Carefully placing the last tiny component onto the wet solder paste with a very fine pair of tweezers, Taylor examined the circuit board under the stereo microscope she was still highly pleased about. One of the best things about the whole DARPA and university connection was that if she needed a tool or piece of equipment, she got it with no questions asked. In the overall scheme of the total budget that was being thrown at her and Gravtec, pretty much anything she asked for was a rounding error.

So she'd taken full advantage of that to equip her home workshop, which had moved down to the basement as it had outgrown her bedroom, with a smaller version of the more useful stuff in the main facility. No one had seemed bothered about it and Angus had merely smiled, saying that having the facilities to work on ideas at the moment they came to you was a good idea. Sometimes if you waited the inspiration evaporated by the time you got to work, he'd said, which was always a massive nuisance and left you peeved for days.

She could see that very well. And now she had everything she needed to make almost anything she could conceive of, including a tiny little benchtop multi-axis CNC milling machine very similar to the one at the DARPA lab they'd visited, along with a small but very good vapor phase solder reflow oven, the microscope which she loved, a cutting edge machine for turning out prototype PCBs in very little time, and several other incredibly useful tools. Not to mention stocks of absolutely anything she was ever likely to need from components to wire, bar, and sheet material in at least a dozen different metals including pure gold.

There was little she couldn't build at least a prototype of, and she was very pleased about that. It hadn't taken her all that long to learn how to use the various CAD programs needed to run all the equipment, although she was certainly aware that really becoming an expert at them would take quite a while. But it was good enough for now and opened up all manner of useful avenues of research.

Very carefully, having checked that nothing was in the way, Taylor picked the assembled but not yet soldered PCB up on the carrying frame, then moved a few feet to the side and slid it into the holder on the reflow oven. Once it was secure and she'd double-checked nothing had been disturbed, she lowered it into position and closed the lid, then tapped the control to run the correct soldering profile. Watching as the indicators showed the horribly expensive synthetic liquid that was in the bottom of the tank under the board heating up, she waited while thinking about the latest alien lessons she'd been watching.

Her far distant tutors were just starting to touch on some concepts she'd derived for herself from the earlier equations, the ones that led her to her ideas of subspace, but they seemed to be taking it in a slightly different direction than she had. It was something that slightly puzzled her, making her wonder if she'd accidentally done it wrong and ended up somewhere that wasn't quite correct and only worked by a fluke, or whether she'd genuinely seen a different end point which was just as valid only not identical. Sooner or later she'd likely find out, of course, when the lesson program got that far.

If she had come up with a unique interpretation of the principles she was learning, it would rather please her, but it also made her wish she could tell her benefactors about it. She'd become quite fond of the aliens, who had opened up so many paths for her and through her everyone else, and at times was sad that she wasn't able to speak to them.

Yet.

She did have ideas toward that goal, but it was still something that was in the early stages, and there were too many other things that seemed to take priority at the moment. In theory making the subspace receiver a subspace transceiver wasn't hugely difficult, but there were some practical concerns that needed to be addressed first, and she wanted to build an entirely new system, rather than modify her first versions. This current project, although it wasn't directly connected to such an end result, was related in a number of ways and would help her down that path in due course. She was in no vast hurry right now.

And, of course, there was the minor problem of actually being able to understand them and they her if and when she managed the feat. She had a very good working knowledge of their mathematics now, of course, but then that part was likely to be much easier than learning an entirely alien language. Even so she was sure she could do it eventually.

Idly reaching over the bench and prodding a button on another piece of equipment, she listened to the strange sounds of people who had evolved around another star somewhere in the universe talking. She'd had a sudden burst of insight four days ago at two AM and had immediately, though very quietly to avoid waking her father, run down to the basement and written a significant amount of code, then reworked part of her receiver, finally finishing at seven in the morning. When she'd tweaked the entire thing about a dozen times she had been excessively pleased to find that she had indeed successfully decoded the sound subcarrier that was buried in the signal she was receiving and converted it into something she could listen to.

Of course she didn't understand a word of it yet, but at least she could now hear it, and that was the first step.

