Brown Recluse said, “The Guild’s bylaws related to the Trials are quite clear. Overlord is the final arbiter of who passes. You know those regulations were put into place to stop the blatant favoritism that existed before we had Overlord. Unless Myth and Kinetic admit they tampered with the results, you have no choice but to accept Overlord’s decision.” I had the feeling we were witnessing an argument the proctors had been having for days while I was unconscious.
“We didn’t tamper with anything,” I said.
“That right,” Isaac added. “If we could game the system, we would simply have had Overlord declare each of us the winners, high-fived each other, and then called it a day. Look at us. Instead we beat each other nearly to death. It was a fair fight. If Overlord says we both deserve to win, then we both deserve to win.”
Pitbull sighed in frustration.
“My colleagues are right. I have no choice under Guild bylaws but to declare each of you the winner and allow you to take the Hero’s oath and get your licenses.” Pitbull’s dark eyes flashed angrily. “But know this: If I ever find proof that either or both of you cheated, I will make it my new life’s mission to see you are stripped of your license. I’ll also have you prosecuted criminally. For fraud and anything else I can think of.”
Isaac was so angry, he looked like he was about to have a stroke. With a visible effort, he controlled himself.
“Am I correct in believing that, short of being caught cheating, now that we have completed all the tests, you have to give us our licenses?” he asked Pitbull.
“Yes,” Pitbull admitted grudgingly.
“Good,” Isaac said. “Then I’m at liberty to say what I’ve always thought: Your name is really stupid. Pitbull? Really? What, was Chihuahua Man already taken? Is biting children your superpower? As soon as I get out of this bed, I’m going to do the world a favor and put a muzzle on you.”
Brown Recluse laughed out loud. His laugh trailed off when Pitbull glared at him. Then Pitbull spun and walked out of the infirmary.
Still looking amused, Brown Recluse opened his mouth to say something. He apparently thought better of it as he turned to trail after Pitbull. Lotus left last, winking at me again before the door drew closed behind him.
Neha, who hadn’t said a word this whole time, walked up to stand between our beds.
“Alright guys, now that we’re alone, fess up. Which one of you did it? Or was it both of you?” she asked.
“What?” I said.
Neha rolled her eyes. “Come on. This is me you’re talking to. If you’re worried about listening devices, don’t. I checked. Plus, Overlord doesn’t have access to this room for medical privacy reasons. The only ears in this room are ours. You can tell me how you guys pulled this off. You know I’m not going to blab it to anyone. I just want to give credit where credit is due.” Her eyes shined eagerly. “I will say I’m surprised either of you would do something like this. This is more along the lines of something I would do.”
“Has everyone suddenly gone deaf and stupid?” Isaac said, almost shouting. “We did not cheat! You want me to say it in Hindi so you can understand it better?”
Neha looked a combination of suspicious and uncertain.
“Maybe you should just leave, Neha,” I said. “Both Isaac and I have been through a lot. We need our rest.”
“If I’m wrong, I apologize,” she said.
“Just get out,” Isaac said irritably.
Neha hesitated for a moment. Then, she walked to the door.
“I’ll come visit you guys tomorrow,” she said before the door closed shut behind her.
“Can you believe their gall?” Theo asked. He sounded offended. “All the hard work and sacrifice we poured into pursuing a license, and those knuckleheads are questioning the results.”
“It’s insulting,” I agreed.
The room fell silent for a bit.
“I didn’t cheat,” Isaac finally said, “but just so you know, I did hold back on you a little. Because you’re my buddy. In the real world, if we ever did throw down, I’d beat you like a stolen drum.”
“Who do you think you’re kidding?” I scoffed. “A real fight between us would consist of two hits: I’d hit you, and then you’d hit the ground.”
“It’s ‘whom’ not ‘who.’”
“I know that. Don’t be pedantic.”
The room was quiet again for a bit.
“Thanks,” I said, thinking of how he had stopped me from passing out and told me to hit him again. If it hadn’t been for that, Overlord would have probably judged Isaac the winner by TKO.
“For what?”
“You know what.”
There was a silence for a few moments.
“Yeah, I know. Don’t mention it,” Isaac said. “You would have done the same for me. Besides, you’re the guy who got Trey bounced from the Trials. I figured I owed you one.” Isaac yawned noisily. “Now stop flapping your gums so I can get some shut-eye. Whatever meds they put me on have got me as sleepy as a narcoleptic.”
In a very short while, Isaac started snoring. Though I also was tired and in pain despite the haze of meds I too must have been on, I had a lot on my mind.
The truth was, I had done the same for Isaac. I had spoken the truth when I told the proctors we hadn’t tampered with anything. We hadn’t cheated.
Unbeknownst to Isaac, I had though.
When I had lain in my bed hours before my fight against Isaac, it had occurred to me the situation as a no-win scenario. That had triggered in my mind something from Star Trek, of all things. In the movie The Wrath of Khan, it was revealed that James T. Kirk had been the only Starfleet cadet to prevail in the Kobayashi Maru, a computer simulation designed to test how the cadets would respond to a no-win situation. After flunking the test twice, the third time Kirk reprogrammed the computer so he could prevail. In his mind, there was no such thing as a no-win situation.
