The Power Broker

by Nick Svolos

  Things got a bit iffier after that. I didn’t know much about fusion reactors, but I’d read enough to know they don’t blow up. They produce a lot of heat, but if you do enough damage to them, the reaction simply stops working and they shut down. The battery backup system, on the other hand, now that was something we might be able to work with. Batteries are chock full of chemicals that can cause all sorts of mischief if mistreated properly, and these were big ones. So, with the help of Dawson and the crew, we could probably somehow overheat enough reactors to do something destructive to the batteries. I admit, I was assuming a lot here, but we had two soldiers downstairs and fifty percent of their primary job description was breaking things. Hopefully they’d appreciate an opportunity to put those skills to use in a good cause.

  Yeah, it was risky, and I still hadn’t worked out exactly how any of us were going to make it out of here alive; but we had a city to save and not a lot of time to do it. I felt tension building in my shoulders and shook it out. Steady Reuben. You’ll find a way to make this work.

  I noticed the dwindling number of giant robots in the hangar, knowing their missing brethren were hidden at various locations in and around Los Angeles, ready to exterminate everyone if things went wrong when they tested the nanovirus. I thought briefly that perhaps we could somehow disable the fliers that they used to move them around, but I scratched the idea. Schadenfreude probably had more than enough robots in place by now, and he was crazy enough to go ahead with his plan even if he didn’t. No, the goal had to be to disable the computer so he couldn’t activate the nanobots.

  At some point during my second lap of the cavernous enclosure, I noticed another rhythm, almost a counter to my own, a second pair of jogging shoes slapping on the hard tarmac. They grew louder and came up beside me. It was Jezebel.

  I should have known.

  “You set a decent pace, Reuben,” she ventured.

  “Jezebel, I—”

  She held up a hand to cut me off. “Relax, I’m not here to mess with you. I always run at this time. Didn’t expect to run into you here.”

  I noticed she wasn’t wearing her mask; and relaxed a little. My run yesterday was a bit later than today’s, so I’d probably missed her. I figured she might actually be telling the truth.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you’d need to run. Doesn’t your DNA keep you, well, you know.” Hot. “Hot” is the word I didn’t want to say.

  “It does. But, I’m going to be losing it soon, and I really want to keep this figure. It’d be a shame to lose it, so I’ve been maintaining the habit.” I grunted my agreement. Hell, it’d be a crime on the scale of burning of the Library of Alexandria. I didn’t say that, of course. Didn’t need to encourage her. Instead, on behalf of my half of the species, I silently wished her luck.

  “Good call. It’s harder to start up again once you stop. So, do you lose your powers with LA, or later on?”

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Dad’s got my nanobots on a separate trigger. Same with the rest of the team. He figures we might be needed to do some crowd control if things get out of hand with the general population. Hopefully, your involvement will make that unnecessary.”

  “Ah. I’ll do my best. Speaking of my involvement, it’s about time to get to work. Figured I’d sprint the last lap. You game?”

  “Try to keep up.” She flashed me a smile and took off, ponytail bouncing furiously. I picked up my pace and sped after her. I was a sprinter in high school, never quite good enough to make varsity, but I had my moments. Either this woman had been all-state or her borrowed superhuman DNA had a bit of speedster in it, because she beat me to the little robot holding towels by a good twenty seconds.

  “Well done,” I complimented her as I accepted the towel she offered me. We walked a little ways together to cool down. “Were you that fast before you took the Force?”

  “Come on, Reuben, I thought you knew by now. I’m the ‘fast woman’ your mother warned you about.”

  I laughed. “That you are.”

  “Seriously, though,” she grunted as she bent at the waist into a stretch that made me look away. “I ran all through high school and college. Almost made the Olympic team for the hundred meter.” She held up her thumb and forefinger, lent a nasally Maxwell Smart tone to her voice and said, “Missed it by that much.”

