like a bastard by the way, and checked out with the equipment. I need a shower."
"We all do," Mark agreed, which was true enough. Every person in the room aside from the PRT troopers were covered, wholly or in part, in foam residue, and the floor had patches of it all over the place. He turned to Foxton. "I think that's probably a job well done, wouldn't you say, Keith?" Both men had ended up on first name terms quite fast once they began torturing the DWU security people, mostly smiling as they did so in a slightly sadistic manner.
"I'd agree with that," the other man nodded. "Your people are quick and competent. I'm impressed. I doubt you'll have any problems with passing on the training to anyone else you need to. Hopefully you won't need the stuff, but if you do, you'll make it work for you." He motioned to his four-man squad to begin packing up their equipment. "We'll get this loaded up, then head back."
"Stop into the cafeteria for some coffee if you have a little spare time," Mark suggested. Foxton glanced at his watch, then nodded again.
"Sure, that sounds like a good idea. Can we find Mr Hebert again so I can let him know things went to plan? The director would want me to observe professional standards and he's the nearest thing you guys have to a commanding officer."
Zephron grinned broadly as Mark chuckled. "He won't thank you for saying that, so probably best not to, but I'd agree. Very good man, Danny Hebert. He inspires loyalty in the weirdest places." The blond glanced at Brian, who masked a slight smile, realizing at least part of what he was getting at. "OK, you guys, go and shower, get changed, and get something to eat. It's nearly five now and I know I'm starving."
The couple of dozen DWU staff all responded affirmatively, then headed towards the exit. Brian stayed behind to help the PRT troopers, Mark, and Zephron carry the crates of equipment towards the door and the truck parked just outside, getting a murmur of thanks from the man he was pairing up with. They hefted the large crate containing four foam projectors between them and moved off.
Just before they reached the door, Alec, who had immediately left when food was mentioned, came back inside with a very odd expression on his face. "Brian? You really need to see this." He gestured, then left again. Brian looked at Mark, who shrugged, before he and his partner followed.
Outside, they all stopped, lowering their burdens to the ground, while staring at the activity going on in the larger part of the main yard.
"What on earth…?" Mark muttered.
"Looks like Vectura has been busy," Zephron observed, also watching with great interest. He was slowly beginning to smile. "That girl is good."
"Vectura?" Sergeant Foxton asked in bemused tones. "Who's that?"
"Our resident Tinker," Mark said, not looking away from what he was observing. "Hired a few weeks ago because she's a fucking good mechanic even without the Tinkering. Boss and the girls gave her a big workshop on the next road over, and I think she's finished her first serious project."
"I'd have to agree," the sergeant nodded, sounding very impressed and quite startled. "I'd definitely have to agree..."
"What do you think?" 'Metis' asked Danny, who was watching as Linda put her new invention through some increasingly elaborate tests. He didn't take his eyes off the sight and was smiling in a weird fashion. So were a number of the other DWU people who were standing near them, many taking photos and video.
"I think that we're going to have fun with this," he finally replied. "She's not like poor Leet? She can make more?"
"Yep. As many as you want. Vectura designs the parts, Saurial makes them, we add a few things from commercial suppliers with suitable modifications, and we could turn those out at probably around a dozen a week. More, perhaps, if we get some of the people in Engineering to help with the assembly. She thinks it can be improved a lot, too, there's a whole list of ideas on the whiteboard back in her workshop just from building this one. My… intuition…," which was code for her power, "tells me that because we can make something pretty much exactly like what her power wants to make, rather than having to improvise around all sorts of missing things, they'll be a hell of a lot more reliable than most Tinker designs. I'm fairly certain of that, although it will still need periodic maintenance."
"Presumably not the hull or any of the parts that Saurial made?"
"No, those are solid. It's the Tinker-specific modifications to the electronics, mainly. They're the same sort of weird black-box mess that almost all Tinkers produce, because as far as I can see they don't really understand what they're trying to do. Leet's designs are kind of an exception to that, for Dragon at least, we've discovered. Vectura and he were playing with some amazingly advanced power armor of his last week and I think that inspired some of this as well, which is how it came together so fast. Not to mention she already had the power units built from a previous project and just reused them. Making more of those is the most complicated part right now."
"Amazing. Genuinely amazing. I mean, the drawings were one thing, but seeing… this… that's really incredible. It looks really polished and complete too, not like some Tinker designs we've seen in the past."
"Saurial does really good work," Lisa grinned, knowing he was referring to Linda's former 'Squealer' designs, which were always ass-ugly at best, even though they normally worked far better than they should have done.
She truly was a remarkably gifted Tinker given the right resources. Not to mention the collaboration between Taylor, the Varga, and Linda had made something that looked very good.
Half the workforce was now staring as the cat-woman tested everything, quite a number of them clapping at various points. She was certain that there would be no shortage of volunteers to try the thing. When Taylor turned up, too, she was bound to want to play with it.