I agreed with Kirk. As far as I was concerned, was a Hero’s job to find a way to win, to make a way out of no way. Once I had thought of the Kobayashi Maru, it inspired me to emulate Kirk. I had left my room to go talk to Hacker. As she had said after our test on Hephaestus, she owed me one. Once I explained what I had in mind, she was only too happy to use her Overlord access panel to break through its security and reprogram it. She looked as happy as a pig in mud while doing it. As she had told me on Hephaestus, breaking the rules was what hackers did.
When I had asked her if she could hack into Overlord without it being traced back to either me or her, Hacker had looked at me like I should be in a padded room and kept away from sharp objects. I had taken that as a “no.”
Hacker had wanted to reprogram Overlord so that it would declare me the winner of my fight with Isaac regardless of who actually won. I told her I didn’t want that. I just wanted to give Isaac and me a chance to both be declared the winner if the fight was close. If we both deserved it, we both would win. If one of us was the clear-cut winner, the other would have lost.
As Kirk said, there were no no-win situations. If the cause is just, a Hero finds a way to win. Even if he breaks the rules a little.
Okay, I’ll admit it—as much as I tried to justify it, I felt pretty guilty about cheating. I had been raised Catholic, after all. Feeling guilty was kind of our thing. Guilt was baked into Catholicism the way Purgatory and the Immaculate Conception were. I didn’t think my parents would approve of what I had done. What they would approve or disapprove of was my touchstone for what was moral or immoral.
Then again, I was convinced Pitbull had bent the rules himself by making sure I went up against one of my friends instead of having my opponent be chosen at random. Also, I would never forget how Isaac had encouraged me to keep fighting when he could have just let me pass out and taken the win for himself.
When I thought about those things, I felt a lot less guilty.
My level of guilt shrank to almost non-existent when I thought about what Hacker had discovered when she had ha
cked into Overlord’s system.
Hacker had discovered who had gotten into Overlord’s system to plant the nanites that had attacked me. That same person had programmed Overlord to allow one of the Hero proctors to plant the bomb in the holosuite that had nearly killed me, Neha, the other test-takers, and God knew how many other people in the Guild complex. Hacker said that person had left almost no trace of their activity. Only a Meta as adept at dealing with intelligent machines as herself would have been able to discover who had done it, she had said without a trace of embarrassment over her lack of modesty.
The person who had accessed Overlord and who had tried to kill me was none other than the creator of Overlord himself:
Mechano of the Sentinels.
Me knowing who had been targeting me during the Trials was the thought that had distracted me when I had first faced Isaac during our final test.
I didn’t know what my newfound knowledge meant yet. Was Mechano also the one who had hired Iceburn to try to kill me, leading to Dad’s death? Neha had told me long ago that a big-time Metahuman assassin like Iceburn only worked for Metahuman big-leaguers. As a member of one of the most powerful group of Heroes in the world—if not the most powerful—Mechano certainly qualified as a big-leaguer. Was Mechano also behind the blonde woman who had planted the small bomb in my pocket after the bank robbery? Maybe. That bomb was pretty much identical to the one I’d found in the mall, only it had been smaller.
Were the other Sentinels in cahoots with Mechano? And why come after me? What in the heck did I ever do to Mechano or the Sentinels? They were Heroes. To a lot of people, they were the Heroes. Avatar himself had been a member of the Sentinels when he had been murdered. They weren’t supposed to be doing things like hiring assassins and trying to kill people.
I didn’t know what was going on. I had more questions than answers.
Here’s what I did know: I had finally earned a license and the right to wear a Hero’s cape. As soon as I got out of this hospital bed and was sworn in as a Hero, I was going to go after Mechano. I’d go up against every single one of the Sentinels if it turned out they were behind my father’s death. I didn’t care how powerful they were.
I had proven to myself I was powerful too.
The End
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If you haven’t already read Caped, Book One of the Omega Superhero Series, you can check it out here:
CAPED: THE OMEGA SUPERHERO, BOOK ONE
In Sentinels, Book Three of the Omega Superhero Series, Theo confronts the Sentinels, the world’s preeminent superhero team. He learns of his world-changing destiny. Sentinels will be released in April, 2017. Click on the link below to sign up for Mr. Brasher’s e-mail newsletter for release information about the third book in the Omega Superhero Series and other new books, as well as for bonuses given exclusively to newsletter subscribers:
DARIUS BRASHER’S NEWSLETTER
If you liked this book, you’ll probably enjoy Mr. Brasher’s Superhero Detective Series, which is set in the same world as Caped where Metas must be licensed to legally use their powers. In fact, the Sentinels are introduced in the fourth book of the series. These books feature Truman Lord, an uncostumed licensed Hero and private eye who uses his powers to solve crimes. The books in the Superhero Detective Series can be found on Amazon here:
Book One: SUPERHERO DETECTIVE FOR HIRE
Book Two: THE MISSING EXPLODING GIRL
Book Three: KILLSHOT
Book Four: HUNTED
Follow Darius Brasher on Twitter at www.twitter.com/dariusbrasher or feel free to drop him a line at [email protected].
