Director Carter’s eyes flickered in thought. “That means this could be a sensitive interstellar matter.”

“And you all know how governments like dealing with those.” And was why the High Guard hadn’t made any moves regarding the matter.

“Panic, finger-pointing, and nukes ready to go,” Walker supplied, shaking his head. “How many aliens are living in SF? Even in New York?”

I eyed him carefully. “You WANT Skrulls and Kree spies living in New York?” I asked archly.

“Like they have been for at least two centuries?” Director Carter sighed, not surprised I knew that. “Word is they’ve been watching our world for centuries, if not millennia.”

“Ancient alien civilizations with nothing better to do than study other species, so as to eventually enslave them or replace them. Certainly nothing can go wrong with that.” I rolled my eyes, and headed for the door out. “Speaking of which, I’m going to go do some impromptu investigating at the docks, and probably get myself in a fight. Have a good evening, Captains!”

------

The two Shields watched her glide off with that unique sliding gait, every step covering three times the ground it looked like without any jumping, just an occasional spark. In a matter of seconds, she was out the doors and heading for the stairs to one of the building fronts.

She hadn’t broken a sweat during all that fighting. They’d been watching for it.

“That is a scarily dangerous and intelligent young woman,” John Walker said, shaking his head. “She has a very, very thorough grasp on her abilities, what can be done with them, and extrapolates them to others. I couldn’t see anything she needed to actually be trained on, only trained with.”

Peggy Carter-Rogers, New York City Director of SHIELD, nodded agreement. “She’s already accessorizing to upgrade her threat level.” She paused tellingly. “I went over and had tea with Sue Richards.”

“About our mutual subject of interest?” Walker smiled.

“Indeed. It turns out Dynamo was acquainted with Reed before they met, although they weren’t aware of it... and by extension she’s known to Tony Stark, too.”

“Seriously? How did she come to the attention of that crowd?”

“You knew her, too. She’s SchmotGurl.”

He blinked. “The chess player?”

There was a fairly exclusive online chess community that was largely restricted to only the very best in the world, with less than a thousand people allowed entry to it.

SchmotGurl had somehow qualified to get in, and stormed up the rankings. So far, she hadn’t been beaten, and had already risen into the top twenty after sixty-some matches, both speed and traditional formats.

A number of Shielders had chess matches or played other games on the site, and a lot of extremely intelligent people vied there and in associated forums on a number of levels. The number of psions, super-scientists, and masterminds of both stripes who had representations on the Broad Games deepsite was rather impressive, and naturally they were all watching one another.

Solidly at the top of the chess ranking there was the Great Bear, who had never been beaten, only tied several times. All of them wondered where the Golden Hag ranked, but she didn’t play chess.

Peggy was at seventeen. Her husband Steve, the Patriot, was up at four. Dr. Richards was at tenth the last time Walker had looked. He himself was at thirty-two, his generally neutral regard for the game made up for by the ability of a super-soldier to calculate tactics and strategies.

“She accessed her account on the computers in the lab they set up for her; that’s how they found out. She also dipped her hand into Pythagoras and Ohm, as well as Chrysopoeia. On those forums, she goes by TraineeOuilette.”

Walker considered the idea of a high school-age girl actually daring to go into the deep-forums devoted to the intelligentsia of the world. Sure, there was some honest information exchanges that went on there, but there was a great deal of posturing by extremely egotistical people, as well.

“I assume she wasn’t laughed out of there?” There were a couple researchers tied to SHIELD who contributed to those forums, and naturally enough moderators didn’t need to actually be members, being there to police language and behavior, not to do assessments in the face of their peers.

Pythagoras was devoted to higher-end math and geometry, heady realms of higher thinking that formed foundations for so much other science. Ohm was devoted to electrical engineering super-science; some of the things being bandied about there nations wanted to consider state secrets and were instead treated as minor tidbits of data. Chrysopoeia was devoted to Modern Alchemy, as opposed to the Classic Alchemy of the Philosopher’s Stone forums, which didn’t see nearly as much traffic.

“Well, according to Sue, she solved a phasing alignment array Reed posted for the upgrade to the very bracelets she’s wearing, and then adjusted the math of a resonance threshold alignment that Tony Stark had thrown out there, which Reed mentioned was probably related to the discharge of Stark’s armor’s repulsor beams... after Tony mocked the newbie for mentioning that he had some errors in his equations.”

Walker smiled despite himself. Tony Stark was renowned for his ego, along with the genius he’d inherited from his father Howard. “And she already said she’s an alchemist...”

“Reed said she fine-tuned a formula for producing Water-Gold that would drop the production time by half, adding reactions at two points in the process. The stuff is incredibly useful in thermal transfer couplings, I’ve been informed.”

He glanced after her. “And that might just have been useful for-?”

“Cooling mechanisms, especially for boot jets and rockets, among other things. Water-Gold radiates heat like nothing else known.”

