Iron Justice
Real name: William Hayne
Powers: Super strength, able to transform skin into metal armour. Metal skin renders him impervious to small arms and low-grade explosions.
Notes: Reported to have survived several direct hits from the Astral Bomber. Faced numerous accusations of physical and sexual assault, but was never formally charged. Left the Manhattan Eight under a cloud of controversy.
—Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #0003]
***
Night fell on Neo-Auckland. Niobe stubbed out her cigarette in the car ashtray, readjusted her mask, and switched her goggles to high contrast.
“Play it clean, mate,” the Carpenter said. He pulled his own mask into place and put on his wide-brimmed hat. He couldn’t come with her; there was no way to get him inside without bringing all of Met Div down on them. He’d be on the outside, guarding her escape.
“Always do,” she said. She wouldn’t be stupid this time. No one would get another look at her face.
The side road they’d parked in was nearly empty, so she pushed open the door and got out. The Carpenter leaned over and stuck his head out the window. “Did I ever tell you you look like Rick Blaine in that coat?”
“Rick who?”
“From Casablanca.”
She shrugged.
“You haven’t seen Casablanca?” He affected an American accent. “‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ That doesn’t ring a bell?”
She turned away, shoved her hands in her pockets, and slipped silently across the road. She didn’t have time for Solomon’s nonsense.
His voice called out after her. “‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.’”
With a shake of her head, she disappeared into the shadows and made her way down the alley to the rear of Met Div headquarters.
Time was ticking away, and they were no closer to finding Sam. If this was a simple kidnapping, she wouldn’t be so worried. Kidnappers who wanted ransom generally didn’t let harm come to their captives. But something weird was going on here, and every day that passed decreased the chances they’d ever find him alive. If they found him at all.
Bloody hell, she needed another cigarette.
The fenced-off car park at the back of the headquarters was deserted. Behind the chain-link fence, cars and vans were lined up in neat rows. She stayed in the shadows and watched for a moment, then something caught her eye. A little white box perched on the brick wall above the rear door. No, not a box. A video camera. That was new.
She touched the side of her goggles and increased the contrast to its maximum, then tried to gauge the camera’s line of sight. It looked out over the car park, probably to stop the division’s vehicles being pinched. But there was a blind spot directly beneath it. Too easy.
She breathed in a lungful of air, held it, and pulled darkness around her. The world flattened out as her body slid into a puddle on the concrete. The rough surface of the alley pressed against her, and her thoughts became flat.
She slipped through the gaps in the fence and sped silently along the dark ground. There weren’t many lights around, but it was still more comfortable to move under the cars, using their shade. As she moved, she became aware of the shadows of cape coppers moving in the building’s windows. Met Div headquarters were never completely deserted, so she’d have to be cautious. Always cautious.
Her shadow form slid up the three stairs at the rear exit and stopped in the darkness beneath the camera. Releasing her breath, she reformed her body and looked around, letting herself readjust to three dimensions. With a glance at the camera to make sure it couldn’t see her, she pressed her ear to the door. Silence. The door was heavy and well-sealed at the edges to protect against gas attacks—no one had forgotten Colonel Mustard’s assault on the New South Wales Met Div back in ’61. Unfortunately for Niobe, it also left no room for a shadow to slip under. She pulled her pick set from her jacket pocket and worked the torsion wrench and pick into the lock. Eyes closed, she let the tips of her fingers fade into shadow and dance along the length of the tools. A hazy picture of the surface of the lock’s pins formed in her mind, adding to the tactile sensations as she jiggled the pick.
She worked the pins as swiftly as she dared. Her heart maintained a steady rhythm, keeping her alert. She’d broken in here before, but it sure as hell wasn’t a cakewalk. Even at night, the hallways were lit and coffee-fuelled coppers huddled over paperwork. Luckily, the higher-ups pulled rank, leaving many of the offices dark and empty after nightfall. If she had to hide, they were her best shot.
The pins gave in to her touch, and she smiled into the darkness. With a twist of the torsion wrench, the lock clicked and the door opened a crack. She returned the tools to her pocket, checked through the crack for any coppers roaming the hallways, and slipped inside.
Her shoes made no sound on the tile floor. The clatter of typewriter keys drifted from somewhere ahead, along with the mutter of quiet conversation. Nothing to concern her. So why was she so nervous? Play it clean.
