Trump Card Pt 31 (Patreon)

Part Thirty-One: Revenge, Interrupted

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

PRT Department 24

Washington DC

Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown

There was something wrong.

Rebecca couldn't quite put her finger on it, but somewhere during her day, she'd seen or heard something that was ever so slightly off. She tried to shrug off the sensation, as nothing seemed to be amiss, but it clung to her consciousness and insisted that all was not right. So she sat at her desk and began to go through her day, examining each incident in her flawless memory, seeking the disparate note in the orchestra.

It seemed the best idea to examine her interactions with the personnel on site first. Deputy Director West was the person who could do the most damage if he were somehow suborned, so she picked him first. One by one, she analysed every word and gesture that he had expressed in her presence. Nothing jumped out at her, so she turned to her memories of West's subordinates in the chain of command.

After fifteen minutes of that, she concluded that their behaviour was well within acceptable norms. The next person on her mental list was Kathryn Grant, West's executive assistant. While not in the chain of command, she held a certain amount of authority within the building. All of this authority, of course, devolved directly from West; she could create no new initiatives without explicit authorisation from her boss.

Rebecca flashed back to the first point during which she had encountered Ms Grant, in the elevator. They had ridden up several floors together. A few casual words had been exchanged, then West and Grant had gotten out on the same floor. As she reviewed her memories of the elevator ride, Rebecca's brows drew together. All of the Grant woman's words and mannerisms had been precisely in line with what Rebecca knew of her … but when she was actually responding to someone as opposed to making a comment of her own, her reaction time was a good tenth of a second slower than average. The delay would have been imperceptible to someone without Rebecca's ability to examine a scene minutely in her memory, but it was there. More to the point, it was consistently there, all the way through the encounter.

She picked up her phone. There was no proof that something was wrong, save her own observations, but she could still have the Grant woman picked up and placed in Master/Stranger isolation until Legend or Eidolon came in to find out what was really going on with her. Just as she hit the first digit, the alarms went off.

She entered the rest of the number as fast as she could. At the other end of the line, West didn't answer immediately. She waited as the sirens blared, trying to restrain her impatience. The plastic creaked in the grip of her hand. Her every instinct demanded that she get out there and find out what was going on now, but common sense restrained her. There were no shots, explosions or smell of smoke, so the emergency had to be more subtle than a straight-up attack on the building.

Finally, her call was answered. “West.”

“What's going on?” she demanded.

“Security breach in secure storage three,” he replied crisply.

Secure Storage SSB3, she knew, was where they kept Endbringer fragments. “Who's involved?” she asked, knowing what answer she would hear. She also knew the precautions that had been taken to ensure nobody could breach the integrity of that secure storage vault—or escape once they had.

“Kathryn Grant. My executive assistant.” His tone was pained. “I can honestly say I never suspected this for a moment.”

At least he was accepting it. “None of us did. Once we get her into Master/Stranger screening, we can find out the truth,” she assured him. “In the meantime, seeing as you've had the most contact with her today …”

He picked up on the hint immediately. “Of course,” he said, a defeated tone to his voice. “I'll hand off my duties and have myself placed in M/S as well. Who should I give them to?”

That was another facet of Master/Stranger screening. Those under investigation were of course required to hand off their duties, but they weren't allowed to choose who to pass them over to. “I'll handle the security breach. My executive assistant will take over your desk. Hang up the phone immediately and report to Master/Stranger screening without speaking to anyone outside that department.”

“Roger that, ma'am,” he replied heavily, and hung up.

Rebecca put her phone away, then stood up from her desk. She took three steps out of her office and turned to her executive assistant, a smoothly efficient young man called Roberts. “We have a situation,” she said crisply. “Report to Deputy Director West's office. You're running his desk for the moment. Redirect all my calls there. Handle all non-urgent matters and put a hold on everything you can.”

Turning on her heel, she left him already folding his laptop. There was no doubt in her mind that he would be set up in West's office within five minutes. Now, all she had to do was find out who was idiotic enough to try to steal Endbringer material from under her nose, and good enough to actually get into Secure Storage Three. A grim smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she walked. She was going to enjoy this interrogation.

