Sarah quietly feared that the data of where the rogues actually were would be totally unavailable, and that she'd have to actually go searching for the base by sending something up to look for it; her experienced, methodical squads rapidly proved her wrong. Apparently not anticipating that they could and would inspect absolutely everything, the rogue's clone had left the information on a USB thumb drive in a locked file cabinet in a little-used part of his home, carefully shoved between two papers of no import, the real data steganographically hidden deep within other files of no import. Apparently one of the rogues had been spying on the others, sending data home to his public clone. Within ten hours, a message was left for the twins; when they woke up the next day, they learned that the rogues had their base within the Tsiolkovsky crater, embedded deep in the massive central boulder.

Shortly thereafter, they got Daniel's gift and his call, a transport helicopter depositing a large black hexagonal cylinder at the same time his smiling face came on the screen. "I was originally going to save these for your birthday," he said. "I didn't think you'd have an immediate need for them." He sent a few gigabytes of technical data as he talked. "Tell me if there's anything wrong with the joints, that's the most tricky part."

"The joints?" Howard asked, a bit skeptical. Please, no incompetent engineereds. Not now. "Shouldn't that be one of the most basic things?"

"Not at all. Especially not for what you guys need. Doing it right with spacesuits is finicky." The twins waited for him to explain, and he just smiled and clicked off instead. He was obviously playing with them, but why? He was retroviral, his father had done excellent work for them in the past, and he was clearly loyal; what was he doing?

Luke was inspecting the package dropped, a hexagonal cylinder with a suit hooked on each face, sizing making it clear which was for who. There were, in fact, times where it was nicer to be remembered than forgotten about. He smiled; the suits were black, almost perfectly black save for the clear (to visible light, anyway) faceplates and some small points. Probably a technical reason for that, but he enjoyed the aesthetic anyway. They looked like the sort of powered battlesuits found in fiction where mercenaries battled horrific beings from a distant star.

He grabbed one, disengaged the connectors, and felt a surprising heft. Could he carry all six? Sure, he'd just have to stack them up like so, and pick them up- c'mon, he could lift a lot more than this- and Paul was kind enough to open the door for him. "These things weigh a shitload." He set them down gently on the floor.

"Then how does he expect us to fight in them?" William lifted up one of the two in his size. No wonder Luke had trouble carrying them in. One was a hundred and twenty pounds, easily, and somewhat bulky in areas. "I'm not going to believe that he forgot that inertia's not weight." Even if Daniel had free fall in mind, they would be pushing the whole mass back and forth as they moved, although with the thickness and likely composition of the strange deep-black steel, they wouldn't have to dodge anything smaller than a fifty-caliber antivehicle bullet. Carrying themselves and their suits on the Moon, they would have about eighty pounds of gravitational force pushing them downwards.

Howard inspected his closely, his industry-standard paranoia active. It looked subtly menacing, its carefully crafted design one of implied threat. The thing could be an elaborate trap and he could be meeting some horrible doom the moment he put it on. But that would imply that Daniel had intended to kill him, which was ridiculous; if he had really intended that, he had access to microfusion after all. "Fuck it. Let's try this shit on."

The twins undressed and opened them up carefully, leaning them upright against a wall. Large slits were in the steel plate, letting them lean back and put in arms, torso, head, legs, thin padded fabric between flesh and solid steel. The helmet fit like a hood, faceplate and flexible neck piece swinging over to seal with the chest. The gloves and boots were part of the suit, and they started wondering about the relevant joints- the wrists and fingers in particular felt swollen, as with arthritis. They couldn't have just gone with fabric? Once they were fully in the suits' HUD activated automatically- 'nice touch'- and they stood up as men of deep darkness, twisting their hands around and moving their arms. Full range of motion, Dan hadn't had anything to worry about; the only thing they couldn't do was put their fingers together all the way. The faceplates were practically invisible, save for a few symbols and percentages on heads-up display. They heard everything as if they weren't wearing helmets at all, a great number of tiny speakers next to their ears for directional hearing. Their left wrists featured screens and they used the main screen to synchronize the suits to the network.

Luke took a cautious, unseen step back. Whatever these things were made of, the suits were emanating magnetic fields with the twins' movement. But that would only make sense if... his earlier guess was right. He waited for them to figure it out.

