“This is Phase One,” I said. “It’s an electromagnetic pulse bomb,” I said. “It shuts down electronic devices.”

  “Sure,” Mandy said. “Usually you get them with nukes.” She looked a little worried. “Nukes?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Oh good, I had to deal with this religious-fanatic colony intelligence that kept threatening everyone with nukes. Trashes the whole ecosystem when that happens.” That round face, so cute, twitched momentarily into a feral grin. “They never got the chance.”

  This girl…

  “No, this is a clean weapon, I mean, no radiation.”

  “My dad was in the biz, I getcha.”

  “Dig it:” I pointed at the palm-sized metal cube. Each side was etched with a blazing Maker rune. “Six marks, each designed to get through his defenses.”

  I hooked up the two metal alligator clamps, each on opposite corners of the cube. “Electricity, right?” A press of a button, and a little Maker engine started chugging. Current flowed. The metal cube shuddered in place, making a rattle-scrape sound, then lifted from the workbench. It hovered three inches from the surface.

  Mandy leaned in, looked it over from up close. “Do the Runes make it hover?”

  “That’s a chunk of the Aegis we chipped off. We call it Upsi-daisium.” I fiddled with a knob on the bench, and the cube lifted, lowered. “If you run a little charge through it you get altitude. Had to be done…Gary refused to enter the stratosphere to drop a bomb.”

  “Did he say you were a fool?”

  “The subject did come up, yeah. But he’s a trooper, right? There’s a gel in the cube that protects the payload, and that’s from his lab, and also he helped us with the super magnet and coating the evil spinny wire. It’s an EMP in the center.”

  She looked up at me. Smug. “Schmendrick do anything?”

  “Yeah, definitely. Do you uh…see bonus content?”

  “I do. Always thought of it as Mandivision.” She squinted. “Holy guacamole, Owen.”

  Because the air around the bomb was a sphere of runes, little ones. They glowed with that un-violet light, the same glow a soul gave off. Invisible, unseeable, unless you checked for bonus content with your Mandivision.

  “How is that…what the hey…” She peered at it from different angles, then grabbed at the top of her dress. “Oops.” She flicked a glance at me.

  Later, in the middle of the night, I found myself furiously pondering that oops. But at the moment I in full showoff nerd mode, and was blathering about mad science. I probably would have fainted if I’d been paying attention, to be fair.

  “The Makers like Runes when they do Magic. The Hunt doesn’t do a Rune, but I was able to mashup the two styles. So the Runes here are applied directly to the chunk of spacetime the bomb occupies. Schmendrick and I wrote them. They keep the bomb invisible, they power it, they do all kinds of fun things.”

  “Schmendrick works with spacetime?”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “She calls it–” And I yelled and yipped in Cazador.

  Mandy laughed, covered her mouth. “Sorry. What did the Bees do?”

  “Wrote a mean note, it’s in there with the payload gel. It’s pretty rude…Gary helped.”

  “Are you going to … what, bomb his tablet PC?”

  “You so DAMN smart, Mandy. Phase one, you got it.”

  “And that way nobody gets killed. And he can’t do his thing to all his hostages. And he’ll be powerless. Just a dumb guy called Jeff Harrigan.”

  “Right!” I smiled, unable to stop. She got it.

  “And the green fire? What’s to stop him from just doing that?”

  “The Bomb has a shard of the Radio itself. It makes a zone of no-green-fire-usage roughly a half-mile in diameter. We don’t have a way to test it directly, but Power-vs-Power is what we’re doing. We set up test fights between the Aegis and the Observatory. All the attacks cancel each other out, fizzling out, whatever.”

  “How do you know what his defenses can handle?”

  “I’m the Steward of the Observatory Sapientiae, and I spy on things and snoop.”

  “You sneak looks.”

  “Also I have Sean the Ghost, and sat through hours of his testimony. He remembers a few useful things.” Sneak looks? “Sean…he’s a victim like any of us. More, in some ways. He’s been ignited and restarted two-hundred and forty-six times. The number is right there, in his no-meat mind, and it burns.”

  She looked sad, if anything. “I hope it works.”

  She hung around, said hello to Schmendrick and even Gary. Mandy didn’t seem to want to leave.

  I wondered why; was there a horror out there in the sea she needed to destroy, one that tested her mettle? The idea of her being afraid wasn’t something that fit into my two-volt brain.

  We walked on the beach as the sun set. The light beans were on, the Gardeners were orange against the deep purple of the sky. My place. Mine.

  “He starts crying when he talks about you,” I said.

  She squinted up. Gunslinger Mandy. “He remembers it.”

  “He regrets it.”

  Her turn to shrug.

  “I feel it,” I said in a rush. “I feel it when you’re hurt. Schmendrick does too. When you’re not this. When you’re recharging, I think?”

  Her face collapsed. “I can’t control that. I’m sorry.” She looked up at me. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to…whatever you’re doing here. Wasn’t ready for telepathically inflicting pain on my pals. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Nothing?”

  Her face hardened. “You mean well.” She looked over at the Aegis. “I think you do, I really think you do. You’re…very squishy.” A smile, looking down, not looking at me. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Oh, come on.” I grabbed at her hands. Once again, she flailed them away, backed off. I found myself pleading. “Come on, let us help. I stole a flying hospital, that’s gotta be doing something for you.”

  She swallowed. “It’s hard.” Another sad smile. “Human people.”

  “I ain’t Human people! Even Schmendrick says so.” I spun. “Check out the graffiti. What Human is loaded with animated ads?” She was smirking when I faced her again. Not smirking, exactly; what was that expression?

  “Sean isn’t Human either,” she said coldly. Flinty, tough Mandy. “But I remember, and he remembers, and here we are. I’m not saying it’s rational. I know I’m…a little nuts here…”

  “We’re all nuts,” I said. “Humans make Humans insane.” I used my desperation attack, the Big Gun: “You’ll be able to eat our cooking and it’s really good!”

  The beginnings of a scowl. “You’re…I’ll…I gotta go.” And splash, gone again.

  Dammit.

  But something she said was in my head. But I remember, and he remembers, and here we are.

  I remember, and he remembers.

  I ran into the dome. I fetched the spare femur.