<><>

L33t

Pwnage Base Apartment

“One,” L33t heard over his headset. 3-D coordinates showed up on the screen in front of him. “Two. Three.” As the Kathryn-duplicate's voice spoke, two more sets of coordinates arrived. His fingers were already hitting the buttons on the remote, followed by the Execute key. If everything was working right, a section of the 'ceiling' of the pocket universe would be shifting to a different texture to allow a piece of Endbringer to fall into the bin left there for that purpose.

He repeated the procedure for the second set and was halfway through the third set when “Now!” resounded in his ears. Abandoning the third set of coordinates momentarily, he hit the override key and the come-home button, both added to the remote after they'd gotten back to Brockton Bay. This was supposed to allow a rather larger portal to drop the Kathryn-duplicate into the base on to a large inflatable mattress. He still couldn't believe how much Über had bitched about not having the same courtesy extended to him, when they'd had to pull him out of Grant's house unexpectedly.

As soon as he had the portal closed, he went back to the coordinates. Hopefully, they hadn't pulled the samples into deeper storage. Entering the third set, he hit the Execute key, then wiped the coordinates from the screen.

As he pulled off the headset and hit the button to power down the computer—no sense in taking chances—Über looked over at him. “Well, how'd it go?”

“Let you know in a sec.” L33t stood up and pocketed the remote. He could've done all this from inside the base, but it was nice to be able to look out the window once in a while. Though they did have their bug-out procedure set up so they could be inside and buttoned up tight in thirty seconds.

They'd be a very frantic thirty seconds, but drills (suggested by Hax and seconded by Über) had shown it could be done.

“I'm coming too,” Über said, turning off the TV. “I wanna see what Endbr—”

“Don't say the word!” hissed L33t urgently, and Über shut up immediately.

Perhaps he was being paranoid, perhaps not. But while a careless utterance of that particular word outside of a secure location (the pocket universe which now made up their base was the only place he considered to be secure) might not be overheard and reported to the authorities, he didn't want to take chances. Especially since, if all had gone well, they now had in the region of forty pounds of stolen Endbringer material on their hands.

That was the difference between this heist and (nearly) every other one they'd managed to pull off. Cash, jewellery, paintings; that was everyday stuff. Nobody really cared about it, apart from the actual monetary value. But this … this was unprecedented. Part of him wanted to shout their triumph from the rooftops, but the more sensible part knew it was best to keep all this on the down-low. Everyone from the Triumvirate down were going to be looking hard for whoever had just ripped the PRT off, and he didn't think Birdcaging would be off the table. Even if Alexandria had put the word out to keep 'hands-off' on Taylor Hebert and Hax. They'd just made her look stupid, and nobody liked to look stupid.

The portal into the base was open all the time—they needed some way to run cables in—so he stepped through, with Über at his heels. “Check the bins,” he said as he peeled off to check on the Kathryn duplicate.

She was sitting up on the air mattress when he got to her. Despite the fact that she wasn't under outside control, she gave him a disconcertingly intelligent look. “Hello,” she said.

“Hey,” he replied, offering his hand to her. “Let's get you outside.” That would allow Taylor to take control of the animatronic puppet once more and let them know where to pick her up from.

“All right,” she said, grasping his hand and pulling herself to her feet. When he headed back toward the portal, she followed him.

“Woo hoo!” whooped Über from across the base. “All three! Fourteen pounds, thirteen point five and fifteen! Hax is a frickin' marvel!”

“Yeah, just don't forget that we've just managed to put egg on the faces of some really high-end people,” L33t said. “This is not something we're gonna be publicising.” He pulled the remote from his pocket. “Which reminds me. You need to go get the control strip. Chances are they made her before I pulled her through, so they'll be kicking down her door in ten minutes or less. We don't want them analysing that strip.” And of course, they couldn't build in a self-destruct for something that was going to be stuck to the back of the neck of an innocent woman.

“Gotcha.” Über headed for the section of the wall they generally used for exterior portals while L33t entered the coordinates for Kathryn Grant's house. When the shimmering pattern shifted to become a portal, he stepped through. L33t waited until he returned, then hit the button to return the shimmering grey portal to being a shimmering grey wall. Forestalling L33t's questions, Über waved the silvery strip. “All good.”

