The Goblin and the Empire

by JD Cole

  “Haven’t seen you in awhile, Derek. Buried up to your eyeballs in experiments, no doubt.”

  “Actually,” he answered her, “I was camping up in Vermont up until all the craziness started. The ‘rents are keeping me cooped up as much as they can now, like terrorists are gonna attack our little suburb.”

  “Oh,” Laura groaned, “tell me about it. My parents haven’t let me go into the city in a month. Where am I supposed to buy clothes in this dinky town?”

  “Your McDonald’s work uniform is nice enough, surprised you’re not wearing it here in enemy territory-”

  “Very funny.”

  Derek pointed at the sausage biscuit she was holding. “Why don’t you guys eat a real breakfast?”

  “So we can all be ripped like you?” She turned to her friends. “I’m telling you guys, he’s built like a swimmer under all those baggy clothes.”

  “Take off your shirt!” one of the girls teased. Derek just rolled his eyes. “How do you know?” asked another, giggling.

  “I gotta get going,” Derek announced, shaking his head.

  Laura raised her voice with pride. “I’ve known him since we were seven years old. He’s like the big brother I never had. I’ve even caught him in his undies a couple times-”

  “Don’t even start that, Laura!” he nearly shouted, but the girls were oohing and ahhing childishly at Laura’s bold claim, getting cheap laughs at Derek’s expense.

  “See,” she went on, “we’re so close that I don’t have to knock on doors in their house-”

  “Yeah, that’s called being rude,” Derek interrupted.

  “It’s called family!” she smiled. “I’m just teasing, Derek. You really are my big brother. You always looked out for me.”

  “Somebody had to. Maybe I was making up for being an only child. How’s your sister, by the way?”

  Laura sighed. “She’s okay. Her and Wendy are taking it day by day. Her therapist says that the Hood kind of did them a favor, crippling those pigs in front of her at the hearing. She still doesn’t trust guys very much, but she’s not freaked out by them anymore. Used to be even dad couldn’t touch her. She’s over that now, mostly. But every once in awhile somebody brings up that internet video. It’s still floating around out there.”

  “Yeah,” Derek nodded. He was working on a solution for that. Or had been, before the entire world turned upside down. “Anyway, I really gotta get going.”

  “Hey, the Yardies are playing a concert over at the gym next week. You should come hang out with us.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll let you know.”

  “Catch ya later!”

  “Bye, Derek,” a couple of the other girls called, more pleasant than teasing now, and he waved as he pedaled away.

  Laura Watson was a sweet girl, and Derek loved her. He thought back to their childhood, and again realized that she had really planted the seed that sprouted and became the Hood. She was a bit less shy these days, as evidenced by that last bit of banter, but she’d always been part of the outcast crowd, an easy target for others to pick on. Derek had always looked out for her, building her back up when others smashed her self-esteem. The Hood was simply Derek on a larger scale, and every innocent in harm’s way he came across was another Laura. When her older sister, Chelsea, was raped with her roommate in college, Derek took another step away from childhood. That was the first time he had ever fully taken his anger out on somebody.

  Things had progressed further now, and again because of a girl. Ashley Benton’s murder had unlocked the dark side of Derek’s heart. While he was still very much aware of the line between murder and defense, he no longer kept his distance from that line, instead choosing to walking confidently atop it. The men who killed Ashley were dangerous, and would have killed again if not for the Hood. But it was a balancing act he would not be able to keep up for long; he hoped if that moment ever came again that he’d make the right choice.

  He arrived at his lab, intending to grab something new to use with the engineering actress. Wasting no time, he entered the secret area and opened a locker, pulling out a helmet similar to the one he usually wore. He swiftly plugged it into a computer port, and wrapped a collar around his neck that interfaced with the neural access point on the back of his neck. He’d invented and implanted the access point over a year ago, a sophisticated needle with hundreds of microscopic sensors and transmitters embedded down its length, stabbed into the base of his brainstem with a small transmitter plate flush against his skin. It was completely unnoticeable under his hair. Coupled with the matching sensor in the collar, the interface was orders of magnitude more advanced and versatile than other types of brainwave receivers, most of which were non-intrusive. It gave him a huge advantage while wearing his armor; commands could be issued and executed at the speed of thought. His armor and his uniform were both controlled precisely by his mind.

