The first order of business to enact their escape was to resume their disguises. Sarah’s smoke wrapped around them, as the two of them became Chiak and Tianit once again. Lia got her own ikiski illusion, a much larger, bulkier model that Sarah decided to name Atia. Isaac wasn’t sure the names were ever going to be used, but they served to anchor the disguises for him. Savage required the smallest changes, where the metallic armor and glass-and-ceramic cybernetics were layered over with the semi-translucent gemstone look of the ikiski riding raptors.
Isaac reached out and pushed the smallest amount of ontological inertia into each of the disguises, making them more real and more resistant to the vagaries of nature. At the same time, he stabilized the illusion itself, making it easier for Sarah to hold. Those were definitely entirely different concepts, which felt odd to him as he wielded his power in still-unfamiliar ways.
“I found a little side corridor where we can land,” Sarah volunteered, her smoke threading its way through the ventilation systems.
“Take Lia first, maybe,” Isaac suggested, feeling like he was dealing with that old logic puzzle regarding the duck, the fox and the boat. “I’m going to have to be last, regardless, in case anyone needs further tweaks.”
“Well, I haven’t taken anyone else before,” Sarah warned. “There’s a chance it won’t work.”
“Then we’ll break out the hard way,” Isaac replied. He wasn’t all that worried about it, even if some part of him knew he should have been. He figured that Lia’s magic could bypass some of the security, or maybe one of the many gadgets worked into Savage’s cybernetics. But smoke was definitely his first choice.
He reached out and put his hand on Lia’s wrist, disguised under scales, focusing on removing the resistance from changing into smoke. All the weird applications of his power were making his brain feel strained, since it wasn’t enough to just think of something. He had to focus, grope in a direction, and push his power in ways that he hadn’t before. All possible, but it was like trying to focus on learning a new skill after seeing it just the one time.
Once he was satisfied that he’d managed make Sarah’s job as easy as he could, he gave her a nod, and she narrowed her eyes at Lia. There was no particular warning about the transition, just one moment Lia was there and the next moment there was a puff of smoke. Sarah vanished at the same moment, but reappeared from the drifting haze a few seconds later.
“She’s waiting for us in the hallway,” Sarah reported. “Only wrinkle is picking up and moving someone is hard, so I won’t be able to do it a lot.”
“I can fix that, probably,” Isaac said, and reached out to put a hand on Savage’s armor, repeating the process with the dinosaur and himself simultaneously. The second time around it was faster and easier, since he’d already felt out the metaphorical directions, and after maybe thirty seconds or so he was ready. All he’d needed to do was tweak the resistance to being moved as smoke. He signaled Sarah, and this time it was the cyber-raptor’s turn to vanish in a puff of smoke. Then his.
Traveling as smoke was distinctly unpleasant. It was like when he’d been trapped as Ravdia, but in the complete opposite direction. A moment of total uncontrol, dispersion and dissolution. It lasted only a fraction of a second but he still staggered when Sarah dropped him in the hallway, trying to recover from the sensation. Sarah herself sagged against the wall, breathing hard like she’d just been running.
“Those tyrannosaurs are still in the stable,” she muttered as she recovered, her eyes distant as she looked through the smoke. “I can keep us invisible to some extent but I’m not sure I’d trust it around them.”
“No,” Isaac agreed, tapping Lia on the shoulder to enact the moving modification before he forgot. The lunarian inclined her head to him, enormous eyes distant as runes shone on her skin. “Those things are scary smart. Hm.”
“We can use that against them,” Savage suggested in his flat, synthetic voice. “An illusion of mounts leaving the stable would draw their attention in ways it would not for less insightful mounts.”
“Oh, perfect. I should have thought of that,” Sarah said, rolling her kiseru between her fingers. “I’m out of practice. Easily done.” He wasn’t sure if she was yet back to where she’d been before the depowerment, but he’d seen her illusions at work before, and figured she didn’t need any further suggestions on what exactly to do.