“Awesome. Leave it in Hax's workspace so she can destroy it.” L33t didn't think they'd need to use something like this again, but there was always the off-chance. If Hax destroyed something, it could be rebuilt, but the same couldn't be said for him. Or at least, that was the way it had always been.

He turned to the K-dup, who'd been standing there, patiently waiting for him. “Come on.” They stepped out into the living room of the apartment, and L33t turned to face the duplicate. “Hax, you there?”

The change that came over the animatronic body was subtle, but by the time it ended, L33t had no doubt he was talking to Taylor Hebert and not Kathryn Grant. “Hey,” she said. “How'd it go?” It still sounded weird to have Kathryn's voice speaking Taylor's words, though.

“No complications on our end,” L33t hastened to tell her. “All three samples in the bins. We just got the strip back, too. So, you want us to come pick you up?”

“Ah … that might be a problem,” she said awkwardly. “You know how I thought it was kind of ridiculous that Alibi got kidnapped twice in a row?”

L33t didn't want to come to the conclusion that her words offered, but it was inescapable. “You're shitting me. You've been kidnapped? Again?”

“Well, not 'again', technically speaking,” she said defensively. “It's the Empire, this time. They're trying to draw in Hax.”

“Shit, that's not a good thing,” he said urgently.

“What's not a good thing?” asked Über as he emerged from the portal.

“Hax's been kidnapped,” L33t explained. “By the Empire this time.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake!” snapped Über. “Again?”

“That's what I said!”

“It's not 'again' if I've never been kidnapped before,” Taylor said through the K-dup. She sounded irritated. “Anyway, they're going full court press on this one. According to Victor, they're taking me to an abandoned warehouse with a electric fence all around it, and an electrified cage to hold me in one place. They're even bringing in a body double in a wig to be a decoy in a second cage, and there'll be a bag over my head.”

“Well, fuck.” Über didn't usually go for understatement; L33t figured he must be rattled. “We'll come get you, of course. Where are you?”

“Right now I'm in transit so I can't be sure,” she admitted. “But once you get Alibi up and running again, she'll be able to home in on me.”

L33t frowned. “Are we going to have time for that?” he asked.

“We're going to have to make the time,” the K-dup insisted. “You two on your own aren't going to be able to rescue me without finding me first.”

“So all I've got to do is swap out the mind gestalts?” L33t said. “Two, three minutes, tops, right?”

The K-dup shook her head. “No, you're gonna have to change out the bodies, too. Kathryn couldn't fit in the Hax armour if she tried.”

L33t held up his hands defensively. “Whoa, no. No way. I know how much you value your privacy. If I changed out your bodies, I'd have to look at some point. And then it would be totally fuckin' weird forever after.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake.” The K-dup sighed. “Alibi's still fully clothed. You're just going to have to move the head over to Alibi's body, then change out faces, reset the brain and restore from Alibi's gestalt unit. I'll walk you through the instructions. But we need Alibi in that damn suit.”

“Oh.” L33t felt foolish. “So I don't have to rebuild her like you did?”

The Kathryn duplicate had a good line in eye-rolling. “Well, duh. I wasn't going to put you through that.”

L33t nodded. “Coolness. So, what do I do first?”

“Well, first, you need to go into the base and get some stuff that we're going to need …”

<><>

Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown

“All right, dissolve the foam.”

It had taken a little while to clear non-essential personnel from the building and lock it down, but Rebecca wasn't taking any chances. If the intruder was someone like Pretender, who could 'ride' people from point to point, she wanted everyone watching everyone else. But everything was in place now. She'd wanted to be on the spot when the foam dissolved to reveal the infiltrator, but the PRT commander had insisted that she was too important to put into harm's way. And so, she was sitting in an office, one floor up, with a bank of screens showing the CCTV views of the area, and a microphone to give orders. It wasn't perfect, but she'd managed with worse.

On the screen, a trooper aimed a long spray-nozzle at the mass of yellow containment foam. A fog billowed out, causing the foam to dissolve into slime that oozed toward the floor. It was going to take a little while, but Rebecca was a patient woman. The last thing she wanted was for Grant to slip away because they were too hasty in their actions.

