Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins

by Gregg Taylor

  He thought for a moment that his quest was over before it began as the five men began to climb quickly into an old sedan that was parked in the alley. But as Brody watched them tear away heading west, he could suddenly hear something, just buried beneath the layers of sound that the city cast in all directions. Screaming. Lots of it, and coming from just a few blocks west. Could this be where Tully and Parker were headed? Tank Brody never doubted it as he began to run in the direction the car had gone.

  The sounds grew louder as he ran down half a dozen blocks or more towards the centre of the city. The screams continued, joined by more warlike sounds as a variety of small-arms fire began somewhere in the distance. Brody pressed on through the crowds running in the opposite direction. One thing was certain, whatever lay ahead of him, he seemed to be the only person interested in doing anything other than getting as far away from it as possible.

  Brody was still breathing easily in spite of the run he had made as he closed the distance between himself and the fearful sounds ahead. The chaos now seemed to be within a block or two, with small explosions now joining the gunfire, together with a whirring, clanking sound unlike any machine Brody had ever heard. For a moment the big man considered turning tail and running. After all, he was unarmed and on the fringes of a situation not of his making. Ahead he could see shattered shop windows and the prone forms of a number of men and women who appeared to have been badly beaten by some unknown force. That tore it. Whatever was going on here, Brody was willing to bet that none of those people were to blame either. He began to drag the wounded to safety one by one. It was only when he ventured into the middle of the street that he could see the terror that had torn through this neighborhood just moments ago.

  Tank Brody froze in his tracks, unable to accept what his eyes told him. Parker, Tully and the others from the gym were engaged in a furious running battle with what appeared to be two dozen full-sized toy soldiers! Painted bright red and blue like tin toys in a shop window, the ferocity of their attack proved that these creations were anything but innocent. The mechanical men were themselves the source of the whirring and clanking sounds, and if Tank had any doubt that the tin soldiers were exactly what they appeared to be, then the way those terrible toys took round after round of gunfire without apparent damage dispelled such thoughts immediately.

  Tank looked quickly at his surroundings. It was clear that since the men had moved to engage the mechanical monsters, the damage to the shops and innocent passersby had stopped. Tank could not imagine just what these men might be doing, or on whose behalf, but they appeared to be the only resistance to this incredible attack. Brody could hear police whistles at a distance but there was no sign of the blue coats yet. He picked up a woman he found lying unconscious in the road and carried her to safety through the shattered doorway of one of the shops. She was bleeding from a wound in her scalp, but not badly. Brody found shelter for the woman between the fallen shelves of the ruined store, his eyes darting to the scene of horror out in the street as he did so. The tin soldiers bore what appeared to be muskets, but each seemed to fire an unlimited number of shots. Parker and Tully's small band of fighters seemed to have been newly reinforced by the arrival of at least two more gunmen, from where Brody could not say.

  Tank heard more police whistles, closer now, and almost left his place rather than be discovered and questioned, but the sight he saw next stopped him cold in sheer amazement. From the buildings high above, a tall man in a long grey coat swung in on some kind of grappling line. Shouting instructions Brody could not hear to the men below, the man released the rope while still at an impossible height, and turned the force of his fall into a viscous kick to the midsection that decimated one of the mechanical monsters. The tall man flipped over the falling form of the broken toy soldier and landed on his feet as gently as a cat. It was impossible to say from this distance, but Brody would have sworn that he saw a bright red mask on the tall man's face.

  Suddenly, as if at some unspoken command, every single one of the mechanical men turned and moved quickly towards the valiant newcomer. Ignoring the volleys of gunfire around them, and even eschewing their own weapons, the tin soldiers closed ranks at top speed and made for the man in the mask.

  Four small explosions tore through the monsters, and for an instant Brody was sure that he saw their point of origin: a small grey shape, like a woman, flying through the air above the fray. She appeared to be coming in to land beside the man in the mask, but he waved her off with a cry and she landed instead on a lamppost before taking to the air again. Closer and closer the tin men got, surrounding their target on all sides, until at last, in perfect unison, they rushed the man in the mask, closing the distance with astonishing speed. At the last instant, the bodies of the mechanical men were torn apart by tremendous explosions which engulfed the area in a great fireball, the brilliance of which blinded Tank Brody from his vantage point almost two blocks away.