"It doesn't feel like it weighs anything," William said, speakers unmuffling his voice. Actually, it felt like it weighed less than nothing without being buoyant. What was the trick? He sat down on the couch, got up again, and it made a sharp skerrrrk on the carpet as he pushed back from it. "The hell? I didn't..."

"Oh," Howard said, grinning and chuckling, bared teeth visible through the faceplate. Of course the fucking thing looked subtly menacing. He was meant to wear it into combat, after all. "Oh, yes. Let's test these.. outside." He opened the door very carefully, and they strode out into the sunlight, the other four hurrying to get theirs on.

Paul's faceplate clicked on over his laughter, which was swiftly sent as encrypted radio. "Spacesuits, right. These are spacesuits." His 'spacesuit' had a number of barrels extending from the arms. Designated Heavy Weapons Guy again. He didn't mind. It was a good role to fill.

"They are suits. They function for the wearer in outer space," Ruby said. "I'm surprised we're not reading the manual."

"That was my first thought," Sarah said, "but I don't want expectations. Technical data can always be read later. I want to see how intuitive they've made it."

Ruby took that as a command. She looked at her palm briefly, pointed her arm at nothing, and opened her palm sphincter, squeezing her pyrogens as hard as possible. Immediately a sixty-foot jet of combusting gases shot out, enhanced further by fusion-generated heat, brightly illuminating everything in a sharp, yellow-orange glare. She held it for two seconds, her own fuel providing a miniscule contribution to the blaze. Her HUD informed her that she had 99.9 combustive/oxidizer mix remaining. Her latent pyromania danced for joy as she did the math in her head: thirty straight minutes of high-temperature charbroiling, far more than she could ever possibly need in any one situation. Shit was going to get burned the fuck down. She leaped- put all her power into it- and holy fuck her feet exploded and she was high in the air, looking down at the top of the mansion. Oh crap, this was meant for space, not a gravity well like Earth's. She was going to make a crater unless- she forced fire into her feet again, it seldom helped much normally, but now she was on a cushion of flame, controlling her descent slowly to the ground, draining combustives for reaction mass (reduced all the way to 99.6%, now), landing on a patch of what was now charcoal and ashes.

"If they made that for you..," Luke said, holding his hands apart an inch, and at once there was a flash of bright blue. He opened his hands gradually wider, and a long plasma arc of electrons and ionized air flowed from his right to his left, the pure glee on his face invisible in the electric glow and the darkened faceplate. His maniacal giggling was audible over the radio despite the energetic crackling.

They started reading the details then, learning about the customizable combination of vocal and gestural commands that drove everything from water/carbohydrate recycling to communications to laser emission. The commands were seldom actual words, the gestures never anything they would make by accident. William set his fusion laser to full power and pointed his arm downwards at a patch of beach he knew had nothing of importance under it, and stuck out his forefinger, ring, and after-pinky; instantly the air in front of him exploded into bluish-white plasma, causing his faceplate to darken at once and his HUD to warn him about too much heat in one place. He turned it off immediately and there was a deep, smoking hole surrounded by dark glass. A few two-inch squares on his back began to glow bright white, waste heat pouring from him. Of course they were black and not mirrored; in space, there were no good options but to radiate the heat, one small area at a time.

"Maybe our front lawn isn't the best place to use these," Paul pointed out.

"Maybe our planet isn't the best place to use these," Ruby replied.

"You're not kidding," Howard said, reading the specs from the screen in his wrist. "The fuel is concentrated deuterium, there's no neutron source. The maximum power output for ours is fifty gigajoules a second. Paul, yours gets two hundred gigajoules a second." Paul looked down at his arms with fascination and horror, arms to kill armies with. The twins' original Micro, at five hundred megawatts, was a small normal power plant's worth of photonic death, blasting holes in anything, melting, reflecting, burning and boiling everything it touched. He was walking around with four hundred times that. Did the building-melting satellites even have that much output? He'd have to check.

"Why worry?" Paul Ghostbustered. "Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back." Forget burning holes in walls. He could incinerate Staten Island if he tried.