They met one another’s eyes. “She wasn’t lying when she said was considering some power armor,” Walker sighed.

“She also patented all of it before she posted, borrowing Dr. Richard’s fast-track review status, since she’s working under him.” Peggy’s lips curled into a half-smile. “Stark might have gaffed a newb, but he didn’t dare do that to Reed. He’s already licensed all three patents from her, and there’s been several others doing the same, including Wakanda.”

“She’s on her way,” he muttered, then shook his head. “SchmotGurl. Another super-powered genius on the level of Richards?” He considered that. “She’s not a Stater, but she’s here. We’ve been tiptoeing around her status, right?”

“Getting her a green card wouldn’t be too hard, given her abilities, but I’ve a feeling she’d refuse States citizenship, and we don’t even know if she claims citizenship anywhere.” Carter was actually amused at the hole in their intelligence about Dynamo’s background.

“There’s no sane nation on the world that would turn away a science genius,” Walker agreed, neither of them mentioning that there were several who would actually be happy to kidnap and enslave her, too.

“Working around the smart ones is always interesting,” Walker went on, tapping his temple thoughtfully. “I suspect we’re already being led along.”

“Don’t suspect, we are,” Peggy corrected him calmly. “She’s being polite about it, for that batch. She gave us all those warning signs on what we are dealing with to alert us.”

“And there’s no way to rope her in?” he asked, considering that approach. Always thinking ahead, every move preplanned, regardless of how spontaneous it looked...

That was some scary smarts, that was certain. And she realized that the Shielders basically all thought that way...

“I suspect she has an arrangement she’s willing to make already worked out, and we simply have to propose something.”

Walker nodded agreement with Peggy’s words. “And we can’t afford her.” That was pretty much a given.

“SHIELD can’t afford us, John,” Peggy winked, and they both laughed. Realistically, it was true, but Shielders weren’t chosen for their greed, after all.

“I’ll reach out to Clark and see what he has to say. We should get an answer quickly.”

-------

To his friends, he was Clark Savage the Third, eldest son of one of the most famous science hero lineages in the world.

The rest of the world just called him Paragon, or Doc Bronze.

He, his father, and grandfather had been the inspiration for multiple super-soldier programs around the world, trying to ‘make’ a perfect man out of obedient and loyal men, not realizing that perfection required so much more to do it right.

To much of the world, he was one of the leaders of the Modern Age, designing and building rockets, space stations, great vehicles, power armor, weapons, scientific devices, and other tools and toys to advance the status and raise the bar for humanity.

The fact that so many of those devices were definitely not his alone was kept a quiet secret among those involved. The public needed a face, and the bronzed, stern face of Paragon, laboring high above the world with the High Guard to safeguard and better humanity, was one of the most trusted images in the world.

It worked, too. When he spoke publicly, which was rare, people listened seriously. His deeds and knowledge had benefited people all over the world, and if he himself had also profited, it only allowed him to continue doing that research.

There were naturally those who despised him, his family, and his friends and associates for what they were and the things they had done, feuds inherited across the generations, as well as those accrued in his own time and place. He and his family dealt with them all, and continued on with their high-minded goal of bringing the Earth together, and perhaps someday being able to join the galactic community peacefully.

Until that time, however, he was there to help fight.

The design work he was doing would have been cutting edge in Svartazk or Wakanda, and he was sure of that because he conferred with Russia’s greatest lab and the African nation’s scientists on a regular basis, as well as the Tribal Meet at Ocampe. The last tended more to psionic and spiritual avenues of technology, enhancing those of the others.

The design work for a process to actually begin producing a usable stardrive was extremely involved, even with the many starships they’d encountered and either captured or salvaged afterwards. The scale of machinery needed, the raw supplies, the incredible tolerances... such work was done on individual levels now, by some of the brightest and most capable minds in the world. Yet without some form of mass production, humanity would never be able to take to the stars.

He alternated between working on the process and on ever-more useful, environment-friendly refining and recycling technology. The primary contributor to that work in process was actually Atlantis, and he hoped to eventually be able to start up a production line to make machinery to help clean the oceans and air of industrial pollution.

A viable and useful source of power that wouldn’t instantly be abused to cause even more damage to the environment was one of the drawbacks, and so things were proceeding cautiously.

The inquiry from Peggy Carter-Rogers caught his eye promptly. Old family friends were much better to hear from than government functionaries and their politically-motivated statements or questions.

His father and Howard Stark had been two of the biggest contributors to the military before and during the abruptly-ended Second World War, as well as afterwards. The development of an actual super-soldier who was emotionally stable and not a slave or a deranged supremacist had been of great interest to his family, but Dr. Erskine had vanished into Russia’s New Israel and not emerged since.

The Great Bear’s methodical and virtuous roll-out of the Shielders later on had gained the approval of both his father and himself, and Peggy Carter had been the first woman granted that status.