Wearing The Cape: Villains Inc. (19 page)

“Donald
Gerrold
,” Fisher said. “You know him?”

And I wanted to kill him.
This time I didn’t have to smell the blood—it was all over poor Don and the floor. At least someone had closed his eyes. I took a breath, swallowed, and decided I wasn’t about to contaminate the crime-scene.

“I met him today, Detective Fisher,” I said.
 
As Hope.
“He works for—worked for—Robert Early. What happened?” I managed to keep my voice even.

“That happened.” He pointed to bits of metal scattered around the floor and imbedded in showroom cars. “K-Strike?”

“Dude.”

The hero straightened up from his post by the door, stepping over the remains of whatever it was to join us. He wore a black half-helmet and a black and gray jumpsuit armored like a motorcycle racer’s. A short black swashbuckler’s cape, slung over one shoulder, made him look like a cyberpunk highwayman.

“K-Strike.” I smiled. I’d met the West Side Guardian at last year’s
Metrocon
blowout party, where he’d hit on Artemis in a charming but perfunctory way.

“Hey Astra,” he said. “Nasty business.”

“What happened?”

He looked at Fisher, and the detective nodded.

“I was riding home from a safety event two blocks from here when Dispatch called—said a metal-man had killed somebody and was shooting up the place. Bullets are no problem, so I came in without waiting for backup and found Robby the Robot here—” He waived around and I could see some of the bigger parts were arm or leg joints. “—firing away with a couple of built-in
autorifles
.”

He frowned. “Metal-dude wasn’t shooting to hit anybody, or even the cars, but I figured that could change. I could see it wasn’t some dude in armor, so I took it down.”

I looked around at the mess. “With what?”

He reached into a belt pocket and pulled out a couple of steel marbles. His power was a personal field that could absorb the kinetic energy of anything that touched it, making him bulletproof. He could also project kinetic energy into anything
he
touched; he could fire those marbles hard enough to punch holes in concrete, and take the eye out of a One-Eyed Jack with one, too—I’d seen him do it on the
Metrocon
best-of video.

“I took off its arms at the elbows so it couldn’t shoot anymore,” he said. “Then it just blew up. Lucky everyone was already under cover—the biggest bit left is its head over there.” He pointed to the caved-in robot head. It had camera-lens eyes and microphone ears.

Galatea looked at it, and then at the fragments of joints nearby.

“May I examine it?”

Fisher nodded. “Don’t touch anything yet.”

“I will not.” She knelt stiffly and placed a hand in front of the thing’s field of vision. “Detective Fisher,” she said. “The visual and audio sensors of this automaton are still active, and it is transmitting a signal.”

“It’s
what
? Wyatt, get me a trash can.”

My super-duper senses aren’t always the biggest help, but I heard the sharp thuds of unlatched steel doors and the timing set off alarms in my head.

“Fisher—”

The steel dragon came through the windows.

Superhero vs.
supervillan
fights are often short but seldom brutal. Lots of confrontations start and end with “You know who I am, do you really want to do this?” If the hero has a formidable reputation, often it’s enough. If it isn’t, neither side is usually trying to kill the other; villains who become cape-killers don’t prosper, and heroes who kill villains have to fill out all kinds of paperwork and appear in front of unsympathetic review boards. And then there’s the other kind of fight.

Astra,
Notes From a Life.

“Dispatch!” I yelled. “Civilian
evac
!” Galatea froze, jerking, in the oddest attack of controlled epilepsy I’d ever seen, but people began disappearing in blurs of red as Rush arrived and started clearing the deck, staff and customers first. Fisher drew his gun before a sweeping claw threw him into the sports car behind him. He
bent
the wrong way, but before I could even react Rush whisked him away as well.

The metal monster—a serpentine Chinese dragon built out of scavenged and spot-welded parts—focused on me as I leaped upward, hoping to draw its attention. It twisted about with a thumping crash, flattened a shiny showroom car, craned its head to follow my flight, and
shot
me with the artillery piece sticking out of its open mouth.

“Hope!”
Shelly screamed as the sabot-round blew me through the roof. I barely heard her, or anything else until my arc ended in the windshield of a BMW parked in the outside lot.

I pulling myself out of the car dashboard, and gasped as agony flared. Broken ribs?

“Clear?”

“Geez! Rush got everybody but Galatea and K-Strike, and you’re hit! Wait for backup!”

“Can’t!” I launched myself back through the frameless windows, coming in high. “We need to keep it here!”