Turn the page for an excerpt from Superhero Detective For Hire, Book One of the Superhero Detective Series.
EXCERPT FROM SUPERHERO DETECTIVE FOR HIRE
Late one afternoon about a week and a half after David Hoff was killed, I returned to my office building after standing up for truth, justice, and the American way. Actually, that’s not true. Upholding truth, justice, and the American way was above my pay grade. I let world-renowned Heroes like the Sentinels and the other Heroes who flew around in tights worry about such things. My daily concerns were a lot more prosaic: doing the things my clients hired me to do. If truth and justice were a side effect of that, so much the better. What were truth and justice anyway? I might not recognize them if I tripped over them. I was a Hero, not a philosopher.
Unfortunately, as far as my client Eileen Rothbury was concerned, I was doing a pretty lousy job so far of doing what she was paying me to do. I still had no idea of who killed George Chase. By that point I had spoken to a slew of the women George had slept with and blackmailed. I had not even gotten to all of them yet. George had been quite prolific in his bedmates, and there were still women I needed to interview. I had also interviewed some of their husbands and the people who could attest to their alibis. The ones who had alibis, that is. I had also spoken to some of my contacts in the underworld to see if they knew anything about George’s death. I had consulted with the police. I had a bunch of facts and leads and things to follow up on. It was times like this I wished I had a staff to help me. Or, at least a young male sidekick who wore tights, exclaimed “Holy Toledo Truman!” periodically, and with whom I could have homoerotic tension.
I knew a lot, but not the thing I was most concerned about: Who had shot George Chase? I had so many details and facts from so many different people I felt like I was drowning in them. The more I learned, the less I knew. But, that was how it was in an investigation. You gathered information and facts and eventually, patterns began to emerge, and what you were looking for fitfully revealed itself. I hoped for my sake this would happen in George’s case before I was old and grey.
The frustration I was feeling almost made me put my key into my office door without consciously registering what my powers were telling me. But, before I slipped the key into the lock, I became aware of what my powers were saying: someone was in my office. No, not just a someone. Two someones.
The hand my key was in froze. I concentrated and confirmed it—there was the unmistakable water signature of two people in my office. Based on the amount of water, it was two men. One of them was on the far side of my office across from the door. The other was on the left, unhinged side of the door, leaning against the wall.
I had locked the office door as usual when I had left hours before. Without moving, I examined the door and lock. Everything looked normal. I was tempted to try the door to see if it was still locked, but I did not want to alert the men to my presence if they did not already know I was on the other side of the door.
Maybe the men were door-to-door salesmen of burglar alarms who had entered my locked office to demonstrate how easy it was to defeat a lock. Maybe they were especially pushy religious missionaries who knew how to pick locks. Maybe they were cops waiting to give me a Crimebuster of the Year award. Maybe the men were friends of mine who were surprising me for my birthday. But, my birthday was months away, and I did not have any friends stupid enough to break into my office to surprise me. Lurking in my office for the purpose of surprising me was a good way to get shot by me.
It seemed more likely the men were in my office awaiting my return with the intent to cause me harm. The fact anyone would bear me ill will showed exceedingly poor taste. Unfortunately, a lot of people had poor taste.
Or, maybe I was being paranoid. But, as I have said before, even paranoids had enemies.
Information was power. I needed to know who the men were in my office so I could act accordingly. I turned away from my door and walked back down the hallway to the flight of stairs. I went down to the ground floor and out of the front of my building. I stopped at my car and grabbed a small pair of binoculars I kept in the glove compartment. I also kept a spare gun in there, but I already had one holstered under my sh
oulder concealed by my jacket.
I was tempted to be a scofflaw in the interest of speed and cross to the other side of the road in the middle of the street. But, my office window directly overlooked that part of the street. If drivers blew their horns at me as I crossed the street illegally, it might draw the attention of whoever was in my office. So, like a good little law-abiding citizen, I went up to the crosswalk and waited for opposing traffic to have a red light before I crossed. As I crossed, I felt a faint itch between my shoulder blades, as if there was a bull’s-eye painted there. I knew it was just my imagination. Yet all the same I was happy to enter the building across the street from mine and to get from out in the open.
I took the stairs up to the third floor. I found the office directly across the street from mine. The name on the outer glass doors to the office read Sullivan and Keith, Attorneys at Law. I opened the door and went inside. The interior was bright, tidy, and modern. Sullivan and Keith appeared to be prospering. Maybe I should have consulted with them about updating my will before I went back into my building.
I breezed past the receptionist with a wave and a smile. I moved so quickly I was well past her by the time she reacted. She shouted “Hey! You can’t go back there!” to my already receding back.
Moments later, I located the office of secretaries I had observed so closely from time to time from my window directly across the street. I entered it, and strode to the window across from mine. I was faintly aware of several people looking at me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” one of the secretaries asked me. I recognized her as one of my favorites to look at from my office window. She had glossy black hair and was slightly overweight, but the weight was distributed in all the right places. I put a finger up to my lips.
Trials: The Omega Superhero Book Two (Omega Superhero Series 2) Page 24
