by Mia Archer
I just hoped it was dark enough that the hero hadn't gotten a good look at me while she was fighting off the thugs.
A girl’s secret identity was a big deal.
The head thug skidded to a halt and if anything the look of terror on his face when he thought he was just dealing with an overeager heroic type turned to one of pure abject horror when he realized he'd just tried to mug Night Terror.
I grinned and waggled my fingers at him in a friendly wave.
"That's right buddy," I said. "You and your friends picked the wrong alley to go robbing in."
He turned and ran in the other direction. Unfortunately the hero’s fist was also waiting for him in that direction. There was a loud crack followed by a grunt and he slammed to the ground.
The hero knelt in the darkness and looked up at me, his eyes glowing slightly. Must be some sort of night vision device he was using. I had similar toys, although mine didn't make that pesky glow.
I wasn't sure if that was an aesthetic choice on his part, or if he just didn't have access to some of the more advanced toys I enjoyed. Probably the latter.
"Night Terror."
I sketched a little bow. "None other than."
15
Shadow Wing
"I don't know what you're doing with these thugs," the hero said. "But you’re not going to work this part of town. Go get your ass handed to you by the new hero and leave this neighborhood well enough alone."
"No need to pull the tough guy routine," I said.
I was a little annoyed, but I was also impressed. Whoever this heroic wannabe was, he had a pair on him. It wasn’t every day that a hero got a chance to go up against the great and powerful Night Terror, and it really wasn’t every day that they stood up to me when they did get that chance.
It would’ve made for an interesting evening of toying with him if it weren’t for the fact that this wasn’t the hero I needed to find tonight, damn it.
Those glowing eyes narrowed. Now that was an interesting trick. How did he manage to pull that one off? There was no rational explanation for how the infrared illuminators on a pair of night vision goggles would narrow like that.
Maybe it was a special modification?
“What are you doing here in my territory?” he growled.
Now it was my turn for my eyes to narrow. Only when they narrowed my mask didn’t do that cool narrowing thing that his had pulled off.
That annoyed me. I was used to being the one with the wonderful toys. Having someone else out there with better toys than mine was frustrating, to say the least.
I’d have to add that feature to the suit the next time I upgraded it.
"Not that it’s any of your business, but I'll tell you exactly what I was doing here.”
The unspoken promise there was I was willing to tell this wannabe hero what I was doing out here tonight because the hero wasn’t going to survive this encounter. I know people like to mock villains who get caught up in doing a monologue and then getting their asses handed to them, but that wasn’t how I operated.
I found it far more efficient to gloat about my genius plan just long enough that a hero thought they might have a chance to defeat me and then vaporizing them.
It was a hell of a lot easier to keep a hero from trying to foil my plans if they were just some free floating molecules that had been a person in a hero suit of wildly varying build qualities moments before.
“I was fishing for a hero."
The hero brushed a speck of dirt off of his suit. "Fishing for a hero?"
"Sure," I said. "I was hoping I could lure Fialux with a little damsel in distress routine, but I'm assuming since you're out here she's not going to be found on the side of town, which is really putting a cramp on my plans and…"
The attack was almost faster than lightning. The only problem is I was ready for it. The instant he darted forward I activated the anti-Newtonian stasis field and his fist stopped an inch from my face.
It wasn’t exactly catching Fialux off guard, the power involved in the punch this wannabe threw was orders of magnitude less than anything Fialux could throw around, but it was a start.
At least that proved that I could stop someone with the stasis field if they weren’t putting out the kind of power that Fialux was capable of. After all, this guy was obviously a mere mortal for all the impressive gadgets he had.
And now that he stood there in the glow of the stasis field I could get a good look at the hero behind the mysterious shadowy figure who was so terrifying to the criminal element in this alley that they'd almost peed themselves when their buddies started disappearing.
I could appreciate that. I was all about putting on a show while I worked, and I felt a kindred spirit in this hero who felt oddly familiar even though I’d probably never seen him before in my life.
It looked like he’d seen me though. At least if the steady glare was anything to go by. I didn’t bother asking when I’d pissed in his Wheaties, though. There were a lot of people in this city lined up for a ticket on the Night Terror train.
Occupational hazard when you were the best worst villain the world had ever seen. I’d stepped on a lot of toes on my rise to the top. Maybe this one even got into heroics because of something I’d done. Swore revenge and all that.
Not that it was going to do him a damn bit of good.
The guy looked to be in pretty good shape. I suppose that's to be expected for a normal who kept himself in good enough shape to go out and tangle with criminals on a nightly basis.
I walked around and gave him a good once over. He wore a dark gray form fitting suit very similar to what I wore.
No cape, which was a sensible choice for a mortal hero. Fialux could get away with a cape since she was impervious to practically anything and it didn't matter if she got tangled up for a few minutes while a giant death robot pounded her with every weapon in its arsenal, but a mortal hero had to worry about that sort of thing.
