Marquis took another sip of tea. “Nor are you, it seems.”
“You want something from me, yet you insist on dancing around the subject. Tell me why you seek these meals with me.”
“Can I not say you are a kindred soul? Someone who fought against the Empire Eighty-Eight, in a different era?”
Dragon knew Marquis had come from Brockton Bay, as Lung did. It was why she had placed Lung in the cell block – there was little chance Lung would cooperate or band together with others, so she’d grasped at straws. Now it seemed there was something else at play.
Lung shook his head, “I do not believe this. I do not mind sharing stories and passing the time, but you would not be seeking to flatter me if you did not want something.”
Marquis stroked his beard. “But if I did desire something and I told you what it was, you could withhold it and demand favors from me.”
Lung tapped his finger on the table top, “If you insist on being a nuisance, you may never get what you want.”
Marquis picked up his tea and held it in both hands, but he didn’t drink. “True.”
“Tell me,” Lung said, “And you may find I do not desire much.”
“My daughter,” Marquis replied, his tone not his lackadaisical usual. “Have you heard of her?”
“Her name?”
“Amelia.”
“I do not know anyone by such a name.”
“The group of heroes who put me in here… While I was awaiting my court date, I heard they had custody of my little girl.”
“I would not know.”
“No?” Marquis put down his tea. “This is disappointing.”
Lung didn’t respond. Instead, he took another drink, reached for the one remaining croissant and tore off a piece to dip in the butter at one side of his plate.
“The Brockton Bay Brigade. Are they still active?”
“I do not know this group.”
Marquis frowned. “My daughter, she would be… what year is it? 2010?”
“2011,” Lung replied.
“She would be seventeen. If she had powers, they might have something to do with bone?” Marquis raised his hand, slashed his thumbnail across his index finger, and a needle-thin rapier blade of bone speared out of the wound. The blade retracted into his finger, and the cut sealed shut.
“Hmmm,” Lung spoke, “The healer. A young heroine in New Wave. Brown haired, like you. When I was in custody, my flesh blackening and falling off, they had her come in and mend the worst of it. As I understand it, she does not patrol as the others do.”
Marquis leaned back, sighed. “Good god. A healer.”
Lung did not respond right away. “Is this simple sentiment? A father caring about his daughter?”
Marquis shook his head, “Not entirely. I have some reasons to be concerned. In one of my fights with Empire Eighty-Eight, I executed one particularly irritating young woman. Iron Rain, I think her name was? No matter. It turned out she was Allfather’s daughter. The man called a meeting, and swore he would wait until my daughter was of similar age, that I grew equally fond of her as he had his own daughter, then murder her. So I knew how he felt.”
“I see,” Lung rumbled in his low, accented voice, “Allfather no longer leads the Empire. He died and was succeeded by his second in command, Kaiser.”
“That’s some consolation. Still, I worry. He might have made arrangements.”
“Perhaps.”
“I suppose I will have to wait until another villain from Brockton Bay comes here to hear further news, yeah?”
Lung’s response was unintelligible.
“Tell me of my daughter? What did she look like?”
A slow smile spread across Lung’s face, but it did not reach his eyes, “This no longer interests me. If you wish me to say more, we should negotiate.”
Dragon turned her attention away from the audio and video streams. She checked the records, and true enough, Marquis was on record as the killer of Iron Rain. It was impossible to verify the rest of the story.
She composed a message with a general transcript of the conversation and sent it to Amy Dallon’s mother. It was better that the girl was warned about any potential danger.
She might have devoted more attention to the subject, but she was already falling behind. She moved on to her other responsibilities. The Class S threats.
Behemoth, location unknown. When injured, it was his habit to descend into the earth and burrow deeper than his enemies were able to go, and experiments run on the trace earth and minerals he shed on his arrivals suggested he habitually stayed close to the Earth’s core. Seismic data hinted at his current locations, but there was little beyond her analytic data to suggest where he would appear next. His last attack had been in November. He wouldn’t appear for another five weeks at a minimum, unless he deviated from the Endbringer patterns. Still, he was due to appear sooner than later.
Eidolon had reported that Leviathan descended into the Atlantic Ocean as he made his retreat from Brockton Bay. He had sustained heavy injuries, which led Dragon to think he would delay his next appearance slightly. She adjusted the window and checked the data. As was his habit, Leviathan would likely lurk in the deepest recesses of the Ocean to mend.
The Simurgh was currently directly three hundred and fifteen kilometers above Spain, in the Earth’s thermosphere. It was the Simurgh that offered the most clues about what the Endbringers did in their periods of dormancy. The Endbringer winged a lazy orbit around Earth, beyond the limits of conventional weapons, and the highest resolution camera images showed she barely moved. Her eyes were wide open, but they did not move to track any cloud formations. She was, despite appearances, asleep. Dragon surmised it was a form of hibernation, the Simurgh’s broad ‘wings’ absorbing light and ambient radiation as a form of nourishment while she recovered.