  We made small talk while we went through our post-run stretches and started back into the complex proper. It struck me that she was just plain charming. Not that she wasn’t charming when she was vamping it up as Jezebel, but this was different. Somehow, she was even more attractive when she wasn’t working her mojo. It wasn’t quite enough to make me forget she was a supervillain or that her father was a madman about to unleash a nanovirus and an army of forty-foot tall death machines on my city, but it was close. She was the kind of woman a guy asked out on the spot or spent the next month wishing he had. Whatever “it” is, she had it in spades. She didn’t need her powers at all.

  We stepped into the elevator and her foot caught the lip of the gap, casting her forward right into my arms. I caught her, preventing her fall, and she looked up into my eyes. Her body pressed against mine, the warmth of her flesh permeating my damp clothing and evoking an involuntary response in my own.

  I realized what was going on, set her on her feet and stepped away. So this was what the “long game” looked like.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked innocently.

  “You’re good, I’ll give you that. I almost fell for it.” The door opened, and I stepped into my quarters.

  “Oh come on, don’t be that way. Why don’t you invite me in?” I felt a now familiar tug at my brain urging me to do just that.

  “Computer, close the elevator door, please. Then put up the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. I believe Jezebel would like to go to her quarters.” I looked back at her through the closing doors and held up my thumb and forefinger. “Missed it by that much.”

  ***

  After a quick shower and getting confirmation from the computer that Doctor Schadenfreude wouldn’t be needing me that morning, I retrieved my messenger bag and headed down to the motor pool. The room was smaller than the hangars where the giant robots resided, but still pretty large. The Park Ranger truck and the humvee sat at the end of a row that included a flatbed truck, a bulldozer, a couple of vans and a pair of huge, sturdy-looking, all-terrain vehicles. The latter caught my interest as they looked like just the sort of thing that could get us out of here in a hurry when the time came. I walked over to check them out but found them locked up tight.

  I took a quick look around the rest of the chamber and spotted a rack of hooks that held all the keys for the vehicles. It was pretty easy to see which keys went to the Tahoe and the Army vehicle, but it took a little trial and error to get the right ones for the ATVs. I popped the hood on one of the oversized ATVs and was pleased to learn it had a beefy, well-maintained, big-block internal combustion engine and a full gas tank. They looked like they could transport four people each. Oh yeah, these would do quite nicely. I grabbed the Angelphone out of my bag, stuck it in my pocket, and stowed the rest of my gear in one of the compartments. Then I locked everything back up in case someone came around to check on them and returned the keys.

  Ranger Oliphant’s vehicle had all the tools I’d need to break into the detention block, namely a pry bar, a flashlight, a couple of long nylon ropes and even some climbing and rappelling gear. There was a portable first aid kit, too, which joined my growing collection of equipment. Checking the soldiers’ Humvee, I was pleased to find a locked case in the back containing a pair of M4A1 carbines and about a hundred rounds of 5.56×45mm NATO rounds in long magazines. They had full metal jackets, and while I didn’t think they’d do much to penetrate the thick armor on the larger robots, I thought they might be more useful against the smaller models. I thought about taking them—they only weighed about seven or eight pounds each—but I wasn’t all that confident in my rappelling skills, so I decide
d to stage the weapons and ammo by the elevator. We could grab them on our way out if we needed them. If I needed gunfire to free the prisoners, this whole thing would be a bust, anyway.

  It took me a little bit to remember how the rappelling gear worked. I’d only done it once, and that was back when I was twelve. Still, it eventually came back to me enough that I thought I could do what I had planned without breaking my neck.

  Now I just had to trick the computer into getting the elevator car out of my way. I’d noticed that the computer tracked my movements somehow, and every time I walked over to an elevator, the car was waiting for me. Unless all the elevators were in use, something that was probably pretty rare in this place, I wouldn’t be able to gain access to the shaft. So, I walked over to the elevator bank and stepped into the waiting car. “My quarters, please,” I said to the computer, and then stepped back out before the doors could close. To my joy, the doors closed, and I heard the hum of the car being whisked up.

