DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) (16 page)

“No way...” Bunny muttered.

Freeway sighed, pulled his spectacles from his face, and mopped them sourly as he glared at me. “Well, congratulations. It was a good secret identity while it lasted. Now get that young lady up on the table, will you?”

I shook my head. “We have no intention of disclosing your true identity, whoever you are.”

“Good. Safer that way. Now please leave the room and let me take a look at my patient.”

I followed his orders, and Martin tagged along behind. Once the door was shut, he looked at me. “Okay, so what are we gonna do about Vorpal?”

I gave him a blank look. “Do?”

“Yeah. How we gonna rescue her?”

“Well, Dire’s pretty sure he pulled her somewhere else in time. So we’re going to need a time machine, then a way to track Timetripper through time. Dire’s going to put that on her list of long-term goals.”

“We’re not—” He closed his mouth. “No. Guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“No, not really. No way to get to them without time travel capabilities. He might bring her back once he realizes his mistake. She’s probably educating him on it very vigorously.” A thought crossed my mind. “Well, assuming he didn’t send her back in time to a point where the Earth’s atmosphere was unbreatheable. Or forward to a time like that, given how we’re going with greenhouse emissions. Might be able to save her depending on what he did. But he doesn’t strike Dire as a lethal-force type of hero. Odds are he just stranded her somewhere.”

“Doesn’t feel right,” Martin said, crossing his arms. “I mean, I got no real love for Vorpal, but she’s part of the team until we’re done with—”

I held up a hand. “Let’s not discuss this while there’s only a thin wooden door between us and a hero, hm?”

A muffled “Thank you,” from Freeway through the door. Martin jumped a bit, looked chagrined.

We waited in silence, and after a few minutes, the door opened. Freeway stood there, glowering.

“A speedster with surgical skills,” I remarked. “Handy, that.”

“So you’re Dire.” He looked me up and done. “Figured you’d be meaner looking.”

I shrugged. “She’ll try to snarl more next time.”

“You’re awfully calm right now.”

“If you wanted her beaten to a pulp and captured you’d have tried it by now. But you mentioned a truce, so she’s going to assume this is neutral ground..”

He shot a glance over at Martin. “You weren’t lying. She’s difficult to parse.”

Martin shrugged, then chewed on his cheek for a second. “Hey. Man, I’m sorry.”

Freeway shook his head. “You made the wrong choice and you know it. I don’t think I want to talk to you again until you’re back in jail. And you
will
end up there, if you don’t die first. Being a minion’s no way to live, son.”

Martin’s face fell. Shame warred with guilt, and he took a shuddering breath. All the while, Freeway just looked at him.

“He’s no minion,” I said.

“No? Hmph. Make sure it stays that way.” He turned his back on Martin, and pointed down the hall. “I want to talk with you. You mind?”

“Actually, no.” I was curious. This wasn’t the sort of hero I was used to. “Lead the way.”

He walked down the hall, to a door that had a ‘community room’ sign on it, and even held it for me as I strolled through. I debated taking one of the loose folding chairs that were scattered around the bare room, and when he settled into one with a grunt of weariness, I decided to stay on equal footing. I took one, spun it around, and surveyed him as I sat.

“Martin’s told me about you.” He began.

“Dire imagines you had plenty of time to speak with him in the jail. Thank you for paying for his lawyer, by the way.”

He waved a hand. “Money’s no problem for me now. Least I could do for the kid.”

“Curious about that.”

“Why?”

I crossed my wrists on the back of the chair, took a second before responding. “Why were you concerned with Martin’s welfare?”

“I wasn’t. I was concerned he wouldn’t get a fair trial.”

“He had no chance of that. The system was rigged against him.”

“Did he kill those cops?”

“No!” I was surprised. Surely Martin had told him that?

“You didn’t either?”

“No.”

“Well, the whole world thinks you and he did.”

“That was the Black Bloods. The cops were corrupt, and didn’t do the job the Bloods paid them to do—”

“Which won’t matter, because now people think this crime’s on you. Because you couldn’t wait for that charge to be disproved.”

