"OK, I need about forty feet of half inch copper pipe, a couple of dozen elbow joints, six t-joints, at least four valves, and two of… Ah, these buckets will work. Are they stainless steel?" Taylor picked one of the mentioned buckets off the shelf in the storage room around the back of the main vehicle workshop and inspected it, tapping it with a finger. "Looks like it."
"Yeah, those are stainless," Kurt nodded. "We need them for salt water work, galvanized corrodes too fast." He looked at the list she had on a clipboard, then pulled the top sheet free and handed the rest back to her. "I can find these parts, you two can dig up the rest. Copper wire is down that corridor, left side. Spark plugs should be on the next one, several boxes on the bottom shelf."
"Great. What do we do about the inanimate carbon rods?"
"If it doesn't matter if they have a copper coating, we've got boxes full of carbon arc torch electrodes around here somewhere. We don't use them much these days but we used to years back."
Taylor smiled. "That will save time, actually. I was going to have to copper plate them or something anyway, so if they've got the copper on already that's a bonus."
"I'll dig some up. How many do you want?"
"A dozen?"
"Sure, no problem."
Lisa was now looking over Taylor's shoulder at the remaining items on her list. "Titanium wire? Is that something you'll have?"
"Sure, TIG filler rod for some of the more exotic welding." Kurt nodded. "Got at least a hundred pounds of the stuff, and all sorts of other alloys for that matter." He leaned over to have a look, then added, "Tungsten rods are easy too, same reason. TIG electrodes. And tungsten carbide will be simple, that's milling tool blanks. Down that way, about twenty feet on the right." He waved a hand to the side. "About the only thing on the list that's a mite tricky is silver. Might have to go to a jeweler or something."
"We'll deal with that once we get the rest of this," Taylor replied, nodding as she jotted down some notes on the list. Handing Lisa one of the stainless buckets, she took the other one, and both of them headed off deeper into the maze-like storeroom, which was more accurately a whole series of rooms that had all manner of strange passageways and stairs connecting them. Like the vehicle workshop, this place had been growing and changing for well over a century now and was so complicated hardly anyone really knew their way around completely. Taylor had gotten lost in here several times when she was younger and spent hours wandering around trying to find her way out until her dad or someone else located her.
It had been a lot of fun most of the time, even if a little scary, as she knew that someone would rescue her sooner or later and in the meantime she could explore all the weird and wonderful stuff that had been accumulating all around for many, many decades. From ancient ship's figureheads through more tools than anyone would think plausible right up to an actual korean-war vintage deck gun from a warship, it was all in here somewhere.
So it was a logical place to look for the parts she needed for her spin on Papa's gnurr-crystal growing device. And it meant that she didn't need to run the probably minor but still non-zero risk of buying the bits and pieces from a hardware store and managing to attract attention she didn't want. Not to mention it would save some money and recycle old odds and ends, which was very in keeping with how Papa had worked, in her view.
The two girls wandered down the first corridor, ducking under huge skeins of hemp rope hanging from shelves and avoiding old boxes and other clutter, Lisa looking around with great interest as Taylor kept an eye out for anything useful that caught her attention. Behind them, Kurt's tuneless whistling faded into the distance as he went in the other direction.
"Wow. This is like that bit at the end of Raiders only bigger with more crap in it," Lisa commented, picking up a dully-gleaming ancient-looking and oddly large pocket watch or something of that nature and inspecting it, before she put it back on the small wooden crate it had been sitting on.
Taylor chuckled. "Yeah, the Union never seems to throw anything away. As far as I know they've kept almost everything since day one, just sticking it in here somewhere in case it comes in handy in the end. Which it often does, of course. Especially when you're trying to repair some piece of machinery no one's made since before the war."
"Which one?" her friend asked wryly, picking up what Taylor eventually tentatively identified as a musket barrel, badly bent and looking like it had been used as a prybar at one point. "Civil, or Revolutionary?"
She snorted with laughter. "Any of them, most likely. Brockton is an old city and this place has been here since it was founded one way or another."
"I bet a museum would love some of this crap," the other girl commented, putting the old and destroyed weapon back and resuming walking.
"Maybe. Maybe not. But for now, it's just useful parts." Looking around, Taylor finally pointed. "Aha. Copper wire."
"Miles of it," Lisa agreed as they stopped. Kneeling down, she picked up a small reel of wire in each hand, looking at them. "What sort of wire do you need?"
"Something about sixteen gauge or so, preferably without insulation," Taylor replied, squatting down next to her. "About two hundred feet of it."
