School for Sidekicks (16 page)

“You'll have to duck,” Foxman led the way up the ramp, “it's very low and tight in here.”

He wasn't kidding; I had to travel the last few feet into the tiny cockpit almost on hands and knees. Inside, there was a small T-shaped space that ran between two low-slung seats back to a narrow cargo area behind them. Foxman was already settling into the left-hand chair as I rose out of my crouch.

Foxman pointed. “Strap yourself in. Right side is primarily for passengers, but there are duplicate controls in case something happens to mine. They're locked, but don't touch them unless I tell you to. This baby's more than a little bit tricky to fly and you don't want to mess with anything.”

His voice sounded different somehow when he talked about the plane, more assured and less cocky. It made me want to listen to him in a way I really hadn't until that moment.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good lad.”

I started fastening the multiple safety belts in place. “Why is it so tricky … if you don't mind my asking?”

“Design trade-offs.” He tapped the armored glass in front of him. “From the outside, this reads as an eye. I wanted any Hoods who saw her to
know
Foxman had arrived. So I went for the fox-head look.” While he talked, he calmly checked the gauges and flipped various switches. “Problem is, foxes don't generally fly. She's a bit more aerodynamic than your average brick, but only a bit. You'll notice she has no wings to speak of.”

“I'd always wondered about how that worked.”

“Partially it's a lifting-body shape, what we call a flying wing, but mostly she gets by on raw power. Anything can fly if you strap big enough jets to it, and that was my solution for the
Flying Fox
. It's how my suit flies, too.”

That was something else I'd always wondered about. “Why even have a plane? Why not fly everywhere in the suit?”

“Power. Or, not enough of it. The supercapacitors that run the suit can only hold so much juice. Flying burns it like you wouldn't believe. The
Flying Fox
is big enough to have its own on-board reactor. Not only does it get me places without running my capacitors down, I can actually charge up on my way. Same with the Foxmobile. It's much more about having a portable power generation system than the ride.”

At that point, Foxman finished with his preflight check. “One more thing and we can be on our way. Gotta blow in the tube.” He opened up his helmet, then pulled a plastic tube out of a device mounted on his control panel. “Breathalyzer. OSIRIS made me install one in every one of my vehicles after the IDS Tower incident. They wanted to make sure I don't drive
impaired
.

“They even made me put one on the armor. But don't worry, I'm reformed now.” He bent forward to blow into the end of the cylinder.

“It's a wasted effort on their part either way, really,” he continued as a green light blinked on the breathalyzer. “If I wanted to get around it, designing a filter that pulled the alcohol out of my breath would take all of ten seconds, and fabricating it would hardly take longer than that.” He tilted his head to the side. “I suppose I could build a blood cleanser into it at the same time, which would at least give me a bit of a challenge.”

He shrugged. “Sorry, problem-solving. Can't help myself, even when it's all moot because I'm not drinking anymore. Well, nothing alcoholic anyway.” He thumbed the bandolier on his chest and took a long sip of the energy drink he pulled out. “I can't really help it—the problem-solving, that is. It's who I am. Foxman has to tech, just like Spartanicus has to villain, and Captain Commanding has to ego.” As he said that last part, he stabbed a button on the console in front of him.

Sudden acceleration pressed me down into my seat and the plane leapt into the air. Despite the enormous kick of the jets, the cockpit remained almost eerily silent. Foxman leaned back in his seat, put one foot up on the edge of the dash, and took another drink just as the plane banked sharply to the right, barely missing a tower on the edge of the OSIRIS campus.

“Shouldn't you have your hands on the wheel?” I yelped.

“Don't worry so much, kid.” He patted the control panel, then tucked his free hand behind his head. “This thing is a VTOL jet—that's vertical takeoff and landing—and it's got no wings. The whole thing runs on computer controllers. Barring some sort of computer malfunction, she drives herself. Which is for the best. There's not a human alive and very few metas who could pilot her any other way. I simply tell her where to go and she takes care of the rest. Like so: Take us home to the Den, baby, and keep a low profile!”