“You’re assuming Dire cares what stupid people believe.” I felt my face draw into a scowl. “The ones that matter to her know the truth.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

I cocked my head at an angle. “What?”

“You talked about ’The ones that matter to you’. What about the ones that don’t?”

“Well, they’re free to live their lives, unless they’re part of a problem. Then some adjustments will be necessary.”

“Like the ones driving home on I-3 an hour ago?”

I studied him. “You knew about that?”

He grunted. “So that was you. Wasn’t sure until you said that.”

I winced. Walked right into that. Twice I’d fallen for that trick, now. Had to get better at banter. Work on a poker face.

“Partly her,” I said. “The opposition was... less careful of their surroundings and the bystanders than Dire.”

“Then that’s on them,” he said. “But it’s also on you. So I ask again; what about the people you don’t care about? How many of them are you going to hurt? How many are going to die?”

I stood, sending the chair clattering to the ground as heat coursed through me. I felt my face flush, and breathed hard, trying to control my temper.

“How dare you. How
dare
you! She went to war to save people from the Black Bloods! All of them, not just her friends!”

He took the spectacles off, rose to face me. “Yes. And that was a bad situation. You hit your power surge in a bad time, and you did the best you could. But now the war’s over.”

A throbbing in my temples, as I shook in rage. Why couldn’t he
see
? “That war? Yes!” I hissed. “But the system itself is broken! Your society is flawed. Too many crises, too many near-misses, and all it takes is
one
patch of bad luck, or one semi-competent powerful villain, and the world is
fucked
. The system is broken. It needs to be fixed! And if you and the rest of the
heroes
won’t do it, then Dire will.”

He sighed. In the faint light from the windows, he looked older. Tired. He reminded me of Roy all of a sudden, and I felt some of the rage ebb out of me. This man wasn’t my enemy. He wasn’t broken. He didn’t need fixing.

“That’s the problem,” he said. “You can’t fix the system from the outside. You want real change? You have to work with the system. Change it from the inside. That’s the only way to make it last.”

“Really?” I asked, moving around the chairs, to stop a few feet from him. “Then why are you here?”

“To fix your friend.”

“And why couldn’t she go to the hospital for that?”

He replaced his glasses, and frowned. “I see where you’re going with this. You’re going to use my own pro bono work as an excuse for your villainy. Not buying it.”

“Oh? What’s the difference? You’re doing this because the system doesn’t work for her.” I shrugged. “Let’s be honest, the state of the modern medical complex in this nation is a joke. They broke and twisted the laws to put the doctors under their thumbs, and extort the sick and the elderly, and collaborated with the insurance companies that were supposed to keep them in check. And that’s not even getting into the price-fixing plaguing big pharmaceutical companies—”

He held up a hand. “Enough. You’re reminding me of why I retired. The reason I offer this service because without it, people die or get hurt needlessly. Gangsters and villains need doctors too, and this way gets bad people their medical care so they don’t go getting desperate and stupid.”

I nodded. “Don’t you see? This is as it should be. Doctors should be free to heal people, without the bureaucracy or the sanction of the rich and uncaring.”

“And people should be able to drive on the roads without getting injured when a supervillain hijacks a truck.”

I shook my head. “We’re not going to see eye to eye on this.”

“Not yet,” he said. “I appreciate the good you’ve done, but I hate the bad you’ve done. When you’re ready to admit your approach is bad, find me. I’ll help you make things right.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“You’re a hell of a lot more reasonable than Quantum. For the record, she appreciates that.”

“Eh. Twenty years a surgeon, and I still can’t tell you the proper procedure for removing the stick from Doc Quantum’s ass.”

I stared at him for a long minute, surprised. Then he winked, and I burst into laughter.

He was smiling by the time I finished. “Good. Had me worried for a minute there.”

“You know the funny part?” I asked. “You’re the second superhero she’s met who’s doing the doctor thing as a secret identity. Is that a custom in this city?”

