South End was an eerie place by night. Shadows masked the alleyways, and the flickering light from the few working streetlamps did little to drive them away.

Anything could be hiding in the shadows.

Anything, like a pair of ultrahumans with Nanofibre Weave Combat Armor.

I prowled through the shadows, looking for the address I'd picked up from the net.

Anne followed behind me at a distance of about a hundred feet. Her movement was more of a skulk than a prowl, but she was trying.

She’d insisted on coming along since it was a non-combat mission. Well, at least in theory.

Just in case things went south, though, she had a Standard Laser Rifle with her..

Our target building was ramshackle, dilapidated, and host to at least two dozen cramped apartments. The apartment I was looking for lay on the fourth floor.

A normal human could simply walk up the stairs, but that wouldn’t do for the effect I wanted.

I pulled out my newest tool.

The climbing grips had been $400 at the local hardware store. Attached to my gauntlets, they let me scale the building walls with the agility of a cat.

A very large cat, concealed in the darkness and wreathed in shadow, with claws to match….

: you’re overthinking again

The message system that came with creating a team had some slight disadvantages. Namely, my little sister wouldn’t let me indulge in a good brood anymore.

: get climbing before he falls asleep

: fine

One benefit over cellphones? No laborious typing. I just had to think it, and the message went out to all others in the team. Which in this case was just Anne.

: climbing now

: i can see that from here

: are you always this slow

: quiet, I’m trying to think

: I thought you were trying to climb

… We’d had the system for less than a day and I was already wishing for an ‘ignore’ button.

Finally, I got to the fourth floor. Our target apartment’s window was dark - they were probably asleep.

I pulled out my newest tool and got to work.

The Laser Cutter was an adaptation of the Laser Rifle, but for more practical purposes. Utterly silent, its beam of focused light could slice through any normal surface material in seconds. The only drawback was the short range - less than two inches - which made it useless as a weapon.

However, for cutting through a glass window pane, it was very useful indeed.

I quietly removed the glass and set it aside. There. Now, open the window, and slide in.

A middle-aged woman snored from the bed. Not my target. I quietly stepped across the bedroom and opened the door.

Next bedroom. I opened the door and stepped inside.

Wallie Sims slept fitfully in his bed, troubled by nameless dreams.

Time to give him a new nightmare.

The door closed behind me with a click. The noise woke Wallie, who turned to state with bleary eyes.

Eyes that widened in panic as he took me in.

Before he could scream, I’d crossed the distance and covered his mouth. “One word and you die,” I hissed.

Wallie nodded, terrified.

“I will remove my hand now,” I murmured softly. “Cry out and you will feel my wrath.”

A mute nod.

I stepped back. Wallie gasped, then swallowed.

“You were to find the Grunter hideouts in the city,” I told him. “Have you found them?”

“I…. I only know a few,” whispered Wallie. “But I can’t talk…. They’ll know.”

“You can talk, and the Grunters will never know who did,” I replied, “or you can stay silent, and the Grunters will never know that either.”

“Th...they have all sorts of tech…..”

“You’re going straight, aren't you?”

Wallie nodded again.

“Then they will never know. I could have gotten the arrangements from anyone. On the other hand, if you don’t talk….” I made a menacing gesture.

Wallie nodded in understanding. “There’s … four main places,” he explained. “The Damini club… you torched that. The Morchain Dock warehouse - you torched that one too.”

“I know. I was there.”

“Manetti and Brown made big losses. They’re out for blood.”

“Who are Manetti and Brown?”

“The Manettis were the managers for the Damini. You got one of them. Yance Brown ran the warehouse and labs - the main drug side.”

“Tell me places I don’t know.”

“There’s….” he swallowed. “There’s the fighting pits, in Northwalk. I don’t know exactly where they are. Then there’s the ranch.”

“The ranch?”

“It’s just outside the city… I swear, I don’t know what goes on there. Only that there’s tons of suits.”

“Suits, as in armoured suits?”

“Yeah, battlesuits… half a dozen are at the ranch most of the time. Black Dog Bowers runs the ranch…. They say he’s meaner than a rattlesnake and Gravitic likes him. The fighting pits are run by Brad Charles, there’s at least three battlesuits there every day.”

“Tell me where they are.”

Wallie rattled off the addresses. The fighting pits were in the middle of the city. The ranch, however, was way beyond city limits.

“Good job,” I muttered. “One more things. What about Blackhat locations?”

