Sloth. AKA Big Brother.
“There we are,” Maestro M said, from the other side of the partition. “Now we can really get started.”
CHAPTER 20: CHECKMATE IN 10... 9... 8...
“No one is entirely clear what happened in the Tower of London. MI9 has sealed the files, and the heroes involved have been sworn to secrecy. About the only fact we know, is the name of the metahuman who perished beneath Jewel House...”
--BBC announcer, reporting in the aftermath of the 'Maddening Crowd' incident
Maestro M sneered at us from the other side of the glassteel wall. He’d traded his bathrobe for simple black clothing. He was shorter than I’d expected in person, I’d be capable of looking down upon him even without my armor.
Well, physically. I already despised the man; I’d look down on him regardless.
His side of the partition contained the rest of the control room, a solid steel door, and a stone pedestal with a closed box upon it. Following my gaze, Maestro M moved in front of it, sneer growing wider. “Ah now, every surprise in its own due time. Welcome to my humble abode. Do forgive Sloth for not stirring, he’s lost the knack of it.”
Judy eyed the barrier, drew her fist back, and Miss Maskelyne caught her arm. “What?”
“YOU SEE THEM TOO?”
“Definitely.” Miss Maskelyne pointed at the metal barrels festooned with wires that lined the walls. “Judy, he’s got enough explosives in that room to destroy the Tower.”
“I am a bit of a sore loser,” Maestro conceded. “In the event that it looks like you might actually kill me, I’ll take you with me. Rather of the opinion it won’t get to that, though.”
“AREN’T YOU THE ETERNAL OPTIMIST.”
“You know, you’ve pursued me across the damned ocean, gone after me in my lair, spent time and resources some poorer countries would kill to have, and even teamed up with heroes,” he grimaced, “just to gain bloody vengeance upon me for a minor violation at best. You would have made a perfect Wrath, you know. Not like those fickle Sins next to you.”
“Sins no more, Pride,” Lust said, folding her arms.
“You’ve put on a bit of weight, love. Might want to watch those crisps. Except hello, it’s not that at all, is it? Now who’s the daddy...”
“I could just go right through that wall and cosh’em,” Rumjack muttered.
“Try it,” Maestro M invited. “But if you manage to survive the wards, I’ll just trigger the explosives. Now then, Lust, who’s the father?”
“I owe you nothing more, you filthy man. Least of all answers to your questions.”
“Mmm. It’s a hero, isn’t it? Stuck his knob in you and now all of a sudden you’re good, hm? That’s the excuse you’ve cobbled up to work with this lot, then? How noble. Honestly, considering how often I’ve been up your tuna slappers, it’d take a lot more than a few pokes and a spurt to turn you good. Figure I’ve canceled that out for the next few centuries, what?”
Lust turned bright red and raised her hands. Khalid slapped them down, and the glare she shot him fazed the Last Janissary not at all. She flinched, and looked away. “I will kill you, little man,” she said to Maestro M. “The world deserves better than you.”
“She’s not wrong there,” Vector said. “Speaking as a former employee, I find the breach of good faith unforgivable.”
“What? Did I promise not to rummage about in your mind? No? Well, your fault for not making me promise that, then.” Maestro folded his arms. “D’ya know why I gave you the Envy spot? Because Envies are always the most pitiful little worms. The villains who don’t know what they want unless someone else already has it. You’d be lost without me, you spoony little wank.”
Vector yawned. “You’re a shitty boss. Look at you, what have you done? You live in a hole, nobody knows your name, and you can’t touch any costumed crime, it’s only the mundane stuff for you. It’s a pity you didn’t bring any of my creations in for this final confrontation, I could have freed them from the torment of your presence. Permanently.”
A flash of annoyance across Maestro M’s face. I figured he’d had a few lined up, but been forced to drop them when he saw that Vector was on our side. Score one for the less bad guys.
“Well, you’re fired anyway.” Maestro looked over the heroes. “You I don’t recognize,” he pointed at Khalid. “So I’ll let you walk out of here.”
“I decline.”
“Ah, nobody ever goes for that option,” Maestro sighed. “No matter how many times I offer. Always the same setup, eh Sloth old friend?”
Sloth didn’t respond, but a chill crawled down my spine. And with it, realization. “HOW MANY TIMES?”
Maestro’s sneer widened. “Finally, someone gets it.” He flopped down in a chair, considered the deadman’s switch he pulled out of a pocket.
“Alpha?” I voxed.
“On it,” he whispered.
