Chapter 79

The suit AI told me as soon as I had the hood on that the Net had a projected path of travel for us. With the hood up and the HUD working, Harley lifted us up and into the air from the back edge of the property. We followed the slope of the ridge until we were fifty feet from the top, then hugged it, following it north and east, before breaking over the ridge and moving even further north at higher speed. It was exhilarating to 'see' the ground rushing by beneath us.

The clear area the 'Net' had given us, the term the suit used to refer to the computer back in the cavern and the network of piggy backed satellites and communication systems, was north of the Austin Creek State Park, buried deep in the tangled hills and mountains between Walbridge Ridge and Vulture Ridge.

I spent five hours running, jumping and rolling at first. I probably looked like the worlds strangest gymnast doing a floor routine. The important part was learning to judge what those actions meant, powered by the suit, and how applying different levels of power changed things sometimes slightly and sometimes drastically.

I also got to unleash some serious Tk devastation for the first time. I made myself what I thought of as an apple peel Frisbee, made of a string of silicon molecules shaped like a loose coil, held in lock by my Tk ability. I whipped that around and through a couple of small trees, and it shredded them, very quickly and very thoroughly. It had the added benefit of being relatively quiet. When I started flinging rocks and small boulders at some other trees, it was considerably noisier, if not somehow more spectacular, as the trees exploded from the force of the impact.

"Wow!" I commented finally. All I got in response was a chuckle from Bud.

"Let's try something new," he suggested a few minuted later.

"Okay, I'm game," I agreed.

"Walk over to that tree," he said, the HUD highlighting a tree with a considerably larger diameter than the ones we'd been playing with so far. I did as requested.

"Make me a cylinder this size, one molecule thick," Bud asked, the HUD again giving me the information I needed.

"Out of anything in particular?" I asked.

"Whatever you want."

I took the lazy way out and reshaped the silicon molecules of my frisbee into the shape requested. I wound up with a cylinder 5 inches in diameter and about three feet long.

"How's that?"

"Fine," Bud replied in his usual dry tone. "Now, push that cylinder through that tree trunk until the end is just sticking out the other end."

I did. There was very little resistance. The cells of the tree were cut very cleanly by the sub-microscopic edge of my cylinder.

"Now, close the far end of your cylinder." I did what was asked once again.

"Now draw the cylinder back through the tree until it is free of the tree."

I did, and of course it brought the cylinder of wood it had cut with it. There was now a five inch diameter hole through the heart of the tree. I eyed the landscape beyond through the hole.

"Cool," I said, impressed with what I'd just done.

"That would work just as easily on a steel beam or concrete wall," Bud observed.

Wow. I guess I could see where that would come in handy. It could also be lethal.

We worked one more hour; again jumping, flying and running. This time I concentrated on making myself weapons quickly from whatever I could find at hand as I moved. It was both easier and harder than I thought it would be. There was always air, so at a minimum I always had those building blocks of nitrogen, oxygen and argon. On top of that, well, if there was free water somewhere, I had water molecules. Dirt, dust, anything else loose and laying around had some sort of potential. I even found a few discarded aluminum cans here and there to reshape to my will.

When we were done, I spent a little time making sure none of the trees I'd wreaked havoc on were left in any condition to leave questions beyond 'who cut this tree down?'. One of those aluminum cans became a shredder like you couldn't imagine, turning the tree remnants into dust so fine as to be impossible to even detect, let alone identify.

Wednesday morning. I woke up with Kelli in my thoughts, and not just because of the family dinner that night. I let the thoughts of Kelli subside in the shower, along with the evidence of her presence in my thoughts that I'd woken up with.

Breakfast was eggs, bacon and a cinnamon roll that would have made the folks in the food court at the mall jealous. If Mrs. Trinh kept feeding me like this, I was going to have to start exercising more.

I called Kelli after breakfast and we had a little phone snuggling – it couldn't have been considered more than that, but I felt like we were closer when we hung up. From there it was down to the basement and into the cavern. The Net, as even I was starting to think of it, had quite a bit of information for me. I began to pour over it, marking bits of information, flagging locations for Net to keep an eye on via the super-satellite system.

The names were a mix of familiar and not. The most frequent names, among those who seemed to have some power within the gangs I had Net monitoring, were Ya Ya Marchiria, Paco Serna and Manuel Pulido. Of those three, Paco Serna was the most intriguing to me. Marchiria kept showing up as some sort of muscle or ultimate enforcer. Pulido only showed up in the news when Serna was mentioned. Serna was never in the story, only referred to.