  When his eyes adjusted a moment later, he could see a still-smoking crater in the pavement and shattered glass falling from windows all around. But of the army of mechanical monsters, the brave fighters who opposed them or the remarkable man in grey there was not a single sign.

  Four

  “Peters!” a gravelly voice boomed from down the hallway, making the lanky man jump in his seat. Jack Peters was behind a desk that seemed two sizes too small for him in a cramped office filled with filing cabinets. It was just the sort of palatial surroundings that you might expect if you happened to be the star reporter for the Toronto Chronicle, which Jack Peters was.

  Jack happened to be leaning back in his chair about to enjoy a cup of lukewarm, stale coffee freshened up ever so slightly with an equal part of bourbon. He called it the “Newsman's Good Night,” and he felt no compulsion to hide it just because Editor Pearly was coming. Pearly's bark was worse than his bite, though many remarked that his bark was bad enough to make up for it.

  “Three, two, one,” Peters counted under his breath. The door burst open and a solid mass of disgruntled newspaperman filled the space, his teeth grinding in irritation and a copy of the morning Chronicle clutched in his paw.

  “Peters!” Editor Pearly repeated. “What in the Sam Hill do you think you're playing at?”

  “Good morning, Tim,” Peters said with the calm that comes from long practice of dealing with the storm. “Is that the bulldog?”

  “Of course it's the bulldog,” Pearly grunted, waving the paper in his hand. “What else would it be?”

  “You might be working on your origami swans,” Peters said, taking a long pull from his cup. “I hear they're all the rage this season.”

  “Don't crack wise,” Pearly snapped. “Would you like to explain what I'm looking at, Mister Peters?”

  Jack peered over the rim of his cup. “It appears to be our coverage of last night's dramatic attack by oversized tin soldiers,” he said.

  “I know what it is!” Pearly exploded.

  “Then why did you–”

  Pearly declined to give his ace reporter a chance to finish his comeback. “Do you know what is missing from this report, Jack? The news! The biggest story in weeks, maybe months, and you forgot to bring the news!” Pearly slapped the bulldog edition of the morning paper down on Peters' desk. “Look at this,” he grunted. “Page after page of eyewitness reports in exhaustive detail. It looks like you talked to every Sally Sob-Story who got her stockings torn in this fracas, and the night editor tells me this is only a tiny fraction of the interviews you took!”

  “So what if it is?” the reporter shrugged.

  “So what if it…” Pearly crumpled the newspaper in his hand in frustration. “Jack, for the love of St. Thomas Aquinas, have a little perspective. Yes, the people want to know what happened, but they also want to know why it happened! They want to know who's responsible, and if there's any chance that it might happen on their street tonight! Those are the questions we have to answer if we want their nickel, Jack, and you know that. So you ge
t enough on-the-spot material to give the piece color and then high-tail it downtown to try and get some answers to those questions!”

  In deference to his boss' high dudgeon, Jack Peters removed his size thirteen feet from the desktop and leaned his increasingly heavy head on his left hand.

  “Listen, Chief. There were two other Chronicle men on the scene, and they both beat it with O'Mally's boys to do just that. They came up with exactly what I knew they would come up with – nothing.”

  “Confound it, Jack,” Pearly began.

  Peters raised his hand. “I have, through my usual mix of cunning and guile, gotten my hands on the bulldog editions of the Telegraph and the Sentinel, and they have pages and pages of nothing much under their great big headlines. And do you know why?”

  Editor Pearly scowled and said nothing. Jack decided to tell him anyway. “Because every reporter they had on the scene cased after the Chief of Police, or the Mayor or anybody official-looking, hoping someone would say the name they wanted to hear: Captain Clockwork. Everybody was looking for an official release on the supervillain angle, and none of them got it. And they didn't get it because the tin men blew themselves sky-high and left no official evidence behind. But since yours truly spent hours on the scene talking to anybody and everybody who saw anything, I came up with just enough good citizens willing to say it sounded like Captain Clockwork was back that Bones was able to pull all the old files from his last crime spree and run a special section.”

