Behind Distant Stars Read online

  “I’m afraid that I lost our target,” I transmitted to Regrowth, glad for the vocoder that altered my voice and removed any trace of my weariness. “Any difficulties on your end?”

  "Oh God. God. Thank God,” she sobbed in a strange and manic tone that made my back stiffen in alarm. Over the communicator, I could hear her take a shallow breath to steady herself. “Things got, um, interesting when you disappeared. I could use a bit of help!”

  “Are you injured?” I shot into the air; Dr. Chaise’s technology was still interfering with some of my scanning technology, but as I gained altitude the effect began to fade.

  She took too long to answer. “A bit, yeah. Also, buried and running out of air. Hurry. Please!”

  I issued a command to summon a triage-capable medical drone from a warehouse in Boston and sped to Regrowth’s last-known location. She’d made her stand in the forested edge of a clearing.

  The grove had been verdant, once; lush and beautiful, a gently sloped field lined with sturdy English oaks that she could put towards her own defense. There’d been low bushes for cover and a plethora of flowers and vines for the heroine to control. Even against an army of mercenaries, she should have been safe.

  Some remnants of green remained, but anything larger than a blade of grass had been shredded to kindling and charred. My sensors identified Regrowth’s position and I dropped to the ground so that I could begin digging, using the Mk 35’s massive hands to tear up volumes of dirt and pieces of shattered tree roots. My powered armor might not have been ready to go one-on-one with Valiant at the moment, but it could still move earth quickly.

  “What happened?”

  “I had everything under control, and then Chaise showed up with an honest-to-God flying saucer,” she grunted uncomfortably. “I used a tree to bury myself to get out of his line of fire, but his stupid ray gun destroyed too much of the root system for me to dig myself out.”

  She may not have been able to dig, but Regrowth had been using her power to stabilize the earth. Roots from small grasses and weeds had stretched into a net, binding great clods of soil together and keeping the ground from collapsing as I tore into it. In moments, I was able to free a path to the trapped heroine; she’d been packed in tight, with only a few inches of space free around her upper body.

  I had never considered myself to be particularly claustrophobic, but I shivered at the mere thought of being constricted similarly. That Regrowth had maintained her wits was remarkable.

  With delicate care, I managed to lift away enough debris to lift the coughing woman out from under the earth. Even through the thick layer of dirt, I could tell that she wasn’t bleeding heavily. One of her arms was, however, badly broken; it looked as though she’d gained an extra elbow mid-bicep and I couldn’t help but wince in sympathy.

  “I have a medical automaton en-route, but I can dose you with painkillers right now.”

  “Oh, God yes!”

  The Mk 35’s life-support systems include a wide array of medications and narcotics useful for keeping my body functional during the rigors of combat; I routed an appropriate dosage to an external hypospray spray injector.

  “Whoo, that’s the stuff.” The change in Regrowth’s expression was almost instantaneous, and tension bled from her shoulders. “Damn…Why are you a supervillain, again? If you market this, you’d be able to take over the world legally.”

  “That particular cocktail was made possible only by ignoring copyright and patent protections to an egregious degree,” I chuckled, relieved that she felt well enough to jest. “One of the benefits of being a villain.”

  “Put a bottle of that in a ‘to-go’ bag, I may consider changing sides,” she joked, then took a deep shuddering breath. The tension seemed to bleed out of her shoulders. “Thank you. God. I didn’t think I was getting out of that.”

  “I had no choice,” I replied, and I altered the programming on the armor’s vocoder to allow some of my relief and humor to slide into Doctor Fid’s modulated speaking voice. “The Red Ghost would have killed me.”

  “He still might. I didn’t tell him that we were doing this,” she half-smiled apologetically.

  I stilled, motionless like a goliath statue. “…Why not?”

  “Miguel’s angry at Titan, but not angry enough to gaslight him,” she shook her head. “It’s not the way he thinks. He’d quit, or maybe even turn on Titan publicly…but he wouldn’t help you with this.”

