Taylor watched as the tall gleaming figure of Armsmaster followed her father and Professor Drekin down the stairs and out of the control room, Deputy Director Renick walking behind them looking like he'd heard something that worried him. As they disappeared from view, her attention turned to the three monitors in front of her. The left one had a feed from the dozens of tiny but incredibly good security cameras that were all over their new building and outside too, the computer automatically tracking motion and following the small party through the building and out the main door into the courtyard to where the rest of the PRT contingent was waiting more or less patiently.

The one on the right had the results of the last test run of her modified reference frame generator still on it, showing that the projected field emitter had worked perfectly, making her feel very pleased. Her insight into an aspect of the theory she'd first learned from a very distant education broadcast had led to some interesting offshoots the classes she'd so far studied intensively hadn't mentioned. It seemed obvious to her when she sat down and thought hard about how it worked, but at least as far as she could see her alien benefactors either hadn't thought of it, or hadn't yet brought it up in the series, which was clearly intended to train new science students in that field.

She'd spent many happy hours watching and re-watching the recordings, learning a little more each time. The math had been easy enough to decode as math was pretty universal, although working in base sixteen was a little strange. It had been familiar to her of course as it was more or less required for learning programming, which she'd always had an interest in from an early age, and had been encouraged by both her parents to learn more about. Her mother had told her when she was only about six or seven that computers ran half the world already and by the time she was an adult would probably run most of it, so it was important to learn how they worked if you wanted to understand things. It was a good piece of advice that had certainly been accurate.

Her father had muttered something about computers stealing the jobs of hard working people, but had looked like he didn't really mean it. He was in a position where that sort of comment was expected, though, and she was aware even then that some people really did think like that. He'd certainly never stood in her way of learning anything she wanted, and had quietly but actively helped her whenever she found a new interest, usually managing to scrape up something that would help. The Union had an awful lot of odd stuff secreted away around the place, the remnants of who knew how many old companies that had gone under over the decades, and had been ultimately collected and stored away for a rainy day by the dock workers. Some of it was used for maintaining the machinery that was still in operation, some was broken up for scrap, but a surprising amount of it was stashed carefully into a warehouse somewhere and sat on just in case.

It amused her that most of the local Tinkers would probably be furious that so much good stuff was right under their noses, since they spent a lot of time rummaging through scrapyards and similar places for parts, never realizing that all the really choice bits got intercepted long before they ended up there. On the other hand, it had kept the Union far more functional over the years than one might expect, and had been a boon for many of her experiments over the years.

It was amazing what you could find if you knew who to ask and had an inside man, so to speak…

Her mother had always seemed to find the whole thing rather funny.

So when she'd decided at the age of nine that she wanted to get into ham radio, it hadn't taken long before an elderly but functional general coverage receiver had appeared in the back of her dad's truck, complete with a dogeared manual. Half a dozen books on the theory had quickly turned up, her mother asking a few of her students who knew about that sort of thing for recommendations, and her dad had got Kurt and a couple of others from the yard to come and help put up a tall antenna on the side of the house outside her bedroom window, the whole thing ending up as a combined antenna-raising and barbecue party.

Six months after that she'd passed her technician class license test, and had a two meter transceiver sitting on top of the lower frequency receiver. Learning Morse code hadn't taken very long when she decided she wanted to know how to decode the messages she picked up from all over the place, and the collection of hardware grew steadily as she acquired random bits from different places. By the time she was twelve she had her extra class license and had build a number of transmitters and receivers from scratch, including an amateur TV system she was still proud of.

The research into communication theory in general had stood her in good stead when she had the first sudden realization that something she'd read about the quantum nature of reality implied that it should be possible to send a signal, or indeed receive a signal, in a way that didn't pass through normal space-time. It had taken her nearly eighteen months of careful work to figure out a possible method for that to be done and build the prototype of what she privately termed a subspace communicator, but the results had exceeded her wildest dreams and opened up a whole vast new world of things to learn about, which she was more than happy to dive headlong into.

