The Goblin and the Empire

by JD Cole

  If he did show up tonight, the specially engineered isotope coating the filmy gloves on Dr. Valentine’s hands would saturate his costume, making him easy to track, and then they would have the upper hand in determining when they next saw him.

  Dr. Valentine’s pants were now around her knees, but thankfully her spandex shorts would stay right where they were. That thought did not exactly comfort her as her shirt was ripped open. She was thirty six, single, and the definition of average in the looks department. A brilliant engineer, she had never really had time for men. This experience with two of them —people she worked with, people whose job it was to protect her— wasn’t exactly an enticement to change that. But it came as a shock to her that, upon seeing the hooded form of a rescuer standing on the roof of the building opposite the one she was pinned against, she felt relief. She did not need saving, and yet… she felt saved. To alert the men, she cried out. “Help me! Please!”

  The “rapists” looked up, saw that their target had thankfully arrived, and took off down the street. Dr. Valentine slumped to the ground, crying out in seeming pain as she struggled to pull her clothes back in place. The Hood dropped six stories to land before her, kneeling and helping tug her shirt closed over her chest.

  “Are you alright, miss?” He was using some kind of audio tweak to disguise his voice in a robotic fashion. He continued to stare over at the alley entrance, obviously ready to chase her attackers down. She struggled to rise, and he supported her at her elbow, giving her the opportunity grab hold of his arm in return, wiping the isotope onto him. Just to be sure, her free hand came up to grab his other arm. Between the two points of contact, they would definitely be able to track him now. Mission accomplished! “I-I don’t know… my knee hurts, and my wrist, they were trying to-”

  The Hood surprised her by gripping both of her arms and hauling her up. Her pants started to slide off, but he caught the waist until she quickly reached down to hold them up. The chivalry in his act was polarized by the accusation in his voice. “Who are you working with?” he demanded of her.

  ~

  Sensors caught the isotope the moment it made contact with his uniform, alerting Derek to something highly irregular being coated onto him. The computer did not offer suggestions on exactly what it was, or what it was for, but Derek was no fool. That wasn’t skin moisturizer on her hands. Police had tried painting him once before, using a chemical far less sophisticated than this.

  Every detection system in his armor went active now, and imaging filters coupled with audio parsers helped him define the snipers covering both ends of the alley. Hauling the woman over his shoulder, he leapt from the trap with help from his tractor beam and scrambled across rooftops. Encrypted radios suddenly came to life as his ambushers began to coordinate their pursuit, and he set his computer to task trying to decrypt and tap into their transmissions to keep appraised of their efforts. His escape was erratic, making sure rifles had no chance to get a lead on him. Having the woman draped over him also ensured they would not fire. Hopefully.

  After a couple of miles, his cracking attempts succeeded, and he listened in on his pursuers chattering in frustration at having lost him and trying to reacquire the signature from the isotope. The Hood stopped to rest atop an apartment building, under the overhang of a service stairway. The woman had been remarkably quiet throughout, apart from grunts and minor shouts as she was bumped around on his shoulder. He put her down now, and she took the opportunity to tighten the belt around her waist where the button had been torn off. “I’m glad we finally got your attention,” she told him, leaving him dumbfounded for a moment. Then he held his hand out, and she took the wire-thin radio from within her hair and gave it to him. It was too small to be able to broadcast further than half a block, probably even less without line-of-sight, but he destroyed it anyway.

  She leaned back against the door and studied him for a moment. “I wish you’d have caught up to us before now, that rape act wasn’t the most pleasant thing in the world.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the engineer who designed the armor you’re wearing. You might as well just wait for my team-mates to arrive and hear us out, Timothy.” His shoulders stiffened at the mention of the last alias he’d used. Then she surprised him again. “I know that’s not your real name… it’s Derek, isn’t it? We never got your last name…” When he stared at her, his irritation obvious even through his masked helmet, she shrugged and smiled as sweetly as she could.

