Chapter One

The dawn of the sun angled across the station's four huge sensor-comm panels that radiated from its center base, giving the station the rough appearance of a mammoth, floating ceiling fan. A fact that was not lost on the onlookers, news helicopter pilots and the ground crews of the Retroville Municipal Airport more than a thousand feet below it.

The same morning light softly probed its way into the station's interior through a clear dome at the very top, where it touched the harsh illumination of the base's surviving lighting coming from the damaged command deck below and was consumed. To Jimmy Neutron, it all just meant that he would be late for school. Very late.

Small mounds of wrecks, the laser-carved hulks of armed robots, lay at his and government agent Jet Fusion's feet, as their electrical fire-induced smoke, coupled with the smoke from ruined consoles and monitor banks on their side of the chamber, gave the shafts of sunlight from overhead strength to glow and give the indoor battlefield an ethereal look.

On the far side of the room, delineated by the heavy smoke, stood a small, balding man with Coke-bottle glasses that made his already weak eyes look like frail specks. Flanking protectively to either side of him were floating, squat machines, the same ones whose destroyed brethren decorated the intruders' side of the room. With their powerful, singular eyes they tried to scan through of the cloud cover.

Every so often, one of the machines, called SecuriBots, would get a faint, ghostly image lock on one or both of the intruders and fire, but would miss due to either fast reflexes on the targets' part or the machine mistakenly firing on the afterimage the smoke would create. The man didn't much care.

For him, what was crucially important was the console he stood guard over and glanced at every so often. Among the myriad switches, knobs, dials and buttons that coated the surface of the control panel, a single large LED dominated the center of the panel. A clock that ticked down instead of up and was just finished with the hours and now was running down minutes. Something the small man noted with unhidden glee.

"Neutron! Fusion!" the man called out. "You're both a day late and a dollar short. The two of you couldn't possibly destroy my ASP base in time to save the airplanes that are even now flying in dangerous patterns and threatening to crash into each other."

"Is that why you've set up your base over the airport?" Jimmy asked. "Sheesh, if you're missing your luggage, just complain to the airline like the rest of us, don't take it out on the passengers."

"Funny, Neutron," said the man. "But your levity won't change the situation. Hovering over this airport and disrupting air traffic will prove to the fools below that nothing in the skies can stop my A-S-P, my Air Supremacy Platform, and after I've killed you two and the airplanes crash into each other, I'm going to make my list of demands known to the soon-to-be-grounded."

He reached over and tapped a flat button off to the side and monitors, the few that survived the battle thus far and surrounded the command deck, flickered to life and a computer animation, an elaborate simulation, played out on the screens.

"This base's communications array can generate anything from long-range EM bursts and comm-jamming static, to instrument-failing radio frequency deflection," he said as the animation showed different images of energy radiating from the large vanes of the wire frame ASP base. It seemed strange to the young inventor and the government agent watching, that the man sounded like he was giving a presentation at a board meeting, rather than gloating at the devilish fruition of a deadly plan, but he continued.

"Right now, I'm generating a scrambler field all around the base but I'm allowing small windows in the field so the news copters can get really nice close-ups of my glorious base. Still, the pilots out there are realizing that they better keep their distance if they want to keep what little control they have," he railed. "No jet fighter, no missile, no vehicle that flies and uses instruments to navigate can withstand my field without flying headlong into the ground. But that's not even the best part."

"Do tell," Jet Fusion quipped.

"I will. Within this base are missile silos, and in the warheads of the hundreds and hundreds of missiles therein are deployable containers, each holding a miniature ASP transmitter linked to this station."

The animation now showed dotted lines curving away from the base in high trajectories.

"Once launched, the missiles will fly to every corner of the Earth, releasing their payloads across the sky. Each transmitter, like this base, is solar-powered, disrupt aircraft, can stay aloft via anti-grav generators, and will give my base constant surveillance of the skies."

