Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (17 page)

“No,” Concorde says as he glowers down at heroes and fugitive alike, “you’re all coming with me.”

SIXTEEN

First, let me say this: New Hampshire is really pretty in the fall.

Second, I’d like to give a big shout-out to whoever invented the GPS app for smartphones (and I’d like to kick myself for not thinking of that sooner).

When I finally make it back to the motel, I find a scene uncomfortably reminiscent of our Main Street brawl, but on a smaller scale; the damage was confined to one motel room window (Manticore’s fault) and a small patch of parking lot—technically my fault but I’m shifting the blame to Manticore, who hasn’t shown his steel-plated face again. Maybe he saw that the big guns had arrived and is somewhere far, far away, gloating over my untimely demise.

Concorde and Mindforce are there among the small army of cops, and Concorde goes absolutely ballistic when he finds out who we’d been tangling with. He screams us stupid for I don’t know how long, tells us to never mess with the guy again, if we ever see him call the Protectorate and then get the hell away, we’re all so damn lucky we got off as light as we did, et cetera.

But Concorde isn’t chewing us out for the sake of it, like normal; he is seriously freaked out about this. Like, Mom and Dad just found out you smoked weed and drank beer before driving your little brother home in their car even though you have no license-level freaked.

“Concorde and Manticore have a history,” Mindforce says in a way that tells me that will be the only explanation I get and I should not push it.

I expect Concorde to send us on our way after his dressing-down, but instead he pushes us off to the side and says, “Don’t go anywhere.” So we go nowhere while he and Mindforce attend to whatever it is real super-heroes attend to after a fight. There’s a lot of talking to the police, to the EMTs checking on the other hotel guests, to the hotel manager and staff.

I catch sight of Archimedes and Manfred sitting in the back of a police cruiser. Manfred is as miserable as you’d expect someone in the back of a police cruiser to be, but Archimedes, he looks—I don’t know. His face is utterly blank, like he’s in shock, until he happens to glance in my direction, and wow, if looks could kill Archimedes would be wiping out three generations of my family.

Concorde and Mindforce return and pull them out of the cruiser. “Let’s go,” Concorde says, but he’s not talking to Archimedes and Manfred.

We follow them around to the back of the motel, where I learn how non-flyer Mindforce gets around. The vehicle occupying an entire block of parking spaces makes me think of a military chopper if it had been designed by Apple. iCopter. In place of rotors there’s a wide flat disk, and when Mindforce starts it up it emits
a hum like Concorde’s suit but on an arena concert scale. More of that—what did Matt call it?—maglev technology, I assume.

The others pile in and the iCopter lifts off. Once it’s clear, Concorde powers up. “I hope you know how lucky you are,” he says. “Manticore should have killed you.”

Not
could
have killed me;
should
have killed me.

“I know,” I say. “He was better than me. A lot better. That’s why I played dead. I knew I couldn’t beat him.”

I hate that I can’t see his face. Whatever he’s thinking about me, it’s his secret.

“Hm,” is all he says.

I guess when we got the HQ tour, Mindforce forgot to show us the small hangar at the back of the property where he parks the Pelican—so-named because it’s white, it flies, and it holds a lot of cargo. iCopter is a way cooler name.

We parade Archimedes and Manfred into HQ and into a holding area in the basement, an off-white room with individual cells. They have
Star Trek
-style sliding doors and the same electronic controls as on the Protectorate’s secret subway. iJail.

Concorde follows Manfred into one of the cells. “What’s going on here, Manfred?” Concorde says.

“You know him?” Mindforce says.

“Roger Manfred, head of Advanced Robotic Concepts’ artificial intelligence department. No one’s seen him or Ashe Semler for over a week,” he says with a nod toward the neighboring cell.

“And no one will see Ashe Semler ever again,”
Manfred says. “He’s gone.”

“Explain,” Concorde says. “Now.”

What Manfred says chills me to my soul. It’s crazy talk, a wild sci-fi tale about a sentient artificial intelligence that enters the real world by invading a man’s brain like a virus, erasing his memories and overwriting a new persona. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for Ashe Semler, to feel his very identity being eaten away and taken over by an invader and being helpless to stop it.

