"This just in..." came from the little portable television Shovels had left behind him. The news was trumpeting this latest disaster, harping on the wanton destruction of private property, the manhandling of the citizenry. One of the men claimed that Lucky had punched him. I snarled under my breath and turned the sound down.
    Scott removed himself from the immediate circle and pulled up our available information on Spyder, having deduced that this was one of Javelin's internal identites. Assassin, some high-level bodyguarding, he comes from nowhere and vanishes, generally leaving a good deal of blood behind him. Javelin would not have the advantage of Spyder's cybernetic augmentation, but he did have many of his skills at his own disposal.
    "Hans, getting into your parents' house is going to mean crossing police lines," Lucky observed. "Do we want to get permission, or do this at night?"
    "Call me Ute," he requested.
    "OK," she agreed.
    "And stop calling yourself part of the Fourth Reich, it's wrong and annoying," Scott added, swiveling part of his liquid form around to rejoin the conversation.
    "It will part of me until the day I day," Ute mumured.
    "Hans—Ute—having spent most of the past two months in a very similar headspace to where you are now... it'll stop," I told him firmly. The more I come to know of this strange segment of humanity I belong to, the more often it occurs to me that I have little to complain about where my own life is concerned. It could have been a lot worse.
    "Head space?"
    "State of mind. Just... grit your teeth and it'll be over eventually."
    He looked up with renewed energy. "First I must wring my brother's neck."
    "We'll be happy to help. So what have we got?"
    "Poughkeepsie, Hans' parents..." Lucky recounted. "I'd say Hans' parents are a priority."
    "The man who impersonated the MEDUSA agent worked at a building downtown, could find an address for the name he was using?" Ute suggested. Scott looked it up, found the home address that went with the name Kymrik had used. "We should investigate, but I should not be the one to knock on the door. They'd be less likely to shoot the rest of you on sight."
    "We should go check it out," Scott agreed. "We should wait until dark." Full darkness is not his best environment, but it would be easier for the rest of us, and easier for him to remain hidden.
    "I need to call Mr. Taurus and see if he got that package," I realized out loud. "Might as well work on more than one thing at a time."
    "Help me think like somebody with military training," Scott suggested to Hans. "I'm assuming that Javelin broke out of the institution because somebody finally used him and they're going to cut him off as a potential backtrail. Not wanting to be dead, he left. I'm also assuming that he's going to consider the lawyer a piece of personal pleasure rather than active problem, so he's going to back-burner that while he deals with the active threat."
    "Which is?" I inquired semi-rhetorically, still trying to come to grips with the robot's rapid evolution over the past two weeks.
    "The people who want him dead."
    "If I were him, I would go to a fortifiable position," Ute suggested.
    "But they're going to predict that," Lucky countered.
    "If he ties himself down a position they can try and find him, and he doesn't have resources," Scott kept on, almost to himself. "He's going to keep moving, and he's going to attack. We need to figure out where."
    "If we knew where, that would be just great," I agreed cheerfully.
    "Either we can figure out where he's going to attack, which I have certain problems with because I have no idea who," Scott conceded, "or we can wait until he kills somebody and use this as a point of information. I don't really like that."

[Perspective switch: K. Robeson Enterprises]

    Lucky's phone rang; I heard a brief, quiet conversation punctuated by curses.
    "Oh, fuck," Lucky repeated, hanging up.
    "What was that all about?" I asked.
    "Vincent's got Scott's brother. Or is Scott's brother, I don't know."
    "Lovely," I managed after a moment.
    "He just came for me at Robeson and either was very unhappy with the job his employees were doing, or they weren't his employees. They're dead. I take it he wants to see me."
    "Hand vote?" I requested. "That can wait." We had a kidnapping to deal with, and if he'd had the gall to come knocking at our door, artificial body or no, it would probably do the man good to stew for a while.
    "Why, so he can kill more people?" she challenged. "I know where he lives."
    "Lucky, if you kill him again, that's really going to look bad. No offense."
    "This time we'll prove that he's a cybernetic organism."
    "Hey!" Scott objected.
    "That's not against the law," I reminded her.
    "At any rate, Im going to give him a call."
    "Okay," I surrendered.
    "Maybe he just wants me to work for him again."
    "Let's hope so."
    More breaking news caught our attention. The police had just raided a weapons transfer point used by smugglers with ties to organized crime, this as part of the police department's ongoing operations based on information provided to them by confidential sources. The bust was pointed to as proof that the police are perfectly capable of handling these matters, without needing the aid of "superpowered, bloodthirsty mercenaries." Said bloodthirsty mercenary, who happened to also be the confidential source just mentioned, swore violently.
    "Now if we just had Reilly, so he could tell them..." she muttered.
    "The only person with any real chance of contacting him refuses to do so," Scott accused me.
    "I don't know where he is!" I replied, startled.
    "He's in Chicago. How hard can it be to find someone as rich as his wife? Start with four and five star hotels."
    "Okay, okay," I growled after a moment. I could think of few conversations I'd enjoy less, after that last one, but I appeared to be outvoted. "Jesus Christ. Let me call Taurus, and I'll call Winters and see if she knows where he—"
    "Don't call Winters."
    "Why not?" I didn't want to spend the afternoon calling every hotel in Chicago.
    "Because while I don't actually distrust her, I was wondering if her phone might be bugged. It could be entirely coincidental, there might be other sources of all the information, but...."
    "Hm. Oh, Lucky, she's calmed down, so if you wanted to talk to her. She was just caught off guard, last time."
    "Should I talk to her in person, or over the phone?"
    "I don't know if it would be a good idea for you to walk into the police station right now."
    "I mean, to set up something for later."
    "Then you'd have to talk to her on the phone to do that, wouldn't you."
    Hans' phone rang as she removed herself to the outer tunnel to place her own call.

[Perspective switch: Promethean]

    "Do I need to ask who that was?" I asked after he hung up. Hans looked shaken. "Hello?" I waved a hand before his eyes.

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