The first person they came across was the guard. He was doing as he'd been trained, lying flat before the foam had a chance to solidify, thus maximising comfort. Once he was free, he scrambled to his feet and stepped out of the way. Another trooper with a smaller spray canister worked him over from head to foot, relieving him of the last remnants of the foam, before he was escorted to Master/Stranger holding. Like West, he would be thoroughly processed before being allowed back on duty. And if he was somehow now the new host to the Stranger, then they'd find that out as well.

Foot by foot, yard by yard, they cleared the foam from the vault. Rebecca found herself leaning toward the screen, eyes searching for any sign of Kathryn Grant.

Her phone rang. Irritably she picked it up, to find that Roberts was calling her. Without taking her eyes off the screen, she answered it. “What is it?” she asked testily.

“Ma'am, I just got a call on Deputy Director West's private line. The lady identified herself as Kathryn Grant and apologised for sleeping in. She said she was getting ready to come in as soon as possible.”

Rebecca froze. “What's the status of the team that was dispatched to her home?”

“Thirty seconds out, ma'am,” he replied promptly. Of course he would've checked on that. “Orders?”

Her mind went into high gear, connecting the dots with lightning speed. There were two major possibilities here. One was that Kathryn Grant was a bald-faced infiltrator with a Mover rating, who was trying to cover her tracks with the story that she'd been sleeping in all this time. The second was that she'd been somehow cloned or otherwise copied and kept in a somnolent condition while the clone entered the building and carried out its mission.

“Put a slowdown on that,” she ordered. “Tell them to surround the house and apprehend her if she tries to leave, but not to effect a dynamic entry just yet. There's a chance she's innocent in all this.” Especially since her perfect memory had just thrown up another instance of someone who made use of a near-perfect body double to appear to be in two places at once. What does Taylor Hebert have to do with all this, if anything?

“Yes, ma'am,” he replied. She hung up the call, eyes still fixed on the screen. As she watched, the last of the foam was broken down into sludge, showing that the vault was otherwise empty. Another memory popped up, of Armsmaster's report from the aftermath of Lung's capture. Hax had been on a rooftop with several others, tentatively identified as Über and L33t, as well as the Undersiders. Though his visor had been mostly covered with containment foam, Armsmaster had said that he'd seen Hax disappear from sight into a doorway that wasn't there.

She's got access to some kind of portal tech, which means that they could've pulled whoever went in there out again, with nobody the wiser. “Get that vault checked out,” she ordered crisply. “I want to know what's missing, if anything. Also I want the recordings from all available cameras plus any and all sensors connected to that vault routed to this workstation stat.”

Someone had just played her for a fool, and she was pretty sure she knew who it was. Once she had any kind of proof, she was going to land on them with both feet. Staying hands-off with a cape suspected to be valuable in Endbringer fights was one thing, but that did not mean she should let them infiltrate the PRT with impunity. At the very least, Taylor Hebert required a reality check.

<><>

Lt Daniel Edwards, PRT

Outside Kathryn Grant's Residence

“Hold … hold … she's coming out now.”

All the way over in the back of the APC, Edwards had been psyching himself up for whatever they might run into. A Master controlling the Deputy Director's executive assistant, a Stranger who might try to cut and run at the first opportunity … there were a dozen different possible scenarios. None of them had included a woman who simply walked out of her front door into the arms of two PRT troopers.

He watched her open her mouth to scream, then pause, obviously recognising his armour insignia. “”Lieutenant!” she called.

“Ear protection,” he subvocalised to the rest of the squad. “If I start acting hinky, foam me down.” He waited until he'd received a round of 'Roger' before he stepped forward. “Yes, Ms Grant?”

“Recognition code Delta Delta Myrddin Kyushu,” she said clearly.

At this point, he was almost certain it was the woman herself. An imposter, or a Mastered puppet, wouldn't know the codes. But there were still procedures to follow. “Papa Foxtrot Legend Ellisburg,” he responded. “We're going to need to search your home. Is there anyone in there?”

“Nobody that I know of,” she replied. Once again, he was impressed by her coolness under pressure. “Am I compromised?”