Along the way, of course, she'd picked up a lot of self-taught skills in soldering, circuit design, mechanical engineering, and other fields which when added to her programming knowledge had made the whole job easier. Professor Drekin had seemed somewhat startled when she'd explained some of her other theories, apparently believing it was unusual to be able to do what she was doing, but she herself found that a little weird. So much of it was obvious when you thought about it carefully. The hard part was actually doing it, and that was mostly a matter of either finding or making the right equipment. Her massive haul from the old TV shop had been the key to that in the end.

She wished she was better at some of the more complex math though; working out the multidimensional eigenvectors sometimes took quite a lot of scribbling and it would have saved time to be able to do all of it in her head. She was getting slowly better at that sort of thing, even though anything more than seven dimensions at once needed something to write on. Practice did after all help.

Of course, once her dad had decided to show her work to the professor, things had kind of snowballed. When he'd finally stopped practically dancing with excitement, he'd said he was going to need to think about the best way to proceed and he'd get back to them in a couple of days or so. She'd just gone back to watching alien classes in interesting physics and fiddling with some ideas all that sparked, while trying to work out how to decode the sound subcarrier that was still taunting her, buried in the signal. And studying the books on comparative linguistics she'd pulled out of her mother's own library in an attempt to try to figure out the written language of her unknown teachers. Learning their symbology as far as the equations went was slowly helping with this task, but she thought it would take quite a while to crack it.

She was patient, though. There was no hurry and she was learning all sorts of other things in the process. Learning was a lot more fun, she'd long since decided, when it was on your own terms and things you sought out rather than had pushed on you.

Ir was ultimately nearly a week after first talking to Professor Drekin that he came over for dinner and they discussed a number of options for moving ahead. Her dad had been worried about the gangs and the PRT, in equal measure and Professor Drekin had come up with a possible solution to that problem and several others, which after a lot of thought they'd decided to proceed with.

Luckily, due to various contacts he had in the wider scientific community, he'd been able to contact Doctor Calhoun at DARPA, who was conveniently also very high up in the military. It had taken some persuasion but in the end the general had been convinced to visit BBU and meet with the professor, who had demonstrated her prototype machine to him.

The professor was still grinning about the reaction nearly four hours later when she was introduced to Doctor Calhoun, who had looked like someone had just hit him unexpectedly with something heavy. He'd been flipping through the slightly updated version of her documentation with a completely baffled but still hilariously excited expression, mumbling to himself. It had been very funny.

At first he hadn't believed that it was all her work, then when she'd managed to prove it to his satisfaction, had decided that she had to be some unusual form of Parahuman. While she was fairly certain that she wasn't, having read up on the background to Parahuman powers and classifications some time ago out of interest and deciding that there was definitely an awful lot missing from the whole story, she was amenable to being tested to prove it one way or the other. After considerable discussion the general had arranged to fly her father and her, along with her prototype, a copy of the documents, and Professor Drekin, down to Virginia and the DARPA main facility in Arlington. It had been her first trip on an aircraft since she was ten and was a lot of fun. Especially as it was a private jet and she got to look at the cockpit.

An hour and a half after landing early in the morning right at the end of August, all of them were in a room about six floors underground talking to half a dozen people, including an internationally famous physicist, who'd spent the first ten minutes looking dismissive, the next two hours looking both fascinated and stunned, and the last ten minutes staring at her like he'd seen a ghost. It had been kind of odd, but he was polite once he got over the initial disbelief, so there was that.

A couple more military guys had also been present, one from the Air Force like Doctor Calhoun, and one from some bit of the Army she hadn't quite worked out. They'd gone very quiet when she showed her prototype working while writing out the equations governing the functioning of the reference frame generator on a large whiteboard.

One of the other people, a slender and sharp-faced redheaded woman in a suit, had looked at the data, then talked quietly to Doctor Calhoun in the corner of the room for about half an hour, before disappearing for another forty minutes. When she came back she headed straight for him, the pair talking again for quite a while, before she shook his hand, nodded, and left. Taylor hadn't seen her again and was still wondering who she was.

