“Of course…” Dr. Maelstrom said with a degree of awe. Arthur turned his head and found that the hero had approached him, staring at him from arm’s length.
“Step away from him, doctor,” Catalina warned.
Maelstrom stretched out his hand, reaching to touch Arthur’s face. “I never thought I’d see you… in person.” Instinctively, Arthur backed away. “Your resemblance to Dante…”
Hearing the name made Arthur’s stomach knot. He swatted the doctor’s hand angrily. “Don’t talk about my father.”
His demand went ignored. “But… you aren’t supposed to be here.” The doctor smiled, brought his hands up in an inverted ‘V’ under his mouth, and shook his head. “No… it wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” He pointed at Arthur. “What have you done?”
“Have you forgotten there’s a gun on you, doctor?” Catalina shouted. “Calm down!”
He cast a glance in Catalina’s direction, then returned to Arthur. The glimmer in his eye was replaced by a twitch of panic and fury. The pinpoint pupils darted as though scanning the floor for some kind of clue. He took a step away from Arthur. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It wasn’t…” His hands found their way to the top of his head, clenching his chaotic hair.
A crown of red lights began to flash above the further chamber, followed by the hiss of pressurized air releasing. Moments later, Zombress’s chamber behaved similarly. Catalina moved toward the first chamber as the door finished sliding upwards, revealing an unconscious girl. Arthur recognized her as the so-called traitorous hero… Morgan? Clad in what appeared to be a Fort-issued orange outfit, she slumped against her restraints. Before Catalina could react, the bindings released and the girl fell haphazardly into the mobster’s arms. She wasn’t particularly heavy, nor was Catalina weak by any stretch of the imagination, but the mobster still stumbled backward at the sudden weight.
Mat helped his boss ease the prone body to the floor as Zombress’s chamber opened, the door revealing her bare flesh in a bizarre parody of a curtain rising. Catalina, busy with the girl, proved to be the only one other than Maelstrom who didn’t avert their eyes away from Zombress’s naked form. Her eyes fluttered open drowsily. With a hiss, the restraints released, and she caught herself on the floor in a crouch. With a great deal of effort, she stood upright as a pale white, flowing dress materialized over her body. On her back, a black skull gazed off behind her, red tears falling from the empty sockets.
Once at her full height, she inhaled deeply before rolling her shoulders and holding her head high. She cast a spiteful glance at Dr. Maelstrom. “I’ll get to you later, Herr Doctor,” she growled, making it hard to tell if it was scorn or outright disgust in her voice. She looked at the others, finally settling on Catalina. “Miss Capone… I honestly hadn’t expected you to engineer my rescue.”
“It wasn’t me,” Catalina said, removing the PDA from her pocket. She looked over at Arthur. “Lovelass over there was the one who was able to do it.”
Zombress’s eyes fell on him. He smiled meekly and threw up his hand in greeting. “Hi.”
She squinted. “You were at the Heroes’ Guild.”
Dr. Maelstrom covered his mouth in shock. “No… impossible…”
“Yes, ma’am,” Arthur dutifully answered.
She approached him. “Lovelass?” He nodded, a gesture she returned. “I can’t say I’m sorry for your loss.”
He looked away from her. “Then don’t.” Catalina was trying to pry open an eye of the unconscious girl so she could scan her.
Zombress smiled, less enthused and more sympathetic. “I always imagined you to be more your mother’s son.” She shifted her weight onto one foot and folded her arms. “Dante’s raving over Julia clearly betrayed his preference.” Something beeped.
“You knew about me?” he asked, slightly astonished.
“Well, well, Aquaria…” Catalina said, rising. The girl slid off her lap and crumpled to the floor.
“Catalina, what are you doing?” Talia asked, stepping forward.
Catalina aimed her pistol at the unconscious girl, prompting Talia taking a defensive step away from the mobster. “We have a rat to take care of.” Zombress leapt toward her, shoving Catalina backward as she gripped her gun arm and yanked it upward. The motion was so quick that Arthur could only process it as a blur of smoke. “She’s a hero, Zombress!”
