Greg carefully redressed the small man and replaced his weapons. Sheathing the katana, he had the bugs attach it to the back of the battlesuit. He cradled the small man gently in his arms, carried him outside, and shot off into the sky, heading for Japan.

It was December 25th, 2009, exactly a year to the day that he’d bonded with his beloved Tricia and Greg was relaxing and reminiscing. It had been a busy few months after the symposium at first, but had quickly settled down into a calm rhythm that the AIs kept annoyingly calling ‘the eye of the storm’. After returning Kychiri to his ancestral home, Greg and Trish had settled into the serious business of setting up the Biel centre. The local government was enthusiastic as the influx of capital was welcome in the quiet little town. They had plans of billing themselves as the Environmental Capitol of Europe to attract the eco-tourists and Greg was surprised and pleased at how little red tape he encountered. Having a lot of press coverage seemed to help smooth the way and encourage the politicians to make the popular decisions. Still and on though, it took eight months and he was beginning to miss his island home in Canada.

It took over four months to have the main building replaced and the out buildings refurbished to Greg’s exacting standards. The facility was running under high efficiency solar cells until the first of the new wind powered modules could be brought online. Rumi and Jon joined Betina as the water and sewage treatment plants were receiving their final additions. The main house of AERIE was completed on schedule and was roughly three times the size of the original back home, with enough room for all three of its permanent residents and one or two transient beings to boot. The biggest problem that they ran into was the masses of applicants and résumés they had to wade through. They made use of the newly installed computer network and some innovative programming from Greg (and secretly the AIs) to find out who were the best candidates for the research positions. The security screening was tight and handled, Greg had told them, by one of the best firms in the business. In reality, Greg had left that portion of the massive job to the computer personalities at Saber Base who were naturally more thorough than any human agency could ever hope to be. Prof had clandestinely set up the consulting firm of Solomon and Julian to handle the legalities and, as a surprise bonus, had generated a new and lucrative revenue stream.

Greg had been shocked and thrilled to see the changes to his island home when he’d first visited it briefly in the months that followed the symposium. Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary when he’d entered the main house one December afternoon, but then Hestia showed him the new entrance in the basement with the palm lock concealed behind a wooden panel. The door had swung inwards and they saw the large chamber carved from the living rock of Franklin Island.

Greg was unexpectedly greeted by holographic representations of both the Prof and Solomon. It had been a bit of a jolt at first, but Prof explained that it was a logical extension of Hestia’s holonet and a good idea in order to facilitate interaction with Trish and himself. The actual computer vaults and work floors were deep within the granite of the Canadian Shield and virtually inaccessible to invading forces. The upgraded ACM materials that were based on Greg and Trish’s original work concealed any surface installations and so far, there’d been no curiosity seekers or any other forms of intrusion, but Hestia had created a series of non-lethal security devices that ringed the complex, just in case. Trish was ecstatic to have Saber Base up and running again.

"Professor?" she asked the AI, "I was just wondering why you didn’t reactivate my brothers and sisters. Didn’t you say you had backups of each one of them?"

“We do Darling Daughter, but we need more processing power now to run them. Gregory, will you approve the purchase of a dozen surplus Cray SV1 supercomputers to wire into the network? I’d ask for the latest models, however, the finances are starting to stretch a little thin.”

Greg informed the AIs.

“We may have an idea that will help you Gregory Howard,” Solomon spoke up then. Greg shook his head smiling as he couldn’t get the elder AI to be any less formal with him than that.

“The consulting firm that you had us set up to do background checks on the applicants for AERIE has been getting inquiries as to contracting out to other companies. It would be prudent to accept selected clients,” the machine intelligence advised him.

Greg told Solomon.

“Of course, understood,” the AI had sounded shocked at the very idea of untruths. Greg smiled as he brought this back to mind.

During all of this time, The SIX had become bolder, even reckless in their campaign against evil and greed. After very nearly destroying the drug trade world wide, they turned their efforts to the food supply. Great swaths of formerly unusable and fallow land in Africa were miraculously made fertile again and the local farmers were finding it impossible to grow less than they needed. The SIX would take a portion of the harvest to feed those people in areas that hadn’t taken in a harvest yet. Parts of the Sahara were becoming green again as icebergs were moved in to melt in the great desert. Those governments that practiced the politics of hunger were thwarted on a regular basis as food was made available to people who had never had a steady food supply, at least not in more than two generations. The African continent was blooming and the world powers could do nothing but praise The SIX, as much as it galled them. As world hunger was eased, so were many ancient tensions, and the tribal wars in Africa seemed to be in danger of extinction as The SIX traded seeds and farming equipment for arms.

The major crises caused by the elimination of drugs had been the literally millions of addicts who could no longer get their fixes. The suffering of withdrawal was soon felt on a worldwide scale... however, that too began to pass as local efforts created clinics for addicts to recover in. Most of the people survived and the charitable services set up for them were provided with fresh food to improve the diets and lives of those withdrawing. The political interference by The SIX rankled those in power the most. three regime changes had been affected by The SIX over the course of eight months and it didn’t matter that the U.N. had publicly condemned the governments and imposed economic sanctions, it was really that The SIX had managed to provide the oppressed peoples of those countries with the freedom that political pressure had never achieved. It was the fact that it made the U.N. look ineffectual and toothless that really rankled the General Assembly.

