Behind Distant Stars Read online

  “ 'kay.”

  ◊◊◊

  When my current house had been purchased, it had been larger than I'd needed; the property had been a status symbol appropriate for my civilian identity's position as CEO of a growing biotechnology company, a well-furnished mansion in which to grant interviews or impress investors. I hosted dinners for AH Biotech's executive staff, too; inviting them into my 'home' improved morale.

  My true refuge had been in my labs and manufacturing facilities, separate installations hidden throughout the northeastern United States. Every lab had a cot and a refrigerator; for years, I'd barely spent any time at all in Terry Markham's estate.

  That pattern had changed when I'd invited Whisper into my life. We played at the domicile, visited with her friends. The house was still larger than was necessary but it no longer felt empty.

  The smell of frying bacon lured me to the kitchen.

  “You're up early,” I yawned. “What's the occasion?”

  “Dinah got another puppy!” Whisper was standing on a step-stool at the stove, making pancakes. Also, making a mess that I would need to clean up later. “You're going to take me to her Dad's house, so I can meet it.”

  “I am, am I?” I couldn't help but smile.

  “Mm!”

  “As you wish.” I poured myself a mug of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table; soon, a plate-full of lopsided pancakes and only-slightly-burned bacon was set before me. “Thank you.”

  She set no plate for herself; when we'd begun designing her current body, we hadn't considered adding the capability to eat. She seemed to enjoy cooking, though, so further research and testing were on the list of action items.

  “Yum!” I told her; she smiled cheerfully and hacked my brain to borrow the sensory data. “What time is Aaron expecting us?”

  Aaron Schwartz was the CIO of AH Biotech; he'd been with the company for years, and his daughter was Whisper's best friend. Terry Markham had, as CEO, long maintained the appearance of amiable camaraderie with his subordinate; the illusion had crystallized over the course of the prior year, and Aaron was as close to a genuine friend as I currently had.

  “At ten!”

  “I'll finish eating and get ready.”

  “Yay! Oh. Um...and you have to promise not to be mad at Cherenkov.”

  And suddenly, the breakfast bribe made more sense.

  “I was only asleep for a few hours,” I complained. “What did he do?”

  “He was trying to be nice,” she insisted. “He said that he was out of line, and thanked Doctor Fid for taking it easy on him.”

  “Oh, for the love of Tesla...”

  “He may have also mentioned that you gave him good advice on how to be a better hero.”

  My hands covered my face. “I'm guessing that the online communities took notice?”

  The android giggled prettily.

  “Doctor Fid was the most feared supervillain on the planet,” I complained tiredly. “I fought Valiant for twenty-two and a half minutes!”

  “And then you saved the world,” Whisper sang merrily.

  “I was taking vengeance against Sphinx and the Legion!” I threw up my hands dramatically. If my ward-slash-adopted sister wanted to make this argument into a game, I was willing to play along. “Saving the world was just a side effect. Besides, I live here too! It was selfish, really.”

  “And you saved that kitten...”

  “It was falling off a window ledge,” I defended weakly. “That was just reflex.”

  “Don't be mad at Cherenkov,” she insisted. “The kitten video has more downloads, by far.”

  In retrospect, that kitten had been the beginning of the real public-perception shift. Prior to that damned calico, the media hadn't known which way to jump. Cloner, the new leader of the New York Shield, had been publicly declaring that I had averted an alien invasion and freed dozens of worlds from horrific oppression...but most remembered my vicious battle with Valiant, and the image of Doctor Fid's fearsome armor facing down one of the largest forces of heroes ever assembled. They remembered footage of brutal beating after brutal beating, two decades of pain and destruction left in my wake.

  But then I was soaring over downtown Boston and heard a little boy crying for his mother's help. Somehow, his kitten had squeezed out of his apartment window onto the building's slim ledge, well out of his reach. The earlier rain had left the concrete wet and cold, and the poor thing was shivering and mewling helplessly. The child was begging, weeping, calling for Mason (the kitten's name, presumably) to come back...but the unfortunate feline was too scared, too confused.

  And then there was a gust of wind, and tiny Mason stumbled and began to fall. The child shrieked like his heart was breaking and I dove from the sky like an ebon comet.

  “Thank you, Mister Fid!” the boy whispers as I carefully hand the squirming kitten back through the window. His focus is on Mason, not on the armored horror floating outside his apartment, and his fingers tremble as he strokes the beloved pet.

  “It's Doctor, actually,” I reply, the armor's vocoder stripping the embarrassed relief from my voice.

  “Thank you, Mister Doctor!”

  I made sure that the window was safely closed and continued my errands, then ended up in one of my laboratories performing tests. It was hours before I discovered that the incident had been captured on film and gone viral.

  “I haven't gone soft,” I grumbled. “I just haven't found anyone worth mauling in a while.”

  “Can we get a puppy, Mister Doctor?” my sister teased.

  “Sure. Fid will drown it on camera.”

  “No, he won't!” Whisper looked scandalized.

  “No. But this is getting out of hand, Whisper. I know you think that it's funny, but it's not. I spent more than two decades building Doctor Fid's reputation. The work is important.”

