I touched down next to a pair of idling ambulances, causing one of the smoking attendants next to it to choke and drop his cigarette. I eased the cot to the ground, and looked at Roy. He was still breathing, but his face was gray. Probably not good. “THIS MAN NEEDS MEDICAL ATTENTION. NOW.”
The medics stirred to life, and took him, cot and all, through a pair of double doors. I followed, ignoring the objections of a white-clad woman at a nearby desk. Stomping and clattering my way through the tiled hallway, I followed Roy. They hauled him into a curtained room off the main ward, and started unwrapping him from the tangle of sheets and rope. He cried out as they did so, and I glowered, standing in the corner as out of the way as I could stand with my arms folded.
The attendants did their dance of taking measurements, examining him, and transferring him as gently as they could to the hospital bed in the center of the room. I closed my eyes, feeling the weight of tension gone from my shoulders. In its place, exhaustion started to surge up. I'd spent the fifteen or twenty minutes of the flight to the hospital pretty much locked in one position, and my aching muscles were the last nail in a coffin of fatigue that had been building ever since we'd gotten clear of that horrible business with Sangre.
When I opened my eyes, someone was trying to get my attention. I looked down at the bald man in the white jacket who'd moved up to stand before me, and servos whined in the armor's neck as my mask followed my movements. He took a half-step back, swallowed in obvious apprehension, but managed to find his courage. “Excuse me. We need information about the patient.”
“OF COURSE.” Even dialed down, my voice boomed through the room. Somewhere down the hall, an infant wailed. I couldn't bring myself to care at the minute.
“Ah. Yes. Well, we've got some forms here. If you could fill these out?”
I looked at the forms. I looked at my gauntlets. I looked at him. “THAT'S GOING TO BE FUN. OH WELL, GOT A PEN?”
Three broken pens later, I gave up and started to unseal the armor, which caused a furor of a different sort. The bald man, who turned out to be called Doctor Sudman, kept going on about secret identities and legal issues. I didn't particularly care, but he sure did. Finally we agreed upon a compromise. The doctor and his attendants departed temporarily, as I stepped out of the armor and filled the paperwork out. Got to admit it was easier without having to deal with a hydraulic-enhanced grip that was entirely unsuited to flimsy plastic writing implements.
When I was done I re-armored and knocked on the door. They took the forms, and Dr. Sudman frowned at them.
“No next of kin?”
“NONE THAT SHE KNOWS.”
“Who is this she that you speak of?”
I tapped my chest. “HER.”
“Of course.” His expression was unreadable. He flipped the papers again. “No insurance?”
“THAT PART WAS UNCLEAR. SHE UNDERSTANDS THE MEANING OF THE WORD, BUT NOT THE WAY IT IS PRESENTED WITHIN THESE FORMS. WHAT IS INSURANCE?”
“Oh boy. Well, Mr. Carver here picked a good time to get battered, then. The computers have been down for days, so it doesn't matter right now. There just might be some problems when this is all over.”
“YOU THINK IT WILL BE ALL OVER, EVENTUALLY?”
“Well, yes. It can't go on forever, right?”
I tilted my head. “FROM HER ADMITTEDLY LIMITED EXPERIENCE, THE ONLY TIME THINGS CHANGE FOR THE BETTER IS WHEN YOU MAKE THEM CHANGE.”
“Very Warholian of you.”
“WHAT?”
“Andy Warhol. He talked about the philosophy of change—” He shot a glance at me, shook his head. “Never mind. If you don't understand insurance I'm not about to get into the artistic merits of soup cans.”
“YOU ARE WASTING TIME.”
He blinked, and swallowed again. “Sorry. I meant nothing by it.”
“AH. NO THREAT WAS INTENDED. WILL YOU TREAT ROY?”
He looked over at the old man, nodded. “Yes. It's what we do. At a glance he's got some broken or cracked ribs, at the least, and probably a pretty big concussion on top of that. I'm glad you brought him in, honestly, injuries like that at his age can be problematic if you just let them go untreated. Ah, we'll need to go get him run through the MRI. I'm sorry, but I'll have to ask you to stay out of that area, we don't allow advanced technology in those rooms, it can interact in unexpected ways.”
