by Logan Jacobs
Besides, the fact that this beast-tank had survived multiple explosions made me love it even more, and I couldn’t wait to upgrade it to my purposes.
I slid into the driver’s seat of the tank and laughed when the engine purred to life.
“Wow, it still works?” Elizabeth raised an eyebrow as she watched from the driver’s seat of my own armored car.
“Almost impressive, Slade,” I said. “But if he’s going to outfit all of his tech with self-destruct switches, he should at least make sure they actually blow everything up.”
“Well, it’s better for us this way,” my superpowered girlfriend replied. “Should we head back now?”
“Have we heard from Beacon and Penumbra yet?” Norma asked.
“Not yet,” Elizabeth said. “But I’m sure we’ll hear from them soon.”
“I hope they were successful,” Norma sighed.
I glanced up as Norma took her plane-glider back into the air, and I noticed that her craft wobbled more than it had earlier, so it definitely needed some improvements. The Shadow Knight’s spray of bullets had definitely made her glider’s wings less stable in the air, and it had been very lucky that she hadn’t nose-dived in the middle of the fight.
But if I could reverse-engineer whatever Slade had used to keep his tank blast-resistant, I could also add it to Norma’s plane to give it some extra protection, just as long as I could figure out how to make it lightweight enough not to affect her agility in the air.
I looked from the inside of Slade’s tank back at my own armored car, and I could tell that my vehicle had also taken a beating from the several explosions we’d survived. Of course, Slade’s tank had survived a lot worse, and that meant I definitely needed to adjust my materials. The metal alloy I used to protect my suits wasn’t going to cut it when it came to armored vehicles.
“Miles?” Elizabeth asked. “Did you hear that?”
“Hm?” I turned my attention back to my girlfriend. “Hear what?”
“Penumbra just called in over the comms,” the black-haired superheroine said. “She and Beacon successfully killed Electronica.”
“They actually killed him?” I laughed. “Really?”
“Penumbra said that Beacon just straight up shot the guy in the head once they’d captured him,” Elizabeth said with a little wince. “You’ve certainly been an influence on him.”
“And a damn better influence than the Shadow Knight,” Norma scoffed. “Should we teach him how to dispose of a body, Miles?”
“Not now,” I sighed. “Just have him toss it into the Ashen River, no one will care if that guy washes up dead on shore.”
“I’ll let Penumbra know,” Elizabeth replied.
“At least they were successful even if we didn’t totally win tonight,” Norma said. “That’s one less supervillain, and they got to him before he caused the entire city to have a blackout, or worse.”
“Oh, we won tonight,” I clarified. “Slade lost one his his tanks and his glider.”
“That’s very true,” my dark-haired girlfriend laughed. “This was our first battle with him, and he can’t replace his vehicles every night.”
“It’s also good to see Beacon take charge of a situation,” I said.
“So, back to the mansion?” Norma asked.
“You got it,” I said. “We’ll go back and regroup so we can make a better plan. We need to come up with a way to keep the Shadow Knight away from his escape vehicles, or we’ll be chasing him all over Grayville.”
“And we definitely want to control where in the city he goes, since we don’t want to have any civilian casualties on our hands,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, it would have been bad if tonight’s fight had happened downtown,” Norma sighed. “But how are we going to keep him away from his escape vehicles?”
“I have a few ideas,” I replied. “We’ll talk it over with Beacon and Penumbra when we all get back to the mansion, but I think I know what we can do.”
I just needed a good reason to keep the Shadow Knight away from his vehicles. I was certain that the answer was somewhere in the files that I’d copied from Slade’s private computer, so it was about time we did a thorough investigation of the information we had stolen.
I wouldn’t let him escape us again.
Chapter 15
I wiped the sweat from my forehead and ducked out of the ruined cockpit. It would take a bit of work to get it up and running, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. I was mostly concerned about the amount of time it would take me, since I didn’t want to take too much of a break and let Slade get too far into a new set of plans against us.
I had already worked on the vehicles for a few days now, and I had just about found everything that could be salvaged in the tank that we’d stolen from the Shadow Knight. After we’d come home from the fight, we had lined up all three vehicles, and it had immediately been obvious that Slade’s car was better prepared to take a huge explosion. My sleek armored car was riddled with dents and one side was almost totally caved in, and even though it was still driveable, the front hood had just about been completely blown off, and the engine had been exposed, too.
It needed a lot of work before another confrontation with the Shadow Knight.
“You can’t connect to his system, can you?” I asked Aileen as I wiped off my hands.
“I still cannot.” The android gave a stunningly human sigh of disappointment. “The access points are too damaged to connect to.”
“Oh, well,” I replied with a shrug. “He can keep his inferior AI system. It won’t help him.”
“It seems to have already helped him,” Aileen said with a tilt of her head. “Have you come up with a plan yet?”
“Obviously.” I smirked. “But it’ll take a bit more thinking. We need to find a way to isolate the Shadow Knight away from his big fancy trucks, but I already have a few ideas on where to start.”
