Dupes: Part 5
Haley and I listened until they finished the meeting, but they didn't have any more bombshells. Not that anything could trump the bit where Russell Hardwick had scanned the relevant bits of Red Lightning's version of the working Impregnator plans and was handing them out to his people.
Probably at that point, people more competent than we were would have tracked down the engineers Hardwick had assigned the job, deleted their files, recovered the original journal, and scared them away from even trying to reconstruct them.
We didn't have the slightest clue where we would have started on that. Plus they'd probably already had the plans for a couple days, so they likely understood the concepts behind the process, which would make the destruction of the plans more of an inconvenience than anything else.
At least that's how it would have worked for me.
One other reason we didn't go directly into action was that Haley and I'd already put off doing something together. We'd planned on going out on Friday night, but I'd ended up meeting with the FBI agents, and then one of her family's restaurants had been short staffed so her dad scheduled her to cover the busiest parts of both Friday and Saturday night.
So what we actually did was go to a park, and go for a walk. We talked about the fact that I'd be graduating soon, and where I'd be going, and where she was hoping to apply...
All the while, I had a vague sense that I ought to be doing something, but I wasn't sure what, and I didn't want her to feel like I'd just dropped the date so that I could run off and play superhero. So, I didn't.
Maybe she would have been interested, but to be honest, it felt like all I'd done lately was school, training, and running around in costume. I couldn't think of the last video game I'd played, and the last book I'd been reading, Brin's Kiln People, sat half finished on my desk.
I decided to enjoy myself, and hoped Hardwick's engineers wouldn't get the Impregnator going that afternoon.