Time Passes...
The building trembled.
I looked up from the conversion on my bracelets I was doing as the gravimetric alarms started beeping. “Cindy!” I called out urgently.
“On it!” Her fingers danced happily over the keys.
It turned out that part of her powers involved being able to follow complex relationships and branching logic paths, which is why complex webspinning came so easily to her. In addition to being able to follow the moving parts of, say, an intricate dance ceremony and instantly see the errors in it, it made her one Hell of a hacker, able to dive into the many layers and links of computer programming and navigate them with incredible speed and surety.
That was coupled with the fact that she could type so fast that we had to reconfigure a keyboard to keep up with her, and nobody but a technopath could possibly have equaled her... and even then, once we got her a working cyberlink, they’d have been at best on par.
“Massive gravimetric pulse from the ground floor, and there’s a penetration alarm on one of the facing windows!” she called out on the overhead coms, warning everyone in the building. “The Stillflight Fields caught it before anything happened, but they’re still active and suppressing it! Someone get down there and turn off whatever is trying to send the building into orbit!”
I was already sprinting for the emergency egress window, which she keyed open just in time for me to dive through. I saw a blast of flame from around the corner reflecting off a neighboring window a floor above, and knew Johnny had done much the same thing.
He was a flier, I was a glider, so basically I was doing a parachute jump, and he was power-diving. I maxed my Repulse to turn my descent into an arcing glide at speed, and came in behind him, both of us seeing the shattered armored window something had driven through.
“Johnny! Turn around and follow the exhaust trail!” I ordered him over coms. About to jet into the window, he turned around sharply, saw the trail of smoke from something combustible, and reversed course, rocketing away at top speed with grimly glowing eyes and mouth.
I dove into the lobby beyond, closed after hours so that nobody had been hurt, Masked eyes with Devasight adjusting instantly to the lighting change. I saw the ruin of the front desk, splayed shards of armored glass that had been vibrated and shattered open, and a gleaming box of steel humming madly and pulsing with gravimetric pressure an inch above the ground.
An inconspicuous pipe on the ceiling popped open, and a liquid form poured out of the two-inch conduit, reforming into a head and arms with fluid speed. Dr. Richards fixed on the device immediately, glancing at me as I slid to a stop next to it.
“It’s using a fast fission power source, probably Hyduranium! Find the antipodal nodes and short-circuit the polarity with an overcharged blast!” he ordered me, quickly arcing over the device to study the five visible sides, and a two-meter-long index finger pointed at a glowing circle. “First node!”
I slapped a hand over the position on the top as his head dipped down, and my hand snaked down there just as fast, following the electromagnetics, and centered on the opposing position. “Yes! Overload the modulation without bursting the operation! If you don’t have enough juice, I’ll patch in the building’s power supply to help!”
“Going up the frequency levels...” My fingers started to spark.
He snapped out a frequency, and I adjusted to it without comment. Spot on, too. “Got it, that’s the primary bandwidth. Counter-modulating...” I began to crackle out the 8d6 of voltage along the tight bandwidth, and the box’s hum noticeably decreased. “There’s six nodes in total, Doctor. I can’t reach them all...”
“Let me borrow your bracelets.” He flicked them off of me with one hand as I Repulsed them open, while his other one drove into the wall above an electrical socket and pulled out the insulated power cable there, yanking it out. With all his fingers moving in ways that a human’s couldn’t, he separated the copper wiring, then ran it into and out of the conductive mechanisms of my bracelets after adjusting the bandwidths on the fly as I rattled off the complementary Hertz numbers for him.
He was lucky his gloves were insulated as he plugged the bare metal into place. “Cindy, if you could open the feed to one thousand amperes on socket 1-22 for five seconds, please,” he said into the com.
I quirked a smile. She wasn’t supposed to have gone into the power systems...
“Uh, sure, Dr. Richards!” she replied, a bit mortified. He glanced at me, clear amusement in his eyes. There was a crack, flash, and hiss of burning components as the device simultaneously powered down as it lost its catalytic power, and burned out as it lost containment on the reduced reaction.
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Naturally this meant it fell right onto my hand, and I had to quickly divert the increased electricity around me and into the ground. Ouchouchouch!...
Ben Grimm came bursting out the stairs, which also happened to lead to his meditation chamber underground. “Stretch! Any problems?” he called out gruffly, pounding up to us with loud crumping steps on the tiles here... which didn’t break under his weight.
“It weighs three-quarters of a ton!” I complained before Dr. Richards could respond. “Can you take it off my arm?”
“Whoa! Sure, Dynamo.” It certainly didn’t look that big. He reached over and casually picked it up with one hand. “Damn, that is a heavy little thing!” he agreed, staring at the smoking, crackling device.
“Jean and I have oversight on the roof,” Susan called out over the coms. If there was follow-up, it would run into TK and forcefields first.
