Ebersol came out a few minutes later, his anger reduced to merely being irked. “I love this business. I hate this business. I’m supposed to be the one jacking tech, not getting jacked!” he complained.
“Anything I should know?” Mr. Hill asked him calmly.
“They already knew he’d hit you, just not that I was involved, too. You already resolved it, but they’ll be floating my name, too.” He sat down on his bench and picked up a stress scanner. “You sure it’s totally resolved?” he asked carefully, not being disrespectful.
“Fifty thousand a mook involved, a quarter-mil for the hostage.”
Ebersol glanced at me. “Twenty-four mooks,” I added helpfully.
“Pocket change?” he asked Hill, rather surprised.
“Yeah, but I told the mooks the price, and if their boss wasn’t willing to pay, they were gonna sing like little birdies about where I could get my money... and then I was gonna sell them off to Libra. The mooks owe me a favor for not offing them and just giving them to SHIELD instead, and they know it.”
“Luggiano, huh.” Ebersol had a vengeful look in his eye.
“This matter is resolved,” Mr. Hill stated, emphasizing the words just so, and Ebersol slowly nodded under his cold, grim stare. “Now, if you want to hire out here and there against Capricorn operations to let Luggiano know how you feel about his choice of corporate espionage targets, that’s your own personal damn business on your own damn time,” he added in a completely apathetic tone.
“Outside the country,” I amended. “Unless you keep it real subtle...”
“There’ll be a bit of a delay,” Jenkins pointed out, earning a grin from Ebersol.
“I’m sure Virgo and Sagittarius might have a few things for me to do regarding that in the future.” I could see Ebersol put the matter aside to percolate in an angry little corner of his head.
Pissing off supervillain geniuses when you are also someone the world won’t miss if you die is never a good idea. That Luggiano’s days as head of the Capricorn branch were probably numbered...
Mr. Hill just nodded and strolled back out of the room. But he hadn’t forgotten Luggiano, and that heavy black mark in his head was not something the Capricorn boss was going to enjoy.
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A few hours pass...
Getting all of the Baxter Buddies involved into usable space suits and body armor was quite the thing, and had been occupying a lot of attention for the past couple weeks or so. It wasn’t Stark quality, but it wasn’t meant to be. Most of the wearers were already superhuman in one form or another, and really, we’d been working together on the suits for years at this point. Everyone had floated ideas for armor of their own at one point or another, and work had been done on and off on the concepts.
Actually, just waiting for everyone to mature so we wouldn’t have to rework the armor was one of the reasons we hadn’t done more work in the area.
Happily, aliens didn’t seem to like using kinetic weapons, which meant the physical defense didn’t have to be all that ungodly high, but the energy dispersion factor did. A lot of Cold Isotopes were involved in the process of building dampeners and deflective fields over the suits we came up with, and adapting them for space wasn’t actually all that hard.
Our mode of getting into space was a bit unusual, too.
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Another unusual point...
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I popped up six inches and gained two hundred pounds, the harness around me suddenly fitting perfectly. I looked back at the proto-adamantium chains hooking us to the front of the ship, and arclit my biceps.
Nova looked a little envious as he stood there in his uniform, also harnessed up. At Nova Core Four, he was rocking thirty-five tons lifting on the scale now, a 57 Might, as strong as Luke Cage had been before he left. He definitely out-powered me when I was normal, but with the Wrecker Buffs, I could stand easily with Ben Grimm, let alone him.
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Life wasn’t fair. Too bad, so sad.
Everything we were bringing was on the people for this trip. Moving in labs and stuff for the hyperspace jump was a separate task, and we’d do it through the Portal link to the Shi’ar vessel which had boosted Nova to the top of Core Four, and was now contributing to the New York Greater Metropolitan Area power grid, among other things.
The rail launch was situated well underground and outside the city, partly because there were still Subterraneans roving around under Manhattan Island and stuff. Giving them a tunnel to mess around or settle in wasn’t too smart.
Also, for some reason, the civilian authorities didn’t want a rocket ship launching from the city. Couldn’t imagine why.
It was actually made in tandem with the Avengers for their use as needed, as well, and Grimm Materials had done most of the digging job. A rail launch was a bit energy-intensive by normal standards, but juice was one thing we weren’t lacking in this regard.
“How’s things, Ben?” I asked him over coms, watching him through the window, McCoy sitting alongside. The shuttle was designed for interplanetary operations at best, a hodgepodge of alien and Terran tech that could reach a significant fraction of light speed, but wasn’t built to endure hyperspace.
Getting out of a gravity well was actually the thing that used the most power and fuel. Once outside Terra’s gravity and magnetic field, the inertial compensators would start working much more efficiently, and the fusion core back there would zip us along nicely.
