While the Bosonic Man sniped at belt packs, the rest of us headed upstairs to try to disinfect the one up by the ship. The wall to one side exploded and revealed seven more of them nearer at hand. Thunderbolt sucked the blue energy out of them.
    "My god, it's Power! Run!" one of the newly freed people yelled, and they began stampeding away.
    "Stop!" he commanded. They were fleeing; they were not threats—unlike the woman standing nearby, who had abilities that might damage his organic host. Situation untenable, too many threats. Escape and disappear—once these nearby threats had been dealt with.... He gritted his teeth and regained control, expelled the Power energy into the closest inanimate object.
    Meanwhile, Ezra found one of the nurse-Powers who was some distance away from the others and put up a wall between her and the others. With no threat in sight, the blue subsided. "Turn your force belt off, please. I'm a friend. Turn your force belt off. In the name of love."
    "What? Who are you?"
    "I'm a friend. You're in severe danger. A friend. Please, just turn the force belt off."
    She did so.
    "Okay. Turn to your right and very quickly come here." When they were insubstantial face to somewhat startled face he asked, "Is there a room near here?" He found one occupied by an unconscious man with a heart monitor on him. "Take care of this guy, don't make a sound, I'm going to shut the door. Don't turn your force belt back on. Everything will be fine, stay calm. Trust me, it will be for everybody's good." She shut and locked the door behind him; he hoped she would be safe in there until she could be properly disinfected.
    Another dozen of them burst out from one of the stairwell doors, coming up from below. And these seemed to have coordinated their actions somehow, although that fell apart when they reached the nurses' station. We had nineteen Powers to deal with in the vicinity now, and they were ripping the place apart. As we skidded to a halt we heard Stephanie yelling from above, "The roof's exploding! I'm pretty sure that's not good!"
    The one up top could probably wait a few more minutes.
    Ezra went on with his sniping, which probably stopped them from getting onto the roof, if only because they considered him a nearby threat that needed to be eliminated, though mostly they were hitting each other and blowing out sections of wall. He took apart some more wall himself and built the particles into a large figure with a sword right in the middle of them, drawing an astonishing amount of power blast fire.
    Cockatrice and I flew along behind Thunderbolt, ready to provide backup. As we passed an intersection we saw a man standing some way along, surrounded by unconscious or possibly dead people and loudly wondering what was going on.
    Thunderbolt limited himself to five this time. Energy pulled from the ones closest to him; the others sensed the energy drain, perceived it as a threat, and fired power blasts into it, adding their own blue to the surge. We watched the glow of nineteen power suits inching its way toward Thunderbolt. Cockatrice timed his strike and dropped a paralysis onto him. The energy formed a glowing sphere and began crackling outward, bolts seeking something to ground them. The chicken-costumed man threw a chair into it and it promptly exploded. Four of the people in the room were re-infected by the new blasts.
    I checked my teammate, worried. There were two things working on his aura now, the blue stuff, and some black stuff that had come off Cockatrice and paralyzed him.
    "Turn off your force belts," I told the uninfected people.
    "What?"
    "Turn them off. Now."
    "Hey, that's Needle!" someone recognized me. Sheesh, people from my own time don't know who the heck I am; history must have been nice to us. We still had four Powers to deal with, and I missed the one I was trying to take down. Ezra lassoed two of them with a manacle of bosons while the other two leaped out of the way and blasted at the restraint, which at least distracted them for a few moments and kept them from infecting anyone else.
    Cockatrice struck and missed, and I tried tiring one of them out, in the theory that he would be easier for someone else to hit that way even if I couldn't fix them. One Power collapsed on the floor, barely able to move. A particle beam came out of nowhere and hit nothing in particular. A power blast went through the Bosonic Man, another struck Cockatrice and seemed to dissipate on contact.
    We finished them off eventually, but it took a while. Thunderbolt was still lying there for a while before shaking off the paralysis; the blue stuff seemed to be gone, but I wasn't sure I trusted it. Then we had to make the rounds and uninfect everyone who hadn't actually been involved in the fight. I kept a careful eye on Thunderbolt; he was looking more strained and jumpy as the night wore on. Cockatrice experimented and found that he could weaken an infected bio-aura, taking some of the pressure off. By the time the sun rose, the Powers were taken care of.
    We climbed wearily back to the ship.
    "Are you okay?" Stephanie ran over to Thunderbolt, who grabbed her and slammed her onto the floor. The rest of cringed at the thud.
    He doesn't deserve her, Ezra thought.
    "Ow!" She turned into a cat and darted back into ship.
    "That reflex could become a bit of a problem," I noted.
    "You need some sleep or something," was Cockatrice's vote.
    We got back on board. Thunderbolt slumped in a corner, clearly exhausted. Stephanie sat with her back pointedly towards him.
    "Wow. I've never been in anything like that before," Ezra said in a bewildered tone. We were all exhausted, and if our calculations were right, Power was 8-12 hours away. "We can do this. Look, we just did it in there."
    "This might be a little bit tougher," I opined. Figure we have time for four hours of sleep, just enough to keep us functioning.
    "But when we work together, there's something greater, the sum of the parts. This is what being a team is all about."
    Thunderbolt raised his head and gave him a fuzzy look, slumped back again. I worried. An anarchist, the dark rooster of the woods, and us, home again but so very far from home.
    "Guys, there wouldn't be a nuclear reactor anywhere around the base," Ezra said, apropos I thought of nothing.
    "I don't know." I pushed the controls carefully, set course for base, and looked at Paul. "You are going to get a REM cycle or two before we leave again." We had a lot of rooms in the place, as it turned out. Paul went off to get some rest without talking to anyone.
    "Do you need a hand?" Stephanie asked Ezra as he looked uncertainly at SphinxNet's keyboard. She had her mask off, so he could see her face for the first time.
    "Um yeah, or lack thereof."
    "No hands," she nodded, and keyed in his request. "What do you need gamma rays for?"
    "I need to eat 'em. It's what I live off of. Real low-fat diet."
    "Not a lot of fiber, though."
    "No, that's not a problem anymore, though. But then I was hoping... you see the thing is that I can't type, and the ideas! I've got all these ideas for poems after today, and I was hoping to do 'em tonight because I don't have to sleep."
    "I'm going to need to get some sleep, but before the whole time travel, cat burglar thing I was an executive secretary, so I can type."
    "Okay, maybe we can do this...."
    "Sure." She smiled brightly.
    I updated the Power records on SphinxNet with our observations from the night now past, including Thunderbolt's reaction, not that I had much faith that an answer would be sitting there when we woke up. In the meantime I was vaguely aware of Ezra's poetic expansions upon the theme of the Revolution, but there was too much on my mind to give more than a passing thought to poetry or to whether Stephanie was trying to somehow get revenge on Paul for his behavior earlier by cozying up to the Bosonic Man. I asked the comm system to respond to attempts to contact us with a message saying that we would answer calls in the morning, and tried to get some sleep myself.
    That meant pulling an armchair into the computer room and curling up in it; the thought of sleeping in one of the bedrooms seems creepy, underlining the fact that we're home but not, and if any alarms went off I'd know about it. I thought about home as I had last seen it, the burned-out shell the Wuxia left us with, so far away from now that it doesn't seem real. I wonder when they're going to build this place. Not long after we disappeared, I guess. Tenses getting all confused, very tired. Time travel so confusing. Stupid. Why won't Thunderbolt tell me what he's got in mind? What if he's not okay in the morning?
    My dreams were disturbing; a six-armed snake-woman chased me until I turned a corner, came face to face with Gretchen, and felt myself disintegrate—and woke up with a yelp in a room I didn't know, which didn't help until I finally reoriented myself.
    What the heck, I was getting bored with the old nightmares anyway.