“Dire? What are you talking about?” Miss Maskelyne asked.
I looked back to the array of heroes at my side. “YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE. YOU’VE FOUND THE TRUTH BEFORE. THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME YOU’VE CONFRONTED HIM.”
“Oh, not not all of them. Queensguard has been through a few members since the first time. And it’s not always them, either.” Maestro set the deadman’s switch aside, and poured himself a glass of wine. “About once every couple of years, someone develops immunity to my powers, or figures out the truth. No matter how I try, I can’t cover everything.” He smiled. “Only human, really. Just a very, very smart and pragmatic one.”
“I was given to understand that once somebody was free of your powers, they were free forever,” Vector took a step back, glancing from me to Maestro.
“Nobody’s free forever,” Maestro M said, sloshing the wine around in the glass, and studying the liquid. “Mind you, sometimes I have to break subjects anew to get the suggestions to take the second time around. A little isolation and torture usually does the trick. Starvation, dehydration, a few selected drugs... or more basic means.” He smiled at Punching Judy. “Sometimes enjoyable ones.”
Oh, Judy looked livid.
“IT’S DIFFERENT, THIS TIME,” I rumbled, stepping forward to the glassteel, pushing my mask up to an inch away from the supermaterial. “THIS TIME YOU ANGERED DIRE.”
“Different? Please. Tell me how.”
“ALPHA? YOU HAVE THE DETONATOR YET?”
He spoke out loud. “Yeah, it’s radio-controlled. It’s also not that deadman’s switch he’s carrying, the real one is wired to his heartbeat, if it stops signaling the bombs go off. Cute.”
Maestro chuckled. “Now you see the dilemma—”
“SHUT UP. ALPHA, PLEASE CONTINUE.”
“As I was going to say, it’s cute, except we’ve scanned the frequencies, and duplicated them. Now they’ll receive the same signal regardless of his heartbeat.”
“Bravo,” Maestro said. “But I doubt you can get through the glassteel before I set them off manually, so there’s no point in—”
“SHUT UP. MASKELYNE, DOES THAT LOOK LIKE CZECH SURPLUS ANTIMATTER? BECAUSE IT DOES TO DIRE.”
“It does. The magnetics were a giveaway.”
“DIRE COULD RUN AN APPROPRIATELY CHARGED PARTICLE BEAM THROUGH ANY OF THOSE BARRELS— AND YOU, MAESTRO— IN THE TIME YOU GOT OVER THERE, BARRIER OR NO BARRIER. MIGHT KILL EVERYONE IN THE ROOM EXCEPT DIRE, BUT THAT’S A PRICE SHE’S WILLING TO PAY. THE BARRELS WOULD NOT EXPLODE SO MUCH AS DISINTEGRATE, AND THE EXPLOSIVES WOULD NOT DETONATE. YOU, ON THE OTHER HAND, WOULD BOTH EXPLODE AND DISINTEGRATE. SO YOUR THREAT IS MEANINGLESS. DIRE’S PROMISE, ON THE OTHER HAND...” I raised a gauntlet crackling gold with energy. “IS VERY MUCH SIGNIFICANT.”
“Then why don’t you?” He took a swallow of wine.
“BECAUSE THE EXPLOSIVES HAVE BEEN RENDERED MEANINGLESS. THEY ARE AN EMPTY THREAT. SHE IS INCLINED TO GIVE YOU TO THE HEROES.”
He snorted. “Come now. We both know you’ll kill me in the end. I’m too dangerous to be left aliv
e, hm?” He snapped his fingers, and the monitors around his side of the room flickered to life. “But since the explosives won’t stop you, how about this? Do you really think my aspirations are limited to Britain?” He leaned forward, eyes disappearing in the shadow under the brim of his bowler. “At one word, at one gesture, at one cue that isn’t bloody radio-controlled or something your little tin bots can interrupt, I can trigger a worldwide broadcast. You know the Sovereigns video? That rock song everyone in the English-speaking hemisphere was singing the other year? It has a trigger in there, a rather suicidal one. If I activate this broadcast, every radio, every television station, every gridnet Metube hookup in Britain plays the cue that activates that trigger, and every weak-willed person who watched that video does their damnedest to kill themselves.”
Maestro stood, throwing the wine glass aside, spraying red on the glassteel, to drip down in streaks. “Do you know what this is, you idiotic band of freaks?” he yelled, spittle flecking his lips. “This is power! This is life and death! This is millions, living and dying at my whim!” He lifted a finger, shaking with rage. “And this is the part where you surrender, because I’ve got literally billions hostage and there’s fuck all you can do about it, you little spandex cunts!”