So, in the interests of saving time and fuel, why not get a tow?
“Running the checklist through, Dyna,” Ben’s stolid voice came back as he went through the process. It wasn’t nearly as complex as an airline, as the monitors were far more comprehensive than passenger jets, and Reed Richards had streamlined a lot of the process. “Two minutes. Powering up the launch system.”
Energy from the ship and the site generators lit up the rings in front of us, and magnetic fields began to spin. The shuttle lifted off its cradle, the cradle retracted, and it hung in the air as mass and position calculations began. Green lights lit up on rings extending out into the distance ahead of us.
“Magnetic accelerators in place. Gravimetric funnel forming.” Rich and I were in midair, wrists clasped to stay in synch, excess juice from me sparking down to his arm. We glided forward, bringing the chains taut just before the fields locked on and solidified them in place.
We leaned into the harnesses.
“One mile clean. Two miles clean. Three. Four. We have five miles clean. Launch ramp opening,” McCoy intoned in his educated, clear voice.
“Magnetic pulse in ten. Nine. Eight, seven...” Grimm counted down, as the energies around us began to focus and build.
“Go!”
Our harnesses were grabbed with everything else, the magnetic wave otherwise having no effect on either of us. As it grabbed everything and the gravimetric field began to hurtle everything forward at an instant ten G’s and building up, we added to it all.
It was actually a series of pulses that were moving the ship along, and our job was to keep riding the front of the wave, instead of the ship having to be continually ‘overflowed’.
I was using all my juice at this moment. I had a hard air cone right in front of us, perfectly streamlined to cut through the wind resistance. I had my Bands of the Titan powered up, and I was juicing my Mutant Core to full power as Nova and I dragged the shuttle forward.
The inertial compensator inside the shuttle would compensate for this level of acceleration without too much problem, but I could still hear the whoops from everyone as we got into motion fast.
Nova was rated for Mach 3 in-atmosphere, having problems with wind resistance if he tried to go faster. At Nova Core Five, he could actually form a gravimetric tunnel and bore through the air, avoiding that problem, but Nova Five was a big jump from Four.
I had done some careful tests, way out over the ocean. Despite bucketloads of Concentration, random kinetic shifts from the nature of how I was using the Core still tended to kick me around... and when you are moving at superspeed, basically that means slamming you into walls of solid air around you, and bouncing.
Bouncing for miles and miles...
It didn’t hurt, because the molecular shearing that the Core speed used also hardened my whole body, and the faster I went, the more invulnerable I became. Still, wildly bouncing and slamming along through the air as wind shear spins you like a superspeed top is one of those roller-coaster experiences I could totally have done without.
Fortunately, that far out at sea there hadn’t been anyone to see me playing Bounce-The-Dynamo across the skies, and I certainly wasn’t going to run into anything but the clouds.
With no wind resistance to speak of, Nova had no problems keeping pace with me, and he bled off a lot of the random kinetic shear with the excess voltage.
We exited the rail launch at Mach 20 and were picking up speed as the shuttle’s shields snapped on. Thunder roared on all sides of us as the air got out of the way and came back together with a great rolling boom, following us into the sky.
The Lantern had casually hit Mach 50. Freaking super-science cosmic-class artifact toys...
Four miles a second is not fast enough when you have over twenty thousand miles to go to hit geostationary orbit!
But it did mean that meaningful atmosphere was behind us in under twenty seconds as we continued to accelerate, the pressure on the hard air bullet field ahead of us dropped off, and the two of us completely bulled forward with everything.
We really had no visible frame of reference as we headed up, but I had Detect Location and he had inbuilt navigation, so we could track our progress and speed.
In space, all you needed was constant propulsion and you could get to any speed, it was more about how much time you needed to get there.
I had most of the load, enabling his Nova Core to keep pace with me as we blew into the void.
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“On course,” Ben said calmly on coms, buzzing in my ear. “Skies look clear.” Nothing from Red Eyes in any direction, either. Of course, pretty much everyone in the shuttle was staring at the vid-windows painting the outside scene for those within, especially the planet getting smaller behind us.
Nova adjusted course, pointing ahead. As he was the only one who could see the Xandaran ship, he and Mentor were actually in charge of our course.
“Who’s watching, Ben?” I called back to him.
“Other than the satellites of every nation that has ‘em?” he asked rhetorically.
“Can’t imagine why they would be concerned with a non-state agency being up here doing random stuff,” I mused aloud.
“Damn right. Uh, Primus is hanging about ten thousand miles off our course. Oversight, just in case he has to push the ship out of orbit in case something happens.”
“Can’t blame him.” Potentially losing a whole hemisphere was something of an important matter to the High Guard.