by Drew Hayes
“This, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, is a bit different. We don’t broadcast its existence with grand schematics or cumbersome doors. This is the heart of our system, the only place where serious, permanent changes can be made. The three of us have remote terminals that can grant temporary clearances or operate the system, but those have strict limitations. We wouldn’t want anyone hacking or stealing them and causing trouble. That’s why we have this heart, this solemn chamber where only those specifically chosen can enter. And like any true heart, it is both delicate and powerful.”
Quorum moved to the center of the room where the button-less terminal stood. As he moved close, a hatch opened and a single object, like an egg on a pole, rose upward. “In here, and only here, true change can occur. As of today, you will be the first non-founder to have permissions within this room. You will have full access to every non-personal aspect and area and the ability to raise the permission levels of those you deem trustworthy. This is a historic day, Apollo.”
“One I will remember for the rest of my life.” There was no insincerity in his voice, nor would it have found a home there. Apollo truly meant those words with every fiber of his being. “But can you do this alone? I imagined the Champions’ Congress would all need to be present.”
“There are only three of us, Apollo, and we trust each other.” Quorum pressed his index fingers to the egg. A soft glow illuminated his entire body. “The others used their remote devices to give permission for this promotion, but only one of us is necessary to carry it out. It was a function added after Lodestar was stuck in a black hole for a month and we were unable to create a temporary council replacement. Thus it was decided that one was enough, though Professor Quantum did take great pains to ensure no one could trick the system. These scanners detect everything from your DNA to your brainwaves to your dimensional footprint. Nothing is impossible, but this is as close as we’ve come to total security.”
The glow faded, and a new hatch opened, bringing up a fresh egg-looking device in front of Apollo.
“And now, my young superhero, it’s your turn. You have worked long and hard to earn this honor, so reach out and claim it as your own. Once you’re scanned, you will have all the rights and privileges of a member of the Champions’ Congress.”
Apollo didn’t need to be told twice. He reached out his hands, noting that the glow cascading over him was almost chilly. All that work, all those years, and now, at last, it was finally in his hands. Literally in his hands. Such a simple, unassuming egg, but it would give him the prize he’d been after all this time. It was the last piece he’d need to begin the work superheroes were truly meant to do.
Wiping out villains.
Chapter 62
Ivan was surprised at how empty his house felt. When the weekend ended, he’d expected a return to normalcy, or at least the strange situation that passed for normalcy these days. But Tori had barely paused long enough to wolf down dinner before she’d buried herself back in the basement lab. Granted, she already spent a lot of time down there, but usually she’d emerge on occasion to grab a beer from the fridge and make a little small talk. This time, Ivan didn’t see her again until it was time to leave for work, and she emerged from the hidden basement blinking the exhaustion out of her eyes.
Work seemed to fly by now that he’d gotten mostly caught up from his time away. Of course, he’d no sooner finished his backlog than the word came down from Mrs. Espinoza that Donald wouldn’t be coming in for a week, maybe two, and that what few remaining responsibilities he still had were to be pawned off on the other programmers. This little shuffle wasn’t particularly hard, especially since Ivan had prepared for the possibility as soon as Donald signed up with the AHC, but it was a bit depressing. Donald really had been one of his best employees, the right mix of smart and cowardly that meant he’d contribute to the company but never be bold enough to strike out on his own. Replacing him wouldn’t be easy, but that was life in Ridge City.
If Tori was bothered by the absence of her friend, it didn’t show. In fact, she barely seemed engaged with the world around her. Her work was flawless and she upheld all the expected pleasantries when greeting others in the office, but it was clear at a glance that her mind was elsewhere. Ivan could hardly blame her, given the proverbial sword dangling over her head, just days away from falling or being removed; it was a wonder she kept things as together as she did.
Tuesday was no different, Tori emerging exhausted in the morning after a hastily-eaten dinner and another night in the basement. Ivan was prepared for more of the same on Wednesday as he finished up the last of his pancakes, but to his surprise, it was a well-rested, vibrant-eyed Tori that stepped out from behind the wall-panel. Her suit was crisp and there was a spring in her step as she descended on the table, grabbing her now cold breakfast and slathering it with syrup.
“This is a nice change,” he commented, not sure how else to broach the subject of her zombie-like state for the last few days.
“Tonight’s the big show, so I cut myself off from work at midnight and went to bed. Last minute crunch time is well and good, but I need a clear head if we want to pull off tonight’s job.” If Tori was bothered by the room-temperature pancakes, she didn’t show it, digging in like she hadn’t eaten in days. Which, really, she hadn’t—all she’d been doing before was quieting her hunger.
“A very responsible decision,” Ivan said. “Were you able to get everything done that you wanted?”
“Holy hell no. Not by a long shot.” Tori’s reply shot a few pancake crumbs across her end of the table, something that might have bothered Ivan more if his own children didn’t commit similar sins at least once a weekend. “I got the thruster system put in but couldn’t tweak the output enough to safely compensate for the combined weight of me and the suit, which means flight is off the table. I realized I didn’t have nearly enough money or parts to get my magnetic disruptor small enough, either. Actually, money and size held me back from most of the things I wanted to implement, with time tagging in as the pain-in-the-ass third.”
