“Wow,” I said, considering it, “I hadn’t been trying to enhance your abilities, but that is obvious now that you mention it. It should be able to interface with your suit, but I think I’d change the design to fit your needs specifically… Let’s start by making sure it reproduces your power and then after that, I’ll see if I can’t come up with something better.

“Provided it works, you can attach the spare sonic to your costume.”

I handed her the sonic unit. It was loosely cylindrical except that the back end was rounded and the front flat. She held it under her right forearm and it attached.

For the record, a gold cylinder hanging under the forearm of someone wearing a pink and white costume does not look good.

From the way her lips twisted, I could see Julie agreed. While I could argue that pink might not be the best color for a superhero costume and that no one had to stick with a color they’d chosen in high school, I said, “If you look in your HUD, you can change the color the same way you change it for every other part.”

The unit turned pink with black accents.

She must have caught my expression because she laughed. “Well, it matches. Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone with pink, but I still like it.”

“If you like it, that’s good enough,” I said. “I’m choosing to go with my grandfather’s identity. Daniel isn’t. It’s all okay. Here’s something you should know though. I don’t want this to get over to the Dominators if it works. So, I’m giving you a self-destruct function you can use if you’re captured.”

She glanced over to look at the device, but hearing that, she looked at me, “You can destroy it too, right? Because if I’m captured, I might not be conscious.”

“Yeah,” I said, “always. There’s a lot of stuff in our current costumes that I don’t want getting out there.”

I waved for her to follow me to the back of the lab, leading her around the tables covered with random parts and bot factories to stand in front of a black cube roughly seven feet tall.

Pointing a finger at the cube, I said, “There’s a League suit inside. Don’t worry about that for now. The cube is the important thing. It’s designed to test my sonic tech. Point the sonic weapon at it and run through the command tones you know at a normal volume. Oh, and put up your mask. Then reabsorb it and do the same thing with just your voice.”

She took a breath and the mask formed over her face. Then she pointed her arm at the cube. It took about as long as it might take to say the alphabet. I didn’t hear all of it, but my buzzer ran the entire time.

Then, as requested, she repeated it with the mask down and no sonics.

Using my implant, I compared the waveforms of the two tests. While they weren’t identical, it was the standard imperfection of being a human being repeating themselves. The sonics reproduced the command tones as she said them. I knew that what I should be doing was having her reproduce the sounds a few hundred more times and try both her voice and her voice mediated through my sonics to find out where the range of effective frequencies ended, but fortunately, I didn’t have to.

The Xiniti had long ago collected the necessary data on unassisted motivator command tones, and I had collected a bit myself since the new suits went into action.

Comparing her tones with the examples available in my implant and the team’s collected Dominator attack experiences showed that they were within normal margins.

“I think we’re good,” I told her. “Now, if you could place the end of the sonic weapon into the indentation here, we can test how much gets through the new version of the buzzer.”

She stepped up to the cube, found the indentation near the corner, and said, “Here?”

“Exactly. We’ll try it at a few different levels. I’ll tell you what they are as you go. We’ll start at volume two,” I said.

She did as I asked her, raising the levels when I asked. The numbers were good.  The sensors inside the suit never detected a command clear enough to follow.”

“And that’s it,” I said. “It looks like we’ll be okay even at the sonics maximum volume—which is about the volume of 1000 motivators. While there may be that many out there, it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll be able to get together and focus on us. Well, unless they get sonic devices too.”

I thought about it for a moment, “You know what? I’m going to make your version right now. It’ll be the standard, but I think I can hide it in your suit so it’s not obvious.”

She blinked, “Really? I’d love that. Working with Kals showed me how much worse I am than she is. I know the Dominators are worse than she is, but they’re trained by people who know what they’re doing.”

“But you got trained by her,” I said.

“For part of a week,” she said, her lips twisting, “I know that’s better than nothing, but I could have used a year or more. With your sonics, I have more power even if don’t have more skill.”

She looked away from me toward the ground for a moment. When she met my eyes again, she said, “I know this might be impossible, but Kals has an implant. She’s been continuing to work on her skills using information from it. You and everyone who went to space have implants too. How do I get one?”

She looked up at me, lips pursed, waiting for an answer.

“Wow,” I said, “you don’t ask for much, do you? We got ours from the Xiniti. They’re not even in the solar system right now.”

She laughed, “You sound like my dad. He says that if you give me an inch, I take a mile. Are you saying it’s impossible?”

“No,” I said, “but it’s complicated. I’m going to look into it.”

I could have said no, or maybe I should have, but I’d been thinking the same thing. Having an implant helped me interface with my suit, and it would give everyone more options if they had one.

More to the point, it was possible. My grandfather had acquired a device for making Abominator implants for humans. It was in our storage room. I’d seen it again when we put away the new artifacts.

Yoselin had one. Her father had turned off its ability to force the user to obey Abominator directives. The Xiniti had figured out the same thing. Their implants repurposed an Abominator design. If I connected to the Abominator device, I could write over its programming and force it to create Xiniti-friendly implants, but complete with any information the Abominators stored—which would likely include training for people with “motivator” skills. That was how they’d controlled their human slaves.

I hoped I wouldn’t regret it.