“Master/Stranger screening,” he advised her. “That's all I'm allowed to say.”

“Understood. I'm going to stop talking now.” Deliberately, she took her hand from her purse and dropped both it and her house keys on the doorstep. Turning her back to the troopers, she placed her hands up against the door and assumed the position.

Edwards keyed his radio. “Thompson, Fairleigh, frisk her and secure her. Don't take any chances but don't be too rough; she knows we're the good guys and she's going to cooperate. Leigh, Harris, Bannon, Stark, make sure the house is empty, then secure it for the tech boys. Don't touch anything.”

As his men jumped to obey, he kept a lookout all around, but he suspected that all the action here was done. But he had a duty to do his job properly, and that was what he was going to do.

<><>

Taylor

The truck had made enough twists and turns that I wasn't really sure where I was. Not that I was really worried about that; over the course of the ride, while I chatted to L33t, I'd been steadily draining Victor's pool of accumulated skills. He had a lot of them, and his power helpfully informed me which ones had been learned naturally, which ones were entirely stolen, and which were a mix. The irony here was that anything I took from him that he hadn't spent the time to learn the hard way, he would lose for good. Ordinarily, stolen skills came back relatively quickly, between retraining and falling back on the memory of learning them the first time. But without those memories, Victor was crap out of luck. I tried not to snicker at the thought.

He may have caught me at it, but one of the first skills I'd eroded over the course of the truck ride was his ingrained paranoia and caution. That had taken a little time, but it had been worth it, because the second skill I'd drawn down was the ability to keep his mouth shut. Boasting was universal, after all. Everyone liked to make themselves look smarter and more important than they really were. It only took a few questions after that to learn that they were taking me to an abandoned warehouse, and to get details of the precautions they'd taken to ensure that I couldn't rescue myself quite as easily as I'd done with Coil.

The interior of the truck grew darker just before the truck pulled to a halt. “We're here,” Victor announced. “Out you get, girl.”

Obediently, I got out of the truck. As I'd suspected, we were now in a warehouse, with a big roller-door that was squeaking and squealing its way shut behind us. Outside, I caught a glimpse of a gate being closed outside the warehouse. That'll be the electric fence. Then my power grabbed my attention and tugged me around to look at the people now approaching us. Kaiser and Hookwolf were easy to identify as they were both covered in metal, as were Menja and Fenja because they were both about fifteen feet tall. The rest I tentatively identified as Stormtiger, Cricket, Othala and Alabaster.

Well, holy crap-balls. Victor had said there'd be capes here to give a warm welcome to Hax when she showed up to rescue me, so I'd figured I'd have a few powers to play with. He hadn't said anything about a buffet.

<><>

Inside Pwnage Pocket Dimension Base

L33t

“Will you hurry up?” fretted Über. “They've had Taylor for ages now. God knows what they'll do to her if we don't rescue her.”

“It's been fifteen minutes,” L33t said absently. Carefully, he fitted the mechanical skull on to Alibi's body. “They've got Taylor as bait for Hax, not because they know she's Hax. She's more valuable to them unhurt.” The neck joint clicked into place, and indicator LEDs flared to life over the top of the cranium. Oh, good. That works.

For years, L33t had been resigned to having his tech fall apart at the worst possible moment. This reputation preceded him, perhaps a little unfairly. The very few Tinkers he'd met as a villain had been leery of letting him even handle their work, for fear that his bad luck would somehow infect them.

And then, Taylor joined the team and everything changed. Technically, she was using his power, but she still got him to assist with her Tinkering, and helped him with his work in return. His rate of catastrophic failure had dropped all the way to zero, and she was available to help fix any blunders he did make. Until now. Now, she needed him to put together Tinkertech she'd made, and he needed to get it right, first time.

Like Über, he was of course concerned over Taylor's well-being, but it would help neither of them if he screwed this up and they weren't able to come rescue her. So he was literally doing this by the numbers.

