Wanderer

by Davros

Summary:

Leet's tech fails even harder than usual and blasts a number of people across time and space. Taylor becomes the Sole Survivor of Fallout 4 fame before she's dragged back to Brockton Bay by Armsmaster & Dragon and becomes the Sole Survivor of Leet's idiocy. Now she has to try and fit back into a world that she no longer feels all that at home in.

Chapter 1: 1.1

1.1

 

“Stay close, Shaun.”

“Sure, mom,” he said, too busy examining the mutated plant he’d picked up to so much as look in her direction. At least he came back to be within her reach.

He was such a curious boy. All that time cooped up in the Institute meant that he’d never really seen what the natural world looked like outside of old textbooks and holotapes or whatever their scouts brought back. And the world didn’t really look like that anymore anyway. Nothing that had made it through the centuries since the bombs fell had stayed quite the same as it had once been. The two-headed cows stood as ample testimony to that. She still had no idea how the hell that mutation had bred true.

But he’d taken to it all with a sense of curiousity and an honest sort of joy that she really couldn’t claim to have. Seeing Boston’s ruins laid bare before her had brought nothing but horror when she saw it for the first time. Her second home turned into a dead wasteland. She’d wished, for a wild moment, that she’d died in the cryo chamber instead of Nate.

No. Stop there. Best not to dwell on those wounds. Hard to wipe your eyes when you’re wearing power armour.

Still, it was a nice enough day. Her power armour was in better health than it had been for a while, and there wasn’t anything in range to need a 2mm slug in its head. Better safe than sorry, but he would probably be fine even if he was still too small for real armour or a proper rifle. Maybe she could improvise something. Metal armour would be far too heavy and leather was just useless, but maybe she could cut down some combat armour to child size. She’d need to get her hands on a few pieces before she tried; she probably wouldn’t get it right first time, not with the tools she had access to.

Taylor remembered a time when arming a twelve year old would have horrified her. She’d got over that sort of thing after pulping the hundredth raider or thereabouts. There were just too many lunatics out there who’d gut you for the joy of it to let anyone strong enough to hold a gun go unarmed.

Shaun was drifting away again, his eyes on a rusted old car by the side of the old road they were using. “Shaun, don’t even think about it,” she said. “Those things are death traps.”

She would know. She’d set more than a few off with strategically placed shots from safe distance. Nothing like a rusting old fusion engine going critical to change the balance of a fight or frighten some of the less crazy bastards off before things had to get fatal.

“Aww.”

But he listened. Not old enough for teenage rebellion yet, she guessed, not that she knew a whole lot about it. Never had the chance really. Too busy with other things and being depressed. It probably didn’t hurt that the first thing he remembered about her was the way she’d blown the Institute to hell and back to get him out, even if that wasn’t an entirely truthful rendition of the story.

They weren’t too far from Diamond City at least. They should make it back inside the defensive circle before dark. See what sort of cats Piper had thrown into the pigeons since the last time they’d visited. Taylor doubted that Piper would ever top the time she’d, somehow correctly, dubbed the mayor a synth, but it didn’t keep the journalist from trying. Trying and trying and trying.

She cast her eyes over the horizon. Still no sign of hostiles. Just a few crows flying in the distance and a couple of radstags trying to hide in the foliage to her left. Lucky for them that she didn’t have time to stop and hunt, not that a gauss rifle was a great weapon for that anyway. The space between ‘not enough stopping power for anything but a head-shot’ and ‘there is nothing left but giblets spread across a several metre radius’ was surprisingly small. And head-shots weren’t really reliable against an animal with, again for some bizarre reason, two heads.

An altogether too familiar blue light washed over her. No. No, not again.

“SHAUN!”

She reached and grabbed for him. He looked terrified. Her hand wrapped around his wrist and then the world blanked out.

---

It took more than a few moments for spots to stop dancing in front of her eyes. She’d been through teleportation more than a few times and none of them seemed to respect the limits of the human eyeball.

All systems green. HUD showing no identified hostiles in visual range. Not that it saying that meant much when she was dumped into a whole new context sans raiders, ferals, super mutants, or any of the other fun things she’d been avoiding or murdering for the last year. Brockton Bay had its problems, but there was a distance lack of mutated monsters roaming around the place as far as she remembered. Raiders, eh, the gangs. She’d have to recalibrate. Not that people would appreciate wasteland solutions to the gang problem.

And more importantly Shaun was there clinging to her side and quivering. Re-assuring him wasn’t exactly going to be easy wearing power armour. Having an arm full of giant gun wasn’t going to make it any easier, not when he was clinging to the other.

She wasn’t alone, but the others didn’t appear to be a threat. A man in some sort of blue power armour, he had some sort of spear strapped to his back but he wasn’t waving it around or doing anything particularly threatening except looking mildly confused, and a number of armoured men with odd looking guns in ready but not aimed positions.

Oh, it was Armsmaster and the PRT. She would have given her left arm to meet him once upon a time. Bit of a childhood hero after her Alexandria phase. He was surprisingly not dead given how long she’d been there with the cryo freeze. There was definitely something strange going on there. Something to think about later, she guessed. Maybe the teleport did something to the progression of time? That was fearsome technology if so.

Well, if she wasn’t safe with an actual superhero and some of the troopers they worked with, who would she be safe with?

Ha. She couldn’t even make that sound unsarcastic to herself in the privacy of her own mind. If they started shit, she had plenty of other weapons she could use. None of them were wearing full coverage power armour, so the deliverer shouldn’t have any trouble putting them down if it came down to it.

“It’s okay,” she said. The synthesised tone of her voice did not seem to be winning her many brownie points judging by the expression on what she could see of Armsmaster’ face. Oh well. “I’m not looking for a fight. I’m going to put my weapon on the ground now.”

And she did so. Slowly. The last thing she wanted to do was knock the coils out of alignment. Those things took forever and a day to get right and it wasn’t like she was going to find a service manual and proper tools to speed things up now, was it? It was laborious patching or full-on reverse engineering for her.

Well, that freed up her arm so that she could hug her son. “It’s okay, Shaun,” she said. She brushed over his hair in a gesture that probably would have worked better without the armour. “It’s not the Institute. They’re gone. We should be safe here.”

“Identify yourself,” said Armsmaster. The soul of polite, personable conversation clearly.

“I need my arms now, Shaun,” said Taylor. He backed away quickly, just a half step and then moved around to stand behind her, and that certainly put the tension up a notch. In retrospect, she could maybe have explained that a little better. Well, time to play her card. She reached up, disengaged the seals, and pulled her helmet off. “My name is Taylor Hebert and I’m guessing you came here looking for me.”

That last part was total supposition, but with the amount of machinery scattered around the place and the teleportation effect being so familiar it seemed that Armsmaster had reversed whatever had sent her off to the shithole of a world she’d been calling home for half her life. That was something she definitely appreciated even if she could have used some notice so that she could say her goodbyes and gather some more of her possessions.

She was really going to miss that machine gun which turned every bullet into a blob of super-heated plasma on its way out of the barrel. And that was to say nothing of her extensive comic book collection. Those were collectors items. Oh, well. Piper would take good care of them and someone would definitely claim the gun; she’d seen Cait eyeing it more than once.

Taylor wasn’t entirely sure that Cait having that level of firepower was a good idea, but it wasn’t like it was her problem anymore. And oh there it was. A little pang of loss. She’d finally made real friends and she was probably never going to see them again.

“We were expecting a teenager,” said Armsmaster. “Not an adult woman with a son.”

“I guess time moved differently where I was,” she replied. She would have ran her hand through her hair if it wasn’t tucked underneath a combat helmet. “My calendar says it’s 2289.”

That seemed to throw him for a loop. She could almost see his eyes twitching behind his mask as he considered that. “January 2011. We’re going to need to take you in. Debrief you. There are other victims we haven’t been able to retrieve. Anything you can tell us may prove critical to helping those people.”

She had a feeling there was more to it than that. Maybe that was just too many years of dealing with the utterly corrupt authorities on the other Earth, but she was there carrying all sorts of advanced equipment and weaponry and that made her something people would want control over. Hell, there was a pretty good chance that absolutely every single thing she had on her was totally illegal and subject to impoundment. Even the madness of the other world hadn’t seen them let private citizens march around in power armour carrying military-grade heavy weapons.

But he’d done this to save her. He had brought her back from hell and given her son a chance to live in actual civilisation. That earned a brownie point or ten. And he was Armsmaster. The memories were long-faded, from half a liftime ago, but he had been one of the good guys fighting the gangs that were killing the city.

“Okay,” she said. “I hope you have some transport, because I do not remember the way.”

---

As it turned out they did have transport, but she definitely wasn’t going to fit on the back of a motorcycle in power armour no matter how super sleek it was. Even if her feet wouldn’t have dragged along the road she seriously doubted that the weight distribution would result in anything other than absolute hilarity for anyone watching.

The PRT troopers had come in a sleek APC, which was a better option, but it wasn’t tall enough for power armour and the armour definitely wasn’t flexible enough to squeeze in the space it offered.

And that was how she’d ended up walking through the streets of Brockton Bay with her son and a Corporal Dawson of the PRT acting as her guide. They’d offered to transport him in the van, but she wasn’t letting him out of her sight. She’d seen too many ways in which her perceptions could be altered to trust something like ‘you’re back home’ that easily.

As it turned out this attracted a certain amount of attention and she was quite glad they’d given Shaun a domino mask to provide at least some cover for his identity.

Gawkers. She’d never had to deal with them before. Before the bombs she had very deliberately been a nobody. She had known exactly what would happen to a known parahuman in that America and she’d had no desire to be dissected so that some rich fuck could get a knock-off of her power. After the bombs people just had more important things to worry about.

When it came down to it people taking pictures of her armour weren’t a real issue. They were clearly suicidal if their first reaction to seeing some new guy in X-01 armour carrying an inhumanly large gun was to get their smartphone out, but that wasn’t her problem. It was a problem that would self-correct sooner or later.

Shaun pestered the trooper with questions the whole time they were walking, but he took them in good stride.

“What’s that?” asked Shaun.

“That’s Fugly Bob’s,” said Dawson. “Best burger joint in town. Not too expensive either.”

“And that?”

“Some sort of Mercedes. God only knows what they’re thinking leaving it parked up around here. The police will be looking for it in the morning, no doubt.”

“What sort of engine does it have?”

“Uh. Diesel probably.”

“That’s really inefficient. Don’t you have micro fusion cells?”

And so on and so forth until Taylor felt tired just listening it. Shaun was probably about ready to build half a dozen new things the moment he had the parts at hand by the time they reached the PRT building. Boy was so clever it scared her at times and she had a Thinker power.

“Thanks for the tour, officer,” said Taylor. “And more thanks for entertaining my boy.”

That had sounded a lot more personable in her own head on the other side of the speaker setup that made her sound like some sort of radio serial villain.

“No worries, ma’am. He’s a good kid.”

“That he is. See you around, Dawson”

He tossed Taylor something that might have been a salute if you were being very generous and wandered away. Leaving her in the lobby of a law enforcement agency wearing power armour and carrying a very, very large gun.

Thanks, officer. There’s no possible way that could end badly for her.

Thankfully a young woman in an almost comically tight costume with a circuit board pattern all over it appeared before Taylor could really work up a good head of paranoia. Instead that paranoia was replaced with jealousy. Holy crap, did everyone else’s powers come with super-boobs or something? She would have done unpleasant things to look like that.

The way Shaun gawped at her did not make Taylor feel any better about the situation. Was he getting to that age? Christ, she hoped not. She had no idea how to deal with teenage boys.

“Hi,” said Ms. Boobs. “I’m Battery. Please follow me to the interview room.”

The back view didn’t make Taylor feel any better. She followed Battery through a door to a suspiciously massive elevator.

“Do you guys get many guests who need this much room?”

“It’s more common than you would think,” said Battery. “Tinkers love their power armour and they don’t all go for miniaturisation like Armsmaster. You should see some of Dragon’s suits. They look like they’re designed to try and fight an Endbringer on their own.”

Dragon. Dragon. Oh.

“I remember,” said Taylor. Shaun looked up at her curiously. “The world’s greatest tinker. We could have really used someone like that where I was.”

Her heart ached just thinking about it. A tinker like Dragon could have turned the tide. Forced the US to pull its head in with tech that let the Canadians fight back against annexation. Maybe then China wouldn’t have been pushed to the brink. Maybe they could have pushed past the crisis point and avoided the disaster.

Or maybe it would have all just gone nuclear sooner. It was impossible to know. The world had gone completely crazy long before the end.

“She’s one of a kind. We’re glad to have her on our side.”

Taylor made a noise that was vaguely agreeable. There was a little more chatter as the elevator clunked on towards its destination. As it turned out Battery was really nice and Taylor felt a little bit guilty about dubbing her Ms. Boobs even if only in the privacy of her own head. She was still kind of jealous though. There weren’t many people who could make glorified spandex look that good.

Eventually they reached an office and Battery departed. Taylor entered with Shaun and found herself facing an obese, blonde woman who looked like life had ridden her hard and put her away wet. To her right stood Armsmaster, posture rigid. To her left was a computer screen filled the face of another blonde woman, this one younger and considerably less harsh looking.

“Ms. Hebert,” said the obese woman. “I am Director Piggot of the Parahuman Response Team. You already know Armsmaster. This woman,” she waved to her left, “is Dragon. Please sit. We have a great deal to discuss.”

Taylor eyed the chairs. Not in her power armour unless she wanted her first impression to be hilarious. She hit the release and exited her armour, pocketing the fusion core on her way out. In her combat armour and armed with a sidearm the chair looked a lot less likely to immediately collapse.

She took the seat and took Shaun’s hand in her own when he joined her a moment later.

“It’s a long story,” she said. “But first I should thank you for saving me. I don’t know how long it took you, but I’m sure it wasn’t easy and you had plenty of other things that needed to be done.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Dragon with a pleasant smile. She had very nice, even teeth. Not something you saw so much in the wasteland. “It’s our job to help people in your position.”

“Well, thanks anyway.” Taylor took a deep breath, and then she started.

She hadn’t been joking when she’d said it was a long story. Almost fifteen years takes a long time to cover even when you only skim over the highlight reel of it.

It wasn’t a happy story. Taylor had found herself trapped on a world that was already well into its death throes when she’d appeared. A place she didn’t understand and couldn’t fit into and where ideas like tolerance had long since receded into the background to be replaced with often outright bigotry against outsiders. That had been a big part of her initial trigger; the reason she became a parahuman.

And hadn’t that power helped. It had let her understand in exquisite detail just how fucked she and everyone else on the planet was and how utterly helpless she was in the face of the oncoming storm. She’d tried to make a difference and she’d failed.

She’d ended up surviving by fading into the background. She’d made it through an education despite her orphan status, been drafted to fight in the resource wars, and finally fallen in love and married. Given birth. Taylor had allowed herself to fall into denial and believe that she could have a life after everything else she’d tried had failed.

Then, as she’d always known it would, it had ended in fire. The end of the whole damned world. Full-scale nuclear war.

Taylor couldn’t miss the expressions on the faces of the people she was spilling the story to. It was a grim story and they reacted appropriately. Dragon, for one, looked quite upset at points. More empathy than the others, Taylor supposed. She looked quite outraged when Taylor described how she, and her family, had been tricked into entering cryogenic stasis as part of some insane experiment.

That had been her second trigger. Mushroom clouds rising over her horizon. The knowledge that she had completely failed and that she still didn’t understand the world she called home. Enough to put her off her stride and let people trick her into going into a cryo pod. She didn’t let on to that; too personal.

The story only got worse from there. Taylor saw little reason to lie or to sugar-coat things. Her husband had been murdered, her son had been stolen, and she had been left to rot in a glorified mausoleum for decades before the machinery finally released her into the hell that was to be her new home.

When she reached the part where she infiltrated the Institute, she changed tack. That was where she started to massage the truth. They didn’t need to know some of those details. They most certainly didn’t need to know that her son was actually a synth or that the son she’d given birth to was an absolute bastard who she’d vaporised in a nuclear detonation along with the rest of his insane colleagues.

“And that brings us here,” she finally said almost an hour after starting. “Home sweet home. I’m honestly not sure what to do now. No more scavenging ruins and fighting raiders for me, I suppose.”

“Certainly not,” said Director Piggot. “We still have the rule of law in this city. But you are in a difficult position, Ms. Hebert. Your identity is that of a teenage girl and your son doesn’t exist at all. We can help.”

Ah, the recruitment pitch. Join us and together we can bring order to this city.

“I would appreciate that,” said Taylor. “I don’t want to make any permanent decisions until I’ve had time to settle back in, but I’m going to need a way to exist here and so will my son.”

“From your description you appear to have a thinker power with a tinker leaning,” said Armsmaster. “You need to be careful. People with powers like yours are often forcibly recruited into gangs.”

Straight to the point. Taylor could deal with that. “I’ll stay quiet for now,” she said. “Keep hidden until I’m ready to make a choice. I’m not going to go looking for criminals to apprehend.”

“Your armour may make that difficult,” said the director. Her voice was as dry as the desert.

“Oh, it has stealth systems. First thing I added after I salvaged the armour.”

“Very well,” said Piggot. “We’ll need you to sign some forms to register as an independent so that you can legally own all of that hardware. After that, your father is waiting for you in the lobby.”

Taylor’s stomach clenched. She’d wanted to see her father again more than anything for so long, but now it was actually happening and she felt like an uncertain child all over again. She’d done so much. Hurt and killed so many people. The causes had always been good but she’d been a brutal vigilante, a soldier, and a wasteland boogeyman. She had no idea how she could explain what she’d done to her dad.

Chapter 2: 1.2

1.2

 

The Protectorate were good enough to give Taylor a meeting room for what came next. She left her power armour in a corner and sat there in a very comfortable chair trying not to think while her son went around in circles on his office chair. Round and round he went. Kids. She supposed she could let him off; there weren’t too many fancy office chairs in the wasteland and she didn’t think he’d been active in the Institute long enough to try them there.

Being irritated at the sound of his chair swishing around beat getting all nervous over her upcoming reunion anyway. It had been a long, long time since she’d seen her dad and a hell of a lot had changed since then. She’d been a kid the last time. Her biggest concerns had been bullying at high school and not having any friends. That sort of stuff didn’t really register next to the end of the world or having the government trick her into becoming a TV dinner or having her husband murdered in front of her or, well, anything that had happened since the accident really.

She wasn’t the same person. She’d seen too much and done too much and not every terrible thing in that story had been done to her. Some she’d done to other people. A lot, really. It was difficult to feel like you were morally superior after you’d turned an airport into a smoking crater full of corpses in the name of revenge. They’d dressed that up at the time, something they had to do to survive, but she’d done it because the Brotherhood had killed Glory and she was going to kill them right back.

It was a nice meeting room though so there was that. Big, fancy table, nice thick carpets, plenty of expensive chairs, and a TV screen that would have sold for millions back where she’d been even before the bombs. That was one area where Earth Bet definitely had the edge. Flat screens. You just didn’t see those on the other Earth. They’d never got past CRTs and you had to be richer than Croesus to have anything other than a very modestly sized one of those. Even colour was a bit of a stretch.

The longer Taylor spent back home the more she wondered how well her equipment would actually stack up in a fight on Earth Bet. A lot of the tech was clearly more advanced even if she was suddenly almost 280 years back in the past. She was pretty sure that shooting someone with a man-portable railgun would prove effective no matter what world she was wandering around on, but her armour was obviously nowhere near as slick as Armsmaster’s. It’d be a pretty unpleasant surprise if all that metal she was walking around in didn’t actually help.

Something she’d need to look into. Worst case she could just strip it down to the frame and rebuild it into something better using Earth Bet technology. It might even be fun, not having to rely on scrap and salvage. She could build something without it having to be a complete hackjob. It had been a long time since she’d been able to do that.

The door slid open. She was on her feet before she’d had so much as a moment to think about it. He looked almost exactly like she remembered. Tall, thin, hair thinning around the edges, always a little rumpled looking no matter how nice his clothes were. There were bags under his eyes that ran a little deeper than she remembered, but that could have just been time playing tricks on her.

She was really home.

Dad looked like he’d seen a ghost. He stood stock still barely inside the room. Swallowed and shook his head. “Taylor?”

Taylor was across the room and clinging to him so quickly it might as well have been a superpower. Chairs be damned. Tears were definitely involved. “I thought I’d never see you again,” she mumbled into his shoulder. She was almost as tall as him now. That was weird.

He held her tight. “That makes two of us. I thought that bastard killed you.”

“They’ll have to try harder than that to get rid of me.”

“God. What happened to you?” he said. She thought he might be crying, too.

Taylor laughed. “Super-long story. Maybe we can do it at home? I'm kind of sick of this place.”

He let go of her. It took a couple of seconds. “Sounds good to me,” he said. “I think I've had enough parahuman bullshit to last me a lifetime.”

Oh the irony. It cuts deep. Taylor couldn't bring herself to correct him even if the power armour made it a little bit obvious by Earth Bet’s standards. There weren't too many ordinary people running around in something like that. Not unless they had a tame tinker to keep it ship shape.

“Before we go,” she said. “I think I should introduce you to your grandson.”

If you wanted a picture perfect definition of what shock looked like, it was her Dad's face right there. Taylor doubted he would look any more surprised if she'd grown a second head and told him she had a Siamese twin now and to say hello to his new extra daughter.

“Uh,” he said. Super eloquent.

“It’s all part of the long story,” said Taylor. “To cut it short, I was married, we had Shaun, some pricks killed my husband and kidnapped Shaun, so I tracked them down and killed them right back. Mission accomplished and then I was pulled back here with him.”

Christ. They could have took her before she'd even found him, couldn't they? It was just a coincidence that she'd finished up and been with him when they pulled the trigger. She could have been pulling her pants up barely out of the vault or even still on ice just as easily. A few months was all that separated them and she'd been away for over two centuries. It was the blink of an eye. A few days earlier and she'd never have managed it.

Worse, she could have been there with him just as she had been, but out of grabbing distance. She would have lost him again and seen the look on his face as she was taken away from him again. Never to meet again, most likely. Lost like Nate.

“Taylor?” asked Dad. “Are you okay?”

“Not so sure anymore,” she said. Shaun took her hand. Squeezed. It centred her. Back into the present. “But I'll live. Shaun, this is your grandfather. I never thought I'd get to say that.”

To his credit, her Dad rolled with it pretty well. He dropped down on a knee to be in Shaun's eyeline and they were swapping greetings like they knew each other lickety split. Pro level grandparenting as far as she was concerned with her vast experience in the matter. And it gave her the moment she needed to collect herself. It was no time to be falling apart over what ifs and maybes. What happened was past.

“I'll just get in my armour and we can get going.”

That seemed to be the moment where Dad realised that there was a rather large suit of power armour in the room and that it belonged to her. Did the PRT tell him nothing before sending him in? It kind of looked that way to Taylor. How very, very helpful of them.

“I, uh, Taylor, you're going to get a lot of attention marching down the street in that. I don't think we want Kaiser knocking at our door with a recruitment pitch.”

“Her armour has a stealth boy built in,” said Shaun. “The way it refracts light is really cool. It just vanishes. All you can see is a sort of shimmer effect.”

Dad was many things, but a scientist wasn't one of them. It took him a moment to digest that one. “Tinker tech, huh?” He said finally. “I take back what I said about parahuman, uh, manure then. I guess we can go?”

It wasn't tinker tech, but it was probably more believable than the truth. She was going to have to tell him everything but she would really much rather do it at home. In a place where she didn't have to worry about other people maybe listening in with the wide array of microphones a meeting room just so happens to have. She'd told the PRT almost everything, but there was still that last little bit she wanted to keep to herself and the emotional stuff she definitely did not want to share.

“Yup,” she said. “Just give me a second to fire it up and we can get moving.”

---

Dad drove home with Shaun in his truck. He offered to take Taylor with him, but she would have had to ride along in the back and she did not trust that rickety old thing to hold up if she dumped power armour in there. It barely started in the mornings, if she remembered right, and she almost always did. That wasn't a great sign for how it would cope with being pushed beyond its limits really.

Maybe it would have been okay, but maybe not. Nothing good was going to come from that breakdown if it happened. How did your truck break down, sir? Well, it was the invisible woman in power armour riding in the back; she was just too heavy for it to handle. Please don't tell anyone. Yeah, Taylor was going to have to pass on that one.

So she was walking home guided by her pipboy’s mapping system and her slightly faded memories. It wasn't a great plan really, but the stealth boy kept anyone from seeing her and she'd modified her armour to not sound like a clockwork banshee a long time ago. She was pretty safe from notice as long as her fusion core held up.

Taylor had always thought Brockton Bay was a dump before the accident. Between the gangs and the lack of jobs things had been falling apart since before she had even been born. And she hadn’t even realised the full extent of how bad it was at the time. The neo-nazis had been so ingrained that it had taken years out of that context for her to realise that their existence was a huge fucking problem for everyone.

It had seemed hard to top.

And yet seeing it with post-wasteland eyes—it seemed like a whole different city. There was a whole lot of bad, but it wasn't anything like the scale of evil she'd seen in post-war Boston which had been crammed full of people who thought that murder, rape, and cannibalism were just peachy. It was after dark and people were walking the streets freely. She'd not seen that outside fortified settlements for what felt like a lifetime.

It could be saved. They just needed to neuter the gangs so that good people would feel safe in the city again. God, she wished Nick had come through with her. He would have relished the chance to do some real police work in a place where they still had police and courts. And he could have done a lot of good with her watching his back. He was like a dog with a really juicy bone when he got started. Not needing to eat or sleep just topped that off.

She was going to miss the old gumshoe. For all that he had been a machine and obviously so, he'd been one of the most human people she'd met in the wasteland and one of the few who actually understood what had been lost and why it had been lost. She really hoped he wouldn't waste too much time trying to track her down, but it was probably too much to hope for.

And there it was. Home sweet home. It was like seeing something out of a dream; it had been so long . A modest two storey house in a slightly rough area and not terribly well maintained, but home. The rotten step leading up to the front door had finally snapped.

Dad’s truck was parked up in the driveway, so they'd beat her home. Not much surprise there. She circled around to the back and jiggled the kitchen door open. Just as she remembered.

They were waiting for her in the living room. It was a tight fit to say the least. Even American houses weren't built with that sort of size in mind. She could drop the stealth boy at least and save her fusion core. Not that it was even close to being low on charge, and she had spares, but it was hard to know when, or if, she'd be able to get replacements.

“I'll ditch the armour in the basement,” said Taylor. “I think it should be big enough. Dad?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That should be fine, but be careful with the stairs. Shaun already went through the front step.”

She gave him what she thought would be a jaunty salute but probably didn't even come close in reality. Then she headed down and immediately started feeding juice to her jetpack. There was no way those stairs were going to take her weight. A little thrust would go a long way to relieving that.

Taylor ditched her armour once she reached the actual basement and pocketed the core. Her Dad wasn't dumb enough or crooked enough to try and run off in it, but she really, really didn't want to be the woman who gave power armour to some two-bit burglar if worse came to worst. Then she checked her sidearms and headed back.

“Did you see it, mom?” came the question when she went back up. “Grandad has a working truck.”

Taylor smiled. That would be pretty exciting to a kid that hadn't seen one until that day. “I think that might be pushing it. Semi-working at best.”

“Hey, that truck has done good by me.”

“I seem to remember some mornings when you would have told a very different story about your, and I quote, ‘stupid, piece-of-shit truck that won't start.’”

He coughed. “Moving on from my sadly unappreciated truck,” he said. “It's getting late. You want me to get out the sleeping bag so Shaun can stay with you for tonight?”

“That sounds like a good idea,” said Taylor. “Shaun, clean your pistol.”

“Aww, but I haven't even fired it today.”

“And what happens if you need to use it and the focusing lens isn't clean?”

Shaun sighed. “The beam will be refracted and lose intensity,” he said in a bored voice. “It won't have the expected punch and might not hurt the target.”

“Exactly. Take care of your weapon and it'll take care of you. I need to clean mine as well. We can do it together.”

Her dad looked mildly horrified, but he didn't interrupt until she'd laid her guns out on the table. The Deliverer and the .44 caliber revolver and started pulling her cleaning kit out of the pouch she had it stashed in.

“That's a big gun,” he said.

“Souvenir of my visit to Nuka-World.”

“That sounds like a theme park.”

“Yup.”

“You picked up a hand cannon as a souvenir from a theme park.”

“Well, it was full of raiders and their slaves at the time,” said Taylor. “But one of the attractions was a bunch of robots playing cowboys with revolvers like this.”

“That's crazy.”

Taylor really couldn't disagree. It was an advanced level of crazy by normal standards. “Yup.”

“I feel like this is going to be a long story,” said her dad. “A violent one too with all these guns.”

“You're not wrong. Tomorrow, when we're all fresh, I'll tell it to you. I've already had to do it once today and I think that's about my limit.”

“Okay, Taylor. Tomorrow. I'll get the sleeping bag ready.”

He left them to it while they cleaned their weapons. There was silence for a couple of minutes broken only by the sound of cloth rubbing over glass and metal and the sound of bore brush doing its work.

“He seems nice,” said Shaun after a couple of minutes.

“He is,” said Taylor. “He's family. You can trust him. Might take a little while for him to adjust though. The last he knew I was only a few years older than you. It must be weird for me to pop back up closer to his age.”

“Okay.”

They finished. Taylor checked Shaun’s work, fine as usual, and then her dad returned to tell them it was ready. One hug later and they trooped off to her bedroom to dig in for the night, but not before Taylor showed Shaun where the toilet was. Now that was a luxury. An actual flushing toilet that still worked with toilet paper and everything. The lack of those was something she was definitely not going to miss about the wasteland.

Sleep came easily. More so than it had for a long time.

Chapter 3: 1.3

1.3

 

Taylor woke up sharply the next day. One moment asleep, the next fully awake. That much was about normal. It didn’t pay to be sluggish in the wasteland; you never knew what sort of nasty might be creeping up to take what you had. It could be anything from a mutated monster to some drugged up raider that wasn’t going to let anything like morals or a sense of self-preservation get in the way of their robbing, murdering, and raping someone. No, you had to be ready to move and you had to be ready to move immediately.

It was the dream she’d woke up from that had put a little extra pep into her heart-rate. It had been a good while since she’d thought about her first days in the wasteland. Crawling out of the vault, finding Dogmeat, meeting Preston and the rest of his group. They weren’t really things she cared to think on too much. Checking her husband’s corpse for signs of life, the frozen blood around the massive entry wound on his chest—it wasn’t a happy memory and things hadn’t got much better for a long time afterwards.

There had been times when she’d thought maybe she should have accepted Preston’s offer and signed on with the Minutemen, even accepted that frankly insane plan to become their leader and rebuild the organisation almost from scratch, but she’d had a clear path. Her son was all that mattered. She had to find him and she wasn’t going to waste time on anything else that she didn’t have to.