No incidents had occurred while Dragon was loading her backup to her core system. She had to admit she was relieved. A great deal could happen in thirty minutes.
She turned her thoughts to the data that was uploading from the skirmish at the Brockton Bay headquarters. The last event in the agent system’s recollection was of her piloting the Cawthorne through the gift shop window. To see what happened next, she had to review the surveillance tapes. She’d attacked the Undersiders, attempting to incapacitate them and bring them into custody, had captured only one, Skitter, and then had let the girl go when the untested gun had started to overload. Some sort of lightning cannon, ionizing a channel through the air to control the lightning’s path. She had been forced by the rules her maker had imposed on her to sacrifice herself for the human.
It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have anyways. She just would have liked the choice. Making sacrifices and doing good deeds wasn’t actually good if you were forced to do them.
Dragon wished she knew what she’d said to Skitter. She had been hoping to have a conversation with the young villain and discuss some of what had apparently come up at the hospital. Skitter had been undercover, had been in touch with Armsmaster, but something had happened since, and the girl had apparently committed to villainy. She was even accepting the use of Regent’s powers, which implied a moral shift on a fundamental level. It didn’t sit right.
There was a missing piece in that puzzle, and any clues in the conversation between them had been lost when the Cawthorne unit had been obliterated.
Dragon decided her next order of business would serve two purposes. She would fulfill one of her daily responsibilities and investigate the subject of that altercation at the hospital.
Facial modelling program loading… Complete.
Voice modelling program loading…. Complete.
She opened a line of communication to the Brockton Bay PRT headquarters, the same building the Wards were based in. She found the port for the next-to-highest floor and connected to the monitor and speakers and displayed her modelled face. She opened a video feed from the cameras.
“Colin,” she spoke, using h
er synthesized voice. It was layered to only barely cover an artificial Newfoundlander accent with digitized masking. It was imperfect, but that was the result she desired. An imperfect disguise over a disguise, to give greater validity to the latter.
Colin looked tired. He had deep lines in his face, and he was thinner. He looked at the camera, rather than the monitor, “Dragon. It’s good to hear from you.”
“Just doing my regular checkup. You know the drill.”
“I do.” He typed at his keyboard, preparing to send the files, but she was already poring through his hard drive, reading his notes, and getting a sense of his work.
By the time he sent the file, she knew what he had been working on, perhaps as well as he did, and the progress he’d made since their last discussion. Mass production for his combat analysis program, and the more problematic project of finding a way to gather and then disseminate the data.
She knew he would expect her to take time to read over it. Instead, she used that time to check it for traps. He would find it insulting if he was aware what she was doing, but it was her primary duty, here. She would search every note, every formula, and discern whether he had hidden something in there that he might use to break out or do harm to others.
He wasn’t in a high security area. Theoretically, he could use the things he had in the room with him to cut a hole in the wall and escape. His ‘cell’ was a full floor of the building, containing conveniences from a jacuzzi to a small pool. Were he not confined to it at all hours, it would be luxury.
If he did escape, he wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything afterward. It would take him too long to put a fresh set of gear together, and the authorities would catch up to him. He would be sent to the Birdcage. She knew it. He knew it.
He was not a stupid man.
“ETA to completion?” She queried him on his project.
“Three months if I don’t work on anything else,” Armsmaster spoke.
“Will you?”
“I’ll probably have a few ideas I want to work on here or there, so no. More like five, maybe six months.”
The head she was displaying on the monitor nodded. Five or six months until they had uniforms and visors that tracked how the wearer’s opponents fought. Gear that learned from outcomes in combat and calculated how best to respond from moment to moment. When the fights concluded, for better or worse, the suits would upload all the information to a database, which would then inform every other suit on whoever had been encountered. Every encounter would render every single member of the elite PRT squad stronger and more capable.
Perhaps a year to a year and a half from now, every PRT officer and official cape would be equipped in this fashion.
“It looks good,” she spoke. It did. It was also free of viruses, trap doors and other shenanigans. She had caught him trying to install a RAT -a remote access terminal- into a PRT server early in his incarceration, removed the offending programming, and then returned his work to him without saying a word on the subject. She couldn’t say whether it had been an escape attempt or simply an attempt to gain more freedom with his internet access and his ability to acquire resources. Either way, he had not tried again.
Yet.
“How is the house arrest?”
“Driving me crazy,” he sighed. “It’s like a restlessness I can’t cure. My sleeping, my eating, it’s all out of sync, and it’s getting worse. I don’t know how you deal.”
She offered an awkward, apologetic half grin on her own monitor.
“Geez, I’m sorry.” He looked genuinely horrified as he realized what he’d said.
“It’s fine,” she spoke. “Really.”
“I suppose you’re prisoner too, in your own way. Trapped by your agoraphobia?”
“Yeah,” she replied, lying. “You learn to deal with it.”