“They want her out of the way, don’t you see that?” She shoved Catalina away. “She knows important information about what happened that night.”
Catalina looked at her, a twisting smile on her face. “She’s still a hero. You know. Our enemy?” Her eyes gleamed with something baleful, making Arthur shudder.
Zombress stared at Catalina, scanning her face. “It was too late to save you, wasn’t it?”
It took a moment, but the mobster’s face softened. She looked over at Mat and nodded, her subordinate lowering his gun while keeping an eye on the two women. “This place is getting to me, that’s all,” she said with a slight laugh. Catalina looked down at the girl. “She can’t do too much harm, anyway.” The girl squirmed, muttering something unintelligible in her sleep.
Zombress pointed a finger at Catalina’s face. “She ends up so much as scratched, I’ll make you wish you had died.” Zombress turned on her heel and walked away.
The mobster snorted. “Wake up on the wrong side of the tube?”
“Don’t antagonize her, Catalina,” Talia warned. She pushed her way past Catalina and toward Zombress. “The night at the Heroes’ Guild…” Zombress turned to face her. “… What happened?”
Zombress inhaled deeply, lost in thought. “Dark Saint barged into my office in a state of…” She tried to find the right words. “Rage, I suppose.” Zombress looked at Arthur. “He was accusing Desert Ranger and me of conspiracy, working together to bring about… something.” She nodded solemnly. “The dead mobster and Aquaria didn’t help calm his fear. We let him talk.” Squinting, she seemed to be intrigued by her own memory of the situation. “He was so loud… louder than he should have been. And… frenzied. I would have half expected him to be frothing at the mouth.” She stopped for a moment, blinking away the memory. “And then… I don’t know who attacked first, but Desert Ranger and Dark Saint lit up like candles. I managed to protect myself and Aquaria… but when I came to, Dark Saint and the goon had been obliterated, Desert Ranger and Tom Gavin whole but dead.”
“What exactly did my father do?” Arthur asked. “He’s just a half-assed mimic, after all.”
“I unfortunately wasn’t taking notes,” Zombress snarked. “But if I were to hazard a guess based on the aftermath, he used Desert Ranger’s ability against him.”
“That… that makes no sense,” Arthur muttered to himself as he scanned the floor.
“Why?” Talia asked.
“It’s not his style. He liked the powers he used to be significant to his enemies. For irony’s sake or something.” He looked up at Zombress.
“Hey, where’s the doctor?” Mat asked.
The whoosh of air as the elevator doors opened drew everyone’s attention. Dr. Maelstrom spun, bringing up a pistol that he had no doubt hidden for just such an emergency. The doctor fired and the villains dove for cover. Catalina leaned out from behind a bank of computers and returned fire, the shots going wide and hitting the frame of the elevator.
“Stop him!” Arthur screamed.
Catalina fired thrice. “I’m trying!”
Maelstrom was in the lift, ducking behind the interior wall and leaning the gun around the corner and shooting. One caught Catalina in the chest, her bullet-proof vest stopping the round but sending her to the floor. “Thank you, son of Lovelass!” he shouted as the doors began to close, sealing in his malicious laughter.
“Fuck!” Arthur shouted, sprinting to the elevator doors. He took a step away, scanned the wall, and found the panel he was looking for. He hit it and the panel moved forward, then lifted, revealing a door with a
keypad. “Thank you OSHA.” He entered the pass code and shoved his way through the unlocked passage into the stairwell beyond.
Arthur powered down the stairs, fighting the urge to go back and wave through the others. They could meet him down there with the elevator. He had to stop Maelstrom. If he didn’t…
“Arthur, there is a man in here,” Mollie chimed.
“Mollie, I want you in your Home Drive. Now.” He had no time to explain. Not that he had to. Mollie would easily figure out what the whack-job was up to.
He hit the final level and slapped the door with his hand, waiting for the panel on the other side to move aside and allow him access to the Panopticon. He shoved the door open as soon as he could, wincing at the loud clang it made. Carefully, he moved toward his computer. He unplugged the laptop from the security console and grabbed the Home Drive. He took a wire from his pocket and hooked it into the ear piece and Home Drive’s audio jacks. “You there, Mol?”
