DIRE:SINS (The Dire Saga Book 5)

by Andrew Seiple

  About the only weakness to this one was a relatively slow flight speed. It could go about as fast as a car, if I needed it to. Didn’t figure it needed much more than that, though. And if it did I could always whip up some boosters or overclock the gravitics. It’d mean repairs later, but I was set up for that.

  It did have one trick I was very proud of. The entire head assembly was a decoy. My face actually fit rather nicely into the heavily-armored and well-protected chest cavity. I’d learned that trick from dealing with an invisible sniper a few months back... People love trying for headshots. And no matter how well you armor it, eventually someone’s going to bring something to the table that can get through your defenses.

  “She’s a beaut,” Alpha said, fading in next to me.

  “Yep. Multi-tasking?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve got a forked persona of myself upstairs helping Captain McHeropants browse through several restricted and not-so-restricted archives. Found a few tripwires already, though I’ve got no way of knowing if they’re Maestro’s or somebody else’s.”

  Tripwires were alarms, set up to notify their maker of certain searches or inquiries. The more we dodged, the easier our task became. Although we weren’t relying solely on Gridnet searches, and thanks to my little stunt earlier, our primary target knew we were coming.

  We had other resources, like Manuel’s back-alley inquiries, and the nanobots I’d slipped onto the poor bastards in the basement.

  “Have you finished calibrating the spies?” I asked.

  Alpha grinned. “Child’s play. Want to see the footage?” He pulled up five AR screens. Four that showed police interrogation rooms, from the perspective of someone sitting in a suspect’s chair. One that looked down at the city from above, leisurely cruising around Brixton, watching the police cars below.

  I grinned. “Perfect. Wasn’t sure we’d get her, couldn’t afford to spray her directly. She handled the hostages, then?”

  “Yep. A reassuring pat on the shoulder. Ah, we had a bunch of other people infiltrated, but I deleted them. First-responders, cops, that sort of thing.”

  “Good. Keep an eye on it, give a yell if anything changes.”

  The nanobots that I’d sprayed the hostages with were a tiny, contagious camera network. They pulled energy from the broadcast grid, so they were really only effective within urban areas, but that’s the only place I needed to use them. They clustered on clothing and hair, working together to provide low-resolution imagery and dropping it off on a frequency long-disused by any broadcast media.

  Not a perfect setup, didn’t have to be. But hard as hell to detect with current technology.

  I settled down to work, AR gauntlets flashing as I calibrated the armor’s subsystems. Putting in that extra time to get response from ninety-seven to ninety-eight percent. It would never truly be perfect until I’d taken it out on a few test flights, or combat runs, but those would come. We’d set a ball in motion. A couple, to tell the truth.

  “So Acertijo’s marks are going to draw some attention,” Alpha hopped up on a nearby shelf, to better meet my eyes.

  “Yep. As will the kamikaze Direbot. In the next hour, the police will trace its path back and find the freighter it came from leaving port. Then a round of ship inspections should follow, slowing down the Maestro’s naval channels. We’ll also see what he does with the hostages, the blanks.”

  “Blanks. Weird name for them.”

  I shrugged. “Mind-scrubbed, mutated metahumans? Blanks is shorter, sums up their mental condition fairly well. In any case we’ve put out feelers with minimal risk to ourselves. Maestro M’s response, or lack thereof, will show us more of his operation, and give us an idea how to proceed.”

  “He’s probably going to use minions.”

  “Counting on it. Observing a villain’s minions is one of the best ways to take their measure.”

  “Speaking of that...”

  I sighed. “No.”

  “Let me finish, please!” Alpha raised his hands, made vaguely placating motions. “This is his home turf. This Island England and all that, you know.”

  “Yeah don’t let any Scots hear you say that.”

  “All I’m saying is it’s two of you against all the local heroes, the Maestro, and all his Sins.”

  The Sins were his super group. He was Pride, naturally. We’d ended Gluttony and Greed back on Mariposa, and unless he’d done some rapid recruiting, Wrath was out of the picture before I ever got involved. Which left three possible Sins, assuming all of them were here, and assuming all the positions were filled.