There was a tense wait in the small side hall as Sarah focused on something that none of them could see, the slightest noise making Isaac twitch. It was only a matter of time until someone realized they’d vanished from the room – assuming the alarm hadn’t already gone out – and when that happened it’d become much more difficult to move around. And of course if they were truly discovered, they couldn’t go toe to toe with any of the powerful ikiski.
“Haven’t been able to send them far, but we’ve got some space,” Sarah said abruptly. “One more jump.” She shifted both Lia and Savage to smoke at the same time for the jump, coming back a moment later to get him. Isaac braced himself and then, upon consideration, stopped. He was pretty sure he wasn’t reinforcing himself with his power, but he didn’t want Sarah to get abruptly hung up because he was making things difficult. A moment later, there was another stretch of awful, blurring dispersal, and then they were in the stables, inasmuch as that word applied to something that was closer to a bunch of single-room apartments than something horses would use.
For a moment, Sarah’s illusions dropped to show her a little bit pale, sweating and panting as she swayed on her feet from overexertion. Isaac reached to steady her, feeling oddly guilty that his part of their escape wasn’t straining him, and she leaned against him as her illusions reasserted themselves. He guided her forward to the pens, from which he could hear their raptors chirping and growling.
Shay, Astoria, and Lia’s raptor – whose name Isaac had yet to hear – were obviously glad to see them. Through the bracelet, Isaac could tell they hadn’t much enjoyed being stuck with the pair of rexes as watchers, though he still didn’t quite know how smart they actually were. The stable doors weren’t as secure as their suite had been, but there were crystal rods barring them in, apparently fused to the wall.
Savage simply broke them. He seemed to have some idea of a weak point or just had that much brute force, because it took only one swipe each with his forearm-blades, sending the bars tinkling to the ground. Their mounts exited the stables of their own accord, pushing open the doors, and Isaac hurriedly gave the raptors the smoke-transformation treatment. He’d seen how she’d looked after trying to shift everyone so quickly, and he knew she didn’t like her face to be visible so it had been more strain than she’d probably admit. He definitely didn’t want to ask his girlfriend to try and move a group twice the size, but it was better to plan ahead just in case.
A blaring, discordant melody belted out abruptly as they headed out of the stables, coming from what seemed to be the very walls themselves. Isaac crouched down on Shay’s back, urging her to go faster as they raced out of the stables and onto the streets of the ikiski city. They shot past one of the rexes, the other one visible at a distance just from sheer size, both of them shaking the ground as they raced back to the jail.
“Dropping invisibility,” Sarah gasped, the four of them sliding into the road traffic. They ended up behind a big, quadrupedal riding dinosaur with one of the palanquins shielding whoever was inside. It was a bit like being stuck behind a cargo truck, something big and slow and annoying, but at the same time that meant they didn’t have to compete with other traffic or infer what few rules of the road there were. That didn’t stop some miniscule dino-rider from trying to squeeze past them – something that reminded Isaac of cyclists trying to use the streets – and getting summarily chomped by Lia’s mount. The half-pint was flung backward behind them, landing with an uncomfortably meaty thud, and Isaac vowed once again to respect ikiski traffic.
The sound of the alarm, which had faded slightly with distance, suddenly redoubled as one of the giant ikiski flew overhead on its tyrannosaurus mount. The crystaltech wings, which he had not yet seen in use, were spread wide, trails of glowing force spiraling out beyond the wingtips in massive airfoils as the soldier shot by. The gawking and pointing from other people stuck behind the dino-truck was reassuringly familiar, even if they were all lizards. Even if flying people were a common sight in Star City, sometimes spectacle would still make people stop and stare.
It was the first real acid test of the disguises. Isaac watched the soldier pass by close overhead, fingers tapping nervously on Shay’s crystalline saddle, but the ikiski’s gaze skipped over them and onward. If anything, he figured that Savage was most likely to give them away, but there were some dinos moving here and there without riders, something he hadn’t noticed in Borealis.
For several very, very long minutes they followed the trundling quadruped, waiting for something to happen. For the tyrannosaurs to drop out of the sky, or for more alerts to go out, or even a lockdown of the entire city. Yet time crawled by, and despite seeing the soldiers swoop through the sky more than once, the boosted illusions held.