“Safe and sound,” she responded as he moved cautiously forward.
He knew where Maelstrom had gone. Arthur made his way to the observation deck. Sure enough, the entrance to the system’s maintenance room was open. A trickle of sparks cascaded to the floor, the chamber’s solitary camera no doubt shot by the panicked hero – which meant he intended to kill to defend himself. Cautiously, he peered into the dark room before ducking inside.
Dim red lights illuminated the relatively narrow corridor that wrapped around the elevator shaft in the middle of the Panopticon. A row of tall computer towers were aligned on the interior wall, labeled with different letters. Levers, red and huge, were pulled on some of the systems, and clear disc trays spun away while reading data.
Echoing quietly, Arthur could hear Maelstrom muttering to himself. “… The key, all along. He answered our questions, the boy would always come through.” He approached the source, finding the doctor placing more discs into their respective trays. “Blessing in disguise… in disguise… ha!”
“Dr. Maelstrom!” Arthur called out, making sure to hide his body in case the pistol was nearby.
Strangely, the doctor continued on his work. “Arthur Ashlie Lovelass… the genius behind the Fortress of Darkness. Or shall I say, Fort Justice?” He chuckled to himself. “I wouldn’t have even guessed you could have broken in here.”
“Well, I have,” he said. “Just step away from the reboot system and we can talk about this.”
The doctor looked at him, smiling wildly. “Don’t you see? There’s nothing to talk about! You, you my child, have made all talk moot! Now is the time for action!” He put another disc in the tray. “At first I thought you had… destroyed… everything we had worked for. But now…” He chuckled.
“Now, what exactly?” Arthur hoped that maybe he could keep him distracted until… well, shit, he really should have thought this plan through. “You know that it’ll take an authorized team to…”
Maelstrom laughed heartily and disappeared further around the corner. “Failsafes, Mr. Lovelass. I am the authorized team.” The next set of discs would be for security and password resets. Arthur carefully followed him. “It would have been weeks… waiting for a riot. But not now. We’d have to orchestrate everything just right…” He pulled a disc free from the wall and slid it into its home in the computer. Maelstrom looked at Arthur and pulled out the disc labeled ‘security’ from its nesting place. He smiled and snapped the disc in two, single-handedly.
“What are you…” Arthur muttered as Maelstrom pulled the lever associated with that security computer tower.
“Once again, you deliver to us the means to glory.” The doctor reached to his back and pulled the gun free of its position in his waistband. Arthur put his hands up to show he was unarmed. “The Overseer program will make sure this becomes your tomb.” He smiled as he backed toward a final switch, sequestered behind glass and sealed with a code panel. “It’s not as smart, I’m sure, as the virus you created awhile back. But it’s proven useful at the Heroes’ Guild.”
Arthur could hardly believe it. The thing that had attacked Mollie… he had inadvertently fathered the creation. Everything was being twisted, turned against those they were designed to help. And it was all thanks to him. “The Overseer program,” Arthur began, now hoping to at least distract him long enough for the others to find them. “How did you…”
Maelstrom was entering in his pass code, dismaying Arthur when it went through. This system was separate from the rest for normally very good reasons. Now Arthur was kicking himself for being so thorough. “It was designed using what little information we had of your AMALIA virus. Dumbed down, of course… I couldn’t match your genius.” Arthur almost wanted to inform him that it had been a mistake, but he kept his mouth shut. “Took the virus principle and used it for good.” The glass shutter protecting the lever from the rest of the world had completely receded. The doctor’s hand went for it, and Arthur lurched forward to stop him. The gun went up in response, aiming squarely at him as he halted. “You were supposed to be safe… far away from here. Dante didn’t want it to end like this.”
Arthur’s stomach knotted over and over again. Once he threw that switch, an electro-magnetic pulse would wipe out the Fortress’s system. Isolated backup drives would then immediately transmit data to boot the main system up and, in this case, to give control to the Heroes’ Guild computer. But for whatever reason, Maelstrom had made sure this would happen without the security system thanks to the broken disc. “There’s no need to do this,” was all he could say.
