“How did Timetripper know we were meeting you here? Why here? He has an entire future of knowledge to draw from, and he focuses on this secret meeting? You’d think he’d have other events to go from.”
He scowled. “I don’t know why he knew about this, and that worries me. Anyway, thanks for bringing Bunny on over. I’ll take her off your hands.” He checked his watch. “Got anything else, or are we done?”
I nodded and we left, off to heroics and villainy as we saw fit.
CHAPTER 10: AN OLD FRIEND
“I've never liked the whole meet-under-flag-of-truce thing, even when you get something from it. Getting information from vills usually isn't worth putting up with their smug, punchable faces. And oh my gawd, the monologues...”
--Mags, leader of the Torchbearers junior hero group, 1998-2002
It was an uneventful return trip. We grabbed some Chinese takeout, then retrieved the armor and headed back to the lair. I’d originally planned to grab it at nightfall, but the confirmation that Timetripper was still after me was reason enough to get it into the shop for an overhaul a little earlier than planned.
Martin was silent the whole trip back, only opening his mouth to order his dim sum. And when we got back to the factory, he headed straight for the living quarters, leaving me to guide the armor to the repair station.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Running into Freeway had shaken him up, obviously. I gave it some thought as I directed the arms to disassemble the damaged layers from the outside in, and fed in materials to the various hoppers, for repair and in some cases, reforging.
Was it better to give Martin space, or confront him upon it? The hero had gotten my temper going, with only a few sentences... but he’d caused me to think about what I was doing. And I rather thought I’d returned the favor, but it was hard to tell the impact of my words without further observation.
I rather doubted he’d go easy on me, during our next encounter. And we’d have one sooner or later, if I stuck around Icon City. Most heroes you could predict, or distract away, but speedsters had a large operating range by their very nature. I’d need better countermeasures than the screamers.
A few damaged components demanded my attention. Serpent Tina’s charge had crushed some of the abdominal circuits, and blown out a motivator in the shoulder of my damaged arm. Those took about half an hour to fix. After it was done I surveyed my now-cold box of chow mein, sighed, and took it upstairs.
As it turned out, my dilemma on whether or not to confront Martin was solved when I walked through the door.
“Hey. Dire. What am I to you?”
“Er... human male? Five-foot-nine? Mostly water, with a mix of chemicals?”
He looked up at me from where he was lying on the couch. His own takeout box was next to him, unopened.
“Am I a minion to you?”
“No! No, no, no. Dire doesn’t have minions.” Ah, so that’s what this was about. “You are upset Freeway called you a minion?”
“He called it like he saw it. And what else have I been doing, but helping you with minion work?”
“Martin—” I put the chow mein on the arm of the nearest chair. “You’re a friend. You’re Dire’s friend.”
He was quiet for a moment. When he looked at me again, his face was almost pleading. “I don’t know if that’s enough.”
I took a breath. “Well, then what’s enough?”
“It...” he lifted a hand, let it fall. “I don’t know. Fuck. I’m whining. Just gimme time to think here.”
I nodded. “As you wish.” I sat in the chair, found one of the plastic sporks that had come with the take out, and did my best to enjoy the chow mein. Eating had always been an incidental thing for me. I grabbed food when I remembered to, and scarfed it down as fast as possible. After all, time spent on nourishment is time away from invention and engineering.
Martin was still silent by the time I’d finished, so I headed back down to the factory floor, and logged into one of the infrastructure terminals. What I wanted wasn’t complex, just a matter of using some of the glass, and a liquid sealant to ensure an airtight space.
Two hours later, I tested the pressure in the modified cargo container, and found it good. I wiped moisture away from the inside of the container’s new window, which had once been part of a Cadillac’s windshield. Next to me the smallest of the robotic arms twitched on its new base.
“You making a tank or something?” Martin asked. I started a bit— hadn’t heard him approach.
“No. Just a hermetically sealed and shielded viewing chamber.”
“Oh. Gonna crack open the cargo?”
“Yep.”
He went and got the crates without me asking, setting them in there one by one. I tried to help on the second one, and he shook his head. “I got this.”
