Thirty minutes after leaving the subcontrol room, the camera in the Dragon Star's private quarters came on suddenly. She was lying on her futon, asleep, or at least resting the human body. SMART watched for a few minutes but her form remained still. The Dragon Star was the only one of the Wonders to make the Citadel their permanent home. Well, her and SMART, but then SMART was the Citadel, in many ways.
The robot allowed itself to make noise now, clicking loudly as it refolded the stealth mechanisms away and reverting to its regular, cumbersome gait. At an even walking pace, it thudded into the subcontrol room and, pushing the high-backed swivel chair aside, extended a powerful arm towards one of the custom computer ports that were studded throughout the entire building. As soon as SMART connected, the Subcontrol Three came to life, readouts changing and displays scrolling through data as SMART flipped the system back through its last actions. Reaching a selected time point of four hours past, SMART rolled through the residue of erased data still clinging to the solid-state hard drives and computer memory. There. A pattern, an unknown program run, and data from one of the surveillance satellites routed past the main system in Control One and fed directly into the subservers on level thirty.
SMART saw the message buried in the high-frequency noise of the raw satellite data quickly, like a person focusing on a magic eye picture puzzle. As the graphs changed on the room's two widescreen displays, SMART threw in various filters and decryption algorithms.
There. The Dragon Star's secret message, a transmission received from the stars.
SMART rewound the data and replayed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was like a scene from a movie.
Tony sighed. No, it was worse – it was like a scene from a chick flick. Gabrielle Gets Hitched, or My Fat Cashcow Wedding Franchise VII.
His arms were sore. Why, he wasn't sure. He was a superhero, invulnerable, having woken up with superstrength, flight, heat vision, the whole damn works. A superhero who, just a couple of days ago, had taken on the Cowl in a downtown bank. Who had flown up, up and away, carrying the supervillain in the wild blue yonder. Who had survived the fall in the sea with nothing more than a sore head and who had walked, rather than raced – well, look where racing had got him – soaking wet back home.
Gee-whizz, that had been a fun day!
So why holding his arms out for fifteen minutes was such a strain, he had no real idea. It was probably psychological. It was probably because having Jeannie pull and shove his groin with a mouthful of pins just inches away from his… well, made him uncomfortable. He wanted to fidget, to move, to do anything to change position and relieve the stiffness in his muscles, but he dared not break the statuesque pose his girlfriend had put him in.
Jeannie wanted to make the costume, and make it she would. It was bizarre, to say the least. Jeannie had clothes-making skills worthy of an old-fashioned seamstress, but was using high-tech fabrics acquired from her day job… whatever that was, exactly. Tony wasn't sure. Jeannie had mentioned it was to do with military research and was mostly classified, and she hadn't exactly been laughing when she said it, so he didn't push the issue. It was a little early in their relationship to be breaking official secrets, but he knew the pins in her mouth were a secret tantalum/protactinium alloy. The industrial sewing machine clamped to the kitchen table − looking more like a heavy-duty drill from a factory − used a needle made of the same substance, superheated with two green lasers.
So yeah, Jeannie was taking it seriously.
Tony felt her hands pull his waist around. He went with the movement, and turned, finding himself looking out of the window. He wondered if he should close it, but then it was late and there was never anyone out on that side of the street, abutting the old warehouse like it did. The sight of the city's latest superhero getting his new kit made would have been an amusing sight.
Tony turned his mind to an equally important matter.
"Been thinking about the name."
"Uh-huh," said Jeannie. In fact she might have said something else entirely, but with a mouth full of nuclear pins Tony couldn't tell.
"I like names that have 'The' in front of them."
"Mmm."
"The Judge."
Jeannie stopped, removed the pins from her mouth, and looked up at Tony. "No." She resumed work.
"The Judge and Jury?"
Pins out. "Yes, that's great! No wait, the other thing. Fucking terrible." Pins in.
"Well OK then," said Tony. He looked back out the window. Names weren't his thing. All of the good ones were already taken. Not that there was any kind of registry, like domain names or trademarks or anything, but superhero names could be copyrighted. Even Aurora had fallen foul of that one. It had been a supervillain's plot, back when there had been more than just one supervillain and one superteam. Red Tape, he had called himself. He'd been second-rate… no, third-rate, at the very least. But he'd been a real handful and although he'd been taken down easily, he'd caused no end of trouble for the Seven Wonders. And since then, Aurora's full name was the slightly awkward Aurora's Light to avoid the rights issues over the original, shorter version laid down by Red Tape's final act of bureaucratic terror, a superpowered contract that promised the Pacific and North American tectonic plates would suddenly wrench the West Coast apart should Aurora's name be incorrectly cited in any official document from now until ninety-five years after Red Tape's death.