She’d memorized the building’s layout years ago. Briefly, she considered checking the prisoner manifests to confirm what Marvin told them, but decided against it. Prisoner records were kept in the south wing, near the cells. Security was tight there; never less than three armed cape coppers on duty at a time, according to standard protocol. Breaking in wasn’t impossible, but she needed to keep attention away from her investigations. If Met Div really was responsible for the kid’s abduction, she’d rather they didn’t know she was coming.
That left the archives for her to investigate. The basement it was, then. Sticking to the wall, she made her way quickly down the hallway to the stairs. She kept both hand in her jacket pockets to stop herself reaching for her gun.
A copper wandered past the hallway ahead of her, facing away from her and gripping a mug of coffee like his life depended on it. Niobe drew still, pressing herself into the corner. The copper wandered on without so much as glancing at her. When he passed, she pulled open the door to the stairwell and made her way downstairs.
Even now in the beginnings of summer, the basement of the building was cold. She emerged into the dark of the archives, surrounded on all sides by row upon row of filing cabinets and file boxes. From the looks of it, the archives had started out as one large hall, but it had spilled over into the accompanying rooms. Offices and supply rooms had been commandeered as the number of meta-related cases soared in the early sixties. File boxes of old case reports were stacked nearly to the ceiling. But from the dust in the air, she’d bet most of them were at least five years old.
She was alone down here; no one guarded the archives. The clerk who tended the records would’ve gone home at five o’clock. I wonder what that’s like, she thought.
She pulled the torch from her utility belt and swung the beam of light around the room. Her footsteps came quiet on the concrete floor as she walked back and forth through the rows. After a few minutes, her torch beam came to rest on a bank of filing cabinets behind the clerk’s desk. She moved closer to read the labels. It took her another minute, but then she found what she was looking for. Officers - Active.
She picked the lock on the cabinet with ease and flipped through the files one by one, shining her light on the photograph paperclipped to the first page of each folder. If he looked like he might have the strong build of the man from her vision, she pulled the file out and examined it in detail. Each folder had a brief summary of basic information: DOB, height, weight, race, nationality. No need for gender. Every copper was male.
It took her nearly forty-five minutes to go through the files. For each “maybe”, she compared the print she’d picked up on the boat to the fingerprint card inside the folder. On the fourth one she pulled out, she found him.
The guy’s name was Daniel O’Connor. Caucasian, 44 years old, New Zealander. In the photograph, he sported long sideburns that didn’t suit his square face, and two cauliflower ears. His expression was hard, cold. Whoever had done the original inking on the fingerprinting was sloppy, but there was no doubt the two matched. She had her man.
She’d give the file a proper look later, but something bothered her about it. A flip through revealed the same basic forms she’d seen in the other folders—tax records, recruitment scores, his original CV, payroll form—but it was still lighter than the others. She pulled out another file to compare. O’Connor’s had no mention of cases or operations he’d worked on. No arrest records. No commendations or accident reports. No recent evaluations.
She frowned, her mask rubbing painfully against the scratches on her cheek. A cover-up? If so, it was sloppy. Why not just take the whole file and be done with it?
As she returned the comparison file to the cabinet, the beam of her torch swept over something at the base of the metal drawer. A leaf of yellow paper poked out from below the rows of folders. She tucked O’Connor’s folder under her arm and retrieved the loose piece of paper.
Daniel O’Connor: suspended from active duty, the typewritten letter read. She swept the light down. Operational reports to be delivered to Senior Sergeant Raymond Wallace and CCed to Internal Affairs.
The signature was an unreadable scrawl. No date, but it wasn’t old or faded. The paper had probably slipped out when the clerk put it back in the cabinet.
“Bloody hell,” she murmured. If she was back in the Carpenter’s precious golden age, she’d be able to get her hands on this sort of info easy. You didn’t say no to the Wardens. Not because they were powerful. Because they got shit done.
She pushed up the bottom of her mask and breathed in a lungful of dusty air. The name was something, she supposed. There were people who could look into these things. Maybe the copper’s suspension had something to do with all this, or maybe he was just generally crooked, and now that he had no job, he found other ways to pay the mortgage.
Bugger it. She tugged the mask down again, slid O’Connor’s folder into her trench coat, and closed the filing cabinet. The floors above creaked with footsteps. She kept her ear trained on the stairwell, ready to descend into shadow if someone came, but there was nothing. She couldn’t hang around here forever, though.