“Let’s see if we can find a map, or a library, or something. Something to plan a route, find another teleporter out of here.” He muttered through the pin, not wanting to alert anyone by speaking in a non-ikiski tongue. It’d be stupid to blow their cover right after managing to slip out of a secure facility.
He nudged Shay at the next intersection, moving out from behind the big quadruped and heading off down another road, aimed toward the inner part of the city where the smaller buildings were. Even if the disguise was holding for now, he doubted it’d last forever, ontological inertia or not. They needed to keep moving, stay ahead of the people after them, and carry on to the south pole.
***
Administrator Ike was glad that Mocker had returned, even if the news wasn’t particularly heartening. The warlock sat sprawled in a chair across from Ike’s desk, while two of the members of Justice for Hire that had gone to the Deep Kingdoms stood behind. Neither of them needed seats as such, but Ike was also not feeling particularly hospitable to them at the moment.
“At least we’re not the only ones who have to suffer Mister Hartson being a slippery little shit,” Mocker observed, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. He didn’t normally use that kind of profanity – at least not while on duty – so he had to be more than a little irritated. Not that Ike blamed him.
“I’m surprised that Mechaniacal didn’t have some method of tracking the man,” Ike observed, sorting through the newest reports from the supers closer to home. While Hartson’s gallivanting was certainly troublesome, there were criminals and monsters that were a more immediate threat to Star City. A stray biotitan had come up out of the bay, which was worrying if they were spreading further than the Isle of Leaves; an artifact that had summoned something that looked like a demon, thankfully destroyed with prejudice by a local magical girl; and then there were Blacktime’s people making trouble in all the other cites of the Five City Alliance.
“He said something about needing to make it,” Mocker replied. Ike nodded; at some point he would review all the footage from Mocker’s excursion to the Deep Kingdoms, though it had already been sent to Vilmonica for dissection and circulation to the various tinkers of Star Central. He was sure everyone would be fascinated by an in-depth look at Mechaniacal’s technology.
It seemed almost wrong to Ike that Mechaniacal wasn’t able to just sweep through the Deep Kingdoms, but then, he’d really only encountered the man after Mechaniacal had been given the time to create an entire industrial base. Enormous factories, hidden mines, and if the rumors were to be believed, ways to extract resources from alternate dimensions. His mental image of the old tinker included a near-infinite number of machines, but of course the truth was that took time, and Mechaniacal had returned only days ago.
“Well, I’ll want you on standby,” Ike sighed. “We have to reconnect with the Deep Kingdoms, and we want more ways in than just relying on him.” The teleporter could be rebuilt of course, and probably would be. Relations would have be resumed first, however, and that meant going through the south pole – which Ike didn’t look forward to – or getting help from one of the other sovereigns or transporters with sufficient range.
Annoyingly, one of the few he knew had the range was employed by Blacktime, and between the two he would almost rather trust Mechaniacal. Their file on Nebula was extensive and painted the woman as more than a little unstable. As were all supervillains, in their own ways, or else they wouldn’t be supervillains.
“In the meantime,” he continued, turning to look at the members of Justice for Hire that Mocker had brought back with him. Stratum, Ike didn’t know anything about, and his dossier was fairly scanty. A low-powered elemental, unknown age. Could be just years old, could be millennia, but it wasn’t who was truly interesting. It was Bubs, one of the beings that had come through when Ike’s power had been undamped in the fallout of the Blackbeam incident. Proof that Ike still couldn’t control his abilities, if nothing else.
That had been years ago, but so far as Ike could tell the shadow-being hadn’t changed much in the intervening time. The only notable addition was the glowing, spiraled piece of machinery that dangled from one of the belts, suffusing him in a faint blue. Ike could feel it even past the chemicals the life support chair put into his blood; a dimensional technology, though it felt more like a stabilizer than anything truly worrisome.
“Exactly how did you wind up in the Deep Kingdoms?” Ike already knew the broad strokes from Vilmonica’s prior investigation, but he was deeply curious about the lunarian’s role in it all.
