Over the next few days, what Sophia called her vacation-week, I split my days between work on one of my projects, mostly laboratory equipment and the backpack first-aid station Galatea had asked for, and relaxing with Sophia, going on dates and having fun together. One of the projects that was neither, was the installation of a state-of-the-art gym in one of the rooms close to my shower, mostly to get into the habit of steady exercise or the gene-modification I had planned would be utterly wasted. It would require a lot of work to get a truly positive return on the risk/reward calculation, but I was willing to put in the work needed.

During that week, I observed a slow shift in my bio-rhythm, I slept less but was more awake during the day, and thus, had more time to work and more than enough time left over for Sophia and even what most people would call normal relaxation, reading and gaming.

I even had enough time to consider the measures we could use to go against the Omega’s, as it was not a simple question of finding and beating them up, if it was just that, Galatea had observed multiple possible gathering places, hitting them sequentially would allow us to strike a vicious blow against them. But it would not make for a serious blow, just a brutal one. Unless we were willing to permanently cripple or kill each and every one of them, they would simply return after a short time during which the ensuing vacuum would cause damage. The only thing such a course of action would achieve was a manhunt for the two of us, most likely without kid-gloves.

Currently, we should be considered low-threat individuals, the League would go after us if they happened upon us out and about, the police was more likely to ignore us and hope that we returned the favour, keeping the overall property damage low. If we started a brutal campaign of terror, we would quickly shift from low-threat to high-threat and both, the League and the police, would invest a great deal of resources to take us down.

No, to pull out the Omega’s by the root, we would have to be smarter, not striking at the average soldier on the streets but to go after the organisation itself. Just looking at the way they had established themselves and the amount of weapons they had stockpiled, there had to be a major organisation backing them and that meant that they had contacts into the local police-force and, most likely, the league.

If we managed to expose those contacts to the press and deliver documentation of the Omega’s activities to the relevant authorities, we should be able to trigger a crusade, as the remaining authorities feverishly strove to regain the trust of the public, recently damaged by the involvement of their colleagues with the Omegas. Such a crusade, guided and directed by the delivered documentation, would likely allow us to achieve Sophia’s goals, depending on what exactly they were. If it was just to root out the Omega’s in their current form, it would work easily, if she wanted more, like finding her brother, the documentation should give us a hint where to start.

On the last evening of Sophia’s vacation, I decided to broach the topic, while we were relaxing on the sofa after a fun day out and about. I was lying on the side, with Sophia in front of me and on the big screen, some mindless entertainment show was providing background noise.

“Soph, can you tell me what exactly you are after with the Omegas? You once told me you wanted them destroyed because they took away your brother. Is that still the case? Have you thought about what exactly you want to do? What we have done, breaking their drug-deal and destroying their weapons cache were small, short-time problems, they are no danger for the gang itself, not without some sort of outside force pressuring them. They lost some money, which weakened them for a time, but as long as there are addicts, they can rebuild.”

I felt her stiffen in my arms for a moment and turn, hiding her face against my chest and I felt her breath tickle me as she spoke.

“You’re right, I can’t hide my head in the sand, not if I want to do something. I know that I want to make sure that they can’t take another girl’s brother away, as they did with mine. So, yeah, wiping them out is necessary. Once they are gone, we can make sure that nobody similar sets up shop. You think we can’t just hit their deals, again and again, until they can’t go on any longer?”

Hearing her speak, I felt the onset of a migraine.

“I know a few of their gathering spaces, that’s how I knew where and when to hit them before. I sneaked onto the roof of those places and listened, most of the time my hearing is good enough to pick something up. And I’m small enough to get into a few tight spaces to get even more information. I can go back and listen some more, maybe we can interrupt more deals and tie them up with their drugs for the cops to find. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

“I do not think that would help. If we have already taken them down when the police arrives, even the most incompetent public defender could insinuate that the gang-members were the victims of us, getting them off scot-free.” I explained the simple reality to Sophia. While the justice-system was far from perfect, there were rules and processes in place and they did not look kindly at vigilantes taking over.

“So, how do we get them? I’ve spent enough time with you to know that you have an idea.”

I explained my current, rough outline, it relied on multiple goals being achieved. We needed to collect enough information on them to let the police fight a crusade, we needed to know who in the force was on the take and we needed to make sure that the person we chose to handle the gathered information would act on it.

While I was horrified at her style of information-gathering, I had a few ideas to improve the yield, mostly by equipping her with cameras and microphones to place, allowing us to enact a serious surveillance-operation. Once we linked that, with Galatea’s drone-surveillance and the predictive models she was trying to use, we should get a relatively good grasp on their operations. With that in hand, we could correlate it with the data on the police-force and look for outliers, putting them under surveillance.

In addition, we might be able to find some of their bases, allowing us to put more pressure onto them, by raiding them. It would only temporarily set them back, unless we found something linking them to bigger things, giving us leverage.

On the other side, we would have to actively try to improve our public image, currently I had a bit of an image, mostly due to the politeness I had employed with the pharmacy I had broken into so long ago, paying for the damages caused by breaking in and leaving a polite note had been used as comedic material in the newspaper for a few days, Anath was virtually unknown outside of dedicated powered-watcher communities and they got at least some of their information from the League.

Creating a positive public image was easier said than one, it was not as if we could go out and rescue kittens from trees, the classic hero-activity and when saving damsels in distress, it was more likely that we were looked at as kidnappers, instead of saviours.

And there was one more thing I needed to ascertain.

“Do you want to find your brother, find out what happened to him? The only thing you know is that he vanished, do you want to know more?” I asked Sophia, immediately regretting it as she stiffened again, before a shudder ran through her body.

“I… I don’t know. A part of me wants to know, but what if he left because of me? What if he couldn’t stand to be around me any longer and did whatever he had to, just to get away from me?” Her voice cracked as she spoke, thick with tears.

It was hard for me to understand, the only reference I had was the idea that Sophia would leave me. But comparing me losing her, a girlfriend of a month, to Sophia losing her brother, the one who had played father, mother and best friend? Simply no comparison. I tried to mentally link it to me, losing my mother, but I did not remember her at all, so I never had her. Intellectually, I knew that I had a mother, but emotionally, there was just a void.

My father, on the other hand, had always been reserved with me, never quite letting me close to him and the etiquette-tutors had always taught me reservation and gentillity, causing me to accept his behaviour as normal, at least until I understood that he simply did not want to deal with me. Once that happened, the reservation shifted, I was no longer treating him as my father, I was treating him as a stranger, someone I had met in a social situation and did not want to insult.

Unsure just how to ease her pain, I did the only thing I could, wrapping her tighter in my arms and pulling her close, holding her in a warm embrace.

I hated feeling helpless like that.