“So do you have a name big boy?” I asked as I came back around to his front and planted my hands on my hips.
“Shadow Wing,” he growled.
I looked up to the sky overhead. Not that there was much to see in the sky up there. For a place called Starlight City there was enough light pollution that the only thing you could really see in the skies above was occasionally the moon when it was full.
Well, the moon when it was full and all the various spotlights with heroic silhouettes projected up into the light pollution and adding to the problem. That had gotten really out of hand ever since the Supreme Court ruled that displaying a spotlight like that was technically free speech and now it seemed like every other rooftop in the parts of town that were good enough to afford it but bad enough to have some crime sported one.
At least until the hero behind the light gave up. That was the problem with projecting your personalized hero spotlight from a building where you lived instead of waiting on the police to need you enough that they put it on the roof of headquarters. It was a good way to advertise to any villains in the area where you lived.
Not that I’d taken advantage of that to track down a hero who was annoying me and ruin their life to the point that they had to leave the city. I’d totally never even consider doing something like that.
I was considering doing something about this hero though. There was something about that name that tickled the back of my mind. Something that…
“Wasn’t that name already taken?” I asked. “Some low level chick who got herself splatted against the side of a building fighting a giant irradiated lizard or something like that?”
Odd, that. Most lizard species reacted to radiation the same as every other mulitcellular thing that was exposed to radiation. They died.
Of course if there was going to be a species of iguana that reacted to radiation by growing to gargantuan size and going for a stroll through the downtown area it would be in Starlight City. This place was like a beacon for weird shit like that.
T
he hero tensed when I mentioned the former Shadow Wing. It was enough to make me wonder if maybe there wasn’t something going on there. Maybe a personal connection.
It would be really sad if this guy was out to avenge his dead wife or something who got it in her head that she was going to be a hero and found out, too late, that there were consequences for trying to sit at the big kid table when you weren’t ready to give up the sippy cup.
Not my problem though. This guy was about to learn the same lesson. If for no other reason than there was something about him that irritated me more than anyone had ever irritated me before.
Well, maybe not as much as Rex Roth, but it was close.
“I’m Shadow Wing,” he growled.
I rolled my eyes. “You’re going to have to do more than repeating your hero name if you’re going to make it in this city.”
“The name’s a work in progress. And not important right now. Whatever you have planned, you won't get away with it," Shadow Wing said.
“Actually I’m pretty sure I am going to get away with it,” I said.
“Never!”
“Will so!”
“No you won’t!”
I stomped. “Yes I will! Because right now my evil plan doesn’t extend past vaporizing you and I’m pretty sure that’s going to be pretty easy to do with a cut rate wannabe!”
Yeah, this guy was really irritating me. Who the hell did he think he was challenging me? I was at the top of the A list and he was strictly bush-league.
I leaned in until I was inches from his face. The glow from his night vision goggles disappeared and his eyes appeared beneath the mask. I felt like I'd seen those eyes before somewhere, but who knew?
The city was lousy with secret identities, and who was to say I hadn't run into this Shadow Wing's secret identity at some point? Hell, he could be the barista where I got my coffee every Friday or a cop that I avoided vaporizing on a regular basis. There was no telling.
Pity he had to cross me now while I was on the job and in a more vaporizing mood. Especially if it turned out to be the nice guy who made that wonderful coffee at the Starlight City University coffee shop.
I reached out and put a hand under his chin. One of the fringe perks I’d discovered with my newly developed stasis technology was that whatever I wanted not moving definitely couldn't move, unless it was Fialux of course, but it was keyed to my biometrics so if I needed to manipulate the field all I had to do was reach out and touch whatever I’d caught in my web of super science.
Something happened, but it wasn’t the vaporizing I was expecting. No, his eyes turned a dark black and I staggered back.
Huh. That was unexpected.
16
Mind Control
Weird. I almost felt like I was back at a middle school dance where I’d turned the DJ’s lights into a hypnotic pattern that would’ve allowed me to overthrow the school and institute my benevolent regime of all academics and no gym class.
I figured that was a better use of my time than risking the terror of wading out into the sea of hormones raging at the center of the gym dance floor and risk sinking in that vast and treacherous ocean.
That plan had backfired when the special glasses I wore to prevent the light pattern from hypnotizing yours truly had slipped when someone bumped into me and I’d been caught in my own web. I only realized I’d failed when I woke up the next day along with everyone else after a janitor came in and unplugged the DJ’s machinery.
I felt that now, only it was hitting me with a lot more power than those lights, even. The more I looked into those dark eyes the more I felt like I wanted to do whatever this idiot wanted me to.