After the demonstration was over, she'd spent a solid three hours answering question after question from everyone there, including Doctor Calhoun, and even Professor Drekin. They'd gone over her document page by page as if they were trying to find a flaw with it, but she'd been able to show that the work was accurate and complete. When that was finished she'd been asked if she thought she could build another one for them.

Of course she'd said yes, if they had the parts she needed. The machine wasn't terribly complex for the most part and she knew the circuits and dimensions by heart. The end result of that had been her finding herself in a large and incredibly well equipped workshop full of hardware she nearly drooled over, along with three technicians who were apparently aware of the purpose of her being there although clearly skeptical.

Having looked around for a bit, she gathered together all the parts she needed, the tech guys helping her very efficiently even though at least one of them seemed to be humoring her. While she'd been using one of the really cool projection microscopes and building a new copy of her circuitry under it, finding that it allowed her to do a much more compact and neater job and resolving that she really needed one of her own, she'd asked them to take the drawings of the outer shell and the tesseract coil former and machine them for her.

It took two of them a while to program up the little benchtop multi-axis CNC mill with the data needed but only about four hours later she was looking at a really professionally made duplicate of the mechanical parts of her device. Impressed, she'd thanked them profusely then carefully wound the tesseract coil with the strangely pretty layered windings in four different thicknesses of copper wire, the final exciter coil made of solid silver. In her original two prototypes she'd had some trouble getting this last bit as it was quite expensive but a jewelry supply shop online had sold her twenty feet of it for only a slightly extortionate price which her dad had paid with a mild wince. Luckily the wire was very thin so there wasn't all that much silver in it.

Eventually, sometime in the evening, she was finally done with the copy of her original machine. It looked almost identical but was much cleaner, none of the file marks her hand-build one had shown visible, and the circuitry was neater too. This last bit had mostly been down to practice as it was still hand made, since she had no way at that point to make printed circuit boards herself.

Even so, it worked perfectly. Taylor had put the three C cells into it, closed it up, and run the diagnostics on the old laptop she'd brought with her. When everything passed she'd unplugged the USB cable from the innards of the machine, held it out, pressed the power button with her thumb, and casually let go, grinning at the expressions of everyone other than her father and the professor. Both of them looked tired and were holding large paper cups half-full of coffee, but they'd looked proud too.

"I told you, Brendan," Professor Drekin had said, turning to Doctor Calhoun, who just nodded, his expression showing multiple emotions.

"You did," he'd replied after a few seconds. "You very much did."

All three techs had gaped, looked at each other, then spent some time very carefully examining her work with growing excitement. She herself, pleased but suddenly exhausted after a very long day, had left it with them and been taken along with her father and the professor to another building that was set up like a very high end hotel and shown to their rooms. She'd fallen asleep almost immediately, the excitement of the day not managing to offset the tiredness of having spend most of it talking or working hard. Even as she drifted off she decided she had no regrets though.

The next two days had involved more medical tests than she'd ever experienced before in her entire life, including a couple of hours in a very noisy MRI scanner holding very still. When that finally ended she'd thought of at least two improvements it needed and added them to the mental list of things to look into, with possible reference to better superconductors. She'd learned some interesting things about that field from her special lessons which seemed applicable to a lot of places, but that wasn't really the main concern at that time.

The end results of the scans showed what she'd expected, that she wasn't a Parahuman. There was no sign of the special brain structure that was generally considered proof of powers and was a critical part of the whole definition of 'Parahuman' as far as the law went. Doctor Calhoun had actually breathed a sigh of relief at that point, which amused her.

The fact that the three techs she'd worked with had successfully built another copy of her prototype over those two days without her direct input also helped in the respect of 'Not Tinker Tech.' That part seemed to surprise even them, and caused a lot of excited discussion.

