Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  "Fine," I said, "Just keep any customizations confined to that room." I didn't want to point out that she was directly under my room, or that there was a larger unused room next to mine on the upper floor.

  "Who do you think you are?"

  "This is still my place," I said. It was the first time I'd ever actually called it that, but the building had been a gift.

  "Where's the rec room?" Jennifer asked.

  "There isn't one."

  "Pool?"

  "Not one of those either. You also seriously don't want to swim in the rainbow river."

  "That's not the river New Port Arthur is on," Jennifer said.

  "That's just what we locals call it because of the multi-hued chemical runoff flowing through it."

  "I see. Do you at least have a kitchen?"

  "Upper floor, next to the medbay."

  "You are so going to need the patience of the inanimate with that girl," Ixa said.

  "I hate to ask this, but is there anything you can do for my knee? It's really starting to hurt."

  "I can at least take a look." I hobbled to my room, taking the garage ramp instead of the stairs to avoid the indignity of hopping up the risers. "Fair warning, I'll need to actually take a look at the knee, and not just through your suit."

  "In that case, can we use my room, the medbay has a glass wall."

  "Yeah, your interior decorator sucks." We passed by the glass front of the kitchen where Jennifer was poking through the cabinets and the fridge with a disapproving scowl. Once safely behind the closed and locked door of my room, I removed the wrist computer and peeled myself out of my suit. That was another shortfall of the hero suit: it was a one-piece with only the opening at the neck. Sure, with the press of a button it was elastic enough to climb out of, but it was obnoxious when you had to do anything as basic as use the bathroom. I wasn't naked; my undergarments continued to protect my modesty, but it still felt that way.

  Ixa examined the discoloration of my knee with dispassionate detachment, feeling the joint and seeing how things changed when it bent. "Yeah, I can fix this," she said.

  "Will it require another blood sacrifice?" I asked.

  "No, that's only for serious matters."

  With careful attention, and the proper corrective ritual, my knee felt good enough to run another marathon. Not that I was actually ready to do so, but at least I wasn't going to have to throw out the offer from Leyden Academy. When Ixa left me, I plopped back on my bed and slept for hours. It was the long, dreamless sleep of exhaustion. Upon waking, I went through my morning routine, showered and donned my costume. There were people around who didn't know me as Travis Colfax, and for the time being, I wasn't ready for them to. I wasn't the only one in professional attire. Jennifer had changed into a bright blue and gold outfit what covered more skin than her civvies but was more form-fitting. It included the same gold headband she'd been wearing earlier. That detail piqued my interest, but I kept quiet.

  Nora was too busy laughing at "Apexa." "I'm just going to call you Miss Pain," Nora said. "I can't say that with a straight face." Jennifer scowled at Nora. Before further argument broke out, the door buzzer sounded. Checking the monitors, I saw it was Ben. He was in civvies, and still looked rather glum. I buzzed him in. Nora gave him a hug as he came down into the garage.

  "I went to the BHA office this morning," he said.

  "And?"

  "I filed my thirty-eight," he said.

  "What name?" Nora asked.

  "Cupric."

  "You realize," I said, "His name was a chemistry joke?"

  "I know, but he was also my mentor, and I want to carry on his work."

  "Well, there's a traineeship for you on the team we're forming. The Fund already earmarked it in case you decided to stay."

  "Who's the leader?"

  "There hasn't been an election yet."

  "Who's the cheerleader?"

  "I am not a cheerleader!" Jennifer said.

  "Miss Pain," Nora said.

  "I am not!"

  I sighed. "Her codename is Apexa. When they met, Xiv said she smelled like pain."

  "Miss Pain sounds better than Apexa," Ben said.

  "Don't you start too," Jennifer said.

  "Anyway, do you have Cupric's mask? I think it would be more appropriate."

  "Somewhere. I'll find it for you."

  "Is Xiv hiding?" Ben asked.

  "He doesn't like being near Miss Pain," Nora said.

  "Will you cut that out!" Jennifer snapped.

  "Why should she?" a voice near the garage ramp said, "Copper-Top is right, Miss Pain does sound better." The speaker appeared to be crouched by the flammables storage cage. All it held was an empty tank meant for diesel fuel for the backup generator. A backup generator that hadn't been installed. I hit the light switch for that area. The young man hiding back there smirked as he was illuminated. Clad in silver and a pale ice blue, he had a simple mask made from a strip of cloth knotted behind his head with two holes for the eyes. The trailing blue fabric gave the impression of a pony tail despite the shortness of his silver-white hair. He had a powder-white complexion and red eyes, but something was off about them. His arms rested calmly on the crossguard of a sheathed sword whose scabbard had a flat tip for just such a pose. The way he was crouched helped disguise the fact that despite the width of his shoulders, he was ungodly thin, bordering on the skeletal.