It’s a totally irrational reaction, but I really
really
want to break this guy’s face.

Concorde’s hands are balled into fists. I think he shares the sentiment.

In the medical bay, Matt is finally free to strip off his face mask. He has dried blood smeared across his face, the stain of a bloody nose.

“It’s not broken,” Mindforce says, pressing his thumbs on either side of Matt’s nose, “and there’s no sign of a concussion.”

“Go me,” Matt says, accepting an ice pack.

“What happens now?” I ask.

“What happens now is the five of you go home,” Mindforce says, and the dismissive edge in his voice catches me off-guard.

“I meant with Archimedes.”

“I know what you meant. That’s not your concern. We have a process and it doesn’t involve you.”

“So that’s it?” Matt says. “We do the legwork and you guys get the credit?”

“Dammit, Matt, this isn’t about—” Mindforce stops himself, takes a breath. “You need to understand
something. Manticore isn’t just some tricked-out bank robber. He’s a hardcore mercenary, and if you’re standing between him and a paycheck, he will murder you, and it doesn’t matter that you’re a kid.”

Mindforce conspicuously glances in my direction when he says that.

“You’ve played your part. This is in our ballpark now,” he says. “You kids, go home.”

Concorde herds us onto the secret subway thingy. He wants to make absolutely sure we do as we’re told for once. I half-expect him to walk each of us home and personally tuck us into bed.

“Okay, so,” Matt says, “bit of an anti-climax, sure, but I think, all things considered, we did good.”

No one rushes to agree with him.

“C’mon. So we didn’t completely ace it right out of the gate, but there’re super-teams out there that’ve had worse debut adventures.”

“Name one,” Stuart says.

“There was a team from Detroit a few years back,” Matt says without missing a beat. “Called themselves the Gangbusters because they were going after all the street gangs. Said they were going to clean up the city.”

“How bad was their first outing?”

“They were killed by the 8-Mile Kings,” Matt says. Stuart laughs, but Matt’s not joking. “Seriously, man. They got gunned down.”

“Oh, dude. That’s harsh.”

“Yeah. So, see? At least we’re doing better than them. The Gangbusters, I mean, not the gang.”

“Yeah, okay,” Stuart says, “we didn’t do so hot.
So what? Judas Priest’s first couple albums kind of sucked, but they got awesome.”

“I guess we didn’t make a
complete
mess of things,” Sara says.

“We found the bad guy and brought him in. Sort of,” Missy says. “I mean, he would have gotten away completely if we hadn’t’ve found him.”

“Exactly,” Matt says. “Right now, we’re the unsung heroes of the day, but if we keep at it, we’ll be right up there with the Protectorate. We need more experience, that’s all.”

Experience, he says. That’s all. Right.

This is what Mom would call a catch-22: we need experience to become better super-heroes, but we’re not going to last long enough to get better without some experience. It isn’t like we can request starter super-villains. This isn’t a video game where we get to start out fighting low-level fodder and work our way up to the boss monster.

Matt’s looking at me, waiting for me to back him up. He wants me to join his Affirmation Chorus with a hallelujah and an amen, and I can’t do it.

“Why are we doing this to ourselves?” I say. “What’s the point of all this? Really? Why are we doing this?”

“Because we’re super-heroes,” Matt says, like that’s all the justification anyone needs.

“No, we’re not. We’re a bunch of dumb amateurs, and it’s a miracle we haven’t been killed.”

“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You had a close call with Manticore and it’s freaked you out.”

“Yes! It has!” I say, and saying it out loud drives home the ugly, terrible truth: someone tried to kill me.
He knew I was just a girl and it didn’t matter. Suddenly the air feels too thin and my head spins and I think I might vomit. “He tried to kill all of us! Doesn’t that bother you?”

“It’s something we have to get used to if we’re going to do this,” Matt says dismissively.

“But why are we doing this? Huh? Seriously, why? Why are we risking our lives fighting giant robots and psychotic killers?”

“Because we’re super-heroes,” Matt says again, and that’s when I completely lose it.

