DIRE:SINS (The Dire Saga Book 5)

by Andrew Seiple

  “Speaking of that, could you get everyone together? Meeting down in the workshop?”

  “Gimme ten. Janissary I just need to wake up, but Vector’s got his nose in the chemical stocks. The others, eh, do you want us there in meatspace? We can just patch in through my sensors, it’ll save some trouble...”

  “Them too. Dire doesn’t want to patch Vector into the vox network just yet, so it’ll be easier to have them there talking directly.”

  “You don’t trust him?”

  “Not like that. It’s just—” I tilted my head, analyzed what my gut was telling me. “He’s got a yellow streak to him. Also we’re the enemy of his enemy, not his friends. Figure he’s about two steps from rabbiting and running, come what may. Can’t blame him, really. But it’s inconvenient enough that he could end up recaptured at some point, and it’s best if he doesn’t know all the details.”

  “Okay, I get what you’re saying. Anyway I’ll have them at the meeting in ten minutes, give or take.”

  He departed, and I changed, feeling grubby and dirty. A shower was in order at some point, here. Just had to sort out business.

  Part of that business was easy enough to get rolling. I headed down to the medium-scale three-dimensional printer and tapped in simple instructions. By the time Khalid and Vector showed up, I had two masks finished, and was wearing one of my own traveling masks. Voice modulator turned off, since we were indoors. Only polite, really.

  “Dire trusts you rested well?”

  Khalid smiled and nodded. Vector shrugged. “I only need two hours a day. What’s with...” he tapped his face.

  I tilted my head. “What are the odds that Sloth can read lips? Or that Maestro has someone watching his television broadcast that can?”

  “Ah.” Khalid said, stretching out a hand for one of the masks I’d made. “Say no more, my friend.” He turned his gaze upon Vector. “Literally. Put this one on before we say anything more.”

  Their masks weren’t full face, just simple white featureless models that covered their mouths and cheeks. Once my two compatriots in crime had theirs on, I relaxed. “Okay, now we should be able to speak clearly. Unless Sloth’s clairvoyance extends to clairaudience as well?”

  “What? Is that even a word?” Vector asked.

  “According to certain roleplaying games, yes,” I replied, pulling around a chair and settling into it. The androids took that as a cue to relax themselves. Delta and Beta hopped up on the nearest counter, Alpha claimed his own chair, only to promptly have it stolen by Gamma, and Epsilon merely stood in a ‘parade rest’ position, hands crossed behind his back and feet spread wide.

  “It means that in addition to providing sight, his power would provide sound,” Khalid explained. He stood as well, hands at his hips.

  “Oh! Oh, no. Unless Pride and Sloth were faking, which I can’t guarantee, everything seemed to be silent. No audio to the picture. It was kind of like security camera footage. Though he did rotate it a few times.” Vector frowned as he sank into the last remaining chair, slouched with long-practiced ease. “I think... yes, he had to keep the subject he was watching in the center of the shot at all times.”

  “Then we’re safe to talk.” I gestured to the androids. “They don’t have lips in the first place. Well, not working ones anyway.”

  “Good. What the fuck is the plan?” Vector asked. “Because if it’s hide in a bunker for the rest of our lives I’ll take a teleport to some other hemisphere, please.”

  Khalid laughed, and clapped him on the shoulder. Vector flinched, but the small Turk didn’t seem to notice. “Have a little faith, Professor. When this woman puts her mind to things, obstacles rarely survive. And she has put her mind to the downfall of this... Maestro M, you said?”

  I nodded. “Yes. He probably called himself Pride, when you met him.”

  Khalid gave me a funny look. “I never met anyone called Pride.”

  “Short man, wiry, with a bowler hat and a smug grin?”

  Khalid shook his head.

  Interesting. “And yet you had one of Maestro’s triggers in your head. You told us to go to hell.”

  “Yes, I remember that, but I am certain I never met anyone called Pride. I was trapped in Lust’s realm for quite a considerable time, and she had no visitors that were not of the fae.”

  I tapped my mask, thinking. “Is it possible you were made to forget the meeting?”

