"Material? A scrap? Did we pick this up from the scene?"
Joe nodded quickly, then slowly as his eyes widened. "Yeah, yeah we did. Do you remember the dumpster, it was all… smashed in. That was on it, like it had been torn off. The dumpster had also been cut up, like with a knife."
Fascinated with the tiny piece of scene evidence, Sam brought it right up to her eye to get a close look. She grabbed the frappé with her other hand and leant back in her chair.
"What do you mean? What kind of weapon can slice into a metal dumpster?"
Joe blinked, and rubbed his forehead. "I… can't remember. No, wait, a quantum knife. And that guy, he wasn't shot, he was sliced up." He took a quick gulp of coffee and coughed, shook his head, and took another. "What the fuck is going on?"
Sam hadn't moved from her position. She thoughtfully pushed and pulled the straw in and out of the tiny hole in the transparent plastic dome that topped her cup with a sound not entirely unlike fingernails on a blackboard. Her mind was full of a montage of images from the morgue − the body of the victim, with gunshot wound to the abdomen… and the body of the victim, abdomen intact, but chest from ribcage to throat stitched up coarsely, a grid pattern that followed the incisions from a knife that passed right through from one side to the other.
Sam squinted, not looking at the evidence bag, but searching the images in her mind for something else. Another person, just a blurry form, something at the edge of her vision. She took another sip. There. Blue and white, blonde and radiant, and standing in the morgue between her and Joe and Doctor Chan.
Bluebell, The Seven Wonders' psychic warrior. Sam drained the remnants of her drink and slammed the cup down onto her desk, throwing the evidence bag down in frustration.
Joe and Sam looked at each other for several seconds, mouths wide in surprise.
"Bluebell! That bitch… Shit, Joe, the Seven Wonders only went and brain-baked us."
Joe half-stood, then sat, face wide in surprise. Then he clicked his fingers and slapped his own desk.
"Motherfuckers. Sorry."
Sam waved away his apology. "Don't. That descriptor is entirely appropriate. Those interfering motherfuckers."
"So what do we do?"
"Oh, that's easy, detective." Sam tapped her laptop awake and started the too-long process of getting the department intranet up. "The Seven Wonders have taken the body. We can't do anything about that, they'll have covered their asses good and proper. But, we have this." She pointed to the evidence bag. "If the murderer was the Cowl, it was unusual, totally out of character. Which might be why the precious Wonders are so interested. But if we can get anywhere with analyzing this scrap − components, manufacturing process, whatever − we might be able to get to the perp first, Cowl or no Cowl."
Joe's smile dropped a degree.
"Trying to track down the Cowl with a little piece of cloth? I don't think he buys his capes at Walmart. It's custom, high-tech. How are we gonna trace… well, anything from that scrap?"
"Ever the optimist, detective."
"Realist, detective. Realist."
Sam folded the evidence bag in half, and again felt the black material between her fingers through the plastic. "We've got to start somewhere. So, what's logical? He probably uses the costume as some kind of light armor. So, ballistics, and ballistics textiles, we start there."
Joe clapped his hands together, the smile reappearing. "Ballistics, yes! Let's get down and see Lansbury, she can take a look."
"Detective Milano, you read my mind. Let's go."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"Thanks, Mary, and good morning San Ventura for Monday the twentieth. I'm Sarah Nova and these are your headlines this morning.
"Fifteen dead in the fourth high-tech raid this year. The Clarke Institute of Technology remains closed this morning after the high-security government energy research unit was attacked in the early hours. A fire later gutted the main office block. San Ventura PD have no leads but Seven Wonders' chairman Aurora's Light said the raid was clearly the work of his arch-nemesis the Cowl, and that the superteam would be assisting local and state law enforcement officials in their investigation.
"Detectives from North Beach sheriff's department are searching for two teenage girls who disappeared from their home near Lee Springs Friday and haven't been seen since. The pair were last seen walking home from their local high school in the mid-afternoon. The parents of the pair said it would be completely out of character for their daughters to run off. SVPD are appealing for anyone who knows of the girls' whereabouts to come forward.
"And later today, Geoffrey Conroy, CEO of Conroy Industries, will present the Build-A-Home Foundation with a check for $150,000, raised from the Police Benevolent Fund charity auction last month. The money will go towards upgrades of two community centers in El Simona. Mr Conroy hosted the auction himself in June at the annual San Ventura Police Department charity ball. The check handover will take place at a garden party hosted by Mr Conroy at his North Beach hillside residence.
"And now our top story. Seven Wonders' chairman Aurora's Light has repeated his call for the supervillain known as the Cowl to give himself up, following the murders of fifteen personnel at CIT in a raid early today. The dead were a mix of security and research staff at the High Valley complex, which has been conducting defense research for the federal government since 1996. The brazen attack was, according to the Seven Wonders, masterminded by the supervillain and his accomplice, known only as Blackbird. While neither felon – both holding joint number one on the FBI's Most Wanted list – left any physical evidence, the leader of the city's superteam told Good Morning San Ventura's Leroy Martin earlier today that the raid is part of the Cowl's latest evil plan."
