I pull Nick to his feet, making a point of being rough about it, and walk him through the perimeter, nervously aware of the complete absence of due process. He’s not helping this look any more legitimate, leaning on me like a drunk and whispering in my ear.
“I know what’s inside of you, Tin Man. I can see it burning. It burned in him, too.”
CoreFire.
“We can’t take him in the car,” Damsel says, sounding bored. “Can you call Blackwolf on that thing?”
“Sure.”
“Tell him to come get us in that ship of his, and that we’ve got a passenger. Sometimes his toys come in handy.”
I spend some time in the Crisis Room learning the computer system while Lily looks on. The display looms above me, casting white light onto our faces as I slide windows and data around, looking for a pattern. Blackwolf stands behind me, pointing out features. It’s a customized mainframe Blackwolf’s company built to his own design.
“They let on like they’re loners, but these people know each other.” Blackwolf is lecturing me, Supervillains 101. He only does his Clint Eastwood routine in public; in private he’s got a higher voice, almost geekily nasal.
I wonder how he knows this stuff. Blackwolf was left behind on a camping trip with his brother and sister in New Mexico when he was eight. He wandered off and he was in the wilderness for five days, and they found him just sitting on a rock somewhere. He never went to school—he was diagnosed autistic. I suppose wearing a picture of an animal on his chest helps him with that.
“A villain like Doctor Impossible makes ripples. They build things; they use custom equipment. Even someone like Doctor Impossible can’t do everything by himself. You don’t build a hundred-foot-tall robot out of nothing. They need people to fly things into orbit, or make a molecule-perfect cut, or translate ancient runes. There’s rumors and gossip, trace evidence. There’s a shadow economy out there, where these things get done.”
This is something I actually know how to do. It’s a lot like the world of drug lords and arms dealers I dealt with as an enhanced operative, just much stranger. I watch Doctor Impossible’s influence extend through the money markets, smugglers, small-time powers-for-hire like Nick. Somebody called him about stealing that diamond, and somebody showed up afterward to take it off him.
“I am here.”
In a warehouse in Chicago, Mister Mystic materializes out of the darkness, trailing that cape he wears. I stare behind him, straining to see where he could possibly have come from, but even in ultraviolet, the wall behind him is in total shadow.
We’ve been loitering here for at least an hour. It was a break-in at a warehouse. Feral was listening in over the police band, and heard it was laboratory supplies. Damsel is squinting with curious intensity at something too faint for me to see. Is there anything she can’t do?
She answers Mystic without turning around. “Great. Microvision isn’t turning up anything. Check the place for resonances.”
“Emanations.”
“Whatever.”
Mystic closes his eyes and stretches out his arms, fingers twitching. I don’t see anything else happening, except his amulet glows a little. He looks like a child playing Marco Polo. I look over at Damsel, who is waiting for his response, perfectly unsmiling. “Yes, there was a presence here. A very…difficult mind.”
Feral growls. “It was him. I know it. This is all geek stuff.” He doesn’t meet up with the superpowers much. He doesn’t fly. He hides on rooftops, and traces drug shipments. For all that he’s been to the Moon, he still kicks knives out of people’s hands night after night. He just really hates crime.
I can access the manifest from here. Nothing’s missing except a set of precision-ground optical diamonds. We interviewed some of the security personnel, but they don’t remember a thing, not even showing up to work. Nick Napalm did this, but he wasn’t alone.
Lily leans against one wall. “God, is this really what you people do? Just stand around in a group? We thought you had computers or something.”
“Actually, we do.” Blackwolf looks up from whatever he is crouching over. “Fatale, can you run this tread print through your database? I don’t think it’s standard.” Supervillains tend to build from scratch, since their technology is way beyond what’s commonly available. So everything’s a little off—screw sizes, voltages—like when you go to Europe. I take a scan and run it through my onboard records, but there’s nothing.
Feral isn’t taking this well. “So it’s another wasted night? Doctor Impossible is out there working, people, and the five most powerful people on the planet are standing around in a warehouse.” I know how he feels. We all want to hit something.