The jet, which had been steadily climbing up to that point, leapt forward and down, hugging the treetops as it headed for wherever we were going. Watching the controls in front of me operate themselves wasn't at all reassuring.

“What happens if something goes wrong with the computer?” I asked.

Foxman shrugged. “We pile into the ground at eight hundred miles an hour. But don't worry, you won't even have time to panic.”

“Oh. Well, that's fine then.” If Foxman recognized the sarcasm in my voice, he showed no sign of it.

 

13

The Den

The
Flying Fox
suddenly dropped like a rock, plunging straight toward the Mississippi. I screamed. Foxman laughed. The plane pulled up a few yards short of impact and the jets splashed muddy brown water across the cockpit windows. We skimmed along within a few feet of the surface of the river for a half mile or so, then pivoted sharply to the left, rocketing through a gap in the trees on the nearer bank.

Our speed dropped to practically nothing. The sun had finished setting while we were in the air, but the windows had changed color at that point and I could still see perfectly. The trees in the little wood stood mostly on hummocks of higher ground amid a scattering of shallow pools and stands of swamp grasses. We traveled another hundred feet or so under the cover of the trees before coming to a halt above a particularly large pool. The jets cut out and we dropped into water that quickly flowed up and over the sides of the plane, covering the cockpit windows.

As we hit bottom, mud swirled up around us, blacking out all view of the world above. I glanced over at Foxman, who didn't seem alarmed in the least, and tried to copy his relaxed attitude.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“That,” he replied, as a pair of sharp metallic clunks sounded from somewhere below us.

The plane began to move again. This time, with something towing it. After about a minute, the mud cleared away. Bright white beams stabbed out from lights on the front of the
Flying Fox
. They illuminated a long, water-filled tunnel cut through gray-green stone. A set of steel rails ran along the bottom of the tunnel, accommodating whatever was transporting the plane. After a while, we slid up out of the water, passing from limestone walls to sandstone soon after.

“Where are we?” I'd seen depictions of the Den before, of course—in comics and on shows about the early Masks—but none of them had been specific about the location of Foxman's lair.

“Under Summit Hill in what used to be St. Paul. I lived in a mansion on the bluff once upon a time in a different life. There are still elevators leading up from the Den to the house, but I don't use them anymore. As much as the new owners might appreciate a visit from the fabulous Foxman, I'd rather skip the whole scene.”

A huge set of steel doors loomed ahead, sliding neatly open as we reached them. They closed behind us as the
Flying Fox
slid to a stop in its hangar.

“Red leather walls?” I whispered, more than half speechless.

“Pretty amazing, isn't it?” Foxman grinned over at me as the ramp lowered between us.

“Yeah, that'd be one word for it.” It was the gaudiest thing I'd ever seen.

“You don't like it?” He actually sounded hurt, and I shook my head quickly—after all, he
was
going to be
my
hero from here on out.

“No, nothing like that, I'm just … stunned.”

Foxman pivoted out of his seat and slid down the ramp. “If you think this is something, wait till you see the rest of the place!”

There was a leather-covered bar beside the exit of the hangar and Foxman stopped to pull yet another can of MaskerAde out from a mini-fridge before opening the door and gesturing me forward. I stepped through into—I don't know—Xanadu?

My painter grandmother used to recite this poem to me every night at bedtime when I stayed with them:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea …

It went through my head again now as I surveyed the main chamber—at least I hoped it was the main chamber—of Foxman's Den. The cavern was huge and domed, easily big enough to hold my parents' entire house and yard. A gigantic central pillar rose up to the ceiling with supports radiating out and up from a point about two-thirds of the way up the pillar. It looked a bit like the spokes of an umbrella blown inside out. Only, in this case, all the spokes and the central shaft had been sheathed in panels of some richly grained wood stained a deep red-brown.

