Act Three, Scene Twenty
Act Three, Scene Twenty
June 14th 2013, 3:46 PM
“Once you get over the fact that taking over the palace of the Titanium Tyrant is impossible it doesn’t look nearly as difficult as you’d think,” Sunburst said.
Jacobin was tuning them out. His head hurt. His chest hurt. He didn’t know how Moon had gotten his hands on any of the stuff he’d gotten, but he had maps of the palace, he had new costumes for everyone, gas masks, grenades... Jacobin’d never heard of this guy before but he already had everything planned out.
His head hurt.
“Sure, there’s armies of killer robots and soldiers, but it looks like you counter most of that solidly. - Four hops?”
Jacobin didn’t think either of them had ever fought in their lives, but Warpdrive nodded. “Here to Clay West to Barker’s Burgers - I’ll need to take a breath - then two more to the palace garden and on to the main control room.” She traced it on the map with one finger. Sunburst looked at her and nodded. “And the passcode for the shield’s just a passcode.”
“So,” Jacobin said. “We get in the palace.” Main control room. “We wreck the defenses. We do the work. We block the door. We wait a day.” They had drugs to stay up that long. “And while we do that we kill every supervillain they send at us.”
The heroes’ eyes flicked to each other.
“I kill every supervillain they send at us. You do whatever it is you do.”
“We get you there and make sure Steelmind can’t just flip the on-switch again,” Sunburst said.
“Fine. Ready?”
“Melissa?”
She looked up. It was Nicator, in full armor, looking tensed and ready for battle.
“That was fast,” Melissa said.
Nicator showed no signs of emotion. “What?”
“We’ve got them. Barker’s Burgers on Victory and Acre. Jacobin and two others.”
“Good work. I’ll call the others. We’ll head there immediately.”
Him and two allies, Melissa had said, chameleon-cameoflaged, teleported in. Then he destroyed the security camera. Four supervillains to hit the burger place square on, Verdant and Recluse covering the front and back entrances with copper bullets and IR scopes on their rifles, would almost certainly be enough. Nicator had no idea who Barker was or had been, but his restaurant was almost deserted now that war had ended the tourist season and it would take only moments for the four of them to spot any injured vigilante -
- not in the main room. “Jim, Jacket, watch them.” Kitchen? Nothing. Two doors. Kicked the bathroom door open, covering it with her railgun - nobody, visible or invisible. Office (the manager didn’t dare protest) - empty. Supply closet. Empty. Were there other hiding places? No. Nicator might not be able to spot someone with a real invisibility power, but Jacobin’s armor? Easily.
So he wasn’t here. Why had he come here - he’d teleported. Why here? What did it have, other than not enough American tourists?
- nothing. It had nothing. Hold that... she looked out the window. The palace complex loomed over it, not the way it loomed over the rest of the city but the way it loomed over the rest of the palace district...
“He didn’t come here to eat,” she said softly. “He came here to spy out the palace before making a second attack - this time, from the inside of the shield.”
She looked around.
“No-one, the target is about to attack the royal palace. No-two, north entrance. No-six, west entrance. No-seven, east entrance, No-eight, south entrance. Scout, do not engage. I’ll inform the prince.”
The world went blind while Julius was having dinner. Most of his attention was on the meal and on the reports he was reading, and only when his senses cut out beyond the palace complex did he raise his hand, flickering his eyes between all the ‘bots in the palace -
- The shield was up and that was why he couldn’t see...
... That was impossible. Only he and his biological sisters could access it... and, as well as impossible, it was foolish. Every robot in the city was a conduit for his powers, and so however shielded his father’s lair might be, it was effortless for him to reach out to one robot next to his father’s laboratory, plug it into the systems, and so look down into the shield control room to see who had just severed his link...
Among the tinkercape communities of America, the Tyrant’s underground fortress was spoken of in legends; supposedly it was the Mecca of all arsenals, where his vast hoards of equipment rested, each tailored for a specific occasion. He’d stolen or commissioned equipment from tinker after tinker, so that with a moment’s pause to access his arsenal he would have a weapon suited to any opponent. Its defenses were infamous, layer upon layer of fortifications protecting the control rooms and experiment rooms at its heart.