Turning the sound track down to a background noise that was oddly comforting, she peered into the reflow oven, seeing that the line of rising very hot vapor that was shimmering above the now-boiling liquid in the tank was nearly at the PCB on its carrier. As she watched, the wavy distortion rose above the board, immediately condensing onto it and releasing the latent heat into the relatively colder plastic and metal, then running off back into the pool at the bottom. The board heated up evenly and only seconds later the solder began to melt, all the minute parts being pulled into line by the surface tension of the molten metal in a little dance she never tired of watching.

Shortly thereafter the machine beeped and started the cooldown phase. Satisfied that nothing had gone amiss, she went back to her desk and sat in front of her heavily modified former ham radio, making a few notes on the project before reaching for the tuning controls having put her headphones on. While she had only so far managed to discover one intelligible signal lurking in subspace, she was well aware that there were a lot more things out there that she could hear, and was very curious to know what they were and where they came from. So every now and then she poked around looking for something interesting and noted where it was for future study.

Subspace was even more complex than the electromagnetic spectrum, of course, and Taylor knew full well that she could spend her entire life studying it and only scratch the surface, but she was a curious girl and patient too, so that didn't seem like a bad thing to her.

Carefully adjusting one of the controls, she cocked her head and listened to the weird warbling moan coming from her headphones, concentrating entirely on the sound to the exclusion of everything else. She didn't hear the reflow unit beep again and shut down, just sat there and let the sound flow through her with her eyes shut while making tiny modifications to a dozen controls with the practiced hand of someone who knew their equipment inside out. Eventually she nodded slightly, opened her eyes, and wrote down all the settings very carefully, double checking that she hadn't made a mistake.

"I'm sure that's a video signal," she mumbled, putting one hand on her left headphone cup and pressing it slightly. "But there's something weird about the modulation. Might be a multiphase digital carrier, but if it is it's really low bandwidth..." She made a few more notes, tapping the pencil on her lips while she thought, then shrugged. "I'll come back to that later."

She turned to another setup, which had her very original subspace converter attached to another radio receiver she'd modified specifically for the job and dedicated to the alien learning channel as she thought of it. .Checking the time, she ensured that it was recording properly as the next physics lesson was due in about ten minutes. She'd worked out that the originators of the transmission seemed to operate on something close to a thirty hour cycle, which might well mean that was the length of their day.

She now had hundreds of hours of video recorded, including not only the physics program she'd initially found, but a number of other learning series including biology, basic math, which had helped her at the beginning to work out the differences between what she was familiar with and what they were using, chemistry, and several engineering subjects. This particular station, if that was the right term, didn't seem to deal with things like linguistics or anything of that nature, being dedicated to harder sciences, which was mildly annoying in some ways but not at all in others. She was more interested in the harder sciences anyway.

And she was sure she'd eventually locate other stations that she could learn other things from. There were an awful lot of transmissions out there after all. Luckily the one she was most interested in and could gain the most benefit from had turned out to be the easiest to get access too. It seemed likely to her that this was deliberate, since you'd want your distance learning system to be simple to use, surely?

Happy that she wouldn't miss the next bit, she got up and went back to the soldering oven, removing the now room-temperature finished PCB from it and inspecting it under the bright light over the workbench, tilting it from side to side in an effort to spot any obvious errors. Not finding anything amiss, she slipped it under the microscope, set the magnification to the right level, and spent the next twenty minutes very carefully studying every component and pad on the board for problems. Twice she had to use an extremely fine-tipped soldering iron to clear tiny shorts where solder paste had formed bridges between adjacent legs of a part, but overall it was pretty close to perfect. Finally satisfied, she pushed the head of the microscope to the side and picked up the probes of a test meter, before checking all the power supply lines for shorts or unusual resistances.

She didn't want to miss something obvious and wreck several hours work by incautiously applying power to something that would immediately convert it into smoke. That was always a pain, although everyone did it at least once.

When all the pre-checks came back as correct, she nodded, then connected the board to the bench power supply, set it to the right voltage and current, and with fingers crossed just in case turned it on. The power supply display showed a short surge of current then settled down to exactly the right level, making her smile.