  “Nothing is impossible, I know that better than most. But it seems unusual that Lust would break her pattern and allow this Maestro in.”

  I shifted to look at Vector. “Can we use the mind control device to see if his memory was altered?”

  “Huh? Oh. Uh, not really. To be honest, we weren’t using it properly when we undid my own triggers. Basically we were just overriding the synapses, restructuring the associated protein chains—”

  I held up a hand. “She’s bad at biology. Thanks for the answer, but an explanation wouldn’t do much for Dire.”

  “It does much for me,” Khalid said, sitting up a little taller. “Perhaps we can discuss this after our business is done?”

  “Ah, sure. You’re not a hero, right? Not gonna suddenly go smash the device in the middle of the explanation because humanity wasn’t meant to wield such power, or some other stupidity like that?”

  “I am no hero.” Khalid tilted his head. “Do people really do that?”

  “The stories I could tell you,” Alpha sighed.

  “But you won’t, because you might risk a temporal paradox,” Epsilon folded his arms.

  “Right, right, sure, okay.” Alpha looked down, looked back up again. “What about the Hyperloaf incident with the Thorough-bread?”

  “No!” Gamma reached out and slapped the back of his head, with a resounding ‘clang’.

  “Okay, now you’ve got me curious,” Vector’s eyes crinkled. “Who the devil calls themselves the Thorough-bread?”

  “Let’s focus,” I knocked on the arm of the chair. “We’ve got heroes on the case, and Maestro’s winning. Time’s not on our side, and we need to get shit resolved or seriously bad things are going to happen.”

  That got their attention. “Winning?” Vector squinted over his mask. “I’d say we’re ahead of the game. Lust has your partner, true, but he’s a hero and she’s not stupid enough to kill him so we can probably rescue him there. And I’m free and on your team, as well as Mr. Janissary here—”

  “Call me Khalid.”

  “—okay, Khalid. But listen, Dire, Pride’s ambush didn’t do a damned thing to you. Your lair was protected enough to withstand his explosives, and now that you know about Sloth, he can’t even spy on you effectively. It seems to me you’re ahead in this little game.”

  “And what, precisely, has Maestro M lost in this little exchange?”

  “Me.” Vector frowned, and slapped his chest. He’d changed into a fresh lab coat, I’d noticed. Or cleaned the one he had.

  “Yes, you. Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Dire had no clue of Sloth’s existence. He’s doubtless been monitoring us for months. Dire and Acertijo spent plenty of time discussing our assault on your facility, hell, it’s probably the reason that Lust showed up when she did. Why let it happen in the first place? Why not get you out of there before we struck, or go all-in and have all of his forces waiting there?”

  Vector blinked. Then I watched the confusion in his eyes swirl into bleak resignation. “I’m expendable to him.”

  “You weren’t always,” I said without mercy, “but now you are. When’s the last time you treated anyone for radiation sickness?”

  “It’s been a while. A month and a half, and that was a mild case.” He ran a hand through his short-cropped hair. “You’re still going on about that, aren’t you? You weren’t lying about that after all?”

  “Entirely truthful.”

  “Shit.”

  Khalid raised a hand. “I believe I am coming in late to this discussion. What
is happening here?”

  I summed up my findings in Mariposa, and Maestro M’s superhuman creation procedures, and Khalid’s eyes got bigger and bigger over his mask.

  “Come to think of it, a majority of the ones I treated were Latino.” Vector nodded. “Makes a horrible sort of sense. So now that he doesn’t need me for that any more, I’ve been moved over to a loose end. A link in the chain that could lead back to him, when he uses his homemade costumes for whatever he’s planning. If you didn’t tie me off, he would have. That fucking prick!”

  Khalid nodded too. “I do not know this Pride who is also a Maestro, but from what I have seen so far and your own stories, he must not retain his hidden army. Man was not meant to wield such power.”

  “See! See! He did it!” Alpha elbowed Gamma.

  Khalid coughed. “Well, yes, but am I wrong?”

  “Eh, no.” Delta spoke. “Still, I’m thinking you’re more of a hero than you let on, buddy. Gonna have to hide the lair’s self-destruct button from you.”