"This do?" Lisa handed her a reel weighing a couple of pounds, mostly full of brown-enameled wire. "Transformer winding wire, my power says."
"Perfect," Taylor smiled, taking it and pulling a little off the reel to examine. "Just right. OK, that'll do nicely, and this is also useful." She snagged another somewhat larger albeit almost empty reel with some considerably thicker silvery wire on it. "Tin plated, I think," she commented, reading the faded paper label that was just about to fall off the old wooden reel. Both went into her bucket. They got up and resumed walking to find the next item.
Half an hour later both their buckets were full for the second time, the first load having disappeared into Taylor's storage space, and they had found almost everything required. As well as a few things that caught one or the other's eye just out of interest. Lisa was wearing an old tricorn hat at a jaunty angle, having taken a liking to it on the spot, which had made Taylor laugh. She herself was inspecting an old theodolite which she'd found in a battered wooden case having nearly tripped over the thing while looking up at the shelves. It was suggesting to her Papa-sense that it might come in handy at some point, so in the end she stored it away as well.
"Taylor?" Kurt's voice echoed down the corridor from some distance away. "Where the hell did you two get to?"
"Over here, Kurt," she called back, getting an acknowledgment quickly followed by the man himself, who was lugging a large metal toolbox under one arm and carrying half a dozen lengths of the required copper pipe in the other hand.
"Found everything you needed?" he queried as he approached.
"I think so, yeah," she replied happily. "Even found some actual silver wire, amazingly enough." Producing the small reel from nowhere she held it out. He looked at it with a raised eyebrow. The wooden reel was absolutely ancient and the wire itself rather blackened, but Lisa's power had insisted it was nearly pure silver under the tarnish.
"Wonder where that came from?" he commented curiously. "I don't recognize it."
"It was buried in a whole pile of random old crap in a box right at the back of a shelf way down there," Lisa said, pointing off into the dimly lit distance. "I think it might have been some sort of workshop contents or something? There were all sorts of tools with it, which looked like they were at least a hundred years old."
"Huh. Possible, I guess. The Union's inherited all sorts of weird shit over the years, from smaller places that went under and that sort of thing," he responded with a nod after a moment. "You wouldn't believe some of the things lying around in here. Silver wire's not that strange all things considered. Bit of good luck finding it though."
"Yeah, I was looking around and saw something that looked interesting, but Lisa identified it," Taylor admitted. "I took a few of the tools too, if that's OK. Like Papa's stuff but a lot more beaten up. I wanted to practice with them and not risk breaking his things."
Kurt grinned at her. "Don't worry, Taylor, help yourself. No one has the faintest clue what all is really in here, and we won't miss some random tools. We've got way more than we'll ever use, and if they were sitting there for fifty years or whatever they're not exactly important."
"Thanks, Kurt," she smiled back.
Glancing at the stuff he was carrying, she vanished it, which made him twitch in shock, then laugh. "Jesus, that will never get anything other than fucking bizarre," he complained mildly, lowering his arms which were in a strange position now there was nothing in them.
Chuckling, she shrugged, then they headed towards the exit. "You can build your thing in that old storage place next to the power room if you want," he offered as they walked. "You know where that is?"
"On the left past the last depot entrance, and down the side corridor?" she replied after a moment's thought. He nodded.
"That's the one." He handed her a key, which she took. "Danny's got the other one, he's fine with it. No one's used that for years and it should be big enough. Decently secure too, the door's about two inches thick. Used to store gas cylinders in it so it's reinforced construction. We moved them to a larger room on the other side of the depot about six years ago and it's been empty ever since, aside from a lot of shelving. I checked, the lights and power work, and I got a couple of the guys to sweep up all the dead insects and rats."
He smirked a bit at her expression and Lisa laughed. "Clean enough for your project, hopefully."
"It should do, thanks," she replied, smiling back.
Soon the trio were inspecting the twenty-foot-square brick room, which was indeed empty aside from shelves around three sides, and a metal table pushed up against them at the back. She walked over and looked at it, then tapped it with her hand. "Solid enough, may as well use it," she noted. Taylor quickly removed all the things she'd stored away, putting the shelves to good use, and within a couple of minutes there was a surprisingly large amount of odds and ends neatly stacked up. She looked around with satisfaction.
"Now all we need to do is actually make it."
