Dr. Cain turned from the capsule towards X. "Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. I’ll repair the programming while his body recharges itself."

"I’m not worried, Dr. Cain," X replied from the bottom of the trench he had made by pacing back and forth.

"Well, then, you can make yourself useful." He tossed a can of black spray paint towards X. "Go give the glider a new coat. And make sure you do it evenly and smoothly around the wings. Nothing ruins a good vehicle like a bad paint job."

X was left mumbling about the glider as the scientist turned to other matters. He skimmed through Zero’s programming, checking the basic functions, before tackling the modifications. He talked to himself as he typed. "I can't believe this amateur programming…This section is almost painful in its ugliness…Now this is just a big circle route…hmm…it works, but it's begging to be more modular...erase this section…let’s just slip in the old programming here…" Dr. Cain wisely kept a copy of the programming of most of the Hunters, so it took him almost no time to undo the hours of hard typing Theta had put into Zero’s programming.

He swivelled in his chair and kicked his feet around while he waited for the computer to analyse his corrections. X returned from the glider looking not at all amused and with black splotches all over himself. He handed Dr. Cain the partially flattened can of paint.

"I take it the glider has a lovely new coat now?" Dr. Cain asked X while still spinning around on his desk chair.

X stared darkly at the scientist for a moment before muttering, "that glider is really starting to irritate me."

"Well, splendid, good job! Oh, and please clean yourself up. I don’t want my best Hunter to look like a can of paint exploded on him." X muttered something about it being what did happen. A lovely rendition of the theme from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony alerted Dr. Cain that the computer had finished its task.

"What happened to the beginning of William Tell’s Overture?" X asked.

"I felt Beethoven was more suiting to my character. Like it? I spent ten minutes mixing the theme for the computer alert sound. Anyway…your sidekick’s back to normal."

"Zero’s not a sidekick, he’s my partner, as in equals?"

"Of course, X, whatever you say," Dr. Cain said, brushing his aside. "Now, if he’ll stop being lazy and wake up, we’ll see how much he knows about this new Maverick."

"No, no, no, why?" Theta murmured to herself. She cradled her head in her hands and rocked it back and forth. Before her, a screen with the layout of a city flashed a red dot. The dot came from a signal Theta had programmed into Zero’s arm cannon. It was located in the squarish outline of a building Mavericks had come to know as "there from which our defeat springs eternal". As she stared at it, wondering how Zero could have failed so miserably, the dot disappeared altogether. They had deactivated Zero.

"NO! NO, NO, NO, NNNOOO!!!" Theta wailed like the insane. She pounded the table, and was a little sorry afterwards when a pile of notes avalanched over her. When she had finally dug herself out again, she flicked off the screen and began folding paper aeroplanes, one of her nervous habits.

Our defences are all set up, the forcefield’s about to go up…why did Zero have to go and ruin it for me now? She ripped a page from her notes and bent it to her will. Relax…what’s done is done…stupid Zero, I'll kill him for this...unless he kills me first. Curses! Will he give Dr. Cain enough information to crack my forcefields? How much does he know? A miniature rendition of a Boeing 747 flew across the room.

Not much, but too much. He saw the plans for the main generator…he knows our formations...well, that's nothing special, everyone knows our formations...and location of the domes. She glanced at the programming notes for a signal cracking chip before folding it in half. So he’ll tell them, of course…what will they do? Well, attack us, of course. How? Send in X and we're done, as usual. But we’re scattered all around Elysia, they can’t get past the forcefields, they want to protect civilians... She sent a perfect model of a Blackbird into the corner.

They’ll need to have an attack on all domes as soon as the central generator is down...provided they can get it down, of course, so that means a central communication, and that would be… "At headquarters, of course!" Theta exclaimed, letting an unfinished stealth bomber drop from her fingers.

She desperately rummaged through all her notes for the diagram before remembering that she had transformed it into a Blackbird. She rescued it from the corner and turned to perfect her plan.

Dr. Cain thoughtfully rubbed his chin and considered what Zero had told him. He studied the upgrades in Zero’s arm cannon which laid open before him. Zero was using his other hand to play cards with X. It was a little hard to be interested after Dr. Cain had been thoughtfully rubbing his chin for half an hour.

"Now…you say she’s working on the forcefields? And she has an energy deflector on her arm cannon? Hmm…judging from your upgrades, I’d say that she specialises in electrical energy fields," Dr. Cain said.

"Well, you don’t say! Goodness, the thought had never occurred to me," said Zero, who was obviously getting very impatient.

"You can’t play ace of spades on that," X told Zero.

"And she knows that obscure NISAR lab in Elysia…" Dr. Cain turned to the plans for the generator that he had printed from the glider’s memory banks, "this is pretty sophisticated work. She must have copied it from one of the NISAR computers. How she broke in is anyone’s guess, but I thought that NISAR was no longer funding this research since that terrible, terrible, horrible, disaster. Unless..."

The eyes of the scientist turned towards the ceiling as he initiated a flashback sequence. "One of my colleagues, Dr. Carthage, did a little work on energy fields…but no one has heard about him for three years now. If he’s still alive, I have no idea how this Theta could have found out where he is. Unless..."

He reached for the picture of Theta scanned from the glider’s memory. "Yes, I do recognise her. She…I think she’s Dr. Carthage’s daughter. Except that she died three years ago. Unless..."

X paused in the act of placing down a card and raised an eyebrow. "The dead daughter of your old scientist friend is building forcefields for the Mavericks?"

"No, X, I don’t think your guess is right," Dr. Cain said, obviously missing the sarcasm, "but I have better guess. His daughter was part of the forcefield research team. I remember seeing her at NISAR, during her university years, studying and doing her own research about energy fields. Unfortunately, she died when Dr. Carthage’s lab was blown to horrible, horrible, terrible pieces by a bunch of troubled kids. They somehow decided that forcefields gave the government too much power over the city's energy flow, so they concocted their own bombs, and...well, it was really very terribly horrible.

"Anyhow, she was Dr. Carthage’s only child, and, well, I guess he wasn't too pleased when she was blown into bits. He always was a little strange, and I guess he somehow got it into his head that he could build a reploid to replace her. Of course, this was long after I had left NISAR, I only heard about this from my old colleague, so maybe I'm wrong. He probably made her as human as possible, you know, have tears, sneeze, so forth.

"Why a reploid designed to mimic a human and programmed to enjoy the company of humans would join the Mavericks is beyond even my intellectual capabilities."

Onwards to Chapter Thirteen
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