But now Tony knew he needed a superhero name. Something original, something with impact and which also reflected his aims and intentions.
Shit. It was hard work.
Jeannie finally embedded the pins into three sheets of gray fabric that were loosely wound around Tony's middle, stood up, and tapped his biceps. Tony took that as an indication he could lower his arms and get off the chair.
"Done?"
"Done." Jeannie nodded, adjusted the pins, and directed Tony to step out of the costume template. Tony then swung the chair around on one leg and sat on it backwards, resting his arms on the back, watching Jeannie align the panels of top-secret material on the table.
"You seem to have this sewn up. Oh, I'm a funny guy. But seriously, what did you have in mind?"
Jeannie fiddled with the atomic sewing machine. "If you like the letter 'J' − and I have no idea why − then Justiciar. Or even 'the' Justiciar. It's original and it means what it means."
"Sorry, I forgot to do my Latin homework this morning."
"It's not Latin, that would be justiciarius"
"Of course. My mistake."
Jeannie poked her tongue out at him. "The Justiciar was a law keeper in medieval Europe. Sort of like a policeman and judge, an officer of the law."
Tony clicked his fingers. "Judge and Jury!" he said again. His smile was ridiculous.
"Yeah, because Judge Judy is a great nickname."
"Judge Judy is a superhero? I fucking knew it."
"You bet. Why do you think her show starts with that voiceover? 'Real people. Real cases. Judge Judy.' It's a secret identity."
Jeannie reached for a set of heavy industrial goggles that lay next to the machine. "The Justiciar is shit cool though, yeah?"
Tony's mouth worked the unfamiliar word. It sounded odd and memorable. He nodded. "Let's run with it for now. See how it fits." He stood and walked behind Jeannie, peering low over her shoulder as she fitting the special fabric under the foot of the sewing machine. "I don't even know what I'm going to look like. You sure you know what you're doing?"
Jeannie nodded, eyes tight in concentration as she prepped the machine. "Trust me, I've had a lot of experience."
"Ah yeah. Amateur dramatics at the company? Christmas shows, that kind of thing?"
Jeannie looked up for a moment. "Yeah, that kind of thing."
"Cool, cool." Tony stood. "I'll leave you to it." He walked to the kitchen and came back with a beer.
Jeannie carefully adjusted the alignment of lasers and needle, slid the goggles down her forehead, and started bondi
ng the Justiciar's armor together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Unlike the morgue at the central city hospital, which acted as the SVPD's main processing center for bodies, the ballistics department was housed in the main precinct building itself in downtown San Ventura. And unlike the morgue, the ballistics department was a place that Sam liked to visit.
She wasn't sure why, exactly, because while it lacked the stench of formaldehyde and racks of chilled bodies in various stages of decomposition or examination, it was still very much a laboratory. And laboratories had never been Sam's thing. She'd taken chemistry at UCSV as her major, but had only lasted a single semester. The sterility of the place, the whiteness of the appliances, the humming of refrigerators, the need for gloves and lab coats and safety goggles, and the silent lurking presence of emergency showers spaced at intervals along the big undergraduate chemistry laboratory had terrified Sam. She'd known it was irrational – a phobia, pure and simple – and had even gone to see the Dean of Studies about it, but unable to shake it off she'd switched to a paralegal course which eventually got her interested in law enforcement. So it goes, and here she was.
Perhaps then it was the feeling of an enemy defeated, the satisfaction that came with overcoming her phobia in the course of her job. Because – like the city morgue – visiting the ballistics department wasn't an uncommon task for a detective in SuperCrime.
"Ballistics" wasn't the official name of the department – it was the Forensic Ballistics and Materials Science, which made more sense as there was a lot more to it than just looking at guns and figuring out who had fired them and what they had fired. The department had its own single-alley shooting range, deep in the basement underneath the main street where the sound would be adequately baffled, and three large laboratories attached to it. The labs were ringed with six offices, in one of which sat Diana Lansbury, the head of the section.
"You realize what you've got here?"
Sam found her lips tightening as she watched Lansbury finger the ziplocksealed evidence bag on her desk. Within was the strip of black curled fabric.
Joe sighed next to her and Sam knew the feeling. Lansbury was someone you might call… old-fashioned. For as long as Sam could remember, Lansbury had ruled her basement empire, and for as long as Sam could remember, Lansbury was about due for retirement. She was one of those older women who had stayed fresh-faced and bright-eyed, her hair still refusing to gray. She was also a scientist, one of the best on the force, and perhaps that explained her eternal youth as well – she was, as Sam well knew, fulfilling her passion, which was her job. Only someone with such absolute single-minded focus on her career could put in such long hours, become such an expert, and apparently be so energized and revitalized by the sheer volume of work.
