“That was just mean,” Christine said. “She saved our lives! And look at this!” She pointed at the hogtied body on the floor. Kestrel was happily adding a few extra straps that truly weren’t necessary. “That can’t be comfortable at all! She’s not going to help us out willingly now, is she?”
“I’ll explain things to her when she wakes up, try to work out some deal,” I said. “I’m sure we can bribe her, if nothing else. But she is going to help us, one way or another.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re talking about torture, aren’t you?”
I shrugged again. “Whatever it takes.”
“But torture doesn’t work!”
“Who told you that?”
“I mean, people will say anything under torture. They will lie, make stuff up so they stop hurting.”
“Yeah, they will say and do anything, including telling the truth. I’m not talking about beating some poor bastard into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. I’m talking about interrogating someone into revealing information. If you know what you’re doing, damn tooting right torture works.”
“I don’t think I can be part of anything involving torture.”
I didn’t want to argue with her. “We won’t start things off by pulling out her fingernails, okay? As soon as we’re back to Condor’s Lair, we’ll ask her nicely and see what she says.”
“Can’t get back to the Lair,” Condor said. Something in his voice made Kestrel take a break from her bondage session and look at him. “The police, the Guardians and a team of Legionnaires just raided my main base. Computer just let me know. My security systems will keep them busy for a few minutes, long enough for Computer to erase all files and upload herself to her backup server. And don’t worry, my defenses will use strict non-lethal protocols. Nobody will get seriously hurt.” He sighed and dipped his head. “Too many people knew how to find my place. Heroes and law-enforcement both. Now that I’m a wanted criminal, all the old deals are off.”
“I’m so sorry,” Christine said. “It’s my fault.”
“We’re trying to save the world,” Condor said, shrugging. “There were bound to be some complications along the way.”
“I always wanted to travel,” Kestrel commented. “Now is as good time as any. And look, we even got a new playmate.” She patted Lady Shi on the head.
“Don’t start, Kestrel,” I warned her. “All right, we need to get out of here.”
“I have the Condor Jet hovering over the park. Let’s take the service van, drive to a clear spot and we’ll get on board.”
We did. A few minutes later, we were in the invisible plane.
“Where to?” I asked after we’d settled in. I sat on the co-pilot’s seat. Christine was standing behind us, apparently unbothered by the turbulence as the Jet rose in the air. “Not the hunting lodge, I take it.”
Condor shook his head. “Not a good idea, not when Ultimate knows about it. No, I got a place in the Catskills that’s completely off the books. Even if a team of forensic accountants go over Carmichael Corps’ holdings and financials, they wouldn’t find a paper trail leading to it. We should be safe there.”
“I’m sorry again,” Christine said.
“I’ve been an unlicensed Neo for thirty years, Christine,” my pal said as he piloted the aircraft. “Sooner or later the law was going to come after me. Believe me, I’ve been preparing for this eventuality for decades. An army of lawyers will fight the Feds tooth and nail all along, and meanwhile I have a nice selection of hiding places, clean cash, and false identities. At least the hammer came down on me over something important, rather than me busting some criminal with well-connected friends or some garbage like that.”
“Okay. And yes, this is important,” she said, and headed back into the passenger cabin, probably to make sure Kestrel didn’t molest the prisoner.
Condor turned to me. “Speaking of important stuff, when did you become Ultimate Junior, Face?”
“Oh, that.” Christine and I probably should have shared that bit of information with the rest of the gang before we went on the raid. I’d been reluctant to do it, and I wasn’t sure why. “Short version: Christine super-charged me.”
“Nice. Might come in handy, with Janus gone who knows where.”
“Yeah. Think we’ll ever see him again?”
“Not a clue. I’ve never seen someone walk through the kind of Hell we rained down on Medved. Mr. Night now, I guess, if what Christine said is true. And he almost killed Ultimate. So no, I wouldn’t bet money on Janus coming back. I showed him a couple of ways to get in touch with us, though. If he makes it out, we’ll hear from him. Meanwhile, we’re the only people in the world who know what’s going on, and give enough of a damn to put a stop to it.”