  He’d tried to mindrape me into becoming his new Wrath. I still felt raw, righteous rage whenever I remembered that incident.

  But I pushed it aside, and smiled at Alpha. “Yes, he’ll have help. Counting on that, too. The more help he has, the easier he’ll be to track down.”

  “And the more trouble it’ll be if he brings everyone to bear against you at once. Like, y’know, a mastermind would do. Which he is.”

  “Are you that desperate to breed?”

  “No! Well, I mean...” Alpha sighed. “All I’m saying is that my job would get easier if you had a few more minions around. And those exoskeletons are the perfect vessels for meatspace operations. I mean, I’m not gonna puke. I don’t suffer from vertigo.”

  I gnawed my lip. Last month I’d cracked his code, scanned it from top to bottom, ensured that he didn’t have any hidden traps or tricks up his sleeve. And in the process, I’d found out how to replicate him.

  Alpha couldn’t replicate alone, that was one of his creator’s countermeasures against him going rogue. But I could spin off shards of his personality, tweak them, enable limited learning potential. Nothing like a full AI or DI, more on par with an exceptionally bright human.

  It was tempting. So I resisted. I trusted my scans, but his creator was cunning, dangerous, and had burned me once already. His creator was also my future self, from a twisted timeline gone horribly wrong. Now just gone, hopefully. But a ghost that would never be now haunted us both, and it flavored all my dealings with him, even if neither of us wanted to admit it.

  Still, my hesitation wasn’t entirely founded upon paranoia. “Even if we could, we lack the resources. No way to get the processors we need without drawing a lot of attention. This is Britain, not America. The local black markets don’t have the pull they do back home.” Back there, something as simple as a clean, untraceable handgun was doable without breaking a thousand dollars. Here, you added a few zeroes. When you started getting into the rare-earth processors required for beings of Alpha’s complexity, it became a daunting prospect. Not impossible, but difficult with the timeframe we were looking at.

  “Yeah, but... well, there’s techno-guys around here. We could maybe scavenge something?”

  I considered, came to another decision. “Tell you what, we’ll do this for now.” I gestured, opened up another tube, a slimmer one among a cluster of five. A fresh, gleaming exoskeleton stood within, cradled in a nest of wires and LEDs.

  “Really?” Alpha bounced up and down on his butt, grinning like a kid at Christmas.

  “Really.” I tapped in the authorization and Alpha’s hologram winked out, as the Dire masked metal skeleton twitched, and stood free of the retracting wires. It raised its hands and examined them.

  “SWEET.” It roared.

  “Na na na, you don’t get the cool voice!”

  “Sorry,” he said, in his usual tones.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’m a real boy!” He tried a happy little jig, feet clicking and clacking and pinging against the forcefields that made up the floor.

  “Yeah... stop that Pinocchio.”

  “Hee hee! Right.” He marched it back into the tube. “Might as well let me charge. Oh, and Manuel’s finished if you want to go back up. We found some good stuff.”

  “Yeah?” I set the armor’s systems to recompile, clicked the AR interface off, and got back on the lift.

&nbs
p; Manuel did have a smug look on his face, when I got back to the living room. “We have them.”

  “Them?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Two of his Sins, both operating actively in the underworld. Or if they’re not his people, I’ll be very surprised.”

  He was a veteran investigator. His hunches were worth more than my most complex prognostic programs. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Manuel tossed me a bundle of printouts, and I read them as quickly as I could turn the pages. Supergenius had some perks, after all. “Desire?” I arched the other eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Really. If she’s not filling the Lust role of his group, in more ways than one, I’ll be surprised.” Manuel folded his arms. “She’s offering magical servitors for perverted acts and undercover operatives. Demons or something, nobody’s really sure. They’re all overly beautiful, overly vicious, and quite frankly dangerous.”