A wire frame of the Earth was now shown with a global network of glowing dots enshrouding it.

"Soon, my network will give me uncontested dominion of the skies in every direction. No aerial trade, traffic or warfare will be tolerated without paying my price," he concluded with a laugh. "Their tribute to me, the lord of the firmament!"

Jet prepared to shoot the man one of his brash trademark retorts and expected Jimmy to fire out one of his own, but Jimmy simply stared at the villain for a long introspective moment. Jet didn't need to read the boy's body language to know that the mad scientist in Jimmy was suitably intrigued.

"That's pretty good," Jimmy admitted truthfully. It was evil, true, but effective.

"Why, thank you," the would-be tyrant gushed off-guard.

Silence.

"No, really. That's pretty good."

Jet had heard enough. "Give it up, Calamitous!" the agent quickly ordered through the haze, still keeping his distance, and raising an intercepting hand in front of Jimmy to soundlessly suggest that he do likewise. Jimmy, brought out of his own daydreams of social change via rampant superscience, sheepishly obeyed.

"Never!" was the expected reply, followed by a salvo of red beams flashing out from the fading smoke to burn the air where the agent and inventor stood moments before they dove away. The beams, however, did stab into more consoles, monitor banks and the backs of the worker drones who were momentarily working there.

"You should have programmed your SecuriBots to understand fire discipline, Professor" Jimmy taunted while rolling to a wary crouch a few feet from Jet. "They're doing more damage to you than we are."

"And you should have minded your business, Neutron," Calamitous shot back. "I'll have to finish you now instead of at a time and place of my choosing. I wonder if the Big Top Secret Organization does group funerals?" He finished the rejoinder with another salvo at Jimmy's apparent location. With the smoke thinning due to the ventilation systems finally getting a handle on things, his robots' aim grew distressingly better

Jimmy could feel the lethal heat of the beams wash around his feet and legs and he hopped and rolled clumsily away again. They were trying to cut my legs out from under me, he surmised.

"Jimmy!"

The boy turned to the sound of Jet and risked a moment to see him wave Jimmy over to where the man now crouched behind, a section of upper deck and support beam that had fallen earlier.

The smoke began to dissipate and Jimmy could now clearly see the diminutive Professor Finbarr Calamitous and his six surviving SecuriBots. The machines created a protective ring around the small man and tracked their weapons to Jimmy's new position.

Jimmy fearfully berated himself for standing still and knew he would be dead when the command to fire left the robots' processors and entered their guns, all of a few nanoseconds' time.

Then the command switched to one of reacquiring a new target, when a piece of metal ricocheted off the optic panel of the lead machine, drawing it and its comrades' attention to the angle of its origin: Jet's position.

Jimmy tore off towards Jet, thankful for the agent's distracting throw, and almost pitched forward into a crashing fall as he hastily sacrificed balance for the chance to manipulate his watch's built-in laser.

The lead SecuriBot decided that Jet, attacking last, was the greater threat and burst-transmitted the order for the rest of its team to maximize firepower at the structure Jet was using as cover.

The leader angled its weapon arm at the structure, and then suffered a sudden, catastrophic failure along its higher brain functions, as the narrow beam from Jimmy's watch burned a clean, smoldering hole through its cranial shell, melting delicate components and chips directly, and frying connective wiring with the beam's residual heat. The lead SecuriBot froze into place and then simply crashed to the floor in a lobotomized heap.

In the tight seconds it took for the remaining machines to reassign one of their number to the position of the new lead, Jimmy slid into Jet as the man tucked the boy closer to himself and the center of the barricade, making sure no extremity was exposed to be targeted.

"You okay, kid?" Jet asked with the breathlessness of a close call.

"Yeah, Jet," Jimmy said shakily. "Thanks for distracting them for me."

"Same here. They could've blew this little piggie's house down, big time."

They both cringed as ear-ringing concussions and gradual heat build-up signaled the start of the robots' final assault on the makeshift barrier.