"What is 'it'?" Kurt asked with interest. She produced a notebook and opened it to a page about halfway through, then put it on the table, all three gathering around as she started to explain her take on Papa's invention for growing dimensionally transcendent crystals from common household materials. Both Kurt and Lisa listened with interest.
"I have some… perplexing… new information, Director," Armsmaster said after he closed the door to Emily's office behind him.
"About?" she queried, putting down the pen she'd been using and folding her hands in front of her as she devoted her entire attention to the Tinker, who was out of costume for once and looked tired. She indicated a chair with a wave of a hand and he sat down somewhat gratefully.
"Calvert. Or at least, his operations."
"Ah." She felt a sinking sensation. Not a hair of the damned man had been seen for several days, and while they'd made some serious inroads into rolling up his assets during which all manner of things that alternately horrified and infuriated her had come to light, there was as of yet no sign at all of where he was hiding. She was now expecting that the man in front of her was about to tell her than he'd found out that Calvert had somehow made good his escape. Which was not even slightly something she was pleased about.
Emily very much wanted to get her hands on her old colleague and personally express her deep irritation with his actions over the last decade or so.
Very much indeed.
Which was proving to be something of a problem, of course.
"You found how he got away?"
"No." Armsmaster shook his head, leaving her feeling somewhat puzzled. "As yet there is no evidence that he did get away. There's no evidence he's still in the city either, granted, but all the data I can locate has no indication that he managed to leave. MY suspicion is still that he's holed up somewhere fairly close by, although I have no idea where."
"Well, that's something at least." She leaned back in her chair as she regarded him. "What did you find?"
"Something rather puzzling," he said. "Dragon and I have been using all the information we were able to glean about Calvert's network and financial arrangements in an attempt to locate any resources he might be able to draw on. Both to preemptively prevent that happening, and as a method of deriving information on the extent of his influence over our systems and anyone else's."
"I recall your last report on the subject. What's the result?"
"As I said, puzzling." He looked somewhat annoyed. "It appears that someone else has beaten us to it in quite a number of places."
She raised an eyebrow. "Calvert himself?"
"Almost certainly not, no. As far as Dragon can determine someone has been systematically working their way through his accounts in a manner that doesn't match any historical records we have of his operational patterns, based on the data we were able to acquire once the warrants were granted. However, they clearly haven't been hacking his accounts, whoever it is must have access to his account information, passwords, and other verification details, since they have penetrated every account we can locate and transferred the contents elsewhere. All of this has happened within the last few days, starting approximately twenty hours after Calvert himself appears to have gone dark."
Emily stared at him in silence for a few seconds. "That raises a lot of questions," she eventually commented.
"Indeed. Is this someone working on Calvert's behalf, for example. Dragon and I both believe the answer to that is probably no. It's hard to quickly explain but the overall pattern suggests the perpetrator is working against Calvert's interests. Whoever is behind this also seems to be exceptionally good at covering their tracks, to a level that is almost certainly the result of either years of experience, a Parahuman ability, or both. The money has been moved through such a complex series of routes that even Dragon has lost track of it, which is… extremely impressive. She is enormously good at tracing such actions. For someone else to be able to avoid her efforts so effectively is almost unprecedented."
"I see." Emily nodded slowly as she thought. "It almost sounds like another agency is involved. That sort of operational security is unusual in the extreme."
"The thought had occurred to me, Director," he nodded, looking rather miffed. "A federal agency would have the resources to do what we've observed, which is a highly esoteric and specialized skill set. However, I have been unable to prove this, or even determine a likely perpetrator."
"A villain group, perhaps?"
"Possible as well, but there are relatively few with the level of skill required to do what we've noticed so seamlessly and easily. Perhaps the Elite, possibly one or two overseas groups, and there are a small number of other groups that conceivably could either have or purchase the skills needed, but it's almost impossible to determine with any accuracy. And even if this is the case, it then raises the question of how did they even know about Calvert to begin with? We didn't know about him and he was operating under out noses for close to a decade. He was very good at avoiding discovery or we'd have stopped him years ago."
The man shrugged a little. "To be honest a government agency, either one of ours or more irritatingly some else's, is the less unlikely option in my view. Dragon agrees. But so far it's proving impossible to determine one way or the other. All we can be sure of is that someone has managed to make a remarkable amount of money simply vanish, and if and when Calvert emerges he's going to find himself destitute."
"I can't bring myself to feel all that upset on his behalf," Emily replied with a certain sense of vicious amusement. By the look on his face Armsmaster was thinking much the same.