  “Mm. Magic.” I didn’t like that idea. Neither he nor I were very magical, and magic was, well, cheaty. “We might need help with that,” I admitted with a sigh. “Something to sic the heroes onto, once we’ve got them properly manipulated.”

  He winced. “I’m still not too happy about that.”

  “Oh come on, you know the unwritten rules. Maestro won’t kill heroes, not this close to home. No matter how well he’s hidden, he won’t need that kind of heat.”

  “True, but if he can blame it on you...”

  “Ouch.” I hadn’t thought of that. One of the major understandings in the metahuman community is that heroes didn’t kill, and villains don’t kill heroes. Villains who flout that rule got stomped on hard by all sides. Heroes that crossed that line stop being heroes. The alternative is all-out war, or extreme measures that would surely escalate into unacceptable collateral.

  From what I understood, the world had come close to that, back around the start of the nineties. Nobody still operating had good memories of those times. Too many truly vile villains and too many extremist heroes; a deadly combination that racked up a horrific body count.

  But none of this was helping the matters at hand. “All right. We’ll deal with that when it comes. Keep a closer eye on the heroes, only catspaw them as needed.”

  “Thank you.” Manuel smiled. “At any rate, the second Sin is Envy. He has his own corporation.”

  “What?” Well, not too surprising when you thought about it. Most corporations were borderline evil in some way to begin with. Wasn’t a leap to have a supervillain running the show.

  “Neo Variants. Medical research firm out of Manchester.” He tossed over another folder, and I read through it. “I am certain they are the source of some very illegal cyberware that the local mafia is using to augment their soldiers. They provide budget-rate chopshop and augment services to anyone for the right price. I know where one of their operating theaters is.”

  “Neo Variants... wait. N and V? N V?” I snorted. “Envy. Yeah, that’s Maestro, clever little puns, taunting you right in plain sight.” I nodded. “Perfect. That operating theater will be a good way for Dire to tie into the scene.”

  “There is another concern,” Manuel offered. “Not what I found, but what I did not find.”

  I nodded. “Still one unaccounted for.” Wrath was long dead, and I'd killed Gluttony and Greed back in Mariposa. With Pride, Lust, and Envy here, that just left—

  “Sloth,” Manuel concluded, rubbing his forehead. “No sign of anything like him.”

  “With luck he's too lazy to interfere,” I concluded.

  Then Alpha nudged me. “Boss, you’ll want to see this.”

  The television flared to life, and went to split-screen. Four screens, four interrogation rooms. The view from the nanite cameras I’d slipped onto the Blanks.

  One of the viewpoints was slumped on the table, and a policeman was staring down at him, eyes devoid of concern, compassion, or anything beyond cold recognition. Blood spread out on the table, a flowing red puddle that washed over the display. I watched with cold horror as the policeman lifted a knife, dropped it into the puddle of blood, and dumped a glass of something over it. Then he turned and walked out of the room.

  Someone outside even held the door for him.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I whispered. Next to me, Manuel crossed himself.

  In another split part of the screen, the viewpoint turned as the interrogation room door opened. A policewoman rushed forward with a nightstick. The viewpoint twisted and dropped. The bloody baton rose and fell, again and again.

  “The corruption stretches that far?” I asked, trying to process it. Another shift, another door opened in the third viewpoint, and I closed my eyes.

  “No. I know that look. I know that body language. They are all programmed. All triggered. The Maestro laid his chains long before we got here.” Manuel’s voice rose as he spoke, the last few words were choked with emotion.

  “They’re in Scotland Yard,” Alpha said, his usual cheery tones subdued and solemn. “This is happening in the heart of Britain’s most famous police station.”

  One by one mesmerized police officers entered the rooms with the Blanks, and one by one the Blanks died.

  I leaned back on the couch, and rubbed my eyes.

  They’d died because we’d unearthed his operation. Because we’d ‘saved’ them.

  Maestro M’s hooks ran deep into this place.

  What else would we have to do, here? What would we have to sacrifice to win this one?