By the time they got home again after four days, she was looking forward to some really neat things in the near future. Both her father and Professor Drekin had spent hours talking to quite a few people, and she'd undergone another grilling about her theories by some more scientists, who were wandering around looking slightly appalled by the time they gave up. The whole lot of them had vanished after that, leaving her to poke around in the workshop and make a list of toys she really wanted.

The end result of all of this was that DARPA, and by implication several other parts of the government, were very very interested in her work and made an offer that had her staring in complete disbelief at the man who casually mentioned a figure. It was so large that she thought it should have been expressed in scientific notation. Her father had nearly fallen off his chair, and the professor simply gaped for a moment, before snapping his mouth shut, swallowing a little, and thinking.

And now here they were; The university had enough money to set up a whole new department entirely from scratch with a budget big enough to keep them going almost forever, and immediately set out to collect the brightest grad students and professors of several disciplines to staff it with Professor Drekin running the entire affair. The DWU got a huge injection of resources right off the bat, which ensured that everyone's jobs were safe for good, appearing to find a whole bunch of security and background checks a price worth paying in exchange. At least no one had complained and a lot of them were looking incredibly happy. That alone made everything worthwhile in her opinion, as did seeing the look on her dad's face.

With DARPA involved, all of a sudden things started happening at a rate that she found hard to believe. Apparently when you had all the money you could work miracles. They'd immediately and amazingly quickly done the conversion work on several of the old DWU facility buildings to upgrade them to working labs and manufacturing areas, helped her dad set up Gravtec and get all the paperwork properly filed so it was a fully legal and operational company, put an entire army of experts on generating patent after patent and pushing them through apparently with the weight of the US government behind them, and so much more. Yes, most of the patents were covered by security restrictions that meant the general public couldn't get access, but they were real patents.

All in the name of Gravtec, without her listed on them, as DARPA seemed to want to keep her off the radar of various people. She was fine with that and she'd been assured that when the time was right she'd be known as the one who was behind the new technology. It seemed a fair deal considering all the benefits she got from it.

The government even spent what must have been a horrendous amount of money fixing up all the roads in the area very quietly without drawing attention to it, blocking off buildings and side alleys, replacing wiring, and generally upgrading a large part of the docks to a level where it was far more functional and safer than it had been in decades. Her father had grumbled that it was a shame it took a miracle to pull that off, but the professor had pointed out that at least they'd got that miracle, which he'd been forced to agree with.

And in the end, here she was, in her own lab that she still had trouble believing was basically hers to do with what she wanted, with a couple of dozen of the brightest people she'd ever met ready and able to help her make anything she came up with, a free hand to come up with whatever she wanted, and a budget that made the Apollo mission look a little underwhelming.

Glancing out the window at the prototype spacecraft she grinned to herself. At some point she was going to make the Apollo mission look like it lacked ambition too…

Yeah, life had taken a distinct turn for the better when she'd managed to make her subspace radio work. She hadn't expected quite this amount of change but it had worked out well so far.

There were so many other things she wanted to learn, and to make. And with Gravtec to commercialize them, DARPA to fund them, and people she trusted to do all the stuff that was beyond her, she could concentrate on those things and leave the rest to people who knew what they were doing.

If only school was this interesting she'd probably get better marks, but it was boring. Compared to what she was doing right now, it was almost lethally boring.

While she'd been ruminating, she'd also been carefully watching the middle monitor. It was displaying, among other things, the output of a number of instruments she'd designed and built that measured the quantum interference level around the frame reference field generators in the test area below her. This was something else that her subspace communications ideas had suggested and when she'd experimented with a prototype system to measure what she liked to think of as background noise in the quantum sea underlying reality itself, she'd found that her gravity widget did some very odd things to it.

She'd pretty much expected that, and it didn't take long to work out that this was the clue as to where the energy required to do what it did was really coming from. Clearly three C cells couldn't provide anywhere within multiple orders of magnitude of the energy required to accelerate something the size and mass of a heavy baseball at 2 g for around 49 hours, or even most likely 49 seconds. Her circuitry wasn't actually directly doing that, she'd always known that. It was more closely analogous to something along the lines of a power MOSFET; a very small amount of energy on the gate terminal could control a vastly larger amount flowing between the source and the drain with high precision. In her machine the batteries she'd used were merely powering the circuitry that was throttling a source of external energy which did all the real work.