"There is a degree of humor in the situation, I agree, Director," he replied calmly. "However that aside it concerns me that we are unable to determine who or what is behind the whole situation. And we are no closer to locating Calvert himself."
She sighed. "I know, and that part is extremely annoying. But we were already working on the basis that until he makes a mistake we're unlikely to be able to lay hands on the bastard. He's hidden himself too well. Even so, we're making good inroads into dismantling his entire operation, and there's more than enough fallout from what we have managed to do to keep us busy for some time. If someone else is working on the problem from a different angle, all we can really do is hope they manage to flush him out sooner or later. Hopefully in our direction so I can have a long, long talk with my old friend Thomas."
"I must confess to wishing to discuss matters with Mr Calvert myself," Armsmaster replied darkly. "Some of the people his actions harmed were friends of mine."
They shared a look of mutual understanding, then he stood up. "I must return to my work, but I'll inform you if I make any breakthroughs," he added.
"Do that," she nodded. "And thank you for telling me what you'd found."
"It was my pleasure, Director," he replied with a nod, then left the room. She gazed at the door for a moment or two, wondering who it was who was so effectively fucking up Calvert's life, smirked a little at the thought of the expression on his face when he found out, and went back to her own tasks.
Danny heard familiar voices, showing he'd successfully managed to track down his daughter and the others. Turning the corner into the old store room, he stopped and looked around curiously. Kurt was next to Taylor, Lisa observing closely, as he showed her how to braze a copper elbow onto some pipe. His daughter was holding the gas torch very carefully aiming the small flame at the joint, a pair of darkened goggles on her face, as the the other pair were also wearing.
"Yeah, that's it. The flux melted properly, see? Just don't overheat it, you don't want to melt the whole thing. Keep it moving around, then let the filler rod flow into the joint. Good… little more… now move the heat around the joint so it flows everywhere. Great. Good work, that looks pretty decent for a first attempt."
Taylor pulled the torch back and thumbed the gas valve so the flame died down to a barely-there presence and inspected her work as the red-hot piping cooled down quickly, turning black from the oxide covering it. She smiled a little. "It's a bit lumpy."
"It's still a reasonable job, kid. Trust me, I've seen a lot worse from the apprentices. It won't leak, that's the main thing." Kurt grinned at her as he patted her shoulder. "Make it work, then concentrate on making it neat. Don't get bent out of shape because it's not perfect first time, or you'll never finish anything."
"You're a lot better at it," his daughter commented, looking at a half-built construction of pipework and valves that was growing on the table in front of them.
"I've been doing it for nearly thirty years, Taylor," Kurt chuckled. "I'd be pretty worried if I wasn't better at it than someone who's just brazed their first joint."
Lisa laughed, as Taylor nodded agreement. "He's got a point."
"Yeah. Thanks for helping, by the way."
"No problem. I'm interested in seeing what this thing ends up doing aside from anything else."
"Learning a trade, Taylor?" Danny put in from the doorway, causing all three to look around at him. "Always a good idea in my view."
Taylor giggled. "Not exactly, but I do like learning how to do things. Kurt's a good teacher."
"She's a good student, Danny," Kurt remarked, smiling. "Unlike some people, she actually listens to the instructions."
Danny nodded, knowing what he meant. They could both think of times that hadn't happened with new trainees over the years, and sometimes it caused serious issues. Walking over he joined them at the table and studied the thing they were building. "How's it going?" he queried, picking up a section of tubing and looking at the oddly shaped section with interest. It was reminiscent of a trombone, but one that had ended up having a serious accident.
"About halfway done, I think, Dad," his daughter replied, also inspecting their progress with a look of satisfaction. She picked up her notebook and flipped through it before stopping on one page covered in drawings. "We've got the resonance plenum mostly built, and the growth initiator section is coming along well. The substrate generation bath plumbing is next, then I have to wind the dimensional vagueness coils, which is a little tricky. Lisa's been working on making the crystal enrichment environment controller, that's nearly done, and once all of the parts are finished we can assemble it and do a final test."
"You're sure you're not a Tinker, Taylor?" he asked with an amused look, which got a huff of exasperation back from her although she was smiling still.
"Yeah, I'm sure. This is just perfectly normal Papa-tech."
"I'm not sure 'Papa' and 'normal' belong in the same sentence," he replied, shaking his head, as Lisa and Kurt both laughed. "The fact that you seem to understand his work is concerning."
She grinned at him. "I can't say I understand all of it, but there's an underlying logic if you look at it from the right direction. Kind of." Waving at her companions, she added, "They're getting on with it fairly well."