I shrugged and let him get on with it. Whatever was eating at him, he’d get over it eventually.
Once it was done, I closed the container and tapped in a series of commands through my AR interface. A long hiss announced the flushing of the atmosphere, and the lights clicked on one by one inside my viewing chamber. I tested the range of the arm, nodded as it checked out, and maneuvered it over to the nearest box. When it was in position, I lowered the blast shield over the window.
“Thought we were gonna take a look at it?”
“Well, if it’s rigged to blow, then Dire doesn’t want to eat a face full of glass. That’s a bad chaser after cold chow mein.”
“You think it’ll blow?”
“Not really, but there’s no point in leaving this to chance.” I tapped in the final command, and waited as the robot opened the first box.
Immediately my sensor suite went to work. I frowned at the readings. “Slight radioactivity? Not enough to be dangerous.”
“Whoa whoa whoa, radiation? That explains it.”
I paused, and looked at him. “Explains what?”
“It’s bomb material. You get people trying to smuggle that shit all the time.”
“Ah... no, actually. This is nowhere near weapons grade emissions. What do you know of radioactive material? It probably doesn’t work like you think.”
“We dropped a bomb full of that shit on Japan, made them surrender, and got Ginormozilla out of it. Wait we got a kaiju involved here, too! This is making sense. Sick sense.”
“Slow down there,” I recommended. “There are a lot of fallacies about nuclear physics. Didn’t help that Tesla opposed further development in the field. Humanity never got those nuclear power plants that science fiction speculated upon, back in the day, because of that.” I sighed. “Opportunities lost.”
“Because radiation is fucking dangerous and makes mutants.”
“Actually most radiation just kills you. You need a balanced Eastman-Laird reaction to get possible mutational effects, according to the few studies Dire’s seen.”
“You’re not helping.” Martin said.
“In any case, this isn’t a significant amount. It’ll register on a Geiger counter, but won’t do much else.” I looked over the other readings, found them within tolerances. Should be safe to open the viewing port.
With a flick of my fingers along the AR interface, the blast shield cranked open, and we looked into the open crate.
“Flowers?” Martin asked. “All this over some goddamn pansies?”
To be fair, they were pretty flowers. Pink and white, about the size of a small apple. They rose from what looked to simple ceramic pots filled with black dirt, and looked no worse the wear for having spent presumably a day or two in a steel crate.
I studied the crate itself. It looked to have a basic hydroponics mister along the sides of it, and those inset lights within the lid of the crate were probably miniature ultraviolet grow lights. Someone had taken care to make sure they would survive the trip.
“Wait a minute.” The metal on the inside of the crates had a different texture than the outside. I zoomed in. “Lead. Got to be lead.” Didn’t know
why they bothered. Geiger counters were pretty rare.
Unless the unknown party with the vines and the giant monster was trying to track them by the radiation... hm. Couldn’t rule that out. I used the mechanical arm to replace the lid, lowered the blast shield, popped the other two crates, and went through the same processes. All were the same, as far as I could tell.
“Hey,” Martin said. “Inside of the window’s getting a little dusty.”
It was, and it shouldn’t be. I got in close, peered at it. “Pollen.”
“Radioactive pollen?”
“Maybe.” I used the arm to add in a burst RFID tracker to each crate, then closed them up again. “Going to bet that pollen does something. Going to have to decontaminate the chamber before we open it up again.”
“Prob’ly a safe bet,” Martin muttered. “Turns people into plant zombies maybe or some bullshit.”
I shrugged. “No way to tell without a method of analyzing the samples. And Dire’s lousy with organic things. But we’ve found out the important thing, they’re not useful to us right now and possibly dangerous.”
“So, does this change the plan any?”
“Not really. Going to call up our client and see how much he’ll offer to get his plants back. Set up something a few days out, and then we can use the time to take care of the important business.”
“Which is?”
“Minna. Got a lead on her earlier, and a midnight meeting with Sparky to follow up on it. Possibly.”
“Sparky? No shit?” He looked pleased.
