“Paste Pot?” They both half-grinned and nodded. “He give you a mixer?” I asked. “Those can’t be his prime formulas, but you’ll still need supplies of them.”

“Yeah. Raw materials to input are fairly simple.” Jenkins gestured at a pack-sized kit in the corner. “That’s the suppression kit he came up with for emergency repairs. Fire, electricity, sealants, sterilizer, insulator. And I’ve been using variants of his armor liner for years.”

“Huh. And the Tinkerer?”

“The old man will do anything for a challenge. First time he worked on a space suit attachment. He was pretty stoked over it,” Norbert said, grimacing. “His gear work has always been a thing of beauty.”

I inclined my head. “I agree. His mechanical and pneumatic stuff is singular, and he handles high-energy stuff smoothly despite his specialization.” I slid my eyes Norbert’s way, and he hastily looked elsewhere. “I wondered who was doing his programming for him. You did a good job hiding your default style.”

Jenkins slapped the table as he started laughing, while Ebersol rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling in mock frustration. “We have an agreement where he handles fine machining and I update the computer protocols for the devices he makes with some modular programs he can adapt pretty easily.”

“You did a good fake style, cribbed it from six or seven different programmers and added some clever machine language in there. I suggest in the future you make up a unique programming language just for him. It’ll solidify his reputation and distance you from him if you don’t use it anywhere else, and only track it in your head.”

“That’s... a pretty good idea,” Ebersol admitted carefully. “Um, you’re not mad?” he asked cautiously.

“If you get caught supplying support functions to a weapon trader to superhumans, you’re going to lose a hundred million dollars. I’m not sure I’m the one who should be angry?” I replied narrowly. He grimaced, and even Jenkins looked uneasy. “I hope it’s been a while since your last update, and you can bury the evidence while you work on improving the distance and security between you.”

He sat down on his workbench, forcibly looking at his techpack. “You, uh, got another of those energy drinks?” he asked faintly.

I silently handed him over a half-bottle, and then a different half-bottle to each of them.

“Ten PM, you drink,” I said in a no-nonsense voice. “I’m gonna be checking on you to make sure you do. “Those will knock you out for a solid eight hours of the deepest sleep you have ever had. You WILL be ready to go tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, ma’am!” they both replied hastily, taking the drinks.

“I’ll be coming by at 8 AM to help you with final calibrations on your suits. I want you ready to suit up. We’re doing the launch at noon solid.”

“Understood!” “Got it!”

-----------

Dealer was out in Wisconsin dealing for Master Logan, the three stoneheads, Thunderbird, Hercules, and the head Shamans of Coyote and Eagle. Apparently, they all knew how to drink, kick back, and enjoy some simple pleasures.

I was sitting in my engineers’ lab, making sure nothing happened to them while they snoozed on the cots in their offices, out cold as lights and not going to react to anything for eight hours.

I said I’d swing by at eight in the morning, but that just meant I’d leave as they were waking up. I had no problem working on the stuff I’d inherited from Reed during the night, and given it was pretty quiet, I started burning through a lot of the hardest design project stuff while cranking through the math for everyone else who needed it.

There were only two men on the night crew, and they basically used the time to see if they could get through Fixer’s training program. It was very gamelike, and beating it meant an instant pay raise and greater trust and responsibility from my engineers. That, in turn, meant they might get in on some Weird Science projects, where all the cool shit was.

Two Red Eyes perked up and turned around.

I opened my eyes and turned my head that way.

The monitoring board for the two Antennae stations that supplied general power to the ElectroFix lab was there. The volturium Alignment Center used a totally different power supply and filtered off the city grid, demand being what it was.

A formerly green light was now blinking white, meaning whatever it had been feeding had gone offline, been shut down... or cut.

I ran the wiring schematics through my head as I let the leaning stool balanced so precariously fall back, and swung the feet I’d kicked up on the lab table down. I whistled gently in a particular tune, repeated twice, carrying through the building and no further as I stood up.

The two men out there were either going to hunt some cover in the secure room, or they were in on what was coming and going to let them in. It shouldn’t be the two newest guys, as the night shift was much sought after by the crew.

Learning to use the super-speed was an exercise in patience. Charge up my cells, align my Kirlian field to control the vibration direction, move.

The Beaubiers hadn’t been ‘speedsters’ in the normal sense, as in they couldn’t ‘run’ at superspeed, and indeed could only make the simplest of motions when going that fast. Learning to fly gracefully had probably been an exercise for them, given what I was going through, and the fact I was basically zipping in straight lines from place to place, using other means to change direction midway as needed.