She made her way through the main stacks, where evidence and case reports were collected, to the metahuman records. She’d had to come here once a couple of years back, to get a lead on a shapeshifter who was blackmailing a local politician with some “sensitive pictures”. She had a look the photos before she gave them to the politician. She’d never figured the old guy would be able to bend like that.
Unlike the search for O’Connor, it was a piece of piss to find Avin’s file. Out of convenience, metas were listed by primary alias rather than name, since so many metas had kept their identities secret. Avin’s file was thicker than O’Connor’s. She flipped through reports and newspaper clippings from the old days. Like Niobe, Avin wasn’t officially registered, and no kill-switch frequency was recorded. No reports from the last couple of years. That wasn’t unusual; even Met Div couldn’t keep tabs on every meta. It was another pain in the arse though.
She glanced through the summary sheet, searching for a last known address.
Alias: Avin
Real name: Unknown
DOB: Unknown
Powers: Flight (winged), enhanced strength, intrinsic weapons (talons), enhanced vision (unconfirmed)
Affiliated Organisations: Wardens (disbanded), Patrolmen (disbanded), Heroes for Freedom (disbanded)
Known associates: Kid Arrow, Blue Shaman, Screecher
No address, but those were names she hadn’t heard for a while. Kid Arrow was definitely part of Heroes for Freedom. The little bugger always had an obnoxious one-liner for the papers. As for the other two heroes listed, she wasn’t sure.
She pulled files on all three of Avin’s known associates. According to the files, Blue Shaman was sleeping the big sleep after getting hit with leukaemia. Kid Arrow had gone to the lunar colony, and Screecher was presumed dead.
She tucked Avin’s file into her coat along with Kid Arrow’s and Screecher’s. Her trench coat was getting heavy, and the corner of the folder poked into her when she twisted. But that wasn’t nearly as frustrating as hitting another dead end. What the hell is it with this case? Everything was a black hole of information.
On a whim, she consulted the file index and tried to find something on Frank Julius. Nothing. She’d been expecting that—the name was almost certainly fake—but it was worth a shot.
She turned to leave, then paused. She was running low on time, but she went back to the “D”s. She searched the whole row, found nothing, and searched it again. Where’s Doll Face’s file? Doll Face hadn’t ever been sighted in New Zealand, but he was high-profile enough to warrant a file. Hell, he was high-profile enough to warrant a whole bloody police division. She checked with the index and confirmed it should be there. A date was pencilled in beside the index entry—three days ago—along with someone’s initials. RW. Raymond Wallace, she thought. She wondered if the bastard had felt the floor drop out from under him like she had when she learned Doll Face was in the country.
She checked her watch. Half an hour until the evening shift left and the late nighters came along. She’d like to be out before then, when everyone would be moving around. But she had time, didn’t she?
She chewed her lip and tapped her watch with her gloved finger. Bugger it. I’m here anyway. Let’s see what Senior Sergeant Wallace knows.
~~~
Wallace’s office was on the top floor. She had to waste eight minutes getting there, avoiding the coppers that roamed the halls like caged lions. The lock on his door was solid, but that couldn’t stop her turning to shadow and sliding underneath.
Like all the other offices on the top floor, it was empty. She switched on her torch and gave the room a quick sweep with the beam. It was big, but it seemed to be wasted on Wallace. No pictures on the walls, no pot plants, no decorations of any kind. A set of blinds covered the window on the back wall, but it must have had a good view of the Old City. Somehow, she couldn’t imagine him ever enjoying the sights.
She padded softly over the carpet to the utilitarian desk. Except for a couple of chairs and a set of the ubiquitous filing cabinets, the desk was the only piece of furniture in the room. All his paperwork sat in neat piles, and for the first time in her life she came across an outbox that was more full than the inbox. If he had a family, there was no picture. Neither was there a memento of his service in the war. With the scar on his scalp and the bullet wound in his arse, maybe he didn’t need anything else.
A strangely shaped machine had pride of place next to the telephone. It looked kind of like a cash register, but when she rounded the desk to get a better look at it, she saw it had a small glass screen set into it and a full keyboard, like a typewriter. A Unity Corporation logo was stamped on top.