"It's weird, Danny, but she's right, it does almost make a bizarre sort of sense if you stop trying to make it fit into how everything else works," Kurt nodded. "I mean, it's crazy, yeah, but at the same time it's… consistent? With itself if nothing else."
"My power is finding it almost as hard to understand as you are," Lisa interjected, looking amused, "but it's absolutely fascinated by the whole thing and keeps muttering about how everything it thought it knew is wrong. Which is even weirder than this is." She picked up one section of half-built machinery made of copper and brass and turned it in her hand, which made his eyes water a little as part of it seemed to waver in and out of focus. "I made this from her diagram, and look at the fucking thing! How the hell did it end up like this?" The girl waved the complex coil of tubing and Danny winced.
"Even a Parahuman power is saying it shouldn't work but it does." She shrugged helplessly. "But the one thing I can absolutely guarantee is that it's not Tinker tech."
"It's folded through a higher dimension, I think," Taylor remarked as she watched. "Not quite like Beneath but not completely unlike it either. Tricky to explain, but easy enough to do once you know how."
"I'll take your word for it," he replied after blinking at the thing Lisa was holding for a few seconds, feeling mildly concerned but also rather impressed. "Need any help?"
"Have you got time?" she replied.
He looked at his watch. "Yeah, I've got to make a couple of phone calls in about two hours or so, but I don't have anything I need to do until then."
"OK. In that case, sure, you can help me with this while Kurt makes the next part of that." Showing him the notebook, she indicated a set of neatly drawn diagrams showing an exploded view of an odd mechanism. "We'll need about sixty feet of that wire there, two of those carbon electrodes, that piece of titanium welding rod, three sugar cubes from the bowl there, and an egg."
Danny looked at her for a couple of seconds. "An egg?" he echoed in disbelief.
"Yeah. Trust me, I know what I'm doing." She gave him a mildly smug look as Lisa started giggling.
"I'm both very curious and very worried now," he quipped, but began following her instructions.
Even so, what happened to the egg was just wrong.
"You look a little happier," Alan noted as he glanced at his eldest daughter when she sat down at the dining table for lunch.
"A little, yeah, I guess," the young woman replied, sighing slightly. "I mean, I'm still…" She waved a hand in a rather lost manner, making him look at Zoe, then back to her. "I don't know. Everything's broken and I hate it."
He reached out and patted her hand. "We all do, Anne. But it'll get better. One way or the other."
"I hope so," she mumbled, staring at her plate, then slowly picking up a fork. "I really hope so." Heaving a breath, she took a little of the risotto Zoe had served and tried it. "This is good, Mom."
"Thank you," Zoe replied with a small smile. "It was one of Annette's recipes I came across when I was looking through some old letters from her a couple of days ago."
Anne nodded, eating some more. "I visited Taylor last night," she said after a moment.
Alan and Zoe exchanged glances. "Is that where you vanished to?" he commented curiously.
"I needed to talk to her. To let her know…" She trailed off, apparently not quite able to finish the sentiment. Her mother put her hand on Anne's and squeezed it.
"We understand, Anne," she said softly. "And I'm sure Taylor did too. She said she didn't blame us for it."
"She said the same to me," Anne admitted, a small smile coming and going. "It was a relief, honestly. I've felt so guilty about all this, ever since…" She shook her head. "That poor girl. She's family, more or less, and none of this should ever have happened to her. To anyone. Especially Emma, even if it's partly her fault."
She glared at her plate, then angrily ate some risotto. "I'm still pissed at the PRT," she grumbled.
"I think everyone involved is," Alan said with a half-grin. "I'm not happy about it myself, and I know Carol was still fuming even after everything was signed and done. We got what we wanted, but you're right, it shouldn't have happened. But that's nothing we can change. All we can do is move on. And the Heberts are on our side. Luckily. I hate to think what would have happened if we'd ended up on opposite sides, which could easily have been the end result."
"It's a good thing Taylor is a lot more level-headed than most people," Zoe remarked.
"Yes. That girl is mature past her years, thankfully," he noted. "How did your talk with her go, Anne?"
Both parents looked at their daughter, who smiled a little. "A lot better than I was worried it might," she replied, looking happier for the moment. "A lot better. She was friendly, and we talked for hours. It was a hell of a weight off my mind, actually. Taylor seems to be dealing with everything well, and said she was happy to see any of us at any time. Uncle Danny brought some pizza when he got back… it was like old times. Except for…" She sighed again, making him nod as he knew well what she meant.