  He stared now at the computer, watching the screen display information as he thought commands and wrote lines of code. The helmet was already functional, it was just the software routines that needed fine-tuning. He took thirty minutes to accomplish this, while simultaneously poking at another application. He’d begun work on an artificial intelligence crawler that he hoped would be able to continually hunt down and destroy every instance of Chelsea Watson’s assault video that got shared and reposted anywhere on the internet. It was based on the same AI that he’d created to crawl the web for digital images of himself. That AI was designed to generate subtle artifacts in videos and images, which prevented most facial recognition software from being able to recognize his features. Those images mainly belonged to friends and family on social media, and he couldn’t go deleting those all the time, but the AI also actively hacked into known companies and agencies that used facial recognition, and deleted any profiles of him that could be found. It was this latter feature that he was now tweaking to hunt the video.

  When his main task was complete however, he closed up the video hunting malware for later, and installed the updated Hood software in the helmet, then unplugged the helmet and stowed it in his backpack. He returned home to find that his father was at work, and his mother had left a note saying she was grocery shopping. Perfect. Running upstairs to his room, he donned his armor, plus the new helmet, and then let the nanomesh uniform crawl into place over that. The armor ran a quick diagnostic check to ensure the new helmet systems worked.

  With that done, he removed the helmet. His uniform reshaped into a casual appearance, one he used often: baggy jeans, a t-shirt under a jacket bearing the insignia of a randomly selected NFL team, sneakers, and a ball cap. Under the cap, fake blonde hair sprouted, and Derek grabbed a pair of large sunglasses off his dresser to complete the disguise. As before, part of the uniform became a sports bag, in which he carried the helmet. He left through his backyard, as discreetly as he could, and headed to the safehouse.

  On the way, he found a hiding place for his uniform to shift disguise once again, and he was now a delivery man, his helmet safely concealed inside a mail package. Whistling, he approached the front door and made a show of ringing the doorbell and knocking. In reality, he did neither, not wanting to alert the woman inside. Looking around like a clueless college kid, he walked around to the back of the house, which was conveniently sealed off from view by trees, bushes, and a high fence. The houses here all had modest yards, and Derek thought it unlikely that anyone even noticed he was here. Suburbia was the perfect place to blend in; nobody wanted to notice you. From there, the Hood entered the house.

  The baking soda on the floor was undisturbed. No one else had been in or out. He activated the new feature on his helmet; the visor began glowing red. He could choose from many different colors, but this one best suited the moment. With the mask forming eyes over the visor, and the nanomachine brows able to mimic his brow movements inside the helmet— thanks to the new software— he looked angry. This was one opponent he couldn’t use his fists to deal with. He opened the door and slowly d
escended a step at a time.

  The woman was sitting on the mattress, engrossed with something on the reader he’d left her. She was gutsy; she kept on reading even though she knew he was there. A moment later she looked up to regard him standing at the base of the stairs, and she put the reader down. “Thanks for the food,” she told him, motioning at an empty can and a used bowl. She flinched then, and Derek knew his red eyes, flaming inside his hood, had unnerved her. Advantage: Hood.

  “Who are you?” he began, his voice mechanically disguised as always while armored up. She seemed to consider herself for a moment, weighing a reply. “Don’t bother with a generic answer,” he warned. “Either give me your name and who you work for, or leave now.”

  “After which, we’ll be enemies?”

  “We’ll be enemies,” he confirmed.

  “Before I answer your question, just tell me one thing. Where did you get that armor?”

  “Costumes overnight dot com.”

  “The only database you could have possibly pulled the design from was-”

  “DARPA. The US Army had a prototype they were playing with before they scrapped it.”

