Profession

Curve ball

We got home and had a late lunch before heading over to Grandpa's. The house was bustling, although it was a lot calmer than I'd expected. Alfred gave us coffee and cookies and Grandma greeted us. "Buttercup. Jon. How was the funeral?"

"Quite a spectacle," Jon said.

"Sad. Such a waste, he was a good king," I added. "What's news here?"

"Well, the League is planning their op. Bruce wants you to reconsider letting them reverse engineer the roaches."

"Nope," I said testily. Jinx didn't want to lose control over his creations, and I didn't blame him. "And if anybody starts to mess with them, I have them linked so that they'll all shut down; their insides will turn into goo, and there won't be any recovery. The price of their use was that they respect the inventor's rights." Jinx had actually made the goo, it was part of the hardware of the bug, I don't know how, but it did a lot of the processing that the bugs' tiny computers needed. I'm software, not hardware. It was contained in a membrane, which, if ruptured, slagged the entire interior cavity. It was acidic and looked like bug guts. But nobody needed to know how to possibly defeat the mechanism.

"Ok, Buttercup," she said, patting my shoulder. "It's just his request, which you can certainly deny."

"Let him make his own," I grumped, and Grandpa grinned. I looked over at the table to see some new faces. Tim and Jason had shown up. I was a little surprised; I knew that Grandpa Bruce had adopted his Robins, but these two had not come back into the fold this lifetime.

"Dick can't come, so he sent these two," Grandma said.

"Tt," Grandpa said, but it was a genial sort of tutting. "They're going to help us with the compound in Afghanistan."

"Nice work on the network," Jason said to me. Alfred came in with a carafe of coffee, which he set down next to Tim.

"Yeah, not bad," Tim said, which rankled a bit. Aunt Barbara had sent a message congratulating and praising me, and it was not easy to get that level of commendation from Oracle. But Tim was supposed to be the best with computers of all the Robins, maybe he was feeling threatened. I tried to feel charitable. Grandpa tutted again, with more emphasis.

"Jon, Clark told me that you have your choice of which op, if you want to take part," he said.

"I got a commission to write up the state funeral for a newspaper back home," he said. "I can get that done this afternoon. Which op could use me more, do you think?"

"The League is going hard on the Gobi installation," Grandpa said thoughtfully. "Lys, your mom is in on that, along with Clark, Flash, all the big hitters."

"This is more of a family operation," Tim said.

 "Great, we'd love to help," Uncle Bucky said, looking up from his knitting. The shawl I was expecting to work on for Diana was now more than half done. Well, I'd be doing the baby stuff, maybe that would be enough effort. I'd better get a move on if I wanted to do anything myself. "Your in-laws are family, right?" he asked Grandpa, who grinned.

"Your help would be greatly appreciated. Do you want to be our sniper, or would you like a more up-close role?"

"The best place for a sniper would be this location here, about 1100 yards out," Tim said dubiously. "We don't have a spotter." Uncle Bucky shrugged.

"Don't need one. In the war, only the Soviets had sniper teams. Besides, these days the scopes calculate the coriolus effect. There's hardly any skill involved." Uncle Steve slapped his shoulder affectionately.