  “That is unfortunate.”

  “I called him when you disappeared. He’s on his way now,” she shivered, sounding strangely vulnerable.

  It occurred to me that—though his motorcycle was undoubtedly lovely—The Red Ghost probably couldn’t manage more than a hundred miles per hour on surface streets…and that there hadn’t been terribly much air in the hole in which I’d found Regrowth. “You’ve told him that you’re safe?”

  She averted her gaze and didn’t answer.

  “Call him,” I instructed. “I won’t go far until we know for sure that Skullface and his minions are gone.”

  I secluded myself so as to give Regrowth some privacy for her call, and also to hide my own injuries. I hated fighting magic users; far too many of their attacks bypassed physical defenses. Even with my nanites working at full capacity, it would be hours before I stopped bleeding internally.

  The flying medical automaton arrived before Regrowth waved for me to return. It hovered twenty feet overhead, waiting patiently until I called it down.

  “You should go,” Regrowth told me. “The entire team is on its way; Titan and Veridian ‘ll find an excuse to start a fight if you’re still here.”

  “Let my drone fix your arm first,” I suggested. “If you're willing to accept more of my illegally obtained medical assistance, I can have your arm back in working order in two days or so.”

  She nibbled at her lower lip and nodded, and I gently helped position her for the medical robot to have easy access. A half-dozen arms, bristling with surgical equipment, extended from within the floating device.

  “You’re probably going to want to close your eyes for this next part,” I informed her. “It won’t hurt, but watching the process is exceedingly disconcerting.”

  She did so, the automaton began its bloody work. I hacked her home computer remotely and played a song from her collection; the music drowned out the disturbingly wet noises caused by the quick and precise surgery underway. Watching the apparatus work from this angle was a new experience. Until this moment, I’d been the robot’s only patient.

  The nerves in her broken arm were temporarily severed, allowing the robot to smoothly reposition the limb and set the bone. The process of lifting away muscle fiber and fascia so that dissolvable mesh bracing could be installed was messy but swift.

  Idly, I searched through the rest of her playlists. Regrowth had an interestingly eclectic taste in music. Not all of it was to my personal taste, but I took note of a few bands and albums to investigate at a later date.

  “You should release this medbot to the public,” Regrowth suggested, raising her voice to be heard over the music. “You could work something out with Miguel, like you did with the inertial displacement fields.”

  I’d conspired with Miguel Espinoza—the Red Ghost—so that he could claim that he’d reverse engineered the inertial displacement technology from equipment that he’d taken from me during our battles. The rules regarding profiting from a supervillain’s work were complicated but were generally structured to discourage villains from profiting from their crimes. Heroes were granted a significant benefit of the doubt, but that charity was not limitless.

  “I’m open to discussing the issue,” I conceded. “However, the laws concerning introducing medical technology are very complex.”

  “I’m just saying…I have a shattered humerus, and you just told me that I’ll be healed in time for Friday’s tennis lesson. That could help a lot of people.”

  “Had.”

  “What?”

&n
bsp; “Had a shattered humerus. The drone is finishing weaving a temporary cast, and you’ll get feeling back in your arm right about…now.”

  Regrowth blinked her eyes open just as the medical automaton retracted the last of its tools. Her right arm was now immobilized, slightly bent at the elbow, and wrapped in a near-skin-tight weave of hardened silk fiber. “It doesn’t hurt much at all.”

  “You still have my painkillers in your system. It will ache later this evening.”

  “Well, damn. I’m only giving this service two stars on Yip.” She grinned, then her expression turned serious. “You should get going…The rest of the Guardians will be here soon.”

  I nodded. “There is a stand of pine over there, still alive. If I bring you to it, will you be able to use them to maintain defenses long enough for help to arrive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Very well. Thank you for your assistance, and I’m sorry that you were injured. I should have planned for aerial support.”

  “You pulled me out of the dirt, there is absolutely nothing you can say that will make me place blame on those metal shoulders. Now git.”