“Lia said that Mechaniacal’s presence in Star City made her own position difficult,” Bubs said, the shadow being almost seeming to fidget despite not visibly moving. “And it is actively painful for me to be so close to an extra-dimensional being. She offered to use her diplomatic credentials to get us elsewhere, and the Deep Kingdom was the easiest to secure passage to.”
“I see,” said Ike, immediately spotting several holes in the story that Bubs couldn’t be expected to have noticed. Most people didn’t know anything about lunarian politics, and while it was true that Mechaniacal made things complicated, it was mostly complicated for the royalists. Which Lia was not, or Moonblast would have known. And while it was true that travel between the cities of the Five Cities Alliance was restricted at the moment, it wasn’t that restricted.
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No, he didn’t buy it, and that meant that Lia was definitely up to something. His instinct said it had to do with Hartson, as no lunarian had shown much interest in the Deep Kingdoms before now, but he couldn’t dismiss the crystalline entity attack. Such things weren’t uncommon in the Deep Kingdoms, of course, in the same way biotitan attacks were a regular feature of the Isle of Leaves. Every civilization was plagued by its own monsters, but lunarians were so diametrically different from those that lived at the center of the Earth that her very presence could have been contributory.
“I’ll have Vilmonica take a complete statement,” he said, focusing on Bubs and Stratum. Part of Vilmonica’s powerset included translation, so she would actually be able to talk to Stratum in ways that Ike couldn’t. “But before I release you, I’ll want the braintrust downstairs to examine that dimensional stabilizer.”
“You know what it is?” Bubs asked in clear surprise.
“I have been around for a while,” Ike said dryly. “You tend to learn these things. I have no objection to you owning it, but given who provided it, you can understand why I would want it screened by another tinker.”
“Yes, sir,” Bubs said, and Ike made a few notes through his chair interface to have Handy Hands take care of the analysis. He was the one with the closest style to Mechaniacal, and the most experience besides. Not that any of Star Central’s tinkers would pass up the opportunity to study something of Mechaniacal’s make.
“Vilmonica will call you from the waiting room,” Ike said in dismissal. “I’ll call you when we’re ready for another move, Mocker.” The warlock nodded stiffly, bowed, and vanished in a swirl of shadow, as was his wont. The two from Justice for Hire escaped out the door, and Ike sighed, swiveling his chair toward Glorybeam. Sometimes even he forgot she was there, despite the fact that the shrouding technology was designed not to work on him.
“How bad is the situation with the Deep Kingdoms?” His question was more about judgement than analysis; neither of them knew all that much about what was going on in the hollow earth, but she had spent more time down there. The relationship between the Deep Kingdoms and the Five City Alliance was more of a civilian venture, with supers only tangentially involved, so his personal understanding was limited.
“The best case would be for Hartson and the lunarian to be promptly returned,” Glorybeam said, not bothering with the sort of hemming and hawing most people would. “The Deep Kingdom culture emphasizes direct contests of force. Our allies understand that superpowers have more nuance, but others may not. Neither Smokeshow nor Hartson are brute force, which means they will seem inherently deceitful if they use their abilities and that could cause escalating tensions.”
“And the lunarian?” Ike frowned; inciting a fracas was not good, but it at least didn’t have wider political ramifications. A few fights were just part and parcel of the Deep Kingdoms, but so far as he knew no lunarian had gone down there before.
“Unknown. I am surprised her runes even function that deep if she is a nativist.” Glorybeam shrugged, jostling the oversized headset she was using to listen to feeds from the various superhero teams. “The ikiski should have no connections, positive or negative, to lunarian politics. Nor does there seem to be any problematic interaction between runes and crystaltech. But we have not run experiments to find if there is any inherent clash or interaction between the two that could cause problems, such as the trouble the shadow creature had with Mechaniacal.”
“Something like dimensional resonance is unlikely.” Ike glanced in the direction of the door, where Bubs had long vanished. “My worry is them potentially setting up a teleportation circle down there and trying to recruit from the Deep Kingdoms. Lunarians in the Hollow Earth is bad enough, but dinosaurs on the moon would be disastrous. We don’t need that civil war spilling out here.”