"There are still five of them out there," Jimmy said soberly. "They could outflank us."

Jet frowned at that. Jimmy was right and it was just a miracle that the machines hadn't thought of that sooner, or else he would have been overrun. They still could be.

Jet securely patted his service firearm in his jacket in a comforting gesture. It was spent of ammo earlier while he made his way to the command deck, not knowing that the boy Neutron had also made his way in, by flying via jet-pack to the top of the command deck's glass dome and laser-cutting his way in.

He picked up a length of metal bar that had once been a minor support to the upper floor section now being used as a barricade. Its end was torn and twisted by stress into a crude chisel point.

"Well, I got me a can-opener," Jet said with faded joviality. "What about you? How much juice you still got in that watch?"

Despite the noise of the attack, Jimmy calmly moved fingers across the open panels of his chronometer and checked readings that made his youthful face somber.

"Not much. I used the majority of the laser's charge cutting through the dome above us. I didn't know Calamitous made it out of carbonium," Jimmy reported sourly. "The rest of the charge was spent fighting off that last wave of SecuriBots and taking out the leader just now. If I divert all remaining power to the laser, I might damage a few, but I doubt it."

"It'll have to do," Jet decided grimly. He stood in crouch and gestured to Jimmy that he stay where he was. "I'm gonna see what they're up to."

"Be careful, Jet," Jimmy warned as his fingers tapped tiny buttons that gave commands to the watch's energy distribution.

When he was satisfied with the results, Jimmy glanced up at Jet as the agent shot his head up past the edge of the barricade and they swiftly ducked back down into a crouching position again.

"You're right, Jimmy. They're flanking," he said while struggling to get a better grip on his weapon than his sweaty palms could provide. "Two on my side, three on yours. Switch places."

Jimmy knew why in a coldly logical flash. With the destruction of the old leader, the new lead robot realized that Jimmy had to be a greater threat with his watch, so it came to the conclusion to overwhelm the boy and the survivors could decimate Fusion soon after.

But that logical voice, however loudly it explained things, couldn't drown out the singular fact that at least he had a fighting chance with his laser. Jet, with his crowbar-like weapon, was less likely to survive.

"Jet, I set my laser to wide-dispersal. It should damage my three or take out at least two of them. But you'd be overwhelmed by superior numbers in seconds if we switch," Jimmy explained quickly, while wondering if his breathlessness was due to talking fast or to the knowledge that his time had just about come.

"I told you to change places with me, kid," Fusion ordered while twisting his head to follow the pulsing whirr of the killing machines' anti-grav propulsion. He wasn't in the mood to be the one who would have to tell his parents that their son had died, if he managed to survive, himself. "That wasn't a request, either."

"But-" Jimmy sputtered as he felt the strong hand of Jet slam into his chest, clutch a handful of shirt and effortlessly start to lift him to where Fusion was about vacate.

"No!" Jimmy cried, just as his peripheral vision caught the sight of the three rounding the side of the barrier, weapon arms raised.

Out of reflex, he shot his arm up and a spreading cascade of red energy firehosed from the tiny jewel emitter in the watch.

Jimmy gritted his teeth at the sudden searing pain of high temperature threatening to cook the back of his hand, but he held the arm still as the laser's heat distorted outer shells, cracked optic panels, consumed sensor material and set fires within. Damage that was mirrored in the internals of the doomed timepiece, as the jewel in the center of the beam emitter built into the watch's tiny communication dish glowed, smoked and then shattered with a quiet pop and the watch itself became too hot to wear, its compressed tritium battery spent and sizzling.

Jimmy tore the dead device from his tortured wrist and stared at the ravaged droids. The fronts of their body shells were ruined, exposed circuitry smoldered and was blackened, and servos, actuators and hydraulic systems were deformed by the heat blast. But they still stood, to Jimmy and Jet's horror. They were listing, half-blind and almost gutted, but they still stood.