The SIX also refused to endorse any particular form of government either. They simply left that up to the will of the freed peoples. The only thing The SIX insisted upon was the surrender of all weapons, which were then converted by Samba into their base elements. Then a simple warning was given to the populations that they would be watched and if human rights were ignored, The SIX would again intervene. The same warning was given to neighbouring nations to discourage any thoughts of invasion. The U.N. Security Council was deadlocked as well because for all of their heavy-handed tactics, The SIX were succeeding at exactly the mission that the U.N. had originally been chartered. Global tensions were on the decline and as the world drew a breath of relief, education and health began to rebound. Even the United States started to focus its attentions on the domestic mess that had almost destroyed its population and the inner cities started to become safe once again.

At both AERI and AERIE, the Wind Energy Modules started to ship out on a regular basis, first to large population centres, and then to the areas of the planet that had never before known a reliable source of electricity. Greg and Trish had started to receive requests from all over the world to set up branches of the institute or train engineers to maintain the delicate planetary ecosystems that had nearly been destroyed. Greg’s proudest moment had come when the Canadian Government declared itself seventy percent free of fossil and atomic energy. He had been present at the decommissioning of Ontario’s three nuclear energy plants as the output they had contributed had been far outstripped by the fields of WEMs around the province. Being named to The Order of Canada was the icing on the cake.

There had naturally been a number of sabotage attempts, but they were ineffective at best. Generally, if a saboteur was captured, it was difficult for them to receive a fair hearing anywhere if he or she survived that long. The people of the planet were enjoying this seemingly golden age of prosperity and taking back the power they had long ago surrendered to the corporations. A groundswell of environmental awareness was building and many species that had been on the verge of extinction were slowly showing signs of a comeback. Greg noticed that Jon and Betina were getting closer as well. Trish thought it was a good match and was amused by Jon’s clownish attempts to curry favour with the beautiful Frauline. In fact, Jon first floated the idea of using the Howard turbine system for geothermal energy production. He privately told Greg that it was a shameless play for Betina’s attentions, so Greg let his friend take all the credit for the idea. There had been spurious lawsuits aimed at the AERIs for ‘patent infringement’ but the claims had always been proven fraudulent, thanks to the expert consultancy of Solomon and Julian. Greg did worry however, about the seeming lack of overt animosity from the Illuminati, and Trish continued to worry about their inability at locating Professor Saber. Her worry rapidly became grief as she began to lose hope that her Father would ever be found alive again.

Ravensclaw Senior was by no means inactive over the eight month period either. He had been furious that two of his assassins had been neutralized in as little as two days. The third, Azeri, had gone to ground to study his subject more closely, so as not to end up the way the others had… in a word… dead. Lindquist was breathing down Nathanial’s neck to produce results from Saber. That had been the one bright light for him in this whole unusual mess, the scorpions had finally broken the old man’s will and he was hard at work for them designing what he called physio-neural interfaces like the ones that had produced The SIX. Saber said he could deliver six suits that would make the wearers the equals of the do-gooders that had been plaguing the Illuminati worldwide. All that Ravensclaw had to do was pick six loyal subjects to bond with the mechanisms, for once bonded there would be no way to control the subjects. Ravensclaw was certain that he had his ways however and soon, The SIX would be defeated and Howard would be dead. It was the one ray of light that kept all of The Council’s setbacks in perspective for him. Ravensclaw had only one other worry that he necessarily kept to himself. He’d not heard from Natalia since she’d fled to Los Angeles and he was beginning to get concerned. The girl had held such potential and to lose her now would be an enormous loss…

Natalia was not currently concerned with anything however. She had embarked on a quest to make herself into a weapon to destroy the man who had stolen her self-confidence from her. Intensive training in the martial arts had transformed her from the once pampered princess to a rock solid engine of pure destruction. She had worked herself to physical exhaustion daily while honing her mind to the epitome of icy calm. She had never imagined the feats she was capable of until her Sensei had grudgingly admitted that she was now his equal in all things save inner peace.

“You will have to cleanse your chi Young Lotus, or it will fail you when you least expect it. The inner self must be as calm as a mountain lake, not as stormy as a great sea. Please learn this lest your anger betray you,” her teacher wisely advised her.

Natalia had been tempted to kill him outright for his criticism, but had stayed her rage, preferring to focus it instead on Greg Howard. Her focus hadn’t stopped her from placing herself into dangerous situations for practice however, crippling her attackers easily and in one case, even killing one of them.. She felt it gave her real experience that could not be gained in the Dojo and though she had trained with a variety of different weapons, she found that she preferred the Philippine Escrima sticks. Stick fighting appealed to her in ways that the edged weapons had not. The seventy one centimetre ironwood sticks could destroy an opponent in no time and were easily carried and deployed when required. After months of training, it was almost time to present herself to her father for his forgiveness and to Greg Howard for her revenge.

To Be Continued