Freeway shrugged. “Usually how it works is you find your powers in the most stressful moment of your life. Doesn’t surprise me if another medical professional ended up with a power surge.”

That wasn’t precisely the case with the Last Janissary, I thought, but I shelved the notion. Another, more pressing question, was crossing my mind.

“How did Timetripper know we were meeting you here? Why here? He has an entire future of knowledge to draw from, and he focuses on this secret meeting? You’d think he’d have other events to go from.”

He scowled. “I don’t know why he knew about this, and that worries me. Anyway, thanks for bringing Bunny on over. I’ll take her off your hands.” He checked his watch. “Got anything else, or are we done?”

I nodded and we left, off to heroics and villainy as we saw fit.

CHAPTER 10: AN OLD FRIEND

“I've never liked the whole meet-under-flag-of-truce thing, even when you get something from it. Getting information from vills usually isn't worth putting up with their smug, punchable faces. And oh my gawd, the monologues...”

--Mags, leader of the Torchbearers junior hero group, 1998-2002

It was an uneventful return trip. We grabbed some Chinese takeout, then retrieved the armor and headed back to the lair. I’d originally planned to grab it at nightfall, but the confirmation that Timetripper was still after me was reason enough to get it into the shop for an overhaul a little earlier than planned.

Martin was silent the whole trip back, only opening his mouth to order his dim sum. And when we got back to the factory, he headed straight for the living quarters, leaving me to guide the armor to the repair station.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Running into Freeway had shaken him up, obviously. I gave it some thought as I directed the arms to disassemble the damaged layers from the outside in, and fed in materials to the various hoppers, for repair and in some cases, reforging.

Was it better to give Martin space, or confront him upon it? The hero had gotten my temper going, with only a few sentences... but he’d caused me to think about what I was doing. And I rather thought I’d returned the favor, but it was hard to tell the impact of my words without further observation.

I rather doubted he’d go easy on me, during our next encounter. And we’d have one sooner or later, if I stuck around Icon City. Most heroes you could predict, or distract away, but speedsters had a large operating range by their very nature. I’d need better countermeasures than the screamers.

A few damaged components demanded my attention. Serpent Tina’s charge had crushed some of the abdominal circuits, and blown out a motivator in the shoulder of my damaged arm. Those took about half an hour to fix. After it was done I surveyed my now-cold box of chow mein, sighed, and took it upstairs.

As it turned out, my dilemma on whether or not to confront Martin was solved when I walked through the door.

“Hey. Dire. What am I to you?”

“Er... human male? Five-foot-nine? Mostly water, with a mix of chemicals?”

He looked up at me from where he was lying on the couch. His own takeout box was next to him, unopened.

“Am I a minion to you?”

“No! No, no, no. Dire doesn’t have minions.” Ah, so that’s what this was about. “You are upset Freeway called you a minion?”

“He called it like he saw it. And what else have I been doing, but helping you with minion work?”

“Martin—” I put the chow mein on the arm of the nearest chair. “You’re a friend. You’re Dire’s friend.”

He was quiet for a moment. When he looked at me again, his face was almost pleading. “I don’t know if that’s enough.”

I took a breath. “Well, then what’s enough?”

“It...” he lifted a hand, let it fall. “I don’t know. Fuck. I’m whining. Just gimme time to think here.”

I nodded. “As you wish.” I sat in the chair, found one of the plastic sporks that had come with the take out, and did my best to enjoy the chow mein. Eating had always been an incidental thing for me. I grabbed food when I remembered to, and scarfed it down as fast as possible. After all, time spent on nourishment is time away from invention and engineering.

Martin was still silent by the time I’d finished, so I headed back down to the factory floor, and logged into one of the infrastructure terminals. What I wanted wasn’t complex, just a matter of using some of the glass, and a liquid sealant to ensure an airtight space.

Two hours later, I tested the pressure in the modified cargo container, and found it good. I wiped moisture away from the inside of the container’s new window, which had once been part of a Cadillac’s windshield. Next to me the smallest of the robotic arms twitched on its new base.