"We'll have those times again one day, Anne," he assured her. "Emma will get the help she needs to get better."
"Whether Taylor will ever really trust her again, though?" Zoe shrugged sadly. "I wouldn't blame her at all if she didn't. I probably wouldn't under the same circumstances. But who knows what the future holds? All we can do is get on with life."
"I guess so, Mom," Anne said, appearing somewhat more cheerful. She ate some more of her lunch. "We're visiting Emma this afternoon around four, right?"
"Yes."
"That gives me time to find that book she used to like reading." Anne smiled. "I thought it might help her."
The reduced but still intact family spent the rest of the meal quietly talking about various things, and Alan found himself grateful yet again that his stupid mistake hadn't ended up costing him everything.
The price was still a heavy one, but it wasn't as bad as it might have been under different circumstances. He didn't like to think about what could have ended up occurring in that case...
"That's nearly got it," Taylor remarked, squatting down and peering closely at the mechanism as Lisa carefully, ever so carefully, adjusted a screw with a long screwdriver. "Little more… Slowly! Yeah, more… more… stop. OK, hold it there for a second." The taller girl carefully pushed a six inch length of tungsten carbide rod wound with layers of silver and copper wire in a very strange pattern slightly deeper into the guts of the machine they'd built, the whole assembly making a faint humming sound overlaid with an intermittent bubbling and gurgling as fluid moved through pipes. The bubbling was joined by a hissing as the rod moved inwards. "Back it off… half a turn? Yeah. Hold it there."
Taylor locked the position of the first rod with a setscrew and tightened a nut down, then moved to the second one and started adjusting it. She was squinting slightly as a strangely iridescent glow from somewhere inside the device began to grow. Kurt and Danny were watching from several feet away, having backed off as the sounds started. "All right, leave that one and adjust the second interaction gap, please."
Lisa very carefully lifted the screwdriver straight up, then when it was clear of anything, moved it to another screw and slowly turned it clockwise. "Two more turns… Half a turn… stop there."
The glow was now bright enough that Taylor pulled the welding goggles that were on her forehead down over her eyes with one hand even as she was making adjustments with the other. "Yeah… That's nearly got it. OK, back it out about a tenth of a turn. Perfect." The machine hummed a little louder and the hissing sound became a rushing like a distant waterfall. The glowing interior flickered slightly for several seconds before stabilizing. "Fantastic. That's working like it's meant to." Taylor straightened up and looked pleased. "Dimensional vagueness calibrated and correctly vague."
"Which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd hear," Lisa chuckled, lifting the screwdriver clear again.
"Hey, correct vagueness is important, you know," Taylor told her with a small smile. "You can't have just any vagueness or who knows what would happen?"
"True enough."
"Next bit…" Lifting the goggles and looking at her notebook, Taylor nodded. "Right, turn that valve there two and a third turns out, and that one one turn in, at the same time, will you?" She indicated two valves then put her hands on two more. "On my mark… now." She and Lisa both turned their valves, causing the gurgling sound to deepen and be joined with distinct rumbling like a truck engine idling outside the building. "Good. Very good." Taylor looked extremely satisfied. Reaching up she carefully felt the outside of the tallest recirculation stack, which was beginning to have water condense on it. "Cooling down fast. That's working nicely."
Studying a couple of gauges, Lisa commented, "The reagent flow is stable at sixteen percent per second."
Taylor watched them as well, then peered inside the viewing port of the heart of the machine. "Turn valve four in a quarter turn?" she requested, not looking away.
"Eighteen percent per second now."
"That should be just about ideal." Taylor nodded, straightening up and appearing satisfied. "All we have to do it let it precool and charge the chamber, then we can turn on the enrichment environment and substrate generator. Should take about… ten minutes, I think."
"Is it meant to make a sound like a distant tortured soul howling in despair, Taylor?" Danny asked a few seconds later. Lisa and Taylor looked back at him, at each other, then Taylor studied the odd construction which covered most of the table in gleaming metalwork. She reached out and carefully flicked one specific point on it. The bizarre sound stopped, being replaced with a lot of other bizarre sounds, but ones that were less disturbing.
Slightly, at least.
"That better, Chief?" she asked her father, who simply sighed faintly.
Kurt was silently laughing to himself, nearly folded over where he was leaning on the wall.