I crossed my arms. “TRY IT.”
“You’re testing— you’re fucking testing me? Me?” He laughed. Then he stopped, and looked to Maskelyne. “You’re smiling. Why are you smiling?”
I looked to Epsilon. “MIGHT AS WELL TELL HIM.”
“Our first task after breaching was to set up a dummy shell around the country. As far as the rest of the world knows, Great Britain is experiencing technical difficulties. Should be fixed sometime tomorrow.” That was a lie, there was only so much we could do. They’d be through in minutes, but Maestro didn’t have to know that. And the scope of his threat chilled me.
But I kept up kayfabe. “AS SHE SAID, YOU LITTLE WHELP, THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU INVOLVED DIRE IN YOUR PATHETIC ROLEPLAY.” I punched the glassteel, cratered a few inches out of it as my comrades flinched... and so did the Maestro. “GOT ANYTHING ELSE? SHE GROWS BORED OF YOUR PRESENCE.”
Maestro tilted his chin up, rubbed it as he looked at me. “You... hm. Most don’t make it past that one. Not bad, not bad indeed.” He sucked his teeth as he thought. “Well, you already took the nuclear arsenal offline, so that’s gone.”
“You’re welcome,” Alpha snarked.
“Do you know about the kill commands in the mobs?” He asked, conversationally. “The ones that’ll have them turning on each other in a few hours, rending everyone from limb to limb in a bloody orgy and turning London into an abattoir if I don’t activate the appropriate triggers?”
“DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THAT ONE, BUT IT WON’T MATTER. BETA?”
“Oh please, let me,” Vector said. Beta hesitated, then nodded and stepped back. “Remember that bioweapon deployment system that you convinced me to install around London last year? Did you notice that a few minutes ago your agents guarding the aerosol fountains went silent?”
Maestro glanced toward a monitor, and sighed.
“Oh yes, that was us,” Vector slapped Beta’s back. “Everyone in London will be exposed to what I call a peace bug. It’s like the flu, but with more apathy and zero threat to anyone’s health. In about half an hour they’ll be too mellow to do anything beyond growl at each other and study their feet.”
“WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT TRY TURNING THE CITY ON US, AND NEEDED A NONLETHAL WAY TO KEEP THEM FROM HURTING THEMSELVES OR OTHERS.”
Maestro took off his hat, and shook his head. Curls flew. “Three. Damn, it’s been years since someone got to three...” He actually sounded happy. “Mind you, it’s taken a fucking superteam, but I was starting to wonder if it was still possible.”
“WHAT, YOU’RE BORED AND LOOKING FOR THRILLS?” I tapped the wall again, ringing metal on crystal.
“Au contraire, Doctor, I’m looking for equals.” Maestro smiled. “Did you really think Britain was the limit of my aspirations? No, no, I want it all. But even I have my limits. Before I go up against Dark Harvest or Mentat, I need my ducks in a row. And you, darling Dire, are a perfect duckie.”
“WHY?” I asked. “WHY TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD? TO WHAT END?”
“The same as you, of course.” He put a hand on the wall opposite me, and smiled. Not a sneer, this time. “To fix the world. To get it running the way it should be.”
“YOU ARE NOT THE SAME AS DIRE,” I snapped. “NEITHER IN METHOD NOR MADNESS. YOU WOULD EXALT YOURSELF TO THE DETRIMENT OF THE SPECIES. INTOLERABLE AND INEFFICIENT.”
Maestro smirked “Well, it was worth a shot. Yes, you’ve put your clumsy metal finger on it, that’s not my game.” He folded his hands behind his back, and glared at me, eyes colder than ice. “Power. That’s my goal. Nothing more, nothing less. Britain works when I run it. And I want to run it forever. As soon as I crack immortality and eliminate all rivals, the world will eventually work like Britain does when I run it. It’ll just take more time to get there, that’s all. So I work and I cozen and I manipulate, to gather the metahuman ingredients I need to make a sustainable form that will live long enough for me to become the god-emperor of mankind, or something similar.”
“You’re horrible!” Lady Thrush burst out. “I’d rather be dead than your, your worshiper!”
He laughed. “Oh, you don’t know how ironic this is. Hm. You lot have been doing well so far, you’ve got four of my plans disabled. Let’s see if you can do five. Doctor, did you ever figure out what I was doing, with all those metahumans I made?”