“I know. Makes me feel all nice and special, knowing it’s all up to us,” I said.
If this was what a Neo heavy-hitter felt like, being responsible for the lives of millions, I wasn’t sure Christine had done me any favors super-charging me. But I would figure out a way to handle it.
I didn’t know about saving the world, but I knew plenty about not punking out just because the stakes were high.
Chapter Fifteen
Hunters and Hunted
Freedom Island, March 17, 2013
It was amusing to see the hero of the ages bouncing off the walls of his cage like an enraged gorilla.
Daedalus Smith watched the futile struggle from his observer position in the mental construct imprisoning Ultimate’s mind. It was crude psychic prison, but with the Dreamer still out of commission – Mr. Night had nearly killed the poor Kraut – it was the best that he could do. It worked well enough and kept John Clarke from doing anything useful, like waking up. Daedalus didn’t want Johnny to start making slanderous accusations. Some people might listen to them.
From Ultimate’s perspective, he was in a featureless white room, a simple hollow square with blank walls and no doors or windows; the place reminded Daedalus of his accommodations at the Dragon Emperor’s dungeons, minus the stench and darkness. Johnny-Boy had been hammering on the walls for hours. The construct was designed to inflict pain on John every time he struck the walls, but he had kept on pounding on them, ignoring the ever-increasing agony, just as you’d expect from an All-American Hero. Eventually, he might even be able to break free, but it would take him weeks to do so. Johnny didn’t have weeks.
He watched Ultimate struggle for a few minutes, but he hadn’t entered the construct just to enjoy his old friend’s suffering. “John,” he called out, his disembodied voice echoing through the white room. Ultimate stopped attacking the walls. “How’s it hanging, good buddy?”
“Daedalus.” The venom in Ultimate’s voice made the name into an obscenity. “You are a dead man.”
“I believe proper Legion policy would be to try to capture me alive and hold me over for trial under the proper legal jurisdiction. Wouldn’t that be fair? I mean, that’s the deal you are getting. Your trial starts in a couple days.”
“You killed Kenneth.”
“I had to. Luckily I had tampered with his armor and his cochlear implant, just for this eventuality. All my contingency planning paid off: I’ve got plenty of video footage showing you killing the Man o’ Brass, Johnny. It’s going to be a short trial.”
“I am going to kill you,” John said in a matter-of-fact tone that chilled Daedalus a little bit. John had never been this murderous, not even when Hiram Hades went after his family. He was taking the whole betrayal thing very personally.
“You aren’t going to ask me why I did all of this, John? Aren’t you even a bit curious?”
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn. And I figure you will tell me, sooner or later, like all the two-bit villains I’ve dealt with in the past. I just never thought you’d be one of them, Daedalus. I thought you were actually smart enough not to go that way.”
John had a point. Crime didn’t pay, even if you were a Neo. Sure, you could run wild for a few weeks or mo
nths, maybe even a couple of years, but sooner or later a more powerful Neo or gang of Neos would come gunning for you in the name of the law. And what was the point? A parahuman with any kind of power and an IQ larger than his shoe size could write his own ticket legally, make as much money as a movie star or CEO, and get all the glory and women and perks he might want. Only the insane or fanatical went into crime, the kind of people who had tastes and drives not condoned by society, or followed some outré political or religious agenda.
That made Daedalus either crazy or a fanatic. He’d long ago given up on wondering which one.
“I’ll save my megalomaniacal speech for later, Johnny. I was hoping you’d share a few things with me instead. The girl’s location, for one. You have no idea how dangerous she is. If she’s left unsupervised for too long, she might go and do something catastrophic.”