It’s a computer, she realised. She’d never seen one outside a supercriminal’s lair before, and those had been a hundred times the size of this one. She recalled hearing that Unity Corp had been racing to ship personal computers before their competitors caught up. But what was the point in it? Probably just a way for Met Div to blow some more taxpayer money.
She tore her eyes from the machine and checked her watch. Twenty minutes until she wanted to be gone. Maybe the computer was full of interesting information, but she didn’t have a clue how to get it out. Didn’t these things work on punch cards or something? She had no choice but to ignore it and deal with any information she could find in paper.
Doll Face’s file was the first thing she found. It actually consisted of three thick manila folders bound together with rubber bands. She unbound the first folder and glanced through. A slideshow of horror greeted her. Crime scene after crime scene was described in meticulous detail, followed by transcripts of interviews with victims. She wrinkled her nose and snapped the rubber bands back in place. She could take the file, but none of the information appeared to be new. The pages ended with Doll Face’s supposed death in Ukraine. That wouldn’t help her now.
Fifteen minutes. She slipped Doll Face’s file back into the pile and continued searching. O’Connor’s information wasn’t on the desk. She picked the lock on the desk drawer and started rummaging.
She got a glimpse of O’Connor’s name under a sheaf of departmental forms when a floorboard creaked in the hall outside.
Her breath caught. She snatched the papers from the drawer, crammed them into her inside pocket, and switched off the torch. Inside, her blood ran cold, but she kept moving.
The shadow of feet appeared in the crack beneath the door, and someone ran a key into the lock. Niobe checked behind the blinds, but the window was sealed, not made for opening. Even as a shadow, she couldn’t pass through glass. Shit. The bare office left nowhere for her to hide. Double shit.
She inhaled and held her breath as the doorknob turned. The room’s shadow swallowed her and drew her down. The door opened silently, and a panel of dull light leaked in. She fled along the floor away from it, making for the corners. She slipped up along the wall and dropped back down to the floor a few feet behind the figure that entered the room.
A moment before he flipped the light switch, she exhaled and left the shadow. She resisted the urge to suck in air like she’d been trapped underwater.
The orange glow of the light bulb filled the room, and she touched the contrast control on her goggles and blinked against the sudden glare. Simultaneously, she drew the revolver from under her coat and kicked the office door closed behind the man.
“Evening, Senior Sergeant,” she said, cocking the gun. The click of cold metal reverberated through the room, and Wallace’s breathing stilled. She stayed a couple of feet away from him, but kept the barrel aimed squarely at his back.
This was the closest she’d ever been to the man, and the first time she’d spoken to him. A faint scent of cologne clung to his clothes, but mostly she smelled Wallace’s sweat, built up over a long day. He looked even gruffer in person than he did from a distance. He was short enough that she could clearly make out the white scar tissue cutting through his thick brown hair.
He half-turned towards her, arms to his side. He didn’t move his muscled arms to the 9mm at his belt. Smart guy. He was in the blue Met Div uniform, minus the helmet, with the tunic buttoned up to his thick neck.
She spun together something that might pass for a plan. She should’ve left straight after the archives, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that now. “Away from the door,” she said, waving her gun. Her hands were steady despite the adrenaline pounding through her. “I’ll be outta your hair soon. I figured you’d gone home. Burning the midnight oil, eh?”
He edged towards the centre of the room where she directed him. His jaw was clenched, and his moustache quivered. For a moment, they stared at each other, then his eyes narrowed. “You’re the one who attacked my men.” It wasn’t a question.
She thought back to the coppers she’d chained to the apartment building stairwell after they tried to drag the McClellan widow downtown. “I didn’t attack anyone. We just had a disagreement on what constituted lawful detainment.”
“Lawful…?!” A muscle in his neck twitched. “Do you have any idea what you’ll get for threatening officers?”
“I threatened people trying to abduct an innocent woman.”
“The woman violated international law, hiding that child. We were obligated to bring her in.” His voice was like gravel. “Now get that gun out of my face.”
The bull of a man took a step forwards, and the vein pulsing in his forehead looked like it might blow at any minute.
“Easy, Senior Sergeant.” The last thing she wanted was to shoot the bastard, stun rounds or not.
“What do you want? I’m a shit hostage, if that’s what you’re after. I’m just a bloody civil servant. Or is this supposed to be some kind of vigilante justice?”
“All I want is information for a job.”
His face twisted into a scowl. “Shove it up your arse.”
