It was good that Stephanie was up for saying hi. The last I’d seen her, she’d been in no condition to do much of anything thanks to Dominator trigger commands.

Of course, she’d now been removed from the triggering situation for days. So, she might not be affected.

I set my implant to remind me to respond to Courtney later. Thanks to Hal sending out messages to more than one hundred heroes and groups in my name, I had several times than many responses. Thanks to Hal, most of them wouldn’t need a personal response, but a few deserved it.

One of them was from Prentkos.

“I have been wondering when this day would come since you returned me to my own time. When our team leader called us in for a mission based on messages from the Heroes’ League, I knew it had arrived. I will confess to be a little disappointed not to receive a personal message, but you hadn’t met me yet, had you? I’m sure that you need some time for recovery, but consider yourself as having an open invitation to visit the Euro Team base in Brussels.

“Please call ahead before you come, however. It’s my hope to have a conversation with you that isn’t interrupted by combat. We both know, of course, that even if it seems slow here, there are no guarantees.”

I laughed, added Prentkos’ message to the reminder list, and moved on to the next, finding a collection of messages from Working Man, V8, Mateo, the Detroit Unity team, and the Hamsters (Rembrandt, Vincent, and Hieronymous).

They weren’t personal. Hal had sent them to take out the Nine’s base in Detroit, a few independent heroes that turned out to be plants from the Nine, and a National Guard officer in the local powered armor unit.

They’d had to take out the entire unit before it was over, helped by another Detroit hero who appeared to have power over small mammals. As much as it might be painful to fight Working Man or V8’s mech, I suspected the Nine’s Detroit operatives would be having nightmares about rats for the rest of their lives—to say nothing of humanoid hamsters.

Vincent did leave a personal message at the end and so did Mateo AKA Blue Mask. Vincent’s went, “Holy shit, kid. I just saw footage from the island end of things. Can’t believe the vampires are on your side this time. On the other hand, unlike the bozos we fought together, Dr. Transylvania’s no fool. Did the Nine think to throw rice? Let me know sometime.”

Mateo’s message started with a laugh. “You remember how Working Man told you he didn’t want us getting involved with the League’s problems? When he saw that you wanted us to take out a couple of city council members, I think that he almost fainted. Getting rid of those two may have been his greatest personal fantasy. I can’t say for sure, but he might be proud of having had you here. I thought you ought to know. Let me know when you’re next on this side of the state.”

I added the two of them to my list and managed to get through the rest. After I replied to everyone on my list, I checked the news, reading story after story about teams that we’d emailed with evidence and a plan, sometimes getting to watch a bit of the action.

I also got to watch the odd commentator who managed to become apoplectic about why, if we’d managed to collect this much evidence, we hadn’t acted sooner? Another asked how the Heroes’ League could have gotten access to all of this information. That was a smarter question than the first. If we allowed interviews, we’d have to hide the AIs’ involvement.

Then I asked myself (and my implant) another question, what had we changed?

I knew we’d changed something thanks to the GCD’s message. My implant, however, replied with answers I hadn’t expected.

Xiniti implants were designed for the possibility that any given Xiniti soldier might visit a parallel universe. So when we arrived and the implant connected to the nearest ansible for updates, it noted changes in the newly downloaded history by comparison to what it had before.

There weren’t many changes—in part because the Xiniti didn’t care about Earth history except as it impacted them and in part because there weren’t many.

Back in the 1970s when the Heroes’ League fought the last remnant of the Abominators, the Heroes’ League had found two of them in government. They hadn’t been high up. They’d been state representatives in Arizona and Missouri.

In the new history we’d come back to, they’d never existed. Those were the Abominators I’d killed them during the fight with Magnus, so they’d never shapeshifted into human form and gone into government. I hadn’t killed all of the Abominators, though, just those two.

So the Heroes’ League fought the rest just like before. The two I’d killed hadn’t used their influence to change the world in disturbing ways. They’d fit in and stayed out of trouble. In the new history, the humans in their place hadn’t acted much differently.

What it meant that normal human politicians didn’t act much differently than evil aliens that had been warped by the Destroy faction’s artifact traps, I didn’t dare speculate.

All the same, I began to feel as if I’d missed an important difference. I couldn’t say what, but I felt sure than if I asked the right question everything would fall into place.

As I searched my memory, trying to think it through, Rachel contacted me via the League’s comm system, “Have you thought about Grandma?”