  “I saw the special section,” Pearly snapped.

  “And did you also see this page of interviews on the scene?” Peters asked proudly, smoothing out the rumpled paper on his desk. “It's pretty compelling stuff, Chief, even by my standards. Ordinary folks in an ordinary neighborhood who found themselves torn apart by a small army of mechanical men. Working men, housewives, kids, old folks, shopkeepers, giving the story as they saw it, and there were dozens more we didn't have space to print. The Chronicle is the only paper with anything real to report, Chief. So mind telling me what's got you in a lather this early?”

  Pearly sighed and chewed on the stem of his unlit pipe. He sat on the edge of Peters' desk and was silent for a moment. “Jack,” he began at last, “when I stole you away from the Sentinel–”

  “Aww for Crimeny's sake, Tim, how long ago was that?” Peters interrupted.

  “The reason that I brought you in was not just the quality of your work. And it certainly wasn't for your winning personality,” Pearly grimaced. “It was because you always seemed to have your nose in these impossible crimes, and you always seemed to have the skinny before anybody else. Now I had a guess as to why that was. Can you imagine what that guess might have been?”

  Jack Peters was silent. Pearly smiled grimly. “Yeah. I thought you might,” he said. “I'm not saying you did a bad job, Jack. I'm not saying that I disagree with you when you say we have the best coverage in the city. But you went a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction from where your instincts would have sent you, and I've been a newspaperman long enough to know that for dead certain. The reason every other reporter in town was looking for an official word on who sent these monsters, or why they were turned loose on the city, is that if their paper was the only one that missed that story, they'd have been out of a job so fast the door would break the sound barrier before it hit them in the fanny.”

  Jack grinned. “Even when I do good, you can't resist threatening to fire me, can you, Chief?”

  Pearly narrowed his eyes and held his star reporter's gaze, hard. “Confound it, Jack, I'm still the Editor around here. And I need to make sure that my reporters are working for me, you understand? Because if you're taking your orders from someone else, you can go and publish a handbill in your basement. Understand?”

  Peters shifted in his chair a little. Things were getting a little too close to the truth for comfort. “Tim, I don't know what you're talking about,” he began. “That was a nice quiet neighborhood that got shellacked last night. Couple of blocks from Christie Pitts. No banks, no jewels. No rich swells. Just a nice family neighborhood in the middle of the city. Last time we saw tin soldiers like this, that maniac Captain Clockwork was using them to hit big-money targets. An army of disposable soldiers raking it in all over town.”

  “Until the local mystery man figured out their weakness.” Editor Pearly watched Peters for a reaction.

  Peters shrugged. “If that's what happened,” he said. “In any case, once his rackets were rumbled, Clockwork crawled back under the icebox and hasn't been heard from since.”

  “Until now,” Pearly nodded grimly.

  “Sure, but why, Chief? I took one look at that neighborhood and all the damage to the shops, to say nothing of the smoking hole in the ground that was all that was left of the main attraction, and knew that the usual stuff wasn't gonna cut it today.” Peters took a sip of the concoction in his cup. “Instincts are important, and knowing when to ignore them is, too. We won today, Chief, and we've got more background info than we can use if these attacks keep up.”

  “Why would they keep up?” Pearly scowled.

  “If I knew that, I'd know why last night went down the way it did. And if I knew that, you'd have read about it in the bulldog. Tearing apart innocent people like that…,” Peters trailed off. “It's an act of madness, Tim. Best we can do is hang on for the ride.”

  Pearly nodded and stood. “Just as you say, Jack. But don't forget what I said. And get some sleep, you look like hell.” And with that, he was gone.

  Jack Peters breathed a long sigh of relief. He had always known that Editor Pearly had his suspicions about him. Heck, when Jack was still at the Sentinel he had been kidnapped once by gangsters who thought he had a line to the Red Panda. But nothing had ever been proven, and it wouldn't do to change that now. He looked at the mountain of eyewitness reports on his desk. They were copies, made for a very specific purpose that Tim Pearly would not have approved of at all.