A familiar tide of bitterness welled up. Yeah, she’d found him alright. Stolen away, raised by sociopaths, and completely and utterly uncaring about the countless lifes he’d ruined with his FEV experiments and synth replacements. An old man set in his ways. He’d been her son in name only no matter how much she’d tried to tell herself otherwise and it should have been damned obvious right from that first meeting, but she’d been in denial.

She looked to her side. Shaun, the synth replica of her son. Snoring away on the camp bed quite happily. So innocent even after months in the wastes. Taylor really had no idea what madness had possessed her son to build a replica of himself as a child, but it might very well have been the only good thing he’d done in his whole life. It had been rough at first, seeing the reminder of everything that had happened, but he was worth it. Every bit.

And it was time for him to wake up. She poked her leg out of the bed and gave him a nudge. He snorted, rolled over, and resumed sleeping. Teenagers. Even super mutants hadn’t taught him to wake up fast apparently. Well, time for more extreme measures. A much firmer push rolled him off the bed entirely.

He jumped up swinging around wildly in her general direction. His hair was everywhere. How he managed that when it wasn’t even all that long she had no idea. “I’m up! I’m up!”

“Go shower. Brush your teeth. Comb your hair for all the good it’ll do.”

“Right, right,” he said scrubbing the sleep from his eyes. “A real shower?”

“With hot water,” she said. “Don’t use it all. The heater’s pretty terrible.”

Shaun nodded, picked up his clothes, and left. She was going to have to get him some more clothes. Wasteland-chic would not serve him well on Earth Bet. His clothes were in good condition by the standards they had grown used to, all in one piece, all holes darned, but he would look like a hobo next to the other boys at school.

Christ. School. She was going to have to enroll him somewhere. He wasn’t old enough for Winslow, thank God. The idea hardly bore thinking about. It was a long time ago, but she still remembered how miserable and scared she’d been there. She hadn’t gunned her way across the wasteland to find her son only to lose him to a place like that.

No, she wasn’t dwelling. Not on that. Not on anything. And it was past time for her to get up, too. Home was safer than she’d been for a long time, but she wasn’t going to let it make her soft. Brockton Bay held its own dangers and some of them were a match for anything she’d seen out there and then some. The wastes had held some real monsters, but no rage dragons or people who turned into human-sized blenders.

It would be interesting to see how Lung would hold up against a behemoth or a mirelurk queen, but only from a very safe distance and with a Fat Man at hand to take care of whichever one survived.

The room was just as she’d left it. Maybe a little bit dustier, but it was hard to tell. Her homework was still piled up on her desk half-done and waiting for her to complete it, ready for the new year at school. Well, that was one thing she was free from. No more tedious world affair classes with Mr Gladly. What a shame. And she bet that if she moved that loose floorboard her journals would still be there.

Yup, there they were. The last few months of misery all documented for some vague idea of evidence. Like anyone at Winslow would have given a shit.

She really had popped out only a few weeks after being sent away. Hard to reconcile with two centuries on ice and fifteen years in action. It had been so long for her that she doubted she’d remember anything without her power making her remember almost everything. For her dad it might as well have been yesterday.

Taylor had an idea of how that felt. She’d had her son pop up as an adult when she was expecting a child. It—it wasn’t good. She was going to have to talk to him. Reassure him, really. It wasn’t his fault and she was still his daughter. He needed to know that.

But first hygiene. She picked out some clothes from her closet — she’d worn them so loose that they’d still fit even fifteen years and a pregnancy later — and headed off to the bathroom. Shaun wouldn’t be in there too much longer and her dad would be getting up soon.

---

The smell of bacon and eggs frying filled the house. Real eggs, from a chicken, not from some radioactive monster that crapped cancer, spat acid, and would try to eat you if you turned your back on it. Bacon from a pig that only had one head and hopefully no tumours. There was no stopping her stomach gurgling.

She could hear her dad moving around upstairs. Not quite the early starter she was, his footsteps came heavy and were easy to pick out. The house wasn’t exactly built from the strongest, most sound-absorbing materials either. Not long. Good thing breakfast was almost done.

It felt like a dream to be there. Cooking normal food in her old home on an oven that wasn’t a centuries old ruin held together by scrap metal and home-made adhesive. Taylor knew it would wear off sooner or later once the reality of life sank in again, but just in that moment, home and safe with her dad and her son, she felt pretty close to being perfectly happy.

“That smells good,” said her dad. “Bacon and eggs?”

“Yup,” said Taylor. “Almost done. There’s a pot of coffee on the table if you want some. Shame I didn’t get to bring Codsworth along with me. He’s been dying to get his hands on real ingredients again.”

She heard the sound of coffee pouring behind her. “Codsworth?”

“He’s a Mr Handy robot,” said Shaun. “Really cool. He can cook and clean and set raiders on fire and he’s like a person. I was building him a laser gun so he could wouldn’t have to get so close to fight.”

“On fire?” said her dad weakly. “A laser gun? I have so many questions”

“I bought him before the war,” said Taylor. The food was ready, so she started serving it up on to plates. “He spent a couple of hundred years waiting for me to come back and by the time I did he’d changed. A lot of robots broke down or turned dangerous as glitches accumulated without maintenance, but Codsworth managed to turn into something like a real AI.”

“That’s some devotion,” said her dad a moment later as she set the plates down on the kitchen table. “Two hundred years?”

“It’s a really long story. I’ll fill you in after breakfast.”

The bacon and eggs did not last long. But god damn did it taste good going down. There were so many things she hadn’t been able to enjoy for years and now they were all there again. Meat, dairy, vegetables, spices. All there for the taking and not even expensive. It was something she’d never really thought about until it was out of reach.

Even before the bombs fell they’d mostly been eating rubbish. Everything had been packaged with low-quality filler to stretch it out, because real food cost unbelievable amounts. Some of those salisbury steaks had about as much beef in them as the average chicken and the less said about the burgers the better.

Shaun had beaten her to the end of the meal. Memories of institute goop and wasteland slop couldn’t give him much of a frame of reference for pre-war, pre-resource-crisis fare. Not even when it was cheap, watery bacon simply fried.

God, she was looking forward to showing him what the world had to offer now. It was his oyster. They just had to keep his synth status quiet and he could do anything, be anything. She was going to miss her friends — Piper, Nick, Deacon, Cait, even the guys back at Sanctuary — but even super villains couldn’t make up the gap between Earth Bet and where they’d been. This would be a better life. For her and for Shaun.

He was such a smart kid. He didn’t need powers. Shaun was already building tech that Earth Bet wasn’t even close to and he was just a boy with a decent education in the sciences for his age. The local college would fall over itself to give him a scholarship when he was old enough and then he’d be set for life.

“I’ve got the next few days off work,” said her dad. “We should do something.”

Taylor thought for a moment. “It's a market day today isn't it?” she asked. “I need to pick up some clothes for Shaun. We could get something to eat and make a day of it.”

Hmm. Taylor really hoped that she was remembering the bank balance right. Things that happened before she triggered were a lot fuzzier than after and it'd be slightly embarrassing to be completely bust already. Not that she'd been particularly flush as it was, but a few hundred went a lot further than zero.

That Protectorate offer looked a little more tempting when she thought about the money situation. Her dad wasn't exactly a rich man. He worked hard, but there wasn't a lot of reward in working for a Dockworker's union in a city where the docks were blockaded by a graveyard of wrecked ships. She was going to need to get a job and better offers were going to be hard to come by unless she started working on her goosestep.

“Okay,” said her dad. “Lets do that.”

“First, I owe you an explanation,” said Taylor. “I've already done this once and I recorded it, so maybe save the questions for after?”

“Okay. It can wait if—”

“No,” said Taylor. “I want to get this out of the way and you deserve to know a hell of a lot more than the PRT.”

She dialled up the recording on her pip boy and hit play.

---

It wasn't the most fun thing to listen to, but Taylor had already lived through it and given the recital once before when she was being interviewed by the local superheroes and their boss. She had distance from the words and acceptance of the things she'd done and had done to her. Emotional calluses had long since been built. None of it shocked her even if she would really rather not be reminded of watching Kellogg put one through Nate’s head, especially not when her ever helpful power had decided to replay it for her in full technicolour detail just that night in dream form.

The same could not be said of her dad. He'd gone very pale very quickly and looked about ready to cry or murder someone by the end. Maybe both. She was pretty familiar with that feeling herself.

“Christ, Taylor,” he said. “If that idiot Leet wasn't already dead—”

“You'd be behind me in the queue to correct it,” said Taylor. “Trust me there’d be a bullet with his name on it.”

“Who’s Leet?” asked Shaun.

“He’s the idiot who sent me away,” said Taylor. “He was a tinker, a parahuman who makes machines beyond normal science, but he was garbage. His stuff never worked right and sometimes just exploded. I got caught up in one of the explosions and ended up on another Earth in the future.”

Shaun’s eyes went wide. “Oh,” he mouthed. Taylor could see the cogs working in his head. Metaphorical cogs. She was about 99% sure that synths were natural humans with nothing more than a genetic-engineering tune-up and a control chip to let the Institute bag and tag ‘em without a fight if they went rogue. So much for the Institute’s collective genius.

“Don’t even think about it, Shaun,” said Taylor. “No playing with machines beyond mortal ken that blast people across time and space.”

“Aww.”

“Maybe when you’re older. And we really need to get you up to speed on how all of this works. Maybe the library will have something?”

“I’m sure they will,” said her dad. “I kinda get the feeling that there’s more to the story then you told the PRT though.”

“Well, I incinerated the son I gave birth to in a nuclear detonation,” said Taylor. “He was a mass-murdering sociopath who thought he could use me. He couldn’t. This Shaun is actually a synth copy he had made of himself because he was all the way crazy.”

Something along those lines. That’s what she intended to say albeit a bit more dressed up and after making sure Shaun wouldn’t hear it. The words choked in her mouth.

“I told them what they wanted to hear,” she said. “History, geography, culture, technology, tactics, threats. That’s what they’re interested in. They don’t want to hear about the nosy reporter I met outside Diamond City who set me on the right track when I was lost or the old gumshoe who helped me track down the man who murdered my husband and stole my boy or the man I fell in love with and married.”

Or the long, dark night she’d spent alone after seeing what Shaun had been turned into by those Institute bastards. Having her reason to fight turn out to be the thing she was fighting hadn’t been a good moment.

After all, what sort of prick sets their mother up to think a synth copy is their son, and then shuts it down in front of them? Knowing that she’d literally gunned her way across the Commonwealth trying to find him? Jesus.

“I’d like to hear some of those stories,” said her dad. “They sound worth passing on.”

Taylor smiled at him. “Sounds like a plan,” she said. “I have some pictures rolled up in one of my armour pockets to put faces to names.”

He cocked his head in a questioning look. “You carry them around with you?”

“If it isn’t nailed down, some dick will try and steal it,” said Taylor. “I lost more than a few things to roving jetheads before I learned that lesson. Can’t carry everything, but small valuables always come along for the journey.”

You would probably expect people to have more important things to worry about than their next fix in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

“I’d love to see them, Taylor.”

“Tonight then. I’ll bring them down tonight.”

Chapter 4: 1.4

1.4

 

“So many people.”

Shaun was very deliberately standing behind Taylor as they approached the market. It wasn’t too hard to work out why. There were hundreds of people milling around the stalls that lined both sides of the street. Even Diamond City, largest settlement in the Commonwealth by some margin, couldn’t offer anything remotely like what they were seeing. There was probably more people there than Diamond City could muster in total.

“It’s okay, Shaun,” said Taylor. “This is normal. You’re perfectly safe here. Just stay nearby.”

He didn’t seem like he stayed in exactly the same position for more than a moment as they manouevred their way to a stall selling boy’s clothes not too far from where they’d entered. But he always stayed behind her. The whole time. Not exactly a mark of feeling secure.

“We need some shirts, trousers, socks, and underwear in a medium boy size,” said Taylor. She pushed Shaun forward. “Go look. See what you like.”

It took a little while for him to get going, but he did. She stayed close, never more than a few feet from him, and he eventually opened up. It probably wouldn’t have worked with a normal waster, but Shaun was an Institute kid as far as he knew. His baggage didn’t run as deep. And he picked up several new sets of all the clothing a boy would need without too much issue.

Taylor wished she could say the same. She felt a little bit naked there if she were being honest. The thick, black hoodie and baggy jeans she was wearing didn’t help. Not even the ballistic weave undershirt and underwear, which really needed new elastic that she could actually buy now, helped as much as you would think. No, it was the lack of a familiar weight at her hip that made her feel that way.

Not carrying a gun of some description, not even one of her sidearms, just felt wrong after her time in the wasteland. She knew intellectually that she didn’t really need it. Brockton Bay had gangs and criminals a-plenty, but shoot-outs in the middle of the market? Roving gangs of raiders attacking people for their stuff on their way home? It wasn’t really part of the local script. When something like that happened it was a headline splash that lasted for days or weeks. The odds of it happening to them were pretty minuscule.

But she still felt it. And she felt it ever more keenly with everyone that brushed past her, everyone that eyed her up, every sudden noise.

“I need a concealed carry holster,” she said. “You think I can get one around here?”

“I, uh, I’m not sure Taylor,” said her dad. “Most gun shops closed years ago. People didn’t see the point when parahuman started throwing fireballs around. We might have to go further out where rents are cheaper to find one.”

Was it possible to call master/stranger protocols on an entire country? Because Americans turning away from guns made absolutely no sense. Americans turning away from guns as the world became more and more violent made even less sense if that were possible. Everything she knew said that there should be more guns if anything. Anything without a brute rating went down just as easily as a normal human if shot. Guns would work fine, so why not use them?

“Maybe a purse then,” she said. “No-one would look twice at one of those. You can carry all sorts of things in a purse and get away with it.”

“Do you even have a license to carry a gun?”

Taylor waved her hand. “Not so much,” she said. “But they’re letting me keep all my gear, so why not?

“You need a license?” said Shaun looking quite honestly baffled in a way that only a child could.

“Yeah,” said her dad. “They don’t want just anyone running around with guns. It causes all sorts of trouble, especially now there are gangs everywhere.”

“But then you need—”

“People work differently here, Shaun,” said Taylor. “They have police and courts to take care of criminals. You can’t just run off and shoot someone who causes trouble.”

“Even if they deserve it?”

“Even then.”

He quieted and looked thoughtful. That gave him something to chew on. The only justice he knew came from the Insitute and the wasteland. Neither wasted much time or energy on things like proportion or human rights and rehabilitation was right out of the question even more so than it was in the really nasty prisons on Earth Bet.

“Nick used to be a cop in a time like this,” she said. “Before they made a synth with his mind. He would track criminals down and arrest them. The courts dealt with punishment. People went to prison, like in Diamond City, but it happened everywhere and they would stay for years. That’s how it works here too.”

They got a couple of strange looks from an old couple passing them by. Taylor supposed it wasn’t every day you heard the idea of police and prison being explained to a kid Shaun’s age.

His clothes probably didn’t help. They’d picked up some replacements from the stalls they’d passed through along the way, but he was still wearing the striped shirt and jeans he’d come through the portal in. They were clean, but not in particularly good condition by Earth Bet standards. Obviously darned and patched in a number of places with thread that didn’t always match. She’d done her best but it’s not like you can just pop down the supermarket for supplies when the supermarket is a radioactive crater that hasn’t seen resupply for over two hundred years.

It also didn’t help that she didn’t really believe what she was saying. She was mouthing the comforting myths that kept countries running. The police weren’t going to show up and save the day when shit hit the fan. They would as often as not be further out than you needed them to be, have higher priorities, or just not give a shit because you were a troublemaker or the wrong skin colour or too poor to be worth the effort. She’d seen all of that before so many times. But you couldn’t tell a barely pubescent teenager that he can’t rely on anything but his own gun-arm.

And that killed the mood. For her at least. She needed a second.

“Hey, that stall’s selling hobbyist electronics,” she said to break the silence. “Let’s go take a look.”

Shaun’s eyes lit up and off he went. The middle-aged man running the stall didn’t look like he knew what hit him as the questions started. It was a pretty endless stream, to be fair. Shaun’d built laser weapons from scrap. Actual, working new things to use had to be a dream to him. Things that were working on new principles even moreso.

“That was a dirty trick, Taylor,” said her dad. “Don’t think I don’t know what you just did.”

“Yeah, yeah. I remember you and mom pointing me at a pile of books to keep me distracted more than once.”

Her dad smirked at her. Actually smirked. The nerve. “Learning from the best,” he said.

Taylor rolled her eyes and went to join her son gawping over the new shiny toys. They ended up buying a bag of generic components for a price that seemed too cheap to be true. The stall owner seemed pleased enough with it, though, so everyone went away happy.

“I think I can build a new type of capacitor for my laser with these,” said Shaun, words spilling out so quickly they almost fell into one another. “Maybe ten percent more efficient?”

“That sounds good. Maybe we can work together and see how we far we can stretch it?”

Shaun’s nod was enthusiastic. She couldn’t help but reach down and ruffle his hair. It was already a mess so why not. He ducked away before she could make much of it, but she could see the smile on his face.

“Ann—Annette?”

Taylor stiffened. That voice was familiar. She turned to face it. Middle-aged, red hair, flushed cheeks, curvy. She knew who that was. And she knew who the teenage girl, very similar looking, but shorter, rounder cheeked, less affected by gravity, stood next to her was, too.

Emma’s voice came out slightly squeaky. “T—Taylor?”

Taylor gave Emma her best icy not-quite-glare. Judging by the way the redhead paled it was effective. Emma was already pretty damned pale, so going paler was quite the sight. Taylor was done with being a victim. And she wasn’t going to let this slip of a girl even think about trying to get back into that old pattern.

“Mrs Barnes,” she said. Her voice came out quieter than she’d expected and she cleared her throat before continuing. The next words came with more strength. “Emma. It’s been a while. I know this won’t make sense, but, yes, I’m Taylor. This is my son, Shaun.”

Her dad was at her side. Offering support. She appreciated that. She really did. Seeing these people again—it wasn’t something she’d ever expected to happen. And it wasn’t anything like the unalloyed joy she’d felt at seeing her dad again.

Mrs Barnes. “I—I don’t understand. How? What happened?”

She looked utterly befuddled. Taylor had entertained some uncharitable thoughts about the Barnes family. Some very, very uncharitable thoughts. In retrospect, it had all been Emma. She’d been the one to sever ties. Taylor had never even thought to check with the adults.

Speaking of Emma, Taylor had ever seen a girl look so confused. Confused, a little scared, and incredibly uncomfortable. Not meeting her eyes. Shifting from foot to foot. Was this really the demon that had ruined her life? She looked so small. Not even slightly intimidating, if Taylor were being honest.

“It’s a long story,” said her dad. He looked at her and she shrugged in response. “Maybe we should step into that coffee shop over there to talk about it?”

General nods of acceptance. Taylor kept a hand on Shaun’s shoulder as they headed to the shop in question.

---

Her dad brought back several large cups of coffe, a cup of tea, and a can of coke and a flapjack for Shaun. There had been a grand total of zero words uttered in his absence. The Barnes seemed content to gawp and shift around uncomfortably as they waited for him to return and Taylor wasn’t overly inclined to be the one to break the silence. This wasn’t exactly a situation she wanted to be in and not one she was particularly wanted to rescue.

Also, watching Emma be uncomfortable in her presence was a little entertaining. There was still a small part of her that held a bit of a grudge it seemed. Watching the girl be scared and uncomfortable in her presence was a little bit revenge that she’d never had before. And her power was filling her in on all the little details of Emma’s body language. The discomfort, the flashes of shame, the fear that kept her from meeting Taylor’s eyes. Hmm.

Shaun took a small, careful bite of the flapjack. A moment later the whole thing was gone. Or at least crammed into his mouth in what could not be called an elegant way to eat.

Taylor turned her attention back to her son. “You’ll give yourself indigestion, Shaun,” she said. “Take your time.”

For better or worse that broke the tension. Apparently a twelve year old boy whose cheeks were bulging out like a squirrel was a good enough cue for people to start talking.

“Taylor, what happened?” asked Mrs Barnes. “The last time I saw you—you were fourteen. Now you look twice that. It hasn’t been that long.”

“You heard about the accident out near the docks?” asked Taylor. “Tinker tech exploding?”

“Something to do with those videogame idiots?”

“The very same. I was caught up in that. It sent me somewhere else and I lived there for fifteen years. Now I’m back and believe me the paperwork is awkward.”

“I—I imagine it would be. My God. The Protectorate should have done something about those idiots years ago before anything like this could happen.”

“Preaching to the choir,” said her dad. Grumbled really. There was a real edge to his voice, not one she heard from him very often, not when he knew she was there. “Those idiots deserved what they got. Taylor and the others didn’t.”

Mrs Barnes was relaxing. Getting to grips with the new reality. Taylor could see it on her face, in her body language, her tone of voice, everything. It was strange but she was getting over it. At the end of the day it wasn’t her problem. Her concern was muted by their broken relationship. It had been well over a year since the last time they had spoken.

“They’re probably still out there somewhere,” said Taylor. “There was a time travel component to the whole mess. Armsmaster is having a real hard time pinning it down, but you might get your chance eventually. You’ll have to beat me to it though. There’s a bullet with their name on it.”

The same could not be said for Emma who was looking worse by the moment. The girl had barely taken a sip of her coffee and looked even paler than she usually did, which was saying something with her red-headed complexion.

It was the first time in a long time that Taylor had been in Emma’s vicinity and not felt like she was the one on the backfoot. The taunts always came eventually, but Emma had always known how to draw it out and make sure that she struck at just the right moment when Taylor was least guarded against it. Now she looked like she couldn’t even bring herself to speak.

Strange. She shouldn’t have been that scared. There was no obvious way for Emma to know more about what had happened than what she’d been told and none of that was particularly intimidating.

Ah, well. It wasn’t important. Emma wasn’t important. Taylor had wasted far too much of her life on this girl already.

“Oh,” said Taylor. “I should introduce you. This is my son Shaun. Shaun, this is Emma and Mrs Barnes. We were friends when I was your age.”

Shaun looked up from his coke. “Hi,” he said. Then he returned to gulping down brown sugar water. She supposed she could excuse him. Cold coca-cola beat the hell out of two century old nuka-cola.

“It has been a long time, hasn’t it?” said Mrs Barnes quietly. Emma shifted in her seat. Ha, that one hit home. “We should get together sometime. Like the old days. I can cook that lasagna you like so much.”

It would have been really easy to spin things out and get some petty revenge on Emma. The right words at the right time, an implication here and there, and it would be done. The girl had more than earned it with the way she’d treated Taylor. Snapping their friendship in half and spending a year and change victimising her for no god-damned reason.

Yet Taylor couldn’t bring herself to really care. What was the point? Emma was the past. It was half a lifetime ago. She just didn’t want anything to do with this anymore. And she sure as hell didn’t want to set an example of petty revenge for Shaun.

“I’m going to be really busy for the forseeable future,” said Taylor. Hopefully they’d get the message. She wasn’t interested. “I don’t think I’m going to have time between getting my paperwork ducks in a row and starting at the PRT.”

“You’re taking their offer then?” asked her dad. He didn’t look happy. Probably didn’t want her playing superhero. She couldn’t say she was really looking forward to it all that much either. Wearing masks and silly costumes didn’t hold that much appeal for her. But she could probably do some good work behind the scenes with her power and tech skills and she needed to do something.

“Not much choice really,” said Taylor. “Thirty year old single mother with no record of education or work history. The PRT are willing to accept that I have skills even if I don’t have the paperwork. I doubt someone would even hire me to flip burgers right now.”

There were the gangs who would no doubt roll out the red carpet for someone who might be able to do a workable impersonation of a tinker, but she really wasn’t interested in going there. How they managed to have a neo-Nazi problem in 2011 was beyond her. Even on the other Earth, with all of its many and varied problems that led to an actual apocalypse, they’d not had actual, heil Hitler Nazis to worry about. No, there was no real appeal to that option at all.

Other superhero groups? Same thing at the end of the day. It wasn’t like she knew any of them well enough to say which was the better option and none of the other major groups were based in the city anyway. The Protectorate was the only game in town unless she managed to worm her way into New Wave, which she had no desire to do whatsoever. Being an unmasked hero in a city full of Birdcage candidates sounded like a straight line to the graveyard to her.

“Oh, what did you do?” asked Mrs Barnes. “A . . . soldier? Police?”

Interesting guesses. Something in her demeanour had given her away? She’d have to learn how to play nice with civilians if she was being that obvious.

“Not quite. I was drafted for a few years, but I was in an engineering platoon attached to an infantry division. Not front-line combat. It’s the engineering degree that’ll make me useful.”

That shut them up. Yes, geeky little Taylor Hebert had been a soldier. Not that she’d been all that good at it. She’d spent as much time on punishment duty for talking back and other such things as she had fighting. God only knew what they’d have done to her if she hadn’t been so good at keeping their beloved power armour working even when they were way out beyond the reach of their supply lines.

The conversation remained dead and they broke apart shortly thereafter. Taylor had no desire to see them again.

Chapter 5: Interlude 1

Interlude 1.1

 

Shaun — Danny’s grandson and wasn’t that strange to think; he’d thought he had years to go before that prospect appeared on the radar — was safely tucked away in bed and he was sat on the couch next to Taylor. His daughter who had vanished off the face of the Earth for just under a month and then come back so different he sometimes had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

The gawky teenage girl he’d raised was long, long gone. There was no lack of confidence. No shyness. And any sign of vulnerability vanished the moment she was around someone that wasn’t family. He still had no idea what to make of that run-in with Emma and Zoe. Those girls had been thick as thieves for so long he doubted either remembered what life was like without the other, but Taylor had seemed completely uninterested and Emma had honestly looked scared.

There was something going on there, but Taylor didn’t seem eager to volunteer what it is. Or to care all that much either. He wasn’t sure if he should push or not. Did it matter? He didn’t know and he sure as hell didn’t want to risk alienating her. Danny had barely known how to talk to his daughter before all of this; now he had no idea whatsoever.

God, he missed Annette even more than usual. She would have known how to handle things. How to talk to Taylor. How to tease out what was bothering her. He felt like an oaf walking through a shop full of fine china. One misstep and it would all come crashing down around him. It wasn’t a nice feeling and he didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

She was showing him pictures from her exile. A roll she’d pulled from a pouch on the belt of her armour. Armour. Danny didn’t want to think of his little girl needing to wear armour but there it was. The stuff covered almost every inch of her body when she had it on and that was before she strapped herself into the metal monstrosity she had parked in the basement. That thing looked like it was designed to take on Lung and it gave him the shivers every time he looked at it.

This picture was a pretty, dark-haired young woman in a leather duster and a girl maybe twelve years old. They were in some sort of hut — there was a corrugated iron wall and a desk with a computer of some kind on it behind them. It didn’t look like any computer Danny had ever seen, but a screen and keyboard are pretty obvious.

“That’s Piper and her little sister, Nat,” said Taylor. “They ran the Diamond City newspaper. Nosiest woman I’ve ever known, but her heart was in the right place. She pointed me in the right direction when I was very, very lost and helped me find Nick. Called me Blue for the vault suit I was still wearing back then. Horrible thing; too tight, too bright, and stifling in hot weather. No pictures of that, thank God.”

There was an obvious fondness in Taylor’s voice. This woman had been a friend then. And it sounded like she’d been a good one.

“Diamond City?”

“Well, they called it a city,” said Taylor. “It was more like a shantytown they’d built into the old ballpark. Strong walls count for a lot when you have to worry about raiders and super mutants. Biggest settlement in the Commonwealth.”

He had more questions than he had answers. Every answer he got opened up more horrifying questions.

“Super mutants, those were the big green ones?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Horrible things. I think I’ve got some pictures of some in here.”

She flipped through the roll for a few moments. He got glimpses of men in labcoats before those were spirited away.

“Here they are,” she said. “There was a whole bunch of them occupying an old building site. I took a bunch of pictures from a building across the way so we could work out how many there were before we hit them. Hell of a fight. They don’t die easily and they always seem to find the biggest guns.”

Danny wished he hadn’t asked. If he’d seen those things coming, he’d have hopped in the nearest car and made his way out of the city. They were a parody of the human form: huge, over-muscled, and she wasn’t kidding about the guns. Was that a minigun? Jesus. It was one-handing a gun you’d normally see attached to a plane. Who needed parahuman villains when you had mutant monsters like that roaming around.

“Yeah, that wasn’t a whole lot of fun,” she said. “But they were causing all kinds of trouble preying on anyone passing through the area. We had to get rid of them to move packages out of the Commonwealth.”

“Packages?”

“Oh, this was after I joined the Railroad. You couldn’t keep synths in the Commonwealth for too long if you wanted them to stay free, so we’d get them out. Hard to do that when super mutants keep turning them into lunch.”

Sometimes the answer to a question is that you’re better off not knowing. That was one of them. “Did that sort of thing, uh, happen often?”

“There’s always some asshole waiting for someone who looks soft to take their stuff,” said Taylor. “No target softer than a newly free synth. Even after you pour some memories into them they still don’t really get it for a while. Wasters know what to steer clear of instinctively. They’re raised in that environment; adapted to it. Synths, it takes a little while to sink in, and they can get into an awful lot of trouble before it does.”

She didn’t talk about herself, but Danny could draw a few lines between those points. She’d come out of that vault as clueless as anyone could be in a violent new world. How much trouble had she found before she’d adapted? It didn’t bear thinking about, so he shoved the idea way. There would be liquor to seal the deal later.

“Was it—was it worth it?”

Taylor blinked and looked thoughtful for a moment. And his heart ached. She looked so much like Annette like that. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it was. I joined up with them just to fight the Institute to start with, but Nick, Glory, all of them changed that. They’re people. They’re not machines to be used and thrown away and they deserved to be free like the right of us even if some of them turned out to be useless assholes.”

“I can’t imagine. Machines that are people. It’s hard to wrap my head around.”

She was so hard to read. Danny had no idea what his daughter was thinking, but there was something evaluating in the way she was looking at him. He felt like he was underneath a microscope. “I didn’t believe it at first, either,” said Taylor. “But then I met Nick. He looks like some sort of bad animatronic, but you talk to him and he’s a person. They feel, want, and suffer like the rest of us no matter how they came to be. It’s a shame you’ll never get to meet him or the others.”

Taylor then launched into the story of how Piper and Nick had helped her track down the man who’d killed her husband and stolen her son. It started with her agreeing to find a lost detective, moved through her shooting her way through a bomb shelter full of mobsters, and moved on to her, in her own words, ‘pounding on Kellogg until he wasn’t much more than a pile of mush on the floor. Mush and machines the Institute had wired up to him.’