"And I bet I can run more than 88 miles an hour in this," Luke added, trying just that, his feet carving furrows in the ground where he took his long, leaping steps, not so much 'running' as 'stomping himself forward'. He backflipped to return, feeling the suit's generated fields even through the thick Faraday-cage insulation. A magnetohydrodynamic fluid that looked like mercury and behaved somewhat like Silly Putty flowed through unseen tubes under the thick metal skin, contracting to mirror almost all of his muscles. The lag between his actions and the suit's response was less than half a millisecond, practically negligible even for engineereds. A great deal of the technologies and innovations involved were previously unheard-of, particularly the materials that were painstakingly developed from the ground up, an enormous amount of effort expended in making the armor resistant to Barnum-style anti-Enforcer weapons while still dissipating heat, inventing molecular structures that previously didn't exist. The amount of technical skill, scientific research, and overall use of resources surely far exceeded those used by the Manhattan Project back when normals (with all-too-mild Illuminated oversight) first learned how to utilize fission.

And some late-teenager only slightly older than him had masterminded the whole development process, from initial design to final production, and had planned to give it away as a birthday present. He'd never get used to this.

It was a vindicating thing, a nod to what he felt was a tenuous grip on sanity, when the twins felt somewhat as he did; they had called Daniel back up and asked him how and why he had manufactured something this advanced so clandestinely.

"Why wouldn't I have?" Daniel asked in response. "My dad gave me the business six years ago, and I didn't need to outsource for anything." He shrugged, smiling at his Masters as if he were teaching small, beloved children an important lesson. "You've been fighting, investigating, settling disputes, doing all your necessities as befits your station. C'mon, Dominator. I know nobody ever tells you this, but please, lose the rarefied atmosphere, it makes you look like a culture shock victim. Your business is politics and dirty deeds. My mind's been working on making us more powerful. What do you think I've been doing this whole time, sitting around with my thumb up my ass?" The twins didn't reply. He was obviously right, he was all too right, and if all the Levels thought like him there probably wouldn't be a rogue problem to begin with. If he wanted to be smug about it, that was fine by them. "Duumvirate, your business is reactive. You find threats and respond to them. But us? We have to be proactive." His tone suggested he'd been having that argument with a lot of other engineereds- that they needed to stop sitting around slacking off and just doing the usual crap while waiting for the twins to make the world right, and that they all should have been as technologically aggressive as Daniel. The twins nodded in agreement.

But the way he talked.. "So you're coming with us?" William asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No, I don't think I would, even if I could." The twins raised three more eyebrows. If he could? "I was one of the first true partials, conceived right after you were born. The Operator did well- I'm faster and stronger than any normal." Which meant nowhere close to you. "And I've got the whole regeneration and immune system, too." Which meant no retrovirus for me. It was obviously a sore point for him, and the twins didn't press it.

"Well, then," William said, about to click off, "I hope you enjoy the kids asking you to make this for them now." His father had his hands full making the jets for engineereds that the Duumvirate had ordered nearly a decade before.

"Actually, I can't. At least not that they can keep wearing for more than a couple of weeks. Half-centimeter growth spurts fuck everything up. Those suits are fitted to the millimeter. What I'm working on now is an expandable version-" he wiggled his wrists and fingers around, just as the twins had- "but fitting this to usable armor? Fat chance." He smiled at the twins, mouth half-open so they wouldn't think the conversation was over, considering his next words carefully. "Duumvirate. Some of us would have it that you are our head, some see you as our heart. No. You are our feet, in the boots of justice. I speak for all of us here: Go, my dear Masters, stomp upon our your and our enemies, and we shall bring to you the future." He nodded solemnly, and clicked off.

The twins shared a soft sigh at the subtexts. The first was that Daniel considered them to have authority but not true leadership, but that was par for the course. The second was a re-affirmation of the deal between civilized sentients and their appointed authority figures: your job is to perform the tasks of violence, for the good of all of us. The third, however, evoked the promise the twins had made to each other: that they would go to the future together.

They were genetically engineered superhumans wearing power armor about to embark on a fusion-powered jet to fly them to the far side of the moon, and they still sought the future.

But to get there, they had to clear away the ghosts of the past.

"Well, justice feet?" Paul asked, grinning. "You heard the man. Let's go kick some ass."

"Wait," Sarah said, and they turned to look at her. She took a deep breath, audible from the speakers, and began to talk operational details.