  "How did you get in here?" Nora asked.

  "Your security is standard Community Fund tech, and whoever laid it out was a rank amateur."

  "Better question," I said, "Who are you?"

  "Pardon, Icerazor at your service." He reached behind his back and tossed something to me. I caught it easily. It was the head of one of Omicron's bots. "Torquespiral said to give you that, 'courtesy of Detective Esposito.' Is he one of our allies?"

  "Not exactly. Esposito doesn't seem to believe that we're on his side."

  "One of those types of cops."

  "You sound like you expected this albino," Jennifer said.

  "I also expected him to knock," I said, "He's the fifth class-three on the team."

  "I'll give you details of how I got in so we can tighten up security," Icerazor said. As he stood and walked forward, I figured out what was up with his eyes, he was wearing colored contacts. His eyes weren't actually red. I didn't call him on it, it was part of his image.

  "What's with the sword?" Jennifer asked.

  "It cuts things," Icerazor said. The scowl on Jennifer's face just caused him to smirk. "When someone has 'razor' as part of their name, do you really expect them to not have an edged weapon of some sort?" He looked up to find Xiv peering down from the ceiling at him. I'd seen the dragon boy approach, but tuned it out. "That's... unexpected."

  "Are you hurt?" Xiv asked.

  "Why?"

  "You smell like you're bleeding. We have bandages."

  "I'm fine. I'm guessing you are this Xiv they spoke of."

  "I am. You look like you're in pain."

  "I'm fine." He walked over to the palettes. "Who opened this?" Everyone's gaze went to Jennifer. Ben and Icerazor were following Nora and me, but the effect was the same.

  "Oh come on, it's not like I lost any. Besides, why do you have two palettes of dried beef blood anyway?"

  "Dietary supplement," Icerazor said, "But it's one palette of blood, the other's a custom protein blend. You may not want to mix any up for yourselves; a key ingredient is charcoal."

  "Dude, you have a seriously messed-up diet if two of your major food groups are blood and charcoal," Jennifer said.

  Icerazor actually laughed. "I know, I'm the one who has to drink this stuff."

  "How about we store it in the room across from the kitchen instead
of the garage?" I suggested. Icerazor nodded and started tearing through the cellophane. I brought the robot head up to the workshop to take a closer look. It was more or less intact, with a few dings and scratches on the casing, the neck joint severed with some dangling wires, but no visible damage to the internal workings. The base plate was attached with flat head screws, and came off without difficulty. When I extracted it, I found that the inner workings appeared to be affixed mostly to the baseplate. It all came out in one piece, with trailing wires linking it to the eyes.

  It was like gazing into the past. Two midplanes rose through the interior cavity, packed on both sides with vacuum tubes, of all things. Vacuum tubes. I wouldn't even know where to begin looking for a source of vacuum tubes. They'd gone out of common use so long ago; I'd expected to find some sort of integrated circuit. "Very old school," I said, awestruck. There shouldn't even be enough calculating power on there to perform multiplication, let alone control a combat robot. They were marked with Cyrillic lettering, but the configuration seemed bizarre. It should have been possible to pack them closer together and fit more on the boards while still controlling the heat produced. Most of the electrical connections fed a longer vacuum tube set directly on the baseplate and towering between the midplanes. It was hard to see, but disconnected from its moorings without difficulty.

  I stared at the components through the glass, but couldn't make heads or tails of them. They did not look like standard electrical components. Whatever was built around the stack in the middle, it was far more sophisticated than I'd expected to see in a vacuum tube. My guess was it had to be the secret to their operation.

  "Vacuum tubes?" Ben asked.

  "Yeah, it's a wonder he can find parts for these things." Ben leaned in for a closer look. Components within the tube I held started to glow dimly. "Whoah." I moved the tube away from Ben and back again. The glow faded and returned. "I think it's the electromagnetic field your body generates."

  "The tubes in that setup would produce a constantly changing field as they switched states," Ben said.

  I laughed. "Omicron is some sort of sick genius," I said, "I think he's doing all of the processing and storage on the magnetic fields inside the head instead of on the circuits he had when he designed this thing."

  "That sounds impossible."

  "It's just a theory, but even if he's using the fields to store or transmit data within the robot's head, its still remarkable."

  "How old is this design?"

  "I'm guessing he designed it before the solid state transistor came out."

  "That piece in your hands looks to be the custom part. Do you think it can tell us anything about where he is?"

  "I don't know. I'm still playing this by ear."

