DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) (4 page)

“You too?”

He nodded. “Yeah. We, uh, were close. Off and on sometimes, when she wanted loving.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Dire saw no signs of that.”

“It was mostly off when you were there. That night after Joan died, we were on again, though. It hit her hard. I’d have been worried, ’cept she had Anya, so I knew she wouldn’t do nothing stupid.”

“Anya. Was she in camp when you got back?”

“Lemme think...” He leaned back further, closed his eyes. Finally nodded. “Yeah. Yeah I saw her. That woman that Minna saved in the church was watching Anya.”

“Her! Yes. Her name was Susan. Are Anya or Susan still around?”

Martin spread his hands. “Dunno. Power came on shortly after, and when we woke up in the morning after, SWAT teams were surrounding us and telling us to lie down and cooperate. I got grabbed quick, and then, well... I don’t know what happened to nobody else.”

I slowed, but kept pacing. “Susan's name is more of a lead than she had. Thank you.”

“No, shit, thank
you
!” Martin said. “I got so many damn enemies, that if I pulled any kind of prison sentence with gen pop, I’d be dead in a week. Only reason I survived is ’cause Freeway’s lawyer got my ass in solitary till the trial was done.”

“Hm. You know the man from before?”

“Never saw him before. He busted up some of our ops while I was running the SCK. Regular pain in our ass. But since then... nah.”

“So he had no ulterior motive?”

Martin shook his head. “I was suspicious, but he kept saying he just didn’t want to see me get fucked over by the system. Well, more than I’d earned, anyway. He had a lot of questions to ask about what went on, and I told him what I thought was safe.”

I nodded. “Fair enough.” The press had blamed me for the deaths in our struggle. That one hero didn’t buy it was encouraging, but in the end I didn’t care. The truth would come out eventually. The winners write the history books, so all I had to do was win and keep winning. And so far, so good.

I chuckled, and Martin looked at me sharply. “Huh?”

“Just musing. Sinister long-term plans. Villain stuff.”

“Ah. Yeah, that. You, uh, gone full villain, then?”

“She thought that was pretty clear back in the courtroom. Not like many other options were available, after the way things shook out with the Black Bloods. And WEB. And Tomorrow Force.”

“Mm. Yeah. Guess I can see that. With WEB having as much of a hateboner for you, turnin’ yourself in wouldn’t have worked out.”

“It would also be tantamount to admitting that Dire had done wrong.” I scowled. “A falsehood. Did the best she could under bad circumstances. If they call her a villain for that, so be it. Besides, easier to acquire resources and complete goals through villainous methods.”

Martin sucked on his front teeth for a few seconds. “Yeah. About that. What are they?”

“What are what?”

“Your goals. What do you want outta life?”

“You’re philosophical all of a sudden.”

“It’s... ah... Freeway and I got to talking a lot when he visited. He kept askin’ me what I wanted out of life. Told him the usual. Wine, women, song, and good things for my friends and shit. He told me I was too smart for that. I got all of those, and no troubles, I’d get bored. I’d want more. He challenged me to find some goals. I think the dude thought he was like my dad and shit.” Martin snorted. “He didn’t know my old man. I woulda been fuckin’ jumping for joy to have a dad like Freeway when I was a kid.”

I listened in silence. It seemed the thing to do. Finally when he trailed off, I cleared my throat. “Well. You’re right in that she has chosen goals. Simple ones, really.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s going to fix the world.”

He chuckled, looked over my face, and stopped chuckling. “You’re serious.”

“As an Irish funeral without beer.”

“What?”

“Ah. A joke she heard on the Latedark show yesterday. She’s trying humor with mixed results. Not used to it. Actually one of the things you can help with.”

“Lady, if you broke me outta there to be the comic-relief black sidekick, we gonna have words. Words like ‘fuck’ and ‘no’.”