It’s like trying to reason with a gorilla. She fought down a sigh. “You hear of any kids being nabbed lately?”
“What do I look like, Missing Persons? I’m a cape copper.”
She studied his face, but it revealed nothing but anger. Beneath her mask, she chewed her lip, then made a decision. “The kid was grabbed by one of your boys. Daniel O’Connor. Know him?”
A pause. “No.”
She pulled the handful of crumpled papers from her pocket. “Then why’s his name stamped over all this crap I found in your desk?”
His lips formed a line, and he said nothing. The son of a bitch wasn’t going to hang one of his people out to dry. It was always the same with ex-military guys. Like a goddamn old boys’ club.
“Tell me something else then. What’s going on with Doll Face?”
His scowl managed to get even deeper.
The building’s intercom system crackled to life, and Niobe almost had a heart attack. Easy, she told herself.
“All officers to briefing room one,” the intercom said. “Six eighty-five in progress. Repeat: all staff to briefing room one.” A hiss of static, then silence.
She didn’t take her eyes from Wallace, but her mind tried to decipher the police code. Hostage situation involving metahumans. Was that right?
She opened her mouth to confirm it with the Senior Sergeant, but a red light blinked twice on the inside of her goggles. A signal from the Carpenter.
Keeping her gun on Wallace, she dropped her free hand and depressed a button on her belt. “Go ahead.”
“Spook, you wanna see this,” the Carpenter said through the radio.
“Kind of in the middle of something,” she said. Wallace’s glare was almost painful.
“Postpone it. I got a feeling you’ll be pissed if you miss this.”
“Roger,” she said, and she released the button.
Wallace licked his lips. She could see every muscle in his body quivering with rage. “I’ll get you,” he said.
“Not today.”
She brought the gun up and fired.
The light bulb shattered, and darkness flooded the room. She caught the sound of metal sliding free of a leather holster, but she’d already drawn darkness around her.
She fled under the door and reformed on the other side. No doubt the gunshot would’ve been heard throughout the building. She needed an exit, fast.
The door crashed open behind her, and the floor creaked under Wallace’s weight. Without slowing, she blew out another light bulb, slipped back into shadow, and fled into another office. Shouts and footsteps reverberated against the surface she travelled along.
She came out of shadow still gripping her gun. With a flick of a switch on the modified cylinder, the revolver hissed and clicked. Live rounds armed.
Still running, she pointed the gun at the window and squeezed the trigger twice. Glass shattered and the blinds shuddered. Her ears rang with the sound of the shots. Once more she inhaled, and then she was a shadow again, slipping over the broken shards of glass and out onto the rough brick surface of the building’s outer wall.
She didn’t stop when she reached the ground. She was on the wrong side of the building, so she skirted away from the streetlights and fled around the rear of the building. Met Div officers scrambled to their vehicles in the car park. Were all of them searching for her? No, something else is going on. The hostage situation.
She kept going, darkness pressing in on her. She was staying in shadow too long. Too long without air. Her senses dimmed.
Finally, she emerged from the alley, back onto the street where Solomon had parked. Her lungs burned as she reformed herself, and she gulped down air. Too close.
She holstered her gun, checked her pockets to make sure she had all the files she’d grabbed, and touched the brim of her bowler hat to confirm it was still in place. Where was Solomon? She stayed in the shelter of the alley and scanned the street.
He pulled up a moment later. With another glance around to make sure the coppers weren’t following, she dashed from the alley and into the car.
“This better be good,” she said, pulling off her mask and goggles and wiping the sweat from her forehead.
The Carpenter peeled away from the side of the road. Sirens filled the air, but they were getting further away, not closer. He flipped open a panel in the centre of the dashboard and switched on the small television concealed there. “Take a look.”
The television hummed, and a black-and-white picture expanded to fill the screen. She was about to ask him what channel to switch to, but saw there was no need.
The picture showed the local newscaster’s desk at the TVNZ studio, but the man who sat and smiled at the camera was no news presenter. He wore an unusual suit jacket so white it was almost blinding. A few patches of pale skin disfigured his face, disappearing behind a black domino mask. Objectively, she supposed he had the sort of sculpted features that could be considered handsome, but the cold eyes that stared out at her would freeze the hormones of any horny schoolgirl.
He seemed to be reaching the pinnacle of some rousing speech. His accent was faintly British, but it was tainted with so many others she couldn’t pick out a region.