  Derek had had enough surprises for one night. “I’m the engineer who improved your crappy armor,” he replied smugly, and turned away. The woman’s eyes widened into saucers as she watched him step backward through his uniform, leaving it standing beside him. The empty uniform turned to face away from them and crouched. Derek turned back to the woman, his black-plated combat suit glinting in the moonlight. “Your buddies can talk to the Hood all they want when they get here, but as you can see, he’s the quiet type. Now, get rid of that tracking paint.”

  She hesitated for only a moment, then peeled the inconspicuous gloves off like dead skin and dropped them to the ground. A small amount of chloroform sprayed from the vigilante’s wrist into the palm of his gauntlet before he closed his hand over her face. Gently, he pulled the unconscious woman to his chest and leapt to find a hiding place atop a nearby building. Two could play the ambush game.

  The clouds began to thin even more overhead, allowing more starlight to filter through. One particularly bright light drew his attention, and he stared for a moment at Mars. There would be a manned mission there in a couple of years, the first in history. Once the lunar base and launch facility was completed in 2035, the trips would become more regular. That was discovery on a level Derek hoped to participate in at some point. He yearned to travel in space at least once, to visit the moon and Earth’s closest neighbor… and for that matter, Sen’giza was proof that interstellar travel was achievable, and if he could figure out how its main engines worked, intergalactic travel would be in humanity’s grasp. He already had designs for his own orbital vehicle tucked away in his lab… but a ship capable of escaping Earth’s gravity was not something that even he could build without attracting notice. That was something better done legitimately, with assistance from others, and for that, he’d have to wait until he was older. He sighed.

  Those thoughts led him to Bennett Kunali’i, Kelli’s husband. He was somewhere out there, traveling among the stars… a Dragon so powerful that he needed no ship to carry him on his journey to find a way to defeat the Chek’than once and for all. Thoughts of Undine, and her offerings of power came back to his mind. Just what would Derek be capable of if he mastered elemental magic?

  During the Lifishi’un trial with Kelli and the others, Derek’s in-dream persona had been known as the Wozzoren. He had been able to manipulate the dream world as skillfully as the sprites, making him seem, to the dream-world inhabitants, the most powerful sorcerer in the world. He could move swifter than wind, make himself invisible, summon fire from the skies, and at the very end of things, he’d used Excalibur to destroy half of Britain’s landmass in protest of what he alone knew was a false reality, necessitating his removal from the Lifishi’un trial altogether. Now he was faced with the possibility that he could actually use real magic in the real world…

  He shook his head. Bennett was born with the incredible power he had. Derek was not going to imperil himself or others by lusting for power that was not naturally his. Especially not when it was controlled by a rogue A.I. that was using him as a safehouse to hide from the sprites. He hoped Kelli would be able help him get rid of Undine. Pushing those worries aside, he waited for the government agents to arrive so that he could turn their plans around on them and get some answers of his own.

  « CHAPTER 6 »

  Making His Acquaintance

  The soldiers pursuing the Hood had finally gotten a faint trace of the isotope on his uniform, on the next-door rooftop. They either had some very sensiti
ve sniffers, or they had air/satellite support. In case of the latter, he had chosen a roof to wait on that had a mechanical room to hide in. The radio chatter did not indicate that they knew he had taken the uniform off; it would be several minutes until they got here.

  There was a faint “click”, and Derek reached behind himself to pull a tablet from a slot on the back of his armor. He sat cross-legged and began scrolling through various lists and folders for his suit’s operating system. There were thousands of pre-programmed disguises for his nanomesh uniform stored locally, and thousands more he could load at his lab. The graphic design program he had created specifically for the armor’s computer began to load, and he used a stylus with the tablet’s screen to begin designing a new disguise to pass the time. It wouldn’t be long before his neural interface would get some much-needed upgrades and he wouldn’t need tablets or a stylus for any of this anymore.