Most people he’d think were bullshitting him with a story like that. Talking things up. The way she told it she’d killed a couple dozen men, even more killer robots, and then took down a near immortal cyborg. That was a hell of a butcher’s bill. No human could take on that many people and win in any sort of a fight. Someone would catch them sooner or later.

But his girl was a parahuman. She had powers. Taylor hadn’t told him what she could do, exactly, and she’d been vague on the tape she’d played for him, but he knew it was some sort of mental power. Let her think quicker, respond to threats quicker, and apparently shoot her way through whole crowds of armed, hostile men.

On the one hand, he’d rather his little girl hadn’t had to do that. On the other, he’d like to think he’d do the same thing. He knew how he’d felt when Taylor had been taken by that idiot of a tinker blowing himself to kingdom come. If he’d had a way to get his hands on that bastard, Danny was pretty damned sure he’d have done something the law would have wanted to make him regret. And the guys at the docks would have helped him get rid of the body to deal with that problem.

But then he remembered what happened after Annette. He’d folded in on himself and barely gone through the motions for so long afterwards. If Alan hadn’t dragged him back into the world, he wasn’t sure he’d have ever made it. Watching some fuck murder her right in front of him and then getting out of the freezer to find nothing but ruins and death all around him?

He supposed it was good to have a daughter that had learned to be stronger from him. He just wasn’t sure she’d learned it from him.

“That was pretty gory,” said Taylor. “I have some happier stories. It wasn’t always violent. I spent a lot of time helping people set up settlements. Building water pumps, wind turbines, that sort of thing. Like back in Sanctuary. I had them set up with their own power grid by the time I got pulled back here.”

Danny leapt on that thread of seeming happiness. Better times. Something that might make her happy to talk about. “Sanctuary?”

"It's where I lived before the bombs fell,” said Taylor. “A little suburb not too far from Boston, but far enough that you didn't get much traffic. It was a good place to raise a kid. Safe. None of the trouble they had in the city with gangs and riots. I helped some settlers set up there after I came out of the vault. We ended up running a railroad safe house out of there. In exchange for that I set them up with power, walls, clean water, trade links. It was a thriving settlement. Not central enough to compete with Diamond City or Bunker Hill, but doing well. Here, this is the original group.”

She pulled out a picture. There weren’t many of them. A black man in a duster with some strange looking, glowing rifle. His attempt at a smile was the sort of thing Danny had seen in the mirror more than a few times after Annette. An old woman who looked like a bit of a hippy. A couple who couldn’t manage half a smile between them. A guy in overalls with grease on one of his cheeks and a belt of tools around his waist.

“The black guy is Preston. He was the last of the Commonwealth Minutemen, a sort of civilian militia. They got wiped out before I left the vault and I eventually helped him get them started again. He didn’t know me for more than about five minutes before he wanted me to take over. Crazy. Hardest part was getting him to show some confidence and take leadership himself.”

Danny didn’t know that was so crazy. If Taylor had showed up in the middle of a crisis, looking hard as nails and dissecting everything with a look, he thought he’d hand the reins over to her as well.

“The old woman is Mama Murphy. She was a parahuman with the power to see the future, but she had to be high as a kite to do it.”

“That doesn't sound real.”

Taylor shrugged. “It's pretty strange, but it worked. I think it was probably psychosomatic. It's not like we had a PRT to tell people how powers actually work. She was the first parahuman I ever met on that world.”

“Huh.”

“Those two are the Longs,” continued Taylor. “They were a complete pain in my ass, always whining, but their son was killed by raiders so you have to make allowances. They did get better eventually. The guy with the dark hair is Sturges; he was a surprisingly good engineer for a guy born two hundred years after the last school burned down. Also, a synth, but he didn’t know that and I didn’t see much reason to drop that bomb on him when I found out.

“They used to annoy the hell out of me, but I think I’m going to miss them,” said Taylor. “Not as much as the Railroad guys but they were way too paranoid to let me take pictures of them even after the Institute was a smoking hole in the ground. I’ll never see Tinker Tom’s bizarre headgear or Carrington’s scowl ever again. Such a heartbreak.”

Danny perked up. “A tinker? Another parahuman?”

“You know, I was never sure. He was crazy, could make machines sing, and built all kinds of incredible things, but you don’t really need to be a parahuman for that. Just smart. And Tom was smart as a whip when he wasn’t stuck on some crazy conspiracy theory. He helped me build the signal interceptor that got me into the Institute.”

Danny wouldn’t even try to pretend that he understood what Taylor spilled out next. Doing office work for a union did not qualify him to understand the intricacies of teleportation and hijacking the signal. Not even close. Something about using radio waves to teleport people, which was so bizarre it had to be tinker tech.

When she finished that particular story Taylor shuffled the pile of photos again and one fell on the floor near Dannys foot. He reached down to pick it up.

It was Taylor with an old, bearded man. Wherever they were looked a lot cleaner than anything he’d seen in her other pictures. All glass and polished metal. But that wasn’t really the thing that caught his eye. It was Taylor. She was smiling but he’d seen that smile before. That was how she’d looked after Annette died. The lips might have been curled into the shape of a smile, but it’ wasabout as genuine as a three dollar bill and it sure as hell doesn’t reach those glassy eyes.

“They called him Father,” said Taylor. Quietly. “He ran the Institute. All of the synths were based on modified versions of his DNA, hence the name. I worked for him for a while after infiltrating the place before I blew it to hell.”

“Not a good man, I take it.”

“No. He, uh, he had a synth copy of Shaun waiting for me when I broke in. Tricked me into thinking it was the real thing to see how it would react. Then he shut it down right in front of me, the bastard. I almost shot him right there. Sometimes I think I should have.”

“Jesus, Taylor. That’s horrific.”

That pretty much killed it. Silence fell for several moments before Taylor spoke again. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Night, Taylor.”

Taylor shuffled off to bed. Danny stayed sat where he was. He knew a line of bullshit when it was being spun to him and that man, Father, looked an awful lot like his father. He didn’t have the Hebert hairline and his jaw was a lot more prominent, but other than that he was the spitting image. There was more to the story. And he didn’t know what to do about it.

Chapter 6: 2.1

2.1

 

“911. What’s your emergency?"

“I just shot Kaiser in the head,” said Taylor. “I need a clean-up crew at my location before the entire Empire drops on me.”

A long moment of silence followed before the responder actually responded.

“Patching you through to the PRT now.”

*

A knock at the door broke through the sound of the TV. Shaun didn’t so much as twitch from his place watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Taylor didn’t really see the appeal, but it had to be a whole new novelty to a boy who remembered growing up in the Institute, where calculus was entertainment and the humanities were for weenies, nevermind any form of actual pop culture. She would have felt bad about interrupting his enjoyment of primo 21st century Earth Bet television, so she was quite grateful when her dad left the couch to go see who was calling.

She was somewhat less grateful when he shouted, “Empire!”

Fuck.

He had at least kept the shout semi-subdued. Enough that it wouldn’t have escaped the walls of the house.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Shaun,” she said. “Raiders!”

The reaction was immediate. He knew the drill. Get your gun. Find cover. Good lad. He was so much smarter than she had been even close to his age.

“Dad,” she said. Quietly, while Shaun fed cells into his laser pistol. Which he had apparently left stashed underneath the coffee table; definitely a good boy. “What did you see?”

“Fucking Kaiser,” he said. You didn’t need to be a parahuman to pick the stress out of his voice. “He’s right there waiting by a car. More with him. What do we do?”

It was the worst-case then. “Wait here,” she said. “Stay away from the windows and doors. We should have a couple of minutes before they push harder.”

Taylor was betting on them looking to charm a rookie, white-girl tinker into their ranks. Anything else and there would already be bullets ripping through their walls. Maybe. She was out of her element. Wasteland gangs would already be shooting or at least shouting some gruesome promises of violence if she didn’t immediately surrender.

She moved with all the speed her muscles could offer, down the stairs, into the basement, and into the X-01 armour she’d left down there when she’d returned from the wasteland. It took no more than a minute before she was back in the living room as a walking tank with a gauss rifle dangling from the strap around her neck.

“Dad,” she said, showing him the revolver she’d brought back from Nuka-World, a .44 calibre hand-cannon. It stopped whatever it hit if that thing was even close to human. “You know how to use this?”

“I—it’s been a while,” he said. “But I think I remember.”

She handed him the pistol and a speed loader. “Use both hands,” she said. “It kicks like a mule. Pick your shots and try to stay calm.”

He was paler than a sheet of paper, but he took the weapon and pointed it in the right direction. His stance was only slightly hopeless. Christ, what was she doing? He was about as well suited to combat as she would be to dancing a ballet. But she didn’t have much of a choice. This was a nightmare.

“Stay behind me,” she said, taking a step forward towards the window and wall. “I’m the one with the power armour.”

Taylor’s HUD was feeding her all kinds of information. It saw right through the wooden walls of the house. There were a dozen people lined up around their door and the cars they’d pulled up in.

Nine of them were twitchy, moving ever so slightly to and fro; their heat signatures showed how nervous they were at being caught between a bunch of Empire parahumans and a possible recruit who was also a parahuman. They were fodder. She dismissed them. Irrelevances. Gang bangers wouldn’t be carrying enough firepower to do more than scratch the paintwork on her armour. So long as Shaun didn’t do anything stupid they shouldn’t be a threat.

The other three were the interesting ones. It wasn’t hard to work out which was the leader. Three heat signatures lined up together. The one in the middle stood back, arms folded across his chest, distinctly self-satisfied in his body language. The two flanking him were ever so slightly shorter and were shaped differently: wider hips, narrower waists. Kaiser and his valkyries.

Taylor opened up her power. The world slowed to a snail’s pace around her as she lined up her shot. Head-first. Between the eyes.

She pulled the trigger. The round punched through the wall of the house like it wasn’t even there and into her target.

The middle of those three fell, the head of the heat signature gone. It fell, heat rapidly evaporating into the night air. One down.

Shouts and screams rose into the air. Bullets came through the windows and walls only to ping harmlessly off her armour as she lined her second shot up at the rapidly growing left heat signature and charged the round. She pulled the trigger.

The second heat signature fell in much the same fashion as the first. Head gone, heat dimming. Laser fire passed by her. Shaun joining her. God damn it, she’d told him to stay back how many times? She didn’t want him getting into gunfights unless he really couldn’t avoid it. It forced the mooks to scatter for cover, despite him aiming blind, but she didn’t need the help. They would be having words when this was over.

A new scream joined the chorus. Loud beyond reason and tortured. It set Taylor’s teeth on edge. The right signature was growing at a rate that defied all reason. No time to charge the round. She aimed up and pulled the trigger for a snapshot.

Too late.

Taylor let her power fall away as an absurdly large arm punched through the house and its fist smacked her aside. She went flying to the side in a tumble and for a few dizzying, terrifying moments she was out of control and had no idea where she would end up as walls and furniture exploded into fragments around her.

Then she was pulling herself upright amidst what was left of a living room. An old woman stared at her from her couch, eyes wide, too stunned to move, as Taylor clambered free of the debris she’d landed in. More instinct than thought. Get up! Never stay down!

Her head was ringing like an old church bell, but that didn’t stop Taylor’s power any. She saw everything: Mooks with their guns rushing to and fro, laser fire punching out through their ranks as they tried to return fire, and the gargantuan valkyrie with a spear bigger than a car staring down with the most undiluted hatred in her eyes.

She threw her aim up and pulled the trigger. For a moment the coils whined and Taylor had just enough notice to drop the rifle before the barrel exploded and scattered shrapnel around her. Too much damage to the charging coils. It had fired the round into the side of its own barrel.

Taylor barely had time to swear to herself before a gigantic fist smashed into her head and drove her down. Moments skimmed away. The next she knew she was flat on her back and her HUD flashed red at her as systems reported damage. Power armour was not meant to experience involuntary flight, but the damage was superficial.

A boot caught her in her ribs and sent her flying back the way she’d come into her own home. She was looking up at the sky through the many holes punched into what had been a perfectly solid house.

A beautiful, blonde giant snarled down at her. Her face, what Taylor could see of it, was twisted in hatred and grief. The spear raised and pointed down at her heart. Taylor almost felt guilty; she recognised the look. It was what she’d seen in the mirror after she’d been defrosted. She knew how it felt.

That didn’t stop her from drawing the deliverer and emptying the magazine into the valkyrie’s face. Sixteen ten millimetre rounds fired as quickly as she could pull the trigger, which was damned quick.

The Valkyrie staggered back, screeching obscenities at a pitch that set Taylor’s teeth on edge even through the power armour’s muffling. That bought enough time for her to get back to her feet. She’d have liked to scramble but power armour wasn’t really built for scrambling. It was more of a ponderous rise and that was being generous.

Laser fire followed the valkyrie back, buying Taylor some more time.

However, by the time she was up there was a blond man with over-pumped muscles pointing an expensive looking assault rifle of a make she didn’t recognise at her face. She could see his finger tensing as it began to pull on the trigger. At that range, aimed at the right spot, she might actually be in trouble. Even power armour had weak points - eyes, joints - if you know where to look.

A loud gunshot rang out. Blood and bits exploded from the side of the nazi’s head. A moment later his body caught up to what had happened and fell to the side.

Taylor spared her white-faced father a nod as she reflexively reloaded her pistol. He looked like he was about to be sick. Of course he did, he’d never killed a man before. She wasn’t sure he’d even been in a fight before. If he had, it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d wanted to share with his daughter.

Not a great feeling to realise that you’d dragged your dad into something like this, Taylor realised. Not really the time to dwell on it though. That could come later if there was a later to be had.

And she was on her last magazine. Not enough firepower to really hurt the last cape unless she forced her back down to human size first. Maybe not even then. She didn’t know all the details of their power and it wasn’t like she could stop for a quick google search.

She holstered her pistol. Fist fighting would have to do until she came up with a better idea. Grenades maybe. She still had a couple of plasma grenades left and they were fine tools for ruining someone’s day. Something to keep in mind if an opportunity presented itself.

That was the last chance she would have to think for a while as the Valkyrie came charging back at her with a ludicrously large spear aimed at her face, screaming all the while.

Taylor pulled the mental muscle that kicked her power into full gear. She was rusty as hell when it came to melee combat and fighting in power armour would leave her about as agile as an obese pensioner. She was going to need the edge.

It almost wasn’t enough. A red light flashed in the corner of her HUD as she stepped away from the thrust and the spear scraped along the edge of her armour. Impact. And not a light one if it tripped that sensor.

The valkyrie’s momentum carried her past Taylor. A perfect opportunity to drill a punch straight into her kidney. Or it would have been if it wasn’t twelve feet up. She felt like a cartoon character who was going to be held at a distance while she swung ineffective punches at the air in front of her.

Still, the punch got a grunt from the valkyrie. It wasn’t totally ineffectual, and neither were the other two she managed to get in before she had to back off to get away from the spear being swung back around at her.

A long step forward carried Taylor inside the spear’s reach. She cocked her arm to throw an overhand right, but she caught a face full of shield before that got anywhere and back she staggered with a ringing sound in her ears.

Taylor made a mental note to attach some sort of melee weapon to her armour at the first opportunity. She much preferred to stay at a safe distance with a large gun, but this was just getting embarrassing. She was getting her ass kicked by a giant woman in a skirt that was covering absolutely nothing at all.

Red laser fire passed over her shoulder. It caught on the valkyrie’s shield, with nothing more than a few glowing spots to show for the effort.

The valkyrie, and Taylor was really beginning to wish she knew which one was which because it was getting awkward even in her own head, turned around and hurled her shield back the way the laser fire had come. Taylor heard what sounded very much like Shaun yelping and the sound of metal hitting concrete.

It was a golden opportunity. Taylor had the pin pulled before the shield had fully passed her. She held on to it for a couple of seconds to cook the timer off as the valkyrie turned back to face her, and then tossed it up in a slow, high arc.

The valkyrie flinched away, starting to turn, but it was far too late and she caught the green blast of the plasma straight in the face. She reeled back screaming and clawing at her bubbling flesh. Her armour filtered out the smell, but Taylor could imagine it well enough.

Taylor charged forward, ramming her shoulder into the valkyrie’s crotch and pushing her back against the SUV they’d arrived in. She ducked underneath a wild, blind swing and pulled her pistol again. Emptied it into the blackened flesh of her enemy’s face as she screamed. Then she went back and collected the shrinking but still enormous spear they’d left in their wake.

It took a few attempts to break the valkyrie’s skin with her own spear, but Taylor eventually managed it. She drove the weapon through the bitch’s gut and pinned her to the vehicle. Left her pinned and floundering.

That was when Taylor allowed herself to stop and breathe again. Time to make a phone call.

Chapter 7: 2.2

2.2

 

Her dad was with Shaun, holding him tight as he stared off into the distance. That was a look she recognised. She’d seen it a hundred times before. It was his first time and the first was always the hardest. For civilised folk, realising that you have it in you to really take a life, not just fantasise about it with someone who’s pissed you off somehow, and then do it was a hell of a bridge to cross. And her dad wasn’t a young man. It had to be a serious shock to his system to go there at his age.

Before she could go to him, for what little that would likely be worth, a voice from outside interrupted her.

“Holy fucking shit,” it said. Definitely a man. Local accent by the sound of it. “What did you shoot these guys with, a howitzer? There are bits of brain halfway down the street.”

“Stay down,” she said to Shaun. He nodded back to her. Her dad was off in his own head. He didn’t respond at all and she would have frowned if her armour wasn’t completely concealing. Pointless gesture as it stood.

She checked her weapon. Only a few bullets left. If this guy was hostile, she was going to be pretty much screwed. She had to hope it was the PRT.

No point delaying. Taylor turned around and headed back outside through what was left of the doorway, which no longer had a door in it or much of a door frame or was even really shaped like a doorway. The house was pretty much going to need rebuilding.

The man outside was wearing some sort of ancient world styled armour. Greek, albeit with some modern twists in the underlay the armour was layered on top of. She remembered him. Dauntless. Something of a hometown hero with a power that would eventually make him a major figure if it kept on growing as it had to date.

Taylor didn’t know much about him. He was reputed to be fairly laid back if she remembered right, but that was about all she could recall. There’d been some speculation that he was going to be transferred out of town to take up a leadership position in a smaller department, but that was just gossip.

“Railgun,” she said. He looked at her quizzically. “What I shot them with. It’s called a gauss rifle. A man-portable railgun. Packs a real punch.”

He whistled. “I bet,” he said. “Any casualties?”

“None on my side. Just the nazis.”

Dauntless nodded at her. “We’ve got a couple of PRT squads en-route,” he said. “They can, uh, do the pickup. Not sure there’s much left to do here but mop up really. Armsmaster and—”

A couple of blurs came to a halt around her. Battery she recognised, looking as annoyingly suited to a spandex costume as she had the first time Taylor had met her, but the other guy wasn’t someone she’d met before. Probably Assault; they usually came as a pair.

“Damn,” said Assault. “This is not what I expected when I got a call that the new girl was having nazi problems. Is that Kaiser? Shit, it is.”

“Is there anyone else here?” asked Battery. “Civilians?”

“My dad’s in the house with my son,” said Taylor. “They’re uninjured, but he’s not taking it well. There were people in the neighbouring houses. I don’t know if anyone was hurt.”

Battery and Assault nodded. She punched him in the chest and then they zipped off to presumably check things out. Damn but they moved fast. Her HUD could barely keep track of them at all.

“Hell of a way to announce your presence,” said Dauntless. “What happened?”

The problem with power armour was that you couldn’t glare holes through people. Taylor liked to think that she had a pretty good line in evil looks, but no-one could see them when she was wearing power armour and so Dauntless remained disappointingly chipper as she gave him the eye. She knew it wasn’t really fair but her nerves were jangling now that the threat was gone and he was there. An easy target.

“The only people who should know about my powers are the PRT,” said Taylor. “And yet tonight I had a small army of neo-Nazi fucks roll up at my front door looking for trouble. What the fuck is going on?”

Taylor could hear the faint echo of someone speaking over Dauntless’s radio link. Not well enough to make out what they were saying and she heard nothing when his lips moved in reply. Picking up sub-vocalised speech, perhaps.

“The answer is we don’t know,” said Dauntless. “But the director is seriously pissed. If someone leaked this, they won’t get away with it for long.”

“They’d better not. My fucking son is in that house. He could have been killed.”

Dauntless nodded. “I understand,” he said. “I have a kid too. If someone threatened him, I don’t even want to think about what might happen. But trust me, Piggot doesn’t mess around, and the Empire has gone too far this time.”

Taylor wasn’t sure she gave a damn about what Piggot would do. Having a neo-nazi gang try to force her into their service hadn’t really prepped her for diplomacy. She was about ready to break out the heavy guns and kill absolutely every single one of the fucking bastards who had dared to send gunmen to her fucking home and threatened her fucking family.

Okay. She was maybe a bit angrier than she wanted to admit, but who wouldn’t be? She’d been through this shit before. It had ended in a mushroom cloud. That wasn’t something she wanted to go through again.

Dauntless was back on his radio when Armsmaster rolled up next to them on a shockingly quiet motorbike.

“Report,” he said.

Taylor didn’t listen. Dauntless summarised the situation and honestly there wasn’t much complexity to it - Nazis showed up looking for trouble, Nazis got more trouble than they could handle. She was too busy ogling the bike. It was nothing like the awful things she’d seen on the other Earth, clunky and noisy, at all. It was silent and smooth.

She wasn’t a real tinker — there was no source of superhuman insight speaking into her mind; no magic letting her built things that shouldn’t be possible — but that bike was a masterpiece. Taylor really wanted to known what made it tick if only to take that and see how it could be applied to her kit.

There were so many systems in her power armour that were just fundamentally noisy. Joints that creaked unless they were full of oil. Hydraulics that made a racket even when they were full of lubricants. She’d done a lot to quieten it and had used stealth boy tech to hide a lot of what was left, but it ate power and there were no more stashes of pre-war fusion cores for her to raid.

“Dauntless, secure the perimeter,” said Armsmaster. He sounded exhausted. “Make sure we don’t have more Empire forces incoming.”

Dauntless gave him a nod and took off into the sky.

Armsmaster turned to her. “This isn’t a defensible position,” he said. An armoured van came to a halt next to him and disgorged armoured, unidentifiable men who set about the scene doing law enforcement things. Gathering evidence. Establishing a perimeter. “The Empire will come looking for their leader soon when they realise he isn’t coming back. You being here will inflame them.”

“And what happens to the people who live here?” asked Taylor. “Who defends them when we leave?”

“The Empire will soon have bigger problems than revenge,” said Armsmaster. “Take the target away and they’ll leave. This was moronic. Attacking a tinker in their base? I don’t know what Kaiser was thinking but he obviously didn’t expect you to be ready to fight him off.”

“You’re the only people who even knew about me.”

Armsmaster turned to her. He didn’t look happy. Not at all. “Your identity is paper-thin,” he said. “The gangs watch us. They keep track of who comes and goes from our facilities no matter what we do. Your disappearance is a matter of public record and it doesn’t take a thinker to join the dots between you, your return, and the new tinker we entertained recently. A tinker on their own without a team to back them up makes for a tempting target.”

Taylor had started unhappy and she was only getting more so. A news helicopter was floating in the sky above them and she could hear at least one more approaching. They were going to be a spectacle if they didn’t leave.

“Fine,” said Taylor. “My dad, my son, they’re going to need somewhere to lay low while the Empire cools down. If they become targets this will escalate.”

“They can be accommodated in the PRT building for the time being. They’ll be perfectly safe there.”

Just like her identity was safe with the Protectorate, Taylor was sure. God damn it, she wasn’t ready for anything like this. She didn’t have the lay of the land. She didn’t have any resources or allies to call upon. All she had was some gear she’d been able to bring along with her, rapidly dwindling as it was, and some faded memories from a time before she’d had whatever it was that let her remember everything like it had just happened.

“Fine,” she said after a moment’s thought. There were no better offers coming and she didn’t have a fallback position of her own. You couldn’t exactly live off the land in the middle of a city and she doubted her dad would go along with that lifestyle anyway; he was, and always had been, a city boy. “I need to talk to my family and find my rifle.”

Armsmaster nodded and stopped paying attention to her as he muttered orders into his mic. She couldn’t make them out at all. Sub-vocalisation perhaps. Neat trick.

Taylor turned and headed back into this house, past the pair of beefy PRT officers who had lined up by the front door. Protecting the entrance to a house whose walls were more hole than wall. Good luck to them. Nothing like standard procedure to get you to do something utterly useless in Taylor’s experience.

Her dad had shifted over to the couch with Shaun. Her revolver was on the ground near his feet. Bad choice, but at least the hammer was in a safe position. Shaun still had his laser pistol close to hand. Good. He remembered his lessons well.

She hit the release on her armour and ducked out. Fresh air filled her lungs, if you could call it that. The stink of gunpowder and death never got any more pleasant.

“Dad, Shaun,” she said. They were already looking at her. “We can’t stay here. It’s not safe. The Protectorate are going to move us out.”

He blinked. It took a weirdly long moment for what she’d said to sink in. Shock. “Right,” he said. “Right. That’s good. I’ll pack some clothes.”

Taylor opened her mouth to point out that they didn’t really have the time, but he was already moving off upstairs. Oh, that was going to take some unpicking. She was not a therapist and she didn’t think her advice would be all that helpful for someone used to the civilised world.

“You might as well go pack, too, Shaun, she said. “Grab my clothes while you’re up there. I need to try and salvage this mess so some hobo doesn’t pick up what’s left of my weapons.”

She really had no idea what to do. Her instinctive response was to grab her guns and go Nazi-hunting, to end the threat before it could catch up with her family, but she wasn’t in the wasteland anymore. If she just ran off and started killing, she’d be headed for the Birdcage, the entry-only cape prison, the moment the heroes caught up with her. As good as dead and no further use to her family.

Well, that’d just make it more difficult. She’d think of something. She always did.

Chapter 8: 2.3

2.3

 

They’d brought a truck big enough for her to fit in even wearing her power armour this time, so Taylor got to ride along with her family. And what a cosy family get-together that was, with her dad staring off into space and Shaun sat next to him looking lost in a way she hadn’t seen in him since the Institute. Considering that she’d been about to turn his home into a mushroom cloud at the time and he’d been begging her to take him with her, that wasn’t the best of memories to bring back.

What a complete and utter clusterfuck of a night it was. It had all started so well, everyone happy and enjoying the simple pleasures of family life, and then those damned Nazis just had to stick their noses into her business and ruin things. Why did these things keep happening to her?

She might have tried to comfort them and make sense of things, but the incredibly broad shouldered PRT officer riding along with them put her off that idea. Taylor wasn’t going to be opening up any emotions while there was a stranger there to listen in and learn from it.

Wearing power armour meant that she sounded like the speaking clock anyway. Not exactly the best way to start a heart to heart talk. It had never really been a priority before, but maybe she should look for a better sound system. Something that let a bit more of her voice through. She could probably buy one in the local hobby shop and sound stuff all ran on jacks that had been standard since before she’d even been born, so it’d be a pretty easy project once she’d adapted it to the electrical wiring in her armour.

Probably best not to get distracted thinking about tech projects, even if it was better than thinking about how she wanted to find the nearest Nazi and rip their fucking balls off for this bullshit. They’d attacked her home. Her family. It’d been a long time since she really felt like she had either of those things and she was damned if she was going to let some Nazi fuckheads take them from her.

It was an uncomfortably long, largely silent trip. The only positive was that her dad was clearly taking well to Shaun, judging by how they were clutching to each other. On the other hand, the circumstances.

The garage they were dropped into was a hive of activity with faceless, black-armoured officers crawling all over the place as they boarded APCs for deployment. She hadn’t seen anything like it since she’d finally been allowed to muster out of the army and she couldn’t say it brought back fond memories.

Shaun was drinking it all in though. He was still getting used to the mass of humanity that existed in this time period. The Railroad rolling out just didn’t have the same effect, what with them being able to muster a couple of dozen guys at best most of the time.

The officer who’d been in the truck with them, both driver and escort, joined them. Gigantic shoulders and slim shoulders as Taylor had mentally dubbed them.

“Please come with me,” said slim shoulders. “Officer Williamson will escort your father and son to the medbay.”

They weren’t injured, but Taylor appreciated the thought and she couldn’t pick out any signs of dishonesty. Not that fully concealing armour and masks helped with that. “I suppose the boss wants to see me?” she said.

“Right in one.”

Taylor nodded and followed. She felt more than slightly ungainly walking through what was, largely, a normal office building in power armour that was intended to be something approaching a humanoid tank, but it wasn’t a new feeling. It had been much the same when Battery had been leading her to Piggot.

“What were you thinking?” asked Piggot. "Assuming you were thinking, that is.”

“That I wasn’t going to work for Kaiser and I wasn’t going to let some neo-Nazi punks take my family for leverage.”

That was apparently not the answer Piggot had been looking for judging by the look on her face, which could only be described as ugly. Taylor was definitely glad for the weight of the power armour around her because there was some real fire in those eyes. More than she would have expected from a grossly overweight bureaucrat. She almost wanted to check under the desk and make sure there wasn’t a pistol aimed at her.

Piggot took a deep breath. “Twelve men are dead,” she said. “Three prominent parahumans among them. The level of collateral damage can only be described as absurd and frankly, it’s a miracle we’re not digging bodies out of buildings. Perhaps you should have considered calling for help before you opened fire instead of afterwards.”

It was Taylor’s turn to take a breath before speaking, because the chances of her saying something she would regret were higher than she would care to admit. She’d never much cared for people like Piggot. Bureaucrats. Administrators. Commanding officers. It was hard to think of more than a tiny handful of times she’d ran across such people and left feeling better off for the experience. Normally it was ‘you have no evidence that you’re being bullied’ or ‘boys will be boys’ or ‘you won the draft lottery’ or ‘we’re extending your term of service for a further four years under the provisions of the Revised Selective Service Act of 2053.’

Fuckers.

“They weren’t going to stand around and wait for sirens so it’d be a fair fight,” she said finally. “And I doubt I could take three parahumans in a fair fight even without the backup they had with them. I had to take them out before the fight started.”

And it was a hell of a lot easier to come up with plans when your guts haven’t been turned to ice by the idea of fucking Nazis getting their hands on your not entirely human son. That was a hill she was entirely willing to die on if she had to.

“You could have retreated. Your home wasn’t surrounded and someone in power armour is far from easy to contain. You have have barricaded yourself in and called for help. You could have talked to them and delayed while waiting for help. There were plenty of options.”

“I’m not going to take risks with my family’s lives to avoid harming people like Kaiser.”

“And starting a firefight isn’t taking risks with their lives?”

“There was no safe path. Eliminating the threat was the quickest way out.”