That, or she'd been granted eternal youth by a superhero back in the Middle Ages. Perhaps she was one herself.
Sam licked her lips. At least Lansbury got job satisfaction. So few people in life achieved their aims. She idly wondered if there was more to her own than the pursuit of the Cowl, but then wondered if there was anything about that that was particularly wrong anyway.
So it was a shame in many ways that Lansbury was a pain, as Captain Gillespie often said, in the fanny. Sam choked back a snort of laughter as she remembered the chief's quite serious appraisal when she'd told him they were heading downstairs to get the results of Lansbury's analysis. The captain said it each and every time, with a fixed look and a tight forehead, like he was offering a vital warning to an intrepid explorer heading into the unknown. Sam knew well enough the ins and outs of Lansbury's manner, and she'd learned through a couple of years of painful trial and error how to deal with her.
The method was simple: keep quiet, look interested and let Lansbury do all the talking.
The problem was that Joe hadn't quite got the hang of it. Sam glanced at her partner, sitting with one leg wrapped over the other in the short space between his chair and Lansbury's desk, an ancient and valuable specimen that was far too large for the pokey underground office. The muscles along Joe's jawline pulsed as he stifled a yawn. Sam looked back at Lansbury, but it was too late. Lansbury had noticed Joe's apparent boredom.
"Low on oxygen are we, detective?" said Lansbury, flicking the evidence bag on her desk and leaning back in her chair, another piece of furniture of the kind they just didn't make anymore. It occurred to Sam that they'd probably been installed in the building's basement when it had been built back in the 1930s. Perhaps Lansbury had signed for the delivery herself.
Sam leaned forward in an attempt to bring herself back to the task at hand. She sniffed. It wasn't hot in the office, but the air was thick and stale and smelt of browning paper and lit fireworks.
"I'm sorry, Doctor Lansbury," she said with a smile that the scientist viewed with some disdain before, apparently, deciding it was genuine. "We hoped you were going to tell us just what we had."
Lansbury sniffed loudly and began shuffling through a manila folder. Sam noticed for the first time that there was no computer in the room.
"I'll send the full report up to you tomorrow once I get it typed up, but I can give you a summary now." Lansbury found the right piece of paper. Sam saw it covered in a thick handwriting with large letters.
"It's synthetic, a ceramic–plastic polymer."
Joe jerked in his chair like he'd just woken up, but when Sam turned to face him she saw his face creased with serious focus.
"That means a superhero?"
Lansbury's right eyebrow went up. Sam clicked her fingers.
"Or supervillain," she said. "Right?"
Lansbury sniffed a third time. "The material is similar to that used by some superheroes, both retired and still active. As you know, this department cooperates with the Seven Wonders on a number of citywide initiatives, and in exchange we have part of their database on reference. This material is similar, but not the same to the material used for Aurora's suit."
Sam sank back into her chair. Well, she'd thought that would be the case – not that the sample would be the same as, or similar to, Aurora's suit, but that it was a high-tech fabric that could have only come from one source. The Cowl.
But she knew how limited their access to the superhero database was. That was probably as far as Lansbury was able to go. Confirmation of a theory, but nothing that could be acted on.
"Don't be so keen to make assumptions, Miss Millar."
Sam froze in her chair, realizing after Lansbury did that her muscles were tense, part-way to lifting herself from the chair, eager to terminate the discussion. The fact that Lansbury had called her "miss" rather than "detective" was noted with irritation.
Sam relaxed back into the chair. She exchanged a look with Joe, but Joe still had his poker face on. He turned back to Lansbury.
"What are we trying not to assume here?"
Lansbury rubbed an eye; Sam watched the skin over her cheekbone move too much under her finger. Sometimes Lansbury showed her real age.
"You're assuming that I've spent the best part of three days analyzing this sample and getting zero results. But actually I can tell you more than just its composition. I can tell you where it came from. In fact, I can tell you who invented the base compound."
Sam blinked. "I was under the impression that these kinds of fabrics are either the work of the superhero community, or some government or military authority, access to which requires security clearance well above our collective pay grades?"
Lansbury hissed like a bicycle tire with a slow puncture.
"Impressions, assumptions. See? Just wait until you get some experience under your belt, then you won't be so quick to make your mind up on a case. Particularly a case as important as this."
Zing. Sam felt her face beginning to heat. Lansbury knew exactly where to place that barb – the whole precinct knew about her history with regard to public enemy number one, the Cowl.
Her and David Millar's history.
The laboratory phobia began
to return, crawling into the edges of Sam's vision like black snow. They were underground, it was stuffy, there was no natural light. Sam wasn't claustrophobic, but she had limits.
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