“TO BE PERFECTLY HONEST, NO.”
Maestro put his hat on again, and the sneer was back. “Picture this, if you will. A man has ambitions, and can work with many tools, but the more powerful of those tools often resist his charms. But what if he had his own tools, tools that were sculpted and molded to be perfectly receptive to his powers?”
“AND THEN YOU SELL THEM? SO YOU CAN INFILTRATE THE VARIOUS CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS THAT PURCHASE THEM?”
Maestro laughed. “Sell them? Now why would I do that! I painstakingly craft them identities and false memories, and set them up as heroes and villains. And then I release them into the wild. They go and they live their lives, and yes, some die, but most of them? Most of them survive, thanks to the unwritten rules. And most of them find their way to spots I couldn’t reach, with a little prodding. And there they wait, until I have need of them.” He moved back to the center of his room, and stretched his arms out. “They're my endgame. If I get uncovered early, then I stage a coup, and switch to actively running the world. And last year, well before you entered the picture, I achieved the best saturation I could, for the resources I had. Not many supergroups out there, without one of my agents in or nearby. Do you get the picture, yet?”
I did. And like a thunderbolt, his words to Lady Thrush echoed in my head. Oh you don’t know how ironic this is...
“Chorus!” I snapped into the vox. “Subdue Lady—”
“Activate the Manchurian Candidacy! Kill everyone!” Maestro shouted.
Lady Thrush turned and punched her fist through Mister Leo’s chest.
At the same time, the Green Knight raised his axe and brought it down on Punching Judy’s unsuspecting back.
Alpha and the others leaped upon Lady Thrush, only to be thrown away like bowling pins. Leo sunk to the floor, coughing blood. “KHALID, HELP HIM!” I shouted, and sprayed Lady Thrush with the knockout mist. But she was either holding her breath or running off of rage, because she came after me next without being slowed in the slightest.
“No! No! Judy!” Maskelyne shouted, and the Human Harrier tackled the Green Knight. But it was Rumjack who howled with grief and stuck his hands into the Green Knight’s head. The treelike giant fell to his knees, shaking and trembling as Rumjack literally scrambled his brain. Could his regeneration handle that? I didn’t know, and I didn’t have time to calculate it, because Lady Thrush was on me, and this time she wa
sn’t holding back.
“A pity!” Maestro called as I frantically blocked and deflected punches and kicks, losing patches of my armored layers with every strike. “I had hopes. Well, since five surprised you, let’s try six!” He opened the box, revealing a familiar-looking stone head. One of the Hogboys, the magical transporters between here and other realms.
I grinned. Even as yellow damage indicators flickered to life, I grinned.
“Who comes to pass the gate?” It rasped.
“Maestro.”
“And where do you go?”
“To the Halls of the Mountain King.”
“The way is shut.”
And even though it cost me some damage to my gravitics, I watched his face go from smug to confused, and my laughter filled the chamber. “MIGHT HAVE MISSED SIX, BUT WE GOT SEVEN, YOU FOOL!”
Then the punches stopped. I looked up to see Vector, standing over Lady Thrush’s limp form, his hands covered in blue gloves that dripped clear fluid. An equally clear handprint faded into Thrush’s face as I watched. “WHAT DID YOU DO?”
“Ever hear of DMSO?”
“NO.”
“Passes through the skin like it isn’t there, and carries any drug you like along with it. She’ll be out for a few days.”
“GOOD, NOW—”
“No!” Delta wailed. “No no no no no!”
And we fell silent as we looked to where Miss Maskelyne and Delta knelt, next to Punching Judy’s still form, and a fast-spreading puddle of blood.
“Shit.” Vector cursed, pulling the gloves off and hurrying over.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Maestro sighed.
Nothing I could do about Judy. I turned back to Maestro. “YOU TIPPED YOUR HAND WITH THE ASSAULT ON DIRE AT THE HAMPSTON GRAVE.”
“The what now?”
“DON’T PLAY DUMB. THE WILD HUNT... THAT WAS YOU. DIRE HAD A CHANCE TO SIT DOWN AND TALK WITH LUST ABOUT IT. SHE DIDN’T SEND THEM. WITH HER OUT OF THE CHAIN OF COMMAND, THAT LEFT ONE CULPRIT. YOU’RE CUTTING DEALS WITH THE FAE, AREN’T YOU?”
DIRE:SINS (The Dire Saga Book 5) Page 26