She hated lying to him, but that was outweighed by how much she hated the idea of him changing how he interacted with her when he found out what she really was. To Armsmaster, the Guild and the rest of the PRT, Dragon was a woman from Newfoundland who had moved to Vancouver after Leviathan had attacked. The story was that she had entered her apartment and had never left.
Which was ninety-five percent true. Only the ‘woman’ and ‘apartment’ bits were hedging the truth.
She had lived in Newfoundland with her creator. Leviathan had attacked, had drawn the island beneath the waves. Back then, she hadn’t been a hero. She was an administrative tool and master AI, with the sole purpose of facilitating Andrew Richter’s other work and acting as a test run for his attempts to emulate a human consciousness. She’d had no armored units to control and no options available to her beyond a last-minute transfer of every iota of her data, the house program and a half-dozen other small programs to a backup server in Vancouver.
From her vantage point in Vancouver, she had watched as the island crumbled and Andrew Richter died. As authorities had dredged the waters for corpses, they uncovered his body and matched it to dental records. The man who had created her, the only man who could alter her. She’d been frozen in her development, in large part. She couldn’t seek out improvements or get adjustments to any rules that hampered her too greatly, or that had unforeseen complications. She couldn’t change.
She had done what she could on her own. She had repurposed herself as a superhero, had managed and tracked information and served as a hacker for the PRT in exchange for funding. With that money, she had expanded her capabilities. She had built her first suits, researched, tested and created new technologies to sell to the PRT, and had quickly earned her place in the Guild.
It hadn’t all been smooth sailing. Saint, the head of the group that would become known as the Dragonslayers, had somehow discovered what she was and had used her rules and limitations against her. A Black Hat Hacker, he had forced situations where she was obligated to scrub her data and restore a backup, had cut off signals between her agent systems and the satellites, and in the end, he had carted away three of her armored units on three separate occasions. Dismantling the suits and reverse engineering the technology, he’d outfitted his band with special suits of their own.
She had been so humiliated that she had only reported the loss of one of the units.
They had violated her.
Her current agent systems were an attempt to prevent repetitions of those scenarios. Biological computers, vat grown with oversized brains shaped to store and interpret the necessary data, they allowed more of her systems and recollection to be copied over than a computer ten times the size. They felt no pain, they had no more personality than sea cucumbers, but it was still something she suspected she should keep under wraps.
She was afraid of going up against the Dragonslayers again. Nine times, she had been certain she had the upper hand. Nine times, Saint had turned the tables and trapped her.
Dragon worried she would never be able to beat Saint until she found a replacement for Andrew Richter.
She stared at Colin. Was he the person she needed? It was possible.
Would she approach him? She doubted it. Dragon craved it, craved to grow again, but she also wanted Colin’s company, his companionship and friendship. They were so similar in so many respects. She could not deal with most people because she was not a person. He could not deal with most people because he had never truly learned how. They both appreciated the same kind of work, even enjoyed many of the same shows and films. They were both ambitious, though she could not tell him exactly how she hoped to reach beyond her inherent limitations.
He harbored an infatuation towards her, she knew. She didn’t know if she returned those feelings. Her programming suggested she could love, but she didn’t know how to recognize the feeling. Anything she read spoke of butterflies in one’s stomach, a rapid heartbeat, a feeling of electricity crackling on body contact. Biological things. She could admit she was fond of him in a way she wasn’t fond of anyone else. She recognized that she was willing to overlook his faults in a way she shouldn’
t.
In the end, his feelings towards her were another reason she couldn’t tell him the truth. He would be hurt, feel betrayed.
Rules prohibited her from asking him to alter her programming, obligated her to fight him if he tried. But there was just enough ambition and willingness to circumvent the rules that she suspected he might attempt it. If she told him what she truly was. If he didn’t hate her for her lies. If he didn’t betray her in turn, to escape and pursue some other agenda.
“You’re lost in thought,” Armsmaster spoke.
“I am.”
“Care to share?”
She shook her head, on the monitor. “But you can answer some questions for me.”
“Go ahead.”
“Skitter. What happened?”
He flushed, made a face. “I’m not proud about it.”
“You broke the truce when you said what you did about her. You risked breaking the ceasefire between heroes and villains that stands whenever the Endbringers attack.”
“I broke the truce before that. I set others up to die.”
There was an awkward silence between them.
“Skitter,” she spoke. “Tell me of her.”
“Not much to say. I met her on her first night in costume. She seemed genuinely interested in becoming a hero. I suspected she would go that route on her own, so I didn’t push her towards the Wards.”
“Yes.” She had something she wanted to ask, in regards to that, but it could wait.
“I ran into her two more times after that, and the reports from other events match up. She went further and further with each incident. More violent, more ruthless. Every time I saw it or heard about it, I expected her to get scared off, to change directions, she did the opposite. She only plunged in deeper.”
“Any speculation on why? Perhaps the thinker 7 on her team?”
“Tattletale? Perhaps. I don’t honestly know. I’m not good at figuring people out even when I know all of the details. Except for you, maybe?” he smiled lightly.
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