"We could actually sell these, you know," she added. "Or at least lease them. That's probably the best approach, actually, since we can build scheduled maintenance into the contract. The PRT would definitely be interested, of course, but just general uses of something like that would be very profitable." Danny nodded absently, still observing with fascination and a thoughtful air. "Not to mention some of the spin-offs."
"Spin-offs?" he asked, finally looking up at her. "What sort of spin-offs?"
"Vectura was going to use hydraulics for the motive power, but she really wanted to use superconducting linear motors. She had several design ideas for some very efficient, powerful, and lightweight ones, but it all hinged on a number of exotic materials that she simply couldn't make. No one could. The most obvious one was a room-temperature superconductor."
"Which is the sort of thing every materials lab on the planet would probably sell their collective soul for," he noted. "I've read about that sort of thing. The best anyone's managed is a Tinker-tech improvement on something that was invented in the eighties, it's superconducting at about minus one hundred or so centigrade if I remember right."
"Yep. The theory of how it works is still a bit up in the air, although there are dozens of physicists and chemists working on it. Reading up on it, Aleph scientists aren't even that close, although they have even more people trying to crack it." She handed him a small slab of a pitch-black yet still oddly iridescent material that was like some weird almost rubbery ceramic, which felt as strange as it sounded. "Here you go."
He looked at the roughly hockey-puck sized lump in his hand, then at her again, his eyebrows raised so far they couldn't go further. Lisa grinned. "Vectura couldn't make it, but she had an exact description of what it was. Saurial was able to produce the stuff after a few attempts. And all the other custom materials that she wanted." She waved at the machine. "That's why it's so quiet, smooth, precise, and quick. Poor woman nearly fainted when she found out that she could simply ask for the impossible and the answer was basically 'How much do you want?'"
"Holy shit." Danny looked stunned, feeling the black pseudo-ceramic in his hand. "This really works?"
"It does. It's an electrical superconductor right up to about bright yellow heat, at which point it sort of evaporates. Three thousand degrees or so. Saurial can make as much of it as we'd ever want, and is pretty sure that Dragon could work out how to mass produce it too. She says it's complicated but not much more so than the super-insulator stuff Dragon showed her a while back for a special project. You can melt it down, cast it with some effort, and machine it. And it's flexible enough to be used as wire."
"Christ. Dragon and Armsmaster are going to be friends for life after they see this," he said faintly.
"I think they already are," she chuckled, "but that'll sure add to it. Every Tinker on the planet who uses electricity will probably pay anything you care to name for it."
"Every time I think I've seen everything..." he muttered. She smiled at him.
"I feel the same sometimes," she replied very quietly. "Oh, looks like Taylor, Amy, and Saurial just turned up," she added more loudly, looking over at the bright blue truck that slowed down to let the occupants stare at the ongoing test, then drove off quite rapidly. "And they're going to come and want to try it."
"I want a go first," he grinned suddenly. "There must be some perks to being The Boss. Which I'm not."
With a laugh, she nodded, then followed him as he headed to where Linda had apparently finished her initial test and was leaning out of the pilot's compartment talking to a couple of DWU people from the garage, who were looking like Christmas had come early.
Kevin tightened the last screw up to the correct torque, put the tool down, inspected his work. With a preliminary cracking of knuckles, he reached out and flipped the power switch to the on position. He smiled to himself when the energy weapon powered up with a faint whine, lights flickering down the heavy barrel and on a display on the back. Picking it up, he panned it around, having made very sure the safety was on and the trigger interlock was enabled. Putting his eye to the high-tech electronic scope on the top, he pulled the weapon to his shoulder and aimed it at the wall between the main workshop and Randall's bedroom.
"I can see you," he whispered, very pleased with himself. There was a false-color image of his friend, created from terahertz radiation emitted by the human body, which went through the wall like it wasn't there. Moving a couple of selector controls with his thumb he watched as the image changed, cycling through different modes and sensing systems, and in the process highlighting various parts of the scenery. One mode produced a ghostly image of all the electrical wiring and other metallic structures, indicating which of them were carrying power and which weren't. Another was a simple thermal vision system, albeit with much higher resolution than anything on the market he was aware of.
Satisfied, he moved the rifle to point away from anything important and out over the bay, checking with the sight that there was nothing on the other side of the wall, just in case. He wasn't planning on firing it but he didn't want to take any chances. Sure that if there was a misfire no one would get hurt, he enabled the charging sequence with a flick of a finger on the appropriate control. The whine came back, louder this time, although still fairly quiet, and was joined by a deep ominous hum and a faint glow from the barrel which reflected off the wall he was aiming at, the bluish light showing a square pattern.
Exhaling in relief that nothing had gone bang, he nodded and powered the device down. It was only charged to a couple of percent for safety's sake, but even so it could easily punch a hole in the wall large enough to drive a truck through.
Putting it down, he patted it. "Hey, Randall, come look at this," he called. His friend popped out of his room, in the process of pulling a t-shirt on and with a quizzical expression on his face.