More wooden paneling covered the bottom ten feet of the encircling wall. Above that, and rising all the way to the center of the dome, was hundreds of square feet of deep blue leather with what looked like gem stones sparkling here and there in the patterns of the constellations. The floor was an incredibly intricate parquet-quilt-work incorporating thousands of little hardwood fox-head logos.

There was an enormous fountain in one section. The water came in through the open mouth of a six-foot-tall bronze fox head on the wall. It cascaded down from there through a series of levels to a large koi pond, exiting eventually as a small stream that flowed out through a low arch. An entire pack of bronze fox sculptures fished and splashed in the fountain and along the edges of the pond.

A bar and kitchen with thick granite counter tops centered another area, while an open living-room-like space big enough to seat thirty on its blue leather couches took up a third. An area covering one-quarter of the circle was given over to a combination crime lab, machine shop, and manufactory. The floor in this last area—demarcated by a boundary of darker wood in the parquet—looked unnaturally shiny.

The whole place seemed inhumanly clean, actually—given the scale. Or, perhaps, free of filth and dirt might be a more accurate description than clean. There was clutter covering every flat surface that wasn't the floor. Even there, drifts of papers and small herds of bric-a-brac consisting mostly of endless cans of MaskerAde, dog-eared books, or open magazines clustered themselves around much of the more comfortable-looking seating.

It was quite the strangest mess I'd ever seen. Not a spot of dirt or dust or a single filthy plate or empty glass anywhere, but endless piles of clutter. Fascinated, I crossed to the nearest heap of books and lifted off the top couple volumes. The ones underneath were as free of dust as those on top.

“I don't get it,” I said, barely even realizing I was speaking while I dug deeper and deeper into the pile.

“Don't get what?” Foxman sounded looser and more relaxed than he had at any time that afternoon.

“How your mess can be so clean?” I dropped the books back into a rough pile.

He finished off his third can of MaskerAde in a bit over an hour—which would have had me buzzing around like a hummingbird—and smiled a rather smug sort of smile. “Wait for it.”

“Wait for what…” I trailed off as a faint mechanical whirring drew my attention toward the fountain.

One of the bronze foxes had left its place at the pond. It trotted toward me now, its metal tongue a-lolling and its tail a-wagging. It went to the pile I had disarranged and reared back on its hind legs. The toes on its front paws extended into fingers and the pad formed a thumb. It very carefully resorted the pile into the exact configuration it had held before I messed with things. As it picked up each item it lifted them to its nose, where, with a vacuum cleaner noise, it sucked off any hint of dust before replacing it. When it was done, the fox returned to the edge of the pond and froze.

“The master computer laser maps the room once every fifteen minutes or so,” said Foxman. “If it finds anything out of place, one of the Foxbots restores it to its rightful order. Once a day, the entire pack goes through and dusts and vacuums the whole place. They also deal with any dirty dishes or other unsanitary messes.”

“And the piles of books and notes and things?”

“That's my filing system. The computer knows I don't like to have my creative tools disarranged—it's like moving bits of my brain around—
very
disruptive to my thinking. So, it leaves my diagrams and references and other stuff exactly as I placed them. When you moved that stack, you triggered the motion sensors. There's been the occasional avalanche over the years, and it knows that I would prefer that it restored everything to exactly the way
I
left it.”

“That's amazing!” It really was. Despite the clutter and general air of decayed glory that hung about the Den, I was impressed.

Foxman smiled. “Come on, I bet you could use a sandwich or something. Even if I hadn't taken you away from the AMO at dinnertime, I know I never got enough to eat when I was your age.” He canted his head to one side. “Hmm, nutritional deficiencies as a contributing factor to my later problems with alcohol and emotional issues? Nooo, my baseline nutritional needs were more than adequately taken care of. Ridiculous hypothesis. Still, what about microdeficiencies? Flag for later research?”