“There is little we can do until we secure travel to the Deep Kingdoms,” Glorybeam pointed out. “Perhaps Endymion would be willing to offer his services.” Ike grunted. It was true that the titanic biomechanical armor Endymion used had its own form of teleportation, but convincing the man to leave the Isle of Leaves for even a short amount of time would be difficult. On the other hand, if the Deep Kingdoms began to get truly restive, that would be good for nobody.
With some reluctance, he began composing a message to Endymion. Unlike sending communications throughout the Five City Alliance, or even to neighboring polities, opening a line to the Isle of Leaves was an ordeal. Generally it required sending an actual courier, given the dangers of the open waters, the distances involved, and the reality-bending squalls that plagued the Corridor of Nightmares that cut through the ocean. Going around it was safer, but that led into the heart of the biotitan menace or into Tinkertown’s territory, respectively.
Ike had hopes that Machine Head’s ultra-long-distance communicators would help shortcut that problem, though there were issues with that, too. Ignoring the technical difficulties of maintaining high-level tinker work, the communications gap gave everyone a comfortable buffer between very different societies. There were tourists and travelers on occasion, not to mention limited trade where the infrastructure existed, but the contact was restricted enough that, for example, adamant monarchists didn’t get restive having to deal with the elective form of government the Five Cities Alliance used.
If there was anything Ike didn’t need at the moment, it was foreigners telling him how to mind his business.
He finished composing the missive, adding in some supporting photostats from Mocker’s feed and some notes from the various files. The printer clicked and whirred, spooling the perforated edges through, and he leaned over to tear off the text while the tinker-made copier hissed and dropped the photos into their own tray. The enclosures got bundled together with his message, and Ike stuck it all in a scroll-case that he sealed with the starburst symbol of Star Central.
Another message summoned one of the runners that he employed, and he handed over both the scroll and an authorization to access one of the equipment rooms. The best quick courier to the Isle of Leaves was a Tinkertown-made item, a small flying saucer that had inspired his own travel chair. The saucer was barely three feet across, good for messages only, not even people, but that was fine. Better than having to go himself.
Once it was off – the silver disk vanishing out of the range of Star Central’s cameras in a matter of moments – Ike turned his attention back to the rest of the problems needing his attention. For all that Hartson and the Deep Kingdoms might be a disaster in the making, there were plenty of disasters already manifest. Blacktime was one, of course, but there were reports of a new supervillain calling himself the Sewer King and infesting the multitudinous tunnels beneath Star City with mutated rats and slimes. Then there was a messenger from the Green Grove, which meant there was something the druids wanted and there was no chance that would make anyone happy. Finally, he had to forward yet another threat from the southern kingdoms disguised as a politely worded letter to the mayor, the people there still upset over the accusations stemming from Hartson’s Harkeem identity.
Trouble never slept in Star City.
***
Professor Mechaniacal sighed as the perimeter alarms began to sound, muting the television and turning away to his internal displays. He’d been in the middle of binging VillainS – with a capital S at the end – and had found the superpowered crime drama to be surprisingly well written. Some of the characters were even familiar, based on people he’d known or interacted with decades prior.
One thing he had certainly missed on the moon was the delightful media people came up with. Some of it had come through – there was a fantastic radio serial from the Isle of Leaves that he could pick up on occasion – but for the most part he was restricted to moonie entertainment. Which was okay so far as it went, but there were so many nuances he just didn’t understand. It was nice to be back among fellow humans again, with normal shows, but with it came the interruptions of living among fellow humans. Which was to say, attempts on his person and property.
The dot display showed an intrusion into his tower where it abutted one of the many underground tunnels lacing Star City’s foundations. A deliberate weakness, as it made any attack more likely to arrive there, and it had already served to lure some of the burgeoning Rat King’s minions to their inevitable doom. Of course, it genuinely was less defended, or else it wouldn’t work as a weakness for anyone with intelligence, but Mechaniacal had always preferred proper planning to blind static defenses.
