McHenry blinked, and found his surroundings entirely changed when he reopened his eyes.
Rampart removed McHenry’s electronic handcuffs and tossed him effortlessly backwards in the air. McHenry landed with an “oof” on something soft. A force field formed in the doorway like ice does on a windshield. McHenry looked down—he’d landed on a single mattress, which sat on a piece of metal jutting out from the wall of the brightly lit, but tiny room. He recognized a prison cell when he saw one. He could hear the heroes step away and talk to one another, but their voices were muffled.
A few minutes later, the energy wall disappeared and Night Owl walked in carrying a metal box in both hands. McHenry sat silently, hoping his glowering stare could ignite his nemesis.
“Need you to take off the cyber-hand-thing,” the hero gestured. “And the armor.”
McHenry glared. His tongue jabbed at the loose tooth again.
Night Owl was clearly unimpressed. “Listen, we can do this the easy way, or…”
McHenry sighed, took off his jacket, and slowly disconnected his cybernetic arm from his armor. He scratched the stump. “Well, this must feel pretty good for you, Owl.”
Grabbing the gauntlet and putting in the box, the hero tilted his head. “How so?”
“I mean,” McHenry started lifting his chest piece over his head while kicking off his rocket boots. “I haven’t been out of jail more than forty-eight hours and you’ve caught me again.”
Night Owl bent down and collected the boots, then took the chest armor from McHenry’s hand. He looked puzzled. “Again?”
“What, you don’t recognize me without my cape?” McHenry spat sarcastically. He tugged on the dark gray undersuit he had on, adjusting himself. The metal floor was cold under his bare feet. “No, I get it. Screw with the bad guy. Screw with the Machinist for messing you up so badly all those years ago. I get it.”
Night Owl shook his head, turning to walk back out of the cell. As he crossed the threshold, he said, “Man, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I fought you to a standstill six times in ninety-four!” McHenry stammered. He stood up, raising his voice, “I nearly killed you at least twice! We played cat and mouse for three years!”
“I have no idea who you are, Machine-er, or whatever,” the hero said with a shrug as the force field reformed. His voice had sounded genuine.
McHenry started shouting and he punched the wall. “I’m the Machinist and I am your fucking nemesis, you prick!”
Night Owl said something, but the translucent energy field made his voice sound like a muffled trombone. McHenry jammed himself down on the cell’s bed with a huff. He fumed for a few minutes, rocking back and forth with adrenaline, before tearing at the collar around his neck. A powerful electric shock made him slam his own shoulder against the wall before he released his grasp on the thing.
He rubbed his shoulder and looked around the cell. It was bright, and metal, and not dissimilar at all from his accommodations at Blackiron, except there was only one bed and—of all the unheard of luxuries—a television mounted to the wall of the cell. A security camera on the ceiling next to the television focused unerringly on McHenry. He gave it the finger.
McHenry sat down on the mattress and felt something dig into his back. He reached his hand under him and dug out a remote control.
“Might as well see what the hell is actually going on,” he muttered, aiming it at the screen. The television clicked to life at the press of a button.
***
Marlon Jones stepped out of a portal with a loud thump, the pavement cracking beneath his feet. He looked around, taking stock of his location, and heard something plink off his chest as he realized he was standing in front of police headquarters. Then there was another plink, and another.
Cops were unloading their firearms at him, but the bullets bounced off his stone skin.
Behind Jones, the portal rippled as the magnetic kid came through, followed by the lizard thug and his posse of beast-men. The magnetic kid raised his hand and the cops’ guns flew into the air and spun there, just outside the reach of the officers’ grasping hands.
The half-animal inmates lunged forward, jumping onto cops and tearing into their throats and chests with teeth and claws. Jones was lumbering towards the chaos when he saw the guns clatter to the ground. He turned his head back at the magnetic kid, and saw him running down the block.
“Kid, where the hell do you think you’re going?” He yelled.
The kid stopped and turned back, shouting. “This-this isn’t what I signed up for, man! Killing cops and—and, people, no way! I just got in it to make some money and have fun, man!”
“Too bad,” Jones said, as the young coward turned and kept running down the block. Jones reached over, picked up a car and lobbed towards the fleeing villain. The car came crashing down right on top of the kid.
“Fuckin’ waste,” Jones muttered. He stomped his foot creating a small seismic wave that knocked down the hero who had tried to sneak up on him.
***
The first image McHenry saw on the television set in his new cell was an overhead shot of the tree at Rockefeller Center. It was burning.
He changed the channel. A talking head was tugging at his collar, sweating as he read off a teleprompter. “—bridges were destroyed, bringing the estimated death toll to over—“
Click. This channel showed something peculiar. A small pile of rubble was visible in the foreground. Cars and streetlights could be seen behind the rubble, but it was clear that the camera was on its side. A thin stream of blood trickled out from under the pile of rocks. Something thumped loudly, and then the camera moved wildly until it faced the sky. Then the angle went down a bit and a massive face formed out of jagged rocks filled the screen. The face said, “City’s ours now, bitches,” before the screen squealed and filled with static. McHenry swore he recognized the voice: It sounded like Marlon Jones, but he wasn’t sure.