"There is no doubt that this is the work of the Cowl. This is the fourth raid on government and privately funded research institutes this year, with each attack bearing his hallmarks. We are continuing to investigate and are assisting the San Ventura Police Department in their investigation, with my team lending specialist equipment and personnel to try to trace the whereabouts of both the Cowl and Blackbird and of the stolen equipment and components."
"When asked about what the Cowl's plans might be, Aurora's Light said the matter was still under investigation."
"I would like to personally reassure the people of San Ventura that the Seven Wonders exist only to serve and protect, with the cooperation of the SVPD and City Hall. We have been gathering intelligence on the Cowl's activities for some time now, and while we have no knowledge of credible, specific threats at the present, we must keep the city's terror level on red for the time being, and I've put all members of the Seven Wonders out on public patrol. I would also like to put a call out to the Cowl and to Blackbird: we may not know your true identities, but if you come forward and give yourselves up to the Seven Wonders or to a representative of the SVPD, this will count in your favor. Thank you, Mr Martin."
"Good Morning San Ventura was unable to verify what has been taken from the institute, but a source close to the sheriff's department said that it fitted the pattern of the previous raids where high-tech experimental electronics had been snatched. The four raids in total have claimed twenty-seven lives.
"Detectives say the disappearance of two teenage girls from Lee Springs is completely out of character. The two girls, aged fourteen and fifteen, have not been seen since Friday afternoon when they appeared on CCTV leaving their high school…"
CHAPTER NINETEEN
With a two-handed key combo, the message was replayed for perhaps the twentieth time. Two displays showed two graphs each, the points plotted and connecting lines drawn as the recorded data were analyzed again. A smaller readout projected a green circular grid with a wildly wavering orange line across the dark computer room, an abstract but highly mathematical interpolation of the transmission pulsing in time with the audio playback.
The audio was down low, because she didn't want anyone to hear. In a building occupied by at least two peop
le with superhearing, keeping things a secret was difficult. At least she didn't have any brain activity that could be read by Bluebell. But to cover any eventuality, the Dragon Star's powerstaff, propped against the desk, was generating a signal-cancelling dome a few yards in diameter, enough for her to work on her own project without drawing attention to herself.
The message finished, she tapped some keys, then started from the beginning again.
The Citadel of Wonders was a building far, far too large for just seven occupants. In reality, only a small part of it was used as the headquarters of San Ventura's superteam. The main purpose of the edifice, a giant, triangular glass skyscraper standing square in the center of the city, was to inspire awe and wonder. Only a few civilians had ever been beyond the cathedral-like atrium, and even those who had had no idea that eighty percent of the one million, one hundred square feet of usable space inside the fantastic construction was completely empty. Mayoral tours, military meetings, presidential galas. It didn't matter what rank or office you held, the Citadel was a castle of secrets.
Deep in the bowels of the building, SMART completed some routine tasks for its master Hephaestus in the Forge, a large, hangar-like room that descended under the city and formed a cuboidal void reaching six stories high through the center of the Citadel. It was here that the Greek god worked on tech for the superteam − it was part workshop, part R&D lab, part test bed. The Supra-Maximal Attack-Response Titan – SMART, the only artificial member of the Seven Wonders – had been designed, built and tested in the room. As far as it was possible, the Forge was the robot's home.
With the Forge computer on sleep, SMART lumbered to the exit, the next part of its nightly routine to take the service elevator to the uppermost floor of the Citadel and install itself into the custom port in Control One, the master nerve center in the building's tetrahedral apex. From there it could monitor not only the city, but patch into the entire global network of superheroes, communicating with operators both machine and living all over the world. Despite worldwide retirement, the Seven Wonders had assigned a few heroes dotted around the world a series of surveillance tasks, just in case a supervillain decided to reappear or, somehow, managed to escape from one of the world's three superprisons. In addition, the Seven Wonders' own surveillance extended into space by several tens of thousands of miles, thanks to their covert satellite network, again designed and built by Hephaestus, the greatest engineer and weaponsmith the world had ever known.
The service elevator was slow, but given SMART's eight-foot bulk, it couldn't get around the building any other way. The journey would take two minutes; in that time SMART routinely ran a remote systems check of the empty building. It was the middle of a quiet night, and as the superteam's mobile supercomputer and operations core, directly linked to the main systems in the Citadel, SMART was the only one who never went off duty.
SMART scanned, cancelled the process, then scanned again. The result was the same − at seventy-five per cent progress, there was an anomaly, the scan sticking on something odd, before continuing uninterrupted until the robot halted the command before completion. A third time, the same. SMART re-launched the application. It hiccupped at seventy-five per cent, again.
The elevator was not quite halfway to the fiftieth floor. SMART tried something different, an old-fashioned short-range wireless scan, reading regular Wi-Fi fields and comparing the data with something similar to a radar scan. The requisite data was gathered in 0.015 seconds, and correlated with the seventy-five per cent scan results in 0.07. SMART stopped the elevator, and patched in the Citadel's internal security computer.
If SMART had been given a simulated sense of humor by its creator, alongside its simulated emotion, the appropriate response might have been "Bingo!" But the robot remained silent, accepting the logical conclusion derived from the available data.
