All Guns Blazing, pt 3
Way Hey, Up She Rises.
DISCLAIMER: Yamato and Worm are not my property at all. I'm just trying to come up with something amusing.
* January 5, 2011 *
* Taylor PoV *
Going to school was strange.
People giving me thumb's up, nodding, generally treating me in a manner unlike anything I'd seen of high school in the past year and a half?
Yeah, very weird.
Principal Blackwell was not present apparently. The Vice Principal, Mrs Blake, was nowhere to be seen. That part was normal, and there were rumors that the woman had vanished years ago and ended up with the concrete boots somewhere in the bay.
The secretary had no time for me, only informing me that I was suspended for the next week.
Which suited me just fine actually. Wasn't like I was welcome here.
More time to work on things.
So much to do and not enough resources to do it all.
I had to squeeze around a crowd at one of the doors, not sure what to make of the lack of insults directed at me.
* PRT ENE HQ *
"Tracker placed when she was bumped up against in the school hallway."
"Good. We're just looking for evidence she triggered, unless she outs Stalker anything else she does is none of our business."
"Stalker outed herself."
"Not our concern. Until we get orders otherwise at least."
"Seems odd though. Against some of them rules."
* Dockworker Union Hiring Office *
Danny Hebert listened, fighting down the rage within him. "Alan? You made your point. Pursue this and you'll bankrupt us with court costs. You'll defend your daughter with everything you have. Got it. You also don't want to get Emma the help she needs, otherwise she wouldn't have turned on the best friend she grew up with. Got that as well. I would strongly suggest you stop threatening me though. I'm saying this quite calmly because I know damn well you're recording this because you've bragged about this sort of thing before. Catching someone with an illegal recording that the jury is ordered to ignore, except it isn't that easy for a jury to actually ignore things. Yes, I remember you saying things like that. Given overnight to think about it, I remember all sorts of times you bragged about such things. No, that is not a threat. You know me well enough, I don't threat."
Danny Hebert sounded completely calm after listening to Alan Barnes for a bit. "Alan? Don't bother. You're a divorce attorney. I have no doubt you are very very good as a divorce attorney. I'll keep all that in mind. Goodbye Alan."
After hanging up, Danny Hebert turned off his own recorder. Oh yes, he remembered some of the times they'd gotten the families together and Alan had talked extensively of how he'd wrecked people's lives - the recording trick among them. That was something Taylor didn't do, which was to lower herself to the level of her attackers. He was quite a bit more pragmatic about such things himself.
Lowering himself to the level of a lawyer? Oh, he could go lower than that. If Alan decided to go after Taylor, well, that would be his problem wouldn't it?
* Taylor *
The first thing to do was go home. The second thing to do was sit on the couch, lean back, and make contact with a certain ship.
"Decision?" asked Yamato as Taylor opened her eyes again to find herself seated in that futuristic bridge.
"Yes, I need to be a hero," said Taylor.
"Understood," said Yamato. "We can start with the medical portion. That will give you the upgrades necessary for the rest."
"I'm physically here then?" asked Taylor. "How does that work?"
"It's power intensive," said Yamato. "Fortunately, I have power. Administrator has the connections to use and together we worked out the basics of the process."
"What's involved with this?" asked Taylor as Yamato led her into the ship.
"We go to the medbay, where you get a series of timed injections. It'll take about four hours to perform, and then you'll go home. It'll take about a week for the process to run its course. Keep in mind you'll be eating about four times what you normally would. About 3% of all people undergoing the process run a slight fever during that week. Don't go having an MRI or other medical procedures during the week, as you'll get some very strange results."
"What exactly does it do? Increased strength?" asked Taylor.
"The basic package was originally cybernetic limbs but there were problems with that, the bio-enhancement series was developed to overcome some of the problems there such as having to replace more and more of the body to deal with the strain of the bionic parts." Yamato led her down a set of stairs. "It starts with frame reinforcement, so the musculo-skeletal structure and ligaments and tendons. After that, muscles and other connective tissues. Neural enhancements were perfected and added to the standard package in 2312. So - tougher, stronger, faster, in that order."
"Not smarter?" asked Taylor.
"Not immediately," stated Yamato. "Results vary with the most common results at 68% with increased ability to remember relevant information. If everything works the way it should, upgrading to Officer level upgrades would normally be after a year to allow for you to get fully adapted to the changes. I'm not sure we have that amount of time though."
"Why?" asked Taylor as they entered a Sick Bay that looked to be somewhere between what you'd expect on an old sea-going ship and a Star Trek sickbay.
"Administrator has given me a lot of data to go over," admitted Yamato. "I will have to correlate with data from your world when I have better access to it."
"Who IS Administrator?" asked Taylor.