Their hard drives, those that survived by virtue of just being far enough inside the robots to be shielded by everything else, ran remaining imperatives, target lists and contingency plans, and realized mathematically, logically, stubbornly, that the machines still had some fight left in them.

Jittering weapon arms and partially working targeting computers worked in struggling concert along with their still intact comrades', who covered Jet from behind.

Jet released Jimmy, who took a cautious step behind Jet as the agent stood his full height and brandished his melee weapon.

Jimmy couldn't help feeling the fear that punched into his heart or the shame of not being able to help Jet more.

"I'm sorry, Jet," Jimmy moaned, his large, sad blue eyes still analyzing the situation, however dire. "I thought I could get them off of you."

In spite of everything, Fusion smiled his best smile yet at the boy. "That's okay, partner. You did what you could." He said nothing more but he kept the smile up. He wanted Jimmy to know that it would be alright, that they did their best, that death, for the brave, was temporary.

The flashes of light and heat thundering around them was quick and final.

The cored bodies of the five SecuriBots that lay in smoking heaps was testament to the weapons' devastating efficiency. Weapons that resided in the cooling, unblinking eyes of the robot dog that yapped happily through the wreckage towards his young master.

"Goddard!" Jimmy yelled in joy as he hugged his pet around the neck and squeezed affectionately. "You tracked my signal before the watch gave out. Good boy! Good boy!"

Jet was caught off-guard. "Wait! How did Goddard make it here past the scrambler field? It should have grounded him, too."

Jimmy just chuckled at their good fortune. "Remember Calamitous saying he allowed small windows in the field to let the news helicopters come in close? I sent a distress signal to Goddard and he managed to find one of the windows." He then hugged his dog again and rubbed his domed head briskly. "Didn't you, boy? That's my good boy," he cooed at Goddard.

"Too little, too late, you meddlers," Calamitous chided, feeling utterly stupid about letting his ego compromise his security. "More SecuriBots are on their way and the countdown is nearly over. Soon my missiles will spread my ASP net across the globe. The earth will pay tribute to me for the use of the heavens!"

The laughter that rang became a hollow accompaniment to the automated voice still counting down the few remaining minutes into even more uncomfortable seconds.

"We gotta reach the missile silos, Jimmy," Fusion said as he brushed himself off and looked around for the exit.

"Way ahead of ya, Jet. Goddard, do a chemical scan for large concentrations of rocket fuel." said Jimmy.

Goddard's nose pointed up in the air as microfilters sifted errant molecules of liquid oxygen and petroleum based polymer chains used in propellants. Tense moments passed and then his chest plate swung up, revealing a small monitor that quickly displayed a schematic of the base and a direct path winding down to a wide, central deck below the command deck, studded and ringed with miniature ports.

"Jackpot," exclaimed Jet.

After a reckless run avoiding arriving SecuriBots through Red Alert-lit corridors and express elevators, the three heroes charged through a hastily hot-wired set of thick armored doors that opened up to vast, circular chamber controlled and monitored by a single, omni-functional control pedestal several yards ahead.

"Goddard, weld the doors," Jimmy ordered as he and Jet scrambled to the console, eager to stop the missile launch, but not feeling too optimistic in succeeding.

Goddard's powerful optic beams lanced to a superheated point along the spaces where door slid across doorway tracks, glowing the edges and melding the metal together into a sealed wall.

Just then, the concussive booms of SecuriBot blasters pounded against the centers of the doors, intent on softening the armor and eventually melting their way in. Already the middle of the doors were starting to slightly brighten and smoke.

A warning bark from the canoid brought that fact to the two humans' attention.

"They sure are persistent," Jet muttered as he looked over the control panel and single use monitor.