"First off, I would pick a spot almost identical to the one they did. The Tsiolkovsky crater is uniquely defensible. There's an enormous boulder in the center, nothing to hide behind for a low land approach, and sniping spots a hundred kilometers away from the base." No atmospheric refraction, no wind, no air friction, the bullet drop one-sixth of what it is on Earth. Sniper's paradise. Emplaced on one side of the 180 km-diameter crater, she could hit targets on the other. "My first order of business would be to have a series of long-range sensors and weapons embedded in the central boulder, and additional sensors and defenses placed along the rim. I would also deploy a network of microcameras along the surface, particularly in the few small craters. And I mean micro- the resolution would be basically nonexistent and it could hardly be called a camera at all. But so what? It's the Moon. Anything unfamiliar moving is obviously hostile. Tremor sensors would also be obvious, because again, there's no local wildlife to set it off. Then I would dig underground, planting lots of kinetic and explosive weapons under the surface, which I would leave effectively untouched. Anything or anyone moving towards my base that thought it was hiding would be blown apart from below. Anything that tried to set up shop around the rim would be blown up as well. Since I have the entirety of the underground to work with, I could put pretty much anything down there. This is assuming that the invaders aren't coming in high, which would be suicide because anything visible would be laser and projectile bait in an environment without secrecy concerns."

"Nuke it from orbit?" Luke suggested. It was, after all, the only way to be sure.

"Everything it from orbit, shotgun style, to disrupt the defenses, then go in the holes we just made, make more holes, and hopefully destroy their defenses without destroying information about them," Paul said. That was fairly basic. With their power armor they could survive jumping through melting-titanium temperatures for the split second it would take them. "Come in behind a lot of rock. Quick, simple, clean, not much they can do about that, and the robots can just lift off from here and they can throw anything we want them to, rocks, thermobarics, fusion. Carry all three, bomb when we need to." The robots would easily be there first, of course. Even engineereds in power armor couldn't take the thirty gravities of acceleration an engineered-built machine could. Illuminated manufacturing had changed beyond what was previously thought reasonable; said robots could probably be produced inside of four hours, as a normal child may put together Legos. Daniel would probably start producing them in one hour, just to prove that he could. "Luke, you know what we need, go order some." Luke was back on the screen with Daniel in a few seconds; Paul's guess was right and Daniel promised a small fleet to be available for use long before the twins' jet got there, even if it was being initially launched in normal-looking rockets for secrecy reasons. The only problem was the scandium, Daniel said, but who cared? This was to end a war.

"And where would you suggest we strike?" Sarah asked, a small smile on her face. This was, hopefully, the twins' last normal-born threat, and it had a straightforward solution. She really shouldn't have to play operational babysitter for them anymore in any capacity. If the rest of them couldn't get this...

"Well, not the obvious dome-bait," Paul said. "Although we should spare a rock or two to blow that up anyway. But that boulder in the center? It's either a double-bluff or not a bluff at all. Bet you that really is their base, all of it, not just some defensive outpost."

"What leads you to that conclusion?" she asked, perplexed.

"Think about it. You expect them to have a secondary fake, and their real base is somewhere else, maybe not even in that crater but still on the far side of the Moon."

"And that would be too difficult to achieve?"

"They still don't have controlled fusion," Paul reminded her. "You're thinking how you would do it- and you do," he said, gesturing to her armor. "They'd either have to completely hide all evidence of working on the surface of the fucking Moon, or dig through miles of solid moon rock without it. Sure- possible. But without leaving a trace? Really? Them, up there?" He shook his head. It just wasn't plausible. "And the guy's records being faked? Possible. It's possible for them to have sent back a fake feed from the telescopes, it's not like we're going to go check the software in person or it'd matter if we did." The servants and twins were listening to this table-tennis argument with interest. "We have evidence they didn't try. Look at them, Sarah. Think about how they see the world, how their organization has worked. Do you really think that they can resist the temptation to keep detailed records on each other? His clone was probably just pissed that the telescopes couldn't watch the Moon a hundred percent of the time." Those were still a normal piggyback, and governments didn't send up enough spacecraft for that to be possible, particularly not between the Sun and the Earth.

"If he really wanted that information he could have ordered up enough."