“No, no no... it’s...” I waved a hand to the bathroom, and the cluttered sink just visible through the open door. “Left Icon City for a time to recover and heal, after escaping WEB and Tomorrow Force. Lived homeless, had experience with that from the camp, at least. Got up the East Coast, disappeared. Worked on blending in. Learned disguises. Learned conversational means to work around the verbal tics. Learned to scavenge.”

I pulled up the blinds on the window, to reveal the factory floor below, and the amounts of material being manufactured. “Worked out well, all things considered, but...” I sighed. “Never had friends like she did back on the beach. Couldn’t risk it. Face known to the MRB and heroes. Losing self. Losing equilibrium.” I let the blinds fall. “Dire needs balance. Needs someone to trust. She needs help regaining... well, humanity. All the things old Dire carved out of herself.” I tapped my skull, then flapped my hand, in a helpless gesture.

Martin stood and wrapped his arms around me. I leaned into the embrace, and hugged him back. No one had done that, not for months, and it struck me harder than I thought. I shuddered a bit, and choked a sob, as tears crawled out of my eyes.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey. I got you, ’kay?”

I cried for a little bit. It was safe to cry. No enemies were there to see me.

Finally I regained composure, and let him go. He eased back, left a hand on my shoulder. “We okay?”

“Yes. Think so.”

He nodded. “Truth be told, I been in solitary for months. No one to shoot the shit with, save Freeway and the guards, and the guards weren’t too friendly. It’s... I think I know how you feel. And it’s shitty.”

I smiled. “Then let us keep each other sane.”

“Promise.” Martin strolled back to the chair. “So. Fix the world, huh?”

“Yes.” I gestured at the bank of televisions, and the various scenes of violence, reports of crime, and disasters that flickered by. “Too much is wrong, and it’s getting worse. Need to change the paradigm. Need to set humanity on a path to a better future.”

“Shit. You ain’t thinking small.”

“No, not really,” I agreed. “Don’t have the full
how
of it yet. Still trying to find all the variables, and key points to influence. Working up a list of priorities to move humanity into a golden age, and make it sustainable. Won’t be able to fix everything, but won’t have to, if Dire sets the framework up to change prosperity from a zero-sum game to a cooperative effort.” I sighed. “No obvious shortcuts there. Just the labors of Sisyphus, only with multiple boulders.”

“There’s worse titans to be. Least you ain’t got no eagle goin’ for your guts cause you gave some dude a handful of coals.”

A lot of people assumed Martin was uneducated because of his manner of speech. A lot of people were foolish. True, he’d never completed high school, but he read voraciously. He’d loaned me a copy of
Lord of the Flies
, once. It had been enlightening.

“Well,” I said, “the first step before fixing any of the world’s woes is establishing a strong foundation.”

Martin stood, opened the blinds, and pointed to the machines below. “You got a lot of toys here. And I’ve known villains who would kill for this sort of secret lair.”

“Eh. It’s not as good as it seems.” I moved up next to him, gestured at the tables. “Dire’s on her last set of components. Building up the drone armor, the drop pod, the remote control harness, and a few other nifty gadgets took most of her resources. And the critical pieces gathered here are going to one last major project.” I dug the universal remote out of my pocket, and scrolled through the menus. Life had gotten much easier when I’d made myself contact lenses with Augmented Reality capability.

The shipping containers moved aside, groaning on hydraulics to reveal the central part of the workshop, and the cradle where the Dire Armor Mk. III awaited the final assembly. Eight solid feet of steel composite with hardened ceramic inlays, a hydraulic system capable of lifting a truck cab, an onboard gravitic flight array through the lower legs that allowed VTOL capability, good maneuverability, and redundancy in the event of trauma. All that plus onboard weapons systems that made the decoy armor’s particle beams look like peashooters. The helmet’s face gaped open. We watched the arms whir and flash around it, hellish light reflecting off of shining silver as the welding torches flared and hissed.

It wasn’t sleek. It wasn’t elegant. It loomed solid and heavy, and it promised pain to any who stood in its way.

Martin whistled. “You come a long way from Scrapper’s sloppy seconds.”

