Villains Inc. (Wearing the Cape)

by Marion G. Harmon

  Rush grunted as it sealed, set it. “On go, take us away fast. Three, two, one, go!” I launched us as Rush brought us back into realtime.

  Bhwoom! The crashing explosion shattered the massive steel neck-joint, and I took us to the ground even as the screech of more distressed metal announced K-Strike’s own attack. The headless dragon fell across the last of the show-cars and lay still.

  The floater arrived minutes later, Lei Zi, Seven, The Harlequin, and Riptide on board. While everyone else maintained distance, I checked the remains to make sure they weren’t rigged to blow like the robot had been. Aching all over, ribs burning and light-headed, I wanted to laugh. I was alive. We had won. Then I nearly wigged when Detective Fisher stepped back into the glass-covered showroom; I’d seen him bend backwards, in a direction no human was designed to go.

  “Good job kid,” he said, lighting up.

  “But—” I shook my head. Later. “Shelly?” I said. “Can you locate Galatea?”

  “Her transponder puts her north of you. Looks like she went the distance.”

  I found her head, eyes blinking up at me, behind a half-collapsed display wall. Picking her up, I started giggling uncontrollably as she looked around.

  “‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well,’” Fisher said behind me.

  “I do not understand your comment, Detective Fisher,” she replied. “Unless you are asking if I am well. I am incapacitated. However, my cranial battery should sustain my higher functions until I can be serviced.”

  “Good to hear.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Many breakthroughs can bring firepower equivalent to military ordinance, making superhuman combat potentially very destructive, so naturally after the Event insurance companies began offering new and enhanced lines of damage insurance. Superhuman Damage riders have proven very profitable, since even in the big cities the insured’s chances of injury or property loss from superhuman combat is low—and of course insurance company lawyers will sue to recover damages in cases where a superheroe’s negligence has added to the damage. Which brings us to liability and the scope of superhero liability insurance.

  A Harvard Law School colloquium text.

  * * *

  I remember being scared of doctors. Childhood cancer will do that to you, but somewhere in the last half-year Dr. Beth had stopped being a source of dread. This time he gave me a compliment on the new costume along with the lollypop—the suit took a direct hit and all it needed was some dry-cleaning, making me wonder what it was really made of.

  My ribs were only fractured, which meant they’d be good in a couple of days. Vulcan called and asked me to come down to the lab when I got out of the infirmary, so even though I really really wanted to find Blackstone and Jacky, after changing I headed for the Pit.

  Vulcan's basement lab had serious security and containment, mostly because half of it was a clean-lab. Really clean; he could make the polymorphic molecules he played with into anything, with whatever physical properties he wanted, but the slightest impurities in the mix resulted in what Rush called “freaky shit.” Sometimes the FS was dangerous, which is why the lab included a plasma-oven that could burn anything down to its constituent atoms in seconds; each of his reacting chambers could dump their contents into the oven with the slap of a button. In an emergency he could seal and slag the entire lab. It made me nervous every time I went down there.

  I found Vulcan consulting with Rush. He had Rush's prosthetic hand off, poking its socket while the fingers flexed.

  Rush's first prosthetic had been a simple cosmetic one, but when Vulcan joined the team he offered to replace it with a fully functional cybernetic hand, cooking polymorphic molecules into artificial skeletal scaffolding, muscle mimickers, nerve chains, and even skin wrap. He used the same Verne-science tech, minus the skin wrap since it got in the way of disassembly, to make Galatea, and when he wasn't tinkering with her or making stuff for the team he donated his talents making customized prostheses for amputees. Since nobody could duplicate his process, the waiting list was endless.

  Galatea stood beside him with a tray of tools, still as a statue.

  “Good afternoon, Astra,” she said when I stepped into the lab. “Are you well?”

  The men looked up from the wiggling hand. Rush gave me the wary look he’d defaulted to since the events of January. He’d been cleared of any charges by the DSA, but he’d gotten a lot more serious about things (though you couldn’t tell from the way he acted in public). I’d heard Stacy had left him; what happened in Reno hadn’t become public knowledge, but he must have at least told her. And he treated me carefully, even off the job.

  But he’d saved my life today. We needed to talk, but not here. I set it aside and smiled at Galatea.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you. And you?”

  “I am operating within acceptable parameters.”

  I laughed, looking her over. “‘I'm fine’ is a better way to say that.”

  “Then I'm fine, thank you. May I ask why, when encountering a person, one is required to ask for a self-diagnosis?”

  Rush snickered and I gave him a glare.

  “It's a friendly salutation. If you want, you can comment on the weather instead.”

  Vulcan looked alarmed, but Galatea nodded. “I have observed this, but there are too many variables in its usage for me to confidently apply it at this time.”

  “Astra,” Vulcan said before the impromptu session could continue. “Thanks for coming down.” His habitual saturnine expression twisted in a smile.