“Well, Dire sent the message through the Torchbearers. Up to him if he accepts it.” I looked at the factory floor, at the pickup. “Was going to use that to get most of the way there, but— well, odds are good Freeway saw it as he came in to the church. Going to need to procure a new vehicle.”
“I can help with that.” Martin said. “Van okay?”
“Probably best. The armor’s heavy. After that, get some sleep, okay? It’s a midnight meeting. Only a few hours to go.”
“Great. I’ll start making some calls.”
He went off to it, and I rolled the blast shield up again, and turned my attention to my armor. The big advantage of my powerset was the flexibility inherent with my focus on engineering and robotics. After each conflict I could analyze the performance of the suit, and adjust it to the situations and foes that I expected to encounter. I was limited only by time and the resources at hand, but even if I stuck to the inexpensive modifications, I could still customize quite a lot.
The screamers were a prime example. It hadn’t missed my notice that Freeway had kept the earplugs he’d snatched out of my hands during our last encounter. I couldn’t expect them to work on him again, and they certainly wouldn’t work on that kaiju, if I was unlucky enough to run into it. Also, the potential for collateral was too high for most urban combat. I had to factor in acoustics, and exposure time, and there was too much potential for accidents. No, the screamers had to go.
Which was fine, because that let me shift a few more things in. Still, I hated to abandon a useful tool entirely, so I put two screamer grenades in the armor’s utility compartment. I filled the now-empty space with a phlogistonic igniter. All the use of a flamethrower, without having to carry fuel. Might be handy against a kaiju, and hell, sometimes a little applied arson can save a ton of trouble.
Now, the forcefield generator... I tapped my chin for a bit, and considered. It was a huge power draw, and one close-range explosion had just about fried it. My collision with the shore had finished the job. It cost a ton of resources to build, and it would about finish my gold stores off entirely, to replace the threads in the shunt circuits. It was a tough call, but I decided to keep it. Armor alone wasn’t enough, when there were potentially more laser-armed guards out there.
Speaking of the armor, there was that outer layer to consider, now that Mags had shown me her trick. Hopefully I wouldn’t run across the Torchbearers again after tonight but I couldn’t rule it out. So how would I keep myself from being immobilized again?
After consideration, I switched over to a slightly-heavier, ablative design. I put in a few small shaped charges that would let me blow away selected parts of it, or fire off all of them at once if I was having a bad day. Not an ideal solution, and each part would weaken as it took damage, but it had a modular advantage, was cheaper and easier to replace, and it had the added advantage of putting a spray of shrapnel into the air if it came down to it. Kind of like having shotguns strapped all over my body under a really big coat.
Hm. Recoil could be an issue. I lowered the size of the shaped charges a bit more, and moved the ones I’d planned for my helm assembly down to the neck. No sense in giving myself a concussion. That’s the sort of thing you make your enemies work for, after all.
As I was finishing up the recompiling, I checked the time, and winced. Ten PM already? I’d gone and lost myself in the project at hand. I eyeballed the robots reconfiguring the armor, and nodded. It would be cutting it close, but they’d finish just in time for our trip north.
In the meantime, I had one thing left to do. Leaving the noise and bustle of the workshop’s floor, I retreated up to the private quarters and gave a half-wave to Martin. “You get the van?”
“It’s outside.” He frowned. “A lot of people out and about. Die Kriegers moving around in groups.”
“Maybe they’re getting ready to hit the SCK, touch off that gang war that Bunny was worried about.”
“If that was the case they’d have more boys up north of here. This is solid turf for them, has been for years.”
“Meh. Well, it shouldn’t matter in a few days, if things go right. Our stay here is temporary, so they can get back to killing each other once we’re gone; Dire cares not.”
“Only thing that concerns me is their attitude on costumes.”
“Ah, right, they’re the ones who hate metahumans.”
“Yeah. They’re fanatics. They catch wind of you in here, right near one of their big safehouses, it’s gonna be bad. As in they’ll come after us with everything they got, bad.”
Ah, bigotry. That perfect combination of fear and stupidity.