“You making a tank or something?” Martin asked. I started a bit— hadn’t heard him approach.

“No. Just a hermetically sealed and shielded viewing chamber.”

“Oh. Gonna crack open the cargo?”

“Yep.”

He went and got the crates without me asking, setting them in there one by one. I tried to help on the second one, and he shook his head. “I got this.”

I shrugged and let him get on with it. Whatever was eating at him, he’d get over it eventually.

Once it was done, I closed the container and tapped in a series of commands through my AR interface. A long hiss announced the flushing of the atmosphere, and the lights clicked on one by one inside my viewing chamber. I tested the range of the arm, nodded as it checked out, and maneuvered it over to the nearest box. When it was in position, I lowered the blast shield over the window.

“Thought we were gonna take a look at it?”

“Well, if it’s rigged to blow, then Dire doesn’t want to eat a face full of glass. That’s a bad chaser after cold chow mein.”

“You think it’ll blow?”

“Not really, but there’s no point in leaving this to chance.” I tapped in the final command, and waited as the robot opened the first box.

Immediately my sensor suite went to work. I frowned at the readings. “Slight radioactivity? Not enough to be dangerous.”

“Whoa whoa whoa, radiation? That explains it.”

I paused, and looked at him. “Explains what?”

“It’s bomb material. You get people trying to smuggle that shit all the time.”

“Ah... no, actually. This is nowhere near weapons grade emissions. What do you know of radioactive material? It probably doesn’t work like you think.”

“We dropped a bomb full of that shit on Japan, made them surrender, and got Ginormozilla out of it. Wait we got a kaiju involved here, too! This is making sense. Sick sense.”

“Slow down there,” I recommended. “There are a lot of fallacies about nuclear physics. Didn’t help that Tesla opposed further development in the field. Humanity never got those nuclear power plants that science fiction speculated upon, back in the day, because of that.” I sighed. “Opportunities lost.”

“Because radiation is fucking dangerous and makes mutants.”

“Actually most radiation just kills you. You need a balanced Eastman-Laird reaction to get possible mutational effects, according to the few studies Dire’s seen.”

“You’re not helping.” Martin said.

“In any case, this isn’t a significant amount. It’ll register on a Geiger counter, but won’t do much else.” I looked over the other readings, found them within tolerances. Should be safe to open the viewing port.

With a flick of my fingers along the AR interface, the blast shield cranked open, and we looked into the open crate.

“Flowers?” Martin asked. “All this over some goddamn pansies?”

To be fair, they were pretty flowers. Pink and white, about the size of a small apple. They rose from what looked to simple ceramic pots filled with black dirt, and looked no worse the wear for having spent presumably a day or two in a steel crate.

I studied the crate itself. It looked to have a basic hydroponics mister along the sides of it, and those inset lights within the lid of the crate were probably miniature ultraviolet grow lights. Someone had taken care to make sure they would survive the trip.

“Wait a minute.” The metal on the inside of the crates had a different texture than the outside. I zoomed in. “Lead. Got to be lead.” Didn’t know why they bothered. Geiger counters were pretty rare.

Unless the unknown party with the vines and the giant monster was trying to track them by the radiation... hm. Couldn’t rule that out. I used the mechanical arm to replace the lid, lowered the blast shield, popped the other two crates, and went through the same processes. All were the same, as far as I could tell.

“Hey,” Martin said. “Inside of the window’s getting a little dusty.”

It was, and it shouldn’t be. I got in close, peered at it. “Pollen.”

“Radioactive pollen?”

“Maybe.” I used the arm to add in a burst RFID tracker to each crate, then closed them up again. “Going to bet that pollen does something. Going to have to decontaminate the chamber before we open it up again.”

“Prob’ly a safe bet,” Martin muttered. “Turns people into plant zombies maybe or some bullshit.”

I shrugged. “No way to tell without a method of analyzing the samples. And Dire’s lousy with organic things. But we’ve found out the important thing, they’re not useful to us right now and possibly dangerous.”

“So, does this change the plan any?”