“Yet you seem surprisingly upbeat.”
“Well, duh. I might not have gotten everything I wanted, but I did manage the one that was the most important.” Tori’s grin was stretched from ear to ear, a combination of mischief and pride that would have left Ivan very worried if he were an enemy. As it was, it still made him mildly concerned.
“I did it, Ivan. It worked last night. It isn’t perfect, and there’s a lot of adjustments I need to cram in before we leave tonight, but I managed to create a successful prototype meta-suit. I can’t tell you how that feels, after so many years of half-assing my way around makeshift labs and jerry-rigging parts to test concepts. Last night, I finally did something that was only a dream. I made my suit, Ivan. And tonight, I get to give it a genuine field test.”
“That is a very high stakes scenario to be taking your first test drive in.” Ivan didn’t try to dissuade her precisely, but he did want to be sure she’d really thought things through. Smart as Tori was, she could also get caught up in her own ambition, which was precisely what had landed her inside Wade’s vault in the first place. Having a meta-suit on the job could be a serious asset, but it could just as easily become a liability if things went awry.
“Give me a little credit here. This isn’t my first robbery,” Tori replied. “I checked everything thoroughly last night, and I’ll do another sweep before I take it out. Plus, every device we factored into the plan is detachable, meaning that even if it all goes to shit, I can salvage what we need and dump the rest. I do still have my fire powers, no matter what else happens.”
“It’s a pragmatic approach, but would you really be willing to discard something you worked so hard on?” Ivan asked.
“Sure. It’s just tech.” Tori grabbed the syrup and squeezed the last few drops out, drawing desperate wheezes from the collapsing plastic. “The important part is the design and testing. Once I’ve actually got my schematics, re
building is just a matter of supplies and time. Though it would take me a while to save up enough to make another. Getting that prize money from our desert fight helped out a lot.”
“Somehow I think you could make it work with a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.” Ivan happened to tilt his glass of orange juice up at that moment, so it wasn’t until several seconds later that he saw the stunned, dumbstruck face of his apprentice staring at him. “What?”
“What do you mean, what? You just casually mention the idea of me getting over a hundred grand and then don’t explain what the hell you’re talking about? Of course I’m waiting to hear more.”
It was Ivan’s turn to be puzzled as he set down his glass and met Tori’s gaze. “I’m not sure where I lost you in this discussion. It can’t have been at the math. Dividing five hundred by four isn’t exactly advanced calculus.”
“Five hundred by...” Tori’s voice trailed off. The syrup near the edge of her plate started to bubble, a rare slip in her control of the ambient temperature. When she found her voice again, it was strangled and choked, like she was forcing each word out one by one. “Ivan, are you saying we get to keep the money from tonight’s job?”
“Of course you get to keep it, you’re the ones who are stealing it. Minus the guild’s cut, I mean. Did you think we were going to have you steal half a million dollars and then spend it on new couches or something?”
“Well, no, but it just occurred to me... I mean, we’re only apprentices,” Tori pointed out.
“Today, you’re only apprentices. If tonight goes well, you’ll be full members. This is a guild of criminals, people who don’t react well to people taking what’s rightfully theirs. You do the work, you keep the rewards. That’s always been our policy.” Ivan rose from his chair, grabbed his dishes and took them into the kitchen, where he set them in the sink. Once he returned, Tori had finished her breakfast, but now had a new, nervous aura around her.
“You look worried,” he noted.
“No shit,” she shot back. “You just told me that if tonight’s job goes well, I’m going to get a payday of over a hundred grand. Those kind of stakes will put anyone on edge.”
“As opposed to, say, knowing that if you screwed up, it would probably cost you your life?”
Tori shook her head and got up from the table, dishes in hand as she made her way to the kitchen. “You don’t get it, Ivan. That was just my life. This, this is fucking money.”
* * *
“How are things?” Apollo stepped into the monitoring room—nicknamed the Chamber of Boredom by most of the other superheroes—and spoke to one of the few members of the AHC who didn’t complain when getting put on monitoring duty. Stalwart Iron sat unmoving save for the precise motions of his fingers, screening through a variety of police and emergency reports. The AHC employed more than two dozen mundane humans whose job it was to find situations that required superheroes and dispatch those who were on duty, but it was policy to always have at least one cape, if not more, on hand at all times to oversee the operation. There were certain patterns one could recognize, hunches they could follow, a kind of intuition that only came from having been out in the field personally.
“A slight uptick in activity, though nothing outside normal parameters,” Stalwart Iron replied, not bothering to look at Apollo. The mechanical man, salvaged from the lair of some mad scientist that had bitten off more than he could chew by going after a cape, often left others on edge. They never quite trusted artificial intelligence, but Apollo honestly preferred it. People could be so emotional and impractical; at least Stalwart Iron was predictable. Even if he’d been gifted with agency, that agency was still made of ones and zeroes. There were limits, and that made him more useful than ninety percent of the other superheroes Apollo worked with.