  “Ah.” There was a curious relief in her voice, and he feared his ego had just cost him a bit of intel. “Yes… yes, I forgot about the ‘Beer Twenty-One’ project. Canceled for lack of funding.”

  “I was always suspicious of that designation,” Derek admitted.

  “Battlefield Equipment Readiness for the Twenty First Century, yes. My armor design was just one component of that. Seems like they came up with that acronym as a joke, doesn’t it?”

  “Name.”

  She straightened up and sat forward, crossing her legs and resting her arms in her lap. “Doctor Cynthia Valentine. I’m the senior projects leader for Valentine/Turronne.”

  “Never heard of ‘em.”

  “Black defense contractors. You’re not supposed to hear about us.”

  “Like ‘Evan Brooks’ and ‘Redding Partners,’ then.” Dr. Valentine blinked, and by the look on her face, he wasn’t supposed to know about those outfits, either. They were funded covertly in ways almost as clever as the ways he used to fund his own research. Derek rarely went looking for government secrets; he considered them mostly boring. He’d stumbled onto the existence of those contractors by accident while looking for other things related to hi-tech research. “So why haven’t I heard of your group, and since when do engineering firms use their own creations to hunt private citizens?”

  The woman quickly composed herself. “I suppose there’s no sense in being deceitful with you, since you seem to know so much already. But tell me, who do you work for?”

  His eyes turned orange, then went red again. “Down here, the questioning only moves in one direction: from me to you. If you convince me you’re serious, maybe that’ll change.”

  “All right, fair enough.” She reached over and opened a bottle of water, taking a quick drink. “I work for people who know that the thing that attacked Boston was not from this planet.”

  “I figured that out already. Go on.”

  “We know you and Kelli Ingram were kidnapped by this alien aggressor, and we believe you can tell us where its lair is. We also want to know what it wanted with you. And we want to know how those feralmen are involved.”

  Feralmen. The scientific, politically correct term was metahumans. People who had physical traits like animals; fangs, fur, claws, tails, long ears… one, all, sometimes even none of the above. Derek knew now that they were jimani: people who, somewhere in their family trees, had ancestors who were faeries. Kelli was technically a feralman, though she did not have any weird physical traits if one made allowance for her platinum hair. Derek suspected the feralmen the woman was referring to were Devon and the elves. “Valentine/Turronne is the lone party in this? Valentine… you’re an owner?”

  “My father.”

  “Ah.”

  “And… no. VT worked exclusively for a multinational entity. They were the ones hunting the alien.”

  “Multinational…” Derek’s memory searched through all of the news reports he’d seen covering the aftermath of the battle in Boston. “There’s rumors of a general named Burke, closed defense hearings…”

  “It was called S2, short for Strategic Sciences, but the alien has ruined it. Somehow it made allies inside the organization, they betrayed us. We no longer exist. S2, VT, they’re both gone. Those androids in the city? They were S2 weapons, developed by my company, that the alien got hold of and reprogrammed.”

  Derek stood taller and looked down at her, his red eyes narrowing even more. “You facilitated all those deaths?”

  “No! Listen, a robber shoots a cashier, you don’t blame the gun manufacturer, do you?”

  “Wrong analogy, lady. Terrorist nukes a city, I blame the terrorist and the incompetent morons who let him get hold of a bomb. What is it you want from me?”

  “Information. That’s all.”

  Derek paced like a caged animal. “Information for what? If your organization doesn’t exist anymore?”

  “You’ve seen what that species can do,” she said. “We need to learn everything we can before the next attack.”

  He turned to face her. “There’s more coming? How do you know?”

  “Because that wasn’t the first one to attack us-”

  “You have proof of that?”

  “More than enough to convince you. They’ll be back, I guarantee it. The state the world is in now, you really think anybody’s willing to listen to our claims about aliens? The former S2 director, that general you saw in the news, was arrested. He briefed the President, the entire administration, and they tossed him in jail.”

  “He got busted out.”

  “Not by us. Somebody kidnapped him, likely the same people who sabotaged S2 for the alien. We’re looking for him right now.”