It was Blacktime. Of course it was; that supervillain was very protective of his territory, for reasons Mechaniacal didn’t quite understand. Even if he knew the general shape of Blacktime’s habits, he couldn’t quite synthesize the mind of the man behind them. Blacktime himself wasn’t in evidence, but several of the supers that were had shown up on footage recovered from his partially-wrecked lab. Combined with his listening devices, he had some idea of who they were.
First things first, he leaned over and flipped a switch. Gears clicked, servos whirred, and hydraulics hissed as the comfortable living room transformed into a protected war room. Armored panels slid down, generators slotted into place, glowing field projectors locked into an array around the perimeter. The television and the stack of rented tapes descended into the floor – he intended on finishing the backlog later – and an array of controls ascended in the center.
As powerful as Mechaniacal was, he wasn’t nearly as unkillable as Blacktime. He’d gotten lucky a few times when he was younger, and had no illusions of his own invulnerability. Oh, he was very difficult to kill, but superpowers came in all kinds of flavors and surprise was a weapon that only caution could defend against. And unlike superheroes, villains and thugs tended toward the lethal.
The dance with superheroes was more like a fencing duel. Ultimately, the heroes didn’t want to drive somebody to flatten a city block or, in extreme cases, a city. The intent was to stymie, safeguard, disarm, and suppress. To render a supervillain’s goals irrelevant or impossible, rather than necessarily to meet force with force.
Clashing between villains had fewer niceties, but there were still things beyond just lethal force to consider. Escalating a feud too much drew in other supers – hero or villain – and could result in an even greater mess. On the other hand, it was important to show he had teeth, because unless he bloodied Blacktime’s nose the man would keep pushing.
Mechaniacal’s fingers played across dials, levers, and mechanical stops as he activated his defenses. Blacktime had sent some twenty men and women, with two tactical supers to lead. One was an electrical super, which was amusing since Mechaniacal barely touched the stuff. Against another tinker he might have been far more effective, though at the same time the lack of Mechaniacal’s electrical infrastructure meant he had fewer weapons to deploy against someone who was mostly composed of electricity. The other was a short, fat man in blue who had a less understandable power set, and was probably more of a threat overall for that very reason.
Each of them led a distinct squad, with Mangonel directing supers in power armor through the wall adjacent to the tunnel while Fantabio infiltrated with the support of stealthy commandos. It was a fairly serious attempt, though far short of what would be necessary to actually threaten Mechaniacal. Giving a tinker any amount of time to build was a mistake.
He slid several levers to one side, flipping a few switches as elsewhere in the tower, turrets rumbled to life. Gears turned them on their mounts, rotating them sideways, downward, and then in another direction orthogonal to normal dimensions. Ultra-fine gears clicked one, two, three notches as the weapons were sent ever-so-slightly out of phase with reality, phantoms that could only barely touch the normal. Such defenses were one reason why he didn’t heavily employ power suppressors in his own buildings — they didn’t work on every power, but they certainly couldn’t coexist with his more esoteric creations.
Cogs and windings twitched as the turrets focused on the infiltrators Mechaniacal’s sensors reported. Visual pickups were already going dark, as the infiltrators ranged out ahead of the grunts, but Mechaniacal had more than just the obvious cameras — or the less-obvious ones, for that matter. Another press of the button, and the turrets fired, spitting dimensionally displaced projectiles through the walls and floors of the tower.
Three quarters of the invaders stopped moving, dropped by the passage of dimensionally-displaced matter through their craniums. It wasn’t necessarily lethal, but it certainly took them out of the fight. The few that were left had enhanced constitutions, but the joy of being a tinker was having so very many options to choose from.
A flip of a switch sent a swarm of drones down the hallways toward the attacking groups, sonic shriekers going full blast. Ensconced as he was deep within the tower, he didn’t hear a thing, but he knew how unpleasant such sounds were. Moving walls began to slide and shift, altering the interior where the attempted intrusion was taking place, and if a few unfortunate individuals were caught in the mechanisms, that was merely a rounding error in the cleaning budget.