The question had always been where exactly that energy came from, or for that matter went to. She'd had a pretty good idea it was something along the lines of vacuum energy, or quantum variance across parallel timelines, which was in a sense another way of restating the same thing. Now she had proof.

In theory this energy well was basically infinite, she thought. It was the next layer below normal space-time, something that some physics theories she'd read had suggested the existence of, but no one had managed to really find convincing evidence of or even a good functional description of. She was pretty close to doing exactly the second and she was already sure she was looking at the first. The signal her equipment measured whenever one of the reference frame systems was in action was very clear and tracked the operation in progress perfectly, although it was still a subtle effect that normal technology wouldn't see at all.

Moving the mouse and clicking on a couple of icons, Taylor watched the playback of the complex waveforms that her monitoring software had produced from the multiple QID units surrounding the test area, then leaned back in her chair and contemplated the screen with a small frown.

She looked over her shoulder to see Brendan and Angus talking in his small side office. She hadn't told either one of them about her subspace radio experiments yet, and wasn't in that much of a hurry to do so. They didn't really need to know and it was kind of her own personal thing at the moment. They had enough to deal with anyway, with Gravtec and now project Hawkflight on the horizon. Her dad knew but he hadn't mentioned it either, for his own reasons.

She'd bring it up eventually. Probably. But she wanted to explore all the other aspects of it she could see but hadn't quite worked out the best way to achieve. That part could stay a private project. Subspace was her own playground for now.

Replaying the recording again, she propped her head on one hand and very carefully scrolled through the data bit by bit, looking at the peaks from the various instrument locations and working out in her head a three dimensional map of how they intersected in real space.

Eventually she saved the file to her private server and started setting up for test run thirty of the prototype spacecraft drive, while wondering exactly why Armsmaster was radiating a very distinctive subspace signal from somewhere around his head.

Had someone else discovered the same thing she had, or was something else going on? The interference signature wasn't the same as her technology produced, but it was clearly related at least loosely, which was… intriguing.

She decided that she'd have to build a portable detector and see what she could find with it. That wouldn't be all that hard with the facilities she now had available.

"Stand by for test run thirty. All personnel are to clear test area immediately. Gravitational shear is expected on this run. Run starts in sixty seconds from mark. Mark." Releasing the talk switch on the console mic as a sixty second countdown started on her center screen, she cleared everything else and prepared for recording and data analysis while behind her the rest of the team got their own equipment ready. Below, several people quickly exited the test bay and one by one checked in as clear. When the last one was out and she'd verified visually that the entire zone was safe, she enabled the dead-man switch and waited for the timer to run down.

Even as the test ran and the prototype calmly lifted up into the air, faint distortions around it showing where the projected reference frame intersected that of everything else, she was designing a better QID in the back of her mind.

Taylor was curious, and she'd seen something that she couldn't explain, so she was damn well going to work out what it was and explain it whether it liked it or not.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Max Anders enjoyed his breakfast under the outdoor heater in the heart of Brockton Bay's commercial district, at a small and exclusive cafe run by and for people of the right type. He, by definition, was of that type of course. While he ate a remarkably good omelet accompanied by an exceedingly good and very expensive cup of Jamaica Blue coffee, he was reading a report that had been emailed to him surrounding the odd goings-on at the Dock Workers Union. That huge ship blithely floating past at a walking pace three days ago had obviously been a message, but he wasn't sure who it was a message to or who it was a message from.

Apparently the PRT weren't completely sure either, which upset them rather a lot. Director Piggot had, according to a couple of low level staff he'd long ago found amenable to slipping him useful information in return for a financial helping hand, spent nearly three hours shouting at Deputy Director Renick in her office that same day, apparently after he'd returned from visiting the site where the ship had ended up. The same sources said he'd looked extremely discomfited, suggesting he'd learned things that he hadn't expected.