  Part 18

  The next few days were filled with deliveries, petty bickering, and people rearranging the furniture in the common areas. Both Jennifer and Icerazor had shipped some things from their previous homes. There were furniture deliveries, small appliances, tools, and a passenger van bought from a police impound sale. The garage developed a row of workbenches with a mismatched set of tools along the wall opposite the living quarters. A desk aligned itself with the edge of the hallway. Its chair appeared to be a bucket seat pulled from the back of the van and propped up on blocks. I wasn't about to risk sitting in it. Icerazor moved into the room next to mine, the boxes of his special blend dietary supplements reducing it to about the size of those on the lower floor.

  True to her word, Jennifer had repainted her room, then plastered the walls with posters of herself, almost making it moot what shade the walls were. By the end of the first week, Jennifer pitched the "chair" from the garage desk into the river, igniting a rather loud argument with Icerazor. It was his van, and the seat was still technically his. As they shouted at each other, I rooted around the medbay for aspirin to deal with the headache. The shouting stopped suddenly and ominously. I hurried to the garage, where Jennifer stood in an aloof posture, deliberately not looking towards the bathroom. The door was still open, and I could hear Icerazor vomit inside.

  "What happened?"

  "Boy can't take a hit," Jennifer said. I headed over to the bathroom, where Icerazor coughed up blood into the toilet bowl.

  "That's-"

  "I know," he said. "It's not as bad as it looks." He spat and wiped the blood from his lips.

  "In this case, it's not mine."

  "I'm leeaaaving," Jennifer called, heading off up the ramp. I ignored her.

  "Right, dietary supplements," I said. "Why do you need such a strange diet?"

  "I got powers, and the side effects suck," he said. "The ice in my name doesn't refer to frost, it means diamonds. My body is constantly producing a diamond grit with whatever carbon is available. It seems to give preference to purer carbon, hence the charcoal. If there wasn't any in me, then my body would be tearing bits of itself out, causing random internal bleeds. It took them a while to figure that part out. The grit usually passes through the gut, where it does a lovely job of scratching up the intestinal lining. Enough of those are bleeding at any given time that I need serious iron supplements to avoid anemia, and a diet that doesn't aggravate the mess. If I ate regular food, I'd be bedridden for days from the pain."

  "Wow, that sucks," I said.

  "It's manageable if someone doesn't knee me in just the wrong spot." He looked up at me with one red and one brown eye.

  "You lost a contact."

  "Shit, check the garage, it probably fell out when she hit me." We spent a few minutes on our hands and knees looking for the small piece of eyewear. When we found it, it turned out to have been stepped on already. "Well, thanks anyway. I have spares, I was just hoping to save this one." We sat on the floor, leaning against the side of the van.

  "I heard you had a less-than-stellar working relationship with your mentor."

  "Jackass was convinced I couldn't handle the life, did everything in his power to make me quit."

  "Mentors can expel sidekicks. If he wanted you gone, why didn't he?"

  "He bet I'd quit, which meant he couldn't throw me out, or he'd never prove himself right. I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction."

  "It seems odd that he'd sponsor you if he thought you'd leave."

  "I guess he figured someone else would go easy on me."

  "Who was your mentor?"

  "An asshole called Agent Six."

  "I've met him. I'm not a fan."

  "Maybe there's hope we'll get along."

  "I have to ask, why a sword? It's awfully hard to avoid lethal force with it."

  "I didn't pick the sword after I became a hero. I was trying to teach myself sorcery, and I set out to make the sword magical. I screwed up. It transformed the sword, but it also transformed me. Bad news is, they can't reverse it." Icerazor partially drew the blade from its scabbard. What should be metal was a mostly transparent, very pale blue crystal. "Diamond, transmuted by a fool who nearly killed himself. The best thaumaturgical minds in the community pored over my notes and the ritual site and can't figure out how it happened. I wasn't trying to change the structure of the blade, just enchant it. I've stuck to simple tricks since. I sort of learned that lesson the hard way." He sheathed the blade. "Besides, there are plenty of non-fleshy things that can be cut instead."

  "That can't be your only ability."

  "No, if I focus, I can make a diamond double of myself. It won't last long, but it can take a lot of punishment. People in my home town think I personally transform, because I only do it from hiding. I can't control it and myself at the same time."

  "Still, there are plenty of cases where that would come in handy."

  "Agent Six didn't think so. He would mock me as a coward for using it."

  "There's a difference between prudence and cowardice. We're almost always outnumbered
. Using our advantages to greatest effect isn't cowardice anymore than sneaking in the side door is."

  "You forget, his goal was to make me quit," Icerazor said. "What are your powers?"

  "I haven't got any." Icerazor laughed.

  "Agent Six made me think all unpowered heroes were assholes. I guess I shouldn't judge the lot of you by his actions."

  "I appreciate the sentiment."