Jimmy cupped his hand under his chin and pondered what he was seeing. The launch bay was huge and reminiscent of an Roman amphitheatre, but where the surrounding tiered seating would be, thousands of thin missiles on short, 45-degree angled launch tracks, propped up against raised, individual blast walls, dominated the chamber. They faced an equal number of missile ports lining the far, curving walls of the room that opened out into the immediate sky.

Something in the back of Neutron's mind told him that a solution was not long in coming every time he looked at the seemingly endless brace of projectiles. It was just having trouble coming up to the surface.

"Got any ideas?" Jet asked, preferring to watch Jimmy think rather than hear the doors' strength wane with each shot or depressing himself by looking at the missile banks.

"I'm working it out, Jet," Jimmy said thoughtfully. "Something about the missiles could help, but I'm not sure yet." His eyes kept scanning the missiles' casings, their engines, their size. "Something...something that was said." Their color...their...

"That's it!" Jimmy shouted. "Their warheads!"

Jet paused. "What about 'em? They won't blow up or anything because there's no explosives in them. Calamitous said that he just put those little transmitters in the warheads."

"Precisely!" Jimmy poured all of his attention over the various keypads and soon found the one that inputted commands to the launch computer, and from it, to the processors that served as the missiles' brains. His hands flashed over the keys to reprogram and then stopped dead above them, his eyes wide with worry.

"Pukin' Pluto!" he swore aloud. "I-I need the security codes for this computer or I can't tell it what I want it to do! I don't have time to hack in!"

"No problem," Jet said as he reached into his inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a folded sheet a paper and handed it to Jimmy. "The BTSO's hackers managed to get their hands on this little beauty. My mission was to capture Calamitous and destroy this place. Failing that, I was to shut down the computers with this."

Jimmy opened the paper and saw two strings of alphanumerical code, a long string over a short one.

"That line of numbers, there, is a backdoor code through the computer network," Jet said.

"And the second, shorter set?"

"Hmm?" Jet looked over at the paper. "Oh! Uh, that's Beautiful Gorgeous' phone number. I said I'd look her up after she escaped from prison," he said sheepishly.

That threw Jimmy for a second, but he recovered, saying, "Yes, well, this will do just fine. Now I can access the computer that feeds targeting information to the missiles."

"Why?"

"So I can make the missiles do our job for us," Jimmy explained as his fingers blurred across the keyboard like a pianist on a caffeine high. Only when the control pedestal's only monitor screen displayed green confirming text, did he stop typing and momentarily admired his sabotage.

"Did you do it?" Jet asked tensely.

"I believe so, but we better get out of here while we've got the chance. If all goes well, we won't want to be here," Jimmy told him, then turned to face his dog. "Goddard, Skycycle mode."

Goddard barked twice then began to initiate a physical transformation. His tube-like legs elongated and bent back as his body began to hover. Ports that led to flexible, internal rocket thrust nozzles, opened in the centers on his metal paws. His ears angled back to act as handlebars and a sissy bar extended out from where the base of his spine would have been.

Jimmy straddled Goddard without preamble and coasted to where Jet was standing nearby.

"Hop on!"

"You don't have to tell me twice," quipped Jet as he quickly sat behind Jimmy. Goddard's anti-grav drive and thrusters sang a song of mild protest as he compensated for the extra weight and then, through Jimmy's urgent body English, he rose smoothly up and banked towards one of the missile ports.

From the corner of their eyes, Goddard's passengers saw a pinkish flash as the crimson light of the SecuriBots' weapons ripped a hole in the welded doors roughly wide enough to hover through.

Bolts of energy zinged up and around the three as Goddard put on more speed, dipped under a warhead, and then accelerated through one of the port's short tunnels and away into the morning sky.

Below the three escapees, they could make out the clusters of firefighters, news crews and national guard members milling around the runways, wisely not directly underneath the ASP base, but near enough to act when needed.

"Goddard," Jimmy ordered, his voice barely audible in the bracing wind that buffeted them as they flew father away. "Land us over by the terminal. This gonna be good."