“Well. Their loss if they do.” No point in worrying about it, either. I had other things to tend to. I moved back to my supercomputer rig, and bounced a burner phone’s number through a labyrinthine series of anti-trace programs. Thus protected, I put my mask on and called our ‘client’.
He picked up on the second ring. “I’m going to assume that you’re one of three people.”
“YOU ASSUME CORRECTLY.”
An angry exhale. “Of course.”
“WE HAVE YOUR CARGO. WHERE DO YOU WISH IT DELIVERED?”
“Do not toy with me.”
“FUNNY, THAT SHOULD BE DIRE’S LINE.”
“You were paid for a task that you did not do, and did a task that I did not ask you to do.”
“YES. BECAUSE YOU LIED. THERE WAS NO CARGO TO BE HIJACKED, AT THE POINT YOU DESCRIBED. AND THERE WAS NO FINAL PAYMENT PLANNED.” That was the point that pissed me off the most. If he’d simply told us what we’d be doing ahead of time, I would have been okay with it. Hell, we could have done it better, thrown some good kayfabe in there, really made a show of it. But no, he’d used us as patsies.
Then again, Chaingang had been secretly working for the third party in this mess, so I could maybe see why he hadn’t told us the full plan. Still, that was no concern of mine. Money was my concern, here.
He’d been silent for a long minute. “WELL?” I demanded.
“If you have the cargo, you’ll be able to tell me what’s inside. I’m sure you’ve opened it.”
A beep from my computer. He’d started a trace. Tch, it had taken him this long? Amateur.
“LET US SAY IT IS A GOOD THING DIRE DOES NOT HAVE HAY FEVER.”
“Ah. My condolences.”
“NONE NECESSARY.”
“Yet.”
Yep, the pollen did something bad, all r
ight. Thank heavens for my paranoia. “IN ANY CASE, THE PRICE FOR THIS CARGO HAS GONE UP.”
“Oh?”
Another beep. I surveyed my defenses and found them still sturdy, but that trace was persistent. He might be an amateur, but he had some smoking hardware. Shouldn’t have expected any less, really. Morgenstern was primarily a tech and heavy machinery corporation, they’d have cutting edge stuff.
“YES. QUADRUPLE THE ORIGINAL PRICE, DIRE THINKS. FOR TIME, EFFORT, AND YOUR TREACHERY.”
I’d collect Vorpal’s fee for her, and hold it in escrow until we managed to find her again. If we did.
“No.”
That threw me a bit. “NO? YOU DON’T WANT YOUR FLOWERS BACK?”
“I would like them back, but the person I represent takes a dim view on extortion. So let me make you a counteroffer.”
“GO ON.”
“I’ll give you a drop-off point. Leave them there and walk away. You’ve earned twenty-thousand apiece from our down payments, that’s fair for the job you undertook. Do this and we won’t bear a grudge—”
“HMHMHMHMHMH... HAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!” More beeps as the trace closed in, but I didn’t care. “YOU WON’T BEAR A GRUDGE? YOU THINK DIRE IS IN THE LEAST CONCERNED ABOUT THAT? YOU BETRAYED HER TRUST. YOU SHOULD BE WORRYING ABOUT HER GRUDGES.”
“You are making a mistake. I represent a powerful client.”
“VERY WELL. IF YOU WILL NOT PAY, THERE IS ANOTHER PARTY WHO MIGHT.”
An intake of breath, and a choked name. “Vec-” He stopped himself, and for a moment the receiver was silent. “You wouldn’t. That’s madness.”
“MADNESS THAT PAYS, VERSUS MALICE THAT DOESN’T. MAKES THE CHOICE A BIT MORE PALATABLE, YES?”
“Look. I have another solution.”
A series of beeps. I eyed the defenses, and frowned. Two of my programs were choking— it was down to the last three. “YOU HAVE TWENTY SECONDS.”
“Destroy them!” He blurted. “Just get rid of them! Burn them, make sure you get all the spores, too. All that you can.”
I paused. This was unexpected.
DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) Page 15