"So far, so good," she muttered to herself, prodding a few test points in the circuit with the probe of her oscilloscope and watching the traces change. "Waveform reconstruction is fine, subcarrier demodulation is… basically good, I think. Phase correction error output is working… yeah, that's right. Great." Picking up a tiny ceramic screwdriver with her other hand while holding the probe on one particular point, she very gently tuned a small and oddly-shaped inductor core she'd machined herself, watching as the widely spaced gold wire started glowing a faint blue-green color while the waveform took on the right shape on the scope screen. "And the subspace resonance deconstructor cavity is coming into alignment… fantastic… little more… little more… ack! Too far!"

The remarkably deep hum that surrounded her made things on the bench rattle until she tweaked the core back just a fraction of a turn, then it stopped instantly. "Whoops. Nearly went into destructive oscillation then," she mumbled, putting the screwdriver down and checking her readings one final time, then sitting back and smiling. "But it works. Excellent."

The small and highly complex circuit board on the bench, covered in parts almost too small to see by eye surrounding a couple of extremely complex glittering pieces of CNC machined metal, emitted a cheery glow from the middle but otherwise didn't appear to be doing anything. She knew otherwise, though. It was busily detecting and monitoring quantum variance interference patterns in subspace, and with the correct processing hooked into it, would allow much more precise measurements of things that her current version didn't quite handle in the way she desired. And it was much more portable than the existing systems, which was something she'd spent a considerable amount of thought on.

Pleased, she turned the bench power unit off, disconnected the board, and opened one of the drawers under the workbench. Taking a box out of it she opened it to reveal a used but still functional high end smartphone, one that was sold specifically for use in marine and heavy industrial applications. It didn't bother with the niceties of a consumer one, such as being wafer thin and all shiny, this thing was a solid matte-black rubberized device close to three quarters of an inch thick, was waterproof to at least sixty feet, could be operated with gloves on, and overall gave the impression you could beat someone to death with it then phone the cops afterwards. And from her point of view it was ideal as the battery compartment was enormous, which meant that by fitting a slightly smaller battery she could get some extra circuitry inside the case and use the phone itself as a nice little portable computer with a good screen.

An hour later she'd eviscerated the phone, removing the huge battery and installing her board where it had been using the internal test connection points on the phone motherboard and some very fine wire. When it was all screwed in place and the connections potted in epoxy to stop anything breaking, she dug out a collection of lithium batteries and chose one that would fit into the remaining space, connected it as well, and screwed the back cover on again. Turning the phone on, she checked it still worked, then plugged it into her computer and transferred the application she'd been writing on and off for nearly a month over to it.

It took another three hours and half a dozen bug-fixes and recompilations but in the end she got the program to do what she wanted it to. Tapping the screen she looked at the graph the app was drawing, while turning in a circle in the middle of the basement. "Hmm. That is interesting," she said quietly, studying the map of subspace interference nodal points her new sensor board was detecting. "Range is… about seven thousand meters to that cluster, bearing… 164 degrees near enough. Which would put it right in the middle of the..."

Taylor stopped dead, then very slowly moved the subspace interference detector back and forth, noting the readings shifting. After a moment she looked at the wall in the direction it was pointing, her brow furrowed, before she went back to her workbench and sat in front of the computer, the device next to her. Bringing up a mapping program, she zoomed in on her house, set it as the home position, then typed in the range and bearing her device was showing.

She stared at the result with great interest.

"Huh," she commented, before picking the thing up again and repeating the scan very carefully indeed, noting every reading she got in her notebook and double checking them all. Each of them was entered into the mapping program too, the resulting image causing her to frown thoughtfully.

"Now that is very peculiar," she said to no-one. Only the low volume alien voices in the background replied.

After some minutes, she saved her work into an encrypted partition on her drive, using a long passphrase specific to this project, cleared the cache just in case, and turned the computer off. Putting her modified phone into her pocket, the app exited and the device working now as only a phone, she went up for dinner.

While thinking very hard about quite a number of things.