The critter spun to face me, impossibly fast, its scything tail neatly decapitating Galatea where she stood. A second sabot-round
whumped
out as I
jinked
, blowing another hole in the ceiling. K-Strike darted forward to
push
on its left foreleg with his field and stressed metal joints screeched as it lurched. I dove for its wildly swinging head as it turned to look for him.

Whang
.
It staggered as I struck the base of its skull, grabbing hold and pulling
up
with stinging hands. Weaving, it flattened another show-car as I forced its metal head back. Its tail hit K-Strike and sheared off against his kinetic field.

Whump
. It fired again, adding a third hole and bringing down bits of burning ceiling. My ears rang and I couldn’t understand Shelly. Damn super-senses.

It swung me into the wall, knocking me off in a shower of cement. I sat up, shaking my head. “Everybody’s coming!” Shelly yelled through our neural link. Then it stepped on me.

I screamed as my ribs ground together. Pinned under tons of steel dragon, no leverage, I pushed back uselessly, taking sobbing breaths in time with each lance of pain. Its head swiveled around, mouth open, barrel down, and I
knew
it was going to blow its own foot off to take the shot. I could see down the barrel to the chambered shell, and I closed my eyes.

“Astra!” Its knee-joint exploded, then Rush was there. He grabbed my shoulder and the world slowed. I pushed again as he pulled. “Move!” he yelled, and hung on as I flew up and back. The gun fired and I
saw
the shockwave propagate through the showroom floor, shattering tiles in a wave that passed under us.

I pulled him up to a better position on my back, cringing as the move lit a fire in my ribs. “What
was
that?” I yelled over the stretched-out echoes of the blast. The expanding cloud of fragments slowed and then stopped as he took us completely over the Wall into
hypertime
.

“Shaped charge to the knee! I always carry a few on my bike just in case!” He sounded like he’d run a marathon. How many transitions had he made?
 
Focus.
“Got any more of those?”

“One.”

“Bike?”

“Outside on the curb.”

We flew out through the glassless windows. Traveling in Rush’s freeze-frame world always gave me the
wiggins
(I’d closed my eyes on the bike ride this morning), but I didn’t have time to think about it. I landed beside the bike and he dropped us out of full
hypertime
into a slow-moving world of
dopplered
sound. Not letting go of me, he cracked a case behind the bike-seat and pulled out a truncated steel cone, bigger than both fists.

He took a steadying breath and the world froze again. “You got a plan?”

I grinned savagely. “Off with its head.”

“That’ll work.” He wrapped his arms around my neck and I took off. We found the frozen dragon, head still bent
groundward
for the shot. K-Strike hung suspended mid-leap, his target another of the critter’s legs. I landed us on the dragon’s neck, right behind where I’d hit it the first time, and Rush slapped the shaped charge onto the joint where neck met head.

Rush grunted as it sealed, set it. “On go, take us away fast. Three, two, one, go!” I launched us as Rush brought us back into
realtime
.

Bhwoom
!
The crashing explosion shattered the massive steel neck-joint, and I took us to the ground even as the screech of more distressed metal announced K-Strike’s own attack. The headless dragon fell across the last of the show-cars and lay still.

The floater arrived minutes later, Lei
Zi
, Seven, The Harlequin, and Riptide on board. While everyone else maintained distance, I checked the remains to make sure they weren’t rigged to blow like the robot had been. Aching all over, ribs burning and light-headed, I wanted to laugh. I was
alive
. We had
won
. Then I nearly wigged when Detective Fisher stepped back into the glass-covered showroom; I’d seen him bend
backwards
, in a direction no human was designed to go.

“Good job kid,” he said, lighting up.

“But—” I shook my head. Later. “Shelly?” I said. “Can you locate Galatea?”

“Her transponder puts her north of you. Looks like she went the distance.”

I found her head, eyes blinking up at me, behind a half-collapsed display wall. Picking her up, I started giggling uncontrollably as she looked around.

“‘Alas, poor
Yorick
. I knew him well,’” Fisher said behind me.

“I do not understand your comment, Detective Fisher,” she replied. “Unless you are asking if I am well. I am incapacitated. However, my cranial battery should sustain my higher functions until I can be serviced.”

“Good to hear.”

Many breakthroughs can bring firepower equivalent to military ordinance, making superhuman combat potentially very destructive, so naturally after the Event insurance companies began offering new and enhanced lines of damage insurance. Superhuman Damage riders have proven very profitable, since even in the big cities the insured’s chances of injury or property loss from superhuman combat is low—and of course insurance company lawyers will sue to recover damages in cases where a
superheroe’s
negligence has added to the damage. Which brings us to liability and the scope of superhero liability insurance.