“On the contrary, Arthur.” He threw the switch. A tremendous whump, and Arthur knew that everything in the Fortress extinguished at once. “There is every need to do this.” He stepped toward Arthur as the computers almost immediately clicked back on. “Project Northwoods will always live on!” Maelstrom’s eyes went wide as someone shoved Arthur downward. There was an exchange of thunderous gunfire, and he watched as the doctor fell to the floor, a red spot blossoming wetly on his shirt. The pistol fell from his hand as his widening pupils locked with Arthur’s eyes. Blood trickled from his mouth as he seemed to whisper ‘thank you’ to him.
Abruptly, he was yanked to his feet. Catalina was still glaring at the man on the floor. “You okay, kid?” she asked.
“Not for long,” he said, running out to the observation deck. “Mollie, did you hear what Maelstrom said?”
“The Overseer program must have been the AI that chased me from the Heroes’ Guild.” Arthur read nervousness into her statement. “It seems I have a brother.”
“And in about five minutes he’s going to be running this place,” Arthur said.
“What’s the problem here, Art?” Catalina asked, walking up behind him. “Do we need to have Talia work her mojo again or something?”
He shook his head. “They’re bringing in a learning program. She has no experience with it.” He heard the others in the Panopticon, talking excitedly. “Shit!”
“Arthur, you need to come up here!” Talia shouted.
Catalina grabbed him by the elbow and they made their way to the second level. “He broke the security disc…” he said to himself.
She looked at him, confused. “Why?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The two reached the room where Mat, Talia, and Zombress were all watching one of the CCTV monitors. The unconscious girl was slumped in a nearby chair. Arthur and Catalina moved their way into the cluster. Talia looked back at him, clearly terrified, as his own eyes drifted toward what had caught their attention. He couldn’t believe it. The forms of Enforcers and costumed heroes, too many to count, were swarming on one end of the courtyard.
“No… no!” he shouted. He ran back down to the observation deck and moved along the perimeter. In the far corner, a shadow-obscured building protruded from the wall, the bulk of it outside the courtyard boundary. That was the reason there were so few guards: they just had them stationed in a secondary barracks. It had been hidden by the corrup
ted data, and in all of his theories, Arthur had somehow not guessed the heroes would do what now seemed so obvious. Catalina and Mat appeared in his peripheral vision to his right, followed by Talia and Zombress on his left.
“It’s not the same for heroes… there’s no hubris…” He had spoken those words himself, self-assured of his own superiority. It had been right in front of him, the glorious vanity that was villainy’s downfall, and he couldn’t bring himself to see it. Off in the distance was the big, red self-destruct button, and he had been duped into pushing it.
“There’s so many of them,” Mat said. His boyish glee had been taken over by a somber, almost deathly tone. Catalina tapped him on the shoulder, breaking the hold the marching columns of heroes had over him. He looked at her as she jammed a thumb in the vague direction of the elevator. The goon nodded and took off in a jog.
Klaxons started to wail in the Fortress. Above them, red lights descended from the ceiling and pulsed slowly. The intercoms hissed to life. An erudite male voice followed: “Attention heroes. There has been a breach in containment in the following areas of Fort Justice: A-Wing, B-Wing, C-Wing, D-Wing, Panopticon. Threat level: Extreme. No fatal casualties. Lockdown has commenced until the crisis has been averted.” The voice was stilted, cold and alien, leaving no question it originated with Overseer. “Thank you,” it said, almost as an afterthought, making Arthur categorize it immediately as Mollie’s slower, sociopathic younger brother.
“They’ll be here any minute,” Zombress said. “Most villains won’t have time to wear off the effect of the sleep chambers.” She shook her head. “It’ll be a massacre.”
And Arthur then realized why the security disc had been broken. “It’s a war,” he said, terrified of his own words. “The security system would have easily stopped us.” The others were looking at him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look back. “He wanted us to fight our way out and die trying.”
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