“So here we are, in the world you people so desired.” His smile was flat, painted on. “The people who used to protect you lie in gutters, drinking wine from paper bags. A generation of superheroes lie in unmarked graves. And the only ones left, the only ones who could save you, live hundreds of thousands of miles away on the surface of the Moon. The only place they could escape your persecution.”
Outside the car, the night was lit with flashing police lights. A pair of police vehicles tore past, sirens screaming. Solomon drove quietly past an appliance store, where late-night pedestrians crowded around the televisions in the store window.
“He’s been going like this for five minutes,” Solomon said, eyes fixed on the road. “Guess what he calls himself?”
She’d already guessed. “Quanta.”
“Right on, little lady.”
Whoever was wielding the camera was either an amateur or scared out of their skull. It shifted constantly, altering focus and moving Quanta out of the centre of the frame. As it moved, she caught glimpses of other costumed figures in the background. They were shifting something into position. One of the metas caught her eye. A skinny man in a skin-tight suit came into view, a visor covering his face. A pattern of sea-green waves shifted along the surface of the fabric.
“Does that look like Screecher to you?” she asked.
Solomon glanced at the TV. “Hey, yeah, maybe. What’s he hanging out with these wackos for?”
She chewed her lip. The file said Avin knew Screecher, and here he was. Too many coincidences. “These are our people. They’ve got Sam. They’ve got my picture.”
He shot her a look, then returned his attention to the road and shook his head slightly. “We sure can pick ’em, huh?”
Quanta folded his gloved hands on the desk and smiled his dead smile. “My demands are simple. First, all incarcerated metahumans in the Asian-Australasian Union are to be released. All such metahumans are invited to seek me out and join me. You will be richly rewarded for your service. Failure on the part of the AAU to comply with this demand within thirty-six hours would be unwise. Needless to say, the civilian death toll would be significant.”
“Can you believe this guy?” the Carpenter said. “I’m getting all nostalgic here. He’s playing all the old classics.”
Niobe didn’t take her eyes from the screen. Something about this guy was off. His words didn’t gel with the look in his eyes.
She could hear the faint wail of sirens from the TV now. Quanta didn’t take any notice of them. “I have another request to make. I’m looking for a man, someone very important to me. He is currently calling himself Frank Julius.”
Solomon grunted, and Niobe’s grip tightened on the mask in her hands. Oh, bloody hell.
“Frank,” Quanta said, “if you’re listening, and I’m sure you are, I want you to seek me out. I know you’ve lost something precious to you. It’s safe.” For now, his smile seemed to add. “All you have to do is return to the place you lost it. I’ll find you there. Or you can try to find me another way. If you stay in hiding, however….” He turned his hands palm up and shrugged. “Well, I think I can show you.”
He stood, and the camera clumsily tracked him as he moved to the side of the newscaster’s desk. In the background, the television studio’s crew and presenters huddled, watched by a metahuman in desert camouflage. But the camera continued to track, and a darker sight came into view.
A huge, musclebound man with a pug-nosed face sat cramped inside a cage that crackled with energy. He glared at Quanta as the supercriminal crouched beside the cage. Quanta’s pure white suit stood in stark contrast to the huge man’s sweat-stained shirt.
“Tell them your name,” Quanta said.
“Go fuck yourself, cocksucker,” the giant man growled.
Morgan didn’t react except to press a button on a panel on the side of the cage. Lightning arced inside the cage, and the man screamed.
“Jesus Christ,” Niobe said. She could hear Solomon grinding his teeth together.
Quanta released the button. The screams were replaced by moans.
“Tell them,” he said.
The man seemed to be having trouble breathing. “Hayne. Name’s Will Hayne. Happy, you motherfucker?”
Solomon’s knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “Did he just say…?”
“Yeah,” she said. What the hell’s going on?
Quanta smiled at Hayne. “There might be some viewers out there who don’t remember that name. But maybe if you were more recognisable, they’d remember. I’ve disabled the field. How about you show them?”
Hayne panted and glanced at the button, where Quanta’s finger hovered. He licked his lips, staring at Quanta with uncertainty in his eyes. Then he began to change.
It only took a second. The metal scales seemed to slide out of his skin all at once, flattening against his muscles, moving with them. The scales caught the studio lights and shone with a perfect gleam. In an instant, he was covered from head to toe in shimmering steel. A metal war machine, the living tank of the Manhattan Eight.