“Look, we’re all frustrated….”
“Lily.” Feral’s ears lie flat now. “The man was your lover, was he not?”
“Sort of,” Lily says. She looks bored with this already.
“There must be things you’re not telling us.”
“Look, I’ve got amnesty, all right? Ask Damsel if you’re not satisfied.”
“Really? ’Cause I don’t remember signing anything.”
They stand like that for a moment, frozen except for Feral’s tail lashing back and forth. Blackwolf makes the tiniest of motions to step forward, and Damsel, again almost without moving, gestures him to stop. Then Feral leaps, claws outstretched, and at almost the same moment Lily takes a quiet step to her right and deals him a precise blow on the side of the head. He staggers, reaches for his stance again, then she clips him across the chin. He’s out.
“Poor kitty,” she murmurs.
No one else says anything for a moment. Lily looks straight at Damsel for a moment, maybe daring her to kick her out on the spot.
Damsel shrugs. “Point made, I think.” Blackwolf glances at her and cocks an eyebrow. Is she hiding a smile?
On the jumpjet ride home I get the seat next to her.
“I can’t believe you did that.”
She lets a breath out, then laughs a little.
“It’s the tail thing. He does it three times, and then he jumps. Doctor Impossible told me.”
I play the scene back later on video and she’s right. I’ll remember.
Five superheroes walk into a bar in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It’s me and Damsel again, with Rainbow Triumph, Feral, and Lily. The bar is Mephisto, a nightclub with a reputation for attracting black-market moguls and the hipper, sketchier side of the powered community. I was here once before and was not, I am mortified to say, let in.
We land in a vacant lot a few blocks away. I can already sense the others getting into character. Damsel briefs us on the way over, mostly for my benefit.
“In and out. Don’t start anything we can’t finish.”
“These guys are mostly wannabes,” Blackwolf adds, checking the fit of his gloves.
“Ohmigod, I totally used to go here,” Lily whispers in my ear, starting to giggle.
Two massive bouncers are watching the door, but at a glare from Damsel they step aside. Inside, the room goes quiet right away. In the past few days, it’s been easy to forget that Damsel’s a worldwide celebrity, especially among this kind of crowd. It’s dark inside, but of course that’s no obstacle to me. I’m already getting traces of radiation, a couple of different particle emissions, maybe even a whiff of sulfur.
Damsel steps into a cleared space under one of the overhead lights. I have to admit she exudes a sense of confidence and authority better than any force field. Years of being untouchable, godlike, and the daughter of one of the most powerful men on Earth. She wears that costume like a uniform, not a disguise. You can just tell her mom’s a princess.
“Take it easy. Nothing to worry about. We’re just here for a drink.” Her voice carries to the end of the room. She has a celebrity’s easy smile, but she gives the room a good hard stare. Everyone knows about CoreFire. There’s a second reaction when Lily steps into the light, a faint hiss that comes from nowhere. Someone over by the pool tables whi
spers, “Judas.”
There must be forty or fifty people in here, way too many to keep track of. A big man with tattoos covering one side of his face gets the idea of stepping into my path.
“Hey, girly-bot,” he grunts, or something like it. He scans funny, enhanced, of course.
And of course they would key on me as the unknown, the one they can intimidate. It’s a familiar moment, familiar to my old self in bone-deep memories of being five and a half feet tall, overweight, a dishwater blonde, the least noticeable person in any room. I slap him, hard, backhanded; the sound is like a handful of heavy ball bearings thrown against a wall. He stumbles back into his chair and I step forward to finish it.
A few people get to their feet, and I’m suddenly conscious of the weak points in my armor plate. I look around for a pillar, anything, to put my back to. A clawed hand falls on my shoulder.
“Easy, Fatale. Any real powers here?” Feral’s voice brings me back to reality. We’re the superheroes here; they’re the criminal element, a cowardly and superstitious lot. And I’ve got teammates.