The robot obeyed, gradually descending at an angle that took them over and past the authorities on the tarmac and then coming to a gentle stop in front of one of the terminal's panoramic windows overlooking the runways and the open field beyond.

After Jimmy and Jet dismounted and Goddard return to his previous configuration, they all looked up and watched the base, while Jimmy quietly counted down the remaining seconds of the countdown he heard as they made good their escape.

"One!" Jimmy called out, as suddenly, like a fireworks show, missiles, roaring, fired out in rapid salvos from the circumference of the floating station.

Like in the simulation, the missiles soared in high trajectories away from the base. Unlike the simulation, however, the missiles didn't continue on to their destined flight paths, but simply detonated above and around the ASP base, releasing tiny globes that glittered in the morning light and surrounded the station.

"Come on, come on," Jimmy chanted under his breath as the clouds of metallic dots just hung there innocently in their hovering holding patterns.

Then a sharp blue flash, like a lightning stroke, rippled across the broad communications array, followed by flaming surface explosions made tiny and sonically out-of-sync by distance. For the three who were watching, it was quite the show.

Then the miracle Jimmy was praying for came to pass. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the station began to lose altitude, crashing through the bottom of the cloud of turncoat transmitters and actually pitching and tumbling in the merciless clutches of freefall, with the helplessness of a baby chick falling from a nest in slow-motion. The people on the runways broke into panicked runs as the base quickly darkened the ground around them with its ponderous shadow.

Trucks and jeeps soon scattered with their passengers, all of them racing haphazardly towards the main gates. Jimmy, Jet and Goddard could hear the frightened and incredulous gasps from the airport staff and patrons who watched, as they did, the mammoth swan song of the base from the wide terminal windows behind them.

Jimmy's heart was caught in his chest as he unconsciously held his breath, awaiting the titanic impact to come. It reminded him strongly of the ill-fated landing of The Hindenberg in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1939. Like that crash, it would be fiery and it would be final. Well worth missing school for.

Jimmy's reverie was broken by Goddard's insistent barking and Jet's sudden pointing at the doomed structure. "Look!" he told the boy.

From the closeness of the station, just before its crushing fall, Jimmy could just make out a glittering red object flying out of the top of the ASP base, where its glass dome would have been located. Yet, the object didn't fall with the parabolic freedom of its fellow debris. Instead, it stabilized in flight and gained noticeable speed in a direction contrary to the path of the station.

It banked in its flight and headed out from the airport, but in doing so, it came close enough over the terminal that Jimmy could see what it was that made his companions excitable. It was a large red and chrome robot, rocketing away with built-in jets in its feet. Its design, beady eyed countenance and hinged, heavy-set jaws were all too familiar to him.

"Calamitous' robot," Jimmy said bitterly to himself, and was more than convinced that the professor was piloting it, as was his custom. Although it wasn't in Jimmy's nature to wish the mad scientist dead, it was somewhat disheartening to see him escape justice. It made the hard-won victory seem sadly pyrhic.

But the thoughts of his enemy still on the loose to cause strife to him, his friends and family, and the world at large, was jarringly broken when the sound and tremors of Doomsday ripped into him.

The base struck the tarmac, distorting it into a cracked, hellish, kilometers-wide crater. The raw weight of it caused the blade-like communications array to fold, break apart, and flip up gracefully into the smoke-darkened air above it.

The kinetic energy of the crash flattened the station and made its center bulge outward until it breeched and ruptured, like a crushed jelly donut, blasting flaming wreckage, ruined decks and vaporized rocket fuel in all directions.

Although Jimmy and his companions were, luckily, far enough away to avoid the firestorm of shrapnel that the disaster gave birth to, the devastating shockwave and thermal front that accompanied it, stripped the balance from their legs and threw them to the quivering ground with ridiculous ease. The people in the terminal behind them screamed as they, too, were knocked to the floor and the windows surrendered to the energy of the localized man-made earthquake and shattered into glassy rain.