“FAIR ENOUGH. SHE WILL WAIT HERE UNTIL YOU BRING HIM BACK.”
He opened his mouth, thought better of whatever he was going to say, and nodded. I settled back against the wall, and crossed my arms. He motioned to the attendants and Roy was wheeled out, bed and all.
After a few minutes, I found my eyes closing again. I locked the armor into its current position, put my faith in the gyroscopes, and let myself sag back in exhaustion. Perhaps a minute later, I was out.
I slept fitfully, odd dreams chasing me in and out of consciousness. I woke to a polite rapping on my chestplate, and wished I hadn't. Sleeping in the armor had been a mistake, I ached all over. And there, standing in front of me with a small smile on her face and a manila folder under one arm, was Agent Kingsley. I re-engaged the suit, shifted the mask to look down at her.
“GOOD MORNING, AGENT.”
“You're a little late with that, it's almost dark.”
I blinked. It took a second to call up the mask's internal clock, and I stared in disbelief at the result. Damn, I had been wiped, hadn't I? Then memory returned to me and I glanced toward the hospital bed in the center of the room. Empty. “WHERE'S ROY?” I asked. “DAMN IT ALL, DIRE HAS NO TIME FOR GAMES, THEY'D BEST NOT BE MESSING AROUND HERE.”
“They're not. He's in surgery now. I pulled a few strings to get him bumped up the queue.” She smiled, showing perfect teeth, and walked around to the side of me, looking me over. “Okay, those things definitely started out as part of a manifold. Did you build this yourself?”
I waved a gauntlet. “MORE OF A SALVAGE PROJECT. YOU ASSISTED WITH SETTLING THE DETAILS OF ROY'S TREATMENT?”
“Yes. Ah... We need to talk, and the shouting's not helping matters. This isn't a secure room. Can I ask you to step out of the armor?”
“THERE WAS QUITE A BIT OF FUSS THE LAST TIME SHE TRIED.”
“Yes, they told me about that. Understandable, given the legal hot potato that secret identities can be. But in this case it doesn't really matter, we know your secret identity already.”
I blinked. “SAY WHAT NOW?”
Kingsley went over, and locked the door. “Just please, step out. Here. This might convince you that I'm on the level.”
She opened the manila folder, held it up to my mask. And I was looking at a photo of my face, a familiar-looking one. That had been on the fake driver's license that was in my wallet, back before it had been stolen. Dora Iris, a name I knew wasn't mine...
And so I'd come to a crisis.
I closed my eyes. Kingsley had helped with Roy, even if she'd rubbed me the wrong way when we first met. And thinking on the matter further, it definitely wasn't an either/or situation. I didn't have to trust her fully, in order to gain her cooperation. As long as I was careful about what I said to her, I could possibly come out on top of this situation.
I hit the manual release. With a hiss the armor opened, chest splitting and arms opening up like the petals of a flower unfurling. I withdrew them from the support yokes, wincing as they protested, and braced myself, stepping out of the legs of the suit. I stumbled a bit, before I managed to make the three steps to the bed, and sit down on it. Kingsley nodded, pulled up a chair, and sat beside me. Her mouth quirked as she glanced down at my chest. “You forgot to put on a shirt today.”
“Don't actually have a clean one right now.” It was still in the laundry.
The agent nodded. “Give me a second.” She headed to the bathroom, closed the door, returned a minute later with an undershirt in her hands. “Here, you can have mine. Less distracting that way.”
“If you say so.” I put it on, then hel
d a hand out for the folder and flipped through it. It held photocopies of the ID cards in my wallet, and not much else. I glanced at her. “So that's where her wallet got to.”
“Yep. Some drifter tried to hock it through a fixer that we watch. The timing was fortunate... we'd put a notice out that we were looking for information on you, right before it showed up.”
I stared at her. “Why? Why go to all that trouble? You would have had to do this immediately after we met.”
“I had a feeling about you. There's a look you recognize, when you've been in the game long enough. You had that look. The look of someone who'd been through an origin.”