  CHAPTER 4: CLUB TECHNICA

  “It was a sweet little racket. Who wouldn't want to be stronger, smarter, better in bed? We had apps and toys for everything, the customers came to us for their upgrades. No, I have no idea where Sully got his cyberware. Or that... thing... that came along with it. It was part and parcel of the bargain, too. I still have nightmares about it.”

  --Madelyne Raspail, former owner of Club Technica, testifying in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

  One of the strategies that we were trying to run against the Maestro was the idea that we were operating separately. That we hadn’t teamed up, beyond some alliance of convenience that hadn’t made it past Mariposa.

  I gave it about even odds of success, honestly. The guy was sharp, and he’d given us plenty of common cause to unite against him. But if we could muddy the waters, keep him guessing, then we’d increase the odds that he’d employ the wrong strategy or tactics to counter us. That was how you dealt with masterminds. It had worked against me before, to tell the truth. No matter how smart you were, humans were simply unpredictable. Nobody knows this better than the metahumans who put on costumes and go out every day to fight for the greater good. Or the lesser evil, so to speak.

  Or the greater evil, in the Maestro’s case.

  He’d effectively covered his tracks, and shown us that the authorities would be essentially useless. I had no doubt that the bodies would disappear, cleaned up by brain-bonked minions. The security footage would be wiped; the shooters would simply return to their lives none the wiser. Eventually someone who wasn’t a minion would notice something wrong at Scotland Yard, probably pretty soon in the grand scheme of things. But there were so many easy ways to get rid of evidence, even without advanced technology and magic in the mix.

  I’d thought the last four Mariposan metahumans he’d made would be worth more to him. But no, he’d chosen to cut his losses, to err on the side of caution.

  Two reasons for that course of action occurred to me.

  The first reason was that he feared me so greatly that he’d burn anything that I touched, to make sure it wasn’t a ploy and keep me at a distance until he could bring proper force to bear.

  The second reason was that he no longer needed those four assets, that his plans, whatever they may be, were far enough advanced that their loss was no big deal.

  The first hypothesis seemed unlikely. His actions back on Mariposa bespoke an ego unused to fear. I would have to teach him that, oh yes, and I looked forward to it.

/>   The second hypothesis was far more troublesome. Whatever his sinister master plan might be, I doubted it was as ultimately helpful to the world as my own were.

  All this was cause for future concern. I had to focus on the now, if we were to resolve this mess with a minimum of bloodshed.

  “This is on Maestro M. On Pride,” I told Manuel. “This is not our fault.”

  A breath, two. Finally he sighed and sank back into the couch. “I know. It makes it no easier.”

  “Yeah.” I sat down next to him, snaked my arm around his shoulders. Manuel was a slender guy with an acrobat’s build. “So Lust is out. No sense messing with magic now. Let’s focus on Envy. Dire’s had a pretty good track record against evil corporations.”

  Actually I didn’t, come to think of it. But that had been special circumstances, and I’d learned quite a lot since my tussle with Morgenstern Inc.

  Manuel nodded, muscles shifting under my forearm. “Neo Variants, then. Based in Manchester, with a laboratory on the outskirts, on the edge of Peak country. Which is significant, because the number of disappearances and livestock mutilations since they came in two years ago, has tripled.”

  “Mutilations?”

  “That might fit with the metahuman imports.”

  Maestro M’s subordinate Sins used radiation to mutate potential metahuman candidates. From the records we’d retrieved, those who had survived often manifested side effects. Unnatural appetites and bestial instincts were a known issue.

  “I don’t know.” Manuel stood, slipping out from under my arm. Like me, he was a pacer. Liked to move as he thought. “The whole point of the Blank processing was to get that sort of misbehavior out of them, or at least manageable enough before they got shipped to Britain. Although, Peak country is supposed to be pretty remote. Just shepherds and sheep and scattered villages and wilderness. Still, I get the feeling something more is going on. From what I saw of their company’s portfolio, they cover a lot of ground; not just the biomedical stuff, but pharmaceuticals and organ transplants as well.”