"OK, I'm looking. What am I looking..." The other man noticed the big gun on the bench and his eyes widened, then he grinned. "Fuck me. You made the BFG work?"
"I did that exact thing, my friend," Kevin said proudly. "I mean, without test firing it, of course. I don't want to have to move just because I took the entire wall out."
"That would be embarrassing," his friend agreed with a chuckle. "It gets annoying after the third time or so."
The Tinker sighed a little. "You're never going to let me forget that, are you?"
"You said 'oops, duck,' you dick," Randall smirked. "You didn't say, 'run like fuck,' which considering how big the explosion was would have been more useful. It took us two hours to dig ourselves out and we're lucky we didn't end up fried."
With a shrug, Kevin conceded the point. "The shield generator worked, though, so we lived."
"It worked once."
"It only needed to." The smaller man looked at the next thing on his list, a foot-tall cylinder about four inches in diameter. "Although it would be a useful thing to have. Best force-field system I ever heard of."
"Think you can fix it?"
He shrugged once again, smiling a little. "I can't promise anything, but I have a good feeling about it. I mean, this thing was a lot more fucked up and it was almost easy to work out the problem and repair it. Almost like my power wanted me to get it going."
"Freaky, man," Randall noted with a small frown. "I know what you mean, though. I keep finding that my own power is working so well I can hardly believe it. I think it's still improving as well. More evidence for that theory the girls have."
"Sure looks that way." Kevin hefted the energy rifle, then handed it to his friend, who took it with eager hands. "I don't know what we'll use it for, we never dared take this thing into the field, it's too fucking dangerous. It might be a good thing it failed after the second shot that time in the Graveyard."
"Made an impressive hole in that old ship, though, didn't it?"
"What ship?" Kevin grinned.
"Exactly." Looking the weapon over, Randall nodded approvingly. "You do damn fine work, my man. It looks fantastic." He activated the weapon, the barrel towards the ceiling, then grinned. "And sounds good too. Not as cool as Athena, but considering the difference in size alone..."
"This doesn't have a fucking fusion bomb in it either," Kevin pointed out with a slight shudder. Even though it was his own work that had led to the insanely big gun, the thing still gave him chills. He wondered with mild dread if it would ever actually get used. The simulations that Armsmaster had shown him of the fringe effects of firing it were… worryingly impressive.
He was interested to see the results, but from a long, long way away…
"The power pack is good for about sixty seconds of full output on a charge," he said, picking up his notes and glancing through them. "Shot selection can vary from a continuous beam, anywhere from one to one hundred percent power, single pulses, burst pulse fire, or continuous pulse fire. The pulse length can be set between a hundred microseconds and a hundred milliseconds, which in combination with the variable output means you can dial it down to the point it's a stun weapon. Admittedly a stun weapon that's going to fuck up a non-brute pretty badly, but it's at least theoretically non-lethal."
"What repetition rate on pulse mode?" Randall asked.
"Anywhere up to a duty cycle of one to one, so at minimum pulse length, you'd get five thousand pulses per second. Not a lot of point to doing that, since you're using the same amount of power as the continuous beam running at fifty percent, but it'll look cool." His friend grinned again, causing him to add, "It's all about presentation, of course."
"Obviously."
"At full power it'll punch a hole right in one side of a tank and out the other with no trouble at all," Kevin said, feeling pleased with his work. "Probably cut it in half, actually. And you can also adjust the beam focus from fine to wide. That was what went wrong on the original test. I accidentally set it to maximum power wide beam continuous, somehow. Melted the main power transfer coupling, and we were lucky the entire power pack didn't go up. That would have been unpleasant."
"Only for a very short time, though," Randall noted, turning the gun off again. Kevin nodded, knowing full well that they'd come closer to snuffing it from one of his inventions going badly wrong then than they ever had again.
"Want to know the best part?"
Randall raised an eyebrow. "Of course."
Kevin got up and took the weapon from him, turning it over to show him a covered port on the bottom of the main stock. "Interconnect to the Mjolnir armor. This will integrate with it seamlessly, you'll get the feed from the multispectral scope right through the neural link, and full fire control too."
"Holy shit." His friend stared at him, then shook his head respectfully. "Excellent."
"It will recharge from the armor as well." Kevin took the gun back and hefted it. "Good thing we got upgraded, the damn thing weighs over ninety pounds. Most people could hardly pick it up and aim it, never mind carry it around for long."
"Think Dragon could copy it?"
"Don't really know, we still don't know how she's coming along with my tricorder or audio inducer." Kevin looked thoughtfully at the repaired weapon, then carefully put it into a large fiberglass flight case and closed the lid. "I'm not entirely sure I should even let her see it… It's a pretty nasty weapon. Do I want her making them?"
"You helped them design Athena."