I frowned as Kingsley grinned. “So, I figued I'd be the one to give you the talk. Before I do, how do you prefer to be called? Doctor Iris? Doctor Dire?”
I rubbed my chin. Shrugged. Doctor Dire? It had a nice ring to it. Kind of corny. But I was stuck calling myself Dire anyway, and a Doctorate was a good honorific to have. Made people take you more seriously. Besides, with my technological know-how, I figured I had the equivalent of at least one of those degrees already. But I was getting sidetracked, here. I had a chance for more information, if I could dig without giving too much away.
“So what have you found, besides the contents of her stolen wallet? Which she'd like back at some point, incidentally.”
“Ah, good luck on that. The pictures have already been destroyed. The rest of your info is already being processed by a group of Czech ID thieves. Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. This mess with the Gridnet and computers in general is playing havoc with everyone's records. For example, I've been quite unable to dig up more on you right now, but that will change.” She smiled.
“What is going on with that situation, anyway?” I frowned. “You can't tell her that this is all due to a coding error. Granted, she hasn't conducted an in-depth study, but this much disruption seems unexpected. Almost impossible, considering the cause. Purported cause, at any rate.”
“Yeah.” Kingsley lost her smile. “At this point all we know is that someone's playing shenanigans. See, this isn't an isolated incident, you're not seeing a single city being taken out, rendered powerless. This is one city among hundreds... or thousands, I guess. As best we can tell, the entire world's been disrupted. The infrastructure that controls and regulates the power is out, and something's actively resisting all attempts to straighten it out. We've been knocked back a century or so, overnight. Every first and second-world nation, and a good number of the third-world ones are running without power, or any sort of network capability. But the worst part of it? This has all the earmarks of something you'd expect Aquatica or Paradigm to try, but not a single person is stepping forward with demands, or any kind of snappy monologue. If it was that, a supervillain, then it'd be easy. We'd have something to point the heroes at, some target to aim punches at until the problem was fixed. This one? Not so. We've got Doc Quantum and the rest of Tomorrow Force helping with it, and they're stumped as well.”
“Hm. Well, do keep Dire appraised if there's anything she can do to help with the situation,” I murmured. I wouldn't mind, either. The general chaos had been getting on my nerves. Fixing this city would go a long way toward settling them.
“I have a feeling you might be able to,” said Kingsley. “Someone with your powers? Yeah, it's an easy bet that you'll be in this up to your tits whether you want it or not.” She flashed a grin.
“She's not so sure she's got powers,” I demurred.
Kingsley rolled her eyes, pointed at the armor. “Did you have that the last time we talked?”
“Well no, but most of it's salvaged—”
“Was it intact? Did you have to rebuild or rework parts of it?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Powers. Custom built flying suits of power armor? Built in a tent with a box of scraps, or however you did it? Powers, totally.”
I shut my mouth, considered it. She wasn't the first to raise that point. I couldn't rule out the possibility. Would be bad science otherwise. I shrugged and let the point drop. “All right. Well, it's been a long day, she'd best be getting home, as it were. You mentioned a talk? The Talk?”
“Yeah. Our standard offer. The MRB's standard offer, anyway.”
“She's listening.”
“Basically? A budget. Resources, funding, materials to build just about anything you want, within reason. Legal support, oversight as requested or required, and backup from both heroes and agents as you need. The same thing we offer every hero who registers with us.”
“You think Dire a hero now?” I asked.
“You just put on a prototype suit of power armor you built out of scraps to carry an injured man halfway across the city to save his life. The word seems to apply in this case.”
I shrugged. “He's a friend.”
“Right. So here's the other thing. That sure as hell looks like villain gear. Registering with us will shut any rumors that way down, right quick.”
I cocked an eye at her, rested my chin on my hand. “Is there no middle ground?” I inquired. “Must one be a hero or a villain?”
“Well...” She spread her hands. “You could always join the MRB, or one of our affiliate organizations. Then it'd just be a job. As long as you stuck to peaceful and small inventions or other power usages, no one would trouble you much.”
“Or she could remain a private citizen,” I remarked. “Are there laws against that?”