Most of my ideas centered around the fact that Slade seemed more than willing to sacrifice civilian lives, while at the same time he always fought tooth and nail to keep his precious supervillains alive. If I could use that to my advantage, I could keep him off the streets and out of his vehicles, and then all I would need was a way to keep him from calling on any of his remote-operated destructive tanks once he realized he’d been caught in a trap.
I was still working that part out.
I patted the armor of Slade’s tank as I tried to decide what to work on next. In comparison to the beating that my car had taken, the armor of Slade’s tank was still quite sturdy even with the few dents we had caused, so one of the first things I had done after the fight was to isolate a panel of the tank’s outer shell. That allowed me to reverse-engineer the same kind of alloy Slade used so I could use it against him.
So overall, the only thing that had really been damaged in the self-destruct sequence was the technological systems on the inside.
I knew that was what the Shadow Knight had targeted with his self-destruct system, even though I was sure that he’d also meant to kill me. He might not have succeeded against me, but he had been able to destroy the data interface of the tank.
It would honestly have to be rebuilt from scratch, but that was something I could easily do. I wouldn’t have time to install new versions of the fancy screens and other tech that the Shadow Knight had shoved into his tank, but I didn’t think that was really necessary anyway.
As long as it functioned like a tank, that was all I needed from it.
Well, it also wouldn’t hurt if it had a few more guns and cannons, too. After all, the tank was bigger and bulkier than my little armored car, so it could probably hold a lot more rockets, and that meant we could make even more shit explode.
“Miles!” Norma’s chipper voice called from outside the garage.
“Hey, Norma,” I said as I turned to see my mousy assistant running up the driveway toward the open garage.
“Hey,” she said as she caught her breath. “Elizabeth wanted
me to come get you, since we’re all ready to go through the Shadow Knight’s files now.”
“She hooked the laptop up to the living room screens?” I asked with a raised eyebrow, since Elizabeth wasn’t exactly amazing with technology.
“Well, um, no, I did that,” Norma replied as her ears turned pink. “She just said that I should come get you.”
“That makes more sense,” I laughed. “Let’s go see what we can learn.”
I would definitely need to spend a lot more time in the garage to fix up the tank before we were ready to go after the Shadow Knight again. I also didn’t think I’d drive the tank myself, so I’d need to decide who would drive it before I fixed it up specifically with them in mind. But since I wanted to figure out the plan first, I shut the doors to the tank, let Aileen lock up the garage behind us, and then we all headed back into the mansion.
Inside the living room, Penumbra and Beacon were seated on the couch as Elizabeth carefully pressed a few buttons on a laptop at a nearby desk. The large television screens in front of the couch were already set up to display the laptop’s desktop, so we could all go through the files that I’d gathered from Slade’s private computer.
I hadn’t had much time to really look through them, since I’d been so focused on trying to fix up the tank. I’d told Norma to skim through the files for anything interesting, and she’d insisted that we all needed to go through it together instead.
“Here, Miles,” Elizabeth said as she got up from the desk and gestured for me to sit down in front of the laptop. “It’s all yours.”
“Have you gone through it yet?” I asked as I sat down in front of the laptop and adjusted the mouse to click on one of the sub-folders.
“Not much.” She shook her head. “But there’s a lot of information on supervillains in there.”
“Yeah, look!” Penumbra pointed at the large screen. “That’s, like, a whole lot of folders.”
The display on the screen did have a whole lot of folders in the ‘villains’ category, and since Slade was nothing if not organized, each folder was named after one of his many supervillains, and all of them had a pretty impressive amount of information. There was definitely more information here than he had given us when we went after the supervillains in the prison breakout, and I felt a smug sense of satisfaction that I’d been right about the fact that Slade had held back some of his knowledge.
To prove it, I opened up a folder for Bonnie and Clyde.
“Wow, there’s a lot in there,” Elizabeth said as she watched the laptop screen over my shoulder.
“That’s way more than we got,” Norma huffed. “Slade had all of this info on them, and he didn’t give any of it to us…”
“I don’t really get him,” Beacon sighed and ran a hand through his light brown hair. “Why wouldn’t he have shown you any of this?”
I continued to open up multiple files and records on the dead supervillain couple’s powers, and I glanced up at Elizabeth to make sure that she hadn’t seen any of this information in the dossier that Shadow Knight had shared with her.
“I don’t know, but Slade definitely didn’t show us most of this,” my turquoise-eyed girlfriend said. “We had a rough estimate of Clyde’s powers and their usual methods, but that’s it.”
“This even has a calculated range of how close Bonnie and Clyde had to be to each other for Bonnie’s amplification powers to work,” Penumbra scoffed. “Wow, that could have been really useful, huh?”
Elizabeth didn’t reply, but she clenched her fists at her sides. From the version of events that she’d told me, my girlfriend had thought she had no choice but to kill Clyde to protect the restaurant’s customers because she thought that Bonnie might be close enough to amplify Clyde’s powers. If she’d had this information, she might not have had to kill him herself at all.
I’d been glad to hear that Elizabeth had killed Clyde when it was necessary, since I always liked to see her develop her more brutal side, but it also meant that Clyde’s death had been the Shadow Knight’s fault since Slade hadn’t handed over his entire dossier on the supervillain couple.