“Not really. Going to call up our client and see how much he’ll offer to get his plants back. Set up something a few days out, and then we can use the time to take care of the important business.”

“Which is?”

“Minna. Got a lead on her earlier, and a midnight meeting with Sparky to follow up on it. Possibly.”

“Sparky? No shit?” He looked pleased.

“Well, Dire sent the message through the Torchbearers. Up to him if he accepts it.” I looked at the factory floor, at the pickup. “Was going to use that to get most of the way there, but— well, odds are good Freeway saw it as he came in to the church. Going to need to procure a new vehicle.”

“I can help with that.” Martin said. “Van okay?”

“Probably best. The armor’s heavy. After that, get some sleep, okay? It’s a midnight meeting. Only a few hours to go.”

“Great. I’ll start making some calls.”

He went off to it, and I rolled the blast shield up again, and turned my attention to my armor. The big advantage of my powerset was the flexibility inherent with my focus on engineering and robotics. After each conflict I could analyze the performance of the suit, and adjust it to the situations and foes that I expected to encounter. I was limited only by time and the resources at hand, but even if I stuck to the inexpensive modifications, I could still customize quite a lot.

The screamers were a prime example. It hadn’t missed my notice that Freeway had kept the earplugs he’d snatched out of my hands during our last encounter. I couldn’t expect them to work on him again, and they certainly wouldn’t work on that kaiju, if I was unlucky enough to run into it. Also, the potential for collateral was too high for most urban combat. I had to factor in acoustics, and exposure time, and there was too much potential for accidents. No, the screamers had to go.

Which was fine, because that let me shift a few more things in. Still, I hated to abandon a useful tool entirely, so I put two screamer grenades in the armor’s utility compartment. I filled the now-empty space with a phlogistonic igniter. All the use of a flamethrower, without having to carry fuel. Might be handy against a kaiju, and hell, sometimes a little applied arson can save a ton of trouble.

Now, the forcefield generator... I tapped my chin for a bit, and considered. It was a huge power draw, and one close-range explosion had just about fried it. My collision with the shore had finished the job. It cost a ton of resources to build, and it would about finish my gold stores off entirely, to replace the threads in the shunt circuits. It was a tough call, but I decided to keep it. Armor alone wasn’t enough, when there were potentially more laser-armed guards out there.

Speaking of the armor, there was that outer layer to consider, now that Mags had shown me her trick. Hopefully I wouldn’t run across the Torchbearers again after tonight but I couldn’t rule it out. So how would I keep myself from being immobilized again?

After consideration, I switched over to a slightly-heavier, ablative design. I put in a few small shaped charges that would let me blow away selected parts of it, or fire off all of them at once if I was having a bad day. Not an ideal solution, and each part would weaken as it took damage, but it had a modular advantage, was cheaper and easier to replace, and it had the added advantage of putting a spray of shrapnel into the air if it came down to it. Kind of like having shotguns strapped all over my body under a really big coat.

Hm. Recoil could be an issue. I lowered the size of the shaped charges a bit more, and moved the ones I’d planned for my helm assembly down to the neck. No sense in giving myself a concussion. That’s the sort of thing you make your enemies work for, after all.

As I was finishing up the recompiling, I checked the time, and winced. Ten PM already? I’d gone and lost myself in the project at hand. I eyeballed the robots reconfiguring the armor, and nodded. It would be cutting it close, but they’d finish just in time for our trip north.

In the meantime, I had one thing left to do. Leaving the noise and bustle of the workshop’s floor, I retreated up to the private quarters and gave a half-wave to Martin. “You get the van?”

“It’s outside.” He frowned. “A lot of people out and about. Die Kriegers moving around in groups.”

“Maybe they’re getting ready to hit the SCK, touch off that gang war that Bunny was worried about.”

“If that was the case they’d have more boys up north of here. This is solid turf for them, has been for years.”

“Meh. Well, it shouldn’t matter in a few days, if things go right. Our stay here is temporary, so they can get back to killing each other once we’re gone; Dire cares not.”

“Only thing that concerns me is their attitude on costumes.”