"He could have, but then his fellow rogues would be asking him why he did that. They didn't know about the feed, of course it wasn't sent directly there. So they think that the first bluff will work, because they had no idea that one of their members would be crazy and stupid enough to keep records on their travels."

Sarah almost asked why he would do something like that. It was the Illuminati equivalent of Scholar's Mate.

"Guys?" she asked, looking at the Duumvirate.

"Paul wins this one, Sarah. Second base it is, robot guard, full throttle, if nothing's there we just keep looking," Howard said. "Fido!", he called out, and the speakers tripled his volume. In seconds, a streak of white darted out of the trees towards them, barking in recognition, followed by other streaks of retroviral canids. Something important had to be going on for his master to yell that loudly, Fido figured. And something was obviously going on- what were they all doing in metal shells? And what was that smell of fire, and the sharp tang after a lightning strike?

"There you are!" Howard said, not daring to touch him. Way too fucking easy to hurt him wearing this, and even with his reflexes he didn't want to risk it. "You don't want to come with us." Dogs have fur, and rely on smell. A dog in power armor would go crazy.

"We're going to be gone for a very long time. We will be back," William said, reaching out his hand and letting Fido lick the metal.

Fido understood four things in that sentence: 'gone', 'long time', 'back', and the apologetic nature of the voice. He also understood the general meaning of 'you don't want to come with us' but that, like most things humans said, made little sense. Of course he wanted to come with them, everywhere. Why would he not? And, like any good dog, he would wait for his master as he had done so many times before. He barked a single time, barked at the other dogs, and ran back into the forest with them.

They turned to their friends, their smiles visible through the glass. "Like everything else we do, this could very well get us all killed," William said.

"Shall we risk it, one final time?" Howard asked, as if offering a vacation. 'No' was not an option. Sarah simply waited. Paul smiled back at them. Ruby was wondering why they hadn't left already.

Luke chuckled. He still firmly believed that their willingness to go themselves was insane. But it was a glorious insanity. It was, after all, their war and their world. He knew very well that if the rest of them had been killed, the twins would still go, just the two of them, in full defiance of anything that suggested that the world did not belong to them. And here he was, gladly defending their ultimate transcendent ego with his own life. He laughed. "Let's get off this fucking planet."

"All right, then. Sarah, we leave the flight to you, Paul, astrogation," Howard said as they entered the plane, carefully moving their increased bulk into the seats. Astrogation. The word flowed off the tongue, and it was a word they'd hope to hear many, many times in the future. It was something engineereds would be doing a lot of in the next million years.

Paul did some math, considered the problem, and almost said something about fuel concerns before he chuckled. The jet (and here Paul had to remind himself that they just called it that; it was really a fusion rocket with wings) had enough delta-V to take them straight to Mars at a tenth of a gravity, and that was before adding booster rockets. Going to the Moon was just a straight shot with as much acceleration as they could possibly want. "How fast do you want to go?"

"Fuck it- let's do three G's," William said. He was tempted to say more, but this would take a while and he didn't want to sit under more for that long. The twins started rotating their seats to face forwards and everyone else followed.

"All right, that'll put us at.." Math, math, where the hell was the Moon right now and what would be their turnaround time, oh of course there was a program for calculating things like that, just be careful with the controls when one false move could shatter the whole thing... "about two hours, so we'll have to aim for..." Fuck it, he didn't have to figure that out himself either, just run this little thing here.. ah. He wasn't used to having to worry about concepts like right ascension and declination, but at least it wasn't on the other side of the planet right now and it would only move about 1\'b0 in its orbit. He oriented Sarah towards a point roughly two Moon-lengths in front of its path- almost straight towards the Sun- and the jet tore out of Earth's gravity well like a bat out of hell.

The jet had a function to synchronize the internal pressure with the external pressure; Howard laughed as this was the first time he had seen a confirmation message in his life. Yes, he was sure he wanted to render the internal space uninhabitable to unsuited humans; the jet had no airlock, so there was no sense trying to keep it pressurized if they were going to open the door on the Moon. As they rose past the exosphere, less than a quarter inch of specialized plastic came between them and hard vacuum. There were no air tanks on their suits; carbon dioxide, exhaled water vapor, sweat, urine, and feces were all reformed back into edible carbohydrates with trace elements returned, drinkable mesohaline water, and oxygen. ('Great, now we're all eating our own shit', Luke thought) They could last without opening their faceplates for several weeks until they died of a lack of vitamins the suits couldn't make, an omission to be rectified in some future version.