“You can’t just kill people,” said Piggot. There was an edge of frustration to her voice now. “This is exactly the sort of bloody mess that the PRT exists to prevent. It frightens people. Plays into the fears they have about violent parahumans and how they might abuse their powers.”

Taylor didn’t have a great response to that. Her immediate response was, ‘easy to judge when you’re sat safely behind a desk and you don’t have a neo-Nazi rally parked on your fucking lawn,’ but that wouldn’t help in the slightest and she bit it back immediately. Instead she waited for Piggot to continue.

“We’ll try to keep your name out of it, but you’re going to be all over the press for weeks. Parahuman shoot-out kills twelve. Gang war expected to follow. Coil’s mercenaries have already been seen making moves downtown and some idiot posted cellphone footage of the fight on the Internet before we could suppress it. Very low quality thankfully. It’s unlikely you could identify anyone from it.”

She hadn’t even thought about that. Keeping her name out of things hadn’t been a factor in her life for a long time. She’d either been completely out of the picture and doing nothing or wandering around a wasteland where it just didn’t matter. There sure as hell hadn’t been anyone trolling around with a cell phone looking to make a video of someone fighting. Taylor wished she wasn’t wearing her armour so she could get at the wedding rings she wore on her necklace. Centre herself.

“My dad’s house is full of bullet holes,” she said. “There are bodies scattered around it and we were taken away in a PRT van. It’s going to be pretty obvious who was involved.”

“And now you start to see the consequences. We’ll throw around NDAs and impress the importance of secrecy upon people. That should keep the civilians quiet. The Empire is a different story. They broke the rules of their game when they came after your civilian identity, but that might not stop them looking for revenge. Capes talk a good game about the rules, but it means little when the chips are down.”

Taylor swallowed. She could defend herself well enough, but Shaun? Her dad? There would be times she wasn’t there. When they would be vulnerable. The manipulation was obvious but so was the truth. She would have to take steps.

“Worse, you’ve just destabilised the city’s gangs. Coil’s men are already moving and it’s only a matter of time until Lung starts sniffing around too. The Empire will be forced to respond in force and if that isn’t sufficient they will call upon their foreign allies for reinforcements. A gang war is inevitable.”

“I didn’t choose to have Kaiser roll up at my door. Someone fed him that information and he decided to come for me. The only people who knew about me are in this building.”

“That’s why we’re talking in my office instead of an interrogation room,” said Piggot. “You are at least nominally guilty of nothing more than exercising your second amendment rights in self defence. There will be an investigation, but I’d be surprised if the DA elected to prosecute under these circumstances.

“Of course, the law is the least of your problems here. One of the largest parahuman gangs on the East Coast is out for your blood. You’ll find that men like Hookwolf care very little about unspoken rules or codes of behaviour.”

Taylor pondered it for a moment. She could pursue a one woman war against the Empire, but getting her family through to the other side of that would be challenging at best and there would be consequences. That was the wasteland plan and she had too much to lose to go with that sort of thing now she’d made it back to Brockton Bay. Cutting a bloody swathe through the local gangs would only see her dead or imprisoned in a deep, deep hole. She had no desire to join the animals in the Birdcage.

She either needed to find allies or to flee the city. She doubted her father would go along with the second, stubborn as he was, and she couldn’t say she liked the idea of letting the bastards beat her like that either. Brockton Bay was a dump but it was her dump. Being driven out of it by some scumbags with delusions of grandeur based around their skin colour didn’t hold much appeal as an idea. She didn’t like losing at the best of times. Losing to the scum of the earth, raiders with penthouses, wasn’t something she could stomach.

No. Allies it was. She needed muscle and the local gangs didn’t present any good options even if she wanted to go in that direction. The Empire wanted her dead and the ABB wouldn’t take a white woman and weren’t a great deal better than the Nazis anyway. Maybe Coil, she supposed, but anyone in that position, coming from nowhere with minimal territory and with enough muscle to take on the Empire 88, well, her gut said no and she’d learned to listen to those feelings.

Piggot had been angling for that. It wasn’t hard to see even when she didn’t have her power ramped up to read the director’s micro-expressions. But Taylor had been planning on taking the job anyway.

“Is that job offer still open?”

“Given the circumstances, you’ll be subject to a longer than usual period as a junior member with limited privileges,” replied Piggot. “That’s the consequence of joining off the back of violence rather than coming in willingly. But Armsmaster is still keen to see you recruited and we can use every parahuman we can get, so I see no reason to reject you, assuming that the investigation turns out in your favour.”

“Twenty years to life in the nearest federal prison would make working as a Protectorate hero difficult,” said Taylor. Living as a fugitive would make it even worse. She wasn’t going to prison for shooting some raiders. “My father and son will need protection either way.”

“For now, you’ll all be transferred to accommodations on PHQ. The gangs aren’t stupid enough to pull anything there. Once word gets out that you’ve been recruited by us the Empire should think twice. It’s one thing to try and bully a lone tinker. It’s quite another to try and attack the local Protectorate division. We carry a bigger stick and attacking the family of a Protectorate hero is a quick path to the Birdcage or worse.”

It wasn’t as cast iron a guarantee as Taylor would have liked. Too much reliance on street gangs taking the rational choice, as if they weren’t glorified raiders. But she couldn’t see a better option that was immediately accessible and it wasn’t like she was getting married. If things didn’t work out, she could just quit at the end of her probation period and look for a better option. It wasn’t a lifetime commitment.

“Fine,” said Taylor. “We can sort out the contracts later. Right now, I need to see to my family. It’s been a rough night.”

“I’ll contact Armsmaster and get the appropriate paperwork arranged.”

For someone who’d got what they appeared to want Piggot did not seem particularly happy about it. There wasn’t an iota of joy to be found in her expression or voice.

“This level of violence is unacceptable,” continued Piggot. “There won’t be a third chance. Armsmaster brought you back from a lawless wasteland. Do not bring that wasteland with you.”

“Right.”

“We’ll look into why Kaiser thought this was a good idea, but answers are likely to be few and far between. For now, Officer Harris will escort you to where you need to be. Dismissed.”

Chapter 9: 2.4

2.4

 

The guest rooms in the Protectorate HQ were shockingly nice by any standard. Taylor had stayed in luxury hotels that were less well appointed. It seemed like a waste of resources to her, but she wasn’t going to complain. She was the one benefitting from their kitting out a glorified police station with some supremely plush furniture after all.

A police station with a hard light bridge and a force field straight out of a science fiction flick. Okay, that analogy fell apart pretty quickly.

Still this was probably the nicest place she’d ever stayed in. The Grand Hotel in Bar Harbour back before the bombs was the only thing that came to mind as better, and that was probably because it was mixed up with pleasant honeymoon memories. Revisiting that place after the bombs when it was Far Harbour hadn’t been half so pleasant.

Speaking of wasteland-related issues.

“Shaun,” said Taylor. “What have I told you about fighting? Only if you have to.”

He looked away from the television to her. “But—”

“But nothing. You aren’t even wearing armour. It only takes one bullet in the wrong place and that’s it. It’s all over.”

There was no point telling him he was too young because no one that age ever listened. She hadn’t. At least he wasn’t wearing a mask and trying to play Robin Hood in a city full of nutjobs, corrupt cops, and gangsters.

“I couldn’t just watch them shoot at you.”

Of course Taylor had never knowingly let being a hypocrite get in the way of anything important. “It’s not your job to protect me, Shaun. I’m the adult with the guns and the power armour,” she said. “I’m the one with the military training and the powers. It’s my job to protect you and letting you charge off into fights with a pistol I gave you for emergencies isn’t doing that. You should have retreated and waited for me to finish up like I’ve told you a hundred times.”

Oh, he was giving her the big eyes now. He knew what was coming.

She put her hand out. “Give it here,” she said. “You can have it back when I can trust you not to misuse it.”

And maybe when it wasn’t a hundred different types of illegal for a twelve year old to have a gun of any type, nevermind what they’d take as tinker-tech on Earth Bet. It was a good thing no one had asked any questions about that really. That was a mess she really didn’t need adding to the rest and something she should have thought of beforehand. Too much wasteland living.

“This isn’t fair,” said Shaun as he slapped the boxy pistol into her hand. He stormed off into his room where he would no doubt realise his mistake, as there was nothing but a single bed, a bedside cabinet, and the single blockiest alarm clock Taylor had ever seen in there. It looked like it’d been built to hold off a sleepy super mutant that didn’t want to be woken up just yet.

“Kids. Was I ever like that?”

“Oh, you had your moments,”” said her dad, finally stirring back into life a little. “You and Emma could be a real handful when you were little. I remember one time, when you were a year or two younger than Shaun is now. Some rich kid mouthed off about dockworkers being stupid.”

Taylor winced. “I think I know where this is going.”

“He was probably just repeating what his dad said about us,” said her dad. “Some crap about us being stupid and lazy or whatever. The usual stuff they say about us to justify treating us like garbage. But you wouldn’t let it lie. There’s not much difference between boys and girls at that age and you laid him out. Then his friends pitched in and it turned into a mass brawl.”

“I definitely remember this. It didn’t work out for me.”

“I’ve never had a harder time keeping a straight face than I did when Annette lectured you about that,” said her dad. “There you were all defiant looking like a cute little raccoon with those black eyes and I had to pretend that I was angry with you for defending my honour. I think I deserve an oscar for pulling that off.”

“He was a little prick,” said Taylor. “I wasn’t going to let him insult my dad like that. I was grounded for weeks.”

“Violence isn’t the answer,” said her dad. “Even when it’s just about impossible to keep a straight face over it.”

The memories were so vague. She was used to the way things became after she got powers when nothing ever slipped away no matter how long it had been. Childhood things were hazy by comparison. Moments more than anything else.

“We grounded you to try and teach you that violence was wrong,” continued her dad. “It seemed like it worked. It was a long time ago.”

“I wish it was always like that,” said Taylor. “Punching a rich brat on the nose seems so easy.”

Her dad sighed. “I miss those days,” he said. Things were so much simpler. Better.”

It was an old, old wound. Her mother had been dead for longer than she’d been part of Taylor’s life by her reckoning and there were still days when Taylor missed her desperately. She would have sold her soul to have her parents there when she’d walked down the aisle and even more so when she’d been in the hospital with a newborn son in her arms. Those were the moments you wanted to share and not being able to had hurt a hell of a lot more than she’d expected.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “I wish we could go back.”

“If only.”

He sounded wistful. She felt pretty similarly. Taylor let the silence grow out for a few moments as she thought. It had been a long time since she’d been anywhere near her first real fight and her first kill. She didn’t want to screw this up and hurt him, but she needed to make sure he was okay.

“Dad,” she said finally. It wasn’t exactly a clever line but honesty was the best policy, right? “Are you okay?”

He blinked and Taylor saw the ripple of emotion pass over his face as the memory hit and he pushed it away. Her dad was nothing if not like her. This bad thing happened - let’s not think about it. But that only worked for a while and he’d gone way past that threshold. He’d killed a man, and, if she were any judge, it was his first. The first was always the worst; the one you thought about, the one you regretted, the one you had nightmares about.

“I’m fine,” he said. “It’s okay, Taylor. I’m fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Wha—”

“I’ve been where you are right now, dad,” she said. “I wasn’t even close to fine once the adrenaline wore off. It was bad.”

“What happened?”

Of course he would want to know that. Did she want to talk about it? Taylor thought about that for a moment. She didn’t have to go into all the horrible details. It was just the end of it that was relevant and maybe it would help. Let him know what he was going through wasn’t unique and you could get past it. It couldn’t hurt, right?

Taylor took a deep breath. Bad memories that she’d left untouched for many a year were coming to mind. Finding someone who’d been nothing but good to her, that she’d kind of had a crush on, laid out in the street with a hole in their back surrounded by their own blood had been an ugly moment. She took a second to let those memories wash over her and then pushed them back down to a place where she could safely not think about them.

“There was a lot of crime in the city,” said Taylor. “A lot of corruption. A lot of violence and murder. It was a dying world and people were going a bit crazy like animals at the zoo when they feel an earthquake coming.

“One of my friends was murdered. They were left in the gutter to bleed out and I found them there.”

Her dad reached over and gave her a one-armed hug. It was nice. Safe. She’d missed having a parent. “I’m sorry, Taylor. That must have been awful. We’ve lost a few guys from the union like that and it’s never easy.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I figured out why he died and who made it happen. It was a big-wig politician who’d been running one of the local gangs. Pulling strings and leaking information to get what he wanted. Money and power. My friend got too close, so he had to go.”

“You killed him.”

“He was never going to stop and the system was never going to take him down,” she said. “He’d already killed a bunch of really good people just to keep this shit going. I could either kill him to end it or let him go. One life against many. I took the shot.”

“Did it help?”

She laughed. Short and bitter. Even all those years later, it still hurt. “No,” she said. “I was sick with guilt once the adrenaline wore off. I could barely sleep for weeks.He deserved it as much as anyone ever could and it still turned me inside out.”

“I don’t see how this helps.”

“The point is that killing someone is a big deal and feeling bad about it just means that you’re still human,” she said. “That’s good. You should hold on to that, because losing it—that’s when things get really bad. It shouldn’t ever be easy.”

“I still feel like shit.”

“You will for a while. You should probably think about finding someone you can really talk to about this. Someone who knows this stuff. A therapist or something. There’s gotta be some in this town who are worth a damn.”

“You seem like you know—”

“No,” said Taylor. Maybe a bit too forcefully with the way he recoiled. “Dad, I’d love to help, and I’m here for you, but I am the wrong person for that. You need someone less, uh, me.”

Taylor knew from experience that her advice wasn’t going to take someone where her dad was and turn out someone who was ready to be normal again. It just wasn’t her game. She’d gone deeper at every turn. That story she’d told him had been true, but really not much more than a sliver of that truth.

It hadn’t worked out all that well for her and there was no going back. What she wanted for everyone in her life, everyone she cared about, was to be not like that. She wanted them to be better and happier. Her dad was someone who might actually get there.

“I don’t—”

“Trust me, dad,” said Taylor. “I don’t have the education to be a counsellor and I’m not—I’m not the right person to talk to about being new at this. Someone who hasn’t spent so long in the mud.”

“If you say so. ”

“I do. You need someone who gets it and I’m way too far down the line for that.”

He didn’t look all that comforted, but it was all she had to give. It was one of the times where Taylor wished she could be someone else. A gentler, happier Taylor who could really do something about these moments. The best she had to offer was a story to say she’d been there and mostly understood.

But she wasn’t that person. She was the killer who’d got them there. The best she could ever really do was keep them alive.

Taylor had wished so many times that she’d been the one who’d died in the vault. That her husband, Nate, had made it. She’d never felt it more keenly than she had in that moment looking at her dad and knowing that she’d brought that haggard look upon him.

Chapter 10: Interlude 2

Interlude 2

 

There were some days when there just weren’t enough antacids on Earth to wash the reflux away. Piggot had known she was in for one of those the moment Hebert had called in that she’d killed Kaiser, but somehow Brockton Bay had managed to exceed even her low expectations.

“Armsmaster, we have a sighting of Hookwolf and Stormtiger moving near the Hillside Mall,” she said into her radio. “They might be chasing after the mercs we saw in the area earlier.”

The reply came back immediately. “Deploying.”

It was a complete and utter shitshow of a night. It hadn’t taken the Empire long to realise something was wrong when Kaiser hadn’t brought his new tinker back. They’d been discreet at first, fanning men out to watch the streets, but it hadn’t taken more than an hour for them to realise that the situation was even worse and then things had gone ballistic. She had no idea how the other gangs had clued in, but it seemed like everyone had moved in on Empire territory at once and of course the nazis had gone crazy then.

By her count at least twenty people had died so far. Most of them weren’t people you would miss, gang members and associated scumbags, but there were always civilians caught in the crossfire. At least three so far. Just people who’d been unlucky enough to be on the streets when the local monsters decided to start shooting at each other.

And now she was stuck watching a screen as incident reports flowed in. She was looking at a map of the city overlaid with lights. Red for immediate threats. Yellow for reports that had aged out. Green for resolved situations. The balance of colours across the map was very, very red.

Another antacid.

There were times when Emily felt the loss of her physical ability very, very keenly. This was one of those. She would have given a lot to be able to pick up a gun and go out there to do something with her people. She’d been a good soldier, a fantastic soldier even it sounded a little egotistical even in her own head, and since Ellisburg that’d been nothing more than a memory. There’d been no amount of effort that could have kept her strong with so much of her body damaged beyond repair.

She was sending people out to fight and maybe die and she wanted nothing more than than to be there with them. And she couldn’t. She would just slow them down and that tasted like acid reflux.

Another antacid.

Despite everything, she’d had some hopes for Hebert. She’d been a soldier, by her own, reluctant admission, and she’d seemed reasonable enough for a parahuman. That was someone who seemed like she could be a stabilising influence, like Miss Militia, but Emily wasn’t too proud to admit she’d been wrong. Hebert had the same reflexive attitude to confrontation and threat that made parahumans so unstable and she clearly had no compunctions about killing at all. It was a terrible mix by any standard and not one she particularly wanted in her city nevermind on her team.

More lights popped up on the display. The Empire 88 had more capes than the Protectorate could muster even with the Wards fully deployed, but that was only the start of the story. They drew white supremacists in from across the continent and had an almost endless supply of idiots willing to fight for them as a result. Far more bodies than the PRT could cope with unless they received reinforcements that Emily knew wouldn’t be made available.

Emily had spent a lot of years balancing this nonsense and she was running out of cards to draw. There were no extra teams of heroes to be tapped or platoons of PRT officers to be drawn in. She had what she had and it wasn’t enough. Her job was damage limitation and even that was getting to be almost impossible to accomplish. The Empire was only one of the problems she was stuck with and it only got worse when a potential monster like Lung was dragged into the picture.

Another antacid. It barely seemed to help, but it’s wasn’t like she had better options to choose from.

“Miss Militia,” she said. “Move south. We have a report of Coil’s men coming up on your rear.”

Now there was a cape. Miss Militia followed orders and did what had to be done wherever she was deployed. No fuss, no complaint. Job done. If they were all so easy to wrangle, Emily knew she would be out of a job, but it would be the happiest redundancy the world could imagine. No more monsters; just people who could be used. It would almost be too easy.

That was what she’d hoped Hebert could be, the tracks she could follow in, but it clearly wasn’t to be. It was a crying shame but Hebert was going to be just another parahuman. A problem to be managed and minimised.

More lights blinked across her screen and Emily had no real answer to them. Threats were popping up across her city and she was sitting there empty-handed like a fool. She could split the teams she already had deployed, but that would just get both halves killed and accomplish nothing. She had no more parahumans who could handle threats independently to deploy.

A big part of her wanted to signal the guest quarters and tell Hebert to get in her armour and deal with the shit tornado she’d set loose, but she knew it wouldn’t help. Seeing her would just enflame the nazis and Emily had absolutely no desire to see what Hebert would do if confronted with more idiots who wanted her dead. It would be a bloodbath and that would bring even more of these idiots into the city looking for their idea of justice.

And that was before the chief director got on the horn to her. The brass were absolutely desperate to get Hebert recruited and under wraps because of the technology she carried around in her head. She’d come back from a world that was generations ahead of theirs and they were stuck playing nice trying to get that information out of her. It would take a lot of murders to overcome that. And shooting nazis who’d come to her door looking for trouble barely counted anyway.

Another antacid. And another. God, she wished her body was functional enough that she could get drunk again without it being a suicide mission.

Maybe Hebert had tech to fix that. Her civilisation had made it to 2077 before imploding. That was a long way forward and Emily’s problems seemed solvable with enough tech; new kidneys, a new liver, some repairs to the circulatory system, and she’d probably be fine. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a country might develop a way to fix such problems that far forwards.

A pleasant dream, to be able to run again, but it would be a cold day in hell before she’d trust her body to a parahuman and their powers.

The armour and weapons were what the other directors were interested in anyway. They had fantasies of being able to send platoons of soldiers kitted out in power armour and carrying energy weapons to deal with parahumans threats instead of relying on other parahumans. Near tinker technology that didn’t need tinkers to build or maintain it. There had to be a catch but the idea was charming.

“Battery, Assault,” she said. “Move to assist Dauntless. Lung is moving into that area.”

Dicey, she knew. She didn’t have anything on hand that could stop Lung if he didn’t want to be stopped. All she could do was put up enough resistance that he thought twice and hope for the best. It had worked so far but if he knew the Empire was decapitated maybe he would be that bit braver and her bluff would fall apart.

She had nothing else. Emily’s only other options were the Wards. She’d already deployed those on duty to hold down safe areas to free up her Protectorate heroes and PRT squads. There wasn’t much slack left to call on and she would be hamstrung by politics in the long-term if she pulled too hard on those people.

There was always New Wave, she supposed, but they weren’t reliable and they weren’t under her command. She could only depend on them so much and she wasn’t inclined to try for more. They hadn’t always been up to the task in the past and nothing had changed in that respect.

Fucking hell. She’d wanted that smug prick Kaiser dead or gone for a long time, for as long as she’d been stuck in this shithole of a city, but she’d wanted it to happen on her terms so she’d have teams ready to mop up and manage the consequences. This had come out of nowhere and she didn’t have half the resources she would need to safely manage the capes and thugs the Empire could draw on, never mind the people trying to muscle in on them.

The ring of her desk phone pierced right through her and pulled her out of those thoughts. The number on the caller ID was familiar.

She picked it up. “Director Piggot,” she said.

“Evening, Emily,” said a familiar voice. Dr Hunt. “We’ve identified the body.”

“Then why haven’t you already told me?”

“It wasn’t easy and I feel like this moment deserves some build-up. Kaiser was Max Anders.”

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck fucking fuckity fucking shit.

“How sure are you?”

Emily would, she felt, be proud of how evenly her voice came at that moment by the time she was ready to write a memoir. It sounded like she was perfectly calm when she was desperately wishing to be on another continent or in some other happy employment.

“It’s pretty certain,” said the doctor. “We have enough of his jaw and teeth to match dental records. It’s Max. I am so glad I turned him down when he asked me out.”

“Being married to your job has some advantages after all.”

“You would know,” said the doctor. “I’ll have the report on your desk by tomorrow, Emily. See you around.”

The phone went dead and Emily put it back down on the receiver. The good doctor always had to have the last word on things. It was her way of staying ahead of a very rigged game. Emily could appreciate that need even if it didn’t help her all that often.

Fuck.

Emily hadn’t wished that her body was up to killing a bottle of scotch so strongly for a very long time. Oblivion hadn’t looked so tempting since Ellisburg. Max Anders was the head of a family that dominated Brockton Bay through simple economics. Him turning out to be a member of the Empire 88 would be bad enough, but being Kaiser? It was a nuclear bomb dropped straight into the heart of the city.

It would open up an endless array of threads to pull on to investigate the Empire and ordinarily she would welcome that, but these weren’t ordinary times. She was going to have to tiptoe through a world of land mines to pull the threads down and she knew she didn’t have the delicate touch for that.

Hebert had, in a single pull of her trigger, handed Emily everything she’d wanted in a way that would would almost certainly make her life a nightmare for months to come.

Fuck.

Chapter 11: 3.1

3.1

 

Apparently the main quality required in a Protectorate hero was an endless supply of patience. The sheer quantity of paperwork she’d been subjected to was at almost army levels of bloody-minded pointlessness. Forms for her employment contract; forms for her consent to their using her image; forms for her power, and oh had there been an endless abundance of those; forms to describe all of the equipment she was bringing in with her; forms to describe her medical history; forms to signal understanding of the apparently draconian consequences of breaking the contract she’d signed; forms for literally everything, and in triplicate, of course.

Going it alone and fighting a one woman war against the local Nazis was starting to look pretty tempting by the time she’d finished scrawling her signature for what felt like the thousandth time. She was almost starting to think that Piggot was spinning these things from whole cloth as some sort of revenge for making her life more difficult or something.

Oh well. The forms were signed and her medical evaluation was complete. Now it was time for the local PR flack to give her what was no doubt going to be a thrilling once over.

No time like the present. She knocked on the door and a muffled shout of ‘come in’ came back in return.

The PR guy, James Daniels, had apparently drawn a short straw, and his office was both pretty small and a complete mess. Every available surface was overflowing with papers of some description or toys or whatever other random memorabilia you might be able to imagine. Clothes among them; she spied a Miss Militia brand hoody perched atop a chair and some Assault branded exercise wear draped next to it. There was a case of Battery branded energy drinks laid in the chair. An enormous, seemingly paper-thin screen dominated the wall behind him. For a moment she kind of wanted to take it apart and see how it worked.

He had the phone cradled against his ear as he tapped away at a keyboard that was far flatter than anything Taylor had ever used. He nodded at her and then at one of the chairs opposite him. It was covered in a stack of old newspapers. The top issue was Armsmaster’s latest capture, a couple of out of towners who’d thought they were hot shots and had discovered that no they were in fact not and that he had no patience for piddling nobodies getting in the middle of the latest crisis.

She moved the papers aside and took a seat. A few minutes of him nodding along to a long parade of instructions followed.

“Yeah, Glenn,” he said finally. “She’s here now, right on time. Yeah, yeah. I will. It’s fine. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

He put the phone down. “Sorry about that,” he said, reaching across the table for a quick handshake. “You have the dubious fortune of having attracted the boss’s attention with the whole returning from another world routine. It’s an unusual story and he’s like a magpie who’s just seen something shiny when one of those comes along.”

Taylor had no idea how to respond to that. “Right.”

“I trust everything went okay with the docs?” said James. “You don’t look too worried, but I can put this little shindig off if you’ve got other things on your mind.”

“It’s fine. They didn’t say anything I didn’t already expect.”

Some malnutrition issues from a wasteland diet. A bunch of wounds that had never had the chance to heal properly. Some shrapnel that was dug in there pretty good and had been missed. There was nothing worth the risk of surgery or in need of serious treatment.

She was going to be eating on someone’s plan for a while to fix some issues with minor vitamin deficiencies, but other than that she was pretty much golden. Better off than most. A lot better off than most of the poor bastards she’d run into during her time in the Commonwealth.

“Cool, cool,” he said with a nod. “So we’re here to run through the basics of how you’re going to present as a cape. Costume, weapons, branding, that sort of thing. The face you’re going to show the world.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever given that too much thought.”

“Most capes don’t,” he said. “You’re a combative lot as a rule and not scaring the herd isn’t something you give much mind until you’re prodded into it.”

Taylor felt like she should feel vaguely insulted.

“So, this,” he said. He hit a button and an image of her armour appeared on the screen behind him. “Not the sort of look we encourage in heroes for a whole lot of reasons.”

“It’s a weapon. It’s not meant to look like happy fun times.”

“You look like a steampunk demon. This is the sort of thing that gives kids nightmares instead of making them buy your toys. You scoff, don’t think I don’t see you, but that matters. You think the next kid who triggers is gonna want to sign up with the lady who made him piss his pants a couple of years ago?”

Taylor opened her mouth to reply, but James was in full swing and gave her no time to actually make words.

“That’s not even the important thing really,” he continued. “Well, it is, but it’s roundabout. It’s about humanity. You go out there like this and you look like a killer robot. The only thing that inspires is fear. 

“We can’t run proper scientific studies on this for obvious reasons, but we have a pile of empirical evidence that villains hit harder against heroes who go full-coverage like this. I could give you a folder full of profiles on heroes who thought it was a good idea and ended up as statistics when they ran into someone bigger and nastier.”

She was tempted to throw out a list of all the bigger, nastier things that had already tried to kill her and ended up dead for their efforts. Getting rid of her wasn’t that easy.

But she wasn’t immortal and she knew damned well what it felt like to lose a mother at Shaun’s age. He didn’t have a living father to fall back on, either, or friends. Just her dad. He was a good man, but he didn’t handle grief well. If she died, he would probably be just about useless for a while, which would leave Shaun with a great-grandmother that he’d never met or the damned Barnes family. It didn’t bear thinking about.

“Okay, I can look at options for that,” said Taylor. “The helmet would stay for heavy combat, but maybe I could wear a cowl underneath it and leave the helmet off for more social occasions.”

He looked surprised for a moment, but he quickly recovered. “Good,” he said. “Please pass proposals my way so we can discuss them.”

What was he expecting? For her to shoot him?

“Okay, that’s good. That’s good,” he said. He looked so relieved. He continued at a hundred miles per hour, words spilling so quickly Taylor almost struggled to follow. “Now we need to talk gimmick. We have a couple of angles you could follow.

 “There’s the hometown hero angle, which is cheap but works pretty well as a rule. The problem is that we already have one of those. You’d be another Dauntless, but he came first and has a far flashier power. It’s a safely mediocre career. Always playing second fiddle to the guy who came before you.

“The other angle is the super-soldier from a dead world,” he continued. “It’ll take more preparation, but it’s a clean path. We don’t have anyone else like that and it’ll play well if we script it right.”

Taylor frowned. “This seems like it’ll blow up in my face,” she said. “It’s at least half fiction.”

James waved his hand. “Who cares,” he said. “They both have enough truth in them. You’re from Brockton Bay and you’re also a soldier from another world with superpowers. We can’t combine them without blowing your ID to anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together, so it’s one or the other. It’s more truth than we can give to most superhero stories and we know how to make sure  journalists don’t go digging. You don’t need to worry too much about that.”

“Fine. Let’s go with that then.”

“Good, good. A costume and a gimmick will get you a long way. The boss has probably already lectured you about the violence?”

She answered with a grimace.

“Yeah, not fun,” he said. “But keeping people calm is half the job. Powers are scary. People who use powers to kill are really, really scary. Frightened people do stupid things like voting for politicians who want to crack down hard on parahumans and treat them as less than human. We don’t want to give those guys any more ammunition than they already have if we can avoid it.

“Stick to non-lethal weapons from now on unless you really have to and it’ll be fine,” he continued. “I doubt the Empire will be dumb enough to pull a stunt like that again. You don’t put your hand back on the oven that burned you, right?”

Taylor had doubts. Gangs were full of violent, hot-headed idiots. She’d have to take steps to protect her family. But that would be a story for another time and not something she’d be sharing with the local bureaucrats, so she grunted an unhappy sounding agreement.

“I wonder if we can use the Railroad thing,” said James. “That’s just about perfect as a hero backstory. Rescuing slaves from a gang of mad tinkers who were custom building them.”

“There’s a lot of baggage there,” said Taylor. “Those slaves weren’t fully human and I killed a lot of people to save them.”

Raiders had seemed like they were the Commonwealth’s one true renewable resource for a long time and the assholes always seemed to stumble their way into synth extraction runs to cause trouble. Taylor had almost lost count of how many drugged up idiots she’d had to shoot over the months she’d spent as a Railroad heavy. And she knew from experience that most people didn’t give a rat’s ass about synths really. They were just machines to them.

