<br/><strong>Gotham First National, five floors up</strong><br/><br/><em>If a year ago, someone had told me that I'd be hanging from the side of the First National building at two am in the morning rather than being home in bed or asleep in the lab checking over my latest sim modeling run was done, I'd have told them they were crazy.</em>Carla thought as she watched the remote work it's way through the bank's offices. She'd piggybacked it into a cleaning remote the day before, when she had gone in to discuss her student loans. Carla Preston didn't need the money but 'Helena Hunt' did. She was a mousy little girl who was majoring in Art History. Of course she had gone in chipped in with enhanced senses that let her find what she had needed about the loan officer who also doubled as the 'Seven's' money launderer.<br/><br/>She had learned a lot of things, such as his unhealthy interest in old Japanese porn, the fact that he obsessed with a rash on his ankle and where he kept the data vault with the 'Seven's ' accounts and discrete data. It was buried deep in the Gotham First National network, and only accessible from the executive logins inside the bank.<br/><br/>Hence her hanging from the side of the building as she used an old Kord Industries remote to remote link with the man's terminal. She had found the remote online along with a few other 'knick-knacks' that she had incorporated into her gear. The display flicked as the remote slid into the computer and started operating it. She issued the commands to start the datalink to her hip mounted computer. Another bit of tech that should be an antique, but was still cutting edge. This one was courtesy of a maniac by the name of Prometheus, that had jump started her own doctoral work into cutting edge neurochemical implants. If the supervillan had a lick of sense back in the day, he'd have used his tech to hijack the computer industry and used that wealth and power to do what he had wanted. Instead he had foolishly threw himself against heroes like the Batman and JLA.<br/><br/>Her thoughts were broken by the beep of her computer link. The Seven, a self named 'gang' of crooked cops that had been running a syndicate that extorted, murdered and pretty much anything that was crooked and profitable. She had stumbled across them when she had first started testing her implants. The portfolio of powers her implant granted to her, along with the mix of gear she had gotten from Prometheus' stash of gear, had allowed her to quickly start profiling a industrial espionage ring that had tried to break her research network.<br/><br/>Six months later, she was hanging from a ledge waiting for the data that would let her put names to the Seven. They weren't the only crooked cops in town, far from it. She smiled as a list of names, accounts and numbers no cop should ever be able to earn legally rolled through her field of vision. She had the names, and all sorts of other data; she spun off the data to her 'drop dead' data haven. She was surprised at a set of the names. One of them was a 'crusading' cop who had broken up several rings of corruption over the few years.<br/><br/>Sending the remote back into the spot she had hidden it, she started down.<br/><br/><strong>Two blocks down</strong><br/><br/>"She took the bait." Trent said into his chin mic. A hiss of data flowed over his vision and he frowned. "Belay that, she found the real drop box. Boss says to drop her now." The image of the woman in armor coming down the side of the bank hovered in his vision as his partner grunted and slammed a round into place. The gun was an antique, but the LexCorp Gauss Accelerator, with a specialized round.<br/><br/>She targeted the gun on the target, the millimeter radar precisely targeting the armored woman, and sending the relevant data to the round to configure it a split second before she pulled the trigger. The smart round shifted to optimum configuration for the target's known resilience to conventional weaponry.<br/><br/>The two members of the Seven watched as the woman took a round that hit her at several multiples of the speed of sound and threw her like a rag doll into the air before her body finally landed in the transformer station behind the bank. The blocks around the bank vanished into darkness as station exploded.<br/><br/>"Moot point, she's not walking out of that mess." The woman said as she scanned the explosion. "Bullet proof she might be in that fancy armor and whatever else she had but she ain't walking out of that mess."<br/><br/>"You're right." Her partner said. "Boss said to make sure though." Trent said as he stood and pulled out his badge clipped in on the armor he was wearing.<br/><br/>"No problem with that, just hope he doesn't get pissed if I shot through a building if I have to shoot her." Torres said as she pulled out her own badge as well, clicking her mic. "Central, this is Torres and Trent, we're in sight of an explosion behind Gotham First National. Requesting back up approach with caution till we confirm the scene." She looked over at her partner as they headed down to their car.<br/><br/>"We got the scene for five maybe six minutes before the confusion starts. Boss says make sure she's dead, tag her gear for Mycroft's lab geeks and fix the money man's little red wagon." Trent says as he gets in the car and starts it.<br/><br/>"Plenty of time, and for the money man.. gang violence or random bad luck?"<br/><br/>"Thinking that it went down like this... the late Prometha  shot him with one of those fancy crossbows of hers if they are still usable."<br/><br/>"Works good for me." Torres said as she got in.<br/><br/><strong>Online</strong><br/><br/>The data bomb sat in the hidden node, counting down as it waited for the fallen hero's 'stand off' signal. The data was flagged for several reporters, a handful of fly by night blogs that campaigned against corruption, and a small list of men and women that Carla Preston had thought might have the drive and/or influence to turn the tables on the Seven. One of them was the reclusive millionaire Bruce Wayne. In twenty hours, if her 'stand off' wasn't sent, a handful of men and women would get her files.<br/><br/><strong>At the transformer station</strong><br/><br/>Carla Preston, cybernetist and rogue vigilante, was dead in all modern measure of the word. Her torso had taken a hit from a hyper-velocity smart-round designed for metahumans resilient to modern ballistics. Her implants had given her the equivalent of a low powered metahuman capable of taking anything the normal Gotham thug or cop had on hand, not resilient enough to shrug off the smart-round designed to try and stagger a Kyrptonian. It was enough to keep her body in one crushed mangled piece as she landed in the transformer station that killed her. To most measures of the word.<br/><br/>If it hadn't been for the experimental biomass she had developed from a tissue sample that had been kept on hand, that would have been it. The massive neural work that Carla had done to herself wouldn't have been possible it wasn't for the mimicry nature of the tissue. Without the control of the now destroyed implant at the base of Carla's skull, it started to adsorb and adapt the tissue around it to suit it's need. In one meaning of the word, Carla Preston was dead. In another, she was simply being reborn.