Warpdrive had gotten them in in an eyeblink, probably because her teleportation power didn’t work exactly precisely the same way as the handful of most famous teleporters’ teleportation powers and so he hadn’t had the opportunity to prepare a counter to it. Admittedly a dozen different security turrets had spun to point at them as they entered but Jacobin had crushed them instantly, and then some poison gas had started to leak out of the vents but they were all wearing complete body-covering suits and gas masks with miniaturized rebreathers and the vents could be warped closed. Then they were standing in the central control room, that temple to artifice. Strange and bizarre machinery lined the walls; projection suits for remote control of robots, consoles with rows of unlabeled controls, the vast majority of them gene-locked to the Tyrant’s relatives...
There was a flash. Half of Sunburst’s gear was sparking.
“Shit!” Sunburst said. He could feel heat buildups in a dozen places across his body, and he divested himself of it as fast as he could.
Warpdrive pulled her triple-blaster out of her pocket and threw it across the room, where it caught fire.
“Defenses?” Jacobin asked. He didn’t seem to have been touched.
“Some kind of localized EMP nonsense,” Sunburst said. “Designed to mess with tinker-tech without doing anything to the Tyrant’s gear.” Whatever it had been had let some of his stuff through... he thought. Better make sure if they had time.
“What are we after,” Jacobin said flatly.
“Gonna guess that?” Warpdrive said, pointing at the incredibly obvious in-your-face shield control console. It had a huge lever locked firmly into place with a keypad right in front of it, next to the palm scanner. The Tyrant had apparently wanted it to take less than ten seconds to turn the shield from off to on after entering the room, even for non-family members.
He tapped out the passcode, flung the lever. There was a thrumming sound and a flicker of light.
“That feels different,” Warpdrive said.
“Yeah, we’ve got it,” Sunburst said, pulling out his scanner. “Not getting anything much past the walls, but -”
“Good,” said Jacobin, and crushed every machine in the room.
Steelmind growled softly, tapped his nails against his glass.
- Of course it was failsafe. Of course his father hadn’t been so stupid as to make a machine where, if you broke the shield controls, you would shut down the shield that was protecting the palace. The entire idea of having that weak point in his defenses would have been a personal insult to him. He would never have thought of it. As long as he held the palace he could always dig something out of his arsenal to counter any attacker... and the idea that someone else might sneak into his palace, set up his impenetrable shield while he was out and then break the controls...
... Steelmind didn’t know what his father would have done about that, actually.
What else was there unusual? Nothing in the palace itself, outside the one control room. None of its defenses were responding. The camera watching the corridor was watching it as normal. The backup showed exactly what had happened - they’d teleported past -
Nicator was shouting at - no, speaking firmly to - the palace guards. He possessed the nearest robot.
“Nicator.” To the panicking guards: “Silent.”
“Your Highness,” she said, and bowed. “Jacobin is inside the shield.”
“Yes,” he said. “He has unexpected allies.” This would have been easier if he could have seen their faces or they’d been wearing the usual easily-recognizable costumes.
“I would be honored to resolve this on your behalf,” Nicator said.
“No doubt,” Steelmind said. What was the cost of that? The cost was that Nicator would have a path through the inner sanctum to the central command center... he could disable the defenses as she passed, limiting her ability to read them, watch her the whole time, set up to reactivate if she tried anything. The central command center, though, had been comprehensively totaled when Jacobin arrived, so she couldn’t do anything if she got there...
And the benefit was that someone other than the Knights of the Palace Guard would be the first one going up against the man who had crushed Pyre’s palace. What would he lose if Nicator died? Very little.
“Do you have subordinates present?”
“Unfortunately,” she said, “they were outside the shield.”
“So be it,” he said. “I’ll call Ironclaw and Silvershield to accompany you.” The rest of the knights could organize a flanking attack.
“The three of us?”
“The guard will take time to assemble, and there’s little purpose to sending robots.”
“So be it,” said Nicator softly. “He’ll trouble you no more.”