  He was the other reason I didn't like coming down here, but I smiled back. “You got Galatea back up fast.”

  He waved it away. “She’s almost completely modular. I wanted to ask you about her seizure.” I looked at her.

  “My memory for the period of the recursive error is unreadable,” she said.

  “Oh.” I thought about those moments. “I think she froze after turning towards the civilians.”

  “Hmm.” He frowned. “How many?”

  “Half a dozen? More, with the police.”

  “Damn. Too many imperatives.”

  “English, Doc,” Rush said.

  “Galatea isn’t a true AI, not really self-aware; she operates on a hierarchy of directives, imperatives, and protocols. One of her main imperatives is to safeguard civilian lives, and when too many people were exposed to immanent mortality risk it triggered a recursive error—she couldn’t choose.”

  “That sucks.” Rush resocketed his hand, flexed it. “Can you fix her?”

  “I doubt it. There are just too many variables in the field. I noticed decision-degradation during the godzilla attack, but it stayed within parameters. It’s too bad; she’s a perfect disposable sensor platform and would make a great weapons platform too.”

  “She’s—” I stopped myself. It felt wrong, watching something that seemed human treated as a thing, but how could I get mad if she didn’t?

  Dispatch came to my rescue. “All Sentinels please report to the Assembly Room. All Sentinels…” Rush and I hit the door before the announcement finished, Vulcan dithering behind us. He caught up to us before the elevator doors closed, but Galatea remained behind, repacking instrument cases without ever looking up.

  * * *

  The Assembly Room actually felt crowded. The round table could seat fifteen, but with Blackstone and Lei Zi at the head, Chakra, Artemis, Rush, Riptide, The Harlequin, Seven, Vulcan, and Dr. Cornelius and Orb, plus Detective Fisher sitting beside me, it was close as Willis, with Tom’s help, worked his way around the table serving coffee.

  It hadn’t felt this way the night before, when we’d mobilized to go after Dr. Millibrand. Had it really been just last night? I looked over at Artemis. She hadn’t come out to the dealership—Lei Zi had grounded her until we knew how daylight affected her powers.

  “You good?” Fisher asked, leaning over.

  I nodded. And why aren’t you in the hospital? I wanted to ask. I didn’t like secre
ts, and it sucked that my life was full of them.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Blackstone said, standing. “This won’t take long, but we felt this should be done together instead of by Dispatch feed. First, we’re instituting Def-1.”

  My stomach sank.

  Riptide hadn’t memorized The Book yet. “Def-1?”

  “Defense Position One,” Lei Zi said. “No contact with civilians outside of operations or on unsecured ground until further notice. No going home, for those of you who’s primary residences are not in the Dome. No school attendance.” She looked at me. “No physical contact with our families and friends until the situation resolves or we have reason to believe the threat is no longer considerable.”

  “Why?” Seven asked.

  “We have been attacked,” Blackstone said. “It is my opinion that the fight at the dealership was set up for us. The obviously superhuman murder naturally drew Detective Fisher’s team, and Astra, as the current CPD-CAI liaison. Once the first automaton’s pick-ups verified Astra was on site, the second automaton was fielded. They configured it to kill Atlas-types.”

  “Shit!” Rush swore. “This isn’t El Paso, what the hell is going on?”

  “Who cares?” Riptide spat. “We know where this connorito is?”

  “We know who he is,” Detective Fisher said. “But like Millibrand, he’s in the wind.”

  “Who is he?” I actually managed to sound calm.

  “Carl Mueler—they call him Tin Man. He can animate anything metal, but only one thing at a time. The robot and the dragon were just armored puppets wired up for video and sound so he could control them from anywhere. Remote-controlled robbery is his thing, and he went away to Detroit Supermax for eight years, got out last April.”

  “Not a model product of Michigan’s wonderful corrections system, to be sure,” Blackstone said. “And obviously one of Millibrand’s new associates.”

  Rush stayed on-topic. “Who starts a war with us?”

  “A good question,” Fisher said. “This new Villains Inc. is shooting every which way; killing Mr. Gerrold was a direct attack on the Outfit, meant to send all sorts of messages. Other superhumans working for the Outfit have been put on notice, and the timing means this new faction has inside intelligence; they knew about the meeting earlier today.”

  “And the message for us?” Artemis asked.

  He shrugged. “Back off.”

  * * *

  Fisher disappeared before I could talk to him, but what was I going to say? I think I saw you die? Did it hurt? I went back to my rooms.

  The attack was all over the news, so the first thing I did was lie to Mom and Dad. It’s easier to do by texting. Yes, there had been a fight. I was fine. No, we didn’t know anything yet. The team was on alert, and wouldn’t stand down until Tin Man had been caught. Since I was in uniform for the duration, home dinners and weekends were canceled. All true, to a given value of “true”—and I hated it.