“They’re close enough and it’s not like we’ve got anyone cranking them out here. It’s all far enough away to lose the threat and just be charming.”

“If you say so.”

“Non-lethal weapons, less intimidating costume, backstory,” he said tapping his pen against his keyboard. “Anything else? Oh, yes. Name. I see you have one picked out, but—”

“That was my Railroad handle. I’m attached to it. It stays.”

“Fine, fine. But I have some ideas—”

“It stays.”

James threw his hands up in the air in a deeply exaggerated signal of frustration. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Wanderer it is. We could have come up with something better, you know.”

“I don’t care. That’s mine.”

They went over some more details and then they parted ways. James was a very different person from her. Far too chaotic. Messy. But not an idiot, and far easier to deal with than Piggot. She’d give his ideas some thought.

---

“So here we are,” said the harried looking office worker who’d been assigned to escort Taylor to it. “Your new lab.”

It was marvellous.

Taylor had to stop for a moment to take it all in. The space: workbenches large enough to accommodate all but the largest projects and plenty of room to move around them; plentiful space to store the tools she would need to make as part of getting started up. The machinery: computers, lathes, fabricators, almost everything she could want. The materials all arranged in neat little containers; aluminium and steel bars, screws that she hadn’t had to scavenge from two hundred year old scrap, adhesives that she hadn’t had to improvise from crops, lubricants and other oils she hadn’t had to improvise from dead animals, and more. Everything was clean and modern and plentiful.

It was enough to bring a tear to a glass eye.

Her armour, looming in the corner, looking a little the worse for wear was more of a downer, but that could be fixed. She might even have the time to buff out some of the dents and scratches so it stopped looking like an old beater some day.

“Wow,” said Shaun. He stopped for a moment. “Wow.”

She’d asked for him to be brought in as her intern so that she would actually get to see him more often than between crises. Piggot had griped for the sake of griping, which Taylor was increasingly sure was the director’s natural response to anything, and then allowed it. A second pair of hands that understood her technology well enough to be useful made for a pretty compelling case.

“If you need anything else, you can use the requisitions system,” said the escort. “It’s all documented in the handbook.”

And with that she turned and left. A true ray of sunshine the whole time. Very personable.

Taylor put it out of mind. She had more important things to worry about. Piggot had clearly dumped her into a lab to try and keep her busy and out of trouble and honestly it didn’t seem like a bad deal to her. She could work on some projects she really wanted to get done in peace and with a quality of tooling that she’d not had access to for a long time.

“Okay,” she said. “Shaun, I want you to get started on a robot workbench. I know it’s not the most interesting project but it’ll come in useful.”

Shaun made a vaguely grumpy sound of affirmation before he headed over to start. A momentary shine to a fancy new lab aside, he was still tetchy over her taking his pistol away. Joke was on him because he wasn’t getting it back. She wasn’t sure what she’d been thinking letting a twelve year old run around with a gun, but it wasn’t something that would play out well for anyone, not on Earth Bet.

Oh well. He’d get over it. Maybe she’d get a stun gun for him or something to make up for it.

Instead of worrying about that anymore Taylor unclipped her pipboy from her arm and headed over to the computer terminal next to the longest workbench. There she called up the specification for the data ports and started looking at building a data transfer cable to get her stuff off the pipboy and onto something a little more appropriate for the local environment.

The first thing she realised was that she was going to miss RobCo terminals more than she’d expected, because the keyboard they’d given her was abominable. There was virtually no discernible key travel. It felt like she was bashing her fingers against a lump of plastic. Taylor supposed that she knew what her second project was going to be.

The second was a sense of dismay as she saw how complicated the protocol used by the connector was. They’d tried to make a single port that could handle every possible use and was also backwards compatible going back to every version they’d ever released. This was going to be much more difficult than she’d anticipated.

It was a good learning experience for getting into the swing of the local technology though. While she’d lived there for the first half of her life she’d been a very different person then and there’d been a lot she’d missed or just never learned.

An hour into writing driver software for her Pipboy to USB connector, framework in place but not entirely stable, a knock on the door distracted her from her task. 

Taylor checked her stage-glued domino mask. It was secure. “Come in,” she said.

The door slid open and a girl walked through. At least Taylor was pretty sure it was a girl. They were wearing a pretty concealing costume between the tailored body-armour and the trenchcoat-styled cape flapping around them.

“I hear you killed—oh fuck me. Hebert?”

That made Taylor pay more attention. The cape was wearing a mask shaped to look like a stern woman looking down on her. It might have been intimidating if the cape hadn’t been a head shorter than her and hence looking up. The voice was obscured but Taylor’s power didn’t really let her forget things like speech patterns.

“Sophia Hess,” she said. “Some things are making a lot more sense now.”

There had been a time when this would have been all been very dramatic. Taylor had hated Sophia Hess with a passion. But that was a long time ago.

“Mom?”

“It’s okay, Shaun,” said Taylor. The deliverer wasn’t far from her reach, but that probably wouldn’t be much use. Shadow Stalker could shift into a shadow form that ignored gunfire and she was sure that a Ward would have some sort of bullet resistant armour anyway. His confiscated laser pistol she’d left a little further away would be much more useful. “It’s fine. Just somebody I used to know when I was a girl.”

It would be a cold day in hell before she admitted to any sort of fear when faced down by Sophia fucking Hess, even without a son she needed to keep feeling safe and secure.

Sophia looked back and forth between her and Shaun. Words weren’t forthcoming. Taylor would have given a good sum of money to see Sophia’s face, but the mask covered that and the costume didn’t offer much in the way of body language.

 “It’s been a long time for me and I’m not the person you remember,” said Taylor. A step to her left took her into immediate grasping range of the laser pistol. “I suppose you can try and bully me if you want, but it won’t work out well for you.”

“She bullied you?” Shaun sounded incredulous.

“We all have to start somewhere, kiddo,” said Taylor. Her eyes were on Sophia, who was still pretty much immobile. They had a worktable between them. Good cover. “No-one comes out of the womb a soldier.”

“I—what the hell,” said Sophia. “Emma said you were different, but this is insane.”

“It’s been fifteen years for me. A lot of growing up ago.”

“Emma’s not taking this all that well,” said Sophia. “I didn’t understand, but—”

“I certainly wouldn’t know anything about Emma going crazy on her friends.”

Sophia twitched obviously enough that Taylor could pick up on it even through the armour.

Shaun looked up at her curiously. “Emma?”

“The redheaded girl we met at the market,” said Taylor. “She was my best friend until we hit high school.”

Taylor hated this. She hated exposing her childhood to Shaun. It was nothing but weakness and she had to be strong for him. He’d lost so much.

But she couldn’t shut him out. He had too much of her in him. He wouldn’t accept not knowing.

“You killed Kaiser and his bitches,” said Sophia. She’d apparently gathered her wits, minuscule as they were. “Jesus, Hebert. You know how to make an entrance.”

“He came looking for trouble. I just gave him more than he could handle.”

Sophia shook her head. More than once. “Piggy probably gave you shit for colouring outside the lines, but you’ve made a lot of friends by getting rid of King Nazi,” she said. “Never thought I’d say this but I kinda owe you one. Try not to die. They’ll come for you sooner or later.”

She turned on her heel and left. Sophia had never been much for social graces.

“Back to work, Shaun,” said Taylor. “Let’s get this stuff done.”

Taylor had learned some valuable lessons from Sophia’s little drop in. The PRT being full of shit was top of that list. 

Be nice and accessible, they told her. Appear human. What a crock. Sophia was about as warm and welcoming as a brick to the face. 

Maybe she was reading too much into it because she didn’t trust the government. Maybe they thought Sophia was a lost cause like she did. Maybe they’d been left with no option for some other reason; it wasn’t like she’d been privy to everything that had happened.

But Sophia was one of them and Sophia had ruined her life for the fun of it. Others had done a lot worse since then and she wasn’t going to do anything stupid about it, but that really took the shine off being a Protectorate hero for Taylor. She was far beyond Emma or Sophia’s ability to hurt, but she knew that without Leet’s brainfart she’d be back at Winslow being crapped on and this explained why no-one had given a tinker’s damn about it until she’d given up on looking for help.

Being a Protectorate hero was the best short term plan while the Empire was still playing up and she’d stick to it for the sake of her dad, who really wasn’t a fighter, but Taylor wasn’t feeling like it was a long term answer and she’d only been there a day.

Chapter 12: 3.2

3.2

 

“I really can’t make it,” said her dad. “I’m sorry, but I’m not trying to pull one over on you. I can’t leave.”

Taylor couldn’t hear the reply. He had his phone volume turned down low enough that it wasn’t even an indistinct murmur, but she could tell from his reply that it wasn’t positive.

“I’ve been working for you guys for how long? You think I’m going to start swinging the lead now?’

Grumbling and bullshit followed. Taylor couldn’t make it out but she knew the material well enough. The union wanted guarantees. The businesses they worked with didn’t have a horizon that extended much past their collective nose and they needed her dad at work to keep things ticking over. Well, needed was pushing it. Wanted.

“Look, if you don’t believe me, go check out my house,” said her dad. There was an edge creeping into his voice. “It’s not hard to find. It’s the one with all the bullet holes.”

The indistinct mutter of noise from the other end of the phone went quiet just long enough for things to start getting a little awkward. Taylor had to give her dad some credit; that had been a fantastic line to shut the guy up with.

She cast her eye to the side while she waited. Shaun still had his nose buried in a book. Fiction, for a change. Some trashy fantasy novel he’d picked up from somewhere with an absurdly over-muscled man and busty woman on the cover. Not the sort of thing he would have ever had the chance to enjoy in the Institute, she supposed. Musty old Grognak comics had been just about all they’d had to offer, which, she supposed, wasn’t that different judging by the cover.

“Right,” said her dad. “Yeah. I’ll come back when I can but right now they’re telling me that it might be dangerous and I should wait until the skinheads settle back down to their normal level of violence.”

Taylor suspected that was going to take a while. That suspicion was why she was working on panic buttons for him and for Shaun. A way for her to know if there was a problem and get there to help before it was too damned late. She already had them half finished.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll remote in from here, but you know there’s only so much I can do from a computer. Right, right. I’ll talk to you later.”

He hit the disconnect button and she didn’t need to be an expert lip reader to pick out the muttered ‘prick’ as he did so.

“And here I thought the bosses at a trade union might be less dickish,” she said.

“If only,” he said, then he shrugged. “That’s not fair really. They’re under a lot of pressure and shit rolls downhill. It wouldn’t be so bad if we had more work to spread around but we don’t and we probably won’t.”

“I remember,” said Taylor. “The boat graveyard.”

“That was the last nail in a coffin that was already firmly attached. Containerisation killed smaller ports like Brockton Bay. It just took a while for everyone to catch on.”

The germ of an idea began to form in Taylor’s head, but it wasn’t one she was entirely sure she’d be able to follow up on. It could wait until later. “Come on,” she said. “We should get breakfast before Assault eats everything again. You, too, Shaun. The book can wait.”

The advantage of being with the Protectorate on their HQ was that it was relatively sparsely populated. Brockton Bay’s Protectorate team wasn’t all that big, really, and the support staff weren’t particularly numerous, either, considering the size of the old oil rig they’d claimed as a home. Most of it was used for storage, training facilities, and tinkering labs. None of those needed a lot of people to run. A small cleaning staff, people to run the cafeteria, and a rotating shift of dispatchers covered most of the place’s needs. That made for a pleasant lack of crowds.

On the other hand, the cafeteria was actually busy. It was a good enough size, but breakfast hours made for a cross between the day shift starting out and the night shift getting something to eat before they turned in. Every table was at least partially occupied.

They settled down on the table with Assault and Battery in the end after a moment of indecision from Taylor. She wasn’t exactly getting friendly vibes from a lot of the people present. That’s what happens when you create an endless pile of work for everyone, she supposed. Oh well.

“Morning.”

Battery nodded. Assault . . . Assault, she was pretty sure was actually asleep with his head propped up on his right hand. He was certainly the quietest Taylor had ever seen him.

“Busy night?” asked her dad.

The reply came in the form or a so-so gesture as Battery shovelled a handful of fries down her mouth. “Sorry,” she said a moment later. “I’m always absolutely starved after I use my power that much. I’ve had worse nights, but Coil’s goons are an absolute pain. I’d rather fight capes any day; less chasing ghosts around that way.”

“We’ve never had anything to do with them at the union,” said her dad. “The Empire would sometimes send some of its goons around to rattle our cage but that’s about all we ever saw unless one of the small-timers started feeling brave.”

Taylor looked up from her porridge sharply. “What?”

“Huh? Oh, it’s nothing to worry about. We’re too close to ABB turf for the Empire to stick around and the small-timers soon learn their lesson when they get a pipe shoved somewhere sensitive.”

He was definitely getting a panic button before she let him out of her sight again. Jesus. Even a small-time independent could easily have a power that a few brawny dockworkers with pipes and wrenches couldn’t handle.

Battery looked between them then back to her food. More fries went down leaving only the impressively large burger. “Well, they’re a pain,” she said. “They’re loaded out with all the latest fancy tinker gear and they always seem to know when we’re coming.”

Man, she could pack it away. Advantages of having a running around power, Taylor guessed.

“They’re trying to take advantage of the Empire being all messed up and it’s working,” she continued after wolfing down half her burger. “The skinheads aren’t really working together all that well. We think they’re fighting over who gets the big chair next.”

The rest of the burger went.

“Anyway, I’d better get this idiot to bed before he falls flat on his face. I’ll see you around.”

Watching Assault’s dopey, half-asleep stumble away from the table was mildly entertaining. That value was somewhat spoiled by the fact that it was at least a little bit her fault that things were so hectic. She couldn’t find it in herself to feel any real guilt over killing Kaiser, but it was a bit of a mess.

As she watched them leave, she caught Shaun out of the corner of her eye. He was still reading his book. So much for leaving it back in the room. Kids.

---

In the end Taylor left Shaun with her dad. He was utterly absorbed in those books of his, so it wasn’t like her dad being similarly absorbed in what scraps of his work he could access remotely would be a problem. Neither of them were going anywhere anytime soon. She doubted a bomb going off in the next room would be enough to disturb them.

It made for a peaceful morning in her lab finishing projects off in advance of her meeting with Armsmaster. Her armour looming in the corner and the repairs she’d done on it to fix the joint damage that those Empire bimbos had done to it wasn’t even the start of her plans, but none of that would amount to a damned thing if she didn’t get them finished.

She could have finished some things earlier, but she’d been running a few things in parallel. Setup projects — building the tools she would use to then move on to the equipment she would eventually need for actual combat. It was probably ambitious to try and get them all done at once but she’d never much cared for messing around and wasting time.

And so she worked. On her pipboy connector and the data transfer that was slowly proceeding tape by tape, on the virtualisation software that would run her pipboy on a conventional mobile phone that would let her use it without sticking out like a sore thumb, and on the replication program that would get her new robot workbench to churn out a Mr Handy chassis she could use to get Codsworth back. She could have used the Robco code she’d downloaded from their factory, but the materials available were all different and she didn’t really think that the locals would appreciate a robot with a flamethrower arm.

The first two were virtually finished and just needed a hand to swap the tapes in and out as necessary. Holotapes had a hell of a capacity but the transfer rate wasn’t the best compared to Earth Bet technology, so that was just taking a while. The third needed more work and that got most of her attention.

Taylor stuck to that until her stomach started grumbling, then she had to stop to go get something to eat. There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation along the way to that and back, but she didn’t care. She was so close to being finished.

A couple of hours later, with a half eaten baguette long forgotten, she was done. POST diagnostics scrolled down her terminal as her new Mr Handy ran through its boot process. First the CPU, then the system buses, then main memory, then storage and onto external peripherals and controls. The whole process took several minutes and it was intensely satisfying to see every step coming up green.

Watching a project come to life was always a release. All that work coming together to actually be worth something. Better than sex was pushing it, but it was pretty good. And in this case it was more than just a new weapon or suit of armour she’d made. It was a friend. Family, even.

“Mum?” said a very familiar voice. “This feels strange. Has something happened?”

“I had to restore you from backups,” said Taylor. “It’s a new chassis with different capabilities. Access fileset alpha for details.”

Codsworth whirred away for a moment. “Ah,” he said. “I’m not quite sure what to say. How strange.”

Taylor leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Tell me about it,” she said. “I never thought I’d get back here. After a while my whole life before started to feel like a dream.”

“I—I suppose there are two of me now?”

They’d bought Codsworth as a robot butler to help take care of Shaun, though honestly Taylor had been more interested in having an extra gun at hand if things went South. Somewhere along the line, after the bombs, he’d become another member of the family. His programming had long since distorted into something an awful lot like an actual AI and his steadfast loyalty had been more than a little endearing even knowing that he’d probably had little choice in it due to where he’d started.

The idea of leaving him behind wasn’t a pleasant one.

“The original is back in Sanctuary a couple of centuries from now on a different world wondering what happened to me and Shaun. There’s not much I can do for him. Hopefully he’ll be okay with the Minutemen.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine, mum. He’ll have plenty of work to keep him occupied with Mr Garvey. It won’t be like last time.”

“I hope so.”

It struck Taylor as strange how quickly Codsworth had got over the idea of there being two of him, but then his programming had probably never really considered the idea of existential angst well enough for it to be really possible. He was something of an aberration in how sapient he was due to how long he’d been active without maintenance. A lot of the surviving robots were; either that or hopelessly glitched and dangerous. But there were still gaps where he hadn’t made the leap to full AI.

“Is there something you need from me, mum?”

“No,” said Taylor. “Nothing specific. You have an Internet hook-up in your chassis. Try and familiarise yourself with the world. It’s very different to what you’re used to, even before the bombs.”

“Very well. I’ll be here if you need me for anything.”

“It’s good to have you back, Codsworth.”

He dropped into standby, hovering a few inches off the ground with his three manipulator arms folded beneath him and the lenses on his eyes closed to the world, and left Taylor alone with her thoughts.

She was surprised at how comforting it was to have him back. He’d been there for long enough that it had started to feel like forever. Supportive, and largely non-judgemental, but always solidly moral in approach. He was a machine that had been rolled off a factory line and he was a better man than most she’d known by a long stretch.

---

When Armsmaster showed up to her lab he was almost an hour late and he was out of armour. Stood there, out of the metal, wearing a bodysuit he turned out to be a very muscular man who stood a few inches taller than her in his boots. There were a few lighter hairs hinting at grey around the edges of his goatee but she couldn’t say it detracted much from his appearance. He was a very well put together man.

He also looked about as patient as a crocodile facing its next meal. His whole body language, which was impossible to not read when he was basically wearing thick spandex, spoke of a need to keep moving and doing things. There was nothing truly still about him.

And he looked worn. The goatee was a little bit shaggier than it’d been when they first met. The eyes were a little deeper sunk, the lines around his face a little deeper set.

“Busy day?” she asked.

“They never stop,” he said. “There are always more gangs. We never really get to win.”

Taylor could think of a way to actually win, but she’d pacified the Commonwealth by straight murdering every raider she’d found causing trouble. What was left of the gangs had eventually worked out that their time was up and moved on. There would always be trouble makers, but she’d broken the backs of the big, organised groups with the help of the Railroad and the Minutemen. That wasn’t really a method you could run with in the civilised world.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.  “We can cancel this if you need some time to rest?”

He straightened up a hair. Armsmaster was actually pretty damned tall. Taller than Nate, even, and he’d been a big man. “No,” he said. “It’s fine. This is more important than fatigue. Tinkers work best in synergy.”

She had a whole bunch of doubts, not least the fact that she wasn’t actually sure that she was a tinker, but he was her boss and ultimately it wouldn’t cost her anything she cared about to play along.

“Okay,” she said. “I have a few things ready. I suspect the one you’ll get most out of is the library datafile.”

“Show me.”

Taylor had never seen a man get more absorbed in a pile of glorified text files with formatting and low-res illustrations. The Boston Public Library database held a whole lot of data and Armsmaster went at it like a famine victim who’d just been showed a buffet of prime cuts. She had seen actual machines show less commitment to absorbing new information. The way he flicked through articles was something else.

 It would have been impressive if it wasn’t so worrying. Taylor was pretty sure she could have left him there until he was a desiccated skeleton and he wouldn’t have known the difference. She waited and waited and he didn’t budge; just flicking through file after file.

She coughed. He didn’t react. She coughed louder. That got him. He turned back to face her. He, uh, didn’t look like he really wanted to be talking but he bit that back.

“This is excellent,” he said a moment later. “Tinkering is largely science with powers added on top and this advances the science underneath it all. For those of us who do our reading this could be a real boon.”

“That’s great,” she said. “But it’s not just weapons. There’s the history and culture of a whole other world in there.”

Armsmaster paused to think before he replied to that. “We’ll have to vet it, but once that’s done we can release it for study. That’s above my pay grade, to be honest. It’ll go to the directors and probably to the chief director considering how unusual the situation is.”

Taylor nodded. “I was thinking of something else,” she said. “This city is the way it is because there’s no work for too many people. With this technology, we could put them to work building things. Robots, maybe. Autodocs. Whatever. There are piles of possibilities and it could fix this city in a way that punching villains can’t.”

“That’s not really our department, Wanderer. We’re law enforcement, not business development. You can try talking to the director but it’s not really something we do.”

She frowned. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Is there anything else you’ve been working on?”

“Codsworth,” she said. “Come on out.”

He’d been resting on the table looking like little more than a metal ball with some limbs dangling out to the sides. Glorified scrap metal at first glance to most. As his eyestalks popped out and he hovered back up into the air he looked very different.

“You made a robot?” asked Armsmaster.

“Aside from everything else, a Mr Handy is a tireless, intelligent, loyal assistant,” said Taylor. “Codsworth is something of a special case, he’s been with my family for a very long time and he’s grown from that, but even the factory fresh version is an amazing help.”

“Good day, Mr Armsmaster,” said Codsworth. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve read a great deal about your work as a law enforcement officer.”

Armsmaster looked back at her. “This is normal,” she said. “Mr Handy units are programmed with personality and Codsworth was active for over two hundred years before I restored him from backup into a new chassis. He’s basically family.”

“Thank you for saying so, mum.”

“AI,” he said. “Fascinating. Also dangerous. What are the limitations?”

“A Mr Handy is one of the finest examples of RobCo engineering you will ever see,” said Codsworth. “We are the most intelligent utility robots you will ever see, capable of everything from cleaning through housecare and on to complex industrial tasks. As a model we are designed to be flexible and to learn from our experience in order to better serve. Our limitations are a matter of time and experience, not functionality. And of course mum has improved on the base model.”

“More manipulator arms with more flexibility,” said Taylor. “Basically a human range of control. No buzzsaw or flamethrower arms. Some improvements to processing power and storage by using Earth Bet components. You have better computers here.”

Better armour. More survivability. He didn’t look it, but Taylor had designed Codsworth to be the next best thing to unkillable unless he was vapourised. Everything that mattered had redundant backup systems. The data that defined him was being poured into half a dozen buckets. Only one needed to survive for a restore to be possible. Over the top, maybe, but she had lost enough people.

Armsmaster nodded. “He can’t tinker for us,” he said. “But there are a lot of tasks a unit like this could cover. Can you make more?”

“Not a problem. I can send you a factory default model in a couple of days and a manual for you to work with.”

“Good work. I’ll look forward to it.”

They spent the next couple of hours going over her power armour and he, if she were being honest, was a bit of a dick about it. She already knew she was going to have to rebuild it to make it work with Earth Bet systems and that they had a whole bunch of sleeker ways to make the hydraulics work. But whatever. He had the interpersonal skills of a particularly clumsy brick, but he was competent. She’d managed to put up with Carrington; this was nothing.

Chapter 13: 3.3

3.3

 

“Good morning, Ms Hebert,” said the officer. He was a relatively slightly built man in a dark suit. His expression barely shifted despite his cheerful words. “I’m Officer Neil. I’m here to interview you about the events on the night of the 17th of January.”

He offered his hand to shake. Taylor took it. Bit of a dead fish, but it beat the macho man cop approach, she supposed. He gestured at the seat he wanted her to take.

She took her seat in the interview room. It was pretty much as she remembered them from the other Earth. Small, a camera in one corner of the room, a table with a couple of chairs on either side, and what was almost certainly a one-way glass window facing her from his side of the table. The only thing missing was the ashtray that had been ubiquitous back there really.

Saying that, it wasn’t as if she’d had much experience of being dragged in by the police, but her trigger event had ended up making her look a little bit suspicious and she’d seen one of these rooms first-hand then. It had come to nothing in the end, but they’d had a long, hard look at her to see if she’d been involved in setting up the robbery when it turned out she knew one of the robbers from school.

The officer dropped a thick manilla folder onto the desk between them and pulled a notebook out of his bag along with a pen that clicked at an obnoxious level of volume as he set up.

“First, I’d like to hear what happened, in your words,” he said. “Please don’t leave anything out. Any detail could be critically important.”

“We were watching the TV,” she said. “Some gameshow, uh, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Shaun never had the chance to watch anything like that before so he was engrossed until someone knocked on the door.”

And so she went about detailing what had happened. How her dad had gone to the peephole and lost about ten years of his life expectancy when he saw Kaiser waiting at the end of the driveway and she’d gone and grabbed her gear and they’d fought it out. He didn’t say anything, just jotted down notes as she spoke and let her get it out, face impassive the whole time. Taylor had to admit she was a little impressed by that; she’d never been half so good at keeping a poker face.

“Interesting,” he said a few moments after she finished with her 911 call. Long enough for a slightly uncomfortable silence to take hold. “Have you had any contact with non-Protectorate parahumans in Brockton Bay since your return?”

“No,” she said. “Not to the best of my knowledge. I might have run into one in their civilian identity, I suppose, but no-one has given me any reason to think they might be a cape.”

“I’ll need names.”

“Emma Barnes, Zoe Barnes, the stall holders at the market. That’s about it. Oh, the barista at the Starbucks near Lord’s Market. I didn’t get her name but she was just a kid. A Chinese girl, I think.”

He scribbled those down into his notebook. “Emma Barnes was a school friend, correct?” he asked. “Have you had contact with anyone else from Winslow?”

“No, they wouldn’t recognise me now, like this, and there’s no-one there I would choose to approach.”

“No friends? Favourite teachers?”

“No.”

He started listing names, children then teachers. Trying to draw a reaction, she assumed, to find a discrepancy. She almost rolled her eyes clean out of her head when he got to Gladly. Taylor doubted there was a single kid in Winslow who actually liked or respected that idiot and most of them hadn’t had to watch him deliberately not notice some brat destroy their work or possessions for the fun of it. She was more than happy to leave him in the rear view mirror.

“You’ve clearly done your research,” she said finally. “So you probably know my school days weren’t exactly happy. There’s nothing there I would go running back to.”

“But there are the Barnes.”

“I didn’t tell them I was a parahuman and I very seriously doubt they have Empire ties.”

He stopped for a moment to leaf through the papers in the folder he’d brought in with him. “It does seem unlikely,” he said. “Let’s move on.”

“Please.”

The silence dragged on for a few moments as the officer continued to leaf through his file and check his notes. “Let’s go over what happened again,” he said. “The Empire 88 gang member knocked on your door, and then?”

Taylor tried to hold back the sigh. “My dad got about a decade worth of adrenaline pumped into his system all at once, then he called me,” she said. “There were a lot of people out there and they were all armed or didn’t need to be because of their powers. The threat was obvious, so I got my gear and opened fire.”

“No explicit threat was issued and no attempt was made to enter your home.”

“You don’t bring a dozen armed men and multiple parahumans along to hold a tea party. Kaiser, Fenja, and Menja are all known murderers and I doubt the men who roll with them are anything less.”

The idea of Kaiser going to bat with men who hadn’t proved their commitment was laughable. She’d eat her hat if a single one of them hadn’t made their bones. You wouldn’t get to sit at the big boy’s table otherwise; you would be peddling pills on a street corner or working whatever other garbage racket the Empire ran until someone senior picked you up for advancement.

“And then you targeted Kaiser with lethal force immediately.”

“I had no non-lethal way to take him down from range,” said Taylor. “And I needed to keep him from controlling the battlefield if I wanted to get out of there alive. I give him a warning shot and he can start conjuring blades out of every surface in my home, in the streets, cut me off from escape, and take me down at his leisure. 

“The same logic goes for his sidekicks. If they’re rampaging around fully powered up, I don’t walk away,” continued Taylor. “I’m not Alexandria.”

Neil’s lip twitched. Just a tiny little bit. “Indeed,” he said. “The weapon you used, the gauss rifle, can you please describe it.”

“It’s a railgun. It uses an electromagnetic charge to fire 2mm rounds at many times the speed of sound.”

“No worries about over-penetration?”

“The rounds detonate on impact to avoid that. Bad for what they hit, but a lot better for anyone behind them. It’s an interesting system—”

“We’re not here for a technical discussion, Miss Hebert,” said Neil. “I’m sure your fellow tinkers would be more appreciative of those details. Your other weapons seem more mundane.”

“They’re pre-war salvage. I did some tinkering on them to reduce recoil among other things, but the frames are standard. They came out of a factory somewhere originally. Not sure where the deliverer came from, but the revolver was definitely mass produced, as was the laser pistol. I always preferred the Wattz range of laser weapons but the army went cheap.”

“And the grenade?”

“Based on a pre-war design with some personal tweaks to reduce the size and keep the firepower. Easier to carry around and conceal that way.”

Neil made some more notes before he spoke again. “So would you would say they’re all tinker technology?”

“I suppose so.”

Taylor was pretty sure she wasn’t a real tinker, but it was close enough. She’d started looking at some samples of actual tinker technology and there were some ideas starting to take form in her head, though it remained to be seen how far she could take it.

Either way, laser and gauss weapons might as well be tinker technology compared to the local gear she’d had a chance to play with. There were some interesting things, and she remembered being amazed by some of them them when she was a little girl and the tinker-inspired boom started, but the other Earth had been at it longer.

“Let’s go back to how this started.”

And they did. Again and again and again. Taylor was pretty sure he checked over every question he wanted to ask at least three times, and by the end of it she could feel herself beginning to mentally check out of the whole thing. Just drifting off into her happy space where some jobsworth wasn’t trying to see if she’d contradict herself and give him something to work with.

Eventually, finally, thankfully, he jotted down his final note in what looked to be an approaching full notebook and clicked his pen closed. The sight of that came as a blessed relief to Taylor.

“I think we’ve covered everything we need to,” he said with a smile that was too well-practiced to be charming. “Hopefully next time we’ll be on the same side of the table.”

“Hopefully.”

Taylor could say with one hundred percent certainty that she was not sorry to see him go. She waited a minute to put her thoughts together and then followed him out of the room into a corridor that had several, presumably similar, rooms opening out onto it. Shaun was there waiting for her with her dad and neither looked all that comfortable.

