Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

21: Always In The Last Place You Look

It’s easy to condemn when you’ve never been through the same thing yourself. I’d just buried my husband and my daughter. Or I would have, if there’d been anything left to bury after Magnon shrunk them down and crushed them. So yeah, I tracked Magnon down, and yeah, I killed him. And now you’re asking me how I got through all his henchmen and took down the supercriminal himself when I’m just a normal? I’ll tell you how. I hit them harder and faster than anyone else had. I was willing to go further than any hero. I had no time for mercy.

—Court transcript from the trial of Pamela Jenkins (aka the Lioness), 1958

***

Even from the shadow of the alley, Niobe could see the smug way Quanta strutted out of the warehouse. It made no difference that a hood covered his face and energy cuffs bound his hands together. The squad of Met Div officers surrounding him could have been an honour guard, escorting him from his limousine to accept an award for supervillain of the year.

She tapped the dashboard with her finger, trying to hold back the magma inside her. Sam was in there, she knew it. But the cape coppers were swarming around the place like ants, loading metas into vans and high-sec transport trucks under half a dozen floodlights. It didn’t make it any easier that she was the one who called them in the first place. She’d had to; it was Quanta’s territory. She could only have given his gang the run-around for so long before they got their act together and brought their numbers to bear. She needed the cavalry.

She could see Senior Sergeant Wallace barking orders at men a good head taller than him. The coppers obeyed without question. It was probably the moustache that did it. His mouth kept moving, but his gaze never left Quanta as his men loaded him into the biggest truck they had. The vehicle was armour-plated with a field generator on the roof, and by the looks of it, the bastard had the whole thing to himself.

The Carpenter lowered his binoculars and slouched down behind the steering wheel. “I count thirty-one arrested so far. No bodies. You didn’t kill anyone, right?”

She lifted her mask and jammed a cigarette between her lips. “Stun rounds only. I got maybe nine or ten of them before I came to talk to you.” She clicked the button on her auto-lighter, but the damn thing was on the fritz. Bloody hell. “Surprised none of them killed their mates, the amount of firepower they were putting out.” One of them had sent a throwing knife her way, and it would’ve got her if she hadn’t gone into shadow the same instant.

“He sure went quiet.” Solomon sounded like he was talking to himself.

She banged the auto-lighter against the dashboard and tried again. Nothing. “Bugger it,” she grumbled, snatching the unlit smoke from her mouth. “What did you say?”

The Carpenter pushed his hat back. “Quanta. He’s fast, Niobe. And I’ll bet my life savings that shield of his is bullet-proof.”

“You don’t have any life savings.”

“None that you know of.” He put the binoculars back to his face. “Maybe the coppers would’ve got him eventually, but he could’ve served up a nice helping of decapitations first.”

She didn’t give a damn what the bastard did. She wasn’t much enamoured of Met Div or the AAU’s metahuman laws, but they’d throw the book at him for what he’d done, and it would be a big bloody book. That was some kind of satisfaction.

Quanta knew her name, though. That grated. But she couldn’t see how he could use it against her now. Even if he sold it to Senior Sergeant Wallace for a deal, she and Gabby would be sitting cozy in a lunar rocket by the time he came knocking.

“Come on,” she said. “They’re not leaving here for a few hours. I’m starving. Let’s come back when they’ve shipped everyone off.”

“Wait,” he said, peering through the binoculars. “Who’s that guy? Doesn’t look like much of a supercriminal to me.”