  The nanomachines that composed his uniform were not available commercially. The R-Tech lab he’d stolen his nanos from was actually manufacturing them en-masse for use in their research into self-replenishing chemical fluids, like industrial lubricants, paint, or whatever else they could think of. The hope was to develop a product capable of reproducing and then bonding together to assume the properties of whatever fluid they were added to, using dirt and other impurities in their environment as building blocks. “Pour a can of R-Tech nanites in your motor oil, and you’ll never have to change it again!”

  Nanotechnology had not yet progressed to where these things could actually replicate themselves or restructure matter at the atomic level. It would probably be another decade or so before even the most basic nanites became a reality. R-Tech’s nanomachines were very basic in function, able only to move themselves in response to simple electronic commands. The machines were multi-sided, with hundreds of different colors and hues among them. R-Tech had designed them that way for their testing, to observe how the machines moved using their tiny flagella. Derek assumed it was easier to reflect light off of the little things rather than trying to engrave letters or numbers onto each side of them. Some had red sides, some had yellows or greens, or any other shade you could think of, but each one had a side that was black. A single nanomachine —and technically, these were too big to be considered true nanomachines; the naked eye could see one if it was laid on a pure white background and you pressed your face against it— could not do much of anything on its own, but put a few quintillion of them together, and you had the Hood’s uniform. They could rearrange themselves over his body on command, becoming different styles of clothes so that he could disappear into crowds when he needed to. The only drawback was that the things really itched. Underwear at the very least was definitely required when wearing the uniform, though he most often wore it only over his armor.

  Derek began to sketch up clothing based on the fashions he’d seen among the faeries, for no other purpose than to fend off boredom and keep his mind off of Undine. He figured there might be a chance he’d visit the faeries again at some point, and he wanted some cool apparel ready for that day. The stylus slid along the screen smoothly, and he tapped occasionally at various commands to select colors and textures.

  He did not consider himself an artist by any means, though he knew he certainly had the imagination of one. But, as with his schooling, he merely thought of himself as a cheater, able to whip out answers and creations in a fraction of the time it took other talented people. He found no satisfaction in being able to score perfectly on tests, or painting original, photorealistic works, or producing exact copies of famous art. There was next to no effort involved in his art, sports, or academics. That was why he was the Hood. He sought out the impossible in the world of science-fiction, finding the challenges that were missing from his life by discovering and accomplishing things no one else had before him. And it just so happened that many of the things he created lent themselves neatly to the world of crime-fighting. It beat playing high school athletics, anyway.

  Radio conversations indicated that his pursuers had just arrived, and Derek saved his file, replacing the tablet in the slot between his shoulders, snapping the compartment closed. The men were reporting to a command post somewhere. Derek stood in the doorway and heard the service door across the way being kicked open, and five soldiers rushed onto the rooftop, surrounding “the Hood” who remained crouched without concern, facing away from the building Derek was hiding on. Derek listened with some amusement as the men ordered the empty uniform to stand slowly, hands raised, as well as asking it where the woman was. They did not offer her name or title, but that was okay. “The Hood” did not offer to answer them.

  Derek crept over to the edge, using the raised ventilation stacks for cover. His roof was a level higher than theirs. They weren’t using a satellite; no warnings had been called to the men alerting them to his presence. Two of the men were the ones who had been “assaulting” his detainee. Dressed casually, they had donned armor vests sometime between then and now, and were armed with a new kind of rifle he’d only seen once before. The other three soldiers were wearing the same kind of hi-tech armor Derek had seen the morning after the alien attack, minus helmets. The woman unconscious in the mechanical room claimed to be the designer. If that was true, he was willing to concede that she was a competent, even adequate, engineer. He had made numerous alterations to her designs, some out of necessity, others out of personal preference, but the core system had been a great platform to build onto.