“Never been interrogated before?” she asked. “It gets easier.”

She spoke from her vast stores of experience gained from being interrogated twice. Unless you counted army training, which she didn’t, because it had been more of an excuse for some dickheads to kick recruits around than to teach them anything useful about handling interrogations.

“It’s not as much fun as it looks on TV,” said her dad. “I was starting to doubt my own memories there by the end.”

“Don’t worry about it. You haven’t done anything wrong, so you have nothing to worry about. It’ll be fine.”

She sounded stupid to herself as she said it and her dad gave her a look that didn’t exactly speak of reassurance. It might have sounded better if she hadn’t repeated herself like a dunce. And if the idea that doing nothing wrong meant you’d be safe from the cops was anything other than wildly naive. Oh well.

“It’ll be fine,” she said. “You okay there, Shaun?”

“I’m fine,” he said, neither looking nor sounding fine at all.

Her dad replied before she did. “You sure, kiddo?”

“Yeah,” said Shaun. “Can we get out of here?”

“Sure, sure,” said Taylor. “Back to the lab?”

He was quick to nod in reply.

---

Her dad had veered off elsewhere as they’d reached the lab. He had his moments, but he wasn’t anywhere near as into technology and the creation of new gizmos as her or Shaun. But he’d shot her a worried look and a glance at Shaun as he’d done so and the message had been very clear. Someone needed to talk to him and as his mother the responsibility fell on her.

Of course she knew exactly how to broach the subject and what to say. Having her boy go from wearing nappies and gurgling by way of communication to being a near pubescent teenager basically overnight had really let her build those skills.

So she set him loose on the machinery and let him work it out on the new laser rifle design he’d been plugging away at for the last week. Shaun was a smart lad, beyond his years, but that was a big project and it kept him busy. Busy pushed thoughts away into the background where the subconscious could chew over them until some of the sharpness was dulled.

Maybe not what you’d find in a parenting manual, but it was something that had worked for Taylor often enough. Give things time to cool and then go back to deal with them.

She checked her mail — still no reply to her request for a meeting with the director, then set about her own projects while she waited for Shaun to unwind. Ballistic weave was incredibly useful, but the durability had always been a double edged sword. It was difficult to work with material that you couldn’t really cut or get a normal needle through. It either took a lot of muscle power, which was what the Railroad had gone with for lack of resources to do better, or machinery. Taylor had never much cared for sewing; she found it tedious and the results here would be less than ideal, so she was going for the machinery approach.

That meant building something that could take a roll of ballistic weave in one end and cut it, stitch it, whatever was needed, to shape it into a design that had been uploaded. It wasn’t the most challenging thing Taylor had ever worked on, but it was still early days for her and Earth Bet computers. She was still on a learning curve.

They worked in near silence for an hour or so, the quiet broken only by irritated muttering when something didn’t work out and the sound of Codsworth’s motors as he hovered around doing basic maintenance and keeping some of the manufacturing tasks running, until it seemed like some of the tension had left Shaun’s back.

“You ready to talk now, Shaun?” she said.

He just about jumped out of his skin. The screwdriver he’d been using went one way and he went the other, with the bits he’d been working on going just ahead of his hand. She tried not to laugh.

“Uh,” he said, cheeks bright red. That was something he’d got from Nate. He’d blushed oh so very easily and it had been so easy to see before he’d grown some designer stubble. She’d had a little hobby getting a flush out of him for a while. “I’m fine.”

“Right. And I’m the easter bunny. I know I didn’t have a whale of a time in there and neither did your grandfather. It’s okay if you got rattled. It’s expected. That’s what they do, even to kids.”

“I’m not a kid!” Yeah, yeah. “I just didn’t expect them to be so, so—”

He trailed off.

“Difficult?” she asked. “We’re going to have to get used to that. They have different ideas about what’s acceptable here than we had back home.”

“They were just raiders. Why does anyone care?”

Because they’re a bunch of prisses who don’t like getting their hands dirty and that’s why a gang of wannabe nazis had been running half the city since before she’d been born, Taylor was tempted to say. The more she thought about it the more irritated she got, even if it was going to come to nothing but a lecture from Director Pain-in-the-ass.

“You remember your history lessons, right?” she asked. “We’re back in the days of police and courts and judges. You need to have a good reason for getting into a fight and an even better one for killing someone. People are a lot more delicate about that sort of thing here.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. A moment later. “Right?”

“Different standards. We’re going to have to learn to live with them if we’re going to live here and we are. There’s no going back.”

“None?”

“None,” she said. “Getting there in the first place was an accident. Powers gone wrong. Armsmaster was able to reverse it, but we have no idea how to do it again even if we wanted to. Even if we opened a portal, it would just take us to America a couple of hundred years before all of that happened. Fenway Park would be a baseball stadium, not a shantytown called Diamond City.”

“So we’re never going to see them again.”

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry, Shaun.”

To her, Brockton Bay was home. Her real home where her family lived, where her mother’s grave rested, even if she’d lost her friends along the way. She should have realised it wasn’t that for Shaun. The wasteland, Sanctuary, Diamond City — that was home to him. And another one he’d lost like the Institute. He’d taken that like a champ, or at least he’d seemed to, but how much of that was him shrugging it off and how much was him trying to fit in?

His eyes were getting wet. She crossed the room and pulled him into a tight hug. He didn’t make a sound.

“It’ll be okay, Shaun,” she said. “You’ll miss them, but you’ll make new friends. Find new things.”

“There, there, young master,” said Codsworth. “A good cup of tea will do you the world of good. Be ready in a jiffy.”

Chapter 14: 3.4

3.4

 

Superhero-chic wasn’t exactly Taylor’s favourite. She definitely preferred her clothes a little less figure hugging largely because she’d never had much of a figure to hug. When even pregnancy can’t give you boobs you know some things just aren’t meant to be.

That was why she’d put her combat armour on around the marine-styled wetsuit she was using as a base for her costume. The PR people had been less enthused about that than they had the wetsuit look, but she couldn’t even pretend to care. Ballistic weave might keep the bullets from punching holes through her but it didn’t do much to keep them from breaking bones or blood vessels. That was what the armour plates and the layers of shock absorbing padding were for.

It’d do the job well enough, Taylor supposed. She wasn’t overly keen on the domino mask — it seemed flimsy — but then she had zero intention of getting into any sort of a fight without putting her helmet on anyway. To hell with seeming approachable when bullets were flying.

She passed a few office workers and officers as she made her way through the PRT building. There were a few nods as she went, but not many. She hadn’t been there long enough to have built any sort of relationships and she’d started in on an awkward footing. Being the nutbar who’d got into a fight with a white power rally and left behind a pile of bodies didn’t make for the best first impression.

Of course, Sophia had been all over the idea of a person like that. It was almost enough to make Taylor think twice about her approach to life.

Her destination loomed. A sliding door recessed into a thick steel wall. She hit the door buzzer and stood waiting a few moments for it to open. A couple of officers passed by in their faceless armour as she waited.

The lab on the other side of the door was a study in chaos, and not organised chaos. At least not any sort of organisation that Taylor could recognise. It was as large as her workspace, and just about every surface seemed to be covered in some manner of project or component or scribbled notes on something or other. 

It was enough to make her teeth itch. How could anyone work like that? It made her want to order the boy to tidy his room or be sent to bed without supper, which would have been more than mildly inappropriate all things considered.

The boy in question was stood not far from the door, wearing a visor that was cock-eyed enough that it was pretty obvious he hadn’t been wearing it until she’d buzzed him. Kid Win, in his red and gold costume. His visor left his hair and the lower half of his face exposed and he looked young. Younger than Taylor had been when she’d triggered and God knew she’d not been ready for it.

Not much to do about it though. It wasn’t her place to decide who went out there and it wasn’t like the kids would listen anyway. She wouldn’t have.

“Uh, hi, Wanderer,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting a visit.”

“I thought I’d drop in and say hello to the other team tinker,” she said. A new Mr Handy came floating in behind her. “And I come bearing gifts.”

“You’re a robot tinker?”

“Not so much,” said Taylor. “I’m not really a tinker. My power is great for understanding tech, but that’s about as far as it goes.”

“I dunno why you’re here then. I’m not much of a tinker.”

 “A Mr Handy is all kinds of help,” she said. “I gave Armsmaster one a few days ago and it’s helping him with all the day to day tasks of running a lab that don’t need his personal touch. You can use it to run machines, errands, whatever you want. Anything that doesn’t need you to hit it with your power before it works.”

“That’s, uh, thanks? That sounds pretty damn useful. How does it work?”

“I’ll send you the manual, but it’s all pretty normal technology driven by a virtual intelligence. It’s smart enough to do most things with some instructions, but you can code new operations in if you need to.”

“And let me say, this place is setting my cleaning sensors off something fierce, young sir,” said the Mr Handy. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Granville and I am a fully equipped Robco Mr Handy. Now what is the organisation system of this laboratory?”

“He’s a teenager, Granville. They’re not big on systems and organisation.”

“But this is a research facility!”

“More engineering than research, really,” said Taylor. “We’re building tools, not advancing the general knowledge.”

Kid Win shot the robot a sideways look that managed to be nervous even with most of his face covered by a visor. “I know where everything is,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“Butlers have some ideas about how things should be even if they’re robots,” said Taylor. “I’m sure you’ll work out how to get along with him.”

“Certainly. You’ll find me quite agreeable.”

“Why don’t you get the lay of the land, Granville? Work out where everything is. Maybe start drawing up some ideas for better ways to arrange things.”

“As you wish, mum.”

The robot took off, slowly hovering around the room and no doubt building its internal map up to whatever resolution it considered appropriate. Mr Handy units could be pretty variable about that sort of thing and she’d not spent a huge amount of time fine-tuning the personality overlay. He was just the factory default with the usual randomisation.

Kid Win, despite his largely covered face, managed to look more than mildly lost.

“He’ll do what you tell him to do,” said Taylor. “He’ll complain and nag, but he’ll do it. You just have to try and not let him run all over you because he might try. These units can be stubborn.”

“Right, right. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Taylor had doubts. He didn’t seem like someone who’d had much practice in being forceful. Never mind. Robots ultimately obeyed their owners, even if they were a pain in the ass along the way. Codsworth was very much a special case in having his own mind for real. Granville wasn’t going to spend two hundred years accumulating data any time soon.

“So you working on anything interesting?” she asked. “It looks like you have a lot of projects running here.”

“I never stick on one thing for long,” he replied. There was a bitter undertone there that Taylor didn’t know what to make of. “Easier if I have things to bounce between when I get distracted. Right now the biggest thing I’m working on is the alternator cannon.”

He led her over to a clearly unfinished but rather large gun that looked more like a fixed weapons emplacement than something you’d carry around to use. There were a lot of gaps and places where the wiring was still hanging out incomplete, but it looked like a pretty serious weapon. The sort of thing she’d seen the army throw up at bases for fixed defences when they were planning to stick around. The sort of thing she’d put together more than once.

“Nice,” she said. “Nice, nice. I didn’t think anyone around here had built anything like this.”

“You’ve seen it before?”

“Things like it,” she said. “Not the same. This is more compact even with the chaotic wiring. That capacitor there, if it powers the whole cannon, I’m pretty sure my bosses would have killed for it. It’s good work even if it’s not finished.”

“I’ve been having trouble with the numbers I need to finish it off.”

“Granville can help with that,” said Taylor. “He’s a living computer. Math is not a problem for him at all.”

“Of course, young master,” said Granville. He sounded positively cheery. “Whatever you need.”

“He’s programmed with the latest in twenty-first century physics and mathematics from the other world. You’ll probably need to feed him some textbooks for the intricacies of Earth Bet technology. Tinker magic will probably take manual programming but these units are smart. They’re good at picking things up.”

“That sounds really useful. Thank you.”

Time to segue. “I was hoping to get a look at one of your pistols. You have a stun setting that I don’t. My laser weapons just burn holes through people and that isn’t too PR friendly.”

“Oh, yeah. They hate that. Wait a sec.”

He went off and started searching through a rack of machinery and pieces of indecipherable function. Taylor could have spent a lot of time digging through the stuff trying to puzzle them out given the chance. You never knew what might be buried in something like tinker technology. What little tricks the power might have come up with to make those seemingly impossible things possible.

“Here it is,” he said, pulling out a pistol of a surprisingly elegant design. It looked somewhat like the sort of thing the Wattz corporation sold to the civilian market. A little blockier; less sci-fi looking. “It’s one of my older designs, but the stun settings are built in.”

 Taylor took it. “Thanks, Kid,” she said. “That should be a big help.”

“No problem. Let me know if you need anything else.”

---

The pistol Kid Win had given her was quite possibly the strangest thing Taylor had ever worked on. She’d thought the processing units for robots made by lunatics who’d decided to cut the brains out of people were the craziest bit of technology she’d ever work with, but those at least followed some sort of natural laws, even if they were an atrocity against all that was good and right in the world. She could not say the same thing about this handgun.

Taylor had thought the crazy wiring was bad to start with, but eventually she’d managed to decipher that spaghetti bowl of technology into something that resembled a sane blueprint and move on. No, it was the components that wiring connected together that were giving her conniptions. They didn’t make any god damned sense.

It wasn’t all of them. The lens system for focusing the energy into a coherent beam was very much like the ones she’d seen in the weapons used by the US military, and she’d been able to quickly move on from that. It was the system that produced the energy that was jamming her brain up.

The component was tiny. It took juice in from the power system, which was another kind of weird that she just wasn’t ready to contemplate, and modulated it into something else entirely. It was wired up to a pair of dials that seemed to control intensity and type, but that was about as much as she could tell.

Even under an electron microscope it didn’t really give up many secrets. The layout didn’t follow anything that followed any sort of reasonable rules, with circuits looping back on themselves, or leading to nowhere, or just being completely disconnected and still somehow doing something, and the sub-components were just the same. It was turtles all the way down.

There was no coherent sense to what these things did or how they worked together. Not according to any rules Taylor had learned either at school or on the job as she’d learned to bodge things that should never have worked together into something vaguely workable. It was like looking at a world where gravity sometimes pushed you away from mass instead of pulling towards it.

But there was something there. Something dancing at the edge of her vision that she couldn’t quite grasp onto. She just needed to find the right thread to pull on and Taylor was sure it would start to unravel into something that made sense to her. It was just a matter of finding it.

Taylor focused in on the trio of sub-components that were wired together in the top left of the piece. They were isolated from the rest of the circuit and there was something about them that called to her. She just needed to find the right angle. The right way of looking at them. She was sure of it.

“Mum?”

Wireless transfer. That was it. They weren’t connected to the rest of the circuit because they didn’t need to be, but how? How did they interface with the rest and what did they do?

She started sketching out notes. Ideas, observations, tests, and results. It started to flow like water. The more she just let it, the more it came. Page after page.

Time got fuzzy then slipped away.

“Mum?”

Someone shook her shoulder and she started up from the diagram she’d been drawing to see her dad looking down at her with a look of concern on his face. “Taylor?” he asked. “Are you okay? Codsworth called me. He said you weren’t answering.”

“No, sir,” said her favourite robot from his position hovering behind her dad. You wouldn’t think a robot could look worried, but Codsworth managed it, with the way he was twitching from side to side and blinking his eyestalks. “I tried to get her attention several times but there was no response. I’ve seen mum lost in projects before but this was considerably more extreme.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I feel pretty good, actually. Like I’ve just been on a long run and beat my normal time.

“That’s, uh, that’s nice, Taylor, but you were completely out of it.”

“Must be a powers thing.”

Taylor used that moment of silence to look at the notes she’d taken and the not quite finished diagram she’d been working on. The notes were not up to her normal standard and honestly looked like the sort of insane chicken scratch you saw an old doctor leave behind to confuse the hell out of everyone who tried to follow up from them, but she could understand them.

“It’s modulating the energy onto frequencies that affect the human nervous system,” she said. Taylor could feel a headache coming on. “Power comes in from the battery and gets turned into the different effects the pistol’s capable of then gets pushed out to be focused into a beam. Simple. Why didn’t I see that before?”

“Mum, those notes make as much sense as those raiders we found in the brewery and they were so drunk one of them shot himself in the foot.”

The lines wavered in front of her and she shook her head. Nothing but squiggles. She squinted and there was something there again.

“I don’t think we can build it,” she said after a moment’s thought. “Not the same. But I can maybe take the principles and manage something similar. Make a laser that doesn’t just burn holes through people.”

“That, umm, sounds great,” said her dad. “Is that what you’ve been working on?”

“I need ways to take people down without blowing holes through them. I’ve been told at great length that we need to take people in alive.” Taylor blinked and looked away from her notes and back to her dad. “How are you anyway? We haven’t really talked for a couple of days.”

“Better,” he said. “I got to talking with one of the guys here who has some experience. It was helpful, and he has a kid, too, so he gets some things.”

“That’s good. Really good.”

“I’m getting a bit stir crazy being stuck on this oil rig, though. I really need to get back to work.”

“They’re working on getting the Empire settled back down. We have a meeting tomorrow about something the boss lady has planned. I think I might be getting pulled in, which is why I really want to get this done.”

“Okay. If you need anything, just give me a shout? I’m only doing the usual rounds being told there are no new jobs to be had, so you won’t be interrupting.”

“Sure, dad. Thanks.”

He gave her one last look before he left. Didn’t look too certain. There wasn’t much he could do to help her with the things she was working on, but it was nice to have him there to offer.

“C’mon, Codsworth,” she said. “We have work to do.”

“Right you are.”

Chapter 15: 3.5

3.5

 

The meeting room was larger than Taylor had expected it to be. It was almost as large as some of the lecture theatres she’d sat in during her university days and it didn’t have the seating for half as many people. The gaps between seats were generous to say the least and nothing like the bench seating she’d seen in some of the cheaper buildings.

Taylor had thought it extravagant at first, just for a moment, until she remembered that universities didn’t generally have to accommodate people wearing power armour, even if it was the more slimline variety that Armsmaster went in for, or dragon-themed robots. They definitely took up a little more room than your average student, even compared to the ones who lived off a diet of pizza, burgers, and beer.

Saying that, they were sat at the head of the room next to the smart screen with the director, so they weren’t really using the seats. Taylor was pretty sure that even the fairly sturdy looking chairs the PRT had stocked up on wouldn’t stand up to that thing sitting in them. Could you even buy office supplies rated for a ton? She kind of doubted it.

She took a seat off to the side and Codsworth settled in, hovering between her and the next seat as they waited for everyone else to filter in. That gave her time to give the room more of a look over.

The director looked awful. She never exactly looked good, but her eyes were sunk in real deep, even deeper than normal, and the rumpled state of her business suit told its own story, considering how precisely attired she’d been every other time Taylor had seen her. Taylor’d not seen anyone more obviously in need of a solid eight hours since she’d finally been demobbed from the army. It was enough to make her feel bad for bureaucrat.

There were a bunch of capes there she didn’t recognise at all. Definitely not locals. The metal man stood out far too much for her to ever forget him. On closer inspection he was more boy than man, perhaps somewhere in between, so a Ward then, and not from Brockton. The director must have called in some favours.

Chatting next to him was someone she did recognise: Glory Girl. Behind her stood a taller, older blonde who wasn’t exactly the most cheerful looking person Taylor had ever seen. New Wave. Local celebrities. A family of independent heroes who’d eschewed the whole idea of masked identities. 

If she remembered rightly, things hadn’t really gone in their favour after they unmasked, but if her paper-thin identity ever got all the way out she supposed she knew who to talk to about how to live with that sort of life.

More people filtered in over the course of the next few minutes. Some capes, some not. A combination of men and women in business clothes and people in bulky paramilitary gear. It made for an odd looking group, with the people who looked like they’d stepped out of a comic book sat with people who looked like they’d be more comfortable in a bank somewhere working out pivot tables. At least no-one had gone for the Grognak-style loincloth and not much else costume. Taylor wasn’t sure her poker face would be up to that particular task.

By the time they’d all arrived it was quite the crowd and the room was just about bursting at the seams. There were more capes Taylor didn’t recognise. This was shaping up to be something bigger than she’d expected.

The director stepped forward and the low hum of conversation fell silent quickly. “As you all know the city has been livelier than usual over the last week,” said Piggot. “The death of Kaiser and his bodyguards has opened up a power vacuum that the gangs are still fighting over.

“What you don’t know is that we have Kaiser’s civilian identity,” she continued. “Kaiser was none other than Max Anders, CEO of Medhall. For obvious reasons we have elected not to reveal this to the public.”

Holy shit. One of the biggest corporations in Brockton Bay. The city’s biggest success story since the shipping industry had consolidated around the larger ports elsewhere and abandoned the city. Founded, owned, and administered by the Empire 88. No wonder they were so well funded.

Taylor couldn’t even begin to imagine how it had worked. How did you run a major corporation and the biggest gang of white supremacists on the continent and still have the spare time to eat the occasional meal and maybe even sleep? She’d burned the candle at both ends trying to do half of that. Death must have come almost as a mercy.

“Through him we have identified most of the Empire’s parahumans and other members.”

Pictures flashed up on the screen behind her along with aliases. Some of them were surprising. Kayden Anders — Purity — looked like she wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Appearances could be deceiving, but she was bizarrely milquetoast in appearance for a mass murderer who regularly got into shootouts with people like Lung.

 Piggot continued, “as well as the rackets they’re running. We are now moving from containment into an offensive posture to capture as many of those parahumans as we can, and to close down their sources of funding.”

It was almost enough to take Taylor’s breath away. The Empire 88 had been active in Brockton Bay for so long it was almost part of the furniture. They’d sunk into the city’s infrastructure, co-opted politicians, judges, cops, bureaucrats, and set themselves up to the point where it was almost unthinkable that the city could ever be free of them.

And there was the director talking about something that could reduce the gang to splinters. No gang can last once the money’s cut off and the competition starts to really smell blood in the water.

“They must know we have this,” said Assault. “They’re not completely stupid.”

“We took advantage of the moles they planted in our organisation,” replied the director. “We leaked the location of the morgue containing the body and that we hadn’t identified it yet. They will suspect we know, but there’s only so much they can do about it. If they abandon too much then they risk collapse.”

There were no more questions so Piggot segued into operational details, which Taylor paid only half a mind to. She’d already studied up on the Empire 88’s capes while readying herself for the inevitable rematches after she’d killed Kaiser, so there wasn’t much new there for her.

It got more interesting when Piggot moved into assignments. Who was going where and what they would be tasked with doing. Mostly it was predictable. PRT teams were being sent to break up the rackets where no parahumans were expected — drug dealing, gambling, that sort of thing — and Armsmaster was leading the core team into Downtown to go after the big boys who were expected to be violently difficult to take in, and so on and so forth. 

The guys they’d dragged in from other cities were mostly being tasked with containment duties to hold ground if anyone tried to take advantage of the chaos. Taylor supposed that made sense. They didn’t know the lay of the land or have the local knowledge that came from sharing a city with and fighting against a bunch of crazy wannabe nazis.

“Wanderer, you’ll be attached to Brandish, Gallant, and Glory Girl,” said Piggot. “You’re tasked with bringing in Victor and Othala. This is your first operation so follow Brandish’s lead.”

Wow. She was really not high in Piggot’s estimation if she was being told to follow orders from an independent. No-one who made it that high up in government trusted an outsider if they could help it.

“Their address is in the file,” continued the director. “They should be at home tonight and relatively easy pickings, but be ready. Any cape can be dangerous.”

And it was a milk run. Taylor could only assume that Piggot was really, really sore about the whole shoot out thing even if the law had came through and let her loose after that whole series of interviews had got everyone shaken up.

“Will do, boss.”

“We’ll take care of it, director.”

The rest of the meeting passed by. Taylor’d like to say it was a blur, but it was a big operation and there were a lot of details to share. She’d never much cared for this sort of thing. Her power made it basically impossible for her to forget things normally so big meetings with lots of people always became very tedious very quickly, as they had to go over the details multiple times to make sure it was drilled in for people who weren’t so lucky. Deeply boring even if she understood the necessity.

But end it did and people started to filter out to prepare for the fun to follow. Some gathered in small groups to chat but Taylor really didn’t have that sort of relationship with any of them. That was what she’d had with the Railroad and she was never going to see any of them again. Not them or Piper or Cait.

Fuck. Now she was the one starting to feel a little weepy.

Taylor shook it off. There was nothing she could do about it, so there was no point dwelling on what she’d lost. She rapped Codsworth with her knuckles to wake him up from the standby mode he’d drifted into at some point. He rose back up with the robotic equivalent of a start and followed along behind her with a hum of his servos as she left the meeting room.

Her new teammates were waiting for her outside. Those white costumes were something else up close. They must have spent fortunes on bleach, Taylor was sure. She knew from experience that getting blood and muck out of light coloured clothes ended up being more of a chore than it was worth.

“Hi.”

Brandish held out her hand. “We haven’t met yet,” she said. She had a good, firm handshake. “I’m Carol Dallon, or Brandish, and this is my daughter Victoria, Glory Girl.”

“Yeah, I remember you guys,” said Taylor. “Family team, right?”

“That’s how it worked out, thought it wasn’t our original intention. I’d like to discuss strategy with you while we still have time.”

“Sure. That makes sense. I need to pick my gear up from my lab. You mind tagging along? Codsworth will have a tea kettle ready if anyone’s thirsty.”

“Absolutely correct, mum,” said Codsworth. “Always have a kettle ready. That’s what I say.”

“You have a robot butler,” said Glory Girl. “Cool. What else does it do?”

“I am fully capable of carrying out all household maintenance tasks and dealing with any ruffians who would interfere with said household, though that was easier when I still had my flamethrower arm.”

“Uh.”

“Sorry, Codsworth. Flamethrowers are wildly illegal on Earth Bet. I checked.”

She had, but she hadn’t expected a different answer. Setting people on fire was pretty uniformly frowned upon in the civilised world.

They set on their way to her lab. Conversation was somewhat stifled by the mention of flamethrowers.

“So, uh, was that serious?” asked Glory Girl. “He had a flamethrower?”

“Well, how else would you take care of the underbrush?” asked Codsworth. “It’s an invaluable tool even before you need to think about the local riff raff.”

“Standards were a little different on the other world,” said Taylor. “Even before the bombs fell things were pretty violent. Lot of crime, food riots, that sort of thing.”

“Bombs?”

Ah, Christ. Taylor stumbled for a moment before catching herself as she realised she’d forgotten that not everyone knew about the backstory.

“You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” said Gallant. Living up to his name, she guessed. And that knightly armour. It might have been charming if she didn’t know he was some spotty teenager under all the metal.

“Nah, it’s fine. The world ended. Full-scale nuclear exchange. Total environmental devastation and the collapse of all organised civilisation. The soil was still poisoned after a couple of centuries in a lot of places and large scale government never came back to the East Coast. It was pretty rough.”

“You cannot scrub nuclear fallout out of linoleum. It simply isn’t possible.”

The conversation remained well and truly dead until they reached her lab. Shaun was thankfully elsewhere. She’d realised halfway there that she was about a minute away from giving up her secret identity, but if he wasn’t there then no problem. The whole idea of masks was going to take some getting used to again. It had been a long time and it had been a lot easier when it was just her against the world.

“Pull up a chair,” said Taylor. “I need to get my gear ready.”

Which was exactly what she did, performing last minute checks on her various weapons and pieces of armour to make sure that they weren’t going to conk out on her in the middle of combat. She finished that particular task, ending with her new laser rifle, as Codsworth served four cups of tea in what he no doubt found to be deplorable excuses for teacups.

“This should be a relatively straightforward operation,” said Brandish. She stopped to take a sip of her tea, which she evidently found surprisingly good as she stopped for a moment to gather her thoughts before continuing. “Othala is little threat in her own right and the powers she grants are short lived. Victor is more of an issue, but unless he has heavy weapons we should be able to disable him quickly, and that ends most of his danger.”

“Problem is if they have guards,” said Taylor. “Maybe some skinheads lurking around the place to take care of the VIPs. We don’t want them calling for help.”

“No, which is why we need to move fast. What sort of weapons do you have?”

“Most of my gear doesn’t come with non-lethal options. I’m down to a laser rifle and a taser if we want them alive. I suppose I could punch them but that carries a lot of weight in my power armour. Codsworth will be tagging along with another rifle, so we’ll have some extra fire support.”

Brandish nodded. “I think it makes sense for Victoria and me to lead the charge while you come in from the rear to provide support from range.”

“You sure? I’m a lot more bullet proof than you when I’m in my armour.”

“We have a great deal of experience in this sort of thing. We can handle a few people with guns.”

“Okay.”

Taylor opened a drawer and pulled out a tray of stimpaks. Her last stimpaks. “Take one each,” she said. “If you get hurt, they’ll help. Plasma, adrenaline, stem cells, and a bunch more chemicals all designed to kick the healing process into high gear and keep a wounded soldier alive.”

Glory Girl was the first to pick one up, rotating it around in her hands with a look of deep curiosity. “Panacea in a syringe?”

“Nothing that fancy. If you let a skinhead blow enough holes through you, it’ll just give you a little more time to contemplate your mistake before the end.”

“Have these been approved?” asked Brandish.

“I’ve used dozens of these things over the years and I still only have two legs, two arms, and one head,” said Taylor. “There were factories up and down the country pumping them out before the bombs fell and they used to lug the things out to the front lines by the boatload. They’re perfectly safe unless you take a stupid number and give yourself a heart attack.”

Brandish looked to Gallant who nodded. Whatever. She just didn’t want to have to explain why their annoyingly pretty local celebrities were coming back in bags if things turned rough.

They went through some more things. Scenarios they might face, details of powers, that sort of thing, but the moment of truth came sooner rather than later and Taylor donned her armour ready for the fight.

Chapter 16: 3.6

3.6

 

The amazingly nondescript van the PRT provided carried them to their destination without a single bother. It was a surprisingly nice neighbourhood. Nice and clean. No graffiti, everything well-maintained, lawns trimmed to a precise length, well-sized houses, and the few cars present in driveways looked very, very expensive. You’d take it for any normal, upper-middle-class suburb to look at it.

Apparently, being a Nazi paid better than any job Taylor had ever had. It made the place she’d lived before the bombs look like a tiny little hovel, and she’d loved that little home away from the city and its noise.

On the other hand, there was a serious stepford wives feel to the whole place. The almost military precision of the lawns combined with how very little of anything was out of place set Taylor’s teeth on edge. Who had that much time to spend on lawn care and cleaning?

Upside was that with it being the middle of the day there was hardly anyone around, so at least they didn’t need to worry too much about that.

“Gallant, what can you see?” asked Brandish.

“There are people in there with them,” he replied. “I think Othala’s healing someone. They’re in pain and she’s keeping hands on.”

“Wanderer, can you do anything to identify who we’re facing?”