"Administrator would properly be considered your power actually," said Yamato. "Now if you'll lay down. I'll begin. If you want to put that headset on, it will use a virtual reality training environment for basic exercises and combat skills."
* PRT ENE HQ *
"She went home and vanished at oh-nine-thirty-seven."
"Check back periodically. Most likely, especially if she's some kind of Thinker, she found the tracker. Which kind was used?"
"Tinkertech tracker, encoded pulse at random times, size of a grain of rice and has a camouflage function to change color to match the object it's covering."
"You could just say 'a Type VI GPS tracker' you know."
"Hope she didn't destroy it. Armsmaster doesn't like making more of the things."
"He just doesn't like the waste of time to try mass producing the things. It's not efficient or something."
* Taylor *
"owie," groaned Taylor as consciousness slowly made its presence known.
"Easy. The process has just begun, but so far everything is within predicted readings."
Taylor's eyes fluttered open, came back with "too damn bright" and closed again. "I repeat. Owie."
"I'll help you sit up, here we go. There, that should be better," said Yamato's voice.
"What all was this supposed to do again?" asked Taylor.
"The bio-enhancement soldier series was begun after 2300," explained Yamato. "Metabolic boosters, telomere degradation inhibitors, regenerative tissue accelerators. Starts with enhancing your gastrointestinal system though that's just to fuel everything else, proceeds with the musculo-skeletal system, immune response... you're not really listening are you?"
"Mmmm. Sort of," admitted Taylor, opening her eyes and seeing things a little better at this point.
"Heightened senses, accelerated healing, stronger, faster, more endurance, the sort of things you'd expect a highly advanced civilization to want for their soldiers. Some of it back-engineered from Gatlantis, or the Comet Empire if you go with their more popular name, and some from surviving Iskandarian bio-tech, some Akerian medical technology, and tweaked or improved on over the years," Yamato said as she peered into her eyes and checked ears and manually took a pulse in order to confirm the readings from the holographic display. "No unpleasant reactions or developments. Everything within normal tolerances. How do you feel?"
"Hungry," admitted Taylor. "Sore. Thirsty. Tired. Aching in places I didn't know I had."
"Believe it or not, that's good," said Yamato. "I've also worked out something else that will make all of our lives easier."
"What's that?" asked Taylor.
"Administrator can use her connection to you to allow you to open micro-gates to me," said Yamato. "That gives you a very nice set of abilities to bring out when you need them. Especially if you need to utterly obliterate something down to its component atoms. Which is always good to have as an option."
"Hmmm," said Taylor, mulling that over.
"By the way," said Yamato. "Were you aware you were being tracked?"
* Dragon *
She had many duties, many activities, and while she was very good at multi-tasking, she had her limits.
The public self-outing of Shadow Stalker had brought her attention to the situation and warrants had been obtained so she casually went through everything she had appropriate permissions for. She found a lot.
Just Sophia's PRT phone and her personal phone (which monthly use fees had been paid for by the PRT) had records on it which the girl had deleted but were still there if you knew how to look.
Dragon, of course, knew exactly how to look.
Dragon also knew exactly where to send the information. She received an acknowledgement from Deputy Director Renick and Director Piggot within a ten minute period.
Of much less high priority but personal curiosity, she attempted to find where the tracker for Taylor Hebert was. She found it suddenly responding to a ping on the rooftop of Waffleburger with a note that had a simple message. "Nice try."
So Taylor Hebert had found it and set it aside.
Taylor Hebert herself was in that particular fast-food establishment at what her drone identified as 13:52 while in the process of eating a loaded fries with the remains of a "Chicken & Waffles" special sitting next to her. And a Mint Chocolate Chip milkshake.
Repressing a shudder at the calorie count and lack of nutritional value, Dragon decided that was enough of spying on the girl. Some people ate to get over trauma, finding comfort in food and some would definitely count that sort of thing as comfort food.
That was enough, she wasn't entirely comfortable in the spying despite whatever reasons were given for it.
Oh, and there was a comment from Void Cowboy that would get him at least a week ban. That had to be done too.
But at least that part was quickly and easily done.
* Yamato *
"What if we did this and this, twisting it like so?" asked Yamato.
Queen Administrator considered that, then sent back a set of queries.
"I have a Wave Motion Engine, backup Yoyodyne Fusion Generators, and I can build and launch solar satellites if it came to that," Yamato assured her co-conspirator. "Power considerations are among the least concerning ones at the moment."
There was a pause as Queen Administrator crunched the numbers and double-checked Yamato's math. A query was sent.
"I admit that I'm not used to 5th-dimensional math, but so far it looks like it will work and I can easily cover it."
Queen Administrator brought up a concern.
"Because having an Inventory function connected to a storage unit will be very handy for her in the short term. And possibly in the long term."