He didn’t expect John would volunteer the information, but the question might make him think about the answer, and the dozen or so psychic probes attached to Ultimate’s comatose brain might be able to ferret out those thoughts. It was a long shot, even with the shadow-energy augments Daedalus had built into the probes, but it was worth a try.
John didn’t say anything. He was determinedly thinking about childhood memories, or old war stories, or anything other than the little redhead bitch. He knew all the tricks for avoiding telepathic probes. Oh, well. “No worries,” he told Ultimate. “We’ll find her the old-fashioned way. If she gets hurt along the way, that’s too bad.”
The Invincible Man remained silent. He’d already announced what he would do to Daedalus if he got the chance, and the big lug didn’t go for rants and bluster. Daedalus was somewhat disappointed. To his surprise, he found that he did want to explain himself after all. If he could show John what was at stake, make him understand why he’d had to do all of this…
A warbling sound in the real world announced a call he couldn’t ignore and stopped him before he could launch into a bona fide villain monologue. Saved by the bell, he thought. That would have been so dreadfully pedestrian, not to mention useless: Johnny-Boy would never understand. He might as well die without ever knowing why.
He severed the connection to Ultimate’s brain without saying goodbye. Only five people in the planet had his private, heavily encrypted and protected number. That was one call he had to take.
“Smith here,” he subvocalized into his implant. The calls were audio only, to make them easier to conceal.
“The Central Park facility has been compromised, sir.” Daedalus recognized the voice; Bert Tuttle, a Type One Neo with a good deal of talent and a notorious lack of scruples. The man was a bit of a punctilious prick, and had a deplorable tendency to go into ‘on the one hand and on the other hand’ tirades, but he did good work.
Bert described the situation in a few terse sentences. Daedalus had already heard about Janus and the girl joining forces in New York; they had spanked the Empire States Guardians and escaped, which was plenty bad enough. And now they had done just as Daedalus feared they would, and gone after the Source holding facility. “Mr. Night disappeared while fighting Janus,” Bert continued. “The self-destruct protocols were initiated, but the targets managed to escape. On the other hand, the self-destruct went off properly; nobody will find any trace of the facility.”
Daedalus ran a cursory check of the newsfeeds through his implants; images, video and headlines were projected directly into his retina. Yep, a 4.6 earthquake centered on the Park was the top news everywhere. “This is just fucking great,” he muttered. About two hundred million bucks in parts and labor, sucked into an Outsider energy implosion. He’d managed to build a literal money pit.
“There is more, sir. Lady Shi helped the targets escape. She remained behind after we evacuated the base and used the alternate portal to the Met to transport the invaders away before the self-destruct process was completed.”
“That is… regrettable,” Daedalus said in a controlled tone. No sense in going berserk in front of the help. It was all Mr. Night’s fault, of course. The little Japanese assassin had always done a fine job, along with her Russian boy-toy, as long as you didn’t mind large incidental body counts. The loss of her teddy bear must have shaken her up more than he’d expected. Even psychopaths could give a shit over their lovers, apparently. Once Medved had become a meat puppet for the creepy Outsider-ling, the sensible thing to do would have been to terminate Lady Shi with extreme prejudice. Instead, Mr. Night had let her live, probably because he was having too much fun watching her squirm. And she’d done what anybody would do if you fucked with them enough; she’d fucked them right back.
“While you wait for Mr. Night to return, liaise with whoever is left in the Russian mob, and our own assets, and keep looking for the girl. While you do that, start evacuating all our other facilities in New York City. If you haven’t found the girl within seventy-two hours, you and everyone who’s left in the city need to get the hell out.” Without the girl, and with the main facility gone, New York was no longer useful. The Humanity Foundation was planning to destroy the city, hoping to take out the Source along with it. That plot wasn’t going to work the way the anti-Neo idiots expected, but the city was getting destroyed nonetheless. As far as Daedalus was concerned, those pathetic bigots were welcome to turn New York into a smoking hole on the ground. The whole place had gone to shit since the Demoncrats took over, way back when. Let the Big Apple burn.