“I….” Wallie swallowed. “I don’t know about that… there’s a place in Seminary Street that they maybe use. That’s all I know, we were just told to avoid it.”

“Keep gathering information for me, Wallie,” I hissed. “I’ll see you again. In the meantime, close your eyes and count to thirty.”

Wallie dutifully screwed his eyes shut.

I turned around and walked out of the main door.

Hey, I’d done the stealth bit already. Besides, do you know how much of a pain it is to climb down in the dark?

Plus, the Jammer Beacon I deployed dutifully shut down all lights - and security cameras - in and around the building for an hour.

Plenty of time for me to make my escape.

“Your control is improving,” I told Anne.

It had been six days since we’d visited Wallie Sims. Long enough to check if he’d tried to turn me in.

Not that he had anything he could share, of course. Other than the locations I’d asked him for. Which might mean a trap at one of them.

We hadn’t been idle during that time. Anne had understood how to make more nanobots.

Granted, they were little more than a microscopic camera that flew around aimlessly, but it worked.

So now, we had a mobile swarm of about 700 nanobots which, working together, put together a comprehensive picture of any location Anne pointed them at.

Thanks to Swarm Command, Anne could make the nanobots move around in the direction she wanted.

Anne stared at me now, bleary-eyed. “I’m hungry.”

I handed over a bottle of juice. “Try to speed them up a bit more.”

“Can’t we take a break? We’ve been at this for five hours.”

“You want to come into the field with me? You’re going to need a lot more than five hours.”

Anne grumbled, but subsided. “I’ve got them to take more pictures of the target. It’s still unaware.”

“Maintain distance and follow.”

Our target for this exercise was a Great Dane belonging to a family down the street. The objective was to track its movements through the day.

Anne was less than enthused. “I think we should be tracking actual criminals, not pets.”

“You need to refine your control a lot more before that point. We don’t want a repeat of the Labrador incident.”

Anne shuddered.

“At least we learnt a useful lesson from it,” I observed.

“Never park your nanobots on a fire hydrant?”

“Maintain appropriate distance from your target.”

“Or they might pee on you. Somehow I don’t think criminals are as likely to do that as pets….”

“They could do other things. And that incident cost you almost two hundred bots.”

Dog urine, as it turned out, had a pretty destructive effect on nanobot systems.

It also had a less-than-pleasant effect on the nanobot controller, since she got to see everything the nanobots did…. In real time.

And they’d dutifully recorded everything right up to the moment of their destruction.

Anne had refused to touch her nanobots for a full day after that.

“More juice?” I asked.

“Not in the mood,” grumbled Anne.

“You need to replace the calories you’re burning.” The energy for the nanobots, we’d discovered, came from Anne’s bodily reserves - which meant that she was always hungry after even a short workout with the bots.

“Fine,” Anne took a swig of the juice. “When do we get to actually scope out the locations? I’m getting tired of just practicing.”

“When you hit Level 2 in Nanosensors.”

Anne grinned cheekily. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Well then, I have good news for you. I just hit Level 2.”

“What? Already?”

“Hey, I’ve been stalking those stupid pets for the last five days.”

She had a point. Sixty hours of practice with anything would result in an increase in skill, even for a normal human being.

(Yes, I’d had her working twelve to fourteen hours a day with her swarm. She volunteered. Besides, she could multitask.)

“All right,” I sighed. “I did promise. Any other skills improved?”

“Swarm Command went up to Level 2. Doesn’t seem to have changed anything, though.”

“Did Nanosensors change anything?”

“I can now capture sound as well as pictures.”

“Hey, that’s useful. Still, you have to be careful not to get overwhelmed by too much auditory input.”

“Pfft. My current nanobots don’t have audio sensors, I’ll have to create new ones. And I’d modulate the input from the pickups automatically so that it doesn’t overwhelm me.”

“Can you make new nanobots?”

“Not enough. Visual’s easy, a hundred bots are enough for a picture. Sound’s harder. I need signal pickups from at least 50,000 bots to get decent quality audio.”

“... how do you know that?”

“I just do.”

It was probably part of her power. From what I’d read, most superhumans claimed to have an instinctive understanding of how to use their abilities - something that, unfortunately, did not seem to apply to me. Oh well.

“So, the stakeouts. When can we go?”

“You really are eager.”

“Hey, it’s got to be an improvement over dog-stalking.”

“And dog pee.”

“And dog pee. When?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll check out the fighting pits tomorrow.”