"Sure. But then, Taylor's the only one on the planet who can actually make the damn thing, or the ammo, or fire it and live. Not a lot of proliferation issues there. This thing… I'm not sure I want the government having access to my tech in the form of weapons." Kevin looked at his friend uncertainly. "I mean, I've designed some really cool ones, but it's all for fun, you know? This thing could kill a lot of people without any trouble at all, I don't want that on my conscience."
Randall put his hand on his shorter friend's shoulder. "I know, Kev, I know. Neither one of us wants to hurt people, and I'm sort of ashamed, looking back, on how many times we fucked up and managed that. Too easy to get carried away." He looked around at the vast number of game-themed devices scattered around the old warehouse they'd taken over as their base. "All we ever wanted to do was have fun and make cool videos. We did that OK, but we might have started to get a little over-enthusiastic at times."
"Recently, I've been thinking we should probably take Legend's advice," Kevin remarked, sitting down again and leaning his chair back on two legs. "I mean, considering the people we know now, and the things they've done for us already… We could make a real difference. In a good way for once, other than just getting YouTube views and likes on PHO. You know, help out more." He waved his hands at the machinery. "If I can fix even ten percent of this shit and Dragon can copy it, we'll be filthy rich for a start, and we could make a lot of people have easier lives." He pointed at one odd-looking machine. "That water collector, for example. You know how much difference it would make in someplace like a desert? It worked fucking well, until it blew the top off."
"Why did we come up with that, again?" Randall scratched his head. "What game was it from?"
"We watched Star Wars while we were drunk and that thing was the result," Kevin grinned. "I thought I was going to make a land speeder but I got distracted."
"Oh, right, I remember," the other man said, laughing a little. "Sort of. Tequila isn't kind to me."
"Not when you drink it by the pint, it isn't."
Randall waved this off as the minor point it was. "OK, fair enough, I get what you're saying. You think we should 'go straight.'" He made finger quotes as he said the last two words. "You want to join the Protectorate?"
"Hell, no!" Kevin snorted. "I mean, I respect Armsmaster, I could learn to like him, I do like Dragon and Legend, but are you nuts? They'd never let either of us have any fun at all. I want to help people, not get told what to do all the time."
"The Guild then?" Randall was smirking at him.
"No. Stop being deliberately obtuse."
"Ooh, nice one."
Kevin sighed, as his friend snickered. "Asshole."
"So you want to talk to Taylor and her friends and come to some official arrangement? More than just visiting sometimes, I mean?"
"Why not? Linda seems to be doing OK, from what we saw. She's got a nice workshop, DWU backing, more resources than you could believe thanks to Taylor, Lisa, and Amy, and that crazy demon… Why don't we get us some of that?"
"And leave this wonderful man-cave?" Randall gestured at the room.
"Of course not. We take it with us."
They looked at each other for a few seconds, then both studied the room. "You know, my friend, you might have a point. This place is drafty and the roof leaks in the kitchen."
"And, of course, if we have a closer relationship with the DWU and BBFO, you realize we could also probably do some really cool videos..." Kevin wiggled his eyebrows. "We still need to do that one we were planning when we first met Taylor."
"Good point. We haven't done anything big for weeks..." Randall thought some more, then spread his hands wide. "Why not? You only live once, after all. Unless you're a demon. Maybe it's time we upped our game. Let's go and talk to them, see what they think."
Kevin dropped his chair back onto all four legs and hopped up. "That, my old friend, is a very good idea. Let's do it." Picking up the weapon in its case, he added, "I want to show this to them too, and maybe use the WCC to find somewhere we can fire it without making the PRT go completely insane. Piggot would blow a gasket."
Randall grinned at him, then they headed towards the truck, Kevin putting the cased weapon in the back, before climbing in with him. Both of them pulled balaclavas on, Randall started the vehicle, and the Tinker flipped the switch that opened the main door. Moments later it closed behind them as they headed deeper into the docks.
Powering her invention down, Linda checked the displays, tapping a couple of touch panels which had started life as a pair of high end tablets. She was very pleased with how well everything was working. Although the tests all showed things worked exactly as she'd hoped, she'd already come up with another page of notes in her mental list of improvements to make. 'Build the second prototype, leave this one intact, though,' she thought. 'It works more than well enough to be a useful system, and there seem to be a lot of potential pilots...' She peered out of the small cabin at the huge crowd watching her with extreme interest, feeling slightly embarrassed suddenly. Checking the domino mask she'd hastily grabbed before leaving her workshop, she decided that she really needed to come up with a decent costume.
'Saurial and the others can help with that,' she mused. 'I want something that looks at least reasonable for the PRT visit. Greasy overalls and a stupid mask aren't the image I want. Not any more.' Flicking the end of her tail, she looked at it, then grinned a little. 'Not that anyone is going to look at me like this and think Squealer,' she snickered. 'Even Skids wouldn't know me. Damn good thing too. If that bastard shows up here and tries to ruin it for everyone, I'll shoot the fucker myself.'