“Okay, next step.” He consulted the carefully written instructions that he'd had Taylor recite, then go over word for word until he'd been certain he knew what to do. “Clear brain memory cache of current imprint.” There was a port in the back of the head, with a recessed button on either side. Hax had told him it was possible to use Alibi's gestalt to overwrite Kathryn Grant's imprint, but that way led to the possibility of minor quirks cropping up later on. It was safer to do a complete wipe. Carefully, he plugged in the gestalt storage, then used his thumbs to press both recessed buttons at once. This wouldn't work at all if the storage wasn't plugged in, thankfully enough. The last thing they needed was to have Alibi fall over because she got tapped in the wrong place in the back of the head.

He watched as the lights on Alibi's skull blinked in sequence, starting at all green, and eventually going to all red. The artificial larynx spoke two words in a soft, impersonal voice: “Hello, world.”

“That's good, isn't it?” asked Über. “Is that good?”

“It's perfect.” L33t smiled. “That means it's ready for me to do the installation.” He re-checked the list of instructions, even though he was pretty sure he had them committed to memory by now. “Okay, this one might take a few minutes. Alibi's pretty damn complex.” Taking careful hold of the gestalt recording device, he pressed the button on the end. Green LEDs began to dance along the length of it. If he knew his binary, the code they were spelling out indicated that this would take some time.

Hold on, Taylor. We're going as fast as we can.

<><>

Alexandria

Safely secluded away from prying eyes, it had only taken Rebecca about thirty seconds to go over the data at maximum playback speed. Then she sat back with her eyes closed, analysing it frame by frame. Not only had 'Kathryn Grant' (she was almost certain now that it had been a Hax-style body double in the elevator with her, though controlled by Hax rather than Grant) vanished from the vault just as the foam was coming down, but three drawers of Endbringer material had also been relieved of their contents at the same time. A total of 42.5165 pounds of the most expensively-won substance on the face of the Earth had gone missing, from the most secure holding the PRT could devise.

Not quite at the same time, she noted. Two drawers had been emptied while 'Kathryn Grant' had been scuffling with the guard—and, she noted, displaying CQC skills above the rating that Ms Grant had on her dossier. The floor sensors had ceased to register her weight just as the foam began to dispense from the nozzles. Visual imagery showed her falling toward the floor of the vault at that moment … or perhaps falling through it? If a portal opened up under her feet … The Endbringer material had vanished from the third drawer just after the foam had filled the vault, a good second after 'Kathryn Grant' fell through the portal, if that was what she'd done.

Opening her eyes, Rebecca studied the frozen image on the screen, of Kathryn Grant putting a trained PRT soldier on the floor with a picture-perfect throw. It had almost been the ideal heist. The perpetrator had gotten away with the goods, with no obvious way to track her down. Had they pulled it off so nobody even knew the Endbringer material was gone until someone looked, that would've been perfection. But it wasn't.

<><>

An Extremely Anonymous Abandoned Warehouse in the Docks

Hookwolf

“Hey.”

Bradley looked around. It was the kid in the cage who’d spoken. The one Victor had snatched from the Boardwalk, Taylor something or other. He didn’t give half a shit about her, either which way. She was just a means to an end, and that end was all about showing Hax why mouthy bitches didn’t talk trash about the Empire.

Her voice was muffled because of the bag over her head. He wasn’t sure how she’d even known he was there, or why they hadn’t gagged her. But there was no real harm in seeing what she wanted. “What’s up, kid?”

“Do I really have to have my hands tied?” She didn’t sound petulant or whiny. She didn’t sound like a kid at all. What she sounded like was someone trying to hold on to their patience despite assholes pissing her off. Bradley knew that feeling. It made up most of his day.

“Sorry, kid,” he grunted. “If we did that, you might take the bag off. Don’t want Hax figuring out who she’s looking for straight off the bat, right?” It made sense to him, anyway.

“Oh, okay,” she said agreeably. “But you know I wouldn't do that anyway, right?”

“Well, no, but that's the orders Kaiser gave and I've gotta follow orders,” he pointed out. “Soon as we've got Hax locked down, we'll untie you and let you go.”

“So you're not going to hurt me?” She sounded hopeful.

“'Course not,” he scoffed. “You're just a little girl. It's not like you're a danger to the Empire or anything.” The whole idea was ridiculous.

“And what about Hax?” she asked. “Does she get to walk away, too?”