    * * *

    Cockatrice stayed up for a while seeing if he could get his armor's communication system talking to the one at base, but found that it would take tools and time to do so, neither of which were available. So he went to bed, propping a chair under the doorknob and balancing a grenade on it before he did so, just in case.
    
    Gamma rays were on subfloor three, as it turned out. His dinner complete, Ezra claimed a room for himself—after all, he was part of the team now—and watched TV for the rest of the night. It was a small one without much in it other than a couple of pictures on the wall, one of a woman he didn't recognize but she certainly looked dangerous. There was a lot of coverage of the approaching Power, in regard to whom they were taking precisely the wrong approach. The National Guard was on the way, and there was talk of evacuating the city. He worked on the poem he had started, too, making a new pair of hands for it.
    That's what I'm going to be, he thought. From now until the rest of my life. Two weeks ago, it was an accident, but now it all fits together! It means something!
    Thunderbolt also dreamed, badly. He was in the birthing chamber for Gretchen's half-daemon entities again, except that midway through it he became aware of optimizing his attacks, power blasts growing more accurate and predictable, and somewhere behind him, not far, was—Fortunately, he woke up before he could grab Stephanie's neck. Having spent the past several years (somehow) tied to him as a familiar, she had reverted to habit and when things were going badly, crawled into bed with him.
    

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