  The soldiers were getting impatient, and Derek moved to a crouch, waiting to attack. He closed his fists, and a pair of cannons sprang over them from within his gauntlets. Switching from the needle-ammunition he had used earlier tonight, he chose to arm the cannons’ non-lethal pneumatic function, their compressors readying high-pressure blasts of air. “Non-lethal” was a misnomer at close range; within two inches, the air cannons would do as much damage as a 9mm bullet fired from a pistol at a hundred yards. It was these weapons he had used to kill eight-year old Ashley Benton’s murderers. But the air cannons’ primary purpose was to be used as a long-distance “punch”, so that he could knock people around who were slightly out of his reach.

  One of the armored soldiers slowly reached for the “Hood’s” shoulder from behind… and the uniform crumpled into a heap of cloth. Behind them all, the armored vigilante leapt into the sky, angling his jump to attack the soldier farthest from him before they could recover from their confusion.

  The immediate threats were addressed first. Both air cannons fired at two of the armored men, knocking them onto their backs as short blasts of concentrated wind slammed against their unprotected temples. Derek’s boots crashed into the chest of the soldier he’d leapt at, and he back-flipped off of the man, sending that one crashing to the rooftop, as well. The cannons pressurized immediately after firing, and Derek spun on his knee upon landing, and fired once more at the rifles in the hands of the two remaining men. Both of those guns went flying over the edge of the roof. Derek spun again, stretching out his left leg to trip an armored man who was trying to rise, and kicking his weapon out of reach. With a gymnastic twist, Derek then leapt over another armored man on his right, landing behind him. He reached under the man’s arm with one hand to spin the rifle stock, twisting the pistol grip out of the man’s fingers, and with his other hand grabbed the man’s wrist to twist and lock it behind him.

  The struggle was a bit more than Derek was used to. The soldiers’ augmented strength was almost evenly matched with his in a stand-up fistfight; now that he was tussling with one of them, he conceded their strength was just slightly superior. But Derek’s position gave him the advantage of leverage, and he subdued the man quickly, holding him as a shield against the last armored man, who was aiming his rifle at them both. Giving no one any time to react, Derek rushed forward, holding the soldier in front of him to keep the other from firing. When he was close enough, he shoved his human shield at the soldier, but that man was ready for the move, and quickly dodged a
round his careening buddy to aim at the Hood…

  A blue beam exploded against the soldier’s chest, wrapping around his torso, and he found himself being pulled forward so quickly that his limbs all spread wide, his rifle pointing away from his target. The soldier felt his abdomen crash right into the Hood’s elbow, while the vigilante disengaged his tractor beam, using that hand to neatly pluck the rifle from his stunned grasp.

  Derek took a quick glance at the rifle, noting the bullpup design and scanning for any evidence of ID lockouts that would prevent him from firing it —there were none— and ensuring the safety selector was set to semi-auto. Then he used it to cover all five men, making sure nobody drew any concealed weapons, or moved to pick up the ones he’d knocked out of their reach.

  “Joo fellas have some ‘splainin choo do,” he mocked them in a characterized accent. Then, more seriously: “Who’s the commanding officer here?” The armored fellow he’d just elbowed in the guts coughed and weakly raised his hand as he fought to gain his knees beneath him. Derek nodded. “Then I suggest you start talking.”

  The soldier stared at him, holding up a finger to ask for patience as continued fighting for breath. A second unarmored man, keeping his arms spread passively, answered instead. “First, is the woman alright?”

  “I don’t hurt women,” Derek replied irritably. “She’s taking a nap that’ll probably result in a mild headache when she wakes up, but other than that, she’s fine. Now, would you like to answer my question before I lose my temper?”

  “We want a truce,” the leader replied, regaining his breath and standing. “We’re sorry about the fake crimes. We didn’t know any other way to get a private meeting with you. We’d like to go someplace secure so we can talk.”

  “A secure location of your choosing? I don’t think so. And if a talk was all you were after, you wouldn’t have tagged me with the intent of following me home to Canada— oh shoot! I just gave away my secret hideout! You guys aren’t Border Patrol, are you?”