Dammit, again.
    At least we had a prisoner. It was Power Line again. Apparently he can generate a strong enough static field around his body to keep him from actually touching other objects, like the ground, which explains his odd motion earlier. I kept a careful grip as we descended, then handed him over to the police. Albert brushed himself off and accompanied him into the back of a van. I'm not sure what he did, not sure I want to know, but he got answers.
    The gang's headquarters, he said, was in an old chemical factory about twenty miles north of town. He also mentioned an inventor named Jeffrey Scott, who is apparently in charge of the state-changing android, but may be a dupe. Owen seemed pretty contemptuous of him.
    Lucky casually jumped the seven stories to the ground and used her staff to absorb the impact, then headed for Taurus. She was halfway there when it occurred to her that, battered as they were, TECH would not be likely to attack anyplace else that night, and headed back to rejoin the rest of us.
    I stared thoughtfully at the wide-open doors of Renaissance Technologies, pondering the chance of getting some answers of my own, but then Albert climbed out of the van to update us and Reilly showed up.
    "Hey, we ran a trace on that wagon you saw, found an owner J. Scott, and a place," he started to say.
    "Old chemical factory north of town?" I finished for him.
    Blink. "Well, excuse me while I feel fuckin' redundant."
    Another pleasant note in our duet of the past months. "You're not redundant. Guys?"
    After a few minutes of discussion we decided to go in guns blazing. Most of them had been wounded to some degree, and probably wouldn't expect that we could find them so quickly. The old factory was isolated and quiet when we arrived, a few lights showing but no noise. Phoenix Talon was with us in spirit as we charged and burst in on a confused and crowded scene.
    Everyone was in a relatively small, glass-walled office off of the main floor. Most of the gang was ranged over near one wall in a line. The silver wave had caught up another man and was carrying him toward the door. A confused free-for-all resulted. Albert went for the man who had attacked him earlier, creating a personal illusion of a wall of the silver beings (plus slavering wolf-faces) to bedevil him. The man reacted by spraying the area with bullets. The woman with the jet-wings took off into the rafters; since she could outrun all of us we let her go. The silver thing seemed intent on getting its burden away; when Lucky raised her staff to attack it, it lifted the man out of range of her blow and surged on. She hesitated uncertainly; when it didn't attack her she turned her attention back to the ongoing battle.
    Only one of the gang really seemed to keep his head. He shouted "Omega Three!" and put a helmet on. Not too much later the bombs began going off. Albert, unprotected, sprinted for safety as the building shook and began coming down from the force of the blasts. One of the other men went down through the floor; the remaining one simply curled up to ride it out. Lucky helped me fend off debris until things had settled, leaving us buried but alive—again. At least this time it wasn't as cold.
    "Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into," I sighed.
    "Uh-huh. Shield me? I'd rather not use the stick, I might bring it all down on us."
    "Right." We dug out in short order—we work reasonably well together, it's only during our off hours that she gets on my nerves. And vice versa, I suppose.
    Albert lay unconscious on the ground nearby; I didn't find any sign of mortal wounding, but the other man, the one the blob had rescued, was in pretty bad shape. Both of his legs had been crushed from the knees down. Lucky tourniqueted the wounds while we waited for the ambulances. I got Albert to come to after a while; he was badly bruised and dazed but otherwise unhurt.
    Lucky talked to the silver thing. It told her that it was a multi-purpose robot built of Plovian superconducting metal with a suspended neural network brain. (Wow.) However self-aware the thing was, it didn't seem to have been so for long, and its attention was focused entirely on its injured creator. It retrieved Mr. Guiliani's stolen objects when she asked for them, and when the police arrived it obediently accompanied them into a van.
    [Albert went home, drank half a bottle of Cognac to wash down his Tylenol (tm) and went to bed. Lucky woke up Chandler and asked him to look over the letters for references to her mother. ("You know the worst thing? Having a precognitive dream that someone's going to show up, and then waking up fifteen minutes before they get there. Coffee?") They turned out to be letters from his wife.]
    I followed them to the police station and found the robot in a holding cell, but the door was open; there wouldn't have been much point to locking it in. Reilly looked up from a stack of paperwork when I came in.

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