  “Anyway!” I tried to seize the conversation back to some semblance of order. “Maestro has lost nothing so far. Dire spent strength and effort and lost a companion going after you, and in return she’s lost a lair, been painted as a big target for every hero in the United Kingdom, and spent finite resources and material repairing her armor. Not gonna be able to do that forever, not without a big infusion of fresh supplies. So yes, Maestro M is winning. Well, he would be save for one thing.” I waited a second, amped up the drama to make sure I had everyone’s attention. “Lust has gone rogue.”

  That caused a stir. Khalid and Vector started talking at once, and my minions shifted and looked at each other. Probably for our benefit, because they could talk among themselves without any need for visual cues.

  “We’re going to need some context,” Gamma said at the first lull. “Can you break down your reasoning on this? Bullet point it out at least?”

  Bullet point it out? I looked to Alpha.

  He spread his hands. “She likes reading business articles. Buzzwords. All of them.”

  “All right, fair enough,” I leaned back in the chair and steepled my fingers. “When Maestro contacted Dire, during the ambush, he offered her a trade. He’d call off the assault if she returned Envy and Lust.”

  “You don’t have Lust,” Vector said.

  “And neither does he, if he wants her returned,” I smiled under my mask. “Which means she’s unaccounted for. Since she won the battle last time around, she obviously left under her own power. Either that or Queensguard got her, and if they did, they’d be crowing about it all over the news. They haven’t, ergo, they didn’t.”

  A beat, two. “That is all?” Khalid asked.

  “Yeah. It sounds a little thin,” Vector said, rubbing his hair again. “I mean, it seems pretty obvious that Pride didn’t care if I was gone, why would he ask to get me back? It sounds like he was trying to deceive you, see if you’d crack under the pressure and bargain. He’s like that sometimes, likes pushing people to see how they break.”

  “Possible, but no. Dire discarded that idea quickly. The likelier explanation is that he did not wish to tip Dire off about the importance of Lust. Which is why he asked for both of you back, to avoid revealing the fact that he cared nothing for your well-being.”

  “And why did you discard that idea so quickly?” Khalid asked.

  I spread my hands. “Simple. Corroborating evidence. If his goal was to break Dire, he would have attempted to taunt her with Acertijo’s capture. Wouldn’t have worked, Dire is made of sterner stuff. But with the sort of villain he is, he wouldn’t be able to resist salting the wound. That makes two anomalies with his little slip. Put together, the only logical explanation is that he doesn’t know what’s become of Lust. Occam’s razor suggests that she likes it that way.”

  “Okay. That’s not necessarily a good thing,” Vector said, fiddling with his mask. He was a twitchy sort, all nerves and motion. The man hadn’t stopped moving since we’d started this little meeting. “The enemy of our enemy is not our friend. She’s scary.”

  “How scary, exactly?” I asked. “We’ve got you, nominally one of her allies until yesterday, so you can probably give a good accounting of her tricks. And we’ve got a victim here skilled in magical arts,” I nodded at Khalid. “So you probably have at least some idea what she hit you with.”

  “Well...” Vector tapped his foot. “She handled everything magical that came our way. Every artifact Pride found, every enchantment we needed done, that was her. Pride sold her magical creatures on the side, to select supervillain groups and criminal organizations. Mostly... sex toys, and enforcers.” He grimaced when he said ‘sex’. Moral misgivings there? Good, if so. “She billed them as demons,” Vector continued. “I never saw her directly in action, usually when we had hero troubles it would be Maestro’s goons, my creatures, and her enforcers. Most of what she can do I got from hearsay.”

  “Powerful combination,” Alpha said. “Three villains who can make or recruit minions of all sorts. Combine with a clairvoyant for espionage and an unblockable strategic overview, that’s some serious oomph.”

  “It was even better when we still had Wrath.” Vector shrugged. “The guy was good at taking enemies apart. Sometimes literally. Oh don’t look at me like that,” he snapped at Khalid. “I always put them back together afterward.”

  “And Maestro took care of their reprogramming, hmmm?” I purred.