That could be good, or it could be bad. In either case Max wanted to know more about the entire thing. The situation in the city had clearly taken a sharp deviation in an unexpected direction and that was always concerning to him, since his long term plans were predicated on knowing as much as possible about the various factions in Brockton Bay. If something critical was different he needed to find out what and decide if it helped or hindered those plans, and in either case how to turn it to his advantage. Preferably by denying it to anyone else, if possible.

Annoyingly it was difficult to get inside information out of the Union. They were a very diverse bunch of bastards who were more stubborn than intelligent or they'd long since have gone somewhere else where there was actual work. He still couldn't figure out how they stayed afloat, aside from sheer bloodymindedness and a focus on helping each other that was both impressive and very irritating. Every attempt to get a covert lever with which to pry information loose had been met with failure, although he'd come close a few times. He didn't want to be more overt in case it alerted either that overgrown slant-eyed lizard, who while an asshole wasn't a complete idiot, the PRT themselves, or possibly someone actually competent like the FBI. The dockworkers might be barely keeping their heads above water with a workforce that was a mere few hundred, a tiny fraction of the twenty or so thousand they'd boasted back in the glory days of the fifties and sixties, but they still had contacts absolutely everywhere and could potentially be quite the handful if prodded in the wrong manner.

Now, though… He flicked a finger up his phone screen, then read the next page as he cut another piece of omelet and put it in his mouth.

Something had definitely happened there in the last couple of months. Rumors of lots of construction work, vehicles coming and going at all hours of the day and night, none of them visiting anywhere else in the city but heading straight to the docks from the interstate; the roads being worked on too, along with discreet but effective clearing up of the entire area… Even the various junkies and low level Merchant scum apparently either being paid to leave the place or forced to.

No, something was, as the saying put it, afoot. Someone was pouring money into that whole place for some reason they were being very quiet about, and he wanted to know who that was and what the reason was.

His informants told him that the Chief Director herself had been calling Director Piggot quite regularly, apparently in an odd mood that was causing considerably difficulty in the local office since the Director when riled tended to bite. And it was widely known that contact with the Chief Director riled her like almost nothing else. Whatever had actually happened to culminate in the extraordinary sight of a vast rusty ship flying across the bay in one of the most spectacular demonstrations of force Max had ever seen, it was definitely causing upset among the authorities.

Perhaps it was time to be a little more forceful in his inquiries. A visit from someone rather more dangerous and persuasive than three or four mooks with guns might shake someone's memory enough to find out what was going on. Brad was too obvious, he never knew when to stop, but perhaps Victor? The man was smart and smooth.

He picked up his coffee and sipped it again, while he read the last page of the report, which hinted at all sorts of things but didn't actually answer any of them. As he pressed the power button to blank the screen someone sat down next to him at the table completely unexpectedly, making him flinch very slightly and turn his head to glare at the interloper.

A red-headed woman with a sharp suit and sharper features regarded him impassively from under a pair of sunglasses. "Good morning, Mr Anders," she said calmly.

"And you are?" he riposted, wondering who the fuck she was and what she wanted. Probably some drug company shill, he got a lot of them.

"Here to give you some advice I suggest you carefully listen to," she replied, her expression completely and eerily blank.

"That almost sounded like you were possibly threatening me," he said after a moment. He was getting an odd feeling about this.

Her mouth, very briefly, twitched into a smile, so quickly it was gone again before he could register it properly.

"That was not a threat, Mr Anders. When I threaten people, they do not mistake it for anything else."

"Who are you?" he snapped, now wondering if she was connected to one of the other gangs. She didn't give off the air of a PRT stooge although anything was possible.

She leaned closer to him, almost uncomfortably close. "Who I am is not something you need to know. Who I represent is."

"And that is?" he asked, leaning away slightly. She was too intense for his comfort, especially from a foot away. Wondering if he was in a position that would force him to use his powers, he tensed slightly.