Running a full diagnostic on the internal systems, she opened the cockpit by lifting the top half, which hinged up with a faint hiss and locked in place. Grabbing the handholds, she pulled herself out of the seat, swung over the side, and dropped ten feet to the ground without bothering with the built-in steps, amused at how easy it was with her new body. She could easily jump right back inside if she wanted, which was still something she was having trouble believing.
Walking around the machine she inspected it closely with an expert eye, nodding in satisfaction. Nothing at all was out of place. The EDM-skinned hull was pretty much indestructible anyway from what she knew, but even taking that into account, the entire system had held up perfectly. The linear motors were a dream, they were almost entirely silent, even faster and smoother than she'd hoped for, and had a lot of power capacity left over. The thing wasn't running anywhere close to its limits and had already exceeded her expectations by close to fifty percent.
'Saurial is fucking amazing,' she thought with a wide, slightly awed grin, running a hand down the slick exterior. 'Without her… no way I could have done this. Not even close. But now...' She shook her head in wonder. There were so many plans rattling around in her head, and she could actually make them! Even the really weird ones. If she could describe it well enough, the lizard-girl could make it, and the ramifications of that were enough to make her dizzy.
Lost in her dreams of ever more elaborate machinery, she twitched when someone a few feet away said, "That is a damn fine job, Vectura."
Turning around, she smiled at Danny. "Thanks. It works even better than I expected. Lots of upgrades to add, of course, but so far I'm more fucking pleased than a kid at Christmas."
"I can see why," he chuckled, looking up at the large machine. "It's extremely impressive when it's not a lot of drawings and a pile of parts. Bigger than I expected as well."
Most of the crowd had started drawing closer, many of them still taking photos, both of her and her creation. An awful lot of them looked weirdly proud, like they were genuinely pleased about it. She looked around, feeling a little overwhelmed. Metis followed her eyes, then turned to her. "Don't worry, everyone here is impressed with your work and pleased that you made it work. Why don't you explain it to them?"
The black lizard, before she had a chance to respond, faced the crowd, which Linda suddenly noticed had several PRT troopers on one side for some reason, next to most of the security department as well as Brian and Alec. She momentarily wondered if anyone was still watching the gate…
"OK, people, Vectura is feeling a little startled by the attention, so try not to push in too much. Give her room and she's going to tell us about her construction here." Metis's deep voice rang out across the damp yard, everyone going silent and listening with interest. "I know a lot of you have been very curious about her work, and now you can see what she's designed."
Looking back at her, the lizard grinned. "Go on, then, they're listening."
"Oh, god," the Tinker sighed. "Thanks. I've never fucking spoken to this many people before."
"It's easy enough, Vectura," Danny said quietly. "Just tell them about it. Don't go into the technical details too much right now, anyone who's interested will ask later, just mention the main points. And possibly explain why it ended up looking like a hybrid of ED209, a walking forklift, and Kaiju."
She grinned suddenly, gazing at her invention. That was a fairly good way to put it. She'd been loosely inspired by the bipedal cargo loaders from the Alien movies, but having thought it over for a couple of days more or less continuously, she'd kept modifying the design. Originally the idea had been to make something that would help the DWU, and the loader concept had been an obvious one, but it was lacking a few things.
Linda had fixed that.
The machine that everyone was looking at stood nearly twelve feet tall, from the ground to the top of the armored cockpit. That part was a roughly egg-shaped, horizontal cabin, large enough for even Zephron to get into easily, although Metis or Ianthe would have been very cramped. Not that they'd need to drive it, of course, each of them was tougher, faster, and probably as strong.
The cockpit was mounted on top of an articulated midsection, from which heavily built legs on birdlike feet sprouted, one on either side, three toes coming out at the front and one at the back. The main power units and most of the control systems were in that midsection, behind even thicker armor than the rest, although since it was EDM, it was actually less than an eighth of an inch thick at the most. Even so, it would take anything she could even begin to think of. Oddly, it had made the entire mech lighter than she'd originally calculated when she'd planned on using titanium and steel for the construction. Under the armor was a layer of some weird super-insulation that Saurial had told her Dragon invented, which meant that the thermal superconductivity of the EDM wouldn't cause the entire thing to get either too hot or too cold for the occupant.
The upper half of the cockpit, which currently stuck up at a forty-five degree angle, was made of two inch thick synthetic single-crystal sapphire, just like the helmets the Family had made for New Wave. It was, again as per that pattern, covered on both sides with a fine EDM mesh. The mesh was barely coarse enough to see, but since you tended to focus past it, it didn't get in the way, and made the window tough enough to take an armor piercing tank shell without damage.
She was already planning to upgrade the instruments to use the inside of the windows as a transparent HUD, but at the moment it was all on various screens.