“Fuck, no.” He cracked his knuckles. “We're gonna fuck her up good. Nobody fucks with the Empire like that and gets away with it.”

“Oh, okay. Well, thanks for talking to me.”

“No problem. Just hang tight. This'll all be over soon.” Sweet kid. Polite, too. Pity she had to be pulled into this shit. Turning, he went to walk away, and nearly tripped. “Christ!”

“Want to watch it,” she said helpfully. “The floor's rough around there.”

“Oh, right, thanks.” He headed off, hoping nobody had seen his near-pratfall. Nice kid. Maybe I should pass the word to try and recruit her.

<><>

Alexandria

For most people, this would've been the end of the line as far as the investigation went. The thread, pulled free, led to no more data. But Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown wasn't most people. She was singular. She was unique.

Back in her office, leaving Roberts to run West's desk until he was cleared (which she was certain he would be, along with the real Kathryn Grant, and the guard that the fake Grant had floored) Rebecca booted up her computer and entered her security code.

She'd been over the sensor readings of the transmissions to and from the vault. These had been what tripped the security alert in the first place, but it seemed that all they had were sidebands. The vault was supposed to be shielded from most normal communication channels. Tinkertech, of course, sneered at 'normal'; for all she knew, the signal had utilised gravitic wave propagation or magnetic field interference. Whatever it was, the shielding had been almost but not quite good enough to block it, so the signal strength had been raised, thus generating the sidebands, which had in turn tripped the security sensors. Unfortunately, even the most careful scrutiny failed to pick up enough data from the sidebands to reconstitute the original transmissions, so she had to go with a brute force method. Brute force, as it happened, was something she was quite good at.

Hax, she knew, was Taylor Hebert. However, the girl had shown herself to be quite adept at distancing herself from her crimes. Her two compatriots, rather less so. Before the team of Über and L33t had become Pwnage, the not-so-dynamic duo had been captured on more than one occasion. As was the practice, their identities had not been made public, and of course they'd broken out of the minimum-security holding into which they'd been placed. As almost painfully stereotypical supervillains, they never hurt anyone badly. Their crimes were flashy, and usually ended with them either running away or being apprehended yet again. Paradoxically, this meant they'd never be in danger of being Birdcaged. They made supervillains seem funny and silly and almost safe, which was the view Cauldron wanted to promote. The last thing anyone in power wanted was a public backlash against villains in particular and capes in general.

Now, of course, they'd undergone a severe competence upgrade. It was taking some longer than others to understand the fact that Pwnage was a force to be reckoned with, but Rebecca had seen that from the start. Of course, the Triumvirate were also a force to be reckoned with, and it was about time Taylor Hebert recognised that fact.

With her clearance, Rebecca had no problem accessing the files belonging to Über and L33t; she'd set the rules in place herself, after all. While she'd never actually had a good reason to view their mugshots before now, this was as good a time as any. Taylor Hebert's face, of course, she knew.

From there, she logged out of the PRT database and began a search of an entirely different type. Once Lung had been captured, the location of their hideout had been blown, so they'd need a new base of operations. It was possible that they'd simply taken over another abandoned location, so she instituted a search for any alterations in the power drain across Brockton Bay's electricity grid, starting from two weeks ago. Nothing seemed to jump out at her, and the search was taking its own sweet time to gather all its data, so she moved to plan B.

Plan B involved hacking into every single security camera and ATM camera across the city. It was a staggering task; or at least, it would have been, if she didn't have access to the world's greatest hacker. Sending an email to Dragon resulted in, shortly after, tens of thousands of adult male facial images being dumped into her inbox.

It didn't take long for her to write a script that took each picture and flashed it up on the screen for a tenth of a second. If Über or L33t had passed by even one security camera in that time, she'd know about it. The more cameras they came into contact with, the tighter the circle she could draw around their location.

This sort of search, of course, was entirely unconstitutional and illegal in several ways. Not to mention the fact that it absolutely shattered the so-called 'unwritten rules' that were bandied about among the street-level capes. But with the fate of the world at stake, Rebecca had never worried about such trivial things as laws, much less agreements of convenience.

The script began its work, flashing a never-ending stream of images on her screen. On and on the progression of images went, hundreds and thousands of them.