“Well, no. But then you run into the problems that you're easy pickings for recruitment from the big villains, the groups, or the syndicates. Powers make you attractive, particularly ones that deal with things like, oh, power armor for instance.” She hooked a thumb at my suit. “And if you remained a private citizen and we found out you were building stuff like that in your basement then we'd have to confiscate it.”
“This is an unacceptable paradigm.”
She shrugged. “I didn't make the rules. I just try and keep the peace. Of course the rules are all screwy now anyway. You got the Black Bloods trying to grab territory in the North, and the Steampunks of all people, fighting them off in the Northwest. Meanwhile the mafia's keeping things quiet on the Boardwalk but I don't want to think about the stuff they're getting away with. To the south the SCK are joined up with the Graveyard Gang against Die Kriegers, and the war's ripping the Wharves apart. That's not even getting into the No-face Ghost killings, or Anne Droid's rampage through Cobbles Cove. It's all coming up gangs and warlords, and we're doing our damnedest to keep things under control and support the heroes. So things are going to be messed up for a little while. My advice? Hero, villain, private citizen, whatever... do the best you can, and so long as you don't break the rules, we'll sort out what you want to be after it's all done.”
“Mmm. What are the rules?” I asked. “She's a bit fuzzy on those.”
She nodded. “It's a combination of guidelines, traditions, and legal precedents. Ah... basically, don't kill people except in extreme self-defense, don't do sex crimes, don't involve families of other costumes, don't try to end the world, and don't try to unmask heroes.”
Well, crap. That first one was a problem already. Might not be a good idea to tell her that, though. I changed the topic by focusing on the last part of her statement.
“Don't unmask heroes?” I asked. “What about villains?”
She shrugged. “Well, if you arrest someone they're going to be fingerprinted and ID'd, that's how it is. How else can they be properly charged, or their case be examined fairly by a jury of their peers?”
“Doesn't exactly seem fair.”
Her mouth turned downwards. “Fair. Listen, I think I know where you're coming from. This is new to you, and it seems like a game. Cops and Robbers or something like that. If you'd seen what I have? Seen the corpses buried under lime in basements under temples to gods that should never be worshiped? Seen the carnage left behind after a doomsday device misfired? Seen the shambling, wrecked men and women left behind after Mentat aba
ndons his minions to fend for themselves to cover his escape? Yeah, no. You wouldn't think in terms of fair, anymore.”
She flicked her sunglasses open, shoved them on her face as she rose from her chair. “Villains hurt people, plain and simple. If they get unmasked? Sucks for them. Good for the rest of the world. On the other hand, there's never enough heroes to go around. Which is why I hope you'll think about what I said.”
I rose as well, folded my arms across my chest. “She will. Thank you for that. And for helping with Roy.”
She half-turned, waved it off on her way to the door. “No problem. Give our regards to Sparky, hah? Coleman likes the guy, he's a sucker for veterans with sob stories.”
After she left, I took advantage of the bathroom and the shower, before locking the door and lying back down on the bed. I'd had enough sleep for a little while, but I lay awake, considering what she'd said to me. And what she hadn't said. Eventually, a knock came at the door. I suited up again and managed to unlock it without breaking the mechanism. It was Doctor Sudman, and he was smiling.
“GOOD NEWS?” I inquired.
“Yes. Mister Carver's been tended to. He's on track to a full recovery. Quite sturdy for his age, I must say. Quite a lot of interesting old scars, too.”
“SO HE IS IN NO DANGER? CAN HE BE TRANSPORTED?”
“Well... That's a bit extreme. We still had to set three ribs, and I'd feel better if we could keep an eye on him a few days, to make sure that the concussion's working out. We drew fluid and eased pressure, but head injuries are always a tricky thing. We'd like to put him in a low-priority ward for a minimum of three days, do you see that being a problem?”
I considered. A heated hospital, doctors watching him, bedrest... “NO. OF COURSE NOT. SHE'LL BE BACK TO CHECK UP ON HIM ONCE THREE DAYS ARE DONE.”
He smiled. “Of course. Er. We'd like to put you as a primary point of contact. Leave notes for whoever's on duty when you return, so we don't have the... surprise... that we got today. What name do you go by?”
DIRE : BORN Page 14