  “The heroes are all still afraid of you,” she assured me, though there was a hint of reproof in her voice. “It's just the media. Blow something up, beat up someone popular, they'll remember who you are.”

  “I just live streamed the cudgeling of a teenager.” I sighed and used my neural interface to mentally scan through recent comment threads on the KNN CapeWatch forums, and other news commentary. “They’re treating it as evidence that Doctor Fid is a hero.”

  “Then maybe Doctor Fid should become a hero.”

  “You know,” I smiled slowly. “That might not be a bad idea.”

  “Really?” She perked up, expression one of surprise and wonder.

  “It could work marvelously!” I grinned and swept the little android up in a brief hug. “No matter what the pundits are currently saying, though, it will take some time to convince the world that Doctor Fid has really changed. This would be a long-term plan.”

  “I can help!” she chirped enthusiastically, “I can watch the news feeds and online forums to analyze public opinions, and we could plan and make Doctor Fid the best hero ever!”

  “Your assistance would be very much appreciated.”

  “Yay!”

  I closed my eyes, envisioning the way it might play out. Right now, the media only toyed with the idea that Doctor Fid was a hero, that one of the world’s most feared supervillains had reformed; over time, that could be shaped and built upon…what would at first be only a faint hope would swell until the populace was firmly—finally—convinced. The idea of redemption was powerful; eventually, Doctor Fid would be welcomed.

  Some heroes would never truly be persuaded, but in public they’d be forced to play along. I imagined Doctor Fid standing alongside local heroes, cameras flashing as the former villain reached out to the leader of the Boston Guardians to symbolize a new alliance. Titan’s jaw would clench so hard that the veins at his temples throbbed, but he’d force a smile and accept the handshake.

  “When I finally return to normal,” I murmured, hand closing as though responding to the imaginary Titan’s grasp. “When I finally return to being Doctor Fid, they’ll be crush
ed. A betrayal like that…people will hate me like never before.”

  “…what?”

  “It’s a brilliant idea, Whisper. Thank you!” Using my neural link to contact my primary computer systems, I opened several new project files and started gathering resources to begin constructing a proper plan.

  The media’s current treatment of Doctor Fid was unacceptable; this new scheme would take significant amounts of time and effort to implement, but the narrative would, in the end, be under my control. I could return to my crusade and punish the unworthy. Even better, I would serve as an example that the public granted trust to their heroes far too easily. The next time one of their champions betrayed the people’s confidence, the hero might actually be held accountable. It would be glorious.

  Whisper was staring at me with an indecipherable expression on her face, so I grinned reassuringly. “If Aaron is expecting us at ten, I should probably start getting ready. We can wait to begin work until afterward.”

  “Okay,” she responded quietly.

  Feeling brighter for having decided upon a plan of action, I hurried off to shower, shave and otherwise prepare myself for the day.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Aaron handed me a beer; it was a generic brand, not one of the craft brews that I'd become snobbish about lately. It was, however, cold in my hand.

  “Thank you.” I took a grateful swallow. It was a hot day and both of us were too close to the grill, poking at burgers while watching the children run with the playful dogs; Whisper had been oddly quiet for the drive, but her mood had brightened after only a few moments of exposure to the new puppy. “I'm glad that we got a chance to visit before you left.”

  “Me too,” he smiled, waving to his daughter. “We're only going to be gone for a month, but Dinah's definitely going to miss Whisper.”

  “They'll text and video-chat,” I replied dryly. “Whisper is good about that.”

  “It's not the same.”

  “No, I suppose that it isn't.” I was only guessing. My own youth had not been characterized by a thriving social life; I'd been too mentally advanced to develop friendships with children my own age, and too emotionally immature to connect with my intellectual peers. I had my books, and eventually my coworkers...but I was already of age when I first developed true friendships. As an adult, I'd gained sufficient perspective that a few weeks of absence had not felt so overwhelming. I was, however, observant enough to notice Whisper's growing sadness as her friend’s departure date neared. “Still, when you get back, Dinah will have interesting stories to tell.”

  “It's gonna be a great trip!” Aaron agreed. “My first road trip in ages. Finally get a chance to see the country a bit.”

  “I've driven cross-country a few times now,” I noted, and swiped a pair of tongs to check my burger for done-ness. “Every trip's been worth the effort. You're bringing the dogs?”

  “Only for the first part. We're leaving them with my parents in Shenandoah.”

  “In that case, make sure to bring books or movies for Dinah.” I'd only been on one road trip with Whisper and she was extraordinarily patient for a creature her mental age. Decades ago, before my younger brother Bobby had been murdered...those road trips had been exercises in boredom management. Books, movies, toys, snacks...We'd cycled through them all, and even then frequent stops had been the norm.

  “We will,” he nodded, then smiled teasingly. “You going to be able to hold down the fort while I'm gone?”

  “I'll do my best to make sure the company's still standing when you get back,” I replied; truth be told, I didn't expect a tremendous change in my own workload. Aaron had trained his subordinates well, and any problems would likely be handled long before they landed on the CEO's desk. “You're taking the northern route?”

  “No, there're a bunch of big wildfires, don't want to get cut off.”

