Chapter 89

I'd skipped lunch during out hot pursuit of the data from Roberto's laundry operation. Mrs. Trinh had left a note saying she was off shopping, so I pigged out on leftovers I found in the fridge, then cleaned up after myself. I wanted to go for a run, to burn off some of my nervous energy, but the perimeter of the property was not a safe place right now. There were holes, trenches and heavy equipment all over the place. Instead I hit the treadmill and ran hard for half an hour, then I got on the inclined bench and did a quick hundred sit ups.

By the time I was done with a shower and back in the cavern, Net had more information for us on that new phone.

"The phone belongs to a young woman named Reyna Gomez. She lives in an apartment leased to Roberto Montoya, and paid for using funds I'm able to trace to the laundry books," I saw the pertinent lines flash on the display.

"She's a girlfriend then?" I guessed. "Do we have any of their phone conversations in our data?"

"Only two," he said. The two calls were interesting, in that Reyna did most of the talking. Pleading more accurately described it. She was vague in her demands and Roberto was noncommittal in his replies.

"She's a junkie," Harley came forward to say. "I've heard that type of neediness before. She's strung out and looking for a fix."

"I think Harley's right," I said. "She'll probably be willing to spill the beans to anyone willing to take care of that need."

We flagged the data showing the phone and lease for Reyna's apartment, and then let Net begin the transfer of the entire laundry data store to the MHR central data system. While it was transferring, I walked around the room restlessly.

"I wish we could add a note to this, connecting the dots," I said internally, sighing as I did.

"Why can''t we?" Bud asked.

"How would I sign it?" I asked. "Even if I had a super hero name, which I don't, it wouldn't mean anything to anyone yet.

"I have a suggestion," Harley said in our heads.

"What?" Bud asked.

Well, I really like the looks of those deep blue lines that show up when the exoskeleton kicks in. I've been calling that shade cobalt blue, so...

"Cobalt!" I anticipated. "Yes!" He echoed.

"I like it," Bud said. It's even a bit misleading, which is good."

"All right!" I cheered. "World, say hello to Cobalt!" I laughed at that, but then had a thought.

"What about my voice?"

"Your voice?" Bud asked.

"When I'm in the suit, being Cobalt, and I talk, will I sound like me? I shouldn't sound like myself."

"Ahh, that's true," Bud and I thought about it.

"Net's voice would be good," Harley suggested. "He even does accents," that was in reference to Net's spoken translations of Roberto and Paco's phone calls. He'd employed different voices for each speaker, and until Harley mentioned it, I hadn't noticed that the voices had typical Spanish accents.

"Having that real-time translation trick would be handy too," I sighed. Could we steal Net's abilities and get him to come live in our suit?"

"There should be no need," Bud said. "With the extra room in the new suit, we were able to add a great deal of computational power. More than enough to implement a system similar to Net's translation and verbalization modules."

"Great, how long will it take to implement?"

"Oh, almost no time at all," Bud laughed. "Net is downloading the configuration information now and the on board AI is reconfiguring itself as we speak."

"Too bad Cobalt doesn't have a nifty symbol to represent it," Harley laughed. "it would look funny having a big blue 'Co' on the chest of the suit."

"What about two concentric circles," Bud suggested, with the outer circle missing an arc segment that makes it resemble a 'C'?"

"That would be perfect," I said, watching a visual representation flash onto a mockup of the suit on Net's display. The image showed the symbol glowing blue in the same way the webbed lines of the exoskeleton did when it was powered up.

"It would be good if the symbol could be lit up separately from the exoskeleton, and not lit up when we needed to be stealthy."

"Of course," Bud said. "Minor modifications. We could do that now, if you wanted.

Of course we wanted. I took the suit off and laid it out on the table where we usually did our work. Bud, happily back in my head was able to guide the new operation, which truly was a trivial application of some of the modified Kinetex. We were done in ten minutes. At the same time, Net and the suit AI had finished their modifications.

I put the suit back on, hood up and ready to go. I reformed my mirror and took a look. I impressed myself. The suit made me a six foot, eight inch herculean visage of alien might and mystery.

"This is Cobalt! Drop your weapons and put your hands in the air!" I said inside the suit. Outside the suit a voice much deeper and more impressive than my own said the same thing. It sounded like one of those guys who does movie trailer voice overs, or that guy who says 'Get ready to rumble!' - a real stentorian announcer's voice.

"Oh that's good," I chuckled. "That voice definitely says superhero."

"With a capital S," Harley teased with a Superman reference.

"We've got a high degree of confidence in my abilities," I said out loud a bit later. "We've got a super suit that kick's ass and our own crack surveillance and monitoring wizard in Net. We've got Bug out in the field doing close observation. We've sent the laundry computer information to MRH."

"It's begun," Bud agreed with where I was going with my little speech.

Net told us the download hadn't been noticed by anyone at MHR yet.

"We're making our first real moves as a superhero. I guess it's time to get obvious about it, but how? Adding a note to the date won't get it noticed any sooner."

"We could send a copy to the police," Bud suggested.