After confirming a few tidbits of what they could do, what they could tolerate, and what they had to avoid, they flew in silence, having nothing to say and not sure what was worth saying. They were isolated, now, the network connection unable to tolerate the increasing lag and packet loss from its nearest node. This was the twins' first time so far from Earth's gravity well, and they took the opportunity to look outside. The front camera showed almost pure blackness surrounding the bright white circle of the Sun, behind them a tail of extremely fast, glowing plasma exhaust obscuring a steadily shrinking blue-and-white orb, nothing but empty space and stars at the sides. Paul relaxed, smiling, taking the acceleration as a comfort, reclining in his seat. How could he say he was happy, almost the happiest he'd ever been in his life? It made no sense, they were about to do something extremely dangerous in unfamiliar territory controlled entirely by enemies, the environment more inhospitable than anything on Earth. And yet.. and yet, even if he did die, it wouldn't even matter. If he was going to go, this is how he'd want to do it, on an adventure with his best friends, defeating the enemies that had been a pain for so long, closing one era and opening another. It was as if he was leaving his worries back where he'd come from. Surprised at himself, he thought of the omnicide the twins were going to commit and realized he didn't even care about that; when he thought about children, he saw Quad, Stan, Ophelia, all the Northberg kids, flying with everyone else he knew towards a new, wonderful dawn. Everything he'd felt when he first got the retrovirus flooded back, enveloping him. He'd found his truth. He fell nearly asleep against the crushing acceleration, a smile on his face.

His reverie was interrupted by a buzzer from the screens- a robot had caught up to them and was requesting permission to install a limited program, as it placed itself somewhere visible to things above both the target area and the near side of the Moon. Daniel'd had his Enforcers cook up a simple, tinkertoy API for fast nuclear death bots, the little machine serving as a relay for the payload-bearers that would shortly start accelerating in a long hook to impact the far side. Now how did this work? Oh, just the very basics, a bunch of pre-made routines bolted together on top of existing control schemes, most of the program having been uploaded to the little bot in mid-flight. Goddamn, that guy was good at his job. Deceleration time happened a moment later, Sarah choosing to turn the jet around instead of relying on the reverse thrusters. Three gravities on one's back is better than upside-down.

They were nearly at their destination when the bots could start seeing the inside of the vast crater, large anti-air artillery atop the boulder, other things coming into focus at the rim. Sarah picked out most of the targets, electing to flatten the domes with medium-sized rocks, throwing large rocks at the anti-air pieces and then using a medium fusion bomb to waste a great deal of the boulder's top, picking off a number of suspicious ridges at the rim with even larger bombs as there was a lot of territory for hidden emplacements.

Against accelerating, targeted, heavy meteors, the anti-air defenses were helpless. By the time the enemy missiles could reach the side of the incoming rocks, the rocks had already come so close that their aim was deflected by just a few dozen meters, kinetic weapons breaking them up but doing next to nothing against their terrible momentum. The bombardment made craters that normals would have given names to. There were two large, visible doors embedded at an angle into the great central boulder's south side; both got hammered. "Looks like Brenk's running Tomb of Horrors," Paul said before he explained the fake-entrance business. The cameras accompanying the fleet of ships were good enough to spy tracks, furrows, and moved material in front of an outcrop of rock on the southeast side of the boulder- that was the real entrance, and the doors embedded there got only a little rock. This was a raid; they were there to invade and explore, not bury the evidence and a possibly still-functioning system. This time they had to know their enemies were destroyed.

By the time the engineereds were done, there was very little man-made that was even visible, and the cameras themselves came to crashing ends on the surface. Sarah wanted to dig a deep landing spot, before the twins informed her it wouldn't work the way she wanted. Too much heat.

Less than fifteen minutes after the bombardment, they had come around the moon's south pole, approaching the area low and slow, lasering anything that looked like too much of a good sniper spot or in any way suspicious, Sarah's paranoia at maximum. They landed in a hundred-meter-deep crater ten kilometers from the entrance, set some autodefense routines on the weapon systems of the 'if it's not emitting a friendly signal, blow it away' variety, and took one small step to the unforgiving surface.