I throw my senses open; the room goes white and green in my left eye, with gashes of pink and violet energy spikes. I feel my hard drive spin up as all the faces in the room are fed through a facial recognition program I got off a contact in law enforcement.
Half a dozen names come up in the metahuman database. One is Psychic Prime, one of Doctor Impossible’s old colleagues. I spot him in a corner booth and give him a hard look. He’s wearing a powder blue jumpsuit, uniform of whatever far-future training academy he claims to have gone through, and with his bald, domed skull, he looks like an out-of-work Star Trek extra. He can’t be stupid enough to make a move on us. He holds up his hands, one of them with a drink in it, and toasts me in mock surrender.
The rest of us fan out through the crowd, looking for our man. No one’s having a conversation anymore. They seem almost cowed by the reputation of a legendary team. Feral wades through the crowd, looking down from an ogre’s height, nodding to the occasional contact. Lily is putting a brave face on things, but she hangs back by the exit doors. This has the potential to turn nasty for her.
There’s a scuffle at the far side of the room, somebody pleading. It’s Rainbow Triumph bullying a disheveled man in a purple velvet jacket; he has the look of a hippie who’s fallen into shady company. She gets his lapel in a quick under-and-up move and lifts him one-handed. She’s doing it like in the movies, holding him off the ground, arm extended, smiling like an evil schoolgirl. I’ve picked up and thrown a lot of people, and you don’t do it that way, even if you’re strong—you use your hips, your shoulders. She hoists him higher, and I can hear the sound of cable twanging inside her. I’ve seen a lot worse, but somehow watching this makes me ill. She’s so thin, I think she’s less human than I am.
His name is Terrapin, and he swears he doesn’t know anything. I, for one, believe him. He’s a low-level exotic arms dealer with minor energy emission powers. The crowd’s looking on, growing restless. There’s only so much humiliation they’re going to take before things get ugly. Most of these people had nothing personal against CoreFire. Who would, really? Only Doctor Impossible seemed to have that persistent grudge.
We head for the exit, the crowd slowly parting for us, and when we get to the doors, Blackwolf stops and turns again.
“Anyone here sees Doctor Impossible, anyone knows where he is, get in touch, if you know what’s good for you.”
There’s an answering murmur now in the crowd. Someone yells out, “You’ll never get him.”
“Come on. We’re done here.” Damsel gestures us out.
I go last. I’m almost out when someone tries to break a beer bottle across the back of my skull. A stupid idea anyway—the metal plating is an inch thick. There’s a built-in reflex that stops things like that, so my first warning is feeling my body twist into action, my left arm coming up automatically to block the bottle and seize the arm in a submission hold, while my right is already raised, ready to strike and shatter ribs, to punch through armor plate.
But as it turns out, my attacker isn’t even strong for a human. Lily’s cool fingers close on my wrist just in time to stop me from killing Psychic Prime.
On a cobbled street in Irkutsk, the snow settles on my chassis and melts—it’s getting colder. I’m on a rooftop, crouching on tar paper and gravel. Lily kneels next to me, apparently oblivious to the weather.
Psychic Prime talked—it didn’t take much. Someone hired him and Nick Napalm to steal the diamond, a two-bit Russian smuggler, a middleman. But who was the middleman working for? Lily and I have been sent here to find out. The others are off on what I assume are more important errands. I’m feeling a little nervous about screwing this up, and I wish Lily talked more. She doesn’t seem nervous at all.
“You ever been to Russia before?” Lame, but I’m trying. She’s supposed to be a teammate, after all. I’m used to working alone.
“I guess. I was all over, back then. You know.”
“I was here a few times. Maybe more. The NSA didn’t always tell me where I was.”
A pause.
“Did you, um, really grow up in the future?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, it’s a long story.”