  I got.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A thorough digital search through the secretive (and supposedly ‘unhackable’. Hah!) darkweb forums used by many ne’er-do-wells to conduct their online business confirmed that Skullface had been building up a small army of mercenaries. The efforts had been slow and careful to avoid casual detection; my own monitoring programs hadn’t noticed anything awry, and it had only been by expanding upon information that I’d been able to find about Barry, Military Boots and the rest of my abductors that a pattern began to emerge. Building up these forces had been the work of several months, begun long before I’d begun my heroic charade.

  Successfully stealing technology from Doctor Fid’s domain would be a direct attack upon Doctor Fid’s reputation. The attempted kidnapping of a corporate officer hadn’t been a mere heist intended to gather up one of the Ancient’s relics; it was also an attempt to destabilize my preeminence in the New England area. It was an insult and it was a challenge! The skeletal supervillain—perhaps thinking me a weakened target after the battle at Mercer-Tallon—had been looking to uproot me from my domain.

  Gaining one vase would be a coup but gaining control of New England would be a triumph. The Ancient had, after all, been based in Rhode Island—well within the region I had claimed. The greatest density of the Ancient’s belongings (and the most likely location of his hidden trove) was under Doctor Fid’s control.

  Skullface had gone to ground, and Dr. Chaise’s technological savvy had somehow allowed him to do so thoroughly enough that even Whisper and I working together were unable to find a trace. If Skullface was moving resources into my domain, however, then those resources would be unearthed and decimated. If he wanted the Ancient’s artifacts then I would find them first. Whatever he desired, I would see him denied!

  The Ancient had been a terrifying villain: a powerful sorcerer and a gifted scientist, he’d created horrors with which to plague the superpowered community. He rarely faced his foes directly; instead, he’d created monsters or empowered minions to fight in his place. And although he’d been captured six times, no one had ever been able to determine from whence he’d come; it was as if he had simply appeared fully formed—menacing and dangerous—to begin his reign of terror.

  Twice, he’d escaped while awaiting trial, and four more times he sat through his time in court, smiling calmly as his crimes were recounted. No prison had held him for long.

  The Ancient had disappeared before I’d finished building the first of Doctor Fid’s armors. According to rumor, he’d shown up at Lassiter’s Den, quiet and thoughtful, and ordered a Sazerac cocktail; upon finishing his drink he had wept and disappeared into the night…never to be heard from again. To this day, ordering a Sazerac at Lassiter’s Den was as good as announcing one’s retirement among the villainous community.

  The Ancient was gone, but his legacy lived on. Young upstarts occasionally rose up—claiming to be the Ancient’s heir or lost disciple—and the heroes gathered in force to combat the new threat. A number of heroes and villains were still active who’d been granted their abilities during the Ancient’s terrible experiments. And rumors spread of a vast abandoned treasure trove.

  Supposedly, clues had been left as to the location of the Ancient’s hidden trove in works of art, jewelry and literature that he’d spread throughout the world. He’d been a generous patron to many very-uncomfortable academics; given his reputation, even the most dedicated of scholars had nervously accepted their tribute. Other pieces, he’d given away as tokens of respect to rulers and kings, to lawmakers and businessmen and community leaders and humanitarians.

  It was difficult to say what had motivated the villain’s largess; only a small percentage of the offerings appeared to be at all connected to the Ancient’s villainous goals. The distribution seemed random…and that, perhaps, was the point. Over the course of twelve years, the Ancient had dispersed a wealth of possibly relevant items evenly across the Earth’s surface.

  When the Ancient had disappeared, there’d been a mad scramble to acquire these objects. Many had been traded or sold to private collectors, more had gone to auction, and others had simply been stolen. Forging certificates of authenticity had been a lucrative business for those who were willing to risk the wrath of an unhappy (possibly superpowered) client.