“Big world out there; it never gets completely quiet,” Apollo said. “Just keep me in the loop if anything unusual comes up.”
“What if... what if there is something that is not happening, but that I suspect might?” Stalwart Iron still didn’t face Apollo, but the rhythm of his keystrokes slowed. Now this was unexpected; Stalwart Iron was rarely hesitant, always working with the surety that only a machine could manage.
“A hunch?” Apollo walked over to look at the screen Stalwart Iron had been working on.
“A theory, or perhaps a pattern that plays out irregularly,” Stalwart Iron replied. “As you can see on the graph, criminal activities go through simple, very general cycles: increasing during hotter months, frequency dropping during the day, variables along those lines. However, in reviewing previous records, I noticed that sometimes, not always, we will see fluctuations like those that have come over the past week. Sudden, small events that seem random, followed by a brief pattern of diminished activity, which ends with a flurry of crime that stretches our personnel and resources thin. They don’t flag anything in the system, though, because when the dust settles, there is almost always a minimum of collateral damage. But at least one high-end theft or robbery will have occurred in the chaos.”
“I get it; someone fills the sky with smoke so we can’t find the actual fire.” Apollo scanned the graph that Stalwart was showing him, most of it little more than lines on a page. He’d never had a great head for numbers and he knew it, which was why he surrounded himself with people who didn’t share his weakness. “And you think we’re on track for one of these incidents?”
“I only know that it’s possible. Even when all the lead up is there, the pattern only fully executes roughly forty percent of the time,” Stalwart Iron replied. “However, if in the next five hours we see a significant drop-off, it would be entirely possible that we’ll soon be hit by an influx of problems.”
“I’m glad you brought this to my attention,” Apollo said, gently patting Stalwart Iron’s metal shoulder. He wasn’t sure if the metal skin conducted touch or if the sentiment came through, but since Stalwart Iron seemed to understand human gestures, Apollo made a point of using them on him. “If the dip occurs, I want you to let me know right away. No matter what I’m doing, get in touch with me. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir.” Stalwart Iron nodded.
“Good man,” Apollo said, his golden glow brightening in visible joy. “Thanks to that brain of yours, I’ve got a hunch of my own. Tonight, we’re going to catch us a whole batch of brand-new villains.”
* * *
A soft hiss filled the lab as Tori’s left gauntlet locked in place on the coupler that ended at her elbow. She flexed her fingers, testing the responsiveness, and watched as the black metal hand covering her own matched her movements. With a moment of focus, she turned her hand to living fire and repeated the motion, nearly squealing with delight as the gauntlet obeyed her motion just like it had when flesh and bone were giving the orders.
Since she needed her fire to refuel the suit’s batteries, and because the less corporeal she was the safer she was, it had been vital to find a way to manipulate her suit while in fire-form. After a lot of trial and error, she’d finally hit on the idea of using an inner material that not only converted her heat to energy but also measured the temperature at every point of contact. Since the core parts of her burned hotter, when she pressed a flaming finger to a spot in the gauntlet, it responded the way it would if it were the pressure of her flesh trying to move it. Admittedly, the system wasn’t as precise as she wanted it to be, but a hundred thousand dollars would buy more than enough components to fine tune the mechanism.
Allowing her hand to go back to normal, Tori rose from her seat, noting that her heavy steps echoed off the walls. With a quick flick on her belt, she activated the noise cancellation system, designed to match and destroy every sound her suit made before it could travel more than three inches from the source. Another step, and this time there was silence. She left it functioning until she made it across the room then turned it off. Handy a tool as it was, the damn thing gobbled power, so it was best used only when needed.
Tori w
as near her work table where the final piece of her project awaited her when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. It likely wouldn’t have even registered to her, except that the person staring back was so foreign that for a moment, she thought she was being attacked. The high-pitched whine of weapons readying filled the air before her brain caught up to her reactions and Tori forced herself to relax. She was on edge; that was the only explanation for readying an attack on her own reflection. Then again, she couldn’t blame herself. The person staring back at her was a far cry from what Tori Rivas normally saw in the mirror.
Gone was the business attire of Tori the intern and the default costume of Tori the apprentice. This woman wore a suit of black metal, with a few red accents added on in a manner she liked to think was tasteful. The suit covered her from the neck down, occasionally bulky and misshapen enough to betray that she’d focused on functionality over design. Oddly, the asymmetrical bits and disproportional lumps didn’t bother her, nor did the knowledge that only two hours of hard work had tucked away the last of the wires that had hitherto been exposed. She’d have plenty of time to refine the design, to make it sleek and cool and the sort of thing that would set other tech geeks’ hearts aflutter. But there was something special about this suit, about her first functioning prototype. Ugly as it was, she knew it would always have a place in her heart that the other iterations could only try to live up to.