The three targets are in a bar across the street. I’m holding a recoilless rifle jacked into my weapons system; the camera on the gun sight goes right into my video feed. I get a pale green light-enhanced image of cobbled streets, and past the other rooftops the silhouette of a cathedral. Awareness.exe is on, tagging the world’s heat sources, metals, and fast movers, chattering away. Cars are fountains of information, driver bios and state-by-state itineraries. Power cables run like ley lines through the park.
In infrared, the three people coming out of the bar read like a bonfire on the cold night. A woman and two men, her breath steaming in the display like she’s breathing smoke and fire. I aim the rifle and zoom in, just to see. I can hear them laughing and talking in the quiet night, oddly far off; their magnified image looks close enough to touch. A little box on one side of the screen is spewing numbers and text—distance, wind speed, and the computer’s broken-English translation of their drunken conversation.
A shot rings out; it’s what I’ve been waiting for, intrigue at the far fringe of Doctor Impossible’s supply chain. Maybe they worked out that Psychic Prime talked to us. One of the men staggers, but the other half of my new brain is already crunching numbers, running its own little Zapruder film and drawing a straight line up to a window in the building opposite.
“Wait here.” I hand Lily the rifle.
I sprint down the fire escape and across the street, and a few minutes later I’m standing in front of a metal door. I brace and kick it in, my fighting form motion-captured off old Bruce Lee footage, Hong Kong perfection transposed into steel. I’m throwing a side kick from the summer of 1972, pure digitally recorded magic, every time. The door splinters at the lock and slams open.
The sniper was set up in someone’s living room, a high rise on the west side of the street. There was a space cleared between the house plants and a coffee table, with a tripod among the dust bunnies and bits of old Lego. A row of clips was laid out on the hardwood floor. He knelt and smoked their cigarettes while he waited for the shot. I’m through the door and across the room before he can get the barrel around. It’s pure science fiction, a blaster rifle, Buck Rogers fins and a curving, ornate shoulder stock in red and gold. Doctor Impossible might as well have written his name on it.
It’s a long flight home in the jumpjet. It’s a plush high-tech affair, a prototype from one of Blackwolf’s aerospace start-ups that never went into full production. Lily settles in companionably next to me, while Feral takes a whole row to snooze, his feet dangling in the aisle. Mister Mystic studies a leather-bound book, seat belt fastidiously in place. Blackwolf and Damsel sit up front as pilot and copilot, neither one speaking.
Damsel k
nows where we’re going now. She was there exactly two years before. Strapped in by the window, I think about how it must have been for them on Titan, the alien army surging around them, tens of thousands of aliens, each one bred to be the perfect warrior. Galatea gave her life for them, glowing like a star. When they got back to Earth, nothing could ever be the same.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ENEMY OF MY ENEMY
I find my uniform in a safe-deposit box, left there under an assumed name. When I finally settled on this identity, I had two dozen suits made, to my own design. This one has been waiting since 1987, and the metallic fabric is cool and clean after its long rest in the dark. Back in my apartment, I spread the pieces out on the bed. Red for the zeta effect, gold for, well, gold. Red tights—trousers won’t do, unfortunately. I have thin legs, but the cape compensates. Red gloves, armored and weighted along the fingers, finned along the outer edge like a 1950s rocket ship.
The crested red helmet is made of lightweight alloys and foam rubber, and inlaid with a dozen cybernetic systems, command and control. The tunic has red-and-gold trim and is woven from a material of my own invention, flameproof, waterproof, bulletproof, soundproof, proof against acid and cosmic rays, and gamma and zeta radiation. I settle it onto my head, and feel myself stand a little straighter.
The cape is pure melodrama, a coup de théâtre, useless in a fight but indispensable in making an entrance, worth minutes of tedious oration. No one who sees that broad crimson swath billowing behind me as I step through the breach I’ve made in their perimeter is going to ask too many silly questions. A simple half mask is enough to keep my identity from public knowledge and fold me into the public persona.
In street clothes I’d just be a criminal. Which I am, of course, but in the costume I’m something more. I wear the flag of a country that never existed and the uniform of its glorious army, spreading forth the dominion of the invincible empire of me. Doctor Impossible.
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