  I jammed the pry bar into the seam between the doors and forced the doors open. The elevator shaft was dark, but my eyes adjusted quickly and I could see far enough down to see the door to the detention level. I also noticed the overlapping electromagnetic coils that powered the car running down each side of the shaft. I got the idea that disconnecting these would prevent the car from coming down on my head while I climbed down, and I trusted my gut that this might be a good thing. Shining the flashlight around, I figured out how to unplug them from their power source.

  Feeling quite pleased with myself, I secured the rope to the door frame with a hook, ran it through the rappelling gear and let the rest fall down into the darkness. I took a deep breath. Remember when I mentioned that I really don’t like heights? Well, this was the moment of truth. I took a firm grip on the belay, forced down a wave of vertigo, sent my acrophobia off to get a sandwich so it couldn’t see what I was doing and eased myself into the elevator shaft. The nylon line accepted my weight without complaint and I started my descent. My hands started to sweat almost immediately and I had to stop my progress to dry them on the leg of my jumpsuit. My stomach was doing backflips. It was a good thing I hadn’t taken time to grab breakfast.

  Fifteen agonizing feet later, I was outside the door to the next level down. I unclipped the pry bar from my harness and went to work. Light flooded the shaft as I got the doors opened and I swung through, happy to get my feet back on solid ground. I found myself in a little lobby area that had two doors and a control panel. With a little guesswork, I figured out which manual override went to which door and managed to get them to open.

  I heard voices talking quietly down the hallway to my left, so I waited and listened. It would suck to find a member of the SchadenForce down here. After a bit, I recognized Dawson’s calm baritone and picked up enough of the jail cell conversation to have confidence that it was safe to proceed. I set to work figuring out how to open the cells in that area. With a series of clanks as my reward, I heard the cell doors open. I went to the hall and saw Sergeant Powell sticking his head tentatively out of his cell. He saw me and exclaimed, “Hey, it’s Conway!”

  “Yeah, figured you guys might want to take a walk.”

  The rest of the team crowded into the corridor and Dawson quipped, “Took ya long enough.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it turns out jailbreaks aren’t as easy to plan as they make it look in the movies. Come on, we got work to do and I don’t think we’ve got much time.”

  On the way back to the elevator, I explained our situation. “So, to make a long story short, Dr. Schadenfreude’s about to unleash a nanovirus on the population of Los Angeles, and we’re the only ones around to stop it. There’s a bunch of fusion reactors three levels down and a whole floor of backup batteries on the floor above it. I figure our best bet is to figure out how to make that stuff blow up.”

  “Sounds like fun. Blowing stuff up is our specialty,” Staff Sergeant Spaulding said with a grin. Corporal Fournier, behind him, nodded his head in eager agreement. “Any idea how we get out of here afterwards? Or preferably just before? You know, so we can look cool, walking away from an exploding mad scientist’s facility?”

  “There’s some vehicles one floor up from here. Your guns, too. That’s the best I could put together.”

  “It’ll do,” the soldier replied. “Leave the demolitions to us. Fournier and I’ll go topside and gear up. The rest of you come up after. Is there any more rappelling gear?”

  Before I could answer, Jezebel stepped into the lobby from the elevator next to the open shaft. “Throwing a party without me, Reuben? How rude.” She pointed at me and her voice rose to a scream. “Help! That man tried to rape me!”

  Oh, crap.

  I looked at the guys around me, seeing the crazy anger that I’d last seen in Golden Gate Park. Dawson looked a little confused, but even he failed to break the spell. His eyes hardened as he stepped towards me.

  “Guys, she’s controlling you! It’s her power! You gotta fight it!” was all I managed to get out before Spaulding shut my yap with a right cross. The rest of the males on the team joined in after that, and despite my best efforts to defend myself, there’s only so much you can do when five men decide to kick your ass.

  Only Maggie seemed to have any resistance to Jezebel’s mental domination, and all she managed to do was watch with a confused expression on her face. “Uh, hang on, something’s not right here.”