Someone was in Subcontrol Three, and was shielding themselves from detection by deflecting all electromagnetic energy waves in a small umbrella which formed a small blank spot on the robot's scan. But logic also told SMART that the "intruder" was really one of the other six members of the Seven Wonders, and that as all had authority to carry out their duties precisely as they saw fit, there was no problem. Deflection shield or not.
SMART redirected the elevator to level thirty, just four floors up. As soon as the doors slid open, it activated a second set of gyros and couplings, transforming the usual slow, heavy and loud gait of the slow, heavy and square white robot into a lithe, smooth motion. Stealth mode was taxing on system memory and couldn't be used for extended periods before SMART's processor heatsinks got hot enough that they could be detected by infra-red through the reflective armor plate. But for sneaking around the Citadel, it would do admirably.
Subcontrol Three was hardly more than a small cupboard housing a redundant bank of servers and a small control desk, a simplified version of the room-sized panels available in Control One. But depending on what systems you wanted to use, the subcontrol rooms dotted around the Citadel made for comfortable and quiet workspaces, the required controls and systems mapped from the master deck on the top level.
The door was open as SMART rounded the corridor. Under stealth, only Hephaestus would have been able to sense SMART's presence. The machine had no mind for Bluebell to read and the white armor deflected any energy signature that Aurora or the Dragon Star might have been able to detect. But unlike the hero working in Subcontrol Three, this included the visible spectrum. The eight-foot-tall robot was a vague shimmer of heat in the corridor.
The person seated at the panel, hunched over in their task, was totally oblivious to the robot's presence. SMART zoomed its optics in. There was the tall golden powerstaff, and the superhero's face was hidden by a huge flowing hood which continued down into a billowing robe over skintight white and red spandex. From the corridor, SMART was only able to see one leg, bare skin visible through a series of geometric – and very revealing – holes in the costume.
SMART knew that the Dragon Star's costume was designed to be attractive to male humans. Part of the Seven Wonders' mission was PR, and the citizens of San Ventura, rightly or wrongly, wanted to be protected by the perfect and the attractive. The Dragon Star was certainly that, although some logical argument worming its way through the back of SMART's CPU suggested that if the general populace knew that the Dragon Star's body was the corpse of a teenage cheerleader stolen from the city morgue and reanimated by a sexless alien entity, then the athletic, spandex-clad form in enigmatic flowing robes and hood would be a lot less attractive.
SMART paused, its CPU completing a full cycle with no processes. SMART… SMART felt something. It was impossible, of course, and as soon as the errant cycle was detected SMART launched a full array of diagnostic applications and processes, cleared terabytes worth of caches, and restarted several systems.
Two seconds later the robot's systems were back up and… the feeling remained. It was almost disgust. SMART considered, then accepted the logic. It was an assimilation of data based on its knowledge of the Dragon Star and of human society. All the robot needed to do was correlate one with the other and simulate a predicted response. This was within its operational parameters, and was therefore entirely logical.
SMART was disgusted, and shrank back a little in the corridor as it watched the Dragon Star at work.
SMART hid.
The crystal set into the top of the Dragon Star's powerstaff pulsed rhythmically, generating the electromagnetic shield that covered her and the computer desk. SMART cycled its optical filters through a range of wavelengths, recording the data as the Dragon Star alternately appeared and disappeared from view depending on the spectrum.
SMART considered again. All members of the Seven Wonders had the express permission of their leader, Aurora, to do what they liked to protect the city, within certain bounds – that each superhero was independent and free to pursue justice when the superteam was not "united", as the catchphrase went; that every action had to be w
ithin the law, unless an emergency was declared; that the no-kill rule was unassailable.
But the Dragon Star was hiding under a deflection shield as she worked in Subcontrol Three, and as no one except the Seven Wonders had access to this part of the Citadel, it meant that the Dragon Star didn't want the others to know she was there.
The Dragon Star was keeping a secret. SMART considered and felt…
SMART's processor skipped a cycle again, and the robot moved slightly in the dark corridor.
Another logical deduction and more of this new process, this simulated emotion. SMART considered. It was not thinking for itself, it was thinking on behalf of the humans it was programmed to protect. What would the people of San Ventura think if the reanimated body of a dead girl was carrying out secret work at the Citadel, hiding it from the superteam she had sworn her allegiance to? Did the honorable vows of an alien to protect the city count, anyway? What would the people think?
After three hours, the Dragon Star stood, powerstaff held firmly in one delicate hand. SMART's optics crash-zoomed to follow her every movement and gesture. There. She took a data stick from the computer and pocketed it in her cloak. Powerstaff still pulsing, the Dragon Star shut the subcontrol room systems down and closed the door, heading down the dark corridor towards the regular passenger lift, and out of SMART's visual range. The robot continued to track her movements for a while afterwards, seismic detectors registering her movements in the floors above, Citadel security systems feeding video and audio. Not that there was much to see, or hear. The Dragon Star moved through dead corridors silently, and with her staff still throwing the cone of invisibility around her, each night vision camera went black as she passed. The trail of active and inactive cameras was a more-than-adequate tracker for SMART, linked as it was to every system in the whole building.
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