The legs and the 'head', or cockpit, definitely did give off a distinct similarity to the ED209 robot from Robocop, which was partly intentional since she'd thought it looked cool, and partly just the way it had worked out. On either side and somewhat below the pilot's compartment, a pair of complex arms were folded. These terminated in hands three feet across with three fingers and a thumb, the entire thing on a joint that allowed it to rotate three hundred and sixty degrees. The articulation and length of the arms was sufficient to let them reach behind, above, or beneath the main body as easily as if it was a human. Each wrist had a high definition camera on it so they could also be used as remote inspection systems. More cameras were mounted on the top of the cockpit pointing in every direction, and underneath in the same way. When she finished the next generation version she intended to use these cameras to allow the pilot to look out as if the entire thing was transparent, a system similar to some that were being designed for military aircraft. If she got that going properly, which needed quite a lot more hardware that hadn't turned up yet, the transparent section of the cockpit could be replaced with another EDM section making it even tougher.
The main resemblance to Kaiju was down to the long and vaguely reptilian 'tail' that came out of the rear of the thing. It did, in conjunction with the gyros, aid in balance, but she'd also needed somewhere to mount the cutting lance, and that worked remarkably well.
The entire thing was colored deep blue, with safety-orange stripes in key areas to make it very visible. She'd even added the standard flashing orange warning beacons to it in a few places, since this model was intended to basically be a piece of construction equipment more than anything else.
It amused her that she'd pretty much done what Tinkers were stereotypically thought to do, and made power armor. She'd just done it on a rather larger scale than most, and not to go out and fight crime, but to go out and fight scrap metal...
'Although the combat version will be interesting,' she thought with a small smirk. Looking back at the expectant crowd, she sighed minutely, then jumped up and grabbed hold of the edge of the cockpit, slipping inside and standing on the seat. From this vantage point she looked down at the close to two hundred people who were watching her, which now included Saurial and a couple of brunette teenagers she didn't recognize, one remarkably tall and the other one several inches shorter. Both of them were talking to Saurial in the manner of close friends.
The taller girl bore a distinct resemblance to Danny, so was probably his daughter Taylor, which meant the other one was likely to be Amy Dallon, she surmised.
"Hi," she said out loud, then cleared her throat nervously. "I'm Vectura."
"Hi, Vectura!" the crowd shouted almost as one, making her nearly fall out in shock. She glared at Saurial, who had started the shout, the lizard-girl grinning at her. Everyone laughed for a moment, then slowly quieted.
"Um… Thanks. OK, as you have probably worked out, this thing is something I came up with and Saurial helped me make. You guys are really nice and I wanted to make a machine that would be useful around here. This is the result."
She waved at the mech she was standing in. "It weighs seven and a half tons, can lift over twenty tons if it's balanced right, should be capable of running at over sixty miles an hour, and can probably leap at least a short building in a single bound."
There was a certain amount of laughter, making her smile and relax a little. "The whole thing is armored enough to take almost anything I can think of short of a fucking tactical nuke. It's currently got life support capable of keeping the pilot alive for about a week, anywhere from a hard vacuum to at least ten thousand feet underwater. I can improve all of that, but it's only the first prototype. It'll definitely walk around on the bottom of the bay no trouble, even so."
They were looking both impressed and very interested by now, everyone going dead silent again.
She went on to explain the various main functions, then the controls, in very general terms. "You've got a feedback system in the two joysticks in here, so you can pretty much just feel what the hands do. I've got a better design in mind for the next one that'll make it even more natural to use, but I had to make this one first to check everything else."
Dropping into the seat, leaving the cockpit open, she engaged the external PA system and put the headset that was hanging over the seat on her head. Her cat's ears demanded a somewhat different design than a normal human used, but she had a standard set down the side of the seat for other people. "OK, there's a PA system as you can see, and a radio comms system as well so you can talk to people on the walkie-talkies too," she continued, powering the mech up as she spoke. It lifted slightly, suddenly looking very alive from the outside. She was incredibly pleased with how well the motion control algorithms had learned and adapted after the first few tentative steps in the workshop earlier. By now it was so fluid it looked almost organic.
Rotating the machine with a twist of one control, she faced it towards them, then tilted the pilot's cabin down a little so they could see her. Thinking that she needed to examine Kevin's neural interface again, and see if she could make something like that which would be even better than her current next generation controls, she made it wave at them with one hand, then interlinked both hands in front of her. "At the moment it's a matter of using both hands and both feet at the same time, with some pedals and two joysticks, along with a few other controls on the handles. It's a lot like an excavator in some ways. I can make that better too, but this was simpler and works fine."
"What about the tail?" Metis called up. She sounded amused.
"Well, if you don't have one of your own," she laughed, since she was actually using her own tail to control the mech's one, "You have a pair of thumb controllers for it. It'll take practice but I think anyone could use it, the onboard computer does most of the work."
"OK, so that's the basic idea." She pirouetted the mech on one foot, then made it jump up and down, bend forward, then squat down so the main body nearly touched the ground, with the legs folded up on either side. Bringing the arms in as well, it became surprisingly compact, small enough to fit into a mid-sized shipping container. "There are thrusters for underwater operation, it'll be capable of about forty knots under water. I haven't installed the flight system yet."