They also only activated their accelerated reflexes when they were moving at speed. It meant that unless they were traveling fast, they were as vulnerable to being attacked as a normal human.

Happily, I did not have that particular restriction. Trailing lines of lightning, I went out into the hall, down it, into the main production room, and towards the security room.

There were people moving across the cameras there, but no alarm had gone off, subtle or otherwise.

I sighed, and made three more straight-line zips.

“Hey, Joey,” I said softly behind the man standing next to the inch-thick locked door, ready to let someone in. He froze as I laid my hand on his shoulder. “I vetted you all when you were hired. I know you don’t want to do this, and you aren’t working for someone else. That either means you got one hell of a payday bribe for trying to put one over on The Mountain, or there’s a threat. Tell me which one it is.”

He didn’t turn around, his hands staying fully in my view. “They, they got my little girl, Dynamo...”

I tapped out a text with one finger in less than one second. -Tell Mr. Hill I need him out in the main yard outside the lab and Weighting it down NOW. Hostage situation.-

“You tell ‘em I was here?”

“You left a couple hours ago,” he replied, exhaling sharply.

There was a soft knock on the door.

“Unlock it.”

He took the key, turned it loudly, and pulled the door open.

The door opened to reveal some men in tacsuits with an irritating symbol on their sleeves. I think this one was Capricorn.

Zodiac ops teams.

My fingers were sparking on Joey’s shoulder, drawing instant attention as they went from three, to two, to one.

They got off a couple shots at him, but the hard air field in front of Joey Capione bounced them, his flinches notwithstanding.

Then the air above these bastards multiplied in weight by a factor of ten, and they were smashed to the ground. Bones broke somewhat abruptly.

“Your daughter’s name is Gina, right, Joey?” I asked him.

“Yes, ma’am, it is.” He was staring at the men beyond the door, all of them slammed to the ground, some with bones jutting out with how hard they’d hit and trying to writhe and scream.

Out in the light of the main yard, over half-a-dozen figures had popped out of the ground. They seemed to be ignoring the increased gravity, and they moved with speed and energy in several directions at once.

A really big guy and a much shorter fullback of a guy were striding towards the door here. A swirl of sand was sweeping over the area, and I heard popguns going off to the rear and side of the building, near the garage doors in the back.

Their mutual footsteps were shaking the ground. Mr. Hill and Ben Grimm walked up on the twitching, gasping guys from Zodiac, and stared down on them, cigars lighting up two very unhappy faces.

Mr. Hill had had to shrink his Weight down in area coming in this close, but the guys elsewhere in the yard seemed to be having their own problems.

“My apologies on interrupting your evening, Mr. Hill. These men seem to have taken possession of the daughter of Joey Capione here, and blackmailed him into opening up the doors.”

His cigar flared, hot and dangerous, but his Weight backed off to merely four times normal. The eight men in front of him gasped despite themselves, the ones not whimpering with broken bones.

“You know who I am.” His voice was so deep the ground was shaking, their bones were vibrating, and three men promptly pissed themselves. “This is my place. This is my money. Now, money I can always deal with, and be made straight on. But, people.” Oh, how low his voice dropped. “You went after my people, and you laid your hands on a little girl.”

Oh, that was freaking awful the way he said that. All of these hard men promptly pissed themselves again now, even the ones crying in pain.

“You have exactly one, and only one, way ta get out of this alive, and that is for that little girl ta turn up safe, sound, and alive.

“Now, one of you is going ta tell me what I want ta know. If nobody volunteers, here’s how this is going ta work.

“That girl with the lightning on her fingers is an Alchemist. She has Truth Potions.” Actually, I did. “She will forcibly administer them, if she has to inject them into your carotid artery.” And I would. “You will then blab anything she asks you.

“If you do not have the answer I want, then you are going ta vanish, deep, deep into the earth, where lava rolls and nobody’s gonna find the ash you are reduced ta.

“I will then ask the next one a’ you.”

He didn’t look around as the rest of the party he’d brought came up, all of them holding onto an unconscious body or two. Or more.

“Master Logan and Coyote Boss are tracking the van that peeled off from here, Mr. Hill,” a short Afrotribal guy with dreadlocks and sharp white streaks through his hair, lots of genetic wrinkles, a proud nose, and eyes like golden daggers spoke out with idle calm, as if this happened every day, throwing a man half again his size on the ground.