“I can see the heat signatures, but that’s all,” replied Taylor. “I don’t have X-Ray specs. Looks like an adult male watching another guy being patched up, but they could just as easily be large women. A few more men are watching out the windows. My money’s on them being armed.”

Brandish tapped her earpiece. “Director, we have unexpected, unidentified extra enemies in the target area. Are we still clear to engage?”

“Clear,” came the reply. “Update me immediately if reinforcements are required.”

Taylor flicked the switch on her rifle to engage the charging coils. She could feel the steady thrum as it kicked into life even through her armour’s gauntlets. Nice and reassuring that it was actually working on its first field outing. 

Her HUD indicated that Codsworth had done similar with his own weapon; the first time he’d used anything other than his built in weapons now that she thought about it. She really hoped his combat programming would cope with it; it should, but you never know how things are going to shake out until they’re tried for real.

Opposite her she saw Glory Girl take a deep breath. The girl looked ready to go. Eager even. Taylor could empathise; she hated these moments before the fight when she was keyed up but it wasn’t quite time to act. Glory Girl saw her looking and gave her a nod, which Taylor returned.

A moment later the word came. “Go,” said Brandish.

Glory Girl burst out of the van. From seat to flying out of the door in a flash. Brandish followed and Taylor took up the rear with the others. PRT officers fanned out from their own van to lock down the area.

It was easy to tell that they’d worked together before, even aside from the family resemblance. They moved quickly and in unison. Brandish transformed into a glowing ball and Glory Girl immediately pitched her through the window, then made a dynamic entry of her own through the wall. There wasn’t much left of wall or window but a cloud of pulverised building bits falling to the ground after that.

Through that cloud Taylor could see the heat signatures moving. She switched back to the simple visual feed and levelled her rifle at the gap, ready to shoot anything that looked right for shooting.

That was when both of the New Wave heroines came flying back the way they’d come. Glory Girl first, followed by Brandish, trailing along in her daughter’s grip. They were followed by a vaguely animal shaped pile of metal sprouting hooks and snarls from every surface.

Oh, shit. 

It was Hookwolf. He was just about the last Empire parahuman Taylor wanted to run into. She could hear Brandish calling into her radio for reinforcements, so she probably wasn’t the only one who thought that way.

“Open fire!” shouted Taylor.

She pulled the trigger and hit Hookwolf with a burst of stun shots aimed at where the heart would be on an actual wolf. Shards of hooked metal glowed and sparked under the hits. One cracked apart. Codsworth’s fire joined hers a moment later to much the same effect.

Hookwolf turned his empty eye sockets to face her and let loose something that sounded like a cross between a growl and the shriek of two cars scraping against each other at speed. Then he charged, ploughing right through her weapons fire.

She could almost smell his no doubt terrible breath when Glory Girl hit him like a falling comet. He bounced away in something approaching free fall for a few metres, scattering lumps of metal along his path, before he managed to dig his paws into the road and slow himself.

For some reason Glory Girl didn’t follow up her attack. She hovered in the sky waiting for something. Taylor took a moment to scope the battlefield. Just in time to see Gallant hit a muscular blond man in a red shirt, Victor, with a beam of energy that battered him back a step before he slumped to the ground.

Brandish was fighting a topless man wearing chains. Taylor had just a moment to contemplate how utterly stupid that sort of costume was even for a relatively mild Northern climate before she went back to her own fight.

Taylor advanced on Hookwolf, maintaining a steady stream of laser fire as she went to try and keep the Nazi pinned. If she could get into grappling range without him getting into a charge, she might just be able to wrestle him down.

Taylor heard gunfire off to the side and Glory Girl zipped away, leaving her to it. Just her and Codsworth now. She was beginning to seriously regret agreeing to non-lethal methods as she watched their shots spark off Hookwolf instead of punching right through him.

She was just a couple of metres away when he got his feet back under him and charged again. Taylor planted her feet and had just a moment to regret her approach before he was on her.

It was like being hit by a train. Unnatural even for his bulk. The force of the impact knocked her rifle out of her grip and sent it spinning away. That was the least of her problems as she staggered and fell on to her back with the beast on top of her clawing away all over her armour.

The shriek of metal on metal was enough to set her teeth on edge. The red lights flashing at the edge of her vision didn’t much help either. She pulled and pulled and wrenched an arm free to throw a punch at what looked vaguely like a head. Not the best she could do, no great leverage, but the servos kicked in and it landed with a satisfying weight.

That knocked Hookwolf aside. Not much but enough for Taylor to buck him off to stop that infernal clawing. He tumbled away while she rolled on to her side and started pushing herself back to feet.

In the background she heard yammering over the radio. Gallant was hurt bad, the stimpak just slowing the bleeding, and Glory Girl was evacuating him to the rally point. Damn it. That was a lot of firepower gone and a kid in danger.

Taylor didn’t make it up before he slammed into her again and knocked her back to the ground. However, this time she was ready for it, and turned the energy of the impact into a throw that sent him hurtling.

This time she made it back to her feet. Hookwolf was already on his. Four legs —well, what passed for legs — dug into the road, ready to go again.

Taylor was almost beginning to miss the days of deathclaws and super mutants. At least she knew which parts of them to hit to hurt and guns actually worked. Her armour was not built for this sort of fist fighting.

He came at her, bounding in with great leaps that ate up the distance in seconds. Taylor met him with an uppercut that slammed his head back and up. In a moment it shifted back into the mass of hooked metal and another head came hurtling out his chest to clamp its jaws around her face.

An edge of panic came in that Taylor couldn’t quite suppress. Gnarls of metal scraped against the reinforced glass of her eyes and she could see little scrapings of that glass peeling away. That was all she could see. She threw left and right hooks quickly, frantically, but without sight she could hardly tell what she was hitting.

Something hit them both and knocked Hookwolf away. Taylor staggered back a step before she caught herself and then she had to take a moment to take it in. Codsworth had slammed himself into Hookwolf and was fighting him with his manipulator arms.

It was a brave, but short effort. By the time Taylor had grabbed Codsworth’s discarded weapon her friend was in pieces and only a few sparks of electricity arcing away from broken circuit boards gave him any sign of life at all.

Fuck that and fuck Hookwolf. Taylor flipped the switch on the rifle to lethal. Then she flipped another switch to fully discharge the power cell with the next shot.

He came bounding at her again. Taylor pulled the trigger.

The flash of the discharge was blinding even through a protective helmet. The whine of the capacitors overloading and frying themselves was similar.

When that passed and Taylor could see again through the spots Hookwolf was a much lesser sight. Listing to one side, obviously smaller, with lumps of glowing metal scattered around him and into the distance, he was a hell of a lot less imposing than he had been.

Taylor tossed the now useless rifle and drew the deliverer. Aimed it at him. “Surrender,” she said. “I won’t ask a second time.”

His response was a groan of shifting metal as he pulled away from her, tilting to one side. Trying to hide the side she’d hit? Looked like it.

That was when some of the PRT officers decided to pull their finger out and use those containment foam grenade launchers they liked to carry around. A pair of grenades went flying past to unleash their sticky payload on Hookwolf. The foam started to spray and expand over him in a matter of seconds and he wasn’t moving enough to get away from it. The mass twitched and kept twitching but it seemed to be holding.

Taylor turned back and gave them a nod of thanks. Then she looked to the rest of the fight.

Brandish was facing down Stormtiger and Victor with a sword and shield made from yellow energy. There were red patches staining that formerly pristine white bodysuit that didn’t look like they’d come from the villains. But she wasn’t the only one with some damage to show for her troubles.

Stormtiger’s ridiculous video game character costume did absolutely nothing to conceal anything. Not the burns she’d left across his upper body or that he wasn’t using his left arm at all. He looked like she’d worked him over pretty good.

The other Nazi, though, looked better off and was pressing the attack, forcing Brandish back with baton strikes that she was catching on her shield but still jarred her back with each impact. She looked clumsy as she moved. Not like someone who could take on two skilled enemies at once and come out ahead. He had to be stealing her skill.

Well, Taylor had a solution for that. She slowed time, lined up her shot, and—

Got smacked in the face by a skinhead who hit way too hard for someone who wasn’t wearing a mask. The blow was hard enough to twist her head to the side despite the power armour and another light blinked red in the corner of her eye as she turned back to face him.

His second punch to her chest was a lot less impressive. The only result was a clang of metal on metal as the knuckle duster hit. And he backed off, shaking his wrist in obvious pain. Strange power to give out so quickly—ah, Othala. Of course she would send the expendable minions out with some crappy ability she’d given them for a distraction.

One taser glove application later that particular issue was solved. He went down in a twitching heap of limbs and didn’t look like he’d be getting back up.

The mass of containment foam that had once been Hookwolf was still twitching. God, she hoped he wasn’t going to get loose, but there wasn’t anything she could do. The officers kept pumping more foam and she just had to hope it would be enough.

Taylor turned back to Brandish just in time to see Victor knock her to the ground with a baton strike to the head. This time she wasn’t interrupted and put a bullet through his knee. The high-pitched yelp he made as he went down did not fit the macho aryan superman image he was clearly trying to project.

Bullets pinged off her armour as she strode toward, Stormtiger who was backing away with some alacrity. He threw his hand out toward her and she saw the air distort along a path coming towards her, but there wasn’t enough force to do much but rock her back a little. She barely broke stride. Too much mass to her armour even if it was starting to feel a little creaky.

He threw a couple more of those at her, but she kept going through them. His mask covered most of his face but his body language told her all she needed to know. Fear.

She reached out to grab him. Metal shrieked. She turned just in time for Hookwolf to bowl her over again.

Taylor thudded against the road. The impact knocked the wind out of her even through the armour and she was back where she’d been just a couple of minutes earlier: on the ground with Hookwolf tearing at her armour. Except this time she had a gun.

Sparks flew as she emptied the magazine into what she guessed was roughly the guy of the blender monster thing Hookwolf turned into. It was where she would keep it anyway, roughly at the centre where there’d be the most metal to cover it. Total guesswork,but that little flunch told her she probably wasn’t a million miles away.

That flinch also gave her enough space to get her arms underneath him so she could heave him off and start scrambling back to her feet. She got most of the way when he hit her again, but she was ready for it and caught him around the midsection. With a twist of her hips she rotated and threw the bastard along the same way his momentum had been carrying him.

Hookwolf bounced a couple of times before he shifted. Now his body was facing the other way; he skidded to a halt with his hooked feet dug deep into the newly furrowed road. Enough time for her to reload the deliverer, for all the good it would do her.

It was becoming uncomfortably clear that she didn’t actually have a way to stop this guy. If he could chew his way out of containment foam, the only way to stop him was probably to kill him, and she just wasn’t loaded with that level of firepower. Her gauss rifle was still in pieces in the lab and that was the only thing she had that might work.

Of all the times she’d listened to people telling her to tone it down and use less destructive methods she just had to pick this one. A time where she really genuinely needed that level of stopping power.

“Glory Girl,” she said into her mic. “Wherever you are. I could really use an assist here. Hookwolf is kicking my ass and your mom is hurt.”

And she was. Brandish wasn’t moving much, but there wasn’t a whole lot Taylor could do about it. She wasn’t in any further danger at least; the PRT had moved in, foamed Victor, and formed a guard to cover the area. They should be okay so long as she didn’t let Hookwolf through to mince them all.

He came at her again and she opened fire, emptying the magazine into his stupid metal face for all the good it did her. Made some pretty sparks at least. She tossed the pistol aside and brought her fists up.

She threw a punch at the oncoming Hookwolf quick as she could manage, but he flowed underneath it, shifting his body to have a lower centre of gravity in a wave of steel. There was nothing Taylor could do to keep him slashing a great tear through the left side of her abdomen.

But that brought him in close enough for her to grab on to. She wrapped her arms around him and heaved. He thrashed the whole while, scratching at her arms, as she lifted him over her head and up to the full extension of her arms.

And then she slammed him back down as hard as she damned well could. Bits of metal flew everywhere.

It took him a few moments to start moving again and when he did Taylor kicked him with as much force as she could muster. That sent him skittering away over the cratered road surface until he crashed into one of the expensive looking cars that littered the place. 

Well, at least it didn’t have a broken down old fusion battery to pop off like the cars in the wasteland.

Despite all that it didn’t really slow him down all that much and he came bounding back at her with little obvious impairment. Where the hell did all of that metal come from? Killing him was like trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket.

But he didn’t get all the far before a wave of some indefinable emotion crashed over Taylor like a bucket of ice water. It hit him too, judging by the way he stuttered in his movement. Glory Girl slamming into him at a hundred miles an hour a moment later turned that stutter into a rather spectacular backwards flight.

Glory Girl fell back, which was an odd thing to think about someone taking to the air, to hover next to another blonde woman in a white bodysuit who looked very, very unhappy. Not as unhappy as Taylor expected Hookwolf felt when all those lasers started hitting him.

Watching Hookwolf retreat with his metaphorical tail between his legs was a truly beautiful sight as far as Taylor was concerned. She almost wished her armour had a record function so she could replay it later to savour the moment appropriately.

The crack of gunfire forced the two New Wave heroines to take evasive action and to raise a force field respectively. Gunfire plinked harmlessly off the shield with barely a ripple to be seen on its iridescent surface. However, it did its job; it cut Lady Photon’s offence off for long enough that Hookwolf got behind cover.

Taylor took the opportunity to limp over to where her rifle had fallen and then to where the PRT officers had formed their protective circle. Brandish was sitting behind their line though she was listing to the side and holding herself up.

“You okay?” Taylor asked.

“I’ve had better days,” she replied with a slight slur. “I understand I have you to thank for Victor not finishing the job.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t realise you were in trouble earlier.”

“You were otherwise occupied keeping Hookwolf off us.”

Taylor nodded an agreement and looked back to the fight. The Nazis were retreating and they were letting them. It burned that there wasn’t anything she could do about it, but stopping Hookwolf would take more firepower than they had available. At least the Nazis didn’t look any happier about it. Stormtiger was virtually dragging Othala away. Actually, there was no virtually about it, he was dragging her and she was resisting.

They hadn’t accomplished all of their mission, but they’d got Victor and some skinheads. It would have to do until next time when she was better prepared for the problems she’d face.

Chapter 17: Interlude 3

Interlude 3

 

A new tinker wasn’t the highest priority prize, but Coil had always prized himself for taking the opportunities that came his way. Throwing a timeline or two at trying to recruit someone who had a useful power was a more than acceptable investment. In the end he would lose nothing but time if things didn’t go his way.

That was why he’d set one of his body doubles up to pull alongside Taylor Hebert as she jogged around the docks. She was from such a poor background, according to the files his friend in the PRT had copied from him, that she would perhaps be impressed by the obvious wealth displayed by driving around in an expensive, imported car. It had to be better than living in some post-apocalyptic wasteland where even something as simple as running water was no doubt scarce.

“Good morning, Miss Hebert,” said his body double. “I have a proposal for you.”

She didn’t even break stride. “Not interested.”

“It’s a mutually beneficial offer, I assure you.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree. I’m not looking for some Pretty Woman deal.”

“That is most certainly not what I’m offering. I have great use for someone with your—“

“Look, I know who you are, Coil,” she said. “I’m not a complete idiot. Take the hint. I’m not interested in working for one of the local gang bosses and if you keep pushing I’m going to start thinking threat.”

“Keep pushing,” he told his body double. “She’s bluffing.”

She wasn’t. A minute later she drew a pistol and shot his body double dead. That was just excessive, and he couldn’t help but feel a little irritated at how she’d not even listened to his offer. It was Tattletale all over again.

He dropped the timeline. Something to think about there. She leapt to violence quickly even by parahuman standards and didn’t appear to have many inhibitions when it came to killing. Useful traits for an employee but not terribly helpful when it came to recruiting if the target was opposed. He would need leverage. Something she wanted that he could dangle in front of her, perhaps. Or something he could take away that she needed.

Coil split off another timeline to see to his usual paperwork tasks, then picked up the phone. Two rings later it picked up, as usual. Quick enough to be acceptable; slow enough that she could feel like she was defying him in some tiny way. “Hello, Tattletale,” he said. “I have a task for you.”

“We’re not really ready for another job—“

“This is for you alone,” he cut in. “I need some analysis done. The files will be accessible at the usual location.”

It took a day before his Tattletale came back with the information he’d asked for.

“This one’s bad news, boss,” she said. “She wasn’t bullshitting the PRT. She actually, literally nuked the last gang she had a problem with. I know you have your ways but this one seems a little too hot even for you.”

“I am aware of the danger. Please continue.”

The response started as a sigh. “Well, it’s your funeral,” said Tattletale a moment later. “Make sure to cut me in on the will, yeah? The usual levers won’t do you any good. She doesn’t care about money, her dad doesn’t care about money, and her son barely even understands what money means. You might be able to win them over with support for the union or getting the ferry running again, but not as Coil. She will laugh in your face if you try and recruit her as a super villain.”

Nothing he wasn’t already aware of. Daniel Hebert was not a difficult man to get a read on. He’d come up a time or two when Coil was working on the mayor. Too straight for his own good. He’d be so much more effective if he were willing to bend the rules a little and use those ties he had with rough, burly men in less mundane ways than finding petty labouring jobs.

“She doesn’t have many social ties. Even less now that she’s suddenly twice the age she was a month ago. Nothing much to exploit there. No debts, no addictions, no sexual peccadilloes that aren’t shared by half the women in America. The only way in is through her family and that’s high risk.”

“Tell me about her family.”

“Her mother ran with Lustrum until things got really nasty, her dad’s attached at the hip to a union that hasn’t had a reason to exist for at least a decade, and her son’s a literal nobody who doesn’t even have a birth certificate. They’re not all that interesting, but you do not want to see what she’s willing to do to keep them safe.”

Coil knew his Tattletale well enough to know there was something else she was holding back. He gave her a moment to see if she would admit it or if he’d have to waste a timeline on extracting the information. Again.

“There’s something off about her kid and that whole story,” said Tattletale finally. “Her story doesn’t add up. She broke into the Institute to get him back loaded with enough firepower to take on an Endbringer and she ended up working for them to get into their good graces. Yeah, she had her Railroad pals and what they were up to for a justification but that’s not it. She would have burned them to get her son back and she was plenty ready to kill her way through that place. Something happened in there that she’s not fessing up to and it’s all about him.”

“Is that all?”

“I would need to see them in person to give you much more than that. There are some more details but nothing all that useful. I’ll email you.”

“Thank you, Tattletale. I’ll have your bonus left in the usual place.”

He could almost hear her grinding her teeth before he hung up. Oh, she did not like being at his beck and call, and she did not like how he treated it as a normal employment relationship. It almost made up for her endless back talk.

And she had come through for him again. A very worthwhile investment. Not that it was a great revelation that the key to a mother was through her children, but that there was a secret he could use. That was the sort of thread he could pull on. Perhaps it would fail the first time, but the joy of being him was that he could always try again.

So he prepared a new approach. Not a subtle one, not this time. He wanted to see how she would react under duress and what little details came loose. It wasn’t a kind plan, but then nobody would even know what had happened except him, so it hardly mattered.

Taking them wasn’t easy. It was always a delicate thing to kidnap a parahuman. So many tricks and caveats and potential dangers. But he had the resources and she had no idea he was coming for her. 

The first attempt failed and led to an inordinately violent response when she saw his men coming. He killed that timeline before she could finish beating his name out of the mercenary she hadn’t fatally wounded. It was something, in retrospect, that Coil knew he should have expected. Hebert wasn’t a fresh off the trigger rookie. She had extensive combat experience and wasn’t far enough removed from it let her vigilance slip.

He modified the plan. More distractions. Less of a direct assault. Smoke and flash bangs deployed from cover to obscure the approach. Tranquillisers to make sure she didn’t return fire. Better helmets that could withstand a headshot from the high calibre handgun that she seemed to carry with her wherever she went.

It took a few more attempts and a little more fine tuning, but eventually he had Taylor and her son zip-tied to steel chairs in a safely out of the way warehouse with a number of his mercenaries, his Tattletale, and himself. It was unusual but this time he wanted to be there in person and to see her reaction for himself. He had no intention of keeping the timeline so there was little risk to it in any event.

“Remove the hoods and apply the counter agent,” he ordered. “Tattletale please keep me apprised of any relevant information.”

“Whatever you say, boss. Let’s wake up the murdering psycho you just kidnapped and see what she does.”

His Tattletale was being surprisingly squeamish for someone who was normally so reckless. An interesting twist and perhaps a bad sign, but he was invested enough to see this through regardless.

Coil spent the moments he waited for Hebert to return to consciousness examining the pistol his men had taken from her. He’d seen more extravagant tinker technology, but he could appreciate a good, solid handgun when he saw one and this was quite the example. Remarkably compact for the punch it possessed and virtually silent in operation. He rather wanted one, but that was a subject for another time.

“Good afternoon, Ms Hebert,” he said as she blinked her way into awareness. “We have much to discuss.”

“So much for the fucking PRT and not leaking my identity. I should have seen this coming.”

She was testing her bonds, looking for a way out, no doubt. He had three armed men around her and she had been disarmed. She wasn’t going anywhere even without the zip ties.

“Indeed you should,” he replied. “Our authorities are not so clean as they pretend. But that isn’t why I’ve arranged for this meeting. I have an opportunity for you.”

“Even the mob had better interview techniques than this. Shaun, you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said. He did not sound it, but it was admirable of him to try and put a brave face on this at his age.

Tattletale was looking between them with a look of intense concentration, but she wasn’t saying anything. Not yet.

“If you let us go now before this escalates, I’ll be willing to call it quits,” said Taylor. “I won’t come after you.”

She was remarkably calm for someone who had a gun to her head, but then it wasn’t her first time.

He pulled up a chair and took a seat opposite her. Between her and her son. “I have great plans for Brockton Bay” he said. “You and your family have spent your whole lives here and put so much into it without reward, but now, with my resources, that can change. We can save this city.”

“And that’s why you have your own personal army fighting the other gangs across Downtown,” she said. “And why you peddle poison to anyone stupid enough to want it. I’m not even going to start on you having a teenage girl in a catsuit following you around. Is she even eighteen?”

“There will always be someone to sell drugs. If it’s me, I can make sure they’re unadulterated and safe, relatively speaking, and funnel the money into constructive uses. As for Tattletale, she has many useful skills, as you will discover for yourself if you accept my offer.”

“Oh, I bet she does.”

“He’s not your son, is he?” blurted out Tattletale.

“Yes, I am!”

“No, even he has doubts,” she said, unheeding of the murderous turn Hebert’s face was taking. “He won’t ever admit but he does. But you know for sure. He’s a copy? A clone? Your son is dead and you killed him.”

There were times when Tattletale’s habit of throwing people’s secrets out to take control of as situation was less charming than others. Watching Hebert slip her ties and set about his men was one of them.

The first was dead before he could react. She stood away from her chair as if she hadn’t been tied to it, pulled the knife from his belt, and slid it into his neck before he could do more than take half a step back away from the new threat.

The second managed to get his rifle up before it was knocked aside and a knife was buried in his head. Now Hebert had a gun.

The third got a shot off, a three shot burst to centre mass. Hebert staggered but didn’t fall. Her return fire had much greater effect as it ripped through his man’s head and dropped him.

Coil hadn’t wasted those moments. He wrapped an arm around the boy’s throat and with the other he held Hebert’s handgun to the child’s temple.

“Now let’s not do anything hasty,” he said. “We can still come to an arrangement.”

“Your little helper doesn’t seem to agree,” said Hebert. She rolled her neck and grimaced. “The girl’s been gone since I killed the first of your punks. Maybe you should have given her more clothes.”

“You’re remarkably calm for a woman whose son is being held at gunpoint.”

She whipped her rifle up. He didn’t even have time to pull the trigger before the timeline ended.

Being shot dead was never a pleasant experience and he most certainly did not appreciate her insinuations about his personal conduct. But he has at least got something useful out of it.

Leverage. A son that isn’t a son. A secret she was willing to kill to keep. He had suspicions, but they would need confirmation.

Coil split a new timeline. This time he ordered hard takedowns. He only needed the boy. The rest of the family could go hang and watching Hebert get bisected by machine gun fire through a body camera proved cathartic enough to justify the order in itself.

A few hours of work later and he had what he needed. The boy wasn’t even human, never mind Hebert’s son. The machinery they’d extracted from his brain stood as testimony to that. He was one of those synths that Hebert had talked about in her statement to Emily. His Tattletale, despite her abrasive attitude, had come through again. A very worthwhile investment.

Coil terminated that timeline and considered the situation. Recruitment wasn’t viable he decided. She wasn’t interested in a business relationship and the hard sell was more risk than it was worth. Even if she didn’t eventually work out a way to escape his grasp by the method of mass murder, and she’d proven more than willing to go there, who would trust the work of an unwilling tinker?

It was something of a staple for gangs to try and press gang any unaffiliated tinker they could find, but the risks held little appeal to Coil. He had the most useful power of them all, money, and it allowed him to buy whatever equipment he needed without worrying about it being deliberately sabotaged to blow up in his face.

No, she wasn’t worth this level of effort and certainly not for a reward he wouldn’t be able to trust.

But he had information on the city’s latest player that no-one else had, and that was a power in itself. You never knew when something like that might come in useful, even with someone who was currently a nobody.

He also had Tattletale’s work, and that allowed him an opportunity for a parting fuck you to a woman who had proven to be beyond irritating. 

It wasn’t difficult to concoct a suitable story to leak through one of his Empire moles. A downtrodden white girl, viciously bullied by a black girl and failed by the authorities that were supposed to protect her, triggered as a tinker. The fact that her father held a position of authority and respect, albeit not the most valuable one, would just make the pot more tempting. All of the paperwork would back it up and none of the PRT data that threw a wrench in the works would be accessible to them.

Perhaps they would kill each other. Perhaps not. Either way it would be a black eye for the PRT and for the Empire. It was just a shame that Hebert would never know he’d done it and why. Chastising someone was much less satisfying when they weren’t even aware of it.

Chapter 18: Interlude 4

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■

♦ Topic: What the hell is going on Downtown
In: Boards ► Places ► Brockton Bay
Number One (Original Poster)
Posted On Jan 28th 2011:
There are cops and capes everywhere and they're not letting me out of McDonalds. My boss is gonna crawl so far up my asshole if I don't get out of here soon.

Edit: Holy Shit that's gunfire. Nevermind I'll stay here. Fuck my boss.

(Showing page 1 of 1)

► Marty
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
I'm in the Starbucks down the street near the bus stop and they've got us locked up with the shutters. Some of those capes definitely didn't look local. Something big's going on.

► Aladdin's shitty hat
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Dude, read the room. When capes flood the streets it's time to get under the nearest rock. This sort of shit is what they do when it's Lung time.

► Mac's Dual Rocket Propelled Grenades
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Dragon just rattled my windows. So cool.

End of Page. 1

■

♦ Topic: Anti-Gang Operation Ongoing
In: Boards ► Places ► Brockton Bay ► Announcements
Officer Neil (Original Poster) (Verified PRT Agent) (PRT ENE)
Posted On Jan 28th 2011:
PRT ENE is conducting an anti-gang operation centered in the Downtown area. Conflict with criminal parahumans is deemed likely.

All citizens should remain indoors until matters have been resolved. A list of contact numbers divided by ZIP code are attached in case of emergency. Misuse will result in a felony charge.

(Showing page 2 of 2)

► Alathea (Moderator)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Thread locked. Keep discussion to the mega-thread, people.

► Officer Neil (Original Poster) (Verified PRT Agent) (PRT ENE)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
The PRT is proud to announce the arrests of the following parahuman criminals:

- Alabaster
- Cricket
- Rune
- Victor

Along with a series of other non-parahuman arrests that will be announced in due time.

Unfortunately Crusader and Krieg chose to fight to the death. Counseling will be made available to all who were involved in and witnessed those confrontations.

End of Page. 1 , 2

■

♦ Topic: Empire Under Siege (Official Megathread)
In: Boards ► Places ► Brockton Bay
Bagrat (Original Poster) (The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)
Posted On Jan 28th 2011:
It seems that the PRT has finally lost patience with Nazi City and is starting a major crackdown. See [Link] for the announcement. This is a big one, guys. I'm hearing talk of cape and PRT teams being drawn in from all over the Eastern seaboard and even Dragon making a pass through. They don't call in this sort of firepower unless they're looking to make a statement.

So timeline:

- January 17th: Kaiser shows up on the wrong person's lawn and doesn't make it out alive. Fenja and Menja go with him.
- January 18th: Announcement that the Protectorate ENE has recruited a new parahuman who was attacked in their home by the Empire 88 as part of a forced recruitment effort.
- January 18th - 27th: Intermittent fighting all over the parts of the city the Empire 88 call home. Coil in particular pushing them hard.
- January 28th (today): PRT decides to put the whole lot of them in check.

I'm jonesing here, people. This is too juicy to go unreported. What's going on?

Edit: Confirmed fighting Downtown centered around the Towers and Medhall building. Be careful!

Edit 2: Confirmed fighting in Oak Hills.

Edit 3: Wow

(Showing page 73 of 77)

► Whyyy
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
So I'm pretty sure I just watched a murder. Some dude in shitty cosplay armour with a spear was stood on the roof of the house across the street making ghosts or something and then Shadow Stalker popped up and popped him. Just blam. Straight through the heart or some shit. Dropped just like that. Fuck me. Isn't she like a kid or something?

► Jordy (Banned)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
That's Crusader. Fuck him. He's done more hate crimes than half the Klan combined. He should have been popped years ago.

► Whyyy
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Gotta be a better way than sending the kids out to kill him.

► Jordy (Banned)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
In this town? They've been getting away with this since before I was born. About time someone did something about them.

► Eric
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
I don't think sending Wards out to assassinate people is ever the right thing to do. Maybe having the new girl start a war with the Empire wasn't a good idea after all if this is where it goes.

► Jordy (Banned)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Fuck off. Killing Kaiser is the best thin any para has done in this city since I was on the tit.

► Anthem
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
You fuck off. Ever since that psycho killed half the E88 capes all hell has broken loose. I've lost friends because of this shit.

► Jordy (Banned)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
My friends have been dying to those racist assholes since they were old enough to leave the fucking house on their own, so you can take the pole and ram it up your asshole before I do it for you.

[Edit: User banned (one month) - repeated violent rhetoric, ignorance of previous warnings and temp ban.]

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♦ Topic: Empire Under Siege (Official Megathread)
In: Boards ► Places ► Brockton Bay
Brocktonite03 (Original Poster) (Veteran Member)
Posted On Jan 28th 2011:
So shit's going down. I think we're all real clear on that now. It sounds like the Empire is getting the shit kicked out it.

A buddy of mine caught these pictures:

[IMAGE]
[IMAGE]
[IMAGE]

New girl (she's a girl right?) looks like a tank on legs and if he's to be believed she got into a fist fight with Hookwolf and walked away from it. She's got the scars on that hide to make me think he's not bullshitting.