"Flight system?" Danny asked in shock. She leaned out and grinned at him.
"Of course. Everyone needs a flying walking construction mech that can swim."
"Oh. Well, of course, what was I thinking?" he asked loudly, shaking his head. Quite a lot of the assembled workers snickered.
"There are a few other things too," she said. "Say you're working on that chunk of hull over there." One mechanical hand came up and an eighteen-inch long finger pointed at a large piece of tanker hull that was lying on the ground fifty feet away, ready to be cut up and loaded into the train. Raising the mech to full height, she walked it over to the piece of scrap. "You want to cut it up, since it's too big to fit."
Bending down, the mech grabbed one side of the twenty by thirty foot piece of two inch thick steel and lifted it smoothly to a vertical position.
"Normally you'd use a thermal lance or a torch. But with this thing you can either do this..." She brought the segmented caudal appendage around and ignited the plasma lance in the end, which projected a ten foot brilliant white flame. Moving it across the middle of the piece of scrap she quickly cut it in half, molten metal running down to the ground in showers of orange sparks.
Dropping one piece, she held the smaller piece up in one hand as she shut down the lance, she lifted the other hand, working a control which made the hand fold out of the way and an eight foot long EDM blade slide out of the wrist. Edge on, it vanished entirely from sight. Saurial had suggested it as a useful tool, it was basically the same as the one both Metis and Ianthe carried. There were shorter ones for precision work in the fingers, replicating claws, but they were normally retracted. Waving it through the steel, she watched as the end dropped to the ground with a crash, the cut edge gleaming. "...or that."
Retracting the blade, she grabbed the other end of the piece of steel, which was now about four feet across and fifteen feet long, then rolled it up like a piece of cardboard, a loud metallic groan coming from the stressed metal. Lifting the resultant lump in one hand, she tossed it underarm towards the nearest empty scrap car, pleased and slightly relieved that it landed directly inside on the first throw. The car rocked with the impact, the clang echoing around the yard. Spinning the mech around, she tipped it down to look at them. Everyone was staring at her, then the car. A good thirty seconds went past before they started clapping.
"The advantage of the plasma lance is that it'll reach about fifty feet, but the blade is quicker and neater for shorter distances. So, who wants to try it?"
Every single hand in view went up, including Saurial's, all the PRT trooper's, Taylor and Amy's, and Danny's. Linda grinned widely. The only one who didn't raise their hand was Metis, who was grinning back and shrugged when Linda looked at her, the lizard looking amused.
And she hadn't even mentioned the stealth systems, or the auxiliary mounting points for add on modules, or the quadrupedal mode for speed, or any of the other cool things she had in mind, yet...
"I don't think your Tinker is going to have any questions asked aside from, 'How many can we have?' when she goes in for power testing," Sergeant Foxton said in a slightly stunned voice as he watched Vectura's construction mech go charging across the yard with one of the heavy excavator operators at the controls, a massive grin on his face. Several of the DWU workers had taken to the machine like they'd been born in it, proving how good the feline Tinker's work was.
Mark nodded, observing with his arms crossed, heedless of the drying goop in his hair from the containment foam and solvent. "Looks like she's done fucking well with it," he said. "I wasn't sure what she was making, but I was pretty certain it would be impressive if Saurial was involved as well. And Metis."
"And they did that in, what, about three or four days?" the man asked, still looking astounded.
"As far as I know. I mean, I think she'd been thinking about it for a while, and I know a lot of stuff was ordered a week ago which was probably electronics and things like that, but they made the hull and most of the machinery from scratch." Mark followed the mech with his eyes as the current pilot hurdled the scrap train, landed with a massive crunch on the other side of it, spun on one foot, and belted off in a different direction. The crowd was yelling and whooping, calling his name, with his work colleagues laughing like idiots. "She's made a lot of friends very suddenly."
"I can see that," the other man commented wryly. He shook his head in wonder. "Jesus. If she can do this that fast, what can she do with time to think?"
"No idea at all. I bet we find out, though." Mark grinned. "Should be fun."
"The director is going to be… confused? Let's go with confused." With a look at his watch, the sergeant mumbled to himself for a second, then shrugged. "Sorry, I have to check in, we'll never get back on time now."
"Going to stay long enough to have your turn?" Mark asked with a small smirk. The other man smirked back.
"Oh, definitely. I'm sure Director Piggot would want me, in the interests of security you understand, to get a full appreciation of the current status of the DWU for my report."
"Of course. Entirely reasonable, really. You'd only be doing your duty."
"Exactly. I was always taught that a good soldier is one who can use his initiative when necessary." Foxton glanced at him, then both of them laughed. "I'll be back in a couple of minutes."