Click. An Asian female reporter stood in front of a police barricade, raindrops rolling off of her umbrella as she spoke. “Word on the street is that the Titans have captured the mastermind behind all of this, but their spokesperson hasn’t—“
Click. A high-pitched electronic whine was playing over a cartoony image of a camera with an icepack on its head and a thermometer in its animated mouth. The words “Technical Difficulties – We’ll Be Back Soon” scrolled by.
Click. A young, black reporter yelled something into his microphone as explosions of plasma and electricity broke through the air behind him. A muscular, charred body spun wildly over the camera and the reporter couldn’t help but stare at it. McHenry couldn’t tell if it was a hero or a villain that’d been crisped.
He turned off the TV. It was bad out there, really bad. Maybe he’d actually gotten lucky, having being hauled off to the heroes’ secret base. He smirked, but it didn’t last.
The big question finally hit him: What was it that Rampart had said? They thought McHenry was behind the chaos, and behind something to do with nukes?
He needed to get to the bottom of this. McHenry started thinking a little harder.
Right after the Titans showed up, Night Owl had said something about a signal, a signal traced back to “there”--to the apartment, to McHenry.
“Son of a bitch,” he gasped.
The Network had given him the gear.
They put him in that apartment.
They wanted him to go back out into the world and--and what?
He finished his thought, “The Network set me up.”
He’d been framed by the Network to take the blame while they launched an all-out attack on the world, but why? A piece of the puzzle was missing. He kept analyzing the situation.
“No,” he said to himself. It wasn’t making any sense. Clearly, the Network had the firepower to pull this off any time they wanted. So why would they need a fall guy?
He laid his head on the pillow and stared at the cell’s ceiling. “W
hat the hell is really going on?”
***
The superheroes of New York were fighting a losing battle. They’d never before faced an onslaught like this; yes, it was common knowledge that the villains outnumbered the heroes twelve to one, but they’d never come out in force before. They’d never acted in unison on such a massive scale.
Sensing defeat after the first hour of fighting, some heroes had turned tail and tried to make a break towards safety. Flying villains from the Fortress armed themselves with grenade launchers and bazookas made short work of them. Then they turned their attentions towards the bridges and tunnels of the city, demolishing them as best they could.
On the streets, heavily armed Network soldiers corralled the citizenry into bank lobbies and other enclosed spaces. The occasional masked vigilante broke through the lines of troops and made some headway in freeing hostages—but they were soon face to face with villainous powerhouses stepping out of the tele-portals that were popping up all around Manhattan.
Prisoners from The Boulder had started appearing—another super-prison, but in Europe—on the streets and in the skies of the city. As had the female meta-human inmates of the Augusta Federal Penitentiary.
The last two standing bridges in the city--the Brooklyn and George Washingon bridges--exploded, collapsing into the waters below.
News stations were reporting that NORAD command had been locked out of the system that controlled America’s nuclear arsenal, and missiles were being programmed to take aim at every major city in the world. But they hadn’t launched.
While the skyscrapers of Manhattan burned, the bank accounts of the wealthiest one percent of the world’s citizens were being drained electronically. Electrical grids around the planet sputtered and went dark.
***
The television in McHenry’s cell turned itself back on. The screen was dark but he could make out a form in the shadows of the picture. He sat up on the bed and looked at the camera.
“What do you want now? I tried to tell you,” he said, exasperated. “I’m not behind all this!”
“Oh, I am well aware,” replied a man’s deep voice. He had a British accent, but it sounded like it was filtered electronically. “Because I’m the one who is responsible.”
McHenry jumped to his feet. “Who is this?”
“You may have heard of me,” the man said. The voice’s breathing was a little labored. “Some call me the Master.”
McHenry nodded. His conspiracy theory had been proven right. Now, he thought to himself, to get some answers.
“So if you’re the one who’s really calling the shots,” McHenry asked, “Why am I in here?”
The voice was silent for a moment, then responded. “There’s a tale in that, McHenry. Or do you prefer ‘the Machinist?’”
McHenry sneered, “That depends. Do you prefer ‘the Master,’ or..?”
The voice huffed. “I suppose you might know me better by my old name, the one I began using in the sixties—the one I buried when I faked my own death twenty years ago.”
The image on the screen became clearer as the man leaned forward. He wore a dark red hooded cloak, trimmed with golden Celtic knots. His face was entirely obscured by a stylized, skull-like mask made of bronze. The mouth of the mask was articulated and moved as the man spoke.
McHenry recognized the face—well, the costume, anyway—straight away. This man was the source of many a child’s nightmares in McHenry’s youth; one of the most feared supervillains to ever cross swords with the Titans of Liberty in most of that team’s incarnations. And he was supposed to be long dead, at the hands of the nuclear-powered hero called Blackiron in a battle that claimed both their lives. Blackiron’s sacrifice had been honored by the government by naming the most advanced prison in the world named after him—while his opponent’s name was only ever spat out with disgust and outrage.
McHenry could almost hear the supposedly-dead villain smile beneath his façade as the man’s bloodshot eyes squinted mirthfully. “You may call me Baron Brass.”
