I turned slightly and was just about to disappear into the black night sky when he interrupted me.
"Hold on! Give your sister a call. She's worried sick. I called her after you and Marty left to see if she'd heard from you. I didn't give her the full details, but my call didn't help her mindset. Call her. Family is important, and I know you don't have as much of it left as you should."
Meredith again. I felt zero desire to put myself back in her zone of control. What Farnell said did sink in a bit, though. Other than one aunt and some cousins I hardly knew, she was the last family I had.
"Thanks, Sheriff. We'll talk soon," I said, and left a plume of snow hanging in the air a moment as I leapt free of the embrace of knee-high snow and streaked northward. I was unfortunately moving far too quickly to see the sheriff's expression as I left.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Searching for a Solution
I'D BEEN IN THE AIR less than a minute when a blue dot appeared to the northeast and Brick spoke.
"I've plotted your return route, Jake. Also, I have a request to make."
"Sure, what's that, Brick?"
"I may be able to determine who removed the stargate materials. I will need your permission to use my computing resources to penetrate various systems connected to the Internet. With luck, we can find evidence of the thieves from in-place surveillance such as security cameras or satellite."
"You mean, you want to go out on the Internet and be a leet haxor? Can you do that?"
"An elite hacker? No. I am an advanced machine intelligence with the ability to trivially break any encryption used on Earth. I will be far more effective than a leet haxor."
"Shit, I'm sold. Why'd you ask for permission?" I asked. It did seem odd. He was usually pretty proactive, only asking for explicit permission for some things.
"What I will do could be construed as a hostile action, or even an act of war. There is also a small element of risk. My Internet connection comes from local mobile phone towers as well as several data satellites. There is a remote possibility that my activity could be traced back to our general area, if not to our actual location."
I had a vision of the FBI showing up and searching hundreds of square miles of wolf-haunted northern Canadian bush for the hacker hiding there. I laughed out loud.
"Hah, don't worry about it, Brick. Try to keep a low profile but do what you need to do. Find us our materials. Hack away, buddy."
"Thank you, Jake. I will hack the planet."
I groaned. I really shouldn't have played Hackers for Metra and Brick.
Not long after, I landed at the cabin and entered the underground outpost. I stepped through the door and into the control center. Marty was up and spun to look at me, his eyes going wide as he took in the intimidating armor. He relaxed immediately once the Interface told him who I was.
"Jake! Cool armor, man! Wow, that's like something out of a comic book."
I willed the suit open and stepped out, leaving it standing there near the door with everything still attached.
"Yeah, it's pretty great. I'm glad you're okay, Marty. I was worried I wasn't going to get you here in time."
"I feel amazing. Better than I ever have in my life. My ribs are healed up too. What happened after I fell in?"
"I fished you out and gave you my parka. You were pretty messed up, completely hypothermic, so I used a couple of food heating pouches to try to keep you from freezing to death. Then I picked you up and ran my ass off to get here before you died."
"Shit, man, thanks. This is super cool, too!" he said, and gestured at empty air. He was pointing at a screen I couldn't see.
"I've got stats! Some dude named Ray welcomed me to the Union. The Interface said he was a tutorial construct, but I could swear he was here in the room with me."
"Ah yes, good old Ray. It didn't strike you odd he was dressed like he was from the 50s?"
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Jake, the Induction tutorial I ran for Marty is from this outpost's library. It was substantially newer than the one on the station, having been updated approximately ten years ago when this outpost still had a connection to the Union communications network."
"Well, that's cool. I guess he didn't answer any questions then?"
"He just said something about no connection and disappeared."
"The same thing happened during my Induction tutorial. I'll have Brick give you some Nanite Clusters for some upgrades. We're pretty flush now. Before that though, let me show you something cool. You'll love it."
I led him down the passageways of the station toward the hangar. He gawked, not having seen anything but the control room. To my eyes these bog-standard Union modules were far from exciting, but to him it was all new and cool.
"This is amazing. We're still on Earth, right?"
"Yeah, we're under my grandpa's cabin."
"I don't remember getting there. I remember the wolves and falling through the ice. It was so damn cold. Not much after that."
"Yeah, that was rough. Anyway, Induction fixes a lot of damage. I'm pretty sure you don't need those glasses anymore, for instance."
Marty took them off, then put them back on again. "Hey, you're right. How did I not notice that? I don't have much of a prescription, but now everything's sharp."
"We're here. Brick, you want to repeat your show for Marty?"
"Of course, Jake," he replied.
The door opened and we walked into darkness. Brick raised the lights, revealing Redemption.
Marty freaked out. "Holy shit! Is that a spaceship? A real spaceship? Can we fly it? Can I sit in it?"
"We can't fly it right now, and yes,