  The villains who’d known the Ancient best had been firm believers in the rumor of a hidden trove; Imperator Rex, in particular, had spent years seeking out items that he’d believed might hold clues. When one such item had been located in a Boston museum, the feared supervillain had come to ask my permission to rob an institution within my territory….as Skullface should have done, had he desired to avoid my wrath.

  The means by which some of this knowledge had been gathered sickened even me, but information itself is neither good nor evil. Even if I never uncovered a path to find the Ancient’s lost fortune, there was value to be gleaned from any research I uncovered along the way.

  Whatever inborn ability allowed some to babble incantations and thus reshape reality, I had none of it. Magecraft itself was beyond me. The science, though, was intriguing. I had suspicions regarding the nature of so-called ‘magic’ that would be easier to confirm with access to the Ancient’s meticulous notes. Also, I wished for my defenses to be better prepared when next I faced Skullface in battle. The Ancient’s knowledge would certainly help in that regard.

  It would, however, be several days before I could devote myself fully to this new scavenger hunt. An opportunity related to my current heroic ruse had arisen and my attention was riveted.

  ◊◊◊

  “Welcome to KNN CapeWatch,” The speaker’s voice was warm and unhurried. “I’m your host, Stan Morrow.”

  “And I’m Pamela Green.” A slight tremor in her introduction betrayed her own tension, but she smiled pleasantly nonetheless.

  “Today’s special show is being recorded in an undisclosed location with no audience and limited staff on site, so please bear with us if there are any technical difficulties.”

  “These precautions are necessary because today we’ve managed to wrangle some time with a man who has never been interviewed, despite spending decades in the public eye,” Pam continued professionally. “Our guest tonight has a long and violent history, but his recent actions have caused many to speculate that he’s had a change of heart.”

  “Doctor Fid,” Stan’s voice grew serious. “Welcome to our studio.”

  The invitation to appear on this show had represented an intriguing opportunity, but also a significant risk. Answering questions in a manner that was beneficial to the current scheme—pretending at heroism—while not disrupting other long-term goals would make for a complicated balancing act.

  “Thank you both,” I acknowledged, taking a seat in a reinforced easy chair and trusting in the Mk 36b’s vocoder to alter my voice an
d to strip any nerves from my tone. “I appreciate the efforts that you’ve put forth to make certain that this interview could occur.”

  “You are one of the world’s most well-known individuals on the planet, and yet you are also one of the most mysterious.” Ms. Green gestured towards me appreciatively. “As journalists, how could we resist?”

  “Even so, I’m grateful.”

  “You’re very welcome,” Stan assured. “A bit of background for our viewers today: Doctor Fid’s first public appearance occurred more than twenty-two years ago, and he quickly became one of the world’s most feared villains. He’s fought countless battles and faced the Earth’s mightiest heroes, yet has never been captured or unmasked.”

  “It is more recent news, however, that has created the most controversy. Eighteen months ago, a video surfaced in which Doctor Fid renounced violence and joined the anti-corporate hacker collective known as the FTW. Doctor, would you care to comment on that decision?”

  “The leader of the FTW—Starnyx—may have been a villain, but he was also a good man and a respected friend. When he died, I…I was inspired to follow his example.”

  “How did that work out for you?”

  “Well, Stan, I’m afraid that I wasn’t a good fit for the FTW’s culture,” I shrugged the Mk 36b’s shoulders expressively. “You have to understand, the FTW is made up of idealists who use illegal but non-violent means to combat social injustice; my reputation, on the other hand…”

  “Is brutal,” Pam supplied.

  “Yes.”

  “How long were you able to stay with the FTW?” the older man asked, gently.

  “Only for four months,” I said. “At that point, I was framed for a murder and the organization disavowed me.”

  “The murder of the Red Ghost,” Pam supplied.

  “Yes. Fortunately, the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.”

  They both laughed, gentle and appreciative.

  “And only a few months later,” Stan continued,” You exposed the heroes Sphinx and Peregrine for their crimes against humanity and saved the world from an alien invasion.”