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

"I'm telling you, there's nothing we can do," Mike said, looking around the table. "Believe me, I've checked. Gravtec is entirely on the up and up, they have a level of backing from DARPA and several other departments of the federal government that has to be seen to be believed, and as far as anything I can find out says they genuinely don't have anything related to Parahumans in their technology or business in general. I talked to every contact I have and they all told me the same thing. And warned me that PRT interference in Gravtec or anyone connected to Gravtec, their employees, Brockton Bay University, the Dock Worker's Union, or anyone else who could even loosely be considered involved would be met with… let's call it significant disapproval and leave it there."

He spread his hands. "I've spent a solid week checking, and they're untouchable. Even if they did have a Parahuman on staff I doubt we could do anything about it, but I'm completely certain that they simply don't. Whoever it is that invented their gravitational control technology did it without any Tinker involvement at all. It's completely reproducible, fully understood, and from what my contacts tell me a breakthrough in a number of scientific fields that totally upends not only physics but cosmology and at least half a dozen other disciplines. And at least one of them said was guaranteed to produce a Nobel award for the genius behind it. He meant it too."

"I concur, Director," Armsmaster said when he'd finished, causing everyone to look at him now. "I've acquired the relevant patents for the current Gravtec technology, which wasn't easy as they are classified to a very high level, but my security clearance together with Professor Drekin's aid sufficed to allow me to gain access. In conjunction with the paper he showed me during our visit, it's very clear that all their technology is as Deputy Director Renick stated far past cutting edge but entirely understandable. It is definitely not Tinker Tech, and if anything may well open up avenues to allow Tinker Tech to eventually be understood. The ramifications of this new insight is… profound."

He shook his head in what almost looked like awe. "The mind that came up with this is beyond outstanding, I can assure you. As Professor Drekin said, a true polymath, which is vanishingly rare but does happen occasionally. I would dearly like to meet this person at some point. But we have no reason to believe they are a Parahuman, and have been assured by Professor Drekin, Doctor Calhoun from DARPA, and a number of other sources that this is definitely not the case. Unless we are to assume that all these sources are either incorrect or deliberately lying, this entire matter is out of our jurisdiction."

Emily Piggot, who had spent nearly the entire time since the ship had given her one of the worst shocks of her life by blithely floating past her office like a Macy's balloon looking like she'd just bitten into a particularly sour lemon, glared at both of them. "You're completely certain of this?" she finally snapped.

Mike looked at Armsmaster, the Tinker meeting his eyes with an expression of resignation, then looked back to her. "Yes, we are, Emily. It's out of our hands, and if we persist in trying to make it our business, I'm fairly certain that there are people who will take exception to that. We most likely don't want the sort of trouble they could bring."

She studied them, then peered at her own notes, flipping pages a couple of times, before picking up one of the tablets at her elbow and flicking her finger over the screen. Eventually she put it down and gently massaged her eyelids with her fingertips. "I hate this city so much..." she growled under her breath. "Fine. If anything, that's a goddamn relief. We have more than enough to worry about without some Tinker superscience company setting up on our patch."

"All we have is mundane superscience," Assault quipped. She opened one eye and fixed it on him, making him pale a little and shut up with alacrity.

"Indeed. Which is still somewhat worrying, but at least it's not Parahuman crap. I've got far more than enough of that to deal with." She took a deep breath then let it out slowly. "So I can report to the Chief Director that this is out of our hands, and if she's so keen on finding out more, she should talk to DARPA, rather than annoying me any more. Good." She closed her notebook and put the pen on the cover. "I just hope that none of the usual suspects get the bright idea to go help themselves to some hypertech. Somehow I can't see that ending very happily for them."

She almost looked anticipatory at the comment. Mike shivered a little, remembering what General Calhoun had said.

"I very much hope it doesn't come to that," he commented.

"So do I, but you know this place. We'll find out sooner or later." There was a momentary pause, then she picked up another tablet and tapped the screen. "Next item; The Parahuman known as Circus and a missing and extremely valuable statue. One that weighed nearly four tons. Ideas?"

Shortly they were involved in the normal run of the mill super-villain problems and Mike relaxed a little, hoping that Gravtec and all the weirdness in the Docks would stay well away from him.