Quanta turned to the camera. “Ladies and gentlemen, behold one of your greatest heroes. Iron Justice.”
Niobe’s insides churned. There was only one way this could end. She wanted to switch off the television, go home, and wrap her arms around Gabby, but she couldn’t take her eyes from the screen.
Iron Justice threw himself against the side of the cage. It crackled, sparked, but barely budged. Quanta regarded the raging hero. For a moment, he seemed conflicted. Then he returned his gaze to the television, the fake smile gone.
“A caged superhero. You people should be enjoying this. This is what you wanted. Behold your perfect world.” He paused, took a deep breath. “Now let me show you what I can do to your perfect world.”
Turn it off, she told herself, but she couldn’t. Quanta pressed his hand against the side of the cage and closed his eyes. For a moment, nothing happened. Then something seemed to form around him. The studio got darker, but Quanta got brighter. Energy flowed around him like honey, dripping from his white suit. Light flowed from his hand and began to fill the cage.
Iron Justice screamed again, a scream that turned Niobe’s spine to ice. The liquid energy filled the cage and flowed into Hayne’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Anywhere unprotected by the scales. His screams became the gurgling of a drowning man. He thrashed against the side of the cage, but it barely shuddered.
It seemed to take hours. Quanta’s face betrayed nothing as the superhero died. The agonizing movements slowly stilled. Vomit pooled in the back of Niobe’s throat, but she swallowed it back. Sweat trickled down the Carpenter’s cheek. He was shaking a little.
It’s over, she assured herself.
Then Hayne’s body exploded. Like a bomb had been placed in his chest, he detonated from the inside out. She turned away, covering her face, but not before she saw the hero’s flesh and metal painting the cage’s shields.
“Oh, Christ,” she whispered. “Bloody hell.” The Carpenter was a statue.
When she turned back to the TV, the cage was gone from view. Quanta’s face filled the screen. In an instant, she knew she hated him. She hated him beyond reason or possibility. He’s got Sam. Jesus.
“You have thirty-six hours,” Quanta said. Then the picture turned to static, and he was gone.
Niobe tried to speak, but her throat wasn’t working. Solomon spared her the need to talk first. “Iron Justice,” he said hoarsely. He looked like he was driving on automatic. “An entire German armoured division couldn’t kill him during the war.”
She tried to clear her head, but it was all fuzzy. He’s got Sam.
“He was supposed to be invincible,” Solomon said. “How’d this psycho get his hands on him?”
“The same way he got the kid, I guess.”
“Iron Justice,” he said again. He didn’t appear to have heard her. “He was one of the Manhattan Eight. He was friends with Dr Atomic, for Pete’s sake.”
Something clicked in her brain. The Manhattan Eight. No. It couldn’t be. She rummaged through her pockets and pulled out the photo she’d found in Sam’s drawer on the boat. Two young men stood in front of a log cabin, one slightly taller and slimmer than the other. She recognised them now. But it was impossible.
“Frank Julius,” she whispered. “I know who he is.”
“What? Who?”
She studied the picture. “He’s Frank Oppenheimer. Bloody hell, Frank Julius is Omegaman.”
She fished out the ring she’d found on Frank’s boat. A signalling device. The signalling device used by the Manhattan Eight.
Solomon didn’t say anything for a moment, but she could see his mind working. If Frank Julius was Omegaman, then his brother, Sam’s father….
“Sam’s father…” the Carpenter said, “…his father is J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
She nodded. “Dr Atomic.” The first hero. The greatest hero that ever lived. “Sam is the son of Dr Atomic.”
“He shouldn’t exist.”
“He does,” she said. “He could be the most powerful metahuman on the planet.” And Quanta’s got him.
The Carpenter nodded. “Told you you didn’t wanna miss this.”
Silence filled the car. As they drove, the wail of Met Div’s sirens grew louder. She switched on the police radio. Chatter came through in an unending stream. She picked one voice out of the noise. “I repeat, we are taking fire. Suspects are making for their vehicles. Three white Bedford vans and one larger van, make unknown. Requesting air support.” The voice dropped back into the noise of overlapping chatter.
Niobe didn’t like the look of the shaky smile on Solomon’s face.
“How do you feel about car chases?” he asked.
She sighed and nodded. “Fine. But I’m driving.”
~~~
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