Everyone watched and waited. Parts of the machine soon had a layer of frost a quarter of an inch thick on them, mist flowing down the sides and across the table to fall to the floor. Lisa's power told her, with some worry, that energy was being sent somewhere via methods it simply couldn't understand, but found endlessly interesting. She was more than slightly amused and simultaneously a bit concerned just how invested whatever it really was seemed to be in everything Taylor did.
It really liked Taylor.
Eventually the other girl checked the gauges against a page of her notebook, wrote down a number of readings, then nodded. "That's got it," she remarked, reaching for a set of repurposed automotive switches wired into the guts of the device. Flicking each of the six switches in turn, leaving a couple of seconds between each one, she activated the whole system. Every switch operated made the sounds change, and the glow still emanating from the center section altered brightness and color as she proceeded. When the last switch was toggled it was a brilliant deep blue with a sort of rainbow effect around the edges and Lisa was convinced she could actually see it right through the metalwork somehow.
"There. Everything's working exactly as it should," Taylor said in satisfaction, checking over all the gauges, and looking at a pair of old multimeters wired into the power feed coming from a socket on the wall. "As far as I can see anyway," she added with a grin. "It matches what Papa's notes said, though, and my own calculations agreed. So with any luck it's doing what it should do."
"How long will it take?" Kurt asked curiously. She looked over her shoulder at him, then back at the machine, scratching her forehead as she thought.
"Um… I think it should take about roughly eighteen hours or so to start growing the crystals, if we got the mix right. Once the seed crystals form, they'll grow a bit faster, but it's going to be several days before they're ready. I can probably improve on that a little once I see how well this version works, but it's not like I need hundreds of them. I just wanted to see if I could make them at all, since I don't have an infinite supply of them in what Papa left." She shrugged. "If I can duplicate what he did, I have all sorts of ideas for ways to change it for other things, though, so getting this working is an important step."
He nodded understanding.
"Is it safe to leave it running without any monitoring?" her father asked.
"Oh, sure, worst case failure mode is it just stops," she replied, turning to face him. "It won't explode or anything even if it completely breaks down. Which I don't think it will, it's actually a pretty simple machine at heart. All it would do is waste all the reagents and energy and they're cheap enough. I'd just have to start over in that case."
Lisa looked at her, then the machine. This was a simple one? She wondered what Papa had thought was a complicated machine…
Her power was clearly also thinking the same thing by the feel of it.
Checking the time, Danny nodded. "Fair enough. I need to go make those calls. When you're done here, better lock the door just to make sure no one accidentally trips over it or something."
Taylor looked at the machine and also nodded. "It seems stable so we can leave it for now. I'll check it later to make sure things are going to plan."
"What are you going to do now?" he asked as they left the room, Taylor locking it behind her.
She and Lisa exchanged glances, the latter grinning. "We were thinking that it's probably time to have a little question and answer session with Mr Calvert," Lisa replied, adjusting her tricorn and looking somewhat dangerous.
"Ah." He nodded, as Kurt smiled grimly. "I understand. Let me get these calls finished, and we can get everything set up for that."
"U.N.I.O.N. is on the case once again," Kurt chuckled, which made Lisa laugh, Taylor look amused, and Danny sigh as he turned and walked away mumbling something under his breath. Kurt hurried after him. "Hey, wait up, Chief!"
"You are as bad as they are. Stop it," Danny grumbled as they both vanished around the corner.
Lisa turned to Taylor, who was giggling to herself. "I love this place," she commented cheerfully.
"It's fun, right?" Taylor replied with a grin. "Come on, let's get everything ready for our forthcoming and hopefully enlightening conversation with our dear friend Coil."
"And some interesting experimentation?"
"Oh, definitely, yes. I'm looking forward to that. I've got all sorts of notes already on things I want to check," Taylor replied happily, waving a notebook she pulled out of nowhere for a moment before it vanished again. Both of them followed after Danny and Kurt, while behind in the locked room the strange machine they'd built gently rumbled and gurgled to itself, eerie light streaming from deep within. And very slowly, small crystalline growths started gradually building themselves atom by atom.
"Strange…"
"What's strange?" Doctor Jillian Kessler looked over at her colleague Larry Fields, who was staring at the screen in front of him with a puzzled expression. Both of them were sitting deep underground in an old salt mine in the north of the UK, which was the site of a long-term experiment in particle physics that had been running for close to a decade now. Hundreds of millions of pounds worth of both normal technology and Tinker tech surrounded them on all sides, the entire collection probably the single most advanced experimental apparatus of its type that had ever been built.