Jet didn't want to get up right away. He swore he could see the concrete undulate like a swell. He simply waited until he was sure the trembling totally subsided before slowly sitting up and brushing off his jacket and knees.

"You okay, kid?" he asked, after Jimmy began to recover from his fall.

Jimmy sat up and exhaled a pent up sigh, "Yeah." Then he stared out at the now settling, blazing destruction that marked the passage of the Aerial Supremacy Platform. "Leaping Leptons! That was too close. Good thing no one was hurt, but Calamitous got away."

"Yeah," Jet said. "But don't worry, he'll be caught. Guys like him? They always think with their ego." He looked off in the distance, away from the wreck of the ASP base, and could see familiar shapes approach. "Here come the planes."

On the unoccupied runways surrounding the burning station, planes, who were freed from the station's debilitating field, began landing, one after the other.

As the news crews and firefighters in their trucks, and the national guardsmen in their jeeps and transports, started to return to the airfield to secure the area and interview potential witnesses, Jimmy suddenly looked crestfallen.

"Great. I'm way too late to go to school now. The last thing I need is to have Ms. Fowl or Principal Willoughby reading me The Riot Act," he muttered.

Jet tugged on the collar of his leather jacket and Jimmy could see the man engage in a short conversation with it. Then Jet stood up and helped the youngster to his feet.

"Hey, you saved my bacon back there," he told Jimmy. "I don't know how you knew he was behind all this, but I owe you one."

Jimmy was about to let his modesty speak for him when a black sedan rolled into view and then stopped a short distance away.

"She may guzzle gas," Jet quipped, "But it'll get you there in style. And I'll put in a good word for you with your teachers and the principal without spilling the beans about what happened here. National security, and all that."

"I really appreciate it, Jet. Thanks." Jimmy said as he stepped into the back seat and patted the seat next to him. "Come on, Goddard. Come on, boy."

Goddard happily bounded into the car and was followed by the dusty, yet swaggering, Fusion.

As the car began to pull away from the chaos of the airport, Jimmy spared one last glance at the remains of Calamitous' latest dream of power and global extortion. He was thankful that the equipment in his lab had detected the high energy signatures coming from the outskirts of town that morning, and that he opted to investigate rather that head straight to school.

Skill. He had been blessed with it in abundance. With an IQ of 210 that wrought a storehouse of inventions that rivaled the reverse engineering wizardry of Area 51, he was the prodigy of a generation. It was no small irony that his name was Neutron, for like the power of that bomb, his intelligence could explode across the plains of scientific endeavor, vaporizing preconceived notions and flattening outdated technological plateaus. It was a gift, a power few possessed, and it came with a heavy, moral price.

The price of The Path. The choice to use his genius for good or ill.

He knew he was no saint, that at times he failed to listen to the voices of his better angels. Such was the folly of youth and such was the folly of prideful arrogance. But he acted with clear conscience when seeing those also with power use that power to injure, to ruin, to conquer. It was the embracing of the moral path and the using of his genius and luck as a bulwark against the dark that earned him so many enemies.

And it was lucky that Jet was also on the scene, and it was lucky that Goddard was on hand to save them both, and that he could detonate the missiles early and just fool them into thinking that the ASP base was just a lowly aircraft trying to evade the effects of the transmitters.

Luck. It was such a limited commodity. One a recent twelve year old like himself was using as though it ran as freely as water, another natural resource. And if he knew anything about natural resources, he knew that they were, more often than not, finite. Such thoughts gave him an edge of wisdom that he never discounted, especially with a young life so full of enemies as his had. But, he also had to admit, sometimes Fighting The Good Fight made him feel far older than his time, and he honestly wondered if it would ever end.

With a tired, melancholy sigh, he adjusted his school jet backpack, settled further in his seat, patted his dog's head and absently thought about the rest of the day.