  Nobody listened to her. I blocked what blows I could and tried a last second dash for the open elevator. Sandoval put a quick end to that with a tackle that cracked my head against the wall. My vision went all crazy, confused stars dancing before my eyes, and the next thing I knew I hung suspended by my arms in the firm grip of Dawson and Sandoval.

  “That’s enough, boys. Thanks so much for your help,” the villain smiled. “I feel so safe with you around. Now, if you two big, strong police officers could bring Mr. Conway, the rest of you can go back to your rooms.” She said it like it was a reward, and the rest of the team marched happily back to their cells.

  While she set about closing and locking the cell doors, I looked up at Dawson and tried to talk him down. “Dawson, you know this is wrong. She’s controlling you. Fight it!” Confusion flashed briefly across his features.

  It faded as Sandoval jammed a fist into my gut. “Shut up, rapist. We know how to deal with your kind.” I gasped for breath as I struggled to get my bruised diaphragm muscle working again.

  “Don’t listen to him, boys,” Jezebel said as she led us into the elevator. “You know these reporters are all full of lies. Now, come along. Mr. Conway has an appointment with the doctor.”

  The car started heading up, and I sagged, letting the two cops bear my full weight. At this point, my only thought was to somehow break free from them and either knock Jezebel out or, if I really had to, break her slender neck. It was kind of extreme; but I was desperate, and violence was all I could come up with. If I managed to do it, the cops would be freed from her control; but after that, I had nothing. The elevator was no doubt headed to wherever Dr. Schadenfreude was. Maybe we could overpower him, but it would be nothing more than a matter of time before his supers caught up with us.

  It was a suicide mission at this point; but dammit, if I was going down, I was gonna do it swinging.

  “Reuben, I’m really disappointed in you. You could have had it all,” she said as I gathered my feet beneath me. “You could have had me!”

  I growled something unprintable as I wrenched my arms free from the cops and launched myself at her throat. Yeah, I know. It’s not much in the way of a battle cry. I didn’t do this sort of thing a lot.

  My hands caught her in the back of the neck and my momentum did the rest. Her pretty head smashed into the elevator wall. She was still on her feet, though, so I yanked her back and gave her another taste. That one did it. She went limp at my feet.

  I spun to face Dawson and Sandoval, my fists up and ready to defend myself. Jezebel’s spell was broken, tho
ugh, and as I saw them shake off the effects, I felt relieved to know I wouldn’t have to.

  I looked down at the supervillain and felt sick. In all my life, I’d never struck a woman. I damned her for forcing me into it. I dreaded what my dad would say when he found out. It was a funny thing to think about at a time like that, wasn’t it? Looking down at her, I felt ashamed that I’d failed him. I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to compound that by failing my city. “You guys got your acts together?”

  “Yeah, we’re with ya, Conway,” Dawson said. I think he recognized the look on my face, because he set a fatherly paw on my shoulder. “Don’t think about it. You did what ya had to do.”

  I nodded, shifting to “What the hell do I do next?” mode. The elevator didn’t have any controls, so I tried the computer. “Take me to the motor pool,” I said to the air. The car continued its ascent.

  “So much for that.” I pulled out the Angelphone. It only has one button, so I pressed it and held it to my ear. Silence. I guessed even they had their limits. I turned to the policemen. “I think we’re out of options. We have to get to Schadenfreude and put him down fast. Don’t let him get to a computer terminal. He’s got four more supers, so we gotta keep an eye out for them, too. The blaster from the shooting gallery, a bruiser, a stretch and a flier with claws. I won’t lie; I think this just became a one-way trip.”

  “It is what it is,” Sandoval grunted. “I swore an oath and pinned on the badge. No place I’d rather be.”

  “Ditto,” Dawson said, a determined glare in his eye. “When the doors open, me and Sandoval go first. You bat cleanup, Conway. Watch our backs.”

  “Got it.”

  The doors opened and the policemen rushed through them shouting, “Freeze! LAPD!”

  I followed and discovered we were in a lab, a level I hadn’t encountered before. Dr. Schadenfreude stood in the center next to some sort of operating table, arms crossed and smiling.