God damn. Kaiser, Fenja, and Menja for her first fight. Hookwolf and Victor for her second. Where are the brakes on this ride?

(Showing page 75 of 77)

► Aladdin's shitty hat
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Capes are fighting outside my home. This is definitely the time to hang around and take pictures.

Does anyone in this city have a survival instinct?

► ArchyTheGreat
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Big armour and big guns. I think I'm in love.

► FlippinMad
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
I don't get it. She took out Kaiser, Fenja, and Menja. Hookwolf isn't that strong.

► Bagrat (The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Cape fights aren't that straight forward. Different powers work in different circumstances against different capes and sometimes you're just out of luck. Even tinkers don't have counters for everything.

► SmaugTheTerrible
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Dragon's cooler.

► Ooyeah
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Dragon's always cooler. Not a fair comparison unless she's Alexandria.

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♦ Topic: Empire Under Siege (Official Megathread)
In: Boards ► Places ► Brockton Bay
GoRedSox (Original Poster)
Posted On Jan 28th 2011:
[LINK]

Godmaster handing out naps to Nazis.

(Showing page 76 of 77)

► Brocktonite03 (Veteran Member)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Fanboy alert.

That is pretty cool though.

► MisterMan
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
That's new tech, right? Just look at him dipping in and out of sight. That's some magic there.

► Brocktonite03 (Veteran Member)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
It's Armsmaster. He never stops finding new ways to wreck villains shit. Dude's a one-man army.

► Dizzy
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Armsy's beatable. Just takes some work. That is pretty cool though. It gives me so many ideas.

► Freddybhoy
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
You know this isn’t the end of them right? The nazis have all sorts of contacts to pull in.

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♦ Topic: Wanderer Announcement Megathread
In: Boards ► Places ► Brockton Bay
Bagrat (Original Poster) (The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)
Posted On Jan 28th 2011:
[LINK]

Our new Brockton Bay hero is here and it's a bigger deal than I expected. Wanderer isn't just a new hero. She's a refugee from another world. A dead world that destroyed itself in a nuclear holocaust.

Surviving that is pretty badass. Taking a big chunk of the Empire 88 out as a starter? It's almost enough to make me wish I were more ambitious and had powers.

Powers? Well, she's a tinker. A fully grown tinker with another world's tech to draw on. Weapons, armour, whatever you want. Just look at the official images the PRT has posted. This is not someone to mess with.

(Showing page 87 of 129)

► BobbyBuilder
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
How did she end up here? They'll machine gun you for getting in the same zip code as a portal.

► Wanderer (Verified Cape) (Protectorate ENE)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
I'm only allowed to disclose so much for national security reasons. What I can tell you is that my arrival was a one time event and that there will be no further traffic between Earth Bet and Earth Ayin. I wish I could bring my friends across, but the door is closed and cannot be opened again.

On a personal note there is nothing on Earth Ayin worth looking for. All usable natural resources were mined out generations ago, there are no functional governments, and God help anyone who thinks they can handle the wildlife. You might as well grab your rifle and go marching into Ellisburg. Between the wildlife, the ghouls, the super mutants, and the raiders your chances would be very low. I've seen a lot of well-trained soldiers die badly.

► Lassie
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
What the fuck is a super mutant?

► Wanderer (Verified Cape) (Protectorate ENE)
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
A man turned into a monster. The technology to make it happen is irreplicable. Don't worry about it. Earth Bet has different problems.

► Aladdin's shitty hat
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Well that's not ominous at all.

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♦ Topic: Wanderer Announcement Megathread
In: Boards ► Places ► Brockton Bay
Mugman (Original Poster)
Posted On Jan 28th 2011:
I don't care what anyone says. She ripped open a gang war like it was nothing and how many people did that kill? Every time I open a newspaper these days it feels like the obituaries are a fucking book. That's not heroic.

(Showing page 92 of 129)

► Ali-Bombaye
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Fuck Kaiser.

► LordyLad
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Kinda hard to blame her for the Nazis showing up on her lawn looking for trouble.

► Eric
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Killing a dozen men doesn't seem very heroic regardless of circumstances. I hope she'll do better now that she's in the Protectorate.

► Restif
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Killing Nazis is good praxis. More power to her.

► Bürgerbräukeller
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Criminals should be handled by the courts, not random people with powers. Where does it end when they choose who lives and dies?

► Restif
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Concern troll alert.

► Answer Key
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
I feel dirty for saying it, considering who I'm agreeing with, but there had to be a better way. Killing everyone isn't a hero's solution and the consequences have been awful. So many dead or hurt and for what? We might be free of a gang, eventually, maybe, but there are always more gangs and who cares what was accomplished when their family was collateral damage?

► LordyLad
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
The Empire 88 has been killing people since before I was born. They were never going to go away peacefully.

► Anthem
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Gangs are always doing gang shit. A lot of people would still be here if it wasn't for all this.

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♦ Topic: Wanderer Announcement Megathread
In: Boards ► Places ► Brockton Bay
GeorgyBoy (Original Poster)
Posted On Jan 28th 2011:
She seems far too comfortable with AIs.What happens when one of her bots goes out of bounds?

(Showing page 125 of 129)

► Aladdin's shitty hat
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
I'm pretty sure a robot butler can't go Skynet on us, dude. Cool your jets.

I kinda want one. Think we'll be able to order one from Sears any time soon?

► Codsworth
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Miss Wanderer is looking into the idea of mass production. I'm sure she'll puzzle out an answer. She always does.

► Aladdin's shitty hat
Replied On Jan 28th 2011:
Uh. Cool?

End of Page. 1 , 2 , 3 ... 123 , 124 , 125, 126 , 127 , 128 , 129

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Chapter 19: 4.1

4.1

There was no place quite like home. Which was why it was a shame that their home was still a bullet-hole riddled wreck with a valkyrie-shaped hole in one of the walls and a power armour-shaped hole in another and another. Taylor imagined that it would be quite a draughty place to rest one’s head for the night until all of that was fixed, and that wasn’t going to happen overnight.

Her dad knew some good, reliable tradesmen who’d make sure that the job was done without undue advantage being taken, but, even so, it wasn’t a small or quick job to get a mess like that fixed up. And that was before they started getting into building code changes since the last time the place had been renovated some time around the stone age and how the wiring would need to be completely gutted for anyone to sign the fixes off.

It didn’t help that they hadn’t even been able to start on getting it fixed until the PRT had finally pulled its finger out and ended the investigation. That had to be a power play of some sort, because ‘there was an actual, literal neo-Nazi rally on my front lawn’ made for a pretty convincing self-defence case in Taylor’s opinion. 

But whatever. Petty bureaucracy wasn’t worth getting worked up over. Neither was grand bureaucracy really.

The apartment they’d rented for the meantime was pretty nice as places went. It had all the conveniences you could expect from a reasonably priced twenty-first century rental and enough space that Shaun had his own room along with a sizable living area and a television that would have been just fantastic if she could think of anything she wanted to watch on it.

The only downside Taylor could come up with was that the kitchen was missing a lot of the tools she’d been used to on the other Earth before the bombs, but that was true of every kitchen on Earth Bet. They just hadn’t hit that level of automation yet.

If Taylor were being honest, she’d admit that the apartment was actually nicer than their house. Between her dad’s wage, her new Protectorate wage, and the insurance payout — and that had been a surprise to her; she’d been sure any self-respecting insurance company would weasel straight out of anything like a supervillain attack — they’d been able to afford something pretty decent.

But she wasn’t, and she missed home and the memories of her mother that came with it. Taylor hadn’t had either of those for a long time and she’d been used to that, but getting them back and then losing them again stung a little even if it was purely temporary.

She threw on a shirt and some slacks and made her way through the open plan living area to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes under a hot shower woke her right up. Now that was a luxury she’d missed more than most. Hot water on demand. There’d come a day when she’d get used, accustomed, to having it again like a normal person from a normal world, but it wasn’t that day yet.

Shaun and her dad were part way through their cereal when Taylor made her way out, feeling suitably refreshed. She poured a bowl out for herself and started working through it. It wasn’t to her normal taste, far too much sugar, but then she was from the world of Sugar Bombs — now with 125% sugar content, as the stupid jingle went — and they weren’t half as bad as those things has been. 

Not that she’d ever eaten Sugar Bombs out of actual choice but there’d been times when she’d not had many other options, and they were still better than radroach steaks or, worse, army rations.

“So what’re your plans for today?” asked her dad. “Any more gangs to break?”

“Today should be a quiet one,” replied Taylor around a mouthful of cereal. She swallowed it down before continuing. Not setting a great example really. “Mostly anyway. I’m going on my first patrol this afternoon but it’s a PR thing. Just walking the Boardwalk and playing nice for the tourists.”

“Sounds like fun.”

He sounded about as enthusiastic about the idea as she felt, though Taylor wasn’t so sure it was for the same reasons. She just couldn’t work up any interest in something that seemed like it was basically pointless. Winning brownie points by smiling for the cameras. In her experience the best way to win people over was to do things that made life better. The rest came along naturally after you did that.

“I’ll take Codsworth,” she said. “Apparently people like the idea of the loyal robot butler. He can do the talking and I’ll just stand around looking scary in my armour.”

“Can I come?” asked Shaun.

“Not this time, son. Secret identity stuff. We have to keep Wanderer from being associated with us or more stuff like Kaiser showing up will happen sooner or later.”

“But—“

“You won’t be able to spend all your days following me around for long anyway. We’re going to have to get you enrolled in school soon or social workers will start showing up looking for trouble.”

Taylor didn’t feel all that great about the idea — she’d never had much luck with school on either Earth — but it was going to have to be done. There was no way to avoid it unless she was going to homeschool him and that wasn’t workable or a good idea for so many reasons.

“I don’t want to go to school. It’s boring. I’d rather be with you.”

“You can’t be with me all the time, Shaun,” said Taylor. She pointed her spoon at him for emphasis. “You need to spend time with kids your own age. Make friends. Learn how this world works. All that good stuff.”

If she said it enough times, maybe it would start sounding convincing.

“How would you know it’s boring anyway?” she asked a moment later. “You’ve never been to a school like they have here. Diamond City’s was just a room with a few tables and chairs. This will be totally different. Much bigger. More classes, better equipment, real teachers.”

“It’s still school. I’d rather be with you.”

The look on his face was mulish. He wasn’t in the mood to listen and Taylor found herself at a loss. She’d been through the routine of working people so they’d come around to her view plenty of times, but she’d never done it with a kid and she’d never done it with someone whose idea of a good time was hanging around with her all day instead of going about their business.

“Hey, Shaun,” said her dad. “You can come to work with me today. Check out some of the machines we have for lifting heavy loads. Some of them have been broken for a while. Maybe you could work it out and get them moving again.”

Shaun blinked then whipped around to face her dad. “What sort of machinery?”

“It’s a crane for loading containers on and off trucks. It broke a few weeks ago and now we can’t do half the jobs.  Can’t afford the repair either, but there’s plenty of old scrap to break down for parts.”

And that was Shaun gone, happily burbling away about how he’d never worked with that sort of thing before and ideas about how it might fit together.

A relief, but one she didn’t expect to last. Shaun headed back upstairs to bathe and prepare for the day. No doubt he’d be a while as he dawdled over the ideas running through his head and how they might play out. The fantasies of a child, except he had the ability to make them happen.

“He‘ll need someone to help him,” said Taylor. “He’s smart, but he’ll hurt himself trying to carry around the parts those things use if you let him.”

He was stronger than the average twelve year old, but not by that much, and like most kids he was very good at getting in over his head without realising it until it was far too late.

“I’ll have the boys keep an eye on him. Kurt’s good enough with kids.”

Taylor vaguely remembered him — a beefy man with a wife who also carried an impressive quantity of muscle on her frame. Her dad’s friends; dockworkers. She wasn’t sure she’d seen them since the funeral. Things before she got her powers were a lot vaguer than after, but she remembered them as being decent enough.

“Sounds good.”

She leaned back in her chair to think for a moment, breakfast forgotten. She’d missed this problem until it hit her right in the face. How the hell had she done that? She’d barely had Shaun out of sight for the last couple of months and she hadn’t noticed.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said finally. “Absolutely not a clue. This must be what it feels like to be one of those clowns the Gunners conscript for cannon fodder.”

Here are some fatigues, here’s a shitty home-made pistol, try not to die. Sometimes they didn’t even get the fatigues and just had to scrounge their own gear up. She’d almost felt bad about shooting some of them. It had been like pulling the wings off a fly at times.

“They don’t come with manuals, Taylor,” said her dad. He sounded amused. “You just have to figure it out as you go.”

“You’re telling me mom didn’t read the whole catalogue of parenting manuals when she was pregnant?”

“For all the good it did. It was all self-help bunk. I get more useful information from the local hobos.”

 Taylor cracked a smile. “Hobos know more than you’d expect,” she said. “No-one pays much attention to them, so they see all kinds of things they shouldn’t. I’ve picked up more than a few good leads from them.”

“I suppose they make for cheap dates. So to speak. Uh.”

“A bottle of cheap hooch gets you a long way,” she said, smothering a smile. “It’s a useful trick. Smart criminals know better than to not pay attention, but most criminals are morons.”

Silence fell. She went back to her breakfast, but it still gnawed at her.

“He’s just a little insecure,” said her dad. “Everything is new here and he’s cut off from what he knows. It’s going to take a while before he feels safe away from you.”

Who told you I was your mother?

Taylor felt a pit open in her stomach. She knew exactly where any insecurity came from. Those mad moments when he’d first showed up at the Institute and she’d had no idea who he was or where he’d come from and then that crushing wave of bitter hatred that had followed. She’d almost told him to take a hike and she knew she wasn’t that good at schooling her features for it not to show.

Whatever insecurity he felt from being in a new world away from everything he knew, she doubted it was anything next to that. His world exploding around him, surrounded by death, he’d fallen back on to a mother that didn’t know who he was.

She dropped the spoon. Appetite gone. “I am the worst mother.”

“Hey,” said her dad. “None of us are born knowing how to do this stuff. It comes with time. I can’t say I always knew what to do or did it right when I did either.”

He had no idea. She’d made sure of it. Where Shaun came from, how he came to be, was a secret she planned to carry to her grave. There was no other way it could work out. She’d seen how people took that sort of secret. It was ugly. Her dad, he was fine, more than fine, she couldn’t see him doing anything bad, but other people — it was better to keep it as quiet as possible.

She ran her hands through her hair. “I can show him how to shoot, how to run a patrol, how to work with machines,” she said. “I could even teach him how to glad-hand people into thinking he cares about their stupid, self-inflicted problems. That’s not being a mother.”

“I really can’t see you glad handing anyone. Not before and not now.”

“It’s easy,” said Taylor. “You just mirror back at them. They’re upset, you’re upset. It works a lot more often than it doesn’t. We’re all just overgrown monkeys under the hood.”

“But it’s not being a mother.”

Taylor sighed. “No.”

“This would be easier if your mother were here. She always knew what to say. I don’t. I don’t have the words.”

She almost laughed. Wasn’t that the story of her life? Everything had been fine before her mother died. She’d been fine. Her life had been fine. She’d had friends; she’d been happy and well-adjusted. Then her mom died playing with her phone while driving and things had gone downhill so fast that the Starship Enterprise wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Being punted over to a dying earth had been the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.

“All you can do is your best, Taylor,” said her dad. “Be there for him. He won’t always appreciate it or even notice but that’s your job as a parent. Just be there for him.”

There was a bitter worm in her heart screaming about the year where he hadn’t been there. He’d been too busy wallowing and she’d had to make do on her own while she’d been dying inside. Unworthy thoughts. She knew what it was like to lose a spouse now. Having that chunk of you ripped right out and having to find a reason to go on. 

Going on a killing spree chasing vengeance wasn’t exactly a healthy coping mechanism, but it was what she had gone with. As long as she’d kept herself pointed at Kellogg and the Institute she’d not had to think about what had happened. She had no idea what she might have done at the end if not for Shaun. 

It made neglecting your daughter look like chump change really.

“It doesn’t seem like enough.”

“It’s all there is.”

---

Taylor put home and its troubles out of her mind as best she could as she donned her superhero gear. The whole thing seemed a lot more ridiculous at age thirty than it had at age fifteen, the silly costumes and the masks and the pretence that it was anything but a fight to survive, but she couldn’t help but feel a little better as she layered it all on. The ballistic weave underwear, and the figure hugging suit made from similar material that went over it. The combat armour over the top of that, and the domino mask and the enhanced perceptions that came with it. It made her feel more like her.

It probably said something not so great about her that she felt more at home wrapped in armour than she did at her actual home wearing normal people clothes.

“What do you think, Codsworth?”

“Very fetching, mum,” he said. “Though the armour may be seen as a trifle intimidating by most.”

Taylor rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“I think you’re right. The young sir needs to find his feet in the new world. School could be a great help.”

“Well, let’s hope so. Kids can be cruel and he’s going to have trouble fitting in.”

“I’m sure it will all be fine.”

Taylor wished she could be so optimistic. She knew it would have to happen but that small kernel of dread just wouldn’t quite go away. Stupid to cling to things that happened to her so long ago, but then the places where they happened were still right there and unchanged with the same old faces running them. Letting go was perhaps not as good a plan as it would be normally.

Thoughts for another time. She had work to attend to.

The reception she received as she made her way through the building was several degrees warmer than it had been before the Empire raids. People acknowledged her. Nods were exchanged. That was nice. She wouldn’t want to admit it, but she’d got used to being respected from her time in the wasteland and losing that hadn’t been pleasant. It was nice to be wanted.

She found her way towards where she wanted to be and almost immediately regretted it when she saw who else was there. Shadow Stalker, another reminder of the dismal school days she’d been dwelling on, in full costume shouting at the much, much larger Armsmaster, who looked entirely impassive.

“Was I supposed to watch him kill everyone?” she asked. “Someone had to stop him.”

“You won’t be allowed back on duty until the inquiry has been completed and you’ve passed a psychological assessment,” said Armsmaster. “This is standard procedure.”

“There’s nothing wrong!”

“That’s what the assessments are for, Shadow Stalker. You’re wasting your breath.”

She made a sound of incoherent frustration that sounded nothing like anything Taylor had heard from her before. Then she turned on her heel and headed back down the corridor away from Armsmaster and towards Taylor.

“Fuck off, Hebert,” she growled, an impressive feat given her size, as she shouldered past.

“Nice to see you, too, Sophia.”

It was funny, but Taylor actually felt sympathy for the girl. She’d killed a very real, very immediate threat. A neo-nazi who’d made it his life’s work to kill people who looked like Sophia. Taylor couldn’t really find any fault with that and she would have been just as frustrated with people who did so.

“You know her?” asked Armsmaster.

“I went to school with her,” said Taylor. “It was a real experience.”

He frowned. “I can imagine,” he said. “She’s difficult and this isn’t helping. The ice she’s standing on is thinner than she seems to realise.”

Taylor cocked her head in confusion. “Why?” she asked. “Crusader was a murdering asshole. No-one’s going to miss him outside of his little club.”

“She’s already on probation from her vigilante days. Excessive violence. We don’t have any evidence to prove it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s killed before.”

Taylor felt retrospectively terrified for a heartbeat as she followed Armsmaster to their destination. Yes, that was someone you definitely wanted to share a classroom with, especially when you were their favourite chewtoy.

Nothing to be done about it now, but Taylor knew she would have gone absolutely nuclear over that little revelation if it had come when she was still close to the age it all actually happened.

“And she’s a Ward.”

“There are a lot like her out there. We try to make something of them before they go too far and they’re lost forever. But her time is running low and she won’t listen.”

He sounded so frustrated. It made Taylor think of her early days in high school trying to work out why all of it was happening and what she might have done to deserve it. Long nights of confusion and tears. She’d not thought much about any of that for a long time, but it was right there now and much harder to throw away because of that.

“All you can do is try to show her the way. It’s up to her whether she comes along for the ride.”

Armsmaster grunted, apparently no happier than Taylor felt about the whole situation. “Well, there’s no point worrying about it now,” he said. “We have work to do. Today’s your first patrol.”

“Time for me to face the masses and put a smile on to make them feel all better.”

“It’s important in its own way,” he said. “The less nervous people are about heroes the more co-operative they’ll be when trouble comes.”

“Right, right,” said Taylor. “It’s just something I need to get used to. People were more practical in the wasteland. They didn’t care if you were a bit scary-looking when you helped them out so long as it got done.”

“It’s part of our job to make sure it doesn’t get like that here. We don’t want this to become a wasteland.”

She knew he was right, but that didn’t mean she had to like it or that she really knew how to work like that. It had been a long time since she’d spent her nights scrambling across rooftops hunting wise guys.

---

Taylor felt it was perfectly justifiable to feel a little bitter when the guy who’d lectured her on the importance of PR patrols had immediately bailed on one to go fiddle around in his lab. That was, she was pretty sure, a dick move in any society.

And that was why she found herself wandering up the Boardwalk with Battery while the crowds eyed them up. Apparently even with her armour helmet off to show that, yes, she was an actual human being underneath all the metal, people were still a little bit intimidated. She supposed that they weren’t so used to power armour of the Earth Ayin style. It was pretty dramatic. Deliberately so; intimidation had definitely been part of the design for the X-01 prototype.

Battery was a lot more approachable looking — average height, attractive, not decked out like a walking tank, no guns, dressed to impress with a flashy, PR-approved costume — and she knew that Codsworth was focus-group approved, but Taylor supposed the effect of the armour was stronger.

Maybe the eyebots she had buzzing around them weren’t helping, but she’d learned a lesson from the Hookwolf fiasco. Information was key and eyebots gave her a very expanded view through the displays in her mask. Extra guns if it came down to it, too, which was something she’d have a hard time giving up now that she knew she could have them.

“This is going great,” said Taylor as a woman ducked into a shop a little too quickly before they reached her. “I can see why you guys are so keen on doing these things.”

“It’s a lot more active normally. Give it a bit. They’ll come around.”

“Sure. They’ll be swarming around to get a hand on the scary gun-toting cape any moment now.”

“You’re new,” said Battery. “They just need to get used to you and your look.”

Taylor had heard stronger justifications, but she nodded along anyway. It was hardly Battery’s fault. It was hers. Or more accurately Kaiser’s. Like Piggot had pointed out more than once: she’d shown up to the cape scene with a massacre. Hero or not that spooked people and there had been some pretty intense violence after that as all the local thugs had started posturing for position.

She didn’t regret killing Kaiser and she doubted she ever would, but there had been consequences. There always were when you killed people. This was one of them. People were uneasy. They looked at someone who was supposed to be a hero and saw someone with a body count who killed easily and carried lethal weapons when most heroes carried glorified water pistols, if they used weapons at all.

It wasn’t great, to sum up.

“How’s Assault doing?” asked Taylor after a moment of thought.

“Still complaining,” said Battery. “He doesn’t like being bed-bound, but a concussion is a concussion. It’s the one thing Panacea can’t make go away. He has to wait it out.”

“I can understand that. Being stuck in place, not able to do anything, is no fun.”

“Understanding wears pretty thin when you have to put up with him like this, trust me. He’s like a hyperactive five year old being kept away from the sugar bowl.”

Taylor stifled a laugh. “I’m sure it won’t be too long before they let him back at it.”

“I hope so or I’m going to end up punting him out into the bay to bother the fish.”

“That’d really please the PR people.”

“Better than having to sit through a lecture on the latest trend analysis and why I need to change my costume again.”

“They’re still nagging me to change my armour design to be less imposing. Joke’s on them. I’m working on something more slimline anyway because I need to be more agile.”

“So they’re just wasting their breath telling you to do something you’re doing anyway. Nice.”

“I think so.”

Silence fell for a moment before Battery spoke again. “I heard a rumour that they’re building a factory to make costumes using your tech.”

“Yeah,” said Taylor. “The ballistic weave is pretty tough and with the right tools you can work it into the sort of material they like to use for those things. You’ve seen mine, right? That’s ballistic weave. It’s mass producible. I’m trying to get them to build the factory in the Bay and spread some jobs around the place.”

“That sounds—wait, that looks like a journalist at three o’clock.”

“The camera they’re unloading from the van does give the game away a little.”

Battery did not look impressed by that remark. “One wannabe comedian in my life is enough, thanks.”

Taylor held her hands up in mock surrender for a moment before the news crew got close enough to start asking questions.

“Wanderer,” asked the woman with a mic. Pretty, blonde, young-ish. Pretty standard TV news front woman. Taylor didn’t recognise her. “I’m Sarah Grant from ANN. We have some questions for you.”

Taylor looked at Battery. She shrugged in reply. Well, the bosses had said something like this might happen, and she had been given some safe answers if it did. Topics to avoid talking about too.

“There are some things I’m not allowed to discuss,” she said. “Anything too sensitive is off limits. I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course. We wouldn’t want to do anything to endanger the Protectorate’s operations in Brockton Bay,” came the reply. “Is it really true that you’re from another Earth?”

“Yes. Earth Ayin.”

“Could you tell us more about that world?” she asked. “Give the viewers at home a flavour of what it was like. The official publications are so dry.”

“At first it wouldn’t seem that different to here,” said Taylor. “It’s still America. They play baseball and football and the Red Sox still lose in the end no matter how good they are. You would think it was just like home but without parahumans and with weird technology. The strangest thing would probably be how most things look like they came out of a 50s sci-fi movie.

“You might even like it there,” she continued. “If you showed up in one of the nice parts, you’d have a robot butler like Codsworth, an automated kitchen, and all sorts of little conveniences that you wouldn’t have living here. It’d seem like a pretty sweet deal in a place like that. But after a while you’d start to notice the ugly parts. Maybe it’s the half-empty supermarket shelves you pick up on first or the news hailing the annexation of Canada and how our brave boys are subduing the locals or maybe one of your neighbours just vanishes into the ether one night and no-one will talk about it. But it’ll be something and then the scales will fall away from your eyes. You’ll see the rot and then that’s all you will ever be able to see.”

“That sounds pretty dramatic. Can you describe the rot you saw?”

“Have you ever been to a zoo when there’s an earthquake on the way?” asked Taylor. The reporter shook her head. “Animals are more sensitive to that sort of thing than we are. They feel it coming. They panic, trying to get away, and they rattle their cages. We all knew the world was dying, but no-one would say it. Denial. That was the only way we could keep going, but it was still there. Different people took that in different ways, but most were bad. Lot of violence, lot of crime. Corruption like you wouldn’t believe. Crazy things happened even without parahumans.”

“And then the wars,” said the reporter. “Is that why they happened? People lashing out in fear?”

“Yes,” said Taylor. “We fought like rabid animals over what was left. Fear drove us into conflict when the only possible way we could have survived was to get on the same page and work towards a real solution.”

“And no-one argued against this?”

“Marginalised or worse. America wasn’t the America you know by then. It was hollow. The law said we had rights, but then people would just vanish into the night if they spoke out too loudly. Whole families just gone like they’d never existed at all. It was a dangerous time to stand out from the crowd.”

“That’s terrible. And you were there for all of this?”

“To the end. I made it to a vault in time to ride it out,” said Taylor. “I spent some time in cryogenic stasis before I got out of there and into the wasteland.”

“That must have been quite the adjustment. What was the wasteland like?”

“It was violent. We didn’t have many parahumans, but we had more gangs than you could shake a stick at. Worse than here by far. But it wasn’t all bad. People are surprisingly resilient. The old world was gone, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be a new one built in its place. Things were really starting to look up by the time I got pulled into this world.” 

They spent some time talking about the Minutemen and the network of settlements she’d helped them put together from there. That was something the PR people wanted to emphasise. The rugged frontiersmen taming a wild world was the sort of story that they thought would play well in America. All it needed was cowboys and horses to finish up the John Wayne-shaped image.

And Taylor didn’t really object. She’d not been as big a part of it as they would probably like to pretend, but she had helped and it had been good. It had given people hope for a better tomorrow where they would actually be safe and secure.

The reporter seemed pretty impressed at least. Better than talking about how the whole nuclear apocalypse thing had left humanity as a shattered husk of its already diminished self.

They reached the end of that subject. “So, you’re new here,” said the reporter. “A whole new world. It must be an amazing experience.”

“It’s not my first time, but sure.”

“What do you think so far?”

Taylor wished she had her power armour helmet on. Her poker face had never been all that hot, if she were being honest. Her power had given her a lot of gifts but that wasn’t one of them.

“It’s been interesting,” she said, dissembling. If she waffled enough they might leave off. “Nothing’s quite the same, even accounting for the difference in date. We’re almost three hundred years in the past to me.”

“And yet you found the same sort of violence you lived with on Ayin.”

The trap was so obvious it might as well have been set by drugged up raiders. She could have walked away, but that would only have marked her as guilty. Someone who needed to run away, because of what she had done. Not great PR.

“Kaiser came to my home with his gang of murderers to back him up,” said Taylor. Battery was moving in towards them. The crowd between them had grown thick, though; they were so much more willing to go to her, a known hero, than they’d been to Taylor, and they’d also crowded around the reporter to form a loose circle and listen in on the interview. “I have a child. What was I supposed to do? Bend my knee and hope that the racist mass-murderers wouldn’t do what they always do? Beg for mercy? Join them?”

“It triggered a lot of violence. Innocent people died. A lot of them.”

“Thirty nine people,” said Taylor. “Those are the ones who are confirmed to have no gang affiliations at the moment. It could increase as we investigate further. It probably will. Would you like me to recite their names? My power doesn’t let me forget things, so it’d just be showing off without any real meaning behind it, but I could.”

“Well—”

A memory came to mind. She swallowed the reaction. “I’m sorry for the families who lost people,” Taylor said. “My husband was murdered by a member of a gang not all that different from the Empire 88, so I know how it feels. The grief, the anger. It can drive you mad. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

“You—“

“I’m not finished. I wish it could have been cleaner, but there was no backing down from that fight. You can’t talk your way out of it with people like that, running away just lets them shoot you in the back, and help would never have arrived in time. The only way out was through and so through I went. I regret that other people suffered from the aftermath, but the only people responsible for what gangs do are the gangs. If you want their violence to stop, the only way you can accomplish that is to annihilate them.”

Battery finally made her way through. “Okay, that’s enough,” she said. “You’ve had your questions and got your answers. Move on and stop hogging the new girl. There are other people who want to talk to her.”

She didn’t look terribly happy about it but the reporter complied. “This is Sarah Grant signing off. Back to you, George.”

Taylor realised that Battery was right. People were looking a great deal more eager to talk to her now that she’d got through the interview without it getting nasty. And there were an awful lot of them. Oh, boy. That crowd drawing in was an even less comforting sight than watching them duck away to avoid her.

Hopefully she could get through this without saying anything too stupid and getting into trouble.