So for someone who liked to say that I was an evil genius, I thought it was pretty ironic that at the end of the day, Slade had been the one indirectly responsible for Clyde’s death.
“Enough of the ones we’ve already killed,” Beacon said. “We want to find a weakness to draw out Slade, right?”
“Right,” I said as I leaned back into my chair so I could observe the ex-sidekicks seated on the couch. “So let’s take a step back. How much do you know about Slade’s life?”
“His life?” Penumbra repeated with a tilt of her head. “That’s, um, a pretty broad topic…”
“Yeah, what do you mean?” Beacon asked. “Like, do you want his entire life story?”
“A short version of it, sure,” I said.
“Well, I don’t really know the details,” Beacon said with a shrug. “Uh, from what I learned from Julien and Slade’s butler Alejandro, his parents died when he was really young, so it was just him and his younger sister, and I think they kind of raised themselves.”
“We’re already aware of the sister.” I remembered her from the last time we’d tried to lure Slade out to keep him away while we dealt with Mayhem. “And I doubt he would fall for that again.”
“Wow, really?” Penumbra sounded awed. “Well, I guess everyone kind of knows about Dan Slade’s sister. They’re pretty publically in the news and stuff.”
“But they’re not often seen together,” Beacon said. “He keeps his distance from her.”
“Well, we can’t use her again, so we’ll need to find some other way to draw him out,” I said. “What else do you know?”
“He doesn’t kill because of what happened to his parents,” Beacon said. “The idea of murder upsets him a lot, so he never wants that to happen to anyone else. That’s why he became a hero in the first place, so no kid would have to grow up without parents because of some crazy supervillain.”
“But he doesn’t care when civilians die because of his actions?” Elizabeth frowned.
“He wasn’t always that way,” Penumbra said as she tapped her fingers against her lips. “He used to tell us that, like, the worst thing we could do would be to accidentally kill a civilian. I think that was why he didn’t like, um, how little I could control my powers, I guess? He must have thought I’d cause a huge accident or something.”
“But you never did,” I replied. “And now he’s the one who’s causing massive amounts of collateral damage.”
“Yeah…” the blonde trailed off.
“Exactly,” Beacon said. “He’s so far gone that he’s definitely not the man I used to respect.”
“Then I don’t know how helpful it will be to talk about who he used to be,” Norma sighed. “What do you think, Miles?”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “I just wanted a little more insight on who he was, but he’s barely that man anymore. We should just see what other kinds of files he has.”
“He probably has some information on the vehicles in there,” Norma said.
“Even a blueprint would assist us to rebuild his tank,” Aileen suggested.
I agreed with both of them, so I left the supervillain files alone for now to browse through the schematics folders instead. Slade had a ton of those, too, but I was surprised that the folder still wasn’t nearly as big as his supervillain folder. That meant it didn’t take long to find the folder where he kept all of his vehicle designs, so I opened up a few of the files to get a better look at them.
To my disappointment, he didn’t have anything in his files about how his AI system worked. I hadn’t expected to find any of that anyway, based on how Julien had said he’d developed the system. Anything that Slade created after his interactions with me wasn’t present in his files, so I assumed he must have gotten extra paranoid about it and destroyed everything.
I couldn’t exactly blame him since I had gotten my hands on
all these secret files.
Still, the base schematics for the tank would be helpful. There was enough information available to reconstruct what Slade had before, although I didn’t intend to copy him exactly. I could already figure out the improvements I wanted to make to the design and weaponry, since the Shadow Knight never had nearly enough deadly ammunition.
“There’s plenty in here to work with,” I told Aileen. “Go start on it, and I’ll join you once our plan is solid.”
“Understood,” my robotic assistant replied.
“I’ll also send you any files in here that could be useful,” I said.
The android nodded and then sauntered off toward the garage, and the sway of her robotic hips reminded me of the skin that she had almost finished. I couldn’t wait to polish it up and see it on her again, and once this whole ordeal with the Shadow Knight was over with, I would definitely reward myself by seeing how many times I could climax her system.
But for now, Aileen’s entire focus needed to be on upgrading our technology to be better than Slade’s. I was confident in my android’s ability to make her own decisions on upgrades, and even though I would go to work on the armored vehicles myself later, I wanted to find another weakness to draw out Slade first.
“Okay, let’s back up again,” I sighed.
“The last time we managed to draw Slade out, we mimicked his sister’s voice in a distress call,” Norma told Beacon and Penumbra.
I noticed that she didn’t say we’d done the same thing to Beacon during the prison roundup, and I figured that was a detail better left unsaid.
“So could we do that again?” Penumbra asked. “I mean, like, not with his sister, but something like that?”
“That’s the idea.” I nodded. “We just need to think of who might draw him out, but in a way that he wouldn’t take his most lethal vehicles with him.”
“He has been going really hard on supervillains lately,” Elizabeth said. “Enough to cause multiple civilian casualties, even though he never uses lethal force on the villains themselves.”