"Part of the US government that is concerned that your organization may have designs on the Brockton Bay Dock Worker's Union or people connected with them," she replied quietly. "I am here to tell you that this is something you should dismiss from your mind. It doesn't concern you, and if you persist in attempting to learn things you shouldn't be aware of, you will not enjoy the repercussions."

He blinked. "Why would the US government believe that Medhall Pharmaceutical would be interested in the dock worker's union?" he asked with a smile, genuinely wondering for a moment what she was talking about. "We're a biotech research company not a shipping one."

"I was referring to your other organization, Mr Anders," she calmly remarked, her face still completely blank. "The one you are the head of, and inherited from your father after your sister met an untimely end."

Max's blood ran cold. "What are..." he began.

"We know who you are," the woman said in a very low voice, her eyes obscured by the sunglasses but still burning into his own. "We know many, many things about you and your extracurricular activities, and those of your like-minded compatriots." Her head moved closer to his as he listened with shock. "Certain other federal organizations who are tasked with handling the problem such groups as yours present may give a certain amount of flexibility in how this is done for reasons of their own. I can assure you that should you become a problem my group is required to handle, there will be remarkably little flexibility how this is done. Further attempts to in any way interfere with the dock worker's union or anyone connected in any way with them will make you that problem."

Feeling something gently prodding his stomach, he flicked his eyes down, then froze. A suppressed pistol was barely touching his suit, the design unfamiliar to him. Raising his eyes again he stared at her. "If you feel that use of your particular abilities is wise, I would suggest you look up and to your left. Third floor window, second from the right, three hundred yards west of us."

Reluctantly he turned his head in the indicated direction. A faint momentary flicker of red light caught his eye as he moved, making him look down again to see a tiny dot centered right over his heart.

"You will not, directly or indirectly, attempt to interfere with the DWU or any person or organization connected to them. If you do, you will die. Nod if you understand." The suppressor pressed every so slightly harder into his gut.

Swallowing, he nodded slowly. He was all too aware that he'd never be able to form any sort of armor under or over his clothes before she could fire, never mind the sniper.

"You will not mention my presence to any of your group, nor attempt to discover my identity. If you do, you will die. Nod if you understand."

Max nodded again, sweating.

"If any member of your organization in any way causes any form of trouble in the docks, with or without your instruction, you will be held personally responsible and you will die." She put her head right next to his. "Nod if you understand."

Once again, rather jerkily, he nodded.

"Excellent. I'm pleased that we could come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement." He absently noticed that the pressure of the gun had vanished, but was fixated on her face. "Please remember that people with special abilities, with relatively few exceptions, are still subject to the same… ballistic necessities… of the population at large. Should it be required, which I do hope it won't be, we would have little difficulty demonstrating this fact to everyone involved. Please don't force us to prove that. And do remember that we know where you live, we know where you work, we even know the color of your underwear. Blue, with white stripes, for today I believe."

She stood up and nodded politely to him. "It was a pleasure talking to you, Mr Anders. Allow me to cover your tab as I think your omelet has gotten cold." She dropped a fifty dollar bill, brand new, on the table next to his plate. "With any luck we won't meet again. If we do, something has gone wrong and we would prefer that not happen, correct?"

Max nodded one last time, then watched as she walked off. After a few steps, she came back and bent down next to him. "That was a threat." The woman smiled at him with a small flash of teeth. Moments later she'd vanished into the pedestrian traffic heading to work, like she'd never been there.

When his hands stopped shaking he picked his phone up and very carefully deleted the report on it along with all related information, then sent a text to the informant who'd provided it telling him his job was done and he'd be paid that afternoon. Eventually he got up, leaving the bill where it had landed, and walked rapidly in the opposite direction to where the woman, whoever the fuck she'd been, had gone.

He would swear for the rest of his life he could feel a tiny red dot on the back of his neck until he reached his car a couple of blocks away.

By the time he got up to his penthouse he was quite relieved to change his blue and white striped underwear for a fresh pair.