There. Her finger stabbed out and paused the lineup. Scrolling back up, she selected the image of Über and put it aside. The next one was L33t, and then Über again. Then she had a rash of them.

By the time she finished, she had a whole series of hits based around a certain area. It wasn't conclusive data regarding an address, but she still had the power spikes to look into.

The map refreshed itself, and she did indeed pick up a mild power spike right in the middle of the area she'd located. But, interestingly enough, she also noticed that electricity use had jumped hard in one particular location in the Docks, just about the time when the heist was ongoing in the secure storage vault. Rebecca was not a person given to believe in coincidence. Her smile became something that a shark might wear while closing in on an unwary swimmer. So you've got an apartment and an offsite base. Clever. Well, you're not clever enough.

And that was when the Endbringer alarm went off.

<><>

Über

Fully aware he was hovering like a mother hen, Über pulled himself away from L33t's side. It was nerve-wracking, being able to do nothing until Alibi was ready for action. They had no idea about where Taylor was, or how many capes they'd be facing, or anything, really. It would be inside a warehouse, there would be other capes there, and there'd be an electric fence outside. That was the sum total of his knowledge.

Seeking something, anything, to distract him, he wandered past the large monitor that served as a repeater screen for the main computer system in the apartment outside. Just as he did so, a window popped up, with a red flashing light on it, while a tone began to sound. This was unusual enough that he looked more closely. Fuuuuuuck.

“Bro!” he called out, sprinting for the entrance. “Get that shit sorted! We got trouble!”

<><>

Taylor

Hm, maybe I overdid it a bit with Hookwolf. I'd been experimenting with drawing down the instinctive skills that everyone learns as they grow up. Balance was a very simple one, and Hookwolf's was now on par with that of a four year old. The draw-down wouldn't last long, because his memories of having learned how to walk without falling over would quickly fill in the gaps once he had a chance to practise again. But in the meantime, he would have a hard time walking and chewing gum. His fighting skills were now likewise woeful, and I'd been hammering on his ingrained habits of suspicion and paranoia, to the point that he was also as gullible as said four year old.

He wasn't my only victim. Victor had fallen prey to his own power, and nearly everything combat-related he'd once known was now something I knew. The funny thing was that he didn't think I knew any worthwhile skills, so he hadn't turned his power on me. In the meantime, between him and the other people I'd been drawing off, I now knew far too many ways to kill someone with my bare hands, and my sense of balance was amazing. I was also hyper-cautious and paranoid to a fault, but in this situation, such traits were actually a bonus. More to the point, I could choose not to use those skills if I wanted to.

Before Hookwolf got out of range, I retracted the razor-steel insectoid mandibles that I'd grown from my mouth to shred my gag, and made sure that the knives I'd generated were hidden up my sleeves. With those blades, I'd be able to murder almost anyone in the room in a spectacularly gory fashion—Victor, Hookwolf and Cricket had known a lot about knife fighting—and I had contingency plans for the ones who fitted in the 'almost' category. Not that I intended to get my hands bloody unless I had to, but I wanted to be able to free myself if necessary, and I couldn't bank on having Kaiser or Hookwolf nearby at the right moment. Although for me, 'nearby' covered quite an area.

Okay, if I've got my timing right, the guys should be bringing Alibi online any moment now.

And that was when the Endbringer sirens went off.

<><>

Simurgh

The Third had targeted many people over the years, usually in order to spread chaos or to ensure that a particular event took place. Rarely had she gone after a specific person with the intent to kill. However, recently she'd noted a potential problem with one specific parahuman in Brockton Bay. Monitoring her activities became problematic, once the parahuman gained access to a time-distortion field and then a pocket universe.

But now the girl in question had access to something that could cause the Third and her brothers serious injury or even death, if she was not stopped. No scenario she could plan allowed either the First or the Second a guaranteed success, so it was up to her.

Arrowing down toward Brockton Bay, on a direct line with one particular teenage girl, the Simurgh had no intention of playing her usual cat and mouse games. While she wouldn't uncover her full potential—worthy opponents, after all, must appear beatable—she would bend all her efforts to one end.

The death of Taylor Hebert.

 Part 32