  Peters' telephone rang, jarring him from his reverie. “Peters,” he said into the mouthpiece. In response he heard a series of clicks as if the call were no longer being routed by the normal telephone system, which was true.

  “Mother Hen calling,” said a female voice calmly on the other end of the line.

  “Hello, Mother dear,” Jack said. “How is every little thing?”

  “Same as usual, Jack,” came the voice.

  “That bad, huh?” Peters snorted. “Listen, I got the stack of eyewitness reports you asked for, is someone coming 'round to collect them so I can turn into a pumpkin?”

  “Leave the window open, Jack. They'll be gone when you get back in.”

  Peters raised an eyebrow. “The personal touch, no less. So I take it the big fella wasn't blown to bits after all? I'm glad to hear it, though he got me in dutch with the boss tonight, I'll tell you that.”

  Mother Hen's smile was audible. “He knows, Jack. And he's made it up to you. When you get back to the office, you'll find there are two city officials willing to go on record to you and only you.”

  “And what will they tell me?” Jack said with his fingers crossed.

  “What every paper in town is dying to print, Jack,” the voice promised. “Captain Clockwork is back in town!”

  Five

  The constant low chatter around the table made distinguishing individual words nearly impossible, but the tone was clear. The men seated around the great mahogany table in the Club Macaw's conference room were grave, worried and becoming angry.

  Marcus Bennett was there, still looking ashen after his brush with doom. To his right sat Gilbert MacKinnon, whose company ran much of the shipping in and out of Toronto Harbor. MacKinnon's close-cropped grey beard was twisted in frustration as he leaned to his right to hear what Byron Page was saying. Like MacKinnon, Page also ran a line of lake freighters and held a great number of railway interests besides. He had brought detailed reports of several mishaps that had befallen his company of late and had passed them
around for the rest of the committee to consider, as had Arthur Welles, seated to Page's right. Welles was a generation younger than most of the table, having assumed the mantle of his family manufacturing empire upon his father's death a year before. Thus far his reign had not been all that he had imagined it might be.

  Stanley Church, bald and taciturn, had not bothered to bring along details of his own company's recent misfortunes. The collapse of the Masterson Tower had been a public event and had received a great deal of unkind attention from the press, much of it directed towards Church's construction interests. In addition to the loss of life and the huge financial setback to the project, the accident had cost his company millions in new contracts and he was now having trouble with his workers. Church's construction interests were vast but his company could not stand much more loss, and Stanley Church knew it.

  To Church's right was a small mousey man with thick spectacles and an oversize tweed jacket, which made him appear even more dwarfish. The fact that this man was Quincy Harrison, the weapons manufacturing magnate, would have astonished any who did not know him, but within the well-heeled confines of the Club Macaw there were no such strangers. He spoke nervously with a pale man with a well-trimmed van Dyke beard. Ian James' family fortune had its roots in long-forgotten history, but it had been as battered by the Depression as many others. James had sunk what remained into developing one of the finest research and development laboratories in the country, and already had recovered much of what had been lost in the stock market crash in the process. Word was that many of the innovations that had come out of his company were pioneered by James' own son, but the wealthy man preferred not to discuss such things. Lab coats were not, he felt, the dignified apparel of a man of means.

  To say that everyone was a little surprised by the presence of the man to James' right was something of an understatement. August Fenwick did not have a reputation for being at all interested in anything even remotely serious. Like Welles, he was a generation younger than most of the table, but unlike the industrious Arthur Welles, Fenwick seemed concerned with nothing beyond his own pleasure. Even now he appeared to have barely made it to the first meeting of this committee. To look at Mister Fenwick, one could only assume that he had been out all night indulging his reputation as a ne'er-do-well. No one believed that his presence would be of benefit to the committee, but when he had expressed an interest, it was quite impossible to say no. His family's holdings were vast and varied, and his fortune almost untouched by the calamities of recent years. Every man at the table had dealings with one of his companies or another, and Fenwick himself owned shares in everything. Let him come, the men of industry had thought, assuming that he would soon get bored and wander off.