“Understood,” Bert said. He would do what he was told, and he wouldn’t play games, unlike most Neos. Type Ones made the best henchmen, if they were smart enough to understand their limitations; the more powerful freaks just never quite got the idea the rules applied to them, too. Daedalus shut off the connection and considered the situation.
Mr. Night had decided to test-drive his new Cossack body by going up against Janus. Daedalus hoped those two had killed each other. The big bad black man had go before he could throw a monkey wrench in the works, and Mr. Night would have to go sooner or later: their respective plans were fairly incompatible, given that the creepy little guy was working to eradicate all life on Earth and Daedalus wanted to save the world from that very fate. At this stage, their inevitable confrontation was drawing near. If Janus could take down the old man, Daedalus would be duly grateful. Not grateful enough to spare Janus, mind you, but grateful enough to say a kind word over the Colored Champion’s grave.
Too many Byzantine plots and counterplots; that was what had led to this dog’s breakfast. Daedalus wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off derailing all the conspiracies he’d uncovered, rather than trying to co-opt them. The problem was, he wasn’t sure he could have won every fight. The Humanity Foundation, sure, he could have crushed that pack of idiots easily enough: a gang of over-privileged vanilla humans could only be a threat if he let them. The Iron Tsar was a different kettle of fish, though. Helmet-head and his empire made better partners than enemies. And Mr. Night was a whole other kettle of krakens. The old guy’s capabilities were a big unknown. Daedalus had tried to have the little fucker killed a couple of times, using rather circumspect methods and agents. He’d failed every time, and in his more paranoid moments he suspected Mr. Night knew he was responsible, and didn’t care.
Daedalus pulled a Cuban cigar out of a fancy humidor, a gift from one the Batistas, either the second or third dictator of that illustrious lineage, and absently lit up, ignoring as usual the no-smoking signs posted on every building in Freedom Island. Smoking helped him think, and if people didn’t like it, they could go fuck themselves. The smoke-Nazis were just another symptom of how fucked-up the world had become. Lung cancer was a solved problem; so was emphysema and pretty much every other health issue related to smoking, except for bad breath, but the sanctimonious reconstructed Puritans of the world were still battling to eliminate the now-harmless vice. They wanted everything to be nice and pure and squeaky-clean; worse still, they were utterly unwilling to pay the price to get what they wanted. They thought whining
about problems would solve them, and never accepted the fact that you couldn’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.
To save the world would require making a massive figurative omelet, requiring a commensurate quantity of broken eggs. He’d done the math and even run some of his initial findings past Doc Slaughter, who hadn’t been able to dispute them but had still rejected Daedalus’ proposed solutions. That self-righteous blond bastard would rather let everyone die, as long as his conscience wasn’t stained with a few – okay, more than a few – necessary sacrifices. Well, that was too bad; now Doc and his conscience were scattered all over the Nevada desert.
Doc and his scruples were the least of his problems, unfortunately. Once again, the girl and her gang of protectors had thwarted him. What irked him the most was that, with the exception of Janus, it was a pretty pathetic gang: Condor, a second-rate Genius-Type with delusions of adequacy; Face-Off, a vigilante so inconsequential Daedalus had to run a Google search just to find out who the hell he was; and Kestrel, whom he’d only known because of one – admittedly memorable – private session he’d had with her a few years back. Their only saving grace had been their illegal status; if they’d been plugged into the system like eighty percent of Neos in the US, Daedalus would have found them and the girl in zip time. He was shocked that they’d had the balls to come gunning for him at the very facility where he’d planned to take the girl apart and put her back together as a good pliable tool.
The facility in question was gone, in a futile attempt to remove the girl from the board. He wasn’t sure whether he was glad or disappointed she’d escaped. If she was dead, he could just carry on with his alternative strategies. Alive, she was a wild card, and he didn’t like those one bit. He was a chess player; there were no wild cards in chess.
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 27