Terror seized me even as the desire to do whatever he wanted washed over me. Maybe it was a good thing I’d made that mistake all those years ago so I knew what it felt like when someone was trying to take control of my mind.
It hit me where this asshole got all his toys even if he seemed like he was a regular. If he had a power that allowed him to control minds then…
Well he was a more dangerous hero than I’d given him credit for. More dangerous, but he still wasn’t much of a threat to yours truly.
No. I was villainy. I was the Night Terror. This wasn’t amateur hour, and I wasn’t going to be taken by something that simple.
“Really? Mind control?” I asked. “CORVAC, could you please analyze whatever this joker is using to mind control and turn up the filtering?”
I said the last bit much quieter. Subvocalized it, really. Most heroes only had one superpower and I was willing to risk that this guy didn’t have super hearing on top of everything else.
“Analyzed and added to the bag of tricks ma’am,” CORVAC said.
“Right,” I said, looking straight at the dude. His eyes were still totally black which was really freaky, but it’s not like it was anything to be worried about.
I always had a plan in place.
He blinked. Obviously he was surprised. I held up my wrist and there was no missing the bright glow there. It was bright enough to light up the whole alley and get across the point that I wasn’t fucking around.
“Nice trick,” I said. “But the problem with only having one ace up your sleeve is it doesn’t work with someone hiding a full deck.”
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the best pithy saying, but I’d been so busy with Fialux that I hadn’t had a chance to come up with any new villainous quips lately.
Whatever. This guy would learn his last lesson ever. It wasn’t a good idea to fuck with Night Terror. Yeah, he’d learn that lesson as soon as I turned my wrist blaster and pointed it to my head. All I’d have to do was squeeze just a little and…
“Isaac Newton’s dangling hairy balls!”
The emergency system built into my suit went into full gear. One moment I was standing there staring into eyes that totally shouldn’t have been able to hypnotize me like that and the next I was rocketing up and over the city.
I really hoped the boys at NORAD weren’t looking too closely at the city. I was always nice enough to notify them when I was doing something that might show up as something ballistic on their sensors which, unfortunately, hadn’t been updated all that much since the sixties and were far more prone to false positives than would make your average civilian comfortable if they had access to that information.
They tended to be a little more lenient about that sort of thing around Starlight City considering all the people with superpowers, both innate and built with their own two hands, but I figured you could never be too careful about that sort of thing.
“Drones are incoming ma’am,” CORVAC said. “Shall I identify the hostile and…”
“No need to send them out,” I said. “He’s not going to be there by the time you get the drones down there.”
“What happened mistress?” he asked.
“The asshole was somehow getting through the filter we put in place. I don’t know how he did it, but he was getting through and I was about to blast myself in the face with the vaporizer.”
I guess it’s not like it would’ve mattered whether I hit myself in the face or another part of my body. I was using the vaporizer, after all, and it pretty much did exactly what it said on the tin.
Which meant it would disassociate all of my molecules rapidly and painfully whether or not it hit my face or another part of my body.
I shook my head. That had been close. Too damn close. I didn’t like when my tech didn’t work. It was the reason I’d come to dominate this city, and some asshole with mind control powers who could make it through one of my filters was really something to worry about.
“How the hell did he manage to get through the filtering CORVAC?” I asked.
“Unknown,” CORVAC said. “There was a spike in the EM his eyes were giving off when you started pointing the vaporizer at your head. It is possible that spike was related to your sudden desire to off yourself.”
“You think?” I asked.
There was another
thought working its way through the back of my mind. I’d been about to shoot myself in the face and CORVAC hadn’t said a damn thing to stop me. That was something to think about.
Something to think about. Not something to ask him about. If the traitorous bucket of bolts really was trying to do me in by messing with some of the settings on my suit it wasn’t something I wanted to let on.
The only place he couldn’t hear me was inside my head. That was one of the reasons why I’d been reluctant to switch over to a suit system that was directly jacked into my brain.
I didn’t trust CORVAC, not entirely, and this little incident was one more reason to wonder. The thought of having a connection that went straight from my brain to any system he controlled was enough to give me a mild case of the shakes.
Or maybe the shakes were from the near miss I’d just had with that Shadow Wing joker. That was one to keep an eye out for.
After I’d gone through and run a bunch of diagnostics on my suit systems with independently verifiable equipment that wasn’t attached to CORVAC’s systems in one of the auxiliary labs he didn’t know about.
“Are you quite well mistress?” CORVAC asked. “I’m registering elevated pulse and blood pressure.”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
He probably knew it for the lie it was. Or suspected it for the lie it was. That was the thing. He might not be jacked directly into my brain, but he did have access to all of the diagnostics on the suit.
I hadn’t figured out a way to keep him away from that information and still maintain combat effectiveness without having him ask too many questions about why I was restricting access.
The dangers of working with an evil supercomputer.