  He closed his eyes. “In my defense, he didn’t broadcast his mental powers. Just said he had resources to take care of things, and billed his abilities as super-genius with a strategic focus.”

  “Figures. So you can’t speak to Lust’s powers outside of her minions?”

  “We never saw eye-to-eye. I did some digging.” Vector tapped his cheek. “Lust had a significant rap sheet before she became a Sin. Maestro worked to erase that, but he missed some of the paper records. I lucked into a disgruntled MI9 agent the last time I was in London, and got ahold of some copies.”

  “Now we’re talking!” Alpha leaned forward.

  Vector shrank back, then caught himself. “Sorry. Just taking some getting used to.”

  “Oh?”

  “Robots. Never dealt much with them before.”

  “Technically we’re androids.”

  “That doesn’t make it any better.”

  “Focus,” I urged them. “The records?”

  “She started life as Miss Morrigan. Had a crow theme, tried to knock over banks.”

  “What? Seriously?” I laughed. Bank robbery was one of the most idiotic things a villain could do. It drew heat all out of proportion to gain, the good banks were built to withstand heavy-duty punishment, and the heroes fucking knew how these things went. Bank robberies by supervillains were like training missions for heroes.

  “Seriously. She’d walk in, drop the illusion that hid her costume, and enchant all the men to love her. Backfired on her at least once, when a female security guard was present. Turns out pepper spray works fine on her, by the way.”

  I laughed harder.

  “The enchantments generally wore off after an hour or two out of her presence. It’s probably something in the frontal lobe. I debated partitioning my brain, but decided against it, ultimately.” Vector shrugged. “Easier to make minions without gender. Like the Mark Three. Not that it had much of a mind to enthrall, anyway.”

  “Could Lust have enthralled Dire? Switched the spell over to affect women?”

  Khalid spoke. “The answer is yes, but perhaps no.” We both looked to him, and he spread his hands. “She is specialized in enchanting men who find her desirable. But fae are good at bending the rules. It would work on you, but you could more easily resist it. I imagine you are very strong-willed against such things.”

  “Fought off Maestro’s mind control in about ten minutes,” I confirmed. Vector’s eyes went wide.

  “How? That shouldn’t be possible! It would require rerouting yo
ur own brain chemistry!”

  I smiled under my mask. “Acertijo did it as well. Took him longer, a few weeks in all.”

  “Well yes, over time you could wear away at them, but... minutes?”

  “She is Dire,” I kept my voice soft and matter of fact. “Nothing is beyond her.”

  And I was shocked to realize that I was being entirely truthful.

  I’d come a long way from my origins, from a busted, stolen set of power armor and forcefields that cooked me if they overloaded. Come a long way from futile, endless fights against heroes and villains alike. I’d walked the kayfabe, lived up to the kayfabe so long that it wasn’t kayfabe anymore. While I was a long way from being invincible, there wasn’t a problem on this planet I couldn’t fix with enough time, resources, and planning.

  “You have grown,” Khalid remarked. “Some would say it is a waste that you have fallen to villainy.”

  “Some people are foolish.” I stretched. “You’ve been awfully quiet, throughout this. Got any good intel to share on our lusty lady?”

  “It is rather embarrassing, perhaps that has influenced my attitude.” He brushed his mustache with the back of his hand. “As I said, I came in armed for demons, and got fae instead. She enchanted me, took me into her shadow world. There she lay with me, to bind the enchantment more strongly.” His eyes flicked away. “I will need a confessor before this is all done with.”

  “Khalid, that was essentially rape,” I said, leaning forward and putting my hand on his shoulder. “You’re not to blame.”

  “It was... borderline consensual. She put me into a cell. Time runs differently there. Days stretched by as years, even an immortal as I found my patience likewise stretched. When I was free of enchantment and burdened with despair, she offered me servitude for a few lifetimes, in exchange for my freedom. The carnal act sealed the deal, as it were.”

  I found a stirring of anger in my chest, that she had used an old friend so. And another stirring, as one more thought occurred to me. “Oh that asshole.”

  “Yes. It is likely she has done or will do the same with your companion.” He took my hand, gave it a squeeze. “I am sorry.”