  “Yeah...I heard about that,” I lied, as I used my neural tap to browse through news reports and hacked internal memos from the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It looked as though this year was particularly bad, with six large blazes currently burning and fire departments working around the clock to contain the damage. “I just hadn't realized that the roads would be closed.”

  “It's been a particularly bad year, this year,” he lamented.

  “And a hot summer.”

  We toasted to the pleasant heat and drank from our still-ice-cold beers.

  I started a program to perform detailed analysis of firefighting techniques; if Doctor Fid were to be seen a hero, then saving firefighters and combating the conflagration would be a good place to start. Professional heroes rarely intervened in wildfires; they may receive some protection from good Samaritan laws, but the liability insurance policies that most heroes operated under was almost always limited to specific locales. There were several volumes worth of fine-print and exceptions but as a general rule…if a hero was outside their contracted region and happened to witness an event where superheroic intervention would be a boon, their insurance would cover liability. If a government official specifically asked for assistance, their insurance would cover liability even if they had to travel to arrive on site. But involving oneself in a distant emergency without an invitation could be professionally ruinous.

  Of course, a villain like Doctor Fid was not concerned about liability issues. Perhaps embarking upon a public works project to improve upon existing firebreaks would make for useful publicity...

  Disaster assistance - and, perhaps, more kitten-rescue - seemed as though it would be a preferred first step; with sufficient publicity, it would be inevitable that the media become enamored with the desired narrative: that Doctor Fid had turned over a new leaf.

  (Interrupting crime would be more dramatic, but also much more likely to end in confusion. If I were present when a hero responded to a bank robbery, the actually-guilty villain might get away while I was busy subduing the spandex-wearing do-gooder.)

  “You're leaving on Monday?” I asked to confirm.

  “Yup. It'll take that long just to get packed.”

  I continued to make small talk but was distracted by planning. Over sixty-seven thousand acres of currently active conflagration...even with the vast technological resources available to Doctor Fid, it would be almost impossible to quell the fires before my company's CIO began his journey.

  There was nothing quite so invigorating as a proper challenge.

  ◊◊◊

  In the towering Mk 35 powered armor, I soared over devastation; the ground was black with char, smoke swirled and sparks climbed through the rippling heat. Soot-covered tree trunks, denuded by the hungry flames that had already devoured this region, stabbed into the air like irregularly spaced still-hot spikes.

  My research had indicated that wildfires were a natural part of the ecological lifecycle. Even so, flying over mile after mile of destruction was sobering.

  A dozen heavy-combat drones formed a wide circle around the Mk 35; with weaponry and walking-legs retracted, the automatons appeared to be naught but massive star-field patterned columns floating through the air. The horizon glowed, muted by billowing black smoke, and I sped towards the blaze's front. Emergency-radio broadcasts had indicated a team of firefighters had been cut off by shifting wind patterns.

  Help was en route, but I was closer.

  A fire is, when viewed objectively, a fairly simple system consisting of three components: Heat, fuel, and oxygen. Remove any one of those components and the flame is extinguished. Theoretically, I could devise a force-field that selectively filtered atmospheric oxygen, and any fire within that field’s boundaries would be extinguished; I would need to maintain that field until the region had cooled, else heat and fuel could cause reignition, but approaching the triangle from that corner was at least hypothetically plausible.

  On the macro-scale, removing the fuel was the simplest solution: carefully placed blasts from Doctor Fid’s (and from the drones’) weaponry to cl
ear grass and trees from the wildfire’s path, and the flames would burn themselves out when they had finished consuming the fuel at one edge of the destruction. It was only a matter of creating a broad enough firebreak that wind could not carry sufficient sparks to restart the blaze. Even with the wind kicked to a chaotic roar by the fire’s rising heat, it would be a relatively simple task to create a broad enough gap. Unfortunately, the process would be sufficiently destructive that the method would be too dangerous to use when there are civilians to be rescued on the ground.

  Eliminating the heat was the most technically intriguing problem. One of the most important defensive inventions within my arsenal has been my inertial displacement device, a method of creating a bounded energy field linked to an artificially-created pocket-dimension; the actual functionality was complicated, but the end result was that the field allowed for kinetic energy to be shunted from the normal world into the pocket-dimension. This limited the effect of impacts or sudden accelerations upon whatever is inside the field. A punch from the extraordinarily-powerful Valiant was painful even through armor and displacement-field, but at least my head was not rattled to jelly inside my armor.

  (The Red Ghost and I had formed a secret partnership to bring similar devices to the public, creating safer automobiles. The first generation of protected vehicles had recently arrived at dealerships around the world.)

  Heat is just an expression of molecular vibration; it had taken seven and a half hours of study and testing, but I’d now refined a method of re-directing said energy from the physical world into a pocket-dimension as well. The process was too slow to be used as the primary means of firefighting. Even with all twelve heavy drones assisting, it would only be able to affect a few thousand square feet at a time. Over sixty thousand acres were currently engulfed in flames, so attacking so vast a swathe of land a few hundred feet at a time would be a fool’s errand. It would, however, be the safer option when attempting to perform a rescue.