Over the years a number of fundamental discoveries had come from the Deep Exotic Particle Facility, or DEPF, including the recent proof of the existence of tachyons, although so far no one had managed to fully integrate this information into the rest of the Standard Model. That was likely only a matter of time, in her opinion, and probably would result in determining that the Standard Model was not only incomplete, but possibly entirely misleading in some very important ways.
She and Larry were currently running the experimental apparatus that was used for measuring neutrino flux, utilizing new hardware that had been installed over the last year or so and should in theory improve the detection sensitivity a hundredfold at least.
Her colleague tapped keys, then leaned forward again, intently reading the data slowly scrolling past as the display changed to a waterfall graph in a rainbow of colors, showing several parameters at the same time. He didn't immediately answer so she got out of her chair and walked over to look over his shoulder at the screen.
"There was a sudden spike in tau neutrinos about twenty minutes ago," he finally said, scrolling the display back with a quick motion of his mouse and pointing with his free hand. "It jumped up from the usual background by… nearly zero point two percent, all at once, then sat there for ten minutes or so. Then it went up in six separate steps to nearly two percent more than expected, about two seconds apart, before falling back to normal."
"That's… well, probably not actually impossible, but it's highly improbable," she replied after a long pause.
"I know. But it's right there in the data."
"Equipment error?"
"I checked, and as far as I can see everything's working normally. Solar neutrino flux has been exactly within expected limits for weeks. We've seen a couple of smallish spikes in the last month, both of which are almost certainly a Tinker's fusion reactor or something like that. That sort of thing happens every now and then and the profile is fairly recognizable. Normal decay product backgrounds too, see? But this… I don't have a bloody clue what did it. It doesn't match anything on record. And the amount of energy behind it must have been enormous to produce such a large change."
"Strange, indeed. I wonder what it was?" She puzzled over the readings as he slowly went back through the logs for a day or so. That particular series of observations was the single instance they could find. Even after Larry spent an hour setting up a computer search using their readings to establish a profile, nothing matched in the entire database. In the end they were forced to admit they'd either had a very unusual equipment artifact, or had genuinely detected something new. Whatever it was.
"Annoyingly I can't even determine a rough direction," Larry complained some considerable time later, drumming his fingers on the desk in irritation. "The bloody detectors show the neutrinos perfectly, but there's no directional vector. It's like they just appeared out of nowhere, which should be impossible."
"Or… perhaps this is evidence of a previously unknown oscillation mode?" Jillian suggested slowly, thinking hard. "Our equipment only detects tau, electron, and muon neutrinos."
"Because that's all there is."
"Maybe not." She looked at him. "If there was a flavor of neutrino we've never seen before, or even suspected, it's perhaps possible that our detectors wouldn't actually notice it. Until it flips into one of the three we do know about."
He stared at her for several seconds, then turned his head to thoughtfully regard the display which was back to showing the real-time output of the detection array. "Possible, I suppose, but very unlikely. It would require a rewrite of everything we thought we understood about particle physics."
"Which is rather the point of our entire job, correct?" she replied with a small smile, causing him to shrug.
"It's an interesting hypothesis but I'd say it was well out at the fringe of likelihood."
"Do you have a better explanation?"
"...no. Annoyingly, I can't think of one. Unless the blasted things are leaking out of the dungeon dimensions or something."
She grinned at him. "Somehow I think my suggestion is that little bit more plausible."
He smiled ruefully. "Probably. I have no idea how we go about determining the truth of it though."
Shrugging, she admitted, "Neither do I, but all we can do is keep observing and see what we see. It might happen again."
"Or not." He prodded a key and looked at the results. "Absolutely normal readings now. Might have been a one off and we'll never work it out."
"That happens. But we got some intriguing data to study even so."
Larry nodded reflectively. "True enough. Probably get a paper or two out of it if we put the effort in."
They discussed the event quite a lot over the next few days but were no nearer to a solution even then, and moved on to other problems for the time being.
"We're all set, Danny."
"Good. Everyone ready?"
"Ready and waiting, Chief."
"Will you please knock that off, Matt?"
"You got it, Chief."
"Jesus. Why me? Fine, whatever. Taylor, do your thing and let's see what our guest has to say for himself."
"U.N.I.O.N. Operation Interrogate Supervillian Coil is a go! Lisa, activate super intuition! Releasing the villain in three… two… one…"
Danny massaged his forehead and wondered if this would ever get less silly, then everyone watched as a certain Thomas Calvert appeared mid-scream-of-rage.
Lisa grinned as he fell flat on his face.
Then they got to work.