“Why should I believe you?” McHenry countered. “Baron Brass died before I even started out.”
“I assure you, I have kept busy in this second life I granted myself.” The figure leaned back and crossed the fingers of his metal-gloved hands over each other. “Building up my wealth and my army by subverting the Brotherhood I started so many years ago into the Network that it is today. I began researching and plotting, fitting the pieces I needed together.”
“Say I believe you, Baron.” McHenry shrugged, sitting back down. “So, what do you want from me? I’ve watched the news. Why did you set me up to take the rap when it’s clear this is not a subtle go at taking over the world?”
“Oh, the point was never to ‘set you up,’ as you say.” The voice paused and took some deep breaths. “It’s just that I needed you to connect to the system one time. What happened to you next was irrelevant.”
McHenry tilted his head to one side like a confused puppy. The voice continued.
“You are aptly named, Nicholas McHenry. Like your namesake, Tesla, you are a skilled inventor, an unparalleled genius.” McHenry felt his heart skip a beat and he felt a smile grow across his bruised face—someone had finally acknowledged him for his brilliance. But the grin didn’t last. “But much like Tesla, you lack vision. You can’t see the big picture, the value and larger scale application of what you’ve created.
I took your technology, reverse-engineered it, and patented it. I sold those patents to various electronics corporations around the world, and made sure your technology spread to every corner of the globe. Every phone in the world, every computer, every music player … they are all connected by the basis of your creations.
For years, I had my hackers and experts embellish the technology, and load it with instructions that would execute simultaneously. Commands that would free our brothers from their cages, that would worm into every bank account and power station. Instructions to surreptitiously take over the government computer networks and lock the generals and presidents out from being able to access to their most powerful armaments.”
McHenry was not thrilled to hear this. So not only was the plot to take over the world based on his own technology, his own life’s work … but the Master had also sold patents based on it? He was getting all of the blame, all of the punishment for the Master’s scheme, but none of the credit for making it possible. Not that he particularly cared, since he was never one who thought about world domination. He just wanted to make enough money to live comfortably and improve upon his creations. But McHenry kept his mouth shut. The answer he was looking for still hadn’t come, but he felt it was close.
“Yes, if you were Tesla, well I would be Edison. I saw the bigger picture; I found a use for the technology you would have squandered on bank robberies and petty feuds with heroes who don’t even remember you.” The Master, Baron Brass, kept talking as McHenry felt his heart sink into his guts.
“But despite the best work of all my technicians, and all the other villains I recruited into my think tank, we never could get the programs to execute. Not without receiving a command signal from your brain. Everything you created was keyed to respond to your brainwaves, and only yours. So I needed to keep you alive, and I needed you to go out into today’s world and connect to one of the many devices based on your work. To put the dominoes in motion, as it were.”
“So I waited, and waited, and finally you did it. And now everything has fallen into place. By this time tomorrow, the world will belong to me, and the vast majority of the heroes will have fallen.”
“And what about me?” McHenry asked, gesturing at the television before remembering, and turning to face the camera. “You couldn’t have done any of this without me. What do I get?”
“Well, McHenry,” the voice paused and the face leaned in a little bit once again. “I had hoped to recruit you, to make you one of my lieutenants, so that in my new world you would be free to explore the sciences o
nce more and create new weapons and devices for my glory. But—“
“’But,’ what?”
“Ah, well, it became clear to me after that poor showing in New Jersey the other night,” Baron Brass’ voice sounded almost disappointed. “That you have gone past your prime, and have served your purpose. So I have but one choice…”
The lighting in the room went red and the screen changed to an entirely orange image with large numbers counting down on it. The Master’s voice boomed out over the klaxon. “I’m afraid I must put you out of your misery. I have activated the self-destruct sequence in the Titan’s base. But because of your contributions to my cause, I’ll be sporting and grant you a chance to escape.”
The restraining collar around McHenry’s neck made a buzzing noise, then disconnected from itself. It fell to the floor as the force field in the doorway dissipated.
“You have two minutes to escape.” said The Master. “Survive, and you have proven yourself worthy of joining me.”
The screen turned itself off before McHenry could respond. He bolted through the door and into the maze that was the secret underground base of the Titans of Liberty.
McHenry connected to the base’s wireless internet and pulled up a diagram of the facility. Two miles of tunnels and elevator shafts lay between him and the surface. Escape was impossible in the little time he had. He instructed his systems to search for a safe spot to hunker down in to survive the base’s explosion, and found one a few dozen meters away. Following the translucent red line that was overlaid in his vision, McHenry sprinted into the trophy room of the Titans of Liberty and sealed the door behind himself.
He ran a decryption protocol on the base’s security system, and found a subroutine that would delay the self-destruct sequence for the room he was in. He activated it, closed his eyes, and slumped to the floor, leaned up against a trophy case.
The room shook and smoke wheezed through the gap in the doorway, but the fuel-air explosion that rocked the rest of the base did not get through to where he sat panting on the floor.
Chapter Six
The Machinist Part One: Malevolence Page 5