Trundling balls hummed and ticked as they advanced down the newly-formed hall, amplifying the strange energies of scavenged meteorites found only on the far side of the moon and bathing the area in yellow-pink radiation. The effect on the human psyche was profound, ranging from mere confusion to outright aneurysm, though those already unconscious were, luckily for them, not subject to the sensations.
The supers weren’t helpless, of course. Nixie tubes lit up on a damage tracker as explosions, punches, electrical cannonballs and whatever it was that Fantabio did destroyed his machines. But they were built to be expendable; the actually delicate and important stuff was much better protected. Some of the attacking force made it deeper into the tower as his capture drones began scooping up the unconscious or dead bodies left behind. The lesser ones would make for a fine delivery to Director Ichabod, and hopefully distract him from constant and justified suspicion of Mechaniacal’s actions.
The lieutenants he’d deliver to Blacktime’s door, alive or dead. So far he hadn’t bothered to say anything to the invasion squad, but maybe it was a good time to invite them to surrender. And he rarely got a chance to monologue these days. Feeling like he might as well indulge where he could, Mechaniacal turned a dial, clicking on the microphone pickup and leaning in.
“As you no doubt have noticed, your attempt to infiltrate my lair has not passed unnoticed. The truth is, you never had a chance. None of you are a match for my profound genius!” He twirled his cane with a flourish, despite not being visible to the poor benighted fools he was speaking to. It was just a matter of principle that a monologue should be stylish. “Surrender now, and you will be returned to Blacktime mostly intact. Or you can keep fighting, and I get to use my more interesting weapons.”
By way of persuasion, he worked the gear levers that began to revolve the dimensional rippers embedded deep in the foundations, the tooth-rattling wail mixing with the sounds of grinding gears and thumping pistons. He’d figured out a way to make them quieter some time ago, but the sound was so ominous he rarely bothered muffling it. In the end, he enjoyed the theater of it all.
As his voice echoed through the hallway that the invaders now found themselves in, the moving dots indicating their presence paused and reversed. He did not, unfortunately, have any cameras still functioning, but microphones were easier, and the pickups caught rapid patters of codewords as they retreated. Far past the point when they really should have, but perhaps they had been emboldened by the fact that his first fusillade of dimensionally-offset bullets had done little to certain types. A false confidence.
“Oh, no, it’s past time to run away,” Mechaniacal said, working an entire switchboard of levers and shifters. Armor slammed down from the exterior of the tower, crunching through sidewalk and street and deep into the underground to sever their retreat. The capture drones continued grabbing bodies, sealing them into restraints and shooting upward into the tubes running throughout the tower’s infrastructure. A design that more than one person in the past had found was not as large a weakness as it might seem.
“The time to decide is rapidly drawing to a close,” Mechaniacal said, as the reality-bending noise of the dimensional rippers peaked. They weren’t even weapons as such, though anything could be used or misused for offensive purposes. They were, in this case, just a terrible sound as their true purpose was to move the tower in its entirety. “Sit on the ground, surrender, or you will be incapacitated my way. I assure you that you will not enjoy the experience.”
Mangonel slowed to a stop, but Fantabio’s particular dot kept moving. Mechaniacal worked his controls once again, and after a few steps an impenetrable dome snapped into place around the short, fat super, emerging from the floor. The walls of the dome vibrated at a very specific pitch, one that resonated with the human nervous system to induce every sensation at once, overloading the brain in a viscerally unpleasant way. Once his sensors confirmed the man was unconscious, Mechaniacal dispatched more drones to scoop up the remaining individuals.
While that cleanup was ongoing, Mechaniacal instructed his manufactory floor to change jobs. While most of what he had been creating was to be used in the Deep Kingdoms, he could spare the time to make a city-to-city missile and deliver Blacktime’s goons to his front door. Such a showing wouldn’t stop anything, of course, as Mechaniacal had learned that his very presence invited opposition. But he trusted his demonstration might slow things down enough that he could retrieve the Hartson boy and fix Glorybeam, returning the natural balance to Star City.
Once Mechaniacal had his mind fixed upon something, there was very little that could stop him, after all.
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