I made a face. “Don’t remind her. Still remember having to wash his shit and gore out of the power armor. Never did get rid of the smell.”

He chuckled, gaze not leaving the suit, light flickering over the whites of his eyes. “So. Okay. You get this bad baby up and running. Then what? Please don’t say bank robbery, that shit never goes well.”

“What? No. Those things seem to draw heroes like flies.” I gnawed my lip. “And actually the immediate steps are something with which she could use some help. Some... feedback, yes, that’s the term. Finding Minna and Anya and making sure they’re all right is the next goal. Dire plans to enlist Minna if she wishes to join, or rescue her if she’s in trouble.”

“She might just have gotten out while the getting’s good,” Martin said, and immediately corrected himself. “No fucking way she’d leave Anya. My bad, disregard.”

“Dire’s guess is that she’s either gone to ground to avoid drawing notice from her pursuers, or been seized by them. Your mention of Anya and Susan opens up a new avenue of investigation, but that will take time and resources to pan out. Which brings us to the next short-term goal. Resources.”

“Yeah? Need cash?”

“Yes. Springing you from the courthouse required taking risks. To avoid being tracked back here, Dire must forgo her former, easier methods of resource acquisition.” I moved over to the computer chair, and sat down. “Had to hack the FBI to get the information needed on their security, procedures, and setup in the courthouse. They know that she’s done that, now, no other way to get that data. So she left a false trail behind, including some decoy hacks that are timed to go off in several cities north of here.”

“You’re making it look like we’re running,” Martin said.

I showed teeth. “Precisely. However, this means that her former method of hacking banks for account transfers is too high of a risk. It’ll be months, at least, before they stop watching for her methods.”

“So you need a new way of getting money.”

“Yes. Only a bit. Worked out ways to multiply it with low-risk investments and chicanery. Just need a seed, as it were, to grow into self-sustaining capital. A few million should do it.”

Martin shook his head. “I hope you don’t want me to start dealing again. I had some talks with Freeway ’bout that in prison. It... wouldn’t sit right. Not anymore.”

“No, no. Wouldn’t ask you to compromise your conscience. That method puts you too much at risk, anyway.”

“Then what?”

“Open to suggestions. She’s got a battlesuit capable of fending off groups of heroes, obscene amounts of scientific skill with a focus in robotics and hardware, and an intuitive grasp of computers and hacking.” I spread my hands. “Surely we can do something with that?”

Martin studied me for a second, rubbed his cheek, and a slow smile spread across his face. “Now that you mention it, I think I might have just the thing.”

It took the loan of a burner phone and about a half-hour’s worth of calls, but Martin finally announced success. “Place we want is up in Barside, off the Waterfront. We’re gonna have to go out of costume. That a problem?”

I looked over the construction bots’ progress. “No. Still got about another day to go before the next layer of armor is baked in. Composites are a bitch to work with, at least without a proper industrial setup.”

“I was more worried ’bout that whole wanted felon shit.”

“Oh. No, it shouldn’t be. C’mere.” I headed back through the office space, cracked open a storeroom door. A dinky bathroom, with several small pots, hanging wigs, and clothes on racks scattered around the cracked sink. The mirror across from the toilet was dirty but functional, and I gestured at the jars full of brushes and applicators.

Martin looked it over. “Looks like backstage at a strip club.”

“You’d know.” I slapped his back, and he jumped. “What’s wrong? Was the humor off again?”

“No, no, my bad. Just been in solitary for a while. Touching feels weird when I ain’t expecting it.”

“Noted.” I tucked my hands in my pockets. “At any rate, most of this was easy to get. Plenty of costume shops and online theater suppliers sell Hollywood quality disguise materials and kits in bulk, and don’t ask questions. Didn’t take Dire long to pick up skills in this area.”

“I bet not. Ain’t all of us geniuses, though.” He frowned. “Genii?”

“Geniuses.” I grinned. “English is weird. Don’t worry, just sit down and hold still, and Dire will do you.”