  Stripping off my mask, I sat at my study desk to write up the after-action report, and tried not to obsess about my family. Blackstone had promised to take their security to the next level in case the Wicked Witch wasn’t playing by the rules, which meant unobtrusive Platoons were keeping them under observation. The next level up from there was retreat to a safe place like the Dome.

  So instead I brooded over not being able to hit every boutique and lunch-spot I knew with Jacky and the Bees (a complete wardrobe rebuild for our new day-walker would make a great distraction for Annabeth). Then I found myself hung up on Fisher.

  “Shelly?”

  “Mmm?” She popped in, looking distracted.

  “Can you get me Lieutenant Fisher’s medical report?”

  “Which one?”

  “Which—oh, from today. Someone must have checked him out after the fight, right?”

  “Wrong.” She shook her head. “He wasn’t injured.”

  I chewed my lip. I wanted to say I know what I saw, but did I really? Everything had happened so fast. “Shell?” I said slowly. “You remember at the cabin, when you offered to replay your neural-linked recording of my and John’s getaway? Can you do that for the attack today?”

  Now she focused. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Um, wait. Can you watch it? I don’t want to relive it—I just want you to tell me what happened to Fisher.”

  “Sure.” She closed her eyes and covered her ears, humming the opening bars of If I Could Turn Back Time. Her eyes flew open. “Jumpin’ thumps! That looked awful! And weird.”

  I nodded, not happy. “I’d hoped it was a trick of my eyes.”

  “Nope. Fisher’s spine bent ninety-seven degrees backward between the nineteenth and twentieth vertebrae. Then it didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “He hit the car, broke his back, and then he didn’t. I slow-mo’d it to look at each micro-sec and it’s like stop-motion photography; one micro-sec he’s down, the next he’s down but fine. Then Rush grabs him and they’re gone. Hope? What’s going on?”

  Fisher had looked different in those weird moments in Mr. Moffat’s apartment, when Dr. Cornelius’ words had changed the world. I’d forgotten about it, but if Cornelius’ spell had shown us what was really there, then had that been the “real” Fisher? And what was he?

  I sighed. “Can you discretely query the DSA database? Does Fisher have a file?”

  “Yes, and no. But they wouldn’t know he was a breakthrough unless he’d registered himself to certify or done something to get their attention.”

  “What about his CPD file?”

  “Nothing there, either, but…”

  “What?”

  “He’s never been sick—well, he’s taken some sick-days, but he doesn’t have a medical record. Never been injured or wounded, either. And…Hope?” Now she sounded worried. “He doesn’t exist before he joined the CPD. I mean, he has a birth certificate, school records, all that, but the hospital is fictitious. So are the schools. It’s all made up.”

  My breath caught. He couldn’t be a fake. So he was a secret breakthrough, so what? Not every breakthrough went public or put on tights and a mask. Lots of breakthrough powers were minor, lots weren’t super-heroic. Maybe his power just made him unkillable—useful for a cop. I circled around the unthinkable; he could be a plant, an inside-man for the Outfit. They’d known to go after Mr. Moffat, hadn’t they? And he could have tipped off Millibrand about the warrant…

  But why make up a whole life? One that included schools that weren’t there?

  I raised my head. “His background. Are any of those schools at the corner of Clark and Taylor?”

  Her eyes widened. “No, but the fictitious children’s home is! But—what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know! He was looking for the man who wasn’t there. We don’t have time for this!” I stood and stretched, testing my ribs. Ouch-worthy, but getting better. I grabbed my mask.

  “I’ve got to talk to Artemis. Shell…” I hate this. “I need you to break open every account Fisher has. If he works for the Outfit, or somebody else, there’ll be a trail somewhere. Look everywhere he’s ever spent money. I don’t know, and we need to.”

  Shelly nodded unhappily, and was gone.

  When did I become a liar and a sneak? I forced myself to sit back down and finish my report, omitting Fisher’s undone injury, found the CPD Incident Report number and appended it, and sent it on its way. Then I sat, looking at my mask, debating really taking this to Artemis till she called me.

  “Astra? You should get up to the Common Room.”

  I knew that voice: pissed off and willing to share her pain.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Machiavelli once said that it’s better to be feared than loved—which makes me want to go back in time and give him a good kicking whenever somebody quotes him. It’s much easier for someone with bad intentions to manipulate people who are afraid of you.

  Astra, Notes From a Life.

  * * *

  Most of t
he team had crowded into the Common Room, and not around the game-room side. Someone had turned on the big-screen TV to Chicago Nightly News. “After the events of the last two days, questions are being asked,” Carl Schumberg reported as they showed clips of Dr. Millibrand’s burning house and the blown-up dealership. Someone had gotten hold of the car-place’s security tapes, and had spliced together a deceptive sequence of the robot and dragon attack; watching it, you really couldn’t tell that the murder had happened separately.