"Sure, take your time," Mark smiled, waving at the mech, which was now juggling three half-ton lumps of steel, Vectura herself staring in amazement. "Looks like these guys are going to be a while."
The sergeant wandered off, pulling his PRT phone from his belt, while Mark waited patiently along with a hundred and fifty of his closest friends for his turn.
Driving up to the gate, Randall looked around, puzzled. "Where are the guards?" he asked. "Normally they're watching us from half a mile away."
There was no response from his friend, so he turned his head to look at him, then followed his eyes, which were very wide. "Fuck me," he whispered. "That's… new."
"I want one," Kevin said in a voice full of envy. "I really, really want one."
"Me too," Randall replied, staring. After a moment, he started honking the horn. "Come on, you guys, let us in," he shouted out the window. "We want to play too!"
Sophia, feeling both very tired and somewhat nauseous from the pain of the burn on her wrist, finally decided that she needed something more substantial to eat, not to mention a break from driving.
She'd been going all night and most of the next day with only a few short half-hour to hour breaks here and there. The sheer amount of caffeine she'd consumed was also starting to give her minor heart palpitations, which was disconcerting although she was aware of the possibility, and an absolutely vicious headache that the painkillers she'd been taking had little effect on. In her flight, she'd so far stolen nine cars and one pickup truck, which was what she was currently in. Each time she changed vehicles, she also lifted some plates from another one, and swapped those onto the next car she took. It was going to take a lot of work for any pursuer to trace her after the sheer mess she'd made of them. Not to mention that she'd been careful to locate and remove vehicles that were clearly not in regular use, to make sure they didn't get reported stolen too quickly.
Having spent some time once reading up on precogs, she'd also been flipping a coin every forty minutes or so to decide which way to go, other than the general heading of 'Away.' From what she knew, that would tend to foul up any real ability to track her using Parahuman powers, at least for a while. Sophia was intent on using any edge she could find. The resultant track on a map would be a totally confusing zig-zag pattern with little real indication where she was going. She didn't even know that herself. More than once she'd doubled back on herself, or suddenly ended up going at right angles to her previous direction.
Now, as far as she could tell, she was somewhere in the general vicinity of Pittsburgh, between there and Cleveland. Having dumped all her phones except for one burner one she was certain wasn't traceable since it was still sealed in the packaging, and eschewed the use of a GPS mapping system on the off chance it could be somehow tracked by external forces, she was forced to resort to paper maps. Unfortunately she wasn't very practiced at map-reading, so she wasn't completely sure of her current location. If anything, this was a positive, since it made it even less likely that anyone else would know where she was or where she was going.
'Have to get some more phones soon,' she thought, adding them to a growing mental list. She'd found a good hunting knife in the last place she'd raided, in some small town two hundred miles behind her, along with a pack full of MREs and another small pistol. While she didn't routinely use a gun, she'd taken the relevant PRT course on basic firearms use and was sure she could hit someone with the thing if required, at least at close range. She preferred the pistol crossbow since it was more or less silent, but it was also quite distinctive, and the ammunition was harder to get.
Bullets, on the other hand, those she could get almost anywhere. This was the US. The PRT issue weapon she'd stolen on the way out was a last resort, since she was pretty sure that they routinely made ballistic records of all their weapons so they could be traced more easily if required. It would be a dead giveaway if someone found an expended round that could be linked to the PRT ENE armory.
Her collection of cash had expanded to close to twenty-five thousand dollars, since she'd also cleaned out any money left in the registers of the stores she'd raided. The larger ones always emptied the tills every night, but apparently a lot of smaller ones in out of the way places didn't bother. She'd also found one isolated ATM which she'd approached from the rear, to avoid any possible cameras, then simply phased her hand into and removed all the bills from it. The theft had taken seconds.
Slowing down as she began to encounter a slightly more built-up area in among the trees and hills, she read signs with bleary eyes and looked for something suitable. Spotting a roadside motel with an attached tavern, she shrugged and indicated, pulling off the road into the gravel car park. There were half a dozen big rigs drawn up to one side of the lot, with a few other cars and a couple of small trucks parked closer to the building. Turning the engine off, she stretched widely, then rubbed her ass, which was killing her from sitting in the lumpy seat for hours.
'Better not take one of those cars,' she thought, looking out at the gray afternoon. 'Too obvious. I can find something in the next town.' Removing the keys from the ignition, she checked that the pistol was tucked into her jacket, which was something else she'd lifted, along with all her current clothes, then got out and locked the truck.
Walking into the main entrance, she looked around, wrinkling her nose a little at the disreputable air of the place. It was very definitely someplace that had seen better days and a hell of a lot of business.
Regardless, it was somewhere to rest for a while, get some real food, and plan the next stage of what would be a triumphant return to Brockton Bay, and her destiny.
Heading towards a table at the back of the dingy restaurant, Sophia sat down, picked up the menu, and began perusing it, not noticing the balding truck driver in a baseball cap who had been watching her discreetly but intently from moments after she entered...