Dr. Richards was busy disassembling his impromptu modulation overload set-up, not even looking at them as he unspliced the copper back into normal cables, gave me back my Bite bracelets, and then fixed up the wall socket, too, looping the extra length of the cable back up into the ceiling tiles professionally.
Have to bring in a drywaller to fix the walls, however, as well as the arrival desk.
“Gravity manipulation on that scale requires some heavy Exotics, Ben. I’d have to crack it open to truly see, but I suspect Neogravymium and Massridium?”
“Anti-Massganese,” I added, wringing out my hand as I clipped my bracelets back on. “I could feel it on the modulation field. It burns out fast, but if all you’re trying to do is pulse anti-grav for a short time, it seems like it works fine.”
“He actually found a use for Anti-Massganese,” Richards murmured. The rest of his body had made it down the pipe by now, but his head was still extended, moving around the cube as Ben held it up by the corners in his stony fingers.
“Does anyone else use that particular configuration for their timing circuits?” I asked Dr. Richards, pointing at one of the circuit packages. He slipped a paper-thin finger into it, popped the small welds, and pulled out a circuit board.
Ben turned the cube slightly, his blue eyes narrowed, and he had to fight to stop his big hands from clenching. “Doom...” he muttered harshly, and the metal creaked ever so slightly. “I recognize them soldering patterns, Stretch.”
“I recognized some of the power circuits from his Doombots,” Dr. Richards nodded slowly, sliding the circuit board back in.
I made a noise of grim exasperation. Sure, it was their base and bound to be attacked. Still, annoying as all get out. “Dr. Richards, you can’t just take this. This was designed to send your whole building into orbit. He was nice enough to wait until the civilians working for you were gone, but we were all bound for outer space otherwise. Probably would have needed Primus or the Lantern to bring us back down, if we weren’t killed in the exit process.”
Or Uncle Ben, but that was obvious. He wouldn’t leave his nephew stranded in space, and Peter should be on the roof with Gwen, eyes scanning the area.
Dr. Richards looked troubled. “We overcame this easily...”
“Because I installed the Stillflight generators,” I interrupted him. “If I hadn’t, we would be having this conversation en route to outer space right now.
“He is sending us a message, and that message is that he can reach you and everyone you work with whenever he wishes, and mess with you as he wishes. If you do not retaliate in some fashion, he will arrogantly believe you have learned your lesson and he can strike at you as he deems fit, you having learned your place.”
“If I do retaliate, he will immediately try to one-up me as he tries to outdo me,” Dr. Richards replied, not denying my words. “The results could be catastrophic.”
“True. The problem is that he is supremely intelligent, and supremely arrogant, and he will not acknowledge you as an equal.” I eyed the device with hard eyes. “Would you mind handing off the responsibility for this?”
“To whom?” Dr. Richards asked seriously, expression also glum.
I saw the reflection of the flames before Johnny flamed into the room and settled down, letting his fires die away. “That the thing?” he asked, before going on regardless, “I found the launcher atop an apartment building three blocks away. Nothing living around it. Slagged everything and came back immediately.” It didn’t mean he was destroying evidence, it meant what he’d found there wasn’t singular enough to deduce anything, and he didn’t want anyone else making off with it.
“Doom,” Grimm grumbled in resignation.
“Again?” Johnny rolled his eyes. “Reed...”
I held up a hand. “I suggest a polite letter explaining the circumstances and your thoughts on the matter, and address it to The Golden Hag.”
“Sama Rantha?” Reed was startled despite himself. “Why her?”
“Victor von Doom will listen to The Golden Hag, or he will die. I would say The Great Bear, but I don’t believe he would act so readily.”
“Would she really respond on our behalf over this matter?” Dr. Richards wondered.
“I’d say that all depends on the letter you write her. Oh, and I know someone who can deliver it right to her, too, for a small fee. Should probably include that cube, so if you want to examine it, best to do so right away.”
---
Richard Ryder nearly fell as he was helped off the conversion machine in the new annex room to the fusion reactor. “Oh, that really sucked,” he said weakly, as Jessica held him up.
“Well, you just absorbed enough juice to fuel Manhattan Island for an hour or two, so I wouldn’t expect you to feel wonderful, especially for your first time. C’mon, go take the lift up to the weight room.”
“The weight room?” he gasped, not feigning how sore he was as I dragged him that way.
“Yeah, I want to see how much your bench went up after an hour on that thing.”
He started to say something, then shut up as he considered that.
After all, he wanted to know, too.
A half hour later, he was on his way home, suddenly feeling not nearly as bad. It was only a hundred pounds of improvement, but that was one hour, and his first time.
In the future, he would stay on it longer, and draw the power in faster. Improvement would come with it.
He was a bit surprised to learn he and Jessica had almost been sent into orbit with us, but it was all in a day’s excitement in the world of the Powered.