“Stop saying that! That’s not a reason! Don’t you have a real reason for wanting to do this? Come on, Matt, give me something! Tell me you’re avenging someone’s death! Tell me you’re atoning for some huge screw-up! God, tell me you’re nothing but a bored teenage boy looking for a cheap thrill, but tell me
something!
”

All he can do is gawp at me. His mouth is moving but no sound comes out. I’ve asked him the one question no one has ever asked, the one he can’t answer—the one he needed to hear. His lip quivers like he’s going to start crying, but I have no sympathy for him.

“Anyone? Do any of you have a reason?” I say, my throat raw. “Have any of you stopped for a single second to think about why you want to do this? Or are you all just following Matt’s lead?”

I look to Sara. She’s staring at the floor. Missy, her eyes are everywhere but on me. Stuart—

“Because we can,” he says, and color me shocked, but he was honestly the last one I expected to say anything. He and Matt, they’re a full-fledged bro
mantic couple, and Stuart’s the loyal wingman. “A lot of crap happens in the world, y’know? People get hurt and killed, and a lot of it happens because people, the people who can do something, they don’t step up. It’s always someone else’s problem. Maybe that’s why the world is such a mess, because no one wants to be the one to try and fix it.”

“Evil triumphs when good people do nothing,” I say.

“Right. Yeah,” Stuart says. “You wanted a reason. There you go.”

The transport glides to a stop, then rises. The doors slide open and Miss Hannaford greets us with a smile none of us can return.

SEVENTEEN

“All right, you,” Concorde says. “Wake up.”

It’s an unnecessary order; Archimedes never fell asleep. The cot was comfortable enough, and heaven knows he was exhausted, but the silence, as the saying goes, was deafening—not the silence of his cell, but the silence that fell when Concorde disconnected the phone that was his lifeline to the virtual world and left the wire dangling from his skull, useless. It was as if Concorde left it there deliberately to taunt him. He seems the type, Archimedes thinks, a petty man who likes to lord his control over others.

“What happens now?” Archimedes says.

“You’ll be transported to Byrne, outside of Worcester. It’s a supermax for...people like you. You’ll cool your heels there until we figure out what to do with you.”

Archimedes sits up, so he can better face his captor. “Off to prison I go, just like that?” Archimedes says. “No police, no courts, no lawyers? Am I not entitled to due process?”

“You’ll have your day in court,” Concorde says, less than convincingly. “The process is different for
people like you.”

“People like me,” Archimedes repeats.

“Unconventional individuals who commit unconventional crimes. You require special treatment on every level.”

“It sounds so nice when you put it that way.
Special treatment
. Not at all like I’m being thrown into a secret government prison.”

“Cry me a river. Get up.”

Concorde rouses Manfred with equal brusqueness, having no sympathy to spare for the men, and leads them down to the hangar, where an unusual vehicle awaits. It is at first glance deceptively mundane: plain white and unmarked by any identifying logos or insignia, and to an uneducated eye it could pass easily as a commercial box truck. A very select few would recognize it as a modified military-grade armored transport. The back doors yawn open like a great devouring mouth awaiting its daily feeding. Each wall is lined with a bench welded directly onto the frame.

Concorde hands his charges off to four men in black paramilitary uniforms and armed with compact automatic rifles. In this line-up, it is the man in the business suit who stands out as incongruous.

“What is this?” Manfred says. “Where are you taking us?”

“We’re going to disappear,” Archimedes says. “Concorde is sending us somewhere where we’ll never bother anyone again.”

“Your friend is being a little melodramatic,” says the man in the suit, who introduces himself as Albert Fresch, “your attorney pro tem. I assure you, neither of you are about to be ‘disappeared.’ Once we arrive at
Byrne, after you have been processed as detainees, your arrests will be released to the media, and you will be provided with a liaison from Amnesty International to ensure your continued humane and legal treatment under the Superhuman Defense Act.”

“It’s more than you deserve,” Concorde says, “but we’re still the good guys.”

Two of the guards grasp Archimedes by the arms and lead him toward the cargo area. His mouth curls into a bitter snarl.

“Of course you are.”

“...at which point you may opt to retain me as your representative in court, or you may hire a private attorney. I will, of course, immediately turn over all documents relevant to your case.” Fresch waits for an acknowledgement from the handcuffed men and, receiving none, forges ahead. “It would expedite the process if I could get your personal information now, then we won’t have to waste time at Byrne.”