Robert Farrell was working late today at his laboratory in the Nevada desert where he was putting the final design tests on his new project, Racer. He had been allowed after his work in field operations to continue some design work on his old Rocket Racer rig from his superhero days. SHIELD told him if he was able to help complete several other project designs he would be allowed to further develop his technology and even work in their super-agent program.  He had not chosen the projects he worked on lightly. Each would, while benefiting SHIELD would also be able to be reincorporated into his new designs. He had spent the last two years working on an array of unusual applications for the agency and now he was putting them together into his new rig.

From the outdated Guardian armor designs, he used the underlying exoskeleton and control systems. They were a bit dated, nearly twenty years old, but were serviceable enough for his needs. He updated them with part of the cybernetic systems used in later armors and added a voice control system for an override and hands-free control system. He also cannibalized the primitive repulsor thrust control systems so he could use them to assist and control the rig in motion. With the repulsors, he could add to his overall thrust by thirty percent and with such a mature technology, the power to weight ratios were excellent, far better than his first skateboard thrust engines stolen from the illegal Big Wheel project. In a pinch, they could also be used to push objects away from him if he was properly braced.

When testing them he was able to push a man-sized object over twenty feet away with just one hand. When used in that way, the price was a huge power drain, so it was best left to emergencies. The underlying old-school metallic layered scale was replaced with a ceramic mesh with Nomex coating for fire resistance, able to protect against heat in excess of eight hundred degrees and cold resistance providing protection against sub-zero temperatures in excess of minus eighty degrees. The armored Nomex under-armor would also be proof against any sort of abrasion injury should he fall off the gravity sled.

This was just the first layer of his new armor. With the Guardian under-armor he could also count on some limited super-strength, nothing major, maybe up to three tons, but if he needed more, when he had the budget he could always see if he could gain access to more recent upgrades. The benefit of working with this tech is nobody cared what he did with it and if he improved it, no one would know or want to know until after he worked the bugs out of it.

The armor systems he created as the final layer to the suit were a masterpiece. They would cover strategic areas providing additional armor support and space for weapons systems. They could be activated cybernetically and were in compressed forms at the strategic locations. Made from memory metals, once activated they would spread out and take a rigid protective shape. These locations included the shins, hips, shoulders, elbows and knees. The shoulder systems also included a fully covering face helm that ensured the suit's temperature resistance applied to his head as well.

The gloves were the most recent additions to the rig. The gloves controlled both the weapons launching systems in the gloves and the magnetic control systems in the boots for the board. The weapons in the gloves were designed to be positive action weapons whose activation could only be done manually or once loaded into the weapons cartridges. They could be activated by hand and used as grenades as well, should the launcher be defective or destroyed. So there was no chances of accidental misfires or explosions. The positive action locks ensured activations only when wanted. He has learned from his first designs how it was possible for a misfire to blow up in your face, literally.

The magnetic boots were similar to his first designs with the addition of providing him with two escrima-style sticks which where held in two ejection launchers in the boots.  He had learned that striking targets at high speeds with your fist was possible, but it was also likely to break your wrist or arm if you were not careful. With the sticks, he was able to fight both in passing and if he had to stop and engage in hand to hand. He had trained for over four years until his mastery with the sticks was one of the things he was most proud of in his physical training. Both sticks were spring loaded and flex formed, so they would come to full extension once they were clear of the housing. The were formed of a light and strong full index plastic, so it would take superhuman strength to even dent them, let alone break them.

Robert was not above punching someone in the jaw if it was required. His SHIELD martial arts training included karate, kung-fu, aikido and escrima and he had excelled in all of them. The trainers were quite surprised at his facility considering he was a lab-rat and took extra time to engage his interest. They said he had the makings of a great field agent if he ever decided to get out of the lab.  In a tribute to his first rig he had included his thruster array into the bracers to recreate his signature, rocket-assisted punch.

Memories of his first use of that technology included thruster burns and a broken wrist that was slow to heal. He had learned from that and his updated designs took that into consideration. Combined with his armor-enhanced strength, his rocket punch should be able get the attention of even super-powered adversaries. Using his new rig he had been able to punch through a reinforced concrete block with no injury. The only disadvantage is that each glove could only fire twice before using up all of the rocket propellant. He had been working on finding a way to redirect the repulsor thrust instead of the rocket propellant but had not been able to find sufficient repulsor matrix crystals in the lab to redesign the system. For the time being he was stuck with his basic design and would update after a supply requisition could turn up some matrix crystals. Maybe he could get them directly from Stark Industries?

The most magnificent part of this entire new rig was the Gravity Sled. Using some broken gravity technology salvaged from the recent Skrull invasion, Robert was able to rebuild and outfit himself with a gravity control and interaction system that could be used in a manner similar to his skateboard. The technology would redirect molecular energies into a form of pseudo-gravity, so no matter what he was near, he could change that into the direction considered to be down. Wearing a gravity harness on his back, he would be able to create that very same field around himself so that he could ride the sled on any surface, wall, floor or ceiling. If he were willing to boost or use more power he could nullify the effect of gravity all together and using the thrust pack and repulsors, fly for short distances of one hundred and twenty miles before he ran out of fuel. The sled was good for nearly a thousand miles if he stayed near a surface as the device skimmed molecular energy from any surface it was near, recharging the Skrull power source. Robert was certain if he could get that particular design to function as expected, his reverse engineering would win him the Nobel prize, if he was not working as a member of SHIELD which never published such findings. Since he was reasonably sure if SHIELD knew it worked, they would disapprove, he neglected to mention it.

Since he was using declassified technology, meaning it was considered unable to be repaired, it should not be a problem but since he was able to repair it, they might decide it should have some other uses. As he was repairing it, he noticed it had several other functions but was unable to activate them at the time. So he simply rerouted the unspecified systems until he could figure out how to fix them later. It was as if he could almost see the answer in the alien technology, it made sense but was just out of reach. Even after reading Richard's recent papers on artificial gravity, he just could not quite understand why these more advanced gravity systems were non-functional. He considered asking Peter Parker to come and consult but wanted to work just a bit longer before asking for help.

He has also made other skateboard mechanisms similar to his first designs but rebuilt using the SHIELD budget and those included an all-terrain board and an urban dweller speed board with an intelligent climbing system capable of going nearly as fast uphill as it could go downhill. Part of that technology had been adopted from the armature system of Doctor Octopus. Both of these designs were quite adequate and with his power plant and gyroscopic systems attached to them, both could move in excess of sixty miles per hour over nearly any terrain. But both were simply too slow when compared with the Gravity Sled.

His first tests in the lab of all of these devices were abysmal. Only the very oldest and most stable technologies functioned as expected. It took almost another six months of constant testing and rebuilding to get everything to be ninety percent reliable. Robert had worked on almost all the designs and specifications on his own, refusing any support staff until it came time for testing. He had managed to get almost all of the tech functioning well and only the internal visor based head's up display require him to depend on someone else for his programming needs. The specialist was a young woman named Donna Ellis. Programming the HUD and the cybernetic interface took quite some time and Donna was often in the lab working while Robert completed his development. The last of the programming allowed him to integrate the HUD and the remote control systems into his last lab test.

Then it was time for a field test.

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