  “They say he was working with the rebels in Europe. What’s the purpose of lying about it?”

  “The whole affair is being blamed on the communist rebels. There’s a little bit of preparation for alien invasion being made behind the scenes, but that’s not the focus at the moment, the communists are. Everyone’s scared witless that another world-war is about to erupt in Russia. The US government is still picking apart the remains of S2 and VT. I’m guessing the administration feels the world needs to be stable before trying to persuade everybody that aliens exist, but whatever the reason… we’re on our own.

  “There are scattered remnants of S2 and VT around the globe, our only goal is researching that alien species, and learning how to beat it if they come in force next time. If we can coordinate with official agencies, we will, but at the moment that’s impossible. We’re blacklisted, fugitives, whatever you want to call it. You know firsthand about the threat, and one of our teams helped you and Kelli escape in Nanortalik, before you vanished with those elf creatures. We need your help, now.”

  Derek stood with his back to her for several moments before answering. Now he knew where Sen’giza was, and the doctor apparently did not realize she’d given him a huge prize. Nanortalik, she’d said. That was in Greenland, the southern tip to be precise. But had somebody else already found Sen’giza? It was going to be enough of a headache finding the cave that led down to the buried starship, without armed guards to sneak around or plow through. It was hubris, of course, but he’d mentally staked a claim to the ship, having been nearly killed inside it while trying to rescue Kelli. He’d been unconscious out in the forest, crippled and dying after fighting the alien to give Kelli a chance to run. He had no memory of soldiers coming to their aid, and Kelli had not mentioned any. He had never asked Kelli for a play-by-play account, so maybe Valentine was telling the truth. “If I help, I want access to every scrap of data you have.”

  “We get the same in return?”

  “No. You get what’s relevant.”

  “That sounds pretty lopsided.”

  “You want my help, or my autobiography?”
<
br />   “All right, you’re the one holding all the cards. If that’s your final offer-”

  Derek walked over to her. “I haven’t said yes, yet. I need time to consider. I’ll give you a location later. Meet me there tomorrow afternoon… let’s say between four and five.” He was going to need to be home that night to keep his parents from wondering what was going on, and he had no desire to put in another early morning like last night. “You can bring whoever you want, as long as they’re in the open with you. I’m warning you, if you try to place snipers or back up in the area, I’ll know, and I’ll treat you people accordingly.”

  “Why can’t you tell me the address now?”

  “You won’t be awake.” So saying, he knocked her out with another spray of chloroform.

  ~ ~ ~ ~

  The Hood took forty minutes to recon the area around the abandoned warehouse where he’d told the mysterious group to meet him. After knocking out Dr. Valentine, he’d left another cute handwritten note –handwriting analysis was useless against someone who could forge any handwriting on the planet— with the address and instructions in her pocket, and taken her near the city limits in the car he maintained in the house’s garage. The license plates were fake, of course, registered to a nonexistent address on the other side of the state. He’d be changing them out with another fake set later this week, maybe even replacing the car altogether. Outside Boston, he woke up the good doctor and sent her on her way with a disposable cell phone to contact her people with.

  Now, having watched the team park their van and enter the warehouse, he watched for late-comers and scanned the surrounding area for backup. If these people were legitimate, they’d follow his guidelines and not try to hide anyone from him. So far, so good. He’d counted five entering the building: Dr. Valentine was present, and with her were four soldiers, one of them a tall woman. He was tempted to summon Undine to keep watch for him, but quickly squashed that notion.

  As his note had indicated, there would probably be homeless people inside the building, and the soldiers courteously flushed them out with handfuls of cash, saving the Hood the trouble. The vigilante made his way to the warehouse roof, and used one of the skylights to enter onto the catwalks. All of his sensors were actively watching for trouble, but the five people were the only ones in here. They had to have radios and wireless devices, but they were again following instructions and kept